Meridian (13 page)

Who would dream, in her home town, of kissing a white girl? Who would want to? What were they good for? What did they do? They only seemed to hang about laughing, after school, until when they were sixteen or seventeen they got married. Their pictures appeared in the society column, you saw them pregnant a couple of times. Then you were no longer able to recognize them as girls you once “knew.” They sank into a permanent oblivion. One never heard of them
doing
anything that was interesting. Oh, one might escape to join the WAC’s. Quite a few—three or four a year, the homely ones—attended a college in the state (which kept the local library and English departments supplied) but there were positively no adventurers—unless you counted the alcoholics—among them. If one of them did manage to experiment with life to the extent that the process embarrassed her parents (or her parents’ friends, the folks at home who filled the churches every Sunday) it was never found out by anyone in the black community.

On the other hand, black women were always imitating Harriet Tubman—escaping to become something unheard of. Outrageous. One of her sister’s friends had become, somehow, a sergeant in the army and knew everything there was to know about enemy installations and radio equipment. A couple of girls her brothers knew had gone away broke and come back, years later, as a doctor and a schoolteacher. Two other girls went away married to men and returned home married to each other. This perked up the community. Tongues wagged. But in the end the couple enjoyed visiting their parents, old friends, and were enjoyed in turn. “How do you suppose they do it?” was a question which—though of course not printed in the newspaper—still made all the rounds. But even in more conventional things, black women struck out for the unknown. They left home scared, poor black girls and came back (some of them) successful secretaries and typists (this had seemed amazing to everyone, that there should be firms in Atlanta and other large cities that would
hire
black secretaries). They returned, their hair bleached auburn or streaked with silver, or perhaps they wore a wig. It would be bold, deathly straight or slightly curled, and remind everyone of the Italians—like Pier Angeli—one saw in the movies. Their pocketbooks, their shoes, would
shine,
and their faces (old remembered faces now completely reconstructed by Max Factor and Maybelline) perfected masks through which the voice of some person formerly known came through.

Then there were simply the good-time girls who came home full of bawdy stories of their exploits in the big city; one watched them seduce the local men with dazzling ease, some who used to be lovers and might be still. In their cheap, loud clothing, their newly repaired teeth, their flashy cars, their too-gold shimmering watches and pendants—they were still a success. They commanded attention. They deserved admiration. Only the rejects—not of men, but of experience, adventure—fell into the domestic morass that even the most intelligent white girls appeared to be destined for. There seemed nothing about white women that was enviable. Perhaps one might covet a length of hair, if it swung long and particularly fine. But that was all. And hair was dead matter that continued—only if oiled—to shine.

Of course Meridian appropriated all the good qualities of black women to herself, now that she was awake enough to be aware of them. In her life with Eddie she knew she had lacked courage, lacked initiative or a mind of her own. And yet, from somewhere, had come the
will
that had got her to Saxon College. At times she thought of herself as an adventurer. It thrilled her to think she belonged to the people who produced Harriet Tubman, the only American woman who’d led troops in battle.

But Truman, alas, did not want a general beside him. He did not want a woman who tried, however encumbered by guilts and fears and remorse, to claim her own life. She knew Truman would have liked her better as she had been as Eddie’s wife, for all that he admired the flash of her face across a picket line—an attractive woman, but asleep.

But now, as they walked under the trees along the campus paths and the chimes from the campus clock rang out their inappropriate eighteenth-century melodies, she needed his arm around her shoulders. The truth was, she had missed him and regretted every single time she had turned him down.

When they got to her apartment she was thankful that he walked in behind her.

“What did he give you this time?” Truman asked.

“Some raisins, Fig Newtons, a carton of Cokes,” she said, swinging them up on the table, “and enough money to buy a
good
tennis racket.”

“He sure must want a daughter,” said Truman, opening a Coke and drinking it in long swallows. “Unless,” he said, and grinned at her,
“unless
he’s a sugar daddy.” He burst out laughing at the thought. “Does he ever,” he asked, his eyes twinkling, “hobble you around his desk?”

