You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (14 page)

“Dear Laurel, I am a mother. [I hoped this would save me. It didn’t.] I have a baby daughter. I hope you are well. My husband sends his regards.”

Most of Laurel’s letters I was not shown. Assuming that my husband confiscated his letters without my consent, Laurel telegraphed:
ANNIE, I AM COMING BY GREYHOUND BUS DON’T LET YOUR DOG BITE ME, LAUREL.

My husband said: “Fine, let him come. Let him see that you are not the woman he remembers. His memory is frozen on your passion for each other. Let him see how happy you and I are.”

I waited, trembling.

It was a cold, clear evening. Laurel hobbled out of the taxi on crutches, one leg shorter than the other. He had regained his weight and, though pale, was almost handsome. He glanced at my completely handsome husband once and dismissed him. He kept his eyes on me. He smiled on me happily, pleased with me.

I knew only one dish then, chicken tarragon; I served it.

I was frightened. Not of Laurel, exactly, but of feeling all the things I felt.

(My husband’s conviction notwithstanding, I suspected marriage could not keep me from being, in some ways, exactly the woman Laurel remembered.)

I woke up my infant daughter and held her, disgruntled, flushed and ludicrously alert, in front of me.

While we ate, Laurel urged me to recall our acrobatic nights on the dormitory bench, our intimate dancing. Before my courteous husband, my cheeks flamed. Those nights that seemed so far away to me seemed all he clearly remembered; he recalled less well how his accident occurred. Everything before and after that week had been swept away. The moment was real to him. I was real to him. Our week together long ago was very real to him. But that was all. His speech was as beautifully lilting as ever, with a zaniness that came from a lack of connective knowledge. But he was hard to listen to: he was both overconfident of his success with me—based on what he recalled of our mutual passion—and so intense that his gaze had me on the verge of tears.

Now that he was here and almost well, I must drop everything, including the baby on my lap—whom he barely seemed to see—and come away with him. Had I not flown off to Africa, though it meant leaving the very country in which he lived?

Finally, after the riddles within riddles that his words became (and not so much riddles as poems, and disturbing ones), my husband drove Laurel back to the bus station. He had come over a thousand miles for a two-hour visit.

My husband’s face was drawn when he returned. He loved me, I was sure of that. He was glad to help me out. Still, he wondered.

“It lasted a week!”
I said. “Long before I met you!”

“I know,” he said. “Sha, sha, baby,” he comforted me. I had crept into his arms, trembling from head to foot. “It’s all right. We’re safe.”

But
were we?

And Laurel? Zooming through the night back to his home? The letters continued. Sometimes I asked to read one that came to the house.

“I am on welfare now. I hate being alive. Why didn’t my father let me die? The people are prejudiced here. If you came they would be cruel to us but maybe it would help them see something. You are more beautiful than ever. You are so sexy you make me ache—it is not only because you are black that would be racism but because when you are in the same room with me the room is full of color and scents and I am all alive.”

He offered to adopt my daughter, shortly after he received a divorce from his wife.

After my husband and I were divorced (some seven years after Laurel’s visit and thirteen years after Laurel and I met), we sat one evening discussing Laurel. He recalled him perfectly, with characteristic empathy and concern.

“If I hadn’t been married to you, I would have gone off with him,” I said, “Maybe.”

“Really?” He seemed surprised.

Out of habit I touched his arm. “I loved him, in a way.”

“I know,” he said, and smiled.

“A lot of the love was lust. That threw me off for years until I realized lust can be a kind of love.”

He nodded.

“I felt guilty about Laurel. When he wrote me, I became anxious. When he came to visit us, I was afraid.”

“He was not the man you knew.”

“I don’t think I knew him well enough to tell. Even so, I was afraid the love and lust would come flying back, along with the pity. And that even if they didn’t come back, I would run off with him anyway, because of the pity—
and for the adventure.
”

It was the word “adventure” and the different meaning it had for each of us that finally separated us. We had come to understand that, and to accept it without bitterness.

“I wanted to ask you to let me go away with him, for just a couple of months,” I said.
“To let me go…”

“He grew steadily worse, you know. His last letters were brutal. He blamed you for everything, even the accident, accusing you of awful, nasty things. He became a bitter, vindictive man.”

He knew me well enough to know I heard this and I did not hear it.

He sighed. “It would have been tough for me,” he said. “Tough for our daughter. Tough for you. Toughest of all for Laurel.”

(“Tell me it’s all right that I didn’t go!”
I wanted to plead, but didn’t.)

“Right,” I said instead, shrugging, and turning our talk to something else.

A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?

D
EAR
L
UCY,

You ask why I snubbed you at the Women for Elected Officials Ball. I don’t blame you for feeling surprised and hurt. After all, we planned the ball together, expecting to raise our usual pisspot full of money for a good cause. Such a fine idea, our ball: Come as the feminist you most admire! But I did not know you most admired Scarlett O’Hara and so I was, for a moment, taken aback.

I don’t know; maybe I should see that picture again. Sometimes when I see movies that hurt me as a child, the pain is minor; I can laugh at the things that made me sad. My trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy, whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head.

But there is another reason I could not speak to you at the ball that had nothing to do with what is happening just now between us: this heavy bruised silence, this anger and distrust. The day of the ball was my last class day at the University, and it was a very heavy and discouraging day.

Do you remember the things I told you about the class? Its subject was God. That is, the inner spirit, the inner voice; the human compulsion when deeply distressed to seek healing counsel within ourselves, and the capacity within ourselves both to create this counsel and to receive it.

