You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Read online

  After sitting before her piano for hours, setting one of her poems to music, she would fling open her cabin door and wave to him as he walked by on his way to or from the lake. He was writing a novella about his former wife and composed it in longhand down at the lake (“So if I get fed up with it I can toss myself in,” he joked) and then took it back to his studio with him to type. She would call to him, her hair and clothing very loose, and entice him into her cabin with promises of sympathy and half her lunch.

  When they made love she was disappointed. He did not appear to believe in unhurried pleasure, and thought the things she suggested he might do to please her very awkward at the least. But it hardly mattered, since what mattered was the fact of having a lover. She liked snuggling up to him, liked kissing him along the sides of his face—his cheeks were just beginning to be a trifle flabby but would still be good for several years—and loved to write him silly letters—scorching with passion and promises of abandon—that made her seem head over heels in love. She enjoyed writing the letters because she enjoyed feeling to her full capacity and for as long as possible the excitement having a lover brought. It was the kind of excitement she’d felt years ago, in high school and perhaps twice in college (once when she’d fallen for a student and once when she was seduced—with her help and consent—by a teacher), and she recognized it as a feeling to be enjoyed for all it was worth. Her body felt on fire, her heart jumped in her breast, her pulse raced—she was aware, for the first time in years, of actually needing to make love.

  He began to think he must fight her off, at least a little bit. She was too intense, he said. He did not have time for intense relationships, that’s why he had finally accepted a divorce from his wife. He was also writing a great poem which he had begun in 1950 and which—now that he was at the Colony—he hoped to finish. She should concentrate on her own work if she expected to win any more prizes. She wanted to win more, didn’t she?

  She laughed at him, but would not tell him why. Instead she tried, very gently (while sitting on his lap with her bosom maternally opposite his face), to tell him he misunderstood. That she wanted nothing from him beyond the sensation of being in love itself. (His stare was at first blank, then cynical, at this.) As for her work, she did not do hers the way he apparently did his. Hers did not mean to her what he seemed to think it meant. It did not get in the way of her living, for example, and if it ever did, she felt sure she would remove it. Prizes were nice—especially if they brought one money (which one might then use to explore Barbados! China! Mozambique!)—but they were not rewards she could count on. Her life, on the other hand, was a reward she could count on. (He became impatient with this explanation and a little angry.)

  It was their first quarrel.

  When he saw her again she had spent the weekend (which had been coming up) in nearby Boston. She looked cheerful, happy and relaxed. From her letters to him—which he had thought embarrassingly self-revealing and erotic, though flattering, of course, to him—he had assumed she was on the point of declaring her undying love and of wanting to run away with him. Instead, she had gone off for two days, without mentioning it to him. And she had gone, so she said, by herself!

  She soothed him as best she could. Lied, which she hated more than anything, about her work. “It was going so poorly,” she complained (and the words rang metallic in her mouth); “I just couldn’t bear staying here doing nothing where working conditions are so idyllic!” He appeared somewhat mollified. Actually, her work was going fine and she had sent off to her publishers a completed book of poems and jazz arrangements—which was what she had come to the Colony to do. “Your work was going swimmingly down at the lake,” she giggled. “I didn’t wish to disturb you.”

  And yet it was clear he was disturbed.

  So she did not tell him she had flown all the way home.

  He was always questioning her now about her town, her house, her child, her husband. She found herself describing her husband as if to a prospective bride. She lingered over the wiry bronze of his hair, the evenness of his teeth. his black, black eyes, the thrilling timbre of his deep voice. It was an exceptionally fine voice, it seemed to her now, listening to Ellis’s rather whining one. Though, on second thought, it was perhaps nothing special.

  At night, after a rousing but unsatisfactory evening with Ellis, she dreamed of her husband making love to her on the kitchen floor at home, where the sunlight collected in a pool beneath the window, and lay in bed next day dreaming of all the faraway countries, daring adventures, passionate lovers still to be found.

  Petunias

  This is what they read on the next to the last page of the diary they found after her death in the explosion:

  As soon as my son got off the bus from Vietnam I could tell he was different. He said, Mama, I’m going to show you how to make bombs. He went with me to the house, me thinking it was all a big joke. He had all of the stuff in a footlocker and in his duffel bag among his clothes. So it wouldn’t jar, he said.

  Son, I said, I don’t think I want that stuff in my house.

  But he just laughed. Let’s make a big noise in Tranquil, Mississippi, he said.

  We have always lived in Tranquil. My daddy’s grandmama was a slave on the Tearslee Plantation. They dug up her grave when I started agitating in the Movement. One morning I found her dust dumped over my verbena bed, a splintery leg bone had fell among my petunias.

  Coming Apart

  By Way of Introduction to Lorde, Teish and Gardner

  IN 1979 I WAS INVITED by Laura Lederer to write an introduction to the Third World Women’s chapter of a book she was then editing about pornography called Take Back the Night. When I agreed to write it, she sent me three essays, by Audre Lorde, Luisah Teish and Tracy A. Gardner. I was moved by the essays and the following “introduction”—published in Ms. before book publication simply as “A Fable”—was the result.

