You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Read online

  Her answer was: “Write nothing. Nothing at all. It will be used against black men and therefore against all of us. Eldridge Cleaver and LeRoi Jones don’t know who they’re dealing with. But you remember. You are dealing with people who brought their children to witness the murder of black human beings, falsely accused of rape. People who handed out, as trophies, black fingers and toes. Deny! Deny! Deny!”

  And yet, I have pursued it: “Some black men themselves do not seem to know what the meaning of raping someone is. Some have admitted rape in order to denounce it, but others have accepted rape as a part of rebellion, of ‘paying whitey back.’ They have gloried in it.”

  “They know nothing of America,” she says. “And neither, apparently, do you. No matter what you think you know, no matter what you feel about it, say nothing. And to your dying breath!”

  Which, to my mind, is virtually useless advice to give to a writer.

  Freddie Pye was the kind of man I would not have looked at then, not even once. (Throughout that year I was more or less into exotica: white ethnics who knew languages were a peculiar weakness; a half-white hippie singer; also a large Chinese mathematician who was a marvelous dancer and who taught me to waltz.) There was no question of belief.

  But, in retrospect, there was a momentary suspension of belief, a kind of hope that perhaps it had not really happened; that Luna had made up the rape, “as white women have been wont to do.” I soon realized this was unlikely. I was the only person she had told.

  She looked at me as if to say: “I’m glad that part of my life is over.” We continued our usual routine. We saw every interminable, foreign, depressing, and poorly illuminated film ever made. We learned to eat brown rice and yogurt and to tolerate kasha and odd-tasting teas. My half-black hippie singer friend (now a well-known reggae singer who says he is from “de I-lands” and not Sheepshead Bay) was “into” tea and kasha and Chinese vegetables.

  And yet the rape, the knowledge of the rape, out in the open, admitted, pondered over, was now between us. (And I began to think that perhaps—whether Luna had been raped or not—it had always been so; that her power over my life was exactly the power her word on rape had over the lives of black men, over all black men, whether they were guilty or not, and therefore over my whole people.)

  Before she told me about the rape, I think we had assumed a lifelong friendship. The kind of friendship one dreams of having with a person one has known in adversity; under heat and mosquitoes and immaturity and the threat of death. We would each travel, we would write to each other from the three edges of the world.

  We would continue to have an “international list” of lovers whose amorous talents or lack of talents we would continue (giggling into our dotage) to compare. Our friendship would survive everything, be truer than everything, endure even our respective marriages, children, husbands—assuming we did, out of desperation and boredom someday, marry, which did not seem a probability, exactly, but more in the area of an amusing idea.

  But now there was a cooling off of our affection for each other. Luna was becoming mildly interested in drugs, because everyone we knew was. I was envious of the open-endedness of her life. The financial backing to it. When she left her job at the kindergarten because she was tired of working, her errant father immediately materialized. He took her to dine on scampi at an expensive restaurant, scolded her for living on East 9th Street, and looked at me as if to say: “Living in a slum of this magnitude must surely have been your idea.” As a cullud, of course.

  For me there was the Welfare Department every day, attempting to get the necessary food and shelter to people who would always live amid the dirty streets I knew I must soon leave. I was, after all, a Sarah Lawrence girl “with talent.” It would be absurd to rot away in a building that had no front door.

  I slept late one Sunday morning with a painter I had met at the Welfare Department. A man who looked for all the world like Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, but who painted wonderful surrealist pictures of birds and ghouls and fruit with teeth. The night before, three of us—me, the painter, and “an old Navy buddy” who looked like his twin and who had just arrived in town—had got high on wine and grass.

  That morning the Navy buddy snored outside the bedrooms like a puppy waiting for its master. Luna got up early, made an immense racket getting breakfast, scowled at me as I emerged from my room, and left the apartment, slamming the door so hard she damaged the lock. (Luna had made it a rule to date black men almost exclusively. My insistence on dating, as she termed it, “anyone” was incomprehensible to her, since in a politically diseased society to “sleep with the enemy” was to become “infected” with the enemy’s “political germs.” There is more than a grain of truth in this, of course, but I was having too much fun to stare at it for long. Still, coming from Luna it was amusing, since she never took into account the risk her own black lovers ran by sleeping with “the white woman,” and she had apparently been convinced that a summer of relatively innocuous political work in the South had cured her of any racial, economic, or sexual political disease.)

  Luna never told me what irked her so that Sunday morning, yet I remember it as the end of our relationship. It was not, as I at first feared, that she thought my bringing the two men to the apartment was inconsiderate. The way we lived allowed us to be inconsiderate from time to time. Our friends were varied, vital, and often strange. Her friends especially were deeper than they should have been into drugs.

  The distance between us continued to grow. She talked more of going to Goa. My guilt over my dissolute if pleasurable existence coupled with my mounting hatred of welfare work, propelled me in two directions: south and to West Africa. When the time came to choose, I discovered that my summer in the South had infected me with the need to return, to try to understand, and write about, the people I’d merely lived with before.

