Living by the Word Page 2

  I’m positive my father never understood why I wrote. I wonder sometimes if the appearance, in 1968, of my first book, Once, poems largely about my experiences in the Civil Rights movement and in other countries, notably African and Eastern European, surprised him. It is frustrating that, because he is now dead, I will never know.

  In fact, what I regret most about my relationship with my father is that it did not improve until after his death. For a long time I felt so shut off from him that we were unable to talk. I hadn’t the experience, as a younger woman, to ask the questions I would ask now. These days I feel we are on good terms, spiritually (my dreams of him are deeply loving and comforting ones), and that we both understand our relationship was a casualty of exhaustion and circumstances. My birth, the eighth child, unplanned, must have elicited more anxiety than joy. It hurts me to think that for both my parents, poor people, my arrival represented many more years of backbreaking and spirit-crushing toil.

  I grew up to marry someone very unlike my father, as I knew him—though I feel sure he had these qualities himself as a younger man—someone warm, openly and spontaneously affectionate, who loved to talk to me about everything, including my work. I now share my life with another man who has these qualities. But I would give a lot to be able to talk grownup to grownup with Daddy. I’d like to tell him how hard I am working to understand. And about the humor and solace I occasionally find (while writing The Color Purple, for instance, in which some of his early life is imagined) in the work.

  My father

  (back blistered)

  beat me

  because I

  could not

  stop crying.

  He’d had

  enough “fuss”

  he said

  for one damn

  voting day. *

  In my heart, I have never wanted to be at odds with my father, but I have felt, over the years, especially when I was younger, that he gave me no choice. Perhaps if I could have relaxed and been content to be his favorite, there would have been a chance for closeness, but because a sister whom I loved was clearly not favorite material I did not want to be either. When I look back over my life, I see a pattern in my relationships going back to this, and in my love relationships I have refused men who loved me (at least for a time) if they in turn were loved by another woman but did not love her in return. I am the kind of woman who could positively forbid a married lover to leave his wife.

  The poem above is one of my earliest as an adult, written after an abortion of which my father would not have approved, in which I felt that visceral understanding of a situation that for a poet can mean a poem. My father far away in the South, me in college in the North—how far away from each other! Yet in the pain of the moment and the illumination of some of what was wrong between us, how close. If he ever read the poem, I wonder what he thought. We never discussed my work, though I thought he tended to become more like some of my worst characters the older he got. I remember going home once and being told by my mother of some of the curses he was capable of, and hardly believing her, since the most I’d ever heard my father say was “God damn!” and I could count the number of times on toes and fingers. (In fact, his favorite curse, when a nail refused to go in straight or he dropped the hammer on his sore corn was “God damn the goddam luck to the devil!” which always sounded rather ineffectual and humorous to me, and which, thinking of it, I hear him say and see his perspiring dark face.)

  Did he actually beat me on voting day? Probably not. I suppose the illegal abortion caused me to understand what living under other people’s politics can force us to do. The only time I remember his beating me was one day after he’d come home tired and hungry from the dairy (where he and my brothers milked a large herd of cows morning and afternoon), and my brother Bobby, three years older than me and a lover of chaos, and I were fighting. He had started it, of course. My mother, sick of our noise, spoke to my father about it, and without asking questions he took off his belt and flailed away, indiscriminately, at the two of us.

  Why do certain things stick in the mind? I recall a scene, much earlier, when I was only three or so, in which my father questioned me about a fruit jar I had accidentally broken. I felt he knew I had broken it; at the same time, I couldn’t be sure. Apparently breaking it was, in any event, the wrong thing to have done. I could say, Yes, I broke the jar, and risk a whipping for breaking something valuable, or, No, I did not break it, and perhaps bluff my way through.

  I’ve never forgotten my feeling that he really wanted me to tell the truth. And because he seemed to desire it—and the moments during which he waited for my reply seemed quite out of time, so much so I can still feel them, and, as I said, I was only three, if that—I confessed. I broke the jar, I said. I think he hugged me. He probably didn’t, but I still feel as if he did, so embraced did I feel by the happy relief I noted on his face and by the fact that he didn’t punish me at all, but seemed, instead, pleased with me. I think it was at that moment that I resolved to take my chances with the truth, although as the years rolled on I was to break more serious things in his scheme of things than fruit jars.

  It was the unfairness of the beating that keeps it fresh in my mind. (And this was thirty-seven years ago!) And my disappointment at the deterioration of my father’s ethics. And yet, since I am never happy in my heart when estranged from my father, any more than I would be happy shut off from sunlight, in writing this particular poem I tried to see my father’s behavior in a context larger than our personal relationship.

  Actually, my father was two fathers.

