You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down by Alice Walker
It was probably with the patchouli that she had caught William Litz White, her husband. He'd never smelled anything like it--successful doctor, intense billiards player that he was--and had never intended to. Bohemian. Bohemian Belle, he had called her. She had wanted to be bohemian: to write on a kitchen table perhaps; but not among her children's unwashed cereal bowls. Patchouli was as close as she got.
The hen was still nesting on Mrs. Hyde's lap. Like most people who are not famous a small thing like getting a Rock Cornish hen out of her lap and back on the table paralyzed her. How could she be so indecorous as to plop the bird back into Andrea Clement White's plate? That famous and fastidious lady (she had read interviews to the effect that she was fastidious; this was not necessarily her own opinion). She began to sweat.
"He's a bore," said Andrea Clement White, audibly and viciously (she had discovered viciousness amused)--but then, she was forgiven everything because of her fame, her use as a fund raiser, and age--and began to feel around Mrs. Hyde's broad knees for the tiny chicken. Dragging it up stuck to Mrs. Hyde's dress--Mrs. Hyde meanwhile going gray with embarrassment--Mrs. Clement White raised it to her lips--and took a bite.
Five hundred in the audience did the same.
Was there a point, she wondered, chewing, in thinking about what one ate at functions like this? The rocklike hen, the red ring of spicy, soggy apple. The broccoli that no one in the South had learned to cook, only to boil? She thought not, and ate it all without thinking beyond the fact that she was hungry, had to pee, was bored to tears, and her bra strap was biting into the radical edges of her latest mastectomy.
A slow, aged string of tipsy wasps (he who owned the newspaper that said Negroes had no use for higher education, though perhaps the trades; she who told far and wide the remarkable insights of her grandmother's enslaved cook; he who...) now rose to drone her praises. She munched her chicken and five hundred others munched along with her, their chewing a noisy, incessant and exuberant ignoring. She was suddenly back at the plantation. But where? Mississippi? Too hot, and already a cliche. Ditto Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. She picked Virginia, where there were cool mountains and where it was not too severe a stretch of the imagination to match five hundred and one chickens to that many hungry slaves. Crunch. She was smiling and chewing but without any intention of listening. She nodded--still grinning and chewing as each person sat down. "In spite of you I'm sitting here," she thought, and reached over for the apple ring from Mrs. Hyde's plate. This second apple ring was always saved for her to eat at the end of the meal. It was her mouthwash.
She projected herself ahead a few minutes to being presented to the audience by Tedious Taylor, the president: she was battling him with her eyes. DON'T YOU DARE KISS ME! But he closed his froglike eyes, descended his head, his pendulous lips, and kissed the most prominent of her liver spots. Yuck. So many Yucks. Because then there would creep up behind her Dean Cooke (whom she would have kept tabs on until now), who would glue his mouth to her neck in an attitude of falling.
She saw herself hit him in the groin with her award, a sharp-beaked silver goose. But was it a silver goose? It would be duck, swan or goose. (Bird awards were lately "in.") Perhaps all three, and it would be not silver but silver plate, and there would be eggs. (She was a woman, after all!) Golden.
She felt briefly terrific, imagining Cooke's piglike squeal, and gnawed her chicken savagely, her eyes quite glazed over, in abstracted glee.
But now there came in front of the audience--with a slight bow to Mrs. Clement White--a small girl the color of chocolate. But really the color of chocolate. Hack writers always said black people were chocolate colored; this saved them the work of looking. Andrea Clement White was amused that this child really was the exact shade of brown of a chocolate drop.
She opened her mouth and began to sing with assurance an old, emphatically familiar song.
A slave song. Authorless.
Picked drumsticks fell onto plates like hail. Profound silence at last prevailed.
And it was this child's confident memory, that old anonymous song, that gave Andrea Clement White the energy to stand up and endure with dignity (the audience surreptitiously nibbling at dessert as she began to speak) the presentation of her one hundred and eleventh major award.
