Meridian Read online

  Many, many years ago, on the banks of the Lalocac River, in deepest Africa, there lived a man blacker than the night, whose occupation was catching little white children—those who had lost at least one tooth to the snags of time—and planting them in his garden. He buried everything except their heads: These he left above ground because he liked to hear them wail and scream and call for their mothers, who, of course, did not know where they were and never came.

  He fed them honey and live eels still wriggling that slipped through their lips and down their throats while underneath their ears the eels’ tails still struggled and slid. At night the children’s heads were used as warming posts for the man’s pet snakes, all of them healthy and fat and cold as ice, and loving to flick a keen, quick tail into a snuffling, defenseless nose.... The man used to laugh as he—

  This portion of Louvinie’s story was later discovered on a yellowed fragment of paper and was kept under glass in the Saxon library. It was in the childish handwriting of one of the older Saxon girls.

  Louvinie’s tongue was clipped out at the root. Choking on blood, she saw her tongue ground under the heel of Master Saxon. Mutely, she pleaded for it, because she knew the curse of her native land: Without one’s tongue in one’s mouth or in a special spot of one’s own choosing, the singer in one’s soul was lost forever to grunt and snort through eternity like a pig.

  Louvinie’s tongue was kicked toward her in a hail of sand. It was like a thick pink rose petal, bloody at the root. In her own cabin she smoked it until it was as soft and pliable as leather. On a certain day, when the sun turned briefly black, she buried it under a scrawny magnolia tree on the Saxon plantation.

  Even before her death forty years later the tree had outgrown all the others around it. Other slaves believed it possessed magic. They claimed the tree could talk, make music, was sacred to birds and possessed the power to obscure vision. Once in its branches, a hiding slave could not be seen.

  In Meridian’s second year at Saxon there was talk of cutting down the tree, and she had joined members of the Chamber Music Ensemble and their dotty Hungarian conductor when they chained themselves to its trunk. They had long ago dubbed The Sojourner “The Music Tree,” and would not stand to have it cut down, not even for a spanking new music building that a Northern philanthropist—unmindful that his buildings had already eaten up most of Saxon’s precious greenness—was eager to give. The tree was spared, but the platform and podium were dismantled, and the lower branches and steps—which had made access to the upper reaches of the tree so delightfully easy—were trimmed away. And why? Because students—believing the slaves of a hundred and fifty years ago—used the platform and who knows, even the podium, as places to make love. Meridian had made something approaching love there herself. And it was true, she had not been seen.

  So many tales and legends had grown up around The Sojourner that students of every persuasion had a choice of which to accept. There was only one Sojourner ceremony, however, that united all the students at Saxon—the rich and the poor, the very black-skinned (few though they were) with the very fair, the stupid and the bright—and that was the Commemoration of Fast Mary of the Tower.

  It was related that during the twenties a young girl named Mary had had a baby in the tower off one end of Tower Hall. She had concealed her pregnancy and muffled her cries (and of course was too ashamed to ask for help or tell anybody anything) as the child was being born. Then she had carefully chopped the infant into bits and fed it into the commode. The bits stuck and Fast Mary was caught. Caught, she was flogged before her instructors and her parents. At home she was locked in her room and denied the presence of a window. She hanged herself after three months.

  Any girl who had ever prayed for her period to come was welcome to the commemoration, which was held in the guise of a slow May Day dance around the foot of The Sojourner (which had been, it was said, Fast Mary’s only comfort and friend on Saxon campus). It was the only time in all the many social activities at Saxon that every girl was considered equal. On that day, they held each other’s hands tightly.

