You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (16 page)

He had chosen a dull gray casket. Sarah wished for red. Was it Dylan Thomas who had said something grand about the dead offering “deep, dark defiance”? It didn’t matter; there were more ways to offer defiance than with a red casket.

“I was just thinking,” said Sarah, “that with us Mama and Daddy were saying NO with capital letters.”

“I don’t follow you,” said her brother. He had always been the activist in the family. He simply directed his calm rage against any obstacle that might exist, and awaited the consequences with the same serenity he awaited his sister’s answer. Not for him the philosophical confusions and poetic observations that hung his sister up.

“That’s because you’re a radical preacher,” said Sarah, smiling up at him. “You deliver your messages in person with your own body.” It excited her that her brother had at last imbued their childhood Sunday sermons with the reality of fighting for change. And saddened her that no matter how she looked at it this seemed more important than Medieval Art, Course 201.

3

“Yes, Grandma,” Sarah replied. “Cresselton is for girls only, and
no,
Grandma, I am not pregnant.”

Her grandmother stood clutching the broad wooden handle of her black bag, which she held, with elbows bent, in front of her stomach. Her eyes glinted through round wire-framed glasses. She spat into the grass outside the privy. She had insisted that Sarah accompany her to the toilet while the body was being taken into the church. She had leaned heavily on Sarah’s arm, her own arm thin and the flesh like crepe.

“I guess they teach you how to really handle the world,” she said. “And who knows, the Lord is everywhere. I would like a whole lot to see a Great-Grand. You don’t specially have to be married, you know. That’s why I felt free to ask.” She reached into her bag and took out a Three Sixes bottle, which she proceeded to drink from, taking deep swift swallows with her head thrown back.

“There are very few black boys near Cresselton,” Sarah explained, watching the corn liquor leave the bottle in spurts and bubbles. “Besides, I’m really caught up now in my painting and sculpting.…” Should she mention how much she admired Giacometti’s work? No, she decided. Even if her grandmother had heard of him, and Sarah was positive she had not, she would surely think his statues much too thin. This made Sarah smile and remember how difficult it had been to convince her grandmother that even if Cresselton had not given her a scholarship she would have managed to go there anyway. Why? Because she wanted somebody to teach her to paint and to sculpt, and Cresselton had the best teachers. Her grandmother’s notion of a successful granddaughter was a married one, pregnant the first year.

“Well,” said her grandmother, placing the bottle with dignity back into her purse and gazing pleadingly into Sarah’s face, “I sure would ’preshate a Great-Grand.” Seeing her granddaughter’s smile, she heaved a great sigh, and, walking rather haughtily over the stones and grass, made her way to the church steps.

As they walked down the aisle, Sarah’s eyes rested on the back of her grandfather’s head. He was sitting on the front middle bench in front of the casket, his hair extravagantly long and white and softly kinked. When she sat down beside him, her grandmother sitting next to him on the other side, he turned toward her and gently took her hand in his. Sarah briefly leaned her cheek against his shoulder and felt like a child again.

4

They had come twenty miles from town, on a dirt road, and the hot spring sun had drawn a steady rich scent from the honeysuckle vines along the way. The church was a bare, weather-beaten ghost of a building with hollow windows and a sagging door. Arsonists had once burned it to the ground, lighting the dry wood of the walls with the flames from the crosses they carried. The tall spreading red oak tree under which Sarah had played as a child still dominated the churchyard, stretching its branches widely from the roof of the church to the other side of the road.

After a short and eminently dignified service, during which Sarah and her grandfather alone did not cry, her father’s casket was slid into the waiting hearse and taken the short distance to the cemetery, an overgrown wilderness whose stark white stones appeared to be the small ruins of an ancient civilization. There Sarah watched her grandfather from the corner of her eye. He did not seem to bend under the grief of burying a son. His back was straight, his eyes dry and clear. He was simply and solemnly heroic; a man who kept with pride his family’s trust and his own grief.
It is strange,
Sarah thought,
that I never thought to paint him like this, simply as he stands; without anonymous meaningless people hovering beyond his profile; his face turned proud and brownly against the light.
The defeat that had frightened her in the faces of black men was the defeat of black forever defined by white. But that defeat was nowhere on her grandfather’s face. He stood like a rock, outwardly calm, the comfort and support of the Davis family. The family alone defined him, and he was not about to let them down.