  We never discussed the rape again. We never discussed, really, Freddie Pye or Luna’s remaining feelings about what had happened. One night, the last month we lived together, I noticed a man’s blue denim jacket thrown across the church pew. The next morning, out of Luna’s bedroom walked Freddie Pye. He barely spoke to me—possibly because as a black woman I was expected to be hostile toward his presence in a white woman’s bedroom. I was too surprised to exhibit hostility, however, which was only a part of what I felt, after all. He left.

  Luna and I did not discuss this. It is odd, I think now, that we didn’t. It was as if he was never there, as if he and Luna had not shared the bedroom that night. A month later, Luna went alone to Goa, in her solitary way. She lived on an island and slept, she wrote, on the beach. She mentioned she’d found a lover there who protected her from the local beachcombers and pests.

  Several years later, she came to visit me in the South and brought a lovely piece of pottery which my daughter much later dropped and broke, but which I glued back together in such a way that the flaw improves the beauty and fragility of the design.

  Afterwords, Afterwards

  Second Thoughts

  That is the “story.” It has an “unresolved” ending. That is because Freddie Pye and Luna are still alive, as am I. However, one evening while talking to a friend, I heard myself say that I had, in fact, written two endings. One, which follows, I considered appropriate for such a story published in a country truly committed to justice, and the one above, which is the best I can afford to offer a society in which lynching is still reserved, at least subconsciously, as a means of racial control.

  I said that if we in fact lived in a society committed to the establishment of justice for everyone (“justice” in this case encompassing equal housing, education, access to work, adequate dental care, et cetera), thereby placing Luna and Freddie Pye in their correct relationship to each other, i.e., that of brother and sister, compañeros, then the two of them would be required to struggle together over what his rape of her had meant.

  Since my friend is a black man whom I love and who loves me, we spent a cons
iderable amount of time discussing what this particular rape meant to us. Morally wrong, we said, and not to be excused. Shameful; politically corrupt. Yet, as we thought of what might have happened to an indiscriminate number of innocent young black men in Freehold, Georgia, had Luna screamed, it became clear that more than a little of Ida B. Wells’s fear of probing the rape issue was running through us, too. The implications of this fear would not let me rest, so that months and years went by with most of the story written but with me incapable, or at least unwilling, to finish or to publish it.

  In thinking about it over a period of years, there occurred a number of small changes, refinements, puzzles, in angle. Would these shed a wider light on the continuing subject? I do not know. In any case, I returned to my notes, hereto appended for the use of the reader.

  Luna: Ida B. Wells—Discarded Notes

  Additional characteristics of Luna: At a time when many in and out of the Movement considered “nigger” and “black” synonymous, and indulged in a sincere attempt to fake Southern “hip” speech, Luna resisted. She was the kind of WASP who could not easily imitate another’s ethnic style, nor could she even exaggerate her own. She was what she was. A very straight, clear-eyed, coolly observant young woman with no talent for existing outside her own skin.

  Imaginary Knowledge

  Luna explained the visit from Freddie Pye in this way:

  “He called that evening, said he was in town, and did I know the Movement was coming north? I replied that I did know that.”

  When could he see her? he wanted to know.

  “Never,” she replied.

  He had burst into tears, or something that sounded like tears, over the phone. He was stranded at wherever the evenings fund-raising event had been held. Not in the place itself, but outside, in the street. The “stars” had left, everyone had left. He was alone. He knew no one else in the city. Had found her number in the phone book. And had no money, no place to stay.

  Could he, he asked, crash? He was tired, hungry, broke—and even in the South had had no job, other than the Movement, for months. Et cetera.

  When he arrived, she had placed our only steak knife in the waistband of her jeans.

  He had asked for a drink of water. She gave him orange juice, some cheese, and a couple of slices of bread. She had told him he might sleep on the church pew and he had lain down with his head on his rolled-up denim jacket. She had retired to her room, locked the door, and tried to sleep. She was amazed to discover herself worrying that the church pew was both too narrow and too hard.

  At first he muttered, groaned, and cursed in his sleep. Then he fell off the narrow church pew. He kept rolling off. At two in the morning she unlocked her door, showed him her knife, and invited him to share her bed.

  Nothing whatever happened except they talked. At first, only he talked. Not about the rape, but about his life.

  “He was a small person physically, remember?” Luna asked me. (She was right. Over the years he had grown big and, yes, burly, in my imagination, and I’m sure in hers.) “That night he seemed tiny. A child. He was still fully dressed, except for the jacket, and he, literally, hugged his side of the bed. I hugged mine. The whole bed, in fact, was between us. We were merely hanging to its edges.”

