You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [8]
“I never told Mama. I thought that would be the end of it. But about two days later, on my way from school, he stopped his car again, and I got in. This time we went to his house; nobody was there. And he made me get into his wife’s bed. After we’d been doing this for about three weeks, he told me he loved me. I didn’t love him, but he had begun to look a little better to me. Really, I think, because he was so clean. He bathed a lot and never smelled even alive, to tell the truth. Or maybe it was the money he gave me, or the presents he bought. I told Mama I had a job after school baby-sitting. And she was glad that I could buy things I needed for school. But it was all from him.
“This went on for two years. He wouldn’t let me get pregnant, he said, and I didn’t. I would just lay up there in his wife’s bed and work out algebra problems or think about what new thing I was going to buy. But one day, when I got home, Mama was there ahead of me, and she saw me get out of his car. I knew when he was driving off that I was going to get it.
“Mama asked me didn’t I know he was a white man? Didn’t I know he was a married man with two children? Didn’t I have good sense? And do you know what I told her? I told her he loved me. Mama was crying and praying at the same time by then. The neighbors heard both of us screaming and crying, because Mama beat me almost to death with the cord from the electric iron. She just hacked it off the iron, still on the ironing board. She beat me till she couldn’t raise her arm. And then she had one of her fits, just twitching and sweating and trying to claw herself into the floor. This scared me more than the beating. That night she told me something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. She said: ‘On top of everything else, that man’s daddy goes on the t.v. every night and says folks like us ain’t even human.’ It was his daddy who had stood in the schoolhouse door saying it would be over his dead body before any black children would come into a white school.
“But do you think that stopped me? No. I would look at his daddy on t.v. ranting and raving about how integration was a communist plot, and I would just think of how different his son Bubba was from his daddy! Do you understand what I’m saying? I thought he loved me. That meant something to me. What did I know about ‘equal rights’? What did I care about ‘integration’? I was sixteen! I wanted somebody to tell me I was pretty, and he was telling me that all the time. I even thought it was brave of him to go with me. History? What did I know about History?
“I began to hate Mama. We argued about Bubba all the time, for months. And I still slipped out to meet him, because Mama had to work. I told him how she beat me, and about how much she despised him—he was really pissed off that any black person could despise him—and about how she had these spells.… Well, the day I became seventeen, the day of my seventeenth birthday, I signed papers in his law office, and I had my mother committed to an insane asylum.
“After Mama had been in Carthage Insane Asylum for three months, she managed somehow to get a lawyer. An old slick-headed man who smoked great big black cigars. People laughed at him because he didn’t even have a law office, but he was the only lawyer that would touch the case, because Bubba’s daddy was such a big deal. And we all gathered in the judge’s chambers—because he wasn’t about to let this case get out. Can you imagine, if it had? And Mama’s old lawyer told the judge how Bubba