Meridian (11 page)

greatest fame

That we are blessed to perpetuate

the Saxon name!

S
HE
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 beginning 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.

She began to have headaches that were so severe they caused her to stutter when she spoke. She dreamed of such horrible things she would wake up shaking. Still, when she thought of the extraordinary opportunity she had in attending Saxon College, which had an excellent social and academic reputation, she knew herself to be extremely fortunate. She studied hard and made the dean’s list, and during her second year she joined the Atlanta Movement. She found it impossible to study while others were being beaten and jailed. It was also, surprisingly, an escape for her. After her friendship with Anne-Marion, they marched often together and would go to jail with their toothbrushes and books and cigarettes under their arms. In jail they were allowed to smoke, which helped to calm their shrieking nerves. On Saxon campus itself, ironically, smoking led to expulsion, as did any other form of “decadent” behavior.

The emphasis at Saxon was on form, and the preferred “form” was that of the finishing school girl whose goal, wherever she would later find herself in the world, was to be
accepted
as an equal because she knew and practiced all the proper social rules. The administration of the college neither condoned Saxon students’ participation in the Atlanta Movement nor discouraged it. Once it was understood that the students could not be stopped, their involvement, as much as possible, was ignored. All of Saxon’s rules, against smoking, drinking, speaking loudly, going off campus without an escort, remaining off campus after six, talking to boys before visiting hours, remained in effect. It was understood that a student who allowed herself to be arrested did so at her own academic risk. Fortunately, there were teachers who would lie for the students—a week in jail became a week on a field trip and was certainly as informative for the student as any field trip could ever be—though everyone knew this was a lie. Or a teacher might himself end up in jail. That too was ignored, though his name and photograph appeared in the papers.

A saying about Saxon was that you could do anything there, as long as you wore spotless white gloves. But because the gloves must remain clean and white, there was very little you could do. In fact, Meridian and the other students felt they had two enemies: Saxon, which wanted them to become something—ladies—that was already obsolete, and the larger, more deadly enemy, white racist society. It was not unusual for students to break down under the pressures caused by the two. One of Meridian’s classmates, a gentle drama student from Ohio, had been dragged out of a picket line by four thugs and forced, on the main street in Atlanta, to drink a pint of ammonia. Later, after she had recovered physically, in the infirmary, though was obviously far from recovered mentally, she was severely chastised one evening for standing about in the bushes near her dorm with her boyfriend. Neither of them had noticed that calling hours had ended ten minutes earlier. The girl’s nerves were wrecked, and she was forced to withdraw from the school for the rest of the term.

Meridian, the former wife and mother, already felt herself to be flying under false colors as an “innocent” Saxon student. The scenes she personally witnessed in the Atlanta streets, combined with this, caused the majority of her waking moments to seem fragmented, surreal. She saw small black children, with short, flashing black legs, being chased by grown white men brandishing ax handles. She saw old women dragged out of stores and beaten on the sidewalk, their humility of a lifetime doing them no good. She saw young black men of great spiritual beauty changed overnight into men who valued nothing.

Things happened. One day, along with a group of demonstrators headed for downtown Atlanta, Meridian passed a young girl, nubile, pretty, with long brown pigtails, sitting on the steps of her house, waving. On impulse Meridian called to her: “Come join us,” she cried. The girl, pigtails flying, came. Once downtown they sat in at a luncheon counter in Woolworth’s and, after being doused with catsup, smeared with mustard and sprinkled with salt and pepper by white patrons of the store, they were arrested. Meridian had tried to keep the girl, whose name was Anne, with her, but in the confusion she disappeared. In the middle of the night there were screams from another cell, far down the row. Screams, according to the guards, of an alcoholic who thought she was being chased around her cell by giant spiders. But Meridian knew it was Anne, and though she never saw her again, she began to imagine she did, and the screams became an accompaniment to the guilt already weighing her down.

Meridian found, when she was not preoccupied with the Movement, that her thoughts turned with regularity and intensity to her mother, on whose account she endured wave after wave of an almost primeval guilt. She imagined her mother in church, in which she had invested all that was still energetic in her life, praying for her daughter’s soul, and yet, having no concern, no understanding of her daughter’s
life
whatsoever; but Meridian did not condemn her for this. Away from her mother, Meridian thought of her as Black Motherhood personified, and of that great institution she was in terrible awe, comprehending as she did the horror, the narrowing of perspective, for mother and for child, it had invariably meant.

Meridian felt as if her body, growing frailer every day under the stress of her daily life, stood in the way of a reconciliation between her mother and that part of her own soul her mother could, perhaps, love. She valued her body less, attended to it less, because she hated its obstruction.

Only during a crisis could she forget. While other students dreaded confrontation with police she welcomed it, and was capable of an inner gaiety, a sense of freedom, as she saw the clubs slashing down on her from above. Only once was she beaten into unconsciousness, and it was not the damage done to her body that she remembered when she woke up, but her feeling of yearning, of heartsick longing for forgiveness, as she saw the bright lights explode behind the red blood that curtained her face, and her feeling of hope as the harsh light of consciousness began to fade.

