Meridian (9 page)

Movies: Rory Calhoun, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, Slim Pickens. Blondes against brunettes and cowboys against Indians, good men against bad, darker men. This fantasy world made the other world of school—with its monotony and tedium—bearable. The young girls she watched were, for the most part, well brought up. They were polite, they were sweet, they were intelligent. They simply did not know they were living their own lives—between twelve and fifteen—but assumed they lived someone else’s. They tried to live the lives of their movie idols; and those lives were fantasy. Not even the white people they watched and tried to become—the actors—lived them.

So they moved, did the young girls outside her window, in the dream of happy endings: of women who had everything, of men who ran the world. So had she.

But these thoughts, which were as random and fleeting as clouds, were simply the outside layer of skin on a very large onion.

She was still only seventeen. A drop-out from high school, a deserted wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law. This being so, in the late afternoons she went to her mother-in-law’s house and picked up the child, who did not want to come home.

H
ER MOTHER’S LIFE WAS SACRIFICE
. A blind, enduring, stumbling—though with dignity (as much as was possible under the circumstances)—through life. She did not appear to understand much beyond what happened in her own family, in the neighborhood and in her church. She did not take extreme positions on anything, unless unreasonably provoked over a long period. Then she spluttered out her rage in barely coherent complaints against—but what
had
her mother complained against? She did not complain against the church because she believed the church building—the mortar and bricks—to be holy; she believed that this holiness had rubbed off from years of scripture reading and impassioned prayers, so that now holiness covered the walls like paint. She thought the church was literally God’s house, and believed she felt his presence there when she entered the door; when she stepped back outside there was a different feeling, she believed.

There were many things wrong with the church, of course. One was that the preacher was not usually understandable. That is, his words were not, his sentences were not. For years—thirty of them—she sat every Sunday convinced that this man—whoever was preaching at the time—was instilling in her the words and wisdom of God, when, in fact, every other sentence was incomprehensible. Preachers preached in a singsong voice that was rhythmic, often majestic and always passionate. They made elaborate modern examples from ancient texts. They were musicians. They were poets. She was aroused, her spirit enlarged by a desire to be good. (For that, she knew, was what all the words of God led to, whether she could hear them clearly or not.) To the attainment of Good. To a state of righteousness. She did not learn very much beyond a rudimentary knowledge of the birth and crucifixion of Christ (which seemed to have occurred so close together in History she often wondered if Christ had had a childhood), and of the miracle of Ezekiel’s wheel (whose meaning was that even before the airplane man could get off the ground if he just had Faith), and of the Exodus, under the command of Moses, of the children of Israel (a race, unfortunately, no longer extant). The songs she understood. They allowed every sinner to sing of her sins to high heaven without the risk of being taken to task personally.

Mrs. Hill did not complain about anything political because she had no desire to understand politics. She had never voted in her life. Meridian grew up thinking voting days—with their strewn banners and long lines of people—were for celebration of some kind of weird festival especially for white people, who, grim and tight, disappeared into dreary, curtained boxes and emerged seconds later looking strongly relieved. Nor did Mrs. Hill complain about the education of her children. She believed the teachers to be eminently qualified (that is, more qualified than she herself) to teach them. If she felt contempt for them because she could no longer count herself among them and because they were poor housekeepers, she kept it very carefully to herself. She respected schoolteachers as a class but despised them as individuals. At the same time, she needed to believe in their infallibility. Otherwise she could not attempt to copy the clothes they wore, the way they fixed their hair or the way they spoke—or the authority with which they were able to confront and often dominate less well educated men.

In fact, she complained only about her husband, whose faults, she felt, more than made up for her ignorance of whatever faults might exist elsewhere.

In the ironing of her children’s clothes she expended all the energy she might have put into openly loving them. Her children were spotless wherever they went. In their stiff, almost inflexible garments, they were enclosed in the starch of her anger, and had to keep their distance to avoid providing the soggy wrinkles of contact that would cause her distress.

