You've Got to Read This (103 page)

It is here that Walker takes a leap and the story becomes not just that of a black girl, and one day in her life, but a story about a race and the oppres-sion of that race. Around the rose's root is the raised mound of the remains
INTRODUCTION BY EDWARD P. JONES • 581

of a noose. Walker's lines are few; no judgment is made by the author; Myop speaks no words. The noose is rotted, and there is the implication that the dead man has lain there longer than Myop has been alive, perhaps even longer than her mother, who might have warned her daughter of such a place, has been alive. The noose makes all the difference in Myop's universe, where lynchings of black men were as common as coming-out parties, and seeing the noose changes her universe. She lays down the flowers, as if on a grave. The story ends, "And the summer was over." And by implication, of course, the girl's childhood.

There are, to be sure, hundreds of stories that create a believable universe and that teach the simple lesson that a story should be about something: stuff of the heart, as Faulkner said, not of the glands. Walker's story is among the hundreds, and it does its job with an economy of words. We ask a lot of a literary work that is supposed to endure, not least of which is that it stay in the mind and the heart for months and years. "The Flowers," those two pages, does that for me, more than twenty years after I first read it.

T h e F l o w e r s

A l i c e W a l k e r

t seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.

Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment.

Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family's sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring.

Around the spring, where the family got drinking water, silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Along the shallow banks pigs rooted. Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.

She had explored the woods behind the house many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves.

Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweetsuds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.

By twelve o'clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep.

Myop began to circle back to the house, back to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then she stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself. It was only when she saw his naked grin that she gave a little yelp of surprise.

He had been a tall man. From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him. When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he'd had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones. All his clothes had rotted away 582

ALICE WALKER • 583

except some threads of blue denim from his overalls. The buckles of the overalls had turned green.

Myop gazed around the spot with interest. Very near where she'd stepped into the head was a wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil. Around an overhanging limb of a great spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled—barely there—

but spinning restlessly in the breeze. Myop laid down her flowers.

And the summer was over.

N o Place f o r You,

M y Love

by Eudora W e l t y

Introduced by Russell Banks

MAYBE ONE HAS TO BE OVER FORTY BEFORE ONE CAN APPRECIATE

this story properly. Or, more to the point, maybe / had to be over forty before I was capable of getting it. Had I come upon it earlier, I would probably have reacted as most of my students do on those rare occasions when I fly in the face of my better judgment and try to teach it. Excuse me? You're saying this story left you breathless the first time you read it, made your heart pound, your legs weak, caused your hands to sweat—you say it left you spellbound? Middle-aged married man meets thirtyish woman at a civic luncheon, man and woman ride around in his rented car for a while, man and woman dance in a roadhouse, they come back to the city, man drops woman off at her hotel. That's
it?
The man and woman don't even
say
anything to each other, except for the dozen or so opaque, curiously deflective sentences which they use mostly for kicking the other person away, moving him or her to the far corner of the car seat, and then, just as opaquely, drawing him or her back.

"It looks to me like your road can't go much further," she remarked cheerfully.

"Just over there, it's all water."

"Time out," he said, and with that he turned the car into a sudden road of white shells that rushed at them narrowly out of the left.

My student doesn't get it. She wants to know, How come you guys over forty get so excited and
moved
by this story? She thinks it must have something to do with
aging.

Well, yes. It does have a lot to do with the passage of time, with the

"too late" of so much of one's life after a certain age—"he thought that here was a woman who was having an affair. . . . With a married man, most likely . . . he was long married. . . . He guessed her age . . . thirty-two. He himself was further along"—and thus it surely must have to do with all our lost chances for love and with the imminence of death. Aging, the end of youth, at least, can bring you up against those twinned subjects with a certain undeniable ferocity, can shove them in your face and say, Son (or Daughter), deal. And most of us would prefer not to deal, thank you, until we happen onto a story like this and find ourselves brought face-to-face, heart-to-heart, with the painful, inexplicable beauty of the transience of human consciousness.

I happened onto it in 1986 in an anthology called
The Art of the Tale,
edited by Daniel Halpern. It's an atypical and little-known Welty story from her 1952 collection,
The Bride of Innisfalien and Other Stories.
I have never seen it anthologized anywhere else. The story is told from an omniscient
INTRODUCTION BY RUSSELL BANKS • 587

point of view that refuses to privilege one character over the other. It keeps both the man and the woman on a shifting plane that switches with disorienting swiftness from a distant, detached objectivity to a wise, all-knowing, Jamesian intimacy. The man and the woman, both Northerners, both unnamed, are described in their immediate present as they drive down from New Orleans through a dark geography that's "south of South," where they pass below the city and head out across the delta into the gulf.