  At the fund-raiser—on Fifth Avenue and 71st Street, as it turned out—his leaders had introduced him as the unskilled, barely literate, former Southern fieldworker that he was. They had pushed him at the rich people gathered there as an example of what “the system” did to “the little people” in the South. They asked him to tell about the thirty-seven times he had been jailed. The thirty-five times he had been beaten. The one time he had lost consciousness in the “hot” box. They told him not to worry about his grammar. “Which, as you may recall,” said Luna, “was horrible.” Even so, he had tried to censor his “ain’ts” and his “us’es.” He had been painfully aware that he was on exhibit, like Frederick Douglass had been for the Abolitionists. But unlike Douglass he had no oratorical gift, no passionate language, no silver tongue. He knew the rich people and his own leaders perceived he was nothing: a broken man, unschooled, unskilled at anything.…

  Yet he had spoken, trembling before so large a crowd of rich, white Northerners—who clearly thought their section of the country would never have the South’s racial problems—begging, with the painful stories of his wretched life, for their money.

  At the end, all of them—the black leaders, too—had gone. They left him watching the taillights of their cars, recalling the faces of the friends come to pick them up: the women dressed in African print that shone, with elaborately arranged hair, their jewelry sparkling, their perfume exotic. They were so beautiful, yet so strange. He could not imagine that one of them could comprehend his life. He did not ask for a ride, because of that, but also because he had no place to go. Then he had remembered Luna.

  Soon Luna would be required to talk. She would mention her confusion over whether, in a black community surrounded by whites with a history of lynching blacks, she had a right to scream as Freddie Pye was raping her. For her, this was the crux of the matter.

  And so they would continue talking through the night.

  This is another ending, created from whole cloth. If I believed Luna’s story about the rape, and I did (had she told anyone else I might have dismissed it), then this reconstruction of what might have happened is as probable an accounting as any is liable to be. Two people have now become “characters.”

  I have forced them to talk until they reached the stumbling block of the rape, which they must remove themselves, before proceeding to a place from which it will be possible to insist on a society in which Luna’s word alone on rape can never be used to intimidate an entire people, and in which an innocent black man’s protestation of innocence of rape is unprejudicially heard. Until such a society is created, relationships of affection between black men and white women will always be poisoned—from within as from without—by historical fear and the threat of violence, and solidarity among black and white women is only rarely likely to exist.

  Postscript: Havana, Cuba, November 1976

  I am in Havana with a group of other black American artists. We have spent the morning apart from our Cuban hosts bringing each other up to date on the kind of work (there are no apolitical artists among us) we are doing in the United States. I have read “Luna.”

  High above the beautiful city of Havana I sit in the Havana Libre pavilion with the muralist / photographer in our group. He is in his mid-thirties, a handsome, brown, erect individual whom I have known casually for a number of years. During the sixties he designed and painted street murals for both SNCC and the Black Panthers, and in an earlier discussion with Cuban artists he showed impatience with their explanation of why we had seen no murals covering some of the city’s rather dingy walls: Cuba, they had said, unlike Mexico, has no mural tradition. “But the point of a revolution,” insisted Our Muralist, “is to make new traditions!” And he had pressed his argument with such passion for the usefulness, for revolutionary communication, of his craft, that the Cubans were both exasperated and impressed. They drove us around the city for a tour of their huge billboards, all advancing socialist thought and the heroism of men like Lenin, Camilo, and Che Guevara, and said, “These, these are our ‘murals’!”

  While we ate lunch, I asked Our Muralist what he’d thought of “Luna.” Especially the appended section.

  “Not much,” was his reply. “Your view of human weakness is too biblical,” he said. “You are unable to conceive of the man without conscience. The man who cares nothing about the state of his soul because he’s long since sold it. In short,” he said, “you do not understand that some people are simply evil, a disease on the lives of other people, and that to remove the disease altogether is preferable to trying to interpret, contain, or forgive it. Your ‘Freddie Pye,’” and he laughed, “was probably raping white women on the instructions of his government.”

  Oh ho, I
thought. Because, of course, for a second, during which I stalled my verbal reply, this comment made both very little and very much sense.

  “I am sometimes naive and sentimental,” I offered. I am sometimes both, though frequently by design. Admission in this way is tactical, a stimulant to conversation.

  “And shocked at what I’ve said,” he said, and laughed again. “Even though,” he continued, “you know by now that blacks could be hired to blow up other blacks, and could be hired by someone to shoot down Brother Malcolm, and hired by someone to provide a diagram of Fred Hampton’s bedroom so the pigs could shoot him easily while he slept, you find it hard to believe a black man could be hired by someone to rape white women. But think a minute, and you will see why it is the perfect disruptive act. Enough blacks raping or accused of raping enough white women and any political movement that cuts across racial lines is doomed.

  “Larger forces are at work than your story would indicate,” he continued. “You’re still thinking of lust and rage, moving slowly into aggression and purely racial hatred. But you should be considering money—which the rapist would get, probably from your very own tax dollars, in fact—and a maintaining of the status quo; which those hiring the rapist would achieve. I know all this,” he said, “because when I was broke and hungry and selling my blood to buy the food and the paint that allowed me to work, I was offered such ‘other work.’”

  “But you did not take it.”

  He frowned. “There you go again. How do you know I didn’t take it? It paid, and I was starving.”

  “You didn’t take it,” I repeated.

  “No,” he said. “A black and white ‘team’ made the offer. I had enough energy left to threaten to throw them out of the room.”