The Distinguished Guest (26 page)

Now Marcea was asking something specifically about integration and Alinsky. Lily’s mouth prissed a little. “Well, he may have thought integration was the right thing, but he never
publicly argued that. That was the point. That he took no stand on that publicly.”

“But what’s the problem with that if he believed in it?”

“Because he never tried to call up that behavior in people. He missed a great opportunity, I think. Because
there
was the civil rights movement in the South demonstrating that
calling on a sense of shame, of justice, of morality, could work. Did work. Really, they had the courage to insist on what was best in the white community.”

Marcea had listened to this with a little half-smile playing around her mouth. She sat for a moment, and then she said, “But see, I don’t think the black community is responsible for
the spiritual health of the white community.”

“No, no that’s true.” Lily frowned. “But finally, it has a strategic interest in it, à la Alinsky, Mister Strategy himself. Because unless the white community is
called on somehow, to behave morally, the black community suffers. And it really can’t—I’d argue—give up on the moral health of the white community without losing something
morally itself.”

Marcea waited a moment, and then said firmly, “I think the black community had every right to give up on the white community.”

Lily leaned her body forward, a tremulous tilt. “My dear, I thought you were here to interview me, not to argue with me.”

Linnett looked at her tape recorder. Still going. Good, she’d have this. She poured herself another glass of wine.

Marcea had seemed a bit startled by Lily’s comeback. But she recovered herself. She smiled. She said, “Let me rephrase that then: Don’t you think the black community had the
right to give up on the white community?”

“Yes. Yes, of course they did. But I’m saying that they achieved so much more where they did not. And I’d argue that it has been a disaster that they did. That they let the
white community off the hook. A perfectly useful hook. Because it’s too easy to say,
mea culpa
, I’m a racist, of course I am, and then not do anything more. And I’d also
argue, I do believe, actually, that sometimes that moral impulse needs to be called up from outside.”

Marcea seemed to start to speak, but Lily’s whisper rode on.

“But that’s neither here nor there. What the black community didn’t have the right to do was to cast aspersions on the other part of black community that wanted to continue the
struggle for integration, that thought friendship with whites was possible, was a kind of ideal, actually.”

“And those were the black women in your group.”

“Yes. Later known as
Toms
, as
oreos
, and the like. Those were my friends.”

Marcea was writing something down now. After a minute, she looked up. In a genial tone, she asked, “I wondered about language.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this is part of what I’m interested in—how members of groups back then, integrated groups, behaved together. And one of the measures I’m using is language. I
wondered about the nature of the language used in the group. Whether the speech was . . . comfortable.”

“Of course it was,” Lily said quickly. Then she paused. “Well. Within certain limits. We were speaking of our most intimate feelings. That was sometimes hard. And we may have
struggled for words occasionally, as one does . . .”

“But I meant specifically whether black English was used.” Marcea’s voice was crisp.

“Well. There’s black English and there’s black English.” Lily seemed to have pulled herself up a little in her chair.

A quiver of amusement—or irritation? Linnett couldn’t tell—passed over Marcea McKendrick’s face. “And what kind of black English would you say was spoken, in your
group?”

She thinks Lily is a fraud, Linnett thought.

“My dear, first of all, we were middle-class ladies. That is what we were. The black women in our group spoke middle-class black English.”

“They spoke white English, then.” Marcea’s voice was gentle, but firm. A kind, strict teacher.

“I would say not.”

“And I would suggest that it’s possible you may not be aware of the distinction I’m making.”

“My dear. I don’t think you are aware of the distinction I am making.”

“Perhaps you can explain it to me.” Marcea never wavered in her politeness. Linnett was impressed. She must have been all of twenty-five, twenty-six or so.

“I think I am speaking of a different world from the one you understand so well, from the one you’re used to operating in. This was, you’ll remember, the fifties, then the late
fifties, the early sixties. We all had a much more . . . how to put it? Not
formal
, but, polite. Public. Way of speaking then. The women in our group—black and white alike—had a
sense of a public . . . vocabulary, really.”

“All I’m saying is, that wasn’t a black vocabulary.”