Meridian put the remainder of the Cokes into the refrigerator. She did not smile, until the silence caused her to consider what Truman said, then her lips briefly twitched. “Nope,” she said quickly. “The thought of some live action would stew his old heart to death.”

But of course that was not true. The truth was, she
was
chased around the desk by Mr. Raymonds. The truth was, her scholarship did not cover all her school expenses and her other needs, too. The truth
was
she depended on the extras Mr. Raymonds gave her. Every Coke, every cookie, every can of deviled ham, every tennis racket that he gave her meant one less that she had to buy.

Yes, Mr. Raymonds did
limp
her around his desk. And what was more, and worse, he caught her. But she knew Truman would never understand. She had hardly understood or believed it herself, at first. The first time Mr. Raymonds accidentally brushed against her, she thought she’d imagined it. After all, he was somebody important, a university professor, covered with honors (his walls were, anyway). They fairly sagged with the plaques nailed there (and she was not sophisticated enough yet to find them tacky) saying that he had been 1. Head of the Colored YMCA from 1919–1925; 2. An Elder in the Episcopalian Church; 3. The Masonic Temple’s Man of the Year 1935–36; 4. Best Teacher of Farming Methods 1938–39. He had written books on various aspects of farming and was an expert. When he gave her copies of his books, autographed, she was as thrilled as anything, and quickly mailed them home to her father. He gave her the books her first day on the job.

He did not tell her anything about his wife, but she had seen a picture of her once, a sourfaced woman, very dark, as were the women often chosen by very light-skinned black men. She had noticed that it went either this way, with light-colored men, or the other. There didn’t seem to be a middle ground. In Mr. Raymonds’ case, he had probably chosen a dark-skinned wife because he was one of those old-fashioned “race men,” the radical nationalists of his day—the 1920’s. He loved to talk even now of The Race as if it were a lump of homogenized matter that could be placed this way or that way, at will, to effect change.

Mr. Raymonds stuck up for the race as a whole, although Meridian thought she detected a slightly defensive attitude around younger and darker-skinned men. It was as if he had to prove himself. He was also very emotional about protecting the virtue of black women from white men. Once he had seen her talking to a white divinity student on the corner before turning in to his building to work, and he had been red in the face from anger. Before she went home she had been told exactly how many black women had reported rape at the hands of white men in the years between 1896 and 1963. She assumed he made up the figure, but she gasped anyway. The divinity student, ironically, had been from South Africa, and she had spoken to him out of a kind of perverse curiosity. She thought because she was black she would notice some kind of strain come into his face, but there was nothing at all. She might have been as white and as near divinity as he.

This curiosity was the way she was, sometimes, with whites. Mostly they did not seem quite real to her. They seemed very stupid the way they attempted to beat down everybody in their path and then know nothing about it. She saw them sometimes as hordes of elephants, crushing everything underfoot, stolid and heavy and yet—unlike the elephant— forgetting.

Mr. Raymonds was tall and bony and the color of caramel candy that is being stretched, with short white hair and a drooping left eyelid. She hated his teeth; they were all false or mostly false, and held together with wires that would have glittered if he ever cleaned his mouth. He never did. Consequently his teeth seemed to be covered with yellowish flannel and the smell of his breath was nauseating, as if his whole mouth were a tunnel of sewerage. He had not always been thin. And even now he was more bony than thin. As a young man he had been heavily muscled. He grew gaunt with age. When he grabbed her as she stepped warily into his office and attempted to rub his old penis against her, she felt nothing but his hard pelvic bones poking her in the stomach.

He wanted her to sit on his lap, which she would sometimes do. Then he would open up his desk drawer and pull out the goodies he bought for her. Tins of tuna, bags of mints and Baby Ruths, dime-store combs and even, sometimes, typing paper. He nestled his long nose in her hair or as far under her chin as she would let him, all the while squirming under her so that some of the desperate delight he was experiencing would work its way up into his limp penis. He had no luck that she could ever tell.