  To the first four of his children he was one kind of father, to the second set of four he was another kind. Whenever I talk to the elder set I am astonished at the picture they draw, for the man they describe bears little resemblance to the man I knew. For one thing, the man they knew was physically healthy, whereas the man I knew was almost always sick; not sick enough to be in bed, or perhaps he was but with so many children to feed he couldn’t afford to lie down, but “dragging-around” sick, in the manner of the very poor. Overweight, high blood pressure, diabetes, or, as it was called, “sugar,” rotten teeth. There are certain facts, however, that identify our father as the same man; one of which is that, in the 1930s, my father was one of the first black men to vote in Eatonton, Georgia, among a group of men like himself he helped organize, mainly poor sharecroppers with large families, totally at the mercy of the white landlords. He voted for Roosevelt. He was one of the leading supporters of the local one-room black school, and according to everyone who knew him then, including my older brothers and sister, believed in education above all else. Years later, when I knew him, he seemed fearful of both education and politics and disappointed and resentful as well.

  And why not? Though he risked his life and livelihood to vote more than once, nothing much changed in his world. Cotton prices continued low. Dairying was hard. White men and women continued to run things, badly. In his whole life my father never had a vacation. (Of course my mother had less of one: she could not even get in the car and drive off to town, as he could.) Education merely seemed to make his children more critical of him. When I went south in the mid-sixties to help register voters, I stopped by our house to say hello but never told either of my parents what I planned to do. I didn’t want them to worry about my safety, and it never occurred to me that they cared much about the vote. My father was visibly ill, paranoid, complaining the whole time of my mother’s religious activities (she had become a Jehovah’s Witness). Then, for no apparent reason, he would come out with one of those startlingly intelligent comments about world affairs or some absolutely clear insight into the deficiencies of national leaders, and I would be reminded of the father I didn’t know.

  For years I have held on to another early memory of my life between the ages of two and four. Every afternoon a tired but jolly very black man came up to me with arms outstretched. I flew into them to be carried, to be hugged, to be kissed. For years I thought
this black man was my father. But no. He was my oldest brother, Fred, whose memories of my father are, surprisingly, as painful as my memories of him, because as my father’s first child, and a son, he was subjected to my father’s very confused notions of what constituted behavior suitable for a male. And of course my father himself didn’t really know. He was in his late teens, a child himself, when he married. His mother had been murdered, by a man who claimed to love her, when he was eleven. His father, to put it very politely, drank, and terrorized his children.

  My father was so confused that when my sister Ruth appeared in the world and physically resembled his mother, and sounded like his mother, and had similar expressions, he rejected her and missed no opportunity that I ever saw to put her down. I, of course, took the side of my sister, forfeiting my chance to be my father’s favorite among the second set of children, as my oldest sister, Mamie, was favorite among the first. In her case the favoritism seemed outwardly caused by her very light color, and of course she was remarkably intelligent as well.

  In my case, my father seemed partial to me because of my “smartness” and forthrightness, but more obviously because of my hair, which was the longest and “best” in the family.

  And yet, my father taught me two things that have been important to me: he taught me not to bother telling lies, because the listener might be delighted with the truth, and he told me never to cut my hair. Though I have tried not to lie, the sister he rejected and I loved became a beautician, and one of the first things she did—partly in defiance of him—was to cut my shoulder-blade-length hair. I did not regret it so much while in high school and college (everyone kept their hair short, it seemed), but years later, after I married, I grew it long again, almost as long as it had been when I was growing up. I’d had it relaxed to feathers. When I walked up to my father, as he was talking to a neighbor, I stooped a little and placed his hand on my head. I thought he’d be pleased. “A woman’s hair is her glory,” he’d always said. He paid little attention. When the black power movement arrived, with its emphasis on cropped natural hair, I did the job myself, filling the face bowl and bathroom floor with hair and shocking my husband when he arrived home.

  Only recently have I come to believe he was right in wanting me to keep my hair. After years of short hair, of cutting my hair back each time it raised its head, so to speak, I have begun to feel each time as if I am mutilating my antennae (which is how Rastafarians, among others, think of hair) and attenuating my power. It seems imperative not to cut my hair anymore.

  I didn’t listen to my father because I assumed he meant that in the eyes of a man, in his eyes, a woman’s hair is her glory (unfortunately, he wore his own head absolutely cleanshaven all his life); and that is probably what he did mean. But now I begin to sense something else, that there is power (would an ancient translation of glory be power?) in uncut hair itself. The power (and glory) perhaps of the untamed, the undomes- ticated; in short, the wild. A wildness about the head, as the Rastas have discovered, places us somehow in the loose and spacious freedom of Jah’s universe. Hippies, of course, knew this, too.

  As I write, my own hair reaches just below my ears. It is at the dangerous stage at which I usually butt my forehead against the mirror and in resignation over not knowing “what to do with it” cut it off. But this time I have thought ahead and have encased it in braids made of someone else’s hair. I expect to wear them, braces for the hair, so to speak, until my own hair replaces them. Eventually I will be able, as I was when a child, to tie my hair under my chin. But mostly I would like to set it free.

  My father would have loved Jesse Jackson. On the night Jesse addressed the Democratic convention I stayed close to my radio. In my backwoods cabin, linked to the world only by radio, I felt something like my father must have, since he lived most of his life before television and far from towns. He would have appreciated Jesse’s oratorical gift, and, unlike some newscasters who seemed to think of it primarily as technique, he would have felt, as I did, the transformation of the spirit of the man implicit in the words he chose to say. He would have felt, as I did, that in asking for forgiveness as well as votes and for patience as well as commitment to the Democratic party, Jackson lost nothing and won almost everything: a cleared conscience and peace of mind.