  The “fable” works, I think, as a story, and in fact it appears as one, rather than as an introduction, in Take Back the Night. However, if I had written it as a story originally, making up all the parts myself, or choosing my informants, my analysis of the roots of vicious white male pornographic treatment of white women would have been somewhat different, with a longer historical perspective.

  While not denying the obvious connections between the lynching of black men and women (which, as Gardner states, became prevalent only after the Civil War) and the pornographic abuse of white women, I would have argued that the more ancient roots of modern pornography are to be found in the almost always pornographic treatment of black women, who, from the moment they entered slavery, even in their own homelands, were subjected to rape as the “logical” convergence of sex and violence. Conquest, in short.

  For centuries the black woman has served as the primary pornographic “outlet” for white men in Europe and America. We need only think of the black women used as breeders, raped for the pleasure and profit of their owners. We need only think of the license the “master” of the slave woman enjoyed. But, most telling of all, we need only study the old slave societies of the South to note the sadistic treatment—at the hands of white “gentlemen”—of “beautiful, young quadroons and octoroons” who became increasingly (and were deliberately bred to become) indistinguishable from white women, and were the more highly prized as slave mistresses because of this.

  Although this “fable,” “story,” “introduction” was itself labeled pornographic and banned temporarily by at least one school district in the United States, I believe it is only by writing stories in which pornography is confronted openly and explicitly that writers can make a contribution, in their own medium, to a necessary fight.

  A middle-aged husband comes home after a long day at the office. His wife greets him at the door with the news that dinner is ready. He is grateful. First, however, he must use the bathroom. In the bathroom, sitting on the commode, he opens up the Jiveboy magazine he has brought home in his briefcase. There are a couple of
jivemate poses that particularly arouse him. He studies the young women—blonde, perhaps (the national craze), with elastic waists and inviting eyes—and strokes his penis. At the same time, his bowels stir with the desire to defecate. He is in the bathroom a luxurious ten minutes. He emerges spent, relaxed—hungry for dinner.

  His wife, using the bathroom later, comes upon the slightly damp magazine. She picks it up with mixed emotions. She is a brownskin woman with black hair and eyes. She looks at the white blondes and brunettes. Will he be thinking of them, she wonders, when he is making love to me?

  “Why do you need these?” she asks.

  “They mean nothing,” he says.

  “But they hurt me somehow,” she says.

  “You are being a.) silly, b.) a prude, and c.) ridiculous,” he says. “You know I love you.”

  She cannot say to him: But they are not me, those women. She cannot say she is jealous of pictures on a page. That she feels invisible. Rejected. Overlooked. She says instead, to herself: He is right. I will grow up. Adjust. Swim with the tide.

  He thinks he understands her, what she has been trying to say. It is Jiveboy, he thinks. The white women.

  Next day he brings home Jivers, a black magazine, filled with bronze and honey-colored women. He is in the bathroom another luxurious ten minutes.

  She stands, holding the magazine: on the cover are the legs and shoes of a well-dressed black man, carrying a briefcase and a rolled Wall Street Journal in one hand. At his feet—she turns the magazine cover around and around to figure out how exactly the pose is accomplished—there is a woman, a brownskin woman like herself, twisted and contorted in such a way that her head is not even visible. Only her glistening body—her back and derriere—so that she looks like a human turd at the man’s feet.

  He is on a business trip to New York. He has brought his wife along. He is eagerly sharing 42nd Street with her. “Look!” he says. “How free everything is! A far cry from Bolton!” (The small town they are from.) He is elated to see the blonde, spaced-out hookers, with their black pimps, trooping down the street. Elated at the shortness of the black hookers’ dresses, their long hair, inevitably false and blond. She walks somehow behind him, so that he will encounter these wonders first. He does not notice until he turns a corner that she has stopped in front of a window that has caught her eye. While she is standing alone, looking, two separate pimps ask her what stable she is in or if in fact she is in one. Or simply “You workin’?”

  He struts back and takes her elbow. Looks hard for the compliment implied in these questions, then shares it with his wife: “You know you’re foxy!”

  She is immovable. Her face suffering and wondering. “But look,” she says, pointing. Four large plastic dolls—one a skinny Farrah Fawcett (or so the doll looks to her) posed for anal inspection; one, an oriental, with her eyes, strangely, closed, but her mouth, a pouting red suction cup, open; an enormous eskimo woman, with fur around her neck and ankles, and vagina; and a black woman dressed entirely in a leopard skin, complete with tail. The dolls are all life-size, and the efficiency of their rubber genitals is explained in detail on a card visible through the plate glass.

  For her this is the stuff of nightmares—possibly because all the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity. He will return, another time, alone. Meanwhile, he must prevent her from seeing such things, he resolves, whisking her briskly off the street.