  The tree was visible from outside the campus walls, but its true magnificence was apparent only after one got near enough for a closer look, though then it was like staring into the side of a tall, rather lumpy building. From the road near the gate the mourners behind Wile Chile’s body could see the top, and the massive body and foliage of the tree, in full bloom, was like a huge mountain lit with candles. Across from the square that held the tree, on both sides, stood the empty red brick dormitories. Some windows were bedecked with flowers. Others were crammed with symbols of the campus sororities: QEZ or ZEQ, or whatever they were. Still others had large handpainted signs addressed to The Wild Child. “God Will Bless You, W.C.” “We Love You, ‘Wile Chile.’ ” “Tell God We Ready, Wild One.” Other windows were simply empty or from them floated crepe paper streamers of purple and gold. These were the school colors.

  Now the commotion at the front of the line, which had been going on for some time, reached them. The girl in front of them, whose name was Charlene, turned around. She was tall, heavily made up, and wore a reddish wig. Her accent reflected the St. Louis that she loved. She was a prisoner, temporarily, of the freshman class, a scholar under duress.

  “They say the president say she can’t have her funeral in you all’s chapel.” Charlene claimed nothing of the school except the men who walked over the grounds. She was chewing gum, popping it as she spoke.

  Meridian laughed in spite of the occasion. She imagined the president—a tan, impeccably tailored patriarch with glinting, shifty gray eyes—coming up to The Wild Child’s casket and saying, as if addressing a congregation: “We are sorry, young woman, but it is against the rules and regulations of this institution to allow you to conduct your funeral inside this chapel, which, as you may know, was donated to us by one of the finest robber baron families of New York. Besides, it is nearly time for Vespers, and you should have arranged for this affair through the proper channels much earlier.”

  And it seemed that, in fact, this was about what he did say, for there was a moiling about in front of the chapel (a stained-glass fortress made of stone, with gigantic circular columns supporting a jutting porch roof) as the mourners tried to plan what to do next.

  When Meridian and Anne-Marion arrived at the chapel steps they found the two guards from the gate. The president, having issued his orders, had retired to his Victorian mansion on the hill, and they imagined him peering down at them from behind his Irish lace curtains on the second floor.

  “I told y’all, y’all’d have trouble,” said the guard. Only now he was not nonchalant. The mood of the students had changed from mournful to indignant. But they were nicely brought-up girls and their wrath was slow to rise. Still, it is the nature of wrath to rise, and the guard was no dope.

  Anne-Marion, after the casket was lowered to the steps, examined the three-inch lock on the chapel door and looked about for a log or even a large rock to bash it in. But there was nothing. The people from the community, Wile Chile’s neighbors, resplendent though they had felt themselves to be on entering Saxon gate—for they were in their Sunday-best outfits of red and yellow and peacock blue—now shrunk down inside their clothes and would not look the students in the eye. They appeared to melt away, slinking farther and farther back until they had vanished, like a snail that has salt poured on its tail. Holding out her arms and pleading, Meridian ran after them, but they would not come back.

  The casket rested on the chapel steps, its color an orange to compete with the sunrise. There was a long moment of silence. Then the knowledge that The Wild Child was refused admittance to the chapel caused a cry to rise from the collective throats of the crowd in one long wail. For five minutes the air rang with shouts and the polite curses of young ladies whose home away from home the college was. They were so ashamed and angry they began to boo and stamp their feet and stick out their tongues through their tears. In the heat of their emotion th
ey began to take off their jewelry and fling it to the ground—the heavy three-strand cultured pearl necklaces and the massive, circular gold-plated chastity pins, the globular, clustered earrings and their glittering bracelets of many-colored stones. They shook loose their straightened hair, and all the while they glared at the locked chapel door with a ferocity that was close to hatred.

  Then, as if by mutual agreement—though no words were spoken—the pallbearers picked up the casket and carried it to the middle of the campus and put it down gently beneath The Sojourner, whose heavy, flower-lit leaves hovered over it like the inverted peaks of a mother’s half-straightened kinky hair. Instead of flowers the students, as if they had planned it, quickly made wreaths from Sojourner’s fallen leaves, and The Sojourner herself, ever generous to her children, dropped a leaf on the chest of The Wild Child, who wore for the first time, in her casket, a set of new clothes.

