Meridian (1976) Read online

  She went up to a yard with an outdoor spigot and soaked the bottom of her blouse in water. When she came back down to the street to wipe the tear gas from Truman’s eyes, he was gone. A police car was careening down the street. She stood in the street feeling the cool wet spot on her side, wondering what to do.

  The majority of black townspeople were sympathetic to the Movement from the first, and told Meridian she was doing a good thing: typing, teaching illiterates to read and write, demonstrating against segregated facilities and keeping the Movement house open when the other workers returned to school. Her mother, however, was not sympathetic.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Mrs. Hill, “you’ve wasted a year of your life, fooling around with those people. The papers say they’re crazy. God separated the sheeps from the goats and the black folks from the white. And me from anybody that acts as foolish as they do. It never bothered me to sit in the back of the bus, you get just as good a view and you don’t have all those nasty white asses passing you.”

  Meridian attempted to ignore her, but her mother would continue. “If somebody thinks he’ll have to pee when he gets to town, let him use his own toilet before he leaves home! That’s what we did when I was coming up!” Eventually Mrs. Hill would talk herself out.

  It had taken Meridian a long time to tell her mother she was in the Movement, and by the time she did, her mother already knew. Now she had news that was even more likely to infuriate her. To deliver it, she brought Delores Jones (another Movement worker) and Nelda Henderson, an old playmate, with her. It was cowardly of her, but Meridian could not face her mother alone.

  While Meridian was still a student in high school she was tested and informed that, for her area and background, her IQ of 140 was unusually high. She was pregnant at the time, sick as a dog and about to be expelled from school; she had shrugged her shoulders at the news. But now, though she had not completed high school, she was to have—if she wanted it—a chance to go to college. Mr. Yateson told her this, explaining that a unique honor was being bestowed upon her—who might or might not be worthy; after all, nice girls did not become pregnant in high school—and that he expected her to set a high moral standard because she would be representing the kind of bright “product” his “plant” could produce.

  He spoke so proprietarily she thought at first he intended to send her to college with his own money. But no. He explained that a generous (and wealthy) white family in Connecticut—who wished to help some of the poor, courageous blacks they saw marching and getting their heads whipped nightly on TV—had decided, as a gesture of their liberality and concern, to send a smart black girl to Saxon College in Atlanta, a school this family had endowed for three generations.

  “You don’t mean I’m the smartest one you’ve got!” said Meridian humbly. But then the thought that this might be true simply because Mr. Yateson’s “plant” generally produced nothing among its “products” but boredom tickled her and she smiled.

  Mr. Yateson was annoyed. “In my day,” he said, “we didn’t reward bad behavior—nor did we think it was funny!”

  So then Meridian felt she had to apologize for her smile, even though it had been such a pathetic one, and some of the joy of the experience went out of it for her.

  It was Truman who put it back by telling her Saxon College was only two hours away, and just across the street from his own school, R. Baron College, which he attended when he was not working in the Movement out of town. Because of course there was an Atlanta Movement, in which he had already been involved. He and Meridian would see each other every day.

  “Mais oui,” Truman kept saying, as she looked shyly but happily up at him, “you will be just the Saxon type!”

  But then, she had never told him she had a child.

  “You have a right to go to college,” said Delores. “You’re lucky to have the chance.” She was slender and brown, with a strong, big nose and eyebrows like black wings. She wore jeans and flowered shirts and was unafraid of everything. “Listen,” she said, “it’s not every day that somebody’s going to care about your high IQ and offer you a scholarship. You ain’t no dummy, girl, and don’t you even consider acting like one now.” They walked up to the front door, Nelda Henderson reaching out to squeeze Meridian’s hand.

  “No matter what your mother says,” Delores continued, “just remember she spends all her time making prayer pillows.”

  Nelda said nothing about Meridian going to college because she wanted to save her words for Meridian’s mother. Nelda cried easily and looked at Delores and Meridian with sad envy. She was pregnant again and it was just beginning to show. When Mrs. Hill came to the door there was a coolness in her response to Nelda’s greeting, which brought the always close tears to the surface.

  The Hills’ house was white on the outside with turquoise shutters. It was cluttered with heavy brown furniture, white porcelain dolls, and churns filled with paper flowers. Dozens of snapshots of other people’s children grinned down at them from the walls.

  “Well, it can’t be moral, that I know. It can’t be right to give away your own child.” They sat around the dining room table drinking tea. “If the good Lord gives you a child he means for you to take care of it.”

  “The good Lord didn’t give it to her,” muttered Delores. Delores was intrepid. Meridian loved her.

  “But this is the only chance I have, Mama,” she said.

  “You should have thought about that before.”

  “I didn’t know before,” she said, looking into her glass. “How can I take care of Eddie Jr. anyway?” she asked. “I can’t even take care of myself.”