The Abortion
THEY HAD DISCUSSED IT, but not deeply, whether they wanted the baby she was now carrying. "I don't know if I want it," she said, eyes filling with tears. She cried at anything now, and was often nauseous. That pregnant women cried easily and were nauseous seemed banal to her, and she resented banality.
"Well, think about it," he said, with his smooth reassuring voice (but with an edge of impatience she now felt) that used to soothe her.
It was all she did think about, all she apparently could; that he could dream otherwise enraged her. But she always lost, when they argued. Her temper would flare up, he would become instantly reasonable, mature, responsible, if not responsive precisely, to her mood, and she would swallow down her tears and hate herself. It was because she believed him "good." The best human being she had ever met.
"It isn't as if we don't already have a child," she said in a calmer tone, carelessly wiping at the tear that slid from one eye.
"We have a perfect child," he said with relish, "thank the Good Lord!"
Had she ever dreamed she'd marry someone humble enough to go around thanking the Good Lord? She had not.
Now they left the bedroom, where she had been lying down on their massive king-size bed with the forbidding ridge in the middle, and went down the hall--hung with bright prints--to the cheerful, spotlessly clean kitchen. He put water on for tea in a bright yellow pot.
She wanted him to want the baby so much he would try to save its life. On the other hand, she did not permit such presumptuousness. As he praised the child they already had, a daughter of sunny disposition and winning smile, Imani sensed subterfuge, and hardened her heart.
"What am I talking about," she said, as if she'd been talking about it. "Another child would kill me. I can't imagine life with two children. Having a child is a good experience to have had, like graduate school. But if you've had one, you've had the experience and that's enough."
He placed the tea before her and rested a heavy hand on her hair. She felt the heat and pressure of his hand as she touched the cup and felt the odor and steam rise up from it. Her throat contracted.
"I can't drink that," she said through gritted teeth. "Take it away."
There were days of this.
Clarice, their daughter, was barely two years old. A miscarriage brought on by grief (Imani had lost her fervidly environmentalist mother to lung cancer shortly after Clarice's birth; the asbestos ceiling in the classroom where she taught first graders had leaked for twenty years) separated Clarice's birth from the new pregnancy. Imani felt her body had been assaulted by these events and was, in fact, considerably weakened, and was also, in any case, chronically anaemic and run down. Still, if she had wanted the baby more than she did not want it, she would not have planned to abort it.
They lived in a small town in the South. Her husband, Clarence, was, among other things, legal adviser and defender of the new black mayor of the town. The mayor was much in their lives because of the difficulties being the first black mayor of a small town assured, and because, next to the major leaders of black struggles in the South, Clarence respected and admired him most.
Imani reserved absolute judgment, but she did point out that Mayor Carswell would never look at her directly when she made a comment or posed a question, even sitting at her own dinner table, and would instead talk to Clarence as if she were not there. He assumed that as a woman she would not be interested in, or even understand, politics. (He would comment occasionally on her cooking or her clothes. He noticed when she cut her hair.) But Imani understood every shade and variation of politics: she understood, for example, why she fed the mouth that did not speak to her; because for the present she must believe in M
But Clarence was dedicated to the mayor, and believed his success would ultimately mean security and advancement for them all.
On the morning she left to have the abortion, the mayor and Clarence were to have a working lunch, and they drove her to the airport deep in conversation about municipal funds, racist cops, and the facilities for teaching at the chaotic, newly integrated schools. Clarence had time for the briefest kiss and hug at the airport ramp.
"Take care of yourself," he whispered lovingly as she walked away. He was needed, while she was gone, to draft the city's new charter. She had agreed this was important; the mayor was already being called incompetent by local businessmen and the chamber of commerce, and one inferred from television that no black person alive even knew what a city charter was.
"Take care of myself." Yes, she thought. I see that is what I have to do. But she thought this self-pityingly, which invalidated it. She had expected him to take care of her, and she blamed him for not doing so now.