  Later, in their hotel room, she watches TV as two black women sing their latest hits: the first woman, dressed in a gold dress (because her song is now “solid gold!”) is nonetheless wearing a chain around her ankle—the wife imagines she sees a chain—because the woman is singing: “Free me from my freedom, chain me to a tree!”

  “What do you think of that?” she asks her husband.

  “She’s a fool,” says he.

  But when the second woman sings: “Ready, aim, fire, my name is desire,” with guns and rockets going off all around her, he thinks the line “Shoot me with your love!” explains everything.

  She is despondent.

  She looks in a mirror at her plump brown and black body, crinkly hair and black eyes and decides, foolishly, that she is not beautiful. And that she is not hip, either. Among her other problems is the fact that she does not like the word “nigger” used by anyone at all, and is afraid of marijuana. These restraints, she feels, make her old, too much like her own mother, who loves sex (she has lately learned) but is highly religious and, for example, thinks cardplaying wicked and alcohol deadly. Her husband would not consider her mother sexy, she thinks. Since she herself is aging, this thought frightens her. But, surprisingly, while watching herself become her mother in the mirror, she discovers that she considers her mother—who carefully braids her average-length, average-grade, graying hair every night before going to bed; the braids her father still manages to fray during the night—very sexy.

  At once she feels restored.

  Resolves to fight

  “You’re the only black woman in the world that worries about any of this stuff,” he tells her, unaware of her resolve, and moody at her months of silent studiousness.

  She says, “Here, Colored Person, read this essay by Audre Lorde.”

  He hedges. She insists.

  He comes to the line about Lorde “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” and bridles. “Wait a minute,” he says, “what kind of a name is ‘Audre’ for a man? They must have meant ‘André.’”

  “It is the name of a woman,” she says. “Read the rest of that page.”

  “No dyke can tell me anything,” he says, flinging down the pages.

  She has been calmly waiting for this. She brings in Jiveboy and Jivers. In both, there are women eating women they don’t even know. She takes up the essay and reads:

  This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

  He looks at her with resentment, because she is reading this passage over again, silently, absorbedly, to herself, holding the pictures of the phony lesbians (a favorite, though unexamined, turn-on) absent-mindedly on her lap. He realizes he can never have her again sexually the way he has had her since their second year of marriage, as though her body belonged to someone else. He sees, down the road, the dissolution of the marriage, a constant search for more perfect bodies, or dumber wives. He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels somehow as if her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights.

  Now she is busy pasting Audre Lorde’s words on the cabinet over the kitchen sink.

  When they make love she tries to look him in the eye, but he refuses to return her gaze.

  For the first time he acknowledges the awareness that the pleasure of coming without her is bitter and lonely. He thinks of eating stolen candy alone, behind the barn. And yet, he thinks greedily, it is better than nothing, which he considers her struggle’s benefit to him.

  The next day, she is reading another essay when he comes home from work. It is called “A Quiet Subversion,” and is by Luisah Teish. “Another dyke?” he asks.

  “Another one of your sisters,” she replies, and begins to read, even before he’s had dinner:

  During the “Black Power Movement” much cultural education was focused on the black physique. One of the accomplishments of that period was the popularization of African hairstyles and the Natural. Along with this new hair-do came a new self-image and way of relating. Then the movie industry put out “Superfly,” and the Lord Jesus Look, the Konked head, and an accompanying attitude, ran rampant in the black community. Films like “Shaft” and “Lady Sings the Blues�
� portray black “heroes” as cocaine-snorting, fast-life fools. In these movies a black woman is always caught in a web of violence.…

  A popular Berkeley theatre featured a porno movie titled “Slaves of Love.” Its advertisement portrayed two black women, naked, in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip! How such racist pornographic material escaped the eye of black activists presents a problem.…

  Typically, he doesn’t even hear the statement about the women. “What does the bitch know about the Black Power Movement?” he fumes. He is angry at his wife for knowing him so long and so well. She knows, for instance, that because of the Black Power Movement (and really because of the Civil Rights movement before it), and not because he was at all active in it, he holds the bourgeois job he has. She remembers when his own hair was afroed. Now it is loosely curled. It occurs to him that, because she knows him as he was, he cannot make love to her as she is. Cannot, in fact, love her as she is. There is a way in which, in some firmly repressed corner of his mind, he considers his wife to be still black, whereas he feels himself to have moved to some other plane.

  (This insight, a glimmer of which occurs to him, frightens him so much that he will resist it for several years. Should he accept it at once, however unsettling, it would help him understand the illogic of his acceptance of pornography used against black women: that he has detached himself from his own blackness in attempting to identify black women only by their sex.)

  The wife has never considered herself a feminist—though she is, of course, a “womanist.”* A womanist is a feminist, only more common. (The author of this piece is a womanist.) So she is surprised when her husband attacks her as a “women’s libber,” a “white women’s lackey,” a “pawn” in the hands of Gloria Steinem, an incipient bra-burner! What possible connection could there be, he wants to know, between her and white women—those overprivileged hags now (he’s recently read in Newsweek) marching and preaching their puritanical horseshit up and down Times Square!