You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (17 page)

Happy as Irene was whenever there were strange creatures to observe or meet, she did not hesitate—silently, of course—to agree. Who would
not
love me? was her attitude. The trauma of having lost the educational project had not damaged an essential self-saving vanity.

“Who is ‘Source’?” Irene asked languidly, because by now the van was filled with mellow
sinsamilla
smoke.

“Wait and see,” said Anastasia, mysteriously.

They lived in a large, rambling house on a hillside in Marin. The rooms were light and airy and filled with sunshine, Indian prints, seashells, rocks, paper mobiles, and lacy straw mats. From every window there was a view: the bay, sailboats; Tiburon, across the Bay.

“How do you manage all this?” Irene asked, glancing in a cupboard stacked high with bags of granola.

“Food stamps and relief,” said Anastasia, with a slight shrug. It was the kind of shrug Irene was seeing a lot. There was…dissatisfaction in it; there was also acceptance. Missing—and, suddenly, it seemed to Irene—was defiance.

Bliss and her parents, Calm and Peace, disappeared into a separate part of the house. Anastasia and Irene sat down at the kitchen table.

“In parts of the country,” Irene said in a voice modulated to show this meant nothing whatsoever to her, “the amount of assistance people get is less, by design, than they can live on.”

Anastasia leaned forward, and in an equally nonpartisan tone, said, “It is
much
better to be on welfare in a rich place than in a poor one. Not only do rich people here dress the way we do—if anything they’re more tattered and less stylish—but they are
so
rich it delights them to support us in our poverty.”

Irene laughed, dutifully.

“How is your teaching?” asked Anastasia. Like many of Irene’s friends, she never read the newsletter that Irene and her group published, in which they discussed in detail methods of teaching older people, under- and miseducated young people, or what they called among themselves, just as society did, “the Unteachables.” Only they said it with an informed sense of humor, not yet having encountered an absolute “unteachable.”

For a moment, Irene debated with herself whether to respond with more than “okay.” In stories, in literature, such work as she did sounds romantic, as well as idealistic. The reality, day to day, is different. In Irene’s case there was, first of all, the incredible brain-broiling heat of the Southern summer, when the majority of her students—all women in their late forties, fifties and sixties—could attend classes from one to three weeks at a time. The trailer they used was not air-conditioned, and there were flies. Sometimes classes were crowded, and composed of people who—from years of being passive spectators in church, required only to respond in shouts or “amens”—found it difficult to take an active part in their own instruction. They doubted their own personal histories and their own experience. The food—donated by the local college whose backyard they were in—was bad. Bologna and pork and beans and yellow, wilted slices of lettuce. Oversweetened lemonade that attracted mosquitoes. And there was the smell of clean poverty, an odor Irene wished would disappear from the world, a sharp,
bitter
odor, almost acrid, as if the women washed themselves in chemicals.

Teaching was exciting only sporadically, when student or teacher learned something. Often no one seemed to learn anything. In desperation Irene would sometimes show films, because whatever the films were about, they seemed to threaten her students less than Irene’s constant insistence that they acknowledge their own oppression, as blacks
and
as women. From films like “Birth of a Nation” there would be an immediate rise; from a film like “Anna Lucasta” a stunned and bewildered silence. At first, anyway.

“It’s not going well,” Irene said, as Anastasia put a filter into the Chemex, spooned in coffee, and poured on boiling water. Through the low-slung kitchen window Irene saw the fog sliding into the garden, a cat napping on a rock, and a round terra-cotta urn of herbs on the back steps. There was a peace and unreality about the house.

“You wrote me about your school,” Anastasia said as noncommittally as possible, as they sipped mellow black coffee and munched on homemade carrot cake.