After The Wild Child’s death she could not live on campus, although she continued to attend classes, and lived instead in the ghetto that surrounded it. It was a poor community but friendly and very clean. In order to pay her rent and to buy other items that one needed at a school like Saxon—tennis racket, bathing suit, ballet slippers and tights, etc.—she went to work as a typist for a professor who had recently retired and whose office was a few blocks from her door. He was a very old man who had, years ago, known her mother’s family. It was her mother who encouraged her to take the job, reminding her that her father could not afford to send Meridian the two or three dollars a week she had asked him to send. His health was poor, and with the loss of the farm he was diminished in every way. He was no longer qualified to teach, now that integration was threatening the schools, and was doing odd jobs when and where he could find them.

It was her mother who first noticed that Meridian’s thick, shoulder-length hair was beginning to thin. She even essayed a joke about how Meridian should be careful not to wind up bald, like Nelda’s mother. It did not surprise Meridian that her hair came out as she combed it, any more than it surprised her that her vision sometimes blurred. She was too driven to notice; and it seemed essential to her then that whatever happened to her she should be prepared to accept. Besides, she was in love, with Truman.

T
RUMAN STOOD ON THE
other side of the screen door in a flowing Ethiopian robe of extravagantly embroidered white, his brown eyes aglow with excitement. Everyone thought him handsome because his nose was so keen and his skin was tan and not black; and Meridian, though disliking herself for it, thought him handsome for exactly those reasons, too. Or had, until, when she had known him for about a year, she began to look closely at him. With scrutiny, much of the handsomeness disappeared behind the vain, pretentious person Truman was. And his teeth were far from good.

But the sly, serious double takes were still in the future. Therefore, she threw open the door for him with such passionate force it banged like a shot against the wall. Truman strode in like a conquering prince returning to his lands.

“You look fantastic!” Meridian breathed, as she cuddled up in his arms.

“Et toi aussi,”
he replied in French.
“Tu es très magnifique!”

Truman loved all the foreign cultures of the world, but his favorite was French. He had spent a year in Avignon and Paris. He believed profoundly that anything said in French sounded better, and he also believed that people who spoke French were better than people
(les pauvres, les misérables!)
who did not.

Therefore,
“Bon!”
said Meridian—which was the only French expression with which she felt comfortable. Luckily, she understood the language better than she spoke it, because Truman would continue to speak it throughout the evening. When he talked to her she had to translate every syllable into English before answering. Their conversation moved slowly. But it didn’t matter. She loved being with Truman. She felt protected when she was with him. To her he was courageous and “new.” He was, in any case, unlike any other black man she had known. He was a man who fought against obstacles, a man who could become anything, a man whose very words were unintelligible without considerable thought. She also wanted to make hot, quick, mindless love with him whenever he was near. When he touched her now, on the arms where they joined her shoulders, she trembled against him, faint with desire, as the description read in old novels. She had never felt faint with desire before and felt she had discovered a missing sense.

“I am so glad you came to Saxon,” he whispered,
en français,
of course. “You were going to waste out there in the sticks. Speaking of which,” he suddenly said, drawing back, but keeping his arms tight about her, “aren’t you losing weight?”

She buried her nose in the center of his throat and sucked his collarbone. They were going to a party, but if he didn’t stop caressing her shoulders, whispering in French (which did sound awfully sexy) and looking at her with his wild brown eyes, she knew they would never make it. So she said, “Let’s go,” abruptly, pushing him reluctantly but firmly from her, and preceded him out the door.

Driving through town Meridian told him of the three white exchange students who had come on the march with them that afternoon.

“From where?” Truman asked. “Swarthmore?”

“No, Smith and Carleton.”

“What do they look like?”

“One is exactly like the little Dutch boy on Dutch Boy paints. A pale blonde with ear-length hair. She’s the prettiest. The other two are kind of homely. Susan is short and mousy with thick legs. Lynne is thin and dark, with bright black eyes that sort of stab at you. They’ve been here a week, and I’ve already been out canvassing voters with Lynne. I like her. She can’t say ‘saw,’ she says, ‘I
sarh
it.’ And she starts her sentences with ‘So.’ Listen, let me tell you about this one lady’s house we went to ... way back in the sticks, on the edge of nowhere. This lady was sitting on her front porch, just as serene and untroubled as she could be. We should’ve seen that her Kingdom had already begun to approach, just by looking at her face. But we have to try everybody, right? She was one of these large, motherly types, with the tits, you know? Everybody’s grandmother. Her food was cooking back somewhere on the stove. Butter beans, Lynne swore she could tell by the smell. Anyhow, we walked up and Lynne put one foot up on the lady’s step. Her stomach was growling and she held her canvassing pad in front of it. The lady looked at her foot for a full minute.