  The students sang through tears that slipped like melting pellets of sleet down their grieved and angered cheeks:

  “We shall overcome ...

  We shall overcome ...

  We shall overcome, someday ...

  Deep in my heart, I do believe ...

  We shall overcome, someday ...”

  That night, after The Wild Child was buried in an overgrown corner of a local black cemetery, students, including Anne-Marion, rioted on Saxon campus for the first time in its long, placid, impeccable history, and the only thing they managed to destroy was The Sojourner. Though Meridian begged them to dismantle the president’s house instead, in a fury of confusion and frustration they worked all night, and chopped and sawed down, level to the ground, that mighty, ancient, sheltering music tree.

  “Have You Stolen Anything?”

  MERIDIAN WAS CONSCIOUS always of a feeling of guilt, even as a child. Yet she did not know of what she might be guilty. When she tried to express her feelings to her mother, her mother would only ask: “Have you stolen anything?”

  Her mother was not a woman who should have had children. She was capable of thought and growth and action only if unfettered by the needs of dependents, or the demands, requirements, of a husband. Her spirit was of such fragility that the slightest impact on it caused a shattering beyond restoration.

  In the final days of her young adulthood she had known the luxury of lying in bed as late as nine or ten o’clock on Saturdays, and the joy of earning money as a schoolteacher. She had known the freedom of thinking out the possibilities of her life. They were actually two: She might stay in her home town and teach or she might move elsewhere and teach. She never tired of considering which she should do. This period of her life passed too quickly, so quickly she had not had time to properly value it. There had been a delight in her independence, an adventure in the fingering of her possibilities, but she wanted more of life to happen to her. More richness, more texture. She had begun to look about her for an increase in felicity over what she had. She noticed that other girls were falling in love, getting married. It seemed to produce a state of euphoria in them. She became unsure that her own way of living was as pleasant as she thought it was. It seemed to have an aimlessness to it that did not lead anywhere. Day followed day, and the calm level of her pleasures as a single woman remained constant. Certainly she never reached euphoria. And she wanted euphoria to add to the other good feelings she had.

  Of course as a teacher she earned both money and respect. This mattered to her. But there grew in her a feeling that the mothers of her pupils, no matter that they envied her her clothes, her speech, her small black car, pitied her. And in their harried or passive but always overweight and hideously dressed figures she began to suspect a mysterious inner life, secret from her, that made them willing, even happy, to endure.

  The man she married, Meridian’s father, was also a schoolteacher. He taught history classes in the room next to hers. He was quiet and clean and sincere. They could talk together and were friends long before she felt toleration for his personal habits that she identified as Love. He was a dreamy, unambitious person even then, who walked over the earth unhurriedly, as if conscious of every step and the print his footsteps would leave in the dirt. He cried as he broke into her body, as she was to cry later when their children broke out of it.

  She could never forgive her community, her family, his family, the whole world, for not warning her against children. For a year she had seen some increase in her happiness: She enjoyed joining her body to her husband’s in sex, and enjoyed having someone with whom to share the minute occurrences of her day. But in her first pregnancy she became distracted from who she was. As divided in her mind as her body was divided, between what part was herself and what part was not. Her frail independence gave way to the pressures of motherhood and she learned—much to her horror and amazement—that she was not even allowed to be resentful that she was “caught.” That her personal life was over. There was no one she could cry out to and say “It’s not fair!” And in understanding this, she understood a look she saw in the other women’s eyes. The mysterious inner life that she had imagined gave them a secret joy was simply a full knowledge of the fact that they were dead, living just enough for their children. They, too, had found no one to whom to shout “It’s not fair!” The women who now had eight, twelve, fifteen children: People made jokes about them, but she could feel now that such jokes were obscene; it was like laughing at a person who is being buried alive, walled away from her own life, brick by brick.