“One day I will paint you, Grandpa,” she said, as they turned to go. “Just as you stand here now, with just”—she moved closer and touched his face with her hand—“just the right stubborn tenseness of your cheek. Just that look of Yes and No in your eyes.”

“You wouldn’t want to paint an old man like me,” he said, looking deep into her eyes from wherever his mind had been. “If you want to make me, make me up in stone.”

The completed grave was plump and red. The wreaths of flowers were arranged all on one side so that from the road there appeared to be only a large mass of flowers. But already the wind was tugging at the rose petals and the rain was making dabs of faded color all over the green foam frames. In a week the displaced honeysuckle vines, the wild roses, the grapevines, the grass, would be back. Nothing would seem to have changed.

5

“What do you mean, come
home
?” Her brother seemed genuinely amused. “We’re all proud of you. How many black girls are at that school? Just
you
? Well, just one more besides you, and she’s from the North. That’s really something!”

“I’m glad you’re pleased,” said Sarah.

“Pleased! Why, it’s what Mama would have wanted, a good education for little Sarah; and what Dad would have wanted too, if he could have wanted anything after Mama died. You were always smart. When you were two and I was five you showed me how to eat ice cream without getting it all over me. First, you said, nip off the bottom of the cone with your teeth, and suck the ice cream down. I never knew
how
you were supposed to eat the stuff once it began to melt.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “sometimes you can want something a whole lot, only to find out later that it wasn’t what you
needed
at all.”

Sarah shook her head, a frown coming between her eyes. “I sometimes spend
weeks,
” she said, “trying to sketch or paint a face that is unlike every other face around me, except, vaguely, for one. Can I help but wonder if I’m in the right place?”

Her brother smiled. “You mean to tell me you spend
weeks
trying to draw one face, and you still wonder whether you’re in the right place? You must be kidding!” He chucked her under the chin and laughed out loud. “You learn how to draw the face,” he said, “then you learn how to paint me and how to make Grandpa up in stone. Then you can come home or go live in Paris, France. It’ll be the same thing.”

It was the unpreacherlike gaiety of his affection that made her cry. She leaned peacefully into her brother’s arms. She wondered if Richard Wright had had a brother.

“You are my door to all the rooms,” she said. “Don’t ever close.”

And he said, “I won’t,” as if he understood what she meant.

6

“When will we see you again, young woman?” he asked later, as he drove her to the bus stop.

“I’ll sneak up one day and surprise you,” she said.

At the bus stop, in front of a tiny service station, Sarah hugged her brother with all her strength. The white station attendant stopped his work to leer at them, his eyes bold and careless.

“Did you ever think,” said Sarah, “that we are a very old people in a very young place?”

She watched her brother from a window of the bus; her eyes did not leave his face until the little station was out of sight and the big Greyhound lurched on its way toward Atlanta. She would fly from there to New York.

7

She took the train to the campus.

“My,” said one of her friends, “you look wonderful! Home sure must agree with you!”

“Sarah was home?” Someone who didn’t know asked. “Oh,
great,
how was it?”

“Well, how was it?” went an echo in Sarah’s head. The noise of the echo almost made her dizzy.

“How was it?” she asked aloud, searching for, and regaining, her balance.

“How was it?” She watched her reflection in a pair of smiling hazel eyes.

“It was fine,” she said slowly, returning the smile, thinking of her grandfather. “Just fine.”

The girl’s smile deepened. Sarah watched her swinging along toward the back tennis courts, hair blowing in the wind.

Stare the rat down,
thought Sarah;
and whether it disappears or not, I am a woman in the world. I have buried my father, and shall soon know how to make my grandpa up in stone.