Well, she was a fraud, anyway. She had known after a year of marriage that it bored her. "The Experience of Having a Child" was to distract her from this fact. Still, she expected him to "take care of her." She was lucky he didn't pack up and leave. But he seemed to know, as she did, that if anyone packed and left, it would be her. Precisely because she was a fraud and because in the end he would settle for fraud and she could not.
On the plane to New York her teeth ached and she vomited bile--bitter, yellowish stuff she hadn't even been aware her body produced. She resented and appreciated the crisp help of the stewardess, who asked if she needed anything, then stood chatting with the cigarette-smoking white man next to her, whose fat hairy wrist, like a large worm, was all Imani could bear to see out of the corner of her eye.
Her first abortion, when she was still in college, she frequently remembered as wonderful, bearing as it had all the marks of a supreme coming of age and a seizing of the direction of her own life, as well as a comprehension of existence that never left her: that life--what one saw about one and called Life--was not a facade. There was nothing behind it which used "Life" as its manifestation. Life was itself. Period. At the time, and afterwards, and even now, this seemed a marvelous thing to know.
The abortionist had been a delightful Italian doctor on the Upper East Side in New York, and before he put her under he told her about his own daughter who was just her age, and a junior at Vassar. He babbled on and on until she was out, but not before Imani had thought how her thousand dollars, for which she would be in debt for years, would go to keep her there.
When she woke up it was all over. She lay on a brown Naugahyde sofa in the doctor's outer office. And she heard, over her somewhere in the air, the sound of a woman's voice. It was a Saturday, no nurses in attendance, and she presumed it was the doctor's wife. She was pulled gently to her feet by this voice and encouraged to walk.
"And when you leave, be sure to walk as if nothing is wrong," the voice said.
Imani did not feel any pain. This surprised her. Perhaps he didn't do anything, she thought. Perhaps he took my thousand dollars and put me to sleep with two dollars' worth of ether. Perhaps this is a racket.
But he was so kind, and he was smiling benignly, almost fatherly, at her (and Imani realized how desperately she needed this "fatherly" look, this "fatherly" smile). "Thank you," she murmured sincerely: she was thanking him for her life.
Some of Italy was still in his voice. "It's nothing, nothing," he said. "A nice, pretty girl like you; in school like my own daughter, you didn't need this trouble."
"He's nice," she said to herself, walking to the subway on her way back to school. She lay down gingerly across a vacant seat, and passed out.
She hemorrhaged steadily for six weeks, and was not well again for a year.
But this was seven years later. An abortion law now made it possible to make an appointment at a clinic, and for seventy-five dollars a safe, quick, painless abortion was yours.
Imani had once lived in New York, in the Village, not five blocks from where the abortion clinic was. It was also near the Margaret Sanger clinic, where she had received her very first diaphragm, with utter gratitude and amazement that someone apparently understood and actually cared about young women as alone and ignorant as she. In fact, as she walked up the block, with its modern office buildings side by side with older, more elegant brownstones, she felt how close she was still to that earlier self. Still not in control of her sensuality, and only through violence and with money (for the flight, for the operation itself) in control of her body.
She found that abortion had entered the age of the assembly line. Grateful for the lack of distinction between herself and the other women--all colors, ages, states of misery or nervousness--she was less happy to notice, once the doctor started to insert the catheter, that the anesthesia she had been given was insufficient. But assembly lines don't stop because the product on them has a complaint. Her doctor whistled, and assured her she was all right, and carried the procedure through to the horrific end. Imani fainted some seconds before that.
They laid her out in a peaceful room full of cheerful colors. Primary colors: yellow, red, blue. When she revived she had the feeling of being in a nursery. She had a pressing need to urinate.
A nurse, kindly, white-haired and with firm hands, helped her to the toilet. Imani saw herself in the mirror over the sink and was alarmed. She was literally gray, as if all her blood had leaked out.