  That was the beginning of her abstraction. When her children were older and not so burdensome—and they were burdens to her always—she wanted to teach again but could not pass the new exams and did not like the new generation of students. In fact, she discovered she had no interest in children, until they were adults; then she would pretend to those she met that she remembered them. She learned to make paper flowers and prayer pillows from tiny scraps of cloth, because she needed to feel something in her hands. She never learned to cook well, she never learned to braid hair prettily or to be in any other way creative in her home. She could have done so, if she had wanted to. Creativity was in her, but it was refused expression. It was all deliberate. A war against those to whom she could not express her anger or shout, “It’s not fair!”

  With her own daughter she certainly said things she herself did not believe. She refused help and seemed, to Meridian, never to understand. But all along she understood perfectly.

  It was for stealing her mother’s serenity, for shattering her mother’s emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very first, though she was unable to understand how this could possibly be her fault.

  When her mother asked, without glancing at her, “Have you stolen anything?” a stillness fell over Meridian and for seconds she could not move. The question literally stopped her in her tracks.

  Gold

  ONE DAY WHEN MERIDIAN was seven she found a large chunk of heavy metal. It was so thickly encrusted with dirt that even when she had washed it the metal did not shine through. Yet she knew metal was there, because it was so heavy. Finally, when she had dried off the water, she took a large file and filed away some of the rust. To her amazement what she had found was a bar of yellow gold. Bullion they called it in the movies. She filed a spot an inch square and ran with it (heavy as it was) to her mother, who was sitting on the back porch shelling peas.

  “I’ve found some gold!” she shouted. “Gold!” And she placed the large heavy gold bar in her mother’s lap.

  “Move that thing,” her mother said sharply. “Don’t you see I’m trying to get these peas ready for supper?”

  “But it’s gold!” she insisted. “Feel how heavy it is. Look how yellow it is. It’s gold, and it could make us rich!”

  But her mother was not impressed. Neither was her father or her brothers. She took her bar of gold and filed all the rust off it until it shone like a huge tooth. She put it in a shoe box and buried it under the magnolia tree that grew in the yard. About once a week she dug it up to look at it.
Then she dug it up less and less ... until finally she forgot to dig it up. Her mind turned to other things.

  Indians and Ecstasy

  MERIDIAN’S FATHER HAD BUILT for himself a small white room like a tool shed in the back yard, with two small windows, like the eyes of an owl, high up under the roof. One summer when the weather was very hot, she noticed the door open and had tiptoed inside. Her father sat at a tiny brown table poring over a map. It was an old map, yellowed and cracked with frayed edges, that showed the ancient settlements of Indians in North America. Meridian stared around the room in wonder. All over the walls were photographs of Indians: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Little Bear, Yellow Flower, and even a drawing of Minnehaha and Hiawatha. There were actual photographs, perhaps priceless ones—which apparently her father had spent years collecting—of Indian women and children looking starved and glassy-eyed and doomed into the camera. There were also books on Indians, on their land rights, reservations, and their wars. As she tiptoed closer to the bookshelves and reached to touch a photograph of a frozen Indian child (whose mother lay beside her in a bloody heap) her father looked up from his map, his face wet with tears, which she mistook, for a moment, for sweat. Shocked and frightened, she ran away.

  One day she overheard her parents talking. Her mother was filling fruit jars in the kitchen: “So you’ve gone and done it, have you?” said her mother, pouring apple slices into the jars with a sloshing noise.

  “But the land already belonged to them,” her father said, “I was just holding it. The rows of my cabbages and tomatoes run right up along the biggest coil of the Sacred Serpent. That mound is full of dead Indians. Our food is made healthy from the iron and calcium from their bones. Course, since it’s a cemetery, we shouldn’t own it anyhow.”

  Before the new road was cut it had not been possible to see the Serpent from the old one. It was news to most of the townspeople that an Indian mound existed there.