  My father was never able to vote for a black candidate for any national or local political office. By the time black people were running for office and occasionally winning elections, in the late sixties and early seventies, he was too sick to respond with the exhilaration he must have felt. On the night of Jackson’s speech, I felt it for him; along with the grief that in neither of our lifetimes is the United States likely to choose the best leadership offered to it. This is the kind of leader, the kind of evergrowing, ever-expanding spirit you might have been, Daddy, I thought—and damn it, I love you for what you might have been. And thinking of you now, merging the two fathers that you were, remembering how tightly I hugged you as a small child returning home after two long months at a favorite aunt’s, and with what apparent joy you lifted me beside your cheek; knowing now, at forty, what it takes out of body and spirit to go and how much more to stay, and having learned, too, by now, some of the pitiful confusions in behavior caused by ignorance and pain, I love you no less for what you were.

  1984

  * From Once by Alice Walker. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968.)

  TRYING TO SEE MY SISTER

  On June 16, 1975, two black women were hitchhiking through the small town of Lyons, Georgia. They were returning from a visit to nearby Reidsville prison, where the brother of one of them was incarcerated and ill. They had been beaten and jailed overnight by local police, who had accused them of vagrancy and public drunkenness when one of them fainted, from the heat and the effects of her low-blood-pressure medication, along the road. Now the women were tired, humiliated, and hungry, sweaty from the severe heat, and scared. They had discovered there was no bus service back to Atlanta, where they lived.

  Sometime before midnight, a white man who said he was a policeman, and who sported all the regalia of a Georgia police officer, offered them a ride. While driving them to a restaurant for a bite to eat, he implied that their troubles were over. This man was not a policeman, but an insurance agent; he had a history of accosting black women; and he had called his associate on his CB radio to meet him at the restaurant to look the two women over.

  After a fight with his associate at the restaurant, the insurance man, still posing as a cop, drove the two women deep into the woods, telling them he intended to have sex with both of them. When they pleaded to be let out of the car, he threatened them with the gun he carried next to him on the seat. He wanted them to “service” him, and made other gross verbal sexual assaults that thoroughly horrified and repelled the women.

  As soon as he stopped the car, one of the women jumped out and ran. The man drew his gun and pointed it after her. The other woman threw her five feet two inches against the five-foot-nine, 215-pound man and struggled to take the gun. In the process of that struggle, the gun went off twice. The man was killed by two bullet shots to the head.

  The women took some money from his wallet, but left his gun, and made their way, terrified, back to Atlanta. They were arrested the following day and charged with theft and murder. The woman who ran was eventually given a five-year sentence, with three and a half years on probation. The woman who saved her life, and saved them both from rape, was given twenty-two years, later reduced to twelve.

  That woman is Dessie Woods.

  There is no story more moving to me personally than one in which one woman saves the life of another, and saves herself, and slays whatever dragon has appeared. And I know that, on a subconscious level, if not a conscious one, this is work black women wish they were able to do all the time. Dessie Woods is a hero. But it is her photograph, really, as much as her story that moves me. She looks exactly like some of the women I write about, in stories and poems, and, looking at he
r picture, I “recognize” her life. She is a very black black woman (as many of those in prison and those remaining in the ghetto are), with the stunned, outraged eyes of the intelligent poor. From the photograph alone one guesses she is the sole support of her children, for her neck is as stiff as her countenance is soft, as if rubbed down, burnished, blurred by the swift, unrelenting rush of irregular events. She wears a necklace that looks like a chain; and with her short hair, the deep blackness of her skin glistening from the swampy Southern heat, she easily becomes, in imagination, the first of our mothers dragged, abused and resisting, to America.

  In 1976, when I lived in New York, I began to keep a file on Dessie Woods. When I moved to San Francisco in 1978, I gave it to a friend at a feminist magazine, with the hope that she would publish something about the case. Two years later, after nothing happened there, I began a second file, and eventually contacted Dessie Woods’s defense committee in San Francisco. I wanted to interview Ms. Woods, I said, in order to help publicize her case. Did they think this possible? Yes, was the reply. Two journalists from Copenhagen had interviewed her recently; why not I?

  I wrote to Ms. Woods at once. Six months later, having received no response, I attempted to telephone her at Hardwick prison in Hardwick, Georgia. My call was not put through. The prisoner, I was told, was not permitted to have calls. Next I called the warden’s office. His secretary said I could see Ms. Woods simply by putting my name on the visitors’ list and appearing at the prison during visiting hours. When were these hours? I asked, and made arrangements to take advantage of them. A week later, I was on my way to Georgia. I stopped off in Eatonton, my hometown, and called ahead to Hardwick to make sure I was still expected next day. I was told to call back in the morning, when the warden would be in. I was asked whether I was white or black.