“It wasn’t black vernacular, if that’s what you mean. Nor was it white vernacular, necessarily.”

Marcea made a slight noise.

“My father, for instance,” Lily said. Her voice was louder, and strained. She’s furious, Linnett thought. “He was brought up on a farm, in Maine. His mother spoke in a
way he was perfectly comfortable with, and he dropped into that way—that vernacular—with her. And at home, occasionally, with me and my mother. To express certain things. As the black
women in our group dropped into their vernacular, a countrified vernacular really, on occasion. To emphasize certain things. Perhaps only slightly less often than they did at home, I’d
argue.” She looked at Marcea, expecting a response.

There was none. Her pen had stilled as Lily got more wound up. When Lily began to speak again, her trembling hands rose slowly from the arms of her chair. “It was not a rhetoric yet, you
see? It had no political meaning for them to speak one way or another, just as it didn’t for my father. It simply allowed them to refer easily to experiences outside our group, to signal
those, in a way, to us.” She leaned forward a little. Her mouth worked. “And you must remember that they were, after all, integrationists too. They imagined a world, as I did, in which
we would
all
be changed. Yes. Not exactly in the twinkling of an eye, but yes, changed. That had implications for all of us.”

“More implications for them than you, I’d guess.”

“It had implications for all of us,” Lily said again. Her voice broke.
She’s torturing her
, Linnett thought.

Marcea pressed her lips together. Linnett saw the wings of her nostrils arch slightly.

Lily began again, her voice weaker, more whispery. She was speaking faster too, and more breathlessly. “Let me explain. These were middle-class women. Teachers. Social workers. The black
English you refer to became important a few years later, and it was a lower-class English. The insistence on its importance was, in effect, already a repudiation of the experience of the
women—the kind of women—in my group. Was part of an argument that said my friends were Toms, were not true blacks, because they spoke as they did.” Lily seemed to be pleading with
Marcea. “You see the result now when black school children feel that to learn anything, to be good at school itself, is capitulation, is trying to be white.”

“But don’t you feel your friends
were
trying to be white?”

Marcea’s head tilted slightly. Her eyes, amused, briefly met Linnett’s. She had no idea what this was costing Lily.

Linnett felt a strong pull of allegiance to the old woman, drawn by her effort, her pain. She watched Lily pull herself together for one more try.

“I would agree they were trying to leave a certain world behind, yes—as we all do when we try to move along, move up. And perhaps they were leaving the language of home behind, as we
do when we grow up, when we’re socialized. But there was an unfortunate conflation of class and race that happened right then, in the early sixties.
To be black
meant you had to act
and sound like a lower-class black, a rural black. But the problem is there aren’t completely parallel black and white universes. If you want to be, say, a teacher, you handicap yourself by
talking like a Mississippi sharecropper. As my father would have handicapped himself by insisting that he should be able to speak as his mother did at board meetings.”

Marcea nodded. “But what I’m saying is, the language he learned to speak at board meetings was white too. He didn’t have to leave his whiteness behind to speak that
language.”

“But my friends didn’t feel any less black—I know they didn’t—because they were educated and could speak an educated language. Look here, if you go around and talk
to . . . Well, there are a whole lot of black ladies my age and older, women who fought to be educated, to become doctors or teachers or whatever. And they
can
sound remarkably white, I
suppose, if by white you mean grammatical, educated. But I would be very interested to hear you or any other young person tell them they were less black because of what they achieved. How they
talk.”

The rain was steady now, with an occasional wind-whipped slap across the glass. Linnett had poured herself a third glass of wine. As she looked up now, she saw Alan’s car pull out from
under the cover of the driveway and park, next to hers, under the beech tree. She watched as he got out, his head hanging between hunched shoulders, and ran to the stairs. His loud footsteps
mounting them caught Lily’s attention. She looked outside.

“Ah,” she said. “
Here
he is!” And in her voice was such a sense of joyous recognition, such relief, that Linnett was startled. Did she imagine Alan as a white
knight, come to rescue her? And then, at that image in this context, she smiled to herself.