The story has the symmetry of a folk tale. It's a journey outside time through a highly symbolic landscape laid down with the precision and mystery of the Stations of the Cross—a road, a bridge, a levee, a ferry, a cemetery, on to the very edge of the continent, where they stop and dance and then reluctantly return to their respective hotels. The action, such as there is, arises from the alternating currents of aggression and flight in the relations between the two individuals, as they shuck and exchange roles of predator and quarry. First the man pursues the woman, until suddenly, unexpectedly, she turns on him and sends him backing, converting him to prey and herself to predator. They'll play these roles until the next stop on their journey, when they will switch again, and then yet again. (Like all dance, it's sexual, of course, but, like good sex, it's profoundly metaphysical too.) At last they run out of road and can go no further south of South. The chase has ended. Out of a tolerable solitude they have reluctantly come forward and after great resistance permitted themselves to pass through a flash-point of communion. They seem for an instant to have become a single person, merged into an entity that a moment later will be compelled to split into two discrete, isolated parts—leaving them just as they were before, only different.

Following fusion, inevitably, fission occurs. For having sought and fought and then accepted that one moment—that brief slow dance with a stranger in a roadhouse on a night south of New Orleans—a man and a woman have been subtly, significantly, changed. And the ideal reader of this incantatory story (a person over forty, probably) has been changed also, and very likely in the same way as has Welty's mysterious couple: the reader's knowledge of them and their strangely ordered yet utterly unfamiliar landscape is an exact replication of the couple's knowledge of each other and the world they have briefly entered together. It's a meticulously structured encounter, theirs with each other and ours with them. We have entered and passed through the mystery with them: our communion with them, the tear in our habitual solitude, that has been provided by the story is precisely the intrusion and resultant communion that Eudora Welty's man and woman on this random summer night have provided for each other. Thus, for a few moments, a story has restored our lives to us filled with "the lilt and expectation of love." No wonder that we are left spellbound by it.

N o Place for You, M y Love

E u d o r a W e l t y

T
hey were strangers to each other, both fairly well strangers to the place, now seated side by side at luncheon—a party combined in a free-and-easy way when the friends he and she were with recognized each other across Galatoire's. The time was a Sunday in summer—those hours of afternoon that seem Time Out in New Orleans.

The moment he saw her little blunt, fair face, he thought that here was a woman who was having an affair. It was one of those odd meetings when such an impact is felt that it has to be translated at once into some sort of speculation.

With a married man, most likely, he supposed, slipping quickly into a groove—he was long married—and feeling more conventional, then, in his curiosity as she sat there, leaning her cheek on her hand, looking no further before her than the flowers on the table, and wearing that hat.

He did not like her hat, any more than he liked tropical flowers. It was the wrong hat for her, thought this Eastern businessman who had no interest whatever in women's clothes and no eye for them; he thought the unaccustomed thing crossly.

It must stick out all over me, she thought, so people think they can love me or hate me just by looking at me. How did it leave us—the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels, and the privilege that went with it of shying away if it seemed best? People in love like me, I suppose, give away the short cuts to everybody's secrets.

Something, though, he decided, had been settled about her predicament—for the time being, anyway; the parties to it were all still alive, no doubt. Nevertheless, her predicament was the only one he felt so sure of here, like the only recognizable shadow in that restaurant, where mirrors and fans were busy agitating the light, as the very local talk drawled across and agitated the peace. The shadow lay between her fingers, between her little square hand and her cheek, like something always best carried about the person. Then suddenly, as she took her hand down, the secret fact was still there—it lighted her. It was a bold and full light, shot up under the brim of that hat, as close to them all as the flowers in the center of the table.

Did he dream of making her disloyal to that hopelessness that he saw very well she'd been cultivating down here? He knew very well that he did not. What they amounted to was two Northerners keeping each other company. She glanced up at the big gold clock on the wall and smiled. He didn't
588

EUDORAWELTY • 589

smile back. She had that naive face that he associated, for no good reason, with the Middle West—because it said "Show me," perhaps. It was a serious, now-watch-out-everybody face, which orphaned her entirely in the company of these Southerners. He guessed her age, as he could not guess theirs: thirty-two. He himself was further along.

Of all human moods, deliberate imperviousness may be the most quickly communicated—it may be the most successful, most fatal signal of all. And two people can indulge in imperviousness as well as in anything else. "You're not very hungry either," he said.

The blades of fan shadows came down over their two heads, as he saw inadvertently in the mirror, with himself smiling at her now like a villain. His t remark sounded dominant and rude enough for everybody present to listen back a moment; it even sounded like an answer to a question she might have just asked him. The other women glanced at him. The Southern look—

Southern mask—of life-is-a-dream irony, which could turn to pure challenge at the drop of a hat, he could wish well away. He liked naivete better.

"I find the heat down here depressing," she said, with the heart of Ohio in her voice.

"Well—I'm in somewhat of a temper about it, too," he said.

They looked with grateful dignity at each other.

"I have a car here, just down the street," he said to her as the luncheon party was rising to leave, all the others wanting to get back to their houses and sleep. "If it's all right with—Have you ever driven down south of here?"