"Don't worry about how you look," said the nurse. "Rest a bit here and take it easy when you get back home. You'll be fine in a week or so."
She could not imagine being fine again. Somewhere her child--she never dodged into the language of "fetuses" and "amorphous growths"--was being flushed down a sewer. Gone all her or his chances to see the sunlight, savor a fig.
"Well," she said to this child, "it was you or me, Kiddo, and I chose me."
There were people who thought she had no right to choose herself, but Imani knew better than to think of those people now.
It was a bright, hot Saturday when she returned.
Clarence and Clarice picked her up at the airport. They had brought flowers from Imani's garden, and Clarice presented them with a stout-hearted hug. Once in her mother's lap she rested content all the way home, sucking her thumb, stroking her nose with the forefinger of the same hand, and kneading a corner of her blanket with the three fingers that were left.
"How did it go?" asked Clarence.
"It went," said Imani.
There was no way to explain abortion to a man. She thought castration might be an apt analogy, but most men, perhaps all, would insist this could not possibly be true.
"The anesthesia failed," she said. "I thought I'd never faint in time to keep from screaming and leaping off the table."
Clarence paled. He hated the thought of pain, any kind of violence. He could not endure it; it made him physically ill. This was one of the reasons he was a pacifist, another reason she admired him.
She knew he wanted her to stop talking. But she continued in a flat, deliberate voice.
"All the blood seemed to run out of me. The tendons in my legs felt cut. I was gray."
He reached for her hand. Held it. Squeezed.
"But," she said, "at least I know what I don't want. And I intend never to go through any of this again."
They were in the living room of their peaceful, quiet and colorful house. Imani was in her rocker, Clarice dozing on her lap. Clarence sank to the floor and rested his head against her knees. She felt he was asking for nurture when she needed it herself. She felt the two of them, Clarence and Clarice, clinging to her, using her. And that the only way she could claim herself, feel herself distinct from them, was by doing something painful, self-defining but self-destructive.
She suffered the pressure of his head as long as she could.
He smoothed her thick hair with his hand. "We'll talk about it," he said, as if that was not what they were doing. "We'll see. Don't worry. We'll take care of things."
She had forgotten that the third Sunday in June, the following day, was the fifth memorial observance for Holly Monroe, who had been shot down on her way home from her high-school graduation ceremony five years before. Imani always went to these memorials. She liked the reassurance that her people had long memories, and that those people who fell in struggle or innocence were not forgotten. She was, of course, too weak to go. She was dizzy and still losing blood. The white lawgivers attempted to get around assassination--which Imani considered extreme abortion--by saying the victim provoked it (there had been some difficulty saying this about Holly Monroe, but they had tried) but were antiabortionist to a man. Imani thought of this as she resolutely showered and washed her hair.
Clarence had installed central air conditioning their second year in the house. Imani had at first objected. "I want to smell the trees, the flowers, the natural air!" she cried. But the first summer of 110-degree heat had cured her of giving a damn about any of that. Now she wanted to be cool. As much as she loved trees, on a hot day she would have sawed through a forest to get to an air conditioner.
In fairness to him, she had to admit he asked her if she thought she was well enough to go. But even to be asked annoyed her. She was not one to let her own troubles prevent her from showing proper respect and remembrance toward the dead, although she understood perfectly well that once dead, the dead do not exist. So respect, remembrance was for herself, and today herself needed rest. There was something mad about her refusal to rest, and she felt it as she tottered about getting Clarice dressed. But she did not stop. She ran a bath, plopped the child in it, scrubbed her plump body on her knees, arms straining over the tub awkwardly in a way that made her stomach hurt--but not yet her uterus--dried her hair, lifted her out and dried the rest of her on the kitchen table.
"You are going to remember as long as you live what kind of people they are," she said to the child, who, gurgling and cooing, looked into her mother's stern face with light-hearted fixation.