Now Alan burst into the room, the screen door banging shut behind him. His shoulders were darkened with rain, his curly hair was slightly flattened. “Jesus,” he said. “I
thought this was supposed to head out to sea.” And then he took them in. “Hi,” he said. “Just a second.”

He crossed the room to the kitchen island, opened a drawer, and took out a towel. Wiping at his face, his hands, he came over to them. He said hello to Linnett, and introduced himself to
Marcea.

Lily whispered to him sharply now. He bent over his mother, listened, looked quickly back at Marcea and Linnett. Linnett heard him say, “I’ll ask Gaby, Lily. I need to get her
up.”

Lily pulled at his sleeve, and he bent close again. He stood up, answering her patiently: “I think that’s fine, Mother, but I want to check with Gaby first.”

He turned to Marcea. “Lily imagines I can shed light on the Blackstone Church scandals.”

Marcea nodded, politely. “Anything you’d care to tell me.”

“Well, who knows? But I need to wake my wife up first, and make sure she doesn’t need me. I usually help her at work about this time. She’s got a shop in town to close
up.”

Marcea nodded pleasantly, and Alan excused himself and went down the hall.

Linnett looked at Lily. Exhausted, collapsed back, hands trembling.

Perhaps hearing Alan, Noreen had come out again now from whatever she’d been doing at the back of the house. She began to ask Lily about her nap in a loud, cheerful voice. Lily’s
lips pressed together, she shook her head.

Linnett got up, clumped down the long hallway past Gaby and Alan’s bedroom to the bathroom. She felt the muffled, pleasant sensation of too much booze. She’d have to slow down a bit,
she thought. All she’d had to eat today was the sandwich. She could hear the murmur of Alan’s and Gaby’s voices as she passed their room.

In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face. She looked at herself in the mirror, seeing herself with the cruel clarity sometimes afforded the slightly drunk. She was getting old, the little
vessels that had pinked her nostrils and cheeks were blooming elsewhere too. Linnett fumbled in her purse and got her makeup pouch out. Carefully she applied foundation and rubbed it in. She put on
lipstick. She leaned close to the mirror and looked at herself. Then, slowly, she lifted her hand. She slapped her own face, hard. Momentarily, tears stung her eyes. She smiled fiercely at her
reflection, and opened the door.

When she came back into the living room, Noreen seemed to have gone. Yes, when Linnett looked out, her tanklike station wagon was no longer there. Alan had taken charge of things. He was moving
around the kitchen area, opening and closing the refrigerator, setting things out. Marcea was standing by the island, talking to him, explaining her presence, her research. Alan’s amiable,
loud voice punctuated her softer one from time to time. Linnett sat down by Lily, in her chair. The teapot and wine bottle had been removed. She picked up her tape recorder. It had finished and
turned itself off. She looked at Lily. The old woman’s return glance seemed not to recognize Linnett.

Alan brought over a plate of cheese and thin white crackers and set it down. He went back to the kitchen and returned with a newly opened bottle of wine and some glasses. Marcea came and sat
down too, and Alan poured for everyone but Lily, who shook her head when he held up a glass to her.

Gaby came out from the hallway now, wearing an old crew-neck sweater over baggy jeans. She looked like a strong young boy. Alan looked over her. “So you think it’ll be okay, you can
manage,” he said.

“Of course,” she said.

He turned to Marcea. “Have you met . . . ?” He gestured toward Gaby.

Gaby stepped over to the little group. “No, we didn’t.” She extended her hand across the table to Marcea, who stood again. The younger woman towered over Gaby. “I was
asleep already when you arrived.”

“Marcea,” Alan said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get the last name.”

“McKendrick,” Marcea said.

“I am pleased,” Gaby said. “I am Gaby, Alan’s wife.” She made a little formal shaking motion with her hand, and then stepped back. “Linnett,” she said
cordially, and bobbed her head by way of greeting.

Linnett raised her glass.

“It
is
awful, isn’t it?” Gaby said. Linnett was startled for a moment, and then realized Gaby was looking outside, that she meant the weather. Linnett looked out too, to
where the trees slowly moved under their burden of wind and wet.