Meridian by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

certainly said things she herself did not believe. She refused help and seemed, to Meridian, never to understand. But all along she understood perfectly.
    It was for stealing her mother’s serenity, for shattering her mother’s emerging self, that Meridian felt guilty from the very first, though she was unable to understand how this could possibly be her fault.
    When her mother asked, without glancing at her, “Have you stolen anything?” a stillness fell over Meridian and for seconds she could not move. The question literally stopped her in her tracks.

Gold
    O NE DAY WHEN MERIDIAN was seven she found a large chunk of heavy metal. It was so thickly encrusted with dirt that even when she had washed it the metal did not shine through. Yet she knew metal was there, because it was so heavy. Finally, when she had dried off the water, she took a large file and filed away some of the rust. To her amazement what she had found was a bar of yellow gold. Bullion they called it in the movies. She filed a spot an inch square and ran with it (heavy as it was) to her mother, who was sitting on the back porch shelling peas.
    “I’ve found some gold!” she shouted. “Gold!” And she placed the large heavy gold bar in her mother’s lap.
    “Move that thing,” her mother said sharply. “Don’t you see I’m trying to get these peas ready for supper?”
    “But it’s gold!” she insisted. “Feel how heavy it is. Look how yellow it is. It’s gold, and it could make us rich!”
    But her mother was not impressed. Neither was her father or her brothers. She took her bar of gold and filed all the rust off it until it shone like a huge tooth. She put it in a shoe box and buried it under the magnolia tree that grew in the yard. About once a week she dug it up to look at it. Then she dug it up less and less ... until finally she forgot to dig it up. Her mind turned to other things.

Indians and Ecstasy
    M ERIDIAN’S FATHER HAD BUILT for himself a small white room like a tool shed in the back yard, with two small windows, like the eyes of an owl, high up under the roof. One summer when the weather was very hot, she noticed the door open and had tiptoed inside. Her father sat at a tiny brown table poring over a map. It was an old map, yellowed and cracked with frayed edges, that showed the ancient settlements of Indians in North America. Meridian stared around the room in wonder. All over the walls were photographs of Indians: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, Little Bear, Yellow Flower, and even a drawing of Minnehaha and Hiawatha. There were actual photographs, perhaps priceless ones—which apparently her father had spent years collecting—of Indian women and children looking starved and glassy-eyed and doomed into the camera. There were also books on Indians, on their land rights, reservations, and their wars. As she tiptoed closer to the bookshelves and reached to touch a photograph of a frozen Indian child (whose mother lay beside her in a bloody heap) her father looked up from his map, his face wet with tears, which she mistook, for a moment, for sweat. Shocked and frightened, she ran away.
    One day she overheard her parents talking. Her mother was filling fruit jars in the kitchen: “So you’ve gone and done it, have you?” said her mother, pouring apple slices into the jars with a sloshing noise.
    “But the land already belonged to them,” her father said, “I was just holding it. The rows of my cabbages and tomatoes run right up along the biggest coil of the Sacred Serpent. That mound is full of dead Indians. Our food is made healthy from the iron and calcium from their bones. Course, since it’s a cemetery, we shouldn’t own it anyhow.”
    Before the new road was cut it had not been possible to see the Serpent from the old one. It was news to most of the townspeople that an Indian mound existed there.
    “That’s disgusting,” said her mother. “How can I enjoy my food if you’re going to talk about dead