Meridian (1976) Page 10

  Someone had put a fast record on and they plunged about the room crazily. When they stopped to breathe Meridian looked about for Truman.

  “I’m looking for my date,” she explained to Con U, who was following the sweep her eyes made across the room, unable to conceal his anxiety that she might walk away.

  “Isn’t that him over there?” asked Con U, delight in his voice.

  Truman was sitting on the stairs that led up from the basement. The Dutch Boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor beneath him, looking up at him with—admiration? curiosity? hunger? Meridian was not sure. That the girl’s skirt was above her knees she could see.

  Con U laughed. “Looks like he’s doing all right for himself,” and he sort of hunkered over her, his elbow against the wall. He seemed to her peculiarly rustic, and though now that she was in college she prided herself on having catholic tastes when it came to men, white farmers were not yet included.

  “My name is Scott,” he said, “after Scott Fitzgerald. My mother loves his books.”

  “Ummm ...” said Meridian, grudgingly relinquishing her own name.

  He was also going to be a talker.

  Did she go to dances often? Did she like to dance? How far away was her home town? Did her mother like to dance? What kind of work did her father do? Did he like to dance? And what of the school—did she like it? Did they teach dancing there? And of the demonstrations—how many had she gone on? Did she believe, truly, that one ought to protest in this way? Wasn’t there some other method that might work and prove less disastrous than marching in the street? Didn’t our Constitution provide for just such emergencies as the present racial crisis? What did she think of the Constitution? the foundling fathers? He wondered if they would like what was going on in the country? Did they believe in unlawful protest? He thought it was an interesting question. Wonder, come to think of it, how they passed their time when not drafting the Constitution? Did they dance?

  “Terence,” she called, clutching his shoulder as he plodded by, “I’m so glad you’ve come back. You know I promised you the last dance.”

  She looked about for Truman to rescue her but he was nowhere in sight.

  Terence beamed with pride and joy. Off they moved to a dreary finish.

  “I went out for cigarettes,” said Truman, adjusting his robe. Meridian stood on the porch. Everyone else had left. Fearing the kindled gleam in Terence’s eye and not feeling up to a struggle, she’d waited for Truman.

  “God, you just don’t know what a drag this evening was,” said Meridian, who was too tired not to complain.

  When they reached her house she invited him in, but he too was feeling tired and sleepy.

  “Maybe tomorrow night,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  But she did not see Truman again, alone (except for one heart-breaking time), for several months, not until he had read The Souls of Black Folk, in fact. The exchange students, all three of them, had gone back North then, and he needed someone to discuss Du Bois with. “The man was a genius!” he cried, and he read passages from the book that he said were reflective of his and Meridian’s souls. But Meridian was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald then, though she never gave up any of the Du Bois she already knew. It just seemed too deep for conversation with Truman, somehow. He was startled by the coolness with which she received his assertion that what he had decided, after reading “le maître,” was that if he dated white girls it must be, essentially, a matter of sex. She laughed when she saw he expected her to be pleased and reassured, a bitter laugh that sent him away again, his chin thrust forward against her misunderstanding.

  The time she had seen Truman, after he began dating the exchange students, had been bitterly regretted. And for her part in what happened, Meridian paid dearly.

  She had been walking down the street from her job at the old professor’s and—walking with her head down—had not seen Truman coming toward her. They almost passed each other before he stopped and turned, his brown eyes very dark and hot against the green polo shirt he wore.

  “Meridian?”

  “Hi,” she said, feeling embarrassed to see him now that he was busy dating the exchange students. It was strange and unfair, but the fact that he dated them—and so obviously because their color made them interesting—made her ashamed, as if she were less.

  He came up to her and casually placed his arm around her shoulders. “You walk with your head down. It should be up. Proud and free.” And he chucked her playfully under the chin.

  She looked at him wondering if he had, as she had done, marched that day. As a rule, he said, he didn’t march any more, “because what I believe cannot be placed on a placard.” And she had teased him about that and said, “How about just the words ‘Freedom, Liberty, Equality’? That would cover what you believe in, wouldn’t it?” She was also tempted to add white exchange students. But how polite she was! How bewildered by his preference. It went against everything she had been taught to expect.

  For she realized what she had been taught was that nobody wanted white girls except their empty-headed, effeminate counterparts—white boys—whom her mother assured her smelled (in the mouth) of boiled corn and (in the body) of thirty-nine-cent glue. As far back as she could remember it seemed something understood: that while white men would climb on black women old enough to be their mothers—“for the experience”—white women were considered sexless, contemptible and ridiculous by all. They did not even smell like glue or boiled corn; they smelled of nothing since they did not sweat. They were clear, dead water.

  Her mother, though not a maid, had often worked for white families near Christmastime in order to earn extra money, and she told her family—in hushed, carefully controlled language, keeping her face set over her ironing board—about the lusty young sons home from school for the holidays, calling her by her first name, of course, and begging and pleading and even (and her mother scoffed) getting all blubbery the way white men get. “Gertrude pul-eze,” her mother mocked the slow pull of the pseudocultivated Southern gentleman. “What are you talkin’ ’bout, Mr. So-an-so?” (This is a twenty-one-year-old kid, her anger and her religion choking her.) “I’m old enough to be your grandma. I can remember when your mama was a girl. You wouldn’t hang around any of your mama’s friends like this. Why you botherin’ me?”

  This would lead Mrs. Hill directly into an exhortation on her religious as opposed to her human dignity. (Because she rightly assumed “Mr. So-an-so” would not be interested in the latter.) She was black, wasn’t she? And a female. (Not lady, not even woman, since both these words conjured up something larger than sex; they spoke of a somebody as opposed to a something.) Yes, it was understood about white men. Some of them liked black women for sex and said so. For the others it was a matter of gaining experience, initiation into the adult world. The maid, the cook, a stray child, anything not too old or repulsive would do. In Mrs. Hill’s voice there was a well, a reservoir, an ocean of disgust. And when she described white men it was with weary religion-restrained hatred. She could speak freely because the general opinion of white men, among blacks, was in her favor. She spoke of their faces as if they were the faces of moose, of oxen, of wet, slobbery walruses. Besides, she said, they were manipulated by their wives, which did not encourage respect.

  But what had her mother said about white women? She could actually remember very little, but her impression had been that they were frivolous, helpless creatures, lazy and without ingenuity. Occasionally one would rise to the level of bitchery, and this one would be carefully set aside when the collective “others” were discussed. Her grandmother—an erect former maid who was now a midwife—held strong opinions, which she expressed in this way: 1. She had never known a white woman she liked after the age of twelve. 2. White women were useless except as baby machines which would continue to produce little white people who would grow up to oppress her. 3. Without servants all of them would live in pigsties.

  Who would dream, in her home town, of kissing a whit
e 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 a
nd 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?”