You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [7]
In the morning we heard Traynor was dead. Some said fat, some said heart, some said alcohol, some said drugs. One of the children called from Detroit. Them dumb fans of his is on a crying rampage, she said. You just ought to turn on the t.v.
But I didn’t want to see ’em. They was crying and crying and didn’t even know what they was crying for. One day this is going to be a pitiful country, I thought.
How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy.
“MY MOTHER AND FATHER were not married. I never knew him. My mother must have loved him, though; she never talked against him when I was little. It was like he never existed. We lived on Poultry street. Why it was called Poultry street I never knew. I guess at one time there must have been a chicken factory somewhere along there. It was right near the center of town. I could walk to the state capitol in less than ten minutes. I could see the top—it was gold—of the capitol building from the front yard. When I was a little girl I used to think it was real gold, shining up there, and then they bought an eagle and put him on top, and when I used to walk up there I couldn’t see the top of the building from the ground, it was so high, and I used to reach down and run my hand over the grass. It was like a rug, that grass was, so springy and silky and deep. They had these big old trees, too. Oaks and magnolias; and I thought the magnolia trees were beautiful and one night I climbed up in one of them and got a bloom and took it home. But the air in our house blighted it; it turned brown the minute I took it inside and the petals dropped off.
“Mama worked in private homes. That’s how she described her job, to make it sound nicer. ‘I work in private homes,’ she would say, and that sounded nicer, she thought, than saying ‘I’m a maid.’
“Sometimes she made six dollars a day, working in two private homes. Most of the time she didn’t make that much. By the time she paid the rent and bought milk and bananas there wasn’t anything left.
“She used to leave me alone sometimes because there was no one to keep me—and then there was an old woman up the street who looked after me for a while—and by the time she died she was more like a mother to me than Mama was. Mama was so tired every night when she came home I never hardly got the chance to talk to her. And then sometimes she would go out at night, or bring men home—but they never thought of marrying her. And they sure didn’t want to be bothered with me. I guess most of them were like my own father; had children somewhere of their own that they’d left. And then they came to my Mama, who fell for them every time. And I think she may have had a couple of abortions, like some of the women did, who couldn’t feed any more mouths. But she tried.
“Anyway, she was a nervous kind of woman. I think she had spells or something because she was so tired. But I didn’t understand anything then about exhaustion, worry, lack of a proper diet; I just thought she wanted to work, to be away from the house. I didn’t blame her. Where we lived people sometimes just threw pieces of furniture they didn’t want over the railing. And there was broken glass and rags everywhere. The place stunk, especially in the summer. And children were always screaming and men were always cussing and women were always yelling about something.… It was nothing for a girl or woman to be raped. I was raped myself, when I was twelve, and my Mama never knew and I never told anybody. For, what could they do? It was just a boy, passing through. Somebody’s cousin from the North.
“One time my Mama was doing day’s work at a private home and took me with her. It was like being in fairyland. Everything was spotless and new, even before Mama started cleaning. I met the woman in the house and played with her children. I didn’t even see the man, but he was in there somewhere, while I was out in the yard with the children. I was fourteen, but I guess I looked like a grown woman. Or maybe I looked fourteen. Anyway, the next