A
MONTH AFTER
the bombing Meridian walked through the gate of a house and knocked on the door.

“I’ve come to volunteer,” she said to the dark young man staring at her there.

What was she volunteering into? She had no real idea. Something about the bombing had attracted her, the obliteration of the house, the knowledge that had foreseen this destruction. What would these minds, these people, be like?

“Swinburn,” said the boy who opened the door, “look what the good Lord done gone and sent us.” He was short and stout with puffy brown eyes behind his glasses. His smile was warm and welcoming, and when he preceded Meridian into the room she noticed he dipped and bobbed ever so slightly like a man pulling a dog on a leash.

Swinburn rose from a table in the back of the room near the window. “Thank God,” he said. “Allah be praised and paid. Come on in here, lady, and let me ask you something. Can you type?”

“No,” said Meridian, who had taken typing for three months before she’d started having morning sickness—all-day sickness, in her case.

“Can you learn quickly?” A young man, older than the other two, stood in the doorway. He was looking at her in a steady, cool, appraising way, and held some papers in his hands. She could not help staring at his nose, which was high-bridged and keen, and seemed to have come straight off the faces of Ethiopian warriors, whose photographs she had seen. It was wonderfully noble, she thought, and gave the young man an arrogant look. He was dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt and his shirt front was covered with buttons. That he wore lots of buttons struck Meridian as odd, too playful, for such a cool, serious man. She wanted buttons like that, though. When he came closer she especially liked the large one that showed a black hand and a white hand shaking, although since the colors were flat the hands did not seem, on closer inspection, to be shaking at all; they seemed to be merely touching palms, or in the act of sliding away from each other.

“Yes,” she said, “I guess I could learn.”

The one called Swinburn was busy pecking out something on the typewriter in front of him, his thin back bent over, his ribs showing beneath his faded shirt. He was very dark brown, with full, neatly curved lips and large eyes behind wireless glasses that further magnified them. When he spoke, his deep voice coming up from the thin cavern of his chest was extraordinary. The timbre was so deep it seemed to make things rattle in the room. When he made an error typing he pulled at his short, rough hair. He was speeding up his pecking, now that he knew she was looking at him, but the number of errors he made soon caused him to jump up and offer his chair to her.

“Don’t you want to know my name?”

“Oh,” rumbled Swinburn, “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ve been so busy since the bombing. Getting another house, trying to raise money ... My name, is, uh, Swinburn, that’s Chester Gray” (indicating one of the other young men).

“
Et je m’appelle
Truman Held,” said the young man with the nose.

The other two men laughed at him: “It even rhymes!” they said. But Meridian was puzzled. Perhaps they were laughing at her, too, because she had not understood what had been said. She told them her name, they grunted and then turned away, except for Swinburn.

“This is just a petition,” he said, standing over her. “You know about the bombing? We’re trying to find out how many local people would be interested in marching downtown to protest. Just type out what I’ve written there, and I’ll take it over to the school and see if I can have it mimeographed.”

“You mean at
our
school?” she asked.

“Of course,” said Swinburn.

“They won’t do it over there.”

“Why not?” asked Swinburn.

“I can’t say why not,” said Meridian, “all I know is they won’t do it. They won’t even let us wear shorts on the Easter egg hunt.”

“Well, type it anyway,” said Swinburn. “Some way or other we’ll get enough copies made.”

Meridian typed and typed, until her back seemed to be cracking and her eyes smarted. Her typing was horrible, and she felt ashamed of the amount of paper she was using. After an hour she was able to lay out a perfect copy of the petition, except that she’d put an “e” on Negro.

“It’s all right,” said Swinburn, crossing out the “e” with a thick, blunt pen, so that the beauty of the finished product was hopelessly marred, “all you need is practice.”