There was a side of Irene that Anastasia did not like. It was the side that seemed unnecessarily obsessed with the dark, seedy side of life. They’d once discussed Anastasia’s inability to get involved in projects that interested Irene, and Anastasia had shrugged and said, “You’re into pain!” They had laughed, but Anastasia realized Irene thought her incapable of deep emotion, and so, in a way, talked (or wrote) down to her. Since this spared her a lot of
Sturm und Drang,
she thought this was okay, and didn’t complain. She accepted the shallowness this attitude assured.

It didn’t occur to Irene that Anastasia could empathize with her commitments, and their college friendship had been based largely on a shared love of movies and jazz. Though she feigned a good-humored acceptance of Anastasia’s easygoing life style, and her reliance on personal fashion to indicate the state of her mind, on a deeper level, she felt contempt for her, as a person who chose to be of limited use.

“It ended for lack of funds,” Irene said.

“Who funded it?” asked Anastasia, politely.

Irene sighed, and began in a rush. “In the beginning, there
was
no funding.” The two women could not help grinning in recognition of the somehow
familiar
sound of this: they had both been brought up in the church. “In the beginning, there
was
no funding,” repeated Irene. “The women wanted to learn before they ‘got too old’ and they simply talked—and in some cases shamed—younger women into teaching them. Then there was a grant from the government that paid those like me who came from outside. The trouble with government funding, of course, is that it is so fucking fickle.… With the war going on in Vietnam, and bombs to be bought, government could hardly be expected to care that a few dozen
old
black women still believe in education.”

“I thought you said in your letters that some of the women are white,” said Anastasia, resting her chin on the back of her hand, and gazing steadily at Irene. She liked to look at Irene, liked her sometimes
fierce
brown eyes, liked very much the dark richness of her skin—but she could never say so.

“Oh yes,” said Irene, “some of them are. Three, in fact.” When white people reached a certain level of poverty (assuming they were not members of the Klan, or worse, which they very often were), they ceased to be “white” to her. Like many of her quasi-political beliefs, however, she had not thought this through. She was afraid to, and this was one of the major failings in her character. If she thought this through, for example, she would have to think of what becomes of poor whites when (if) they become rich (and how could she waste her time teaching incipient rich, white people?) and what becomes of blacks when they become middle class; she was already contemptuous of the black middle class. In fact, for its boringly slavish imitation of the white middle class, which she considered mediocre in its tiniest manifestations, she hated it. And yet, technically, she was now a part of this class.

If she began questioning these things, she would have to question her own place in society and how she was going to be a success at whatever she did (she had few doubts about her capabilities and none about her energy) but at the same time avoid becoming bourgeois. She enjoyed so many bourgeois pleasures, and yet she loathed the thought of settling for them. Just as jazz was her favorite music because it held the middle class in abeyance,
Steppenwolf
was the novel that, since college, had most enduringly reflected her mind.

“Can the women go back to learning the way they did before the funding?” asked Anastasia.

“One day they might,” said Irene. “I don’t know. A funny thing happened to them, and to me, around the funding from government. At first it lifted our spirits, made us believe someone up there in D.C. cared about the lives of these women, the deliberate impoverishment of their particular past. And the women settled down to learn in that belief. As amazingly as the funding began, though, it ended. We had just had time to get used to more than we had before when suddenly there was nothing at all. We had ‘progressed’ to a new level only to find ourselves stranded. To go back to the old way would feel like defeat.”

As Irene talked, she thought of one of the women in her class who particularly moved her, and who resisted learning to read because everything she was required to read was so painful. Irene had had to coax her back to class after the first day. On the first day, the woman, whose name was Fania, had expressed a strong desire to learn to read. She was a stout, walnut-colored woman who wore her hair in braids that crossed at the back of her neck and, in her ears, small gold loops. Her embarrassment at not knowing how to read was so acute that, in admitting it, she kept her eyes tightly shut, and in the course of making a very short statement of her condition, she undid both braids and managed to get the earrings tangled in her hair.

Like so much that is deeply tragic, this sight was also comic. Realizing how she must appear to the class, and to Irene, Fania had blushed darkly and offered a short puzzled laugh at herself. It was a look and a laugh that Irene never forgot.

