You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [65]
“You already had your freedom,” said Irene. “The freedom to go either way.”
“To be thrown either way, you mean,” said Anastasia. “Even you got in on the throwing.”
Like most people who have come to believe they are better than they are, Irene resented the notion that she could be intolerant. She sat up very straight to listen to this.
“Remember Styron’s Nat Turner?” asked Anastasia.
“Vaguely,” said Irene, who had worked diligently over a decade to erase the book from memory.
“Well, I remember it very well. One of our professors had the nerve to teach it to our class, and when you couldn’t make him see what an insult Styron’s monster was to the memory of the real Nat Turner, you were so mad you wouldn’t speak to anyone on campus for days. That was when you started to drink a lot. And you were this shining example of sober, intelligent black peoplehood, too!” Anastasia laughed. “Not only drunk every evening, but nastily drunk. Throwing up, starting fights, calling people names. And they couldn’t really expel you; you were the only really dark black student they had. And they adored you. But you said that was shit because they could not adore you and teach Styron’s version of your history at the same time. Which made absolute sense to me.”
“Hypocrites, the whole bunch,” said Irene.
“And so were you. You loved being adored. Being exceptional. Representing the race. I knew, from the backhanded way I was treated, that they were hypocrites. I mean, they knew I was black, I just didn’t look black. I never got any of the attention you got, and I could have used some, because those white folks were just as strange to me as they were to you. But you thought everything was fine until the hypocrisy touched you.”
“Oh, if only we didn’t have to live with what we have been,” thought Irene, feeling a surge of self-disgust. What Anastasia said was basically true; but even worse was the realization that she had viewed Anastasia in the same “backhanded” way her professors had. In fact, she had never been able to consider her entirely black, and in subtle ways had indicated a lack of recognition, of trust.
“We had gone for a walk, to help clear your head,” Anastasia was saying. “I understood what you were feeling because, wonder of wonders, I felt the same way. I followed you back to your room—do you realize you were the only student in the whole school who had a private room? Remember what you said to me?”
She hadn’t wanted the private room, was all she could think, but that was not the answer to the question. Irene thought and thought. She couldn’t remember. She had been assigned the private room because she was “different,” that she could remember.
“As we were going into your room, I said, ‘God, I know just how you feel.’ And you turned, right there in the doorway, and you blocked me from coming into your room, and as you closed the door very slowly in my face, you said, very distinctly, and as if you’d thought about it for a long time, ‘How could you possibly?’”
Irene felt as if live coals had been thrown down her back.
“Wait, wait a minute,” she said with relief, having found a straw to clutch. “Styron’s book wasn’t even out then. That was two or three years later!”
Anastasia looked at her, and pushed her palms against the edge of the table in front of her.
“So?” she said. “It was the same book with a different name. There’s at least one racist best seller published a year.”
Irene groaned. “I was drunk.”
“Not good enough,” said Anastasia.
“No.”
Anastasia was glad she was finally able to say these things. All her life she had felt compelled to take and take and take from black