T
RUMAN HELD WAS THE FIRST
of the Civil Rights workers—for that’s what they were called—who began to mean something to her, though it was months after their initial meeting that she knew. It was not until one night when first he, then she, was arrested for demonstrating outside the local jail, and then beaten.

There had been a Freedom march to the church, a prayer by the Reverend in charge, Freedom songs, several old women testifying (mainly about conditions inside the black section of the jail, which caused Meridian’s body to twitch with dread) and finally, a plan of what their strategy was to be, and the singing of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.”

The strategy was for a midnight march, with candles, across the street from the jail by the people who had not been arrested earlier, of whom Truman was one. The strategy was, in fact, for everyone not formerly arrested to be so. This was in protest against the town’s segregated hospital facilities. It was also an attempt to have the earlier demonstrators released from jail. But even as she marched, singing, to the courthouse square, which was across from the jail, Meridian could not figure out how it was supposed to work. The earlier demonstrators, she felt sure, would not be set free because a few singing people stood peacefully across from the jail. And the jail was too small to accommodate any more bodies. It must already be jammed.

They had been singing for only a few minutes when the town became alive with flashing lights. Police cars came from everywhere. Dozens of state troopers surrounded them, forming a wall between them and the jail. She noticed they really
did
have crew cuts, they really
did
chew gum. Next, the jailhouse door was opened and the earlier demonstrators came wearily out, their faces misshapen from swellings and discolored from bruises. Truman limped along with the rest, moving in great pain and steadily muttering curses as the line of troopers hurried them relentlessly out of the square. It was a few seconds before Meridian understood that it was now their turn.

As soon as this line was out of sight, the troopers turned on them, beating and swinging with their bludgeons. One blow knocked Meridian to the ground, where she was trampled by people running back and forth over her. But there was nowhere to run. Only the jail door was open and unobstructed. Within minutes they had been beaten inside, where the sheriff and his deputies waited to finish them. And she realized why Truman was limping. When the sheriff grabbed her by the hair and someone else began punching her and kicking her in the back, she did not even scream, except very intensely in her own mind, and the scream of Truman’s name. And what she meant by it was not even that she was in love with him: What she meant by it was that they were at a time and a place in History that forced the trivial to fall away— and they were absolutely together.

Later that summer, after another demonstration, she saw him going down a street that did not lead back to the black part of town. His eyes were swollen and red, his body trembling, and he did not recognize her or even see her. She knew his blankness was battle fatigue. They all had it. She was as weary as anyone, so that she spent a good part of her time in tears. At first she had burst into tears whenever something went wrong or someone spoke unkindly or even sometimes if they spoke, period. But now she was always in a state of constant tears, so that she could do whatever she was doing—canvassing, talking at rallies, tying her sneakers, laughing—while tears rolled slowly and ceaselessly down her cheeks. This might go on for days, or even weeks. Then, suddenly, it would stop, and some other symptom would appear. The shaking of her hands, or the twitch in her left eye. Or the way she would sometimes be sure she’d heard a shot and feel the impact of the bullet against her back; then she stood absolutely still, waiting to feel herself fall.

She went up to a yard with an outdoor spigot and soaked the bottom of her blouse in water. When she came back down to the street to wipe the tear gas from Truman’s eyes, he was gone. A police car was careening down the street. She stood in the street feeling the cool wet spot on her side, wondering what to do.

The majority of black townspeople were sympathetic to the Movement from the first, and told Meridian she was doing a good thing: typing, teaching illiterates to read and write, demonstrating against segregated facilities and keeping the Movement house open when the other workers returned to school. Her mother, however, was not sympathetic.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Mrs. Hill, “you’ve wasted a year of your life, fooling around with those people. The papers say they’re crazy. God separated the sheeps from the goats and the black folks from the white. And me from anybody that acts as foolish as they do. It never bothered
me
to sit in the back of the bus, you get just as good a view and you don’t have all those nasty white asses passing you.”