(It had always amused me that the God who spoke to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth told them exactly what they needed to hear, no less than the God of the Old Testament constantly reassured the ancient Jews.)

Indeed, as I read the narratives of black people who were captured and set to slaving away their lives in America, I saw that this inner spirit, this inner capacity for self-comforting, this ability to locate God within that they expressed, demonstrated something marvelous about human beings. Nature has created us with the capacity to know God, to experience God, just as it has created us with the capacity to know speech. The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God,
is innate!

I suppose this has all been thought before; but it came to me as a revelation after reading how the fifth or sixth black woman, finding herself captured, enslaved, sexually abused, starved, whipped, the mother of children she could not want, lover of children she could not have, crept into the corners of the fields, among the haystacks and the animals, and found within her own heart the only solace and love she was ever to know.

It was as if these women found a twin self who saved them from their abused consciousness and chronic physical loneliness; and that twin self is in all of us, waiting only to be summoned.

To prepare my class to comprehend God in this way, I requested they read narratives of these captured black women and also write narratives themselves, as if they
were
those women, or women like them. At the same time, I asked them to write out their own understanding of what the inner voice, “God,” is.

It was an extraordinary class, Lucy! With women of all colors, all ages, all shapes and sizes and all conditions. There were lesbians, straights, curveds, celibates, prostitutes, mothers, confuseds, and sundry brilliants of all persuasions! A wonderful class! And almost all of them, though hesitant to admit it at first—who dares talk seriously of “religious” matters these days?—immediately sensed what I meant when I spoke of the inner, companion spirit, of “God.”

But what does my class on God have to do with why I snubbed you at the ball? I can hear you wondering. And I will get on to the point.

Lucy, I wanted to teach my students what it felt like to be captured and enslaved. I wanted them to be unable, when they left my class, to think of enslaved women as exotic, picturesque, removed from themselves, deserving of enslavement. I wanted them to be able to repudiate all the racist stereotypes about black women who were enslaved: that they were content, that they somehow “chose” their servitude, that they did not resist.

And so we struggled through an entire semester, during each week of which a student was required to imagine herself a “slave,” a mistress or a master, and to come to terms, in imagination and feeling, with what that meant.

Some black women found it extremely difficult to write as captured and enslaved women. (I do not use the word “slaves” casually, because I see enslavement from the enslaved’s point of view: there is a world of difference between being a slave and being enslaved.) They chose to write as mistress or master. Some white women found it nearly impossible to write as mistress or master, and presumptuous to write as enslaved. Still, there were many fine papers written, Lucy, though there was also much hair tugging and gnashing of teeth.

Black and white and mixed women wrote of captivity, of rape, of forced breeding to restock the master’s slave pens. They wrote of attempts to escape, of the sale of their children, of dreams of Africa, of efforts at suicide. No one wrote of acquiescence or of happiness, though one or two, mindful of the religious spirit often infusing the narratives studied, described spiritual ecstasy and joy.

Does anyone want to be a slave? we pondered.

As a class, we thought not.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when many of us watched a television special on sado-masochism that aired the night before our class ended, and the only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.

And this is why, though we have been friends for over a decade, Lucy, I snubbed you at the ball.

All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved
condition
of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a “fantasy” that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts. And embarrassment and disgust, at least in the hearts of most of the white women in my class.

One white woman student, apparently with close ties to our local lesbian S&M group, said she could see nothing wrong with what we’d seen on TV. (Incidentally, there were several white men on this program who owned white women as “slaves,” and even claimed to hold legal documents to this effect. Indeed, one man paraded his slave around town with a horse’s bit between her teeth, and “lent” her out to other sado-masochists to be whipped.) It is all fantasy, she said. No harm done. Slavery, real slavery, is over, after all.

But it isn’t over, Lucy, and Kathleen Barry’s book on female sexual slavery and Linda Lovelace’s book on
being
such a slave are not the only recent indications that this is true. There are places in the world, Lucy, where human beings are still being bought and sold! And so, for that reason, when I saw you at the ball, all I could think was that you were insultingly dressed. No, that is not all I thought: once seeing you dressed as Scarlett, I could not see you. I did not
dare
see you. When you accuse me of looking through you, you are correct. For if I had seen you, Lucy, I’m sure I would have struck you, and with your love of fighting this would surely have meant the end of our ball. And so it was better
not
to see you, to look instead at the woman next to you who had kinked her hair to look like Colette.

A black student said to the S&M sympathizer: I feel abused. I feel my privacy as a black woman has been invaded. Whoever saw that television program can now look at me standing on the corner waiting for a bus and not see
me
at all, but see instead a slave, a creature who
would
wear a chain and lock around my neck for a white person—in 1980!—and accept it.
Enjoy
it.

Her voice shook with anger and hurt.

And so, Lucy, you and I will be friends again because I will talk you out of caring about heroines whose real source of power, as well as the literal shape and condition of their bodies, comes from the people they oppress. But what of the future? What of the women who will never come together because of what they saw in the relationship between “mistress” and “slave” on TV? Many black women fear it is as slaves white women want them; no doubt many white women think some amount of servitude from black women is their due.

But, Lucy, regardless of the “slave” on television, black women do not want to be slaves. They never wanted to be slaves. We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing; which I would advise all black and white women aggressing against us as “mistress” and “slave” to remember. We understand when an attempt is being made to lead us into captivity, though television is a lot more subtle than slave ships. We will simply resist, as we have always done, with ever more accurate weapons of defense.