  Mrs. Hill frowned. “Do you know how many women have thought that and had to have God make a way? You surprised me,” she continued, sighing. “I always thought you were a good girl. And all the time, you were fast.”

  “I was something,” said Meridian. “But I didn’t even know what fast was. You always talked in riddles. ‘Be sweet.’ ‘Don’t be fast’ You never made a bit of sense.”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Hill. “Blame me for trusting you. But I know one thing: Everybody else that slips up like you did bears it. You’re the only one that thinks you can just outright refuse ...” Mrs. Hill stopped and wiped her eyes.

  “Look at Nelda,” she began, “I know she’d never ...”

  But Nelda interrupted. “Don’t say that, Mrs. Hill,” she said, her eyes tearing. “I’d do anything to have a chance to go to college like Meridian. I wish to God I could have made it to junior high.”

  For a moment, as she looked at Meridian’s mother, there was hatred in her sad eyes. Hatred and comprehension of betrayal. She had lived across the street from the Hills all her life. She and Meridian played together in the Hills’ back yard, they went to school together. Nelda knew that the information she had needed to get through her adolescence was information Mrs. Hill could have given her.

  There had been about Nelda in those days a naive and admirable sweetness, but there was also apparent, if one knew how to recognize such things (and Mrs. Hill might certainly have done so), a premonition of her fall, which grew out of her meek acceptance of her family’s burdens. She had been left in charge of her five younger brothers and sisters every day while her mother worked. On Saturdays she struggled to town to do the shopping, the twins racing ahead of her down the street, the two toddlers holding to her arms and the baby strapped to her back. This was Nelda—as pretty, the boys used to say, as an Indian—at fourteen, just before she became pregnant herself.

  On Sundays Nelda was free to do as she liked. Her mother did not work then, but spent most of the day—with all her other children neatly dressed and combed—in church. (She was a large “bald-headed” woman, with massive breasts and a fine contralto singing voice. Her husband had been lost in France during the Second World War, and though only two of her children were his—Nelda and the next oldest child, a boy—they all carried his name. She had lost her hair, bit by bit, during each p
regnancy.) Nelda was allowed to spend the day at home washing her hair, making dinner and doing her homework (she made it to school perhaps six times a month, and no truant officer ever knocked on her door), and in the late afternoons she went, with Meridian and Delores, to a movie in town, where the three of them sat in the gallery above the heads of the white movie goers and necked with their boyfriends of the moment.

  Meridian knew the father of Nelda’s first baby. He was an older boy, in high school, a gentle boy who treated Nelda as if he loved her more than life, which he might have. He bought her combs and blouses and Bermuda shorts, and her first pair of stockings—all from the three-dollar allowance his mother gave him each week plus his earnings from cutting lawns during the summer. While her mother was at work he often came by to cut their grass and stayed to help Nelda give the children supper, baths and put them to bed. Nelda was well into her third month before she realized something was wrong. It started, she confided to Meridian, by her noticing her pee smelled different.

  “What do you mean, your pee smells different?” Meridian laughed.

  “I don’t know,” Nelda giggled, “but this ain’t its usual smell.”

  They sat on the toilets at school and laughed and laughed.

  “You should want Eddie Jr.,” said Mrs. Hill. “Unless you’re some kind of monster. And no daughter of mine is a monster, surely.”

  Meridian closed her eyes as tight as she could.

  Delores cleared her throat. “The only way Meridian can take care of Eddie Jr. is if she moves in here with you and gets a job in somebody’s kitchen while you take care of the kid.”

  “Of course I’ll help out,” said Mrs. Hill. “I wouldn’t let either one of ’em starve, but—” she continued, speaking to Delores as if Meridian were not present, “this is a clean, upright, Christian home. We believe in God in this house.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” asked Delores, whose face expressed belligerence and confusion. “The last time God had a baby he skipped, too.”

  Mrs. Hill pretended she wasn’t angry and insulted. She smiled at this girl she wanted to hit. “You’re not from around here,” she said, “everybody knows people from up Atlanta have strange ideas. A lot of you young people have lost your respect for the church. Do you even believe in God?”

  “I give it some thought,” said Delores.

  Mrs. Hill drew in her stomach and crossed her plump arms over it. “I just don’t see how you could let another woman raise your child,” she said. “It’s just selfishness. You ought to hang your head in shame. I have six children,” she continued self-righteously, “though I never wanted to have any, and I have raised every one myself.”

  “You probably could have done the same thing in slavery,” said Delores.

  “Let’s all be monsters!” Delores joked as she and her friends left Mrs. Hill’s house, but Meridian and Nelda did not laugh.

  She might not have given him away to the people who wanted him. She might have murdered him instead. Then killed herself. They would all have understood this in time. She might have done it that way except for one thing: One day she really looked at her child and loved him with as much love as she loved the moon or a tree, which was a considerable amount of impersonal love. She wanted to know more about his perfect, if unplanned-for, existence.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “Where were you when I was twelve?”