Source

I
T WAS DURING
the year of her first depressing brush with government funding of antipoverty programs that San Francisco began to haunt Irene. An educational project into which she’d poured much of her time, energy and considerable talent was declared “superfluous and romantic” by Washington, and summarily killed; Irene began to long for every amenity the small, dusty Southern town she worked in did not offer. With several other young, idealistic people, she had taught “Advanced Reading and Writing” to a small group of older women. Their entire “school” was a secondhand trailer in back of a local black college; the books they used were written by the teachers and students themselves. The women had a desire for learning that was exciting; the town, however, was dull; its main attraction a grimy, only recently desegregated movie theater with an abandoned appreciation for Burt Reynolds. Irene daydreamed incessantly of hilly streets, cable cars, Chinatown and Rice-o-Roni. Of redwood forests and the Pacific Ocean.

She decided to visit a friend from her New York college days, Anastasia Green. Anastasia now lived in San Francisco, and frequently wrote, inviting her to visit, should she ever make it to that fabled city.

Anastasia was tall and willowy, with cautious, smoky topaz eyes, hair the color of unpolished brass, and a mouth that seemed much smaller than her teeth, so that when she smiled the planes of her face shifted radically to accommodate a sudden angularity in a face that had seemed round. This irregularity in her features was not grotesque, but charming, and gave to Anastasia’s face a humor she herself did not possess.

While Irene knew her on the East Coast, Anastasia went through two complete external changes: The first was from the “Southern Innocent” (she was from Pine Lake, Arkansas), wide-eyed, blushing, absurdly trusting—but not really—to the New York SuperVamp. Tall boots, of course, slickly bobbed
blackened
hair, heavily made-up eyes (brown and black make-up, a rather Egyptian effect), against skin that by contrast seemed to have been dusted with rice powder, and, in fact, had been. The second change was to a sort of Faye Dunaway, whom she—with her peculiar smile—somewhat resembled, or what she referred to as her “little English schoolboy look.” Hair lightened and cropped close to her (it was now revealed)
round
little head, bangs down to her eyebrows, skirts up to her ass. And always a swinging purse and absurd snub-toed shoes. In this getup she didn’t walk, she
tripped
along, and one was not surprised if, when she passed trippingly by, “Eleanor Rigby” popped into mind.

It was while in this disguise that she fell in love with a man named Galen, who was as addicted to the theater as Anastasia was to travel. After college, Galen left the East Coast for the West, where he hoped to become an actor. He convinced Anastasia to come along. From letters, Irene knew that Galen had dropped out of the picture, so to speak, while doing TV commercials in Los Angeles. Anastasia, already rinsing her hair in vinegar and staying out in the sun, had pressed north.

TV documentaries about the flower children of the sixties carried many shots of people who looked like Anastasia–in–San Francisco. Gone was the vamp, the English schoolboy. Instead, she appeared in clogs, a long granny dress of an old-fashioned print and sleazy texture, with a purple velvet cape. The kinkiness of her hair was now encouraged, and formed an aura about her beige, un-powdered face. She was beaded and feathered to a delightfully pleasant extreme.

“It’s great to see you!” the two women said almost in unison, embracing and smiling, amid the anxious and harried looking travelers at the airport.

With Anastasia were a young man, a young woman, and their baby. The baby’s name was very long, Sanskrit-derived, and, translated into English, meant Bliss. The man’s name, arrived at in the same fashion, meant Calm, and the woman’s name, Peace. All three adults giggled easily and at everything, absent-mindedly fingering small silver spoons that hung around their necks.

Not knowing what the spoon signified, Irene was amused by it. Unisex jewelry, she thought, had finally hit the mark.

There was a van, painted all the colors of the rainbow, so that simply riding along felt
vivid.
The adults were soon chanting and singing; the baby was kicking and cooing. They crossed merrily over the bridge into Marin, to which Anastasia and her friends had recently moved. From there they would “strike” day trips into San Francisco.

“Source would love Irene,” said Peace or Calm.

“He sure would!” Anastasia agreed, turning to give Irene’s arm a squeeze. “I’ve told them you’re one of the least rigid people I know.”