Each day when she rose to go—having typed letters for him in a veritable swamp fog of bad breath—he clasped her in his arms, dragging her away from the door, the long bones of his thighs forcing her legs apart, attempting to force her to the floor. But she smiled and struggled and struggled and smiled, and pretended she knew nothing of his intentions—a thought which no doubt aroused him all the more. As she twisted and squirmed, keeping her face averted as much as possible from his lips and his breath, his face became gray with determination and sweat, his breathing became hoarse and labored, and when he looked at her the gleam in his eye was pathetic.

“What’s the matter?” asked Truman.

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Tell me what’s really been happening?”

“I’ve been working out at the country club again,” he said, sighing and lying back on the sofa. “God, I hate those bastards. You just don’t know how hard a time I have making a little bread.” He reached out and caught her wrist, pulling her down to the couch. “Those crackers throw cigarettes in the pool for the express purpose of making me pick them out. And I can’t wait until tomorrow either. Oh no. ‘Trooo-munn,’ some old shit calls, ‘go git them butts out the pool buffore some more of our guests arrive.’ And while I’m fishing for butts some of their old skinny broads saunter over to watch and of course to give advice. ‘Trooo-munn,’ they coo, ‘I bleve you got to lean over more this way, don’t you?’ Or, ‘You’re just a very ajul boy, for a boy your size.’ And I have to just stand there and grin and bear it. I despise them,” he said vehemently, socking a pillow, his other hand tight around her arm. “You women sure are lucky not to have to be up against’em all the time.”

The short muttering laugh that answered him was black with derision, and Truman looked at Meridian sharply.

“You’re right,” he said, “we don’t have to talk about shit like that tonight. Come here, woman, I missed you.”

She could not help remarking how his own sense of masculinity gratified him. The pressure around her wrist, like his crude order, was certainly not necessary, since she was already lying, like a beached fish, across his lap.

With his warm long fingers he stroked the insides of her arms, then kissed her on the lips. Her mind was still working perfectly. She had planned, because of the exchange students, to be unmoved, but something alive seemed to be moving, unfolding, spreading and reaching out in the bottom of her stomach. Indeed, she felt, and carefully noted it, as if the entire center of her body was beginning to melt. She decided to click her mind off, and her body seemed to move into his of its own accord. Deliberately though, when he began to suck her nipples through the blouse, she sat up and took it off. He fastened his mouth on one nipple and his fingers pinched and stroked the other.

The exchange students were banished to a corner of the world her thoughts did not need to follow. She chased them there with an imaginary broom, invented special for that purpose. It was a long black broom with a yellow ribbon around its handle. In her hands it scoured both heaven and earth until only the two of them were left. Truman hesitated when his hand touched her panties. She rose up, silently, and let her skirt, bra and panties drop to the floor. Her gaze fell on his penis. It seemed to her extremely large and oddly curving, as if distorted by its own arrogant weight. When she took it in her hand Truman shivered, his face contorted. His face moved her. She guided him into her and they fucked (she consciously thought of it as that), they fucked, it seemed, for hours, and over and over again she nearly reached a climax only to lose it. Finally, when she was weary enough to scream, Truman came and quickly fell asleep. He mumbled she was very sexy as he turned. It was only then that she remembered he had not worn a condom—the only means of contraception she knew.

Flinging his leg off her (he had slept with the curve of his foot locked about her ankle) she hurried to the bathroom and strained over the commode. She wished she had had a douche bag. Instead she took a glass of hot water and worked some of the water up her while lying in the tub. She had made up her mind before coming to Atlanta not to have sex. When she went back into the living room, Truman was gone.

He had gone back to the last of the exchange students, the one she had liked, Lynne Rabinowitz. It was for this reason, among others, that he never knew she was pregnant. On her way to have an abortion she saw them riding across campus in his father’s new red car. From a distance, they both looked white to her, that day. Later, as the doctor tore into her body without giving her anesthesia (and while he lectured her on her morals) and she saw stars because of the pain, she was still seeing them laughing, carefree, together. It was not that she wanted him any more, she did not. It enraged her that she could be made to endure such pain, and that he was oblivious to it. She was also disgusted with fecundity of her body that got pregnant on less screwing than anybody’s she had ever heard of. It seemed doubly unfair that after all her sexual “experience” and after one baby and one abortion she had not once been completely fulfilled by sex.