  “Who are you?” she persisted, studying his face for signs of fire, watermarks, some scar that would intimate a previous life.

  “Were there other people where you were? Did you come from a planet of babies?” She thought she could just imagine him there, on such a planet, pulling the blue grass up by the handfuls.

  Now that she looked at him, the child was beautiful. She had thought him ugly, like a hump she must carry on her back.

  “You will no longer be called Eddie Jr.” she said. “I’ll ask them to call you Rundi, after no person, I hope, who has ever lived.”

  When she gave him away she did so with a light heart. She did not look back, believing she had saved a small person’s life.

  But she had not anticipated the nightmares that began to trouble her sleep. Nightmares of the child, Rundi, calling to her, crying, suffering unbearable deprivations because she was not there, yet she knew it was just the opposite: Because she was not there he needn’t worry, ever, about being deprived. Of his life, for instance. She felt deeply that what she’d done was the only thing, and was right, but that did not seem to matter. On some deeper level than she had anticipated or had even been aware of, she felt condemned, consigned to penitence, for life. The past pulled the present out of shape as she realized that what Delores Jones had said was not, in fact, true. If her mother had had children in slavery she would not, automatically, have been allowed to keep them, because they would not have belonged to her but to the white person who “owned” them all. Meridian knew that enslaved women had been made miserable by the sale of their children, that they had laid down their lives, gladly, for their children, that the daughters of these enslaved women had thought their greatest blessing from “Freedom” was that it meant they could keep their own children. And what had Meridian Hill done with her precious child? She had given him away. She thought of her mother as being worthy of this maternal history, and of herself as belonging to an unworthy minority, for which there was no precedent and of which she was, as far as she knew, the only member.

  After she had figuratively kissed the ground of the campus and walked about its lawns intent on bettering herself, she knew for certain she had broken something, for she began hearing a voice when she studied for exams, and when she walked about the academic halls, and when she looked from her third-floor dormitory window. A voice that cursed her existence—an existence that could not live up to the standard of motherhood that had gone before. It said, over and over, until she would literally reel in the streets, her head between her hands: Why don’t you die? Why not kill yourself? Jump into the traffic! Lie down under the wheels of that big truck! Jump off the roof, as long as you’re up there! Always, the voice. Mocking, making fun. It frightened her because the voice urging her on—the voice that said terrible things about her lack of value—was her own voice. It was talking to her, and it was full of hate.

  Her teachers worked her hard, her first year at Saxon. She read night and day, making up for lost time. But no matter how hard she labored she was always willing to tackle more, because she knew almost no one there, and because Saxon was a peaceful but strange, still, place to her, and because she was grateful to be distracted. She was not to pause long enough to respond to this spiritual degeneration in herself until she was in her second year.

  The Driven Snow

  We are as chaste and pure as

  the driven snow.

  We watch our manners, speech

  and dress just so;

  And in our hearts we carry our

  greatest fame

  That we are blessed to perpetuate

  the Saxon name!

  SHE HAD FELT BLESSED her first year at Saxon. It was so beautiful! The tall red brick towers, the old courtyards, the giant trees— especially the greatest tree of them all, The Sojourner. This tree filled her with the same sense of minuteness and hugeness, of past and present, of sorrow and ecstasy that she had known at the Sacred Serpent. It gave her a profound sense of peace (which was only possible when she could feel invisible) to know slaves had found shelter in its branches. When her spirits were low, as they were often enough that first year, she would sit underneath The Sojourner and draw comfort from her age, her endurance, the stories the years told of her, and her enormous size. When she sat beneath The Sojourner, she knew she was not alone.

  She was happy to make friends with Anne-Marion Coles, who seemed to her as sharp and bright as a blade of sunlight. It was Anne-Marion who had balked at singing the school song as it was written and who created instead the “parallel song,” the beg
inning of which was: “We are as choice and prime as the daily steak.” Naturally, steak was a food they never had at Saxon. They sang it with gusto while their classmates sang tamely of being like driven snow.

  Of course it was kept secret from everyone that Meridian had been married and divorced and had had a child. It was assumed that Saxon young ladies were, by definition, virgins. They were treated always as if they were thirteen years old. This included the imposition on the student body of a requirement that was particularly awkward for Meridian that had to do with religion: Each morning at eight all Saxon students were required to attend a chapel service at which one girl was expected to get up on the platform and tell—in a ten-minute speech—of some way in which she had resisted evil and come out on the right side of God. Meridian could not recall any temptation that she had resisted, and whether she had resisted temptation or not, she did not believe she now stood even in the vicinity of God. In fact, Meridian was not sure there was a God, and when her turn came, she said so. She was still a very naive country girl who had expected an atmosphere in college that was different from that in her local church. She was wrong. When her fellow students found themselves near her afterward they would look about as if they expected lightning to strike, and her teachers let her know she was a willful, sinful girl.