Irene had had much success teaching reading by using the newspapers. She found nonreaders related quickly to news about what was going on in their midst, and that often too they recognized certain words—like names of towns, stores, and so on—with which they were already familiar. Each time they “read” a word they already knew, they were encouraged.

For Fania, Irene had chosen a rather innocuous item about the increasing mechanization of farm labor, which was the kind of work most of her students knew well. She thought the words “fertilizer distributor,” “automatic weeder,” “cotton picker” and the like would be easy. They were long words, true, but words used every day by the women, as they passed by plantations where this new machinery was already in operation.

Irene read quickly over the short news item, to rob it of any surprise. Surprises in any form, she had discovered, inhibited these would-be readers.

“‘Way, Georgia: Sources at the Department of Agriculture predict that in less than ten years, farming as our state has known it for generations will no longer exist. Widespread use of fertilizer distributors, automatic weeders and cotton pickers will virtually wipe out the need for human labor. Thousands of tenant farmers who have traditionally farmed the land, have already been displaced. Crop prices—including those for soybeans and peanuts—are expected to continue to rise. It is expected that automation will increase profits and stimulate the growth of other industries that are beginning to relocate in the South because of the abundance of energy, in terms of both the environment and the ever-populous, non-unionized, labor pool.’”

Fania had stammered, choked, pulled at her earrings and her braids—but in the end had simply refused to learn to read that the only work she’d ever known would soon not exist.

While Irene talked, Anastasia fingered the colorful straw place mat in front of her. As so often happened when she talked to another black person, the world seemed weighted down with problems. “You can’t improve anything, you know?” she said. “You can’t change anything. I’ve learned that from Source.”

Irene waited. Anastasia seemed inspired.

“Source got me and my folks together again. You won’t believe this, but we write to each other now at least once a week. Hey, let me show you…” Anastasia rose and disappeared into another room. She returned with a bundle of letters. She peeled off a letter from the bundle and spread the pages on the table. She changed her mind about reading aloud to Irene, who was looking at her, she felt, skeptically. She pushed the letter toward Irene, who glanced quickly over it.

Anastasia’s parents had once been Baptists; they were now Jehovah’s Witnesses. There was a lot in the letter about continuing to love her and even more about continuing to petition Jehovah God in her behalf. From the letter, prayers were going up from Arkansas by the hour. The hair rose at the back of Irene’s neck, but she forced herself to remain calm.

Irene had met Anastasia’s family once, by design, she always thought, on Anastasia’s part. Irene lived for a time in a terrible D.C. slum, and represented, therefore, a kind of educated lunatic fringe to those friends who thought poverty in and of itself was dangerous to visitors. While her parents were in town, Anastasia asked to stay with Irene, though in fact she was at that time living with her friend Galen. Her parents had driven up in the longest pink Lincoln Continental Irene had ever seen. Her father and brothers had braved the trashy street to come up to Irene’s flat, but her mother had waited in the car—doors locked and windows rolled up tight—until Anastasia and Irene were brought out to her. Her gray, stricken eyes clutched at Irene’s. Why? Why? they asked, while her mouth said how pleased she was they had finally met. “What is she afraid of?” Irene had asked Anastasia; “What
isn’t
she afraid of?” Anastasia had replied.

Anastasia’s brothers were amber-skinned and curly-haired, with the slouching posture and menacing non-language of other boys their age. They were fifteen and sixteen. Anastasia’s father was an olive-skinned, crinkly-haired man whose intense inner turmoil and heaviness of spirit caused an instant recoiling; on his face, one felt a smile would look unnatural.

This father now wrote of God’s love, God’s grace, God’s assured forgiveness, and of his own happiness that his daughter, always, at heart, “a
good
girl,” had at last embarked on
the path of obedience.
This path alone led to peace everlasting, in the new and coming system of the world.

“
Obedience,
” thought Irene. “
Peace Everlasting
! Holy shit!”