Meridian by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

Indians?”
    “The mound is thousands of years old,” said her father. “There’s nothing but dust and minerals in there now.”
    “But to give our land to a naked Indian—”
    “Naked? He ain’t naked. You believe all that stuff they put on television. He wears a workshirt and blue jeans. His hair is the only thing that looks like Indians look on TV. It’s cut off short though, blunt, right behind the jowls, like Johnny Cash’s.”
    “How do you know he ain’t a white man playing Indian?”
    “Because I know. Grown-up white men don’t want to pretend to be anything else. Not even for a minute.”
    “They’ll become anything for as long as it takes to steal some land.”
    And once Meridian had actually seen the Indian. A tall, heavy man in cowboy boots, had his face full of creases like a brown paper bag someone had oiled and pinched a lot of lines in with careless fingers. Squinty black eyes stared with steady intensity into space. He was a wanderer, a mourner, like her father; she could begin to recognize what her father was by looking at him. Only he wandered physically, with his body, not walking across maps with his fingers as her father did. And he mourned dry-eyed. She could not imagine that weathered dusky skin bathed in tears. She could not see his stout dirt-ringed wrists pressing against his silver temples, or flattening in despair the remainder of his still-black hair.
    His name was Walter Longknife. Which caused Meridian to swallow her first hello when they were introduced, and he came from Oklahoma. He had started out in an old pickup truck that broke down in the shadow of Stone Mountain. He abandoned it, and was glad, he said—in a slurred voice, as if he were drunk, which he was not—to walk through the land of his ancestors, the Cherokees.
    Her father gave Mr. Longknife the deed to the sixty acres his grandfather acquired after the Civil War. Land too rocky for plowing (until her father and brothers removed all the rocks by hand and wheelbarrow), and too hilly to be easy to sell (prospective buyers always thought the mounds were peculiar hills). Mr. Longknife had kept the paper in his shirt until he was ready to move on—he spent most of the summer camping out on the land—and then he had given it back to her father.
    “Other men run away from their families outright,” said her mother. “You stay, but give the land under our feet away. I guess that makes you a hero.”
    “We were part of it, you know,” her father said.
    “Part of what?”
    “Their disappearance.”
    “Hah,” said her mother. “You might have been, but I wasn’t even born. Besides, you told me how surprised you were to find that some of them had the nerve to fight for the South in the Civil War. That ought to make up for those few black soldiers who rode against Indians in the Western cavalry.”
    Her father sighed. “I never said either side was innocent or guilty, just ignorant. They’ve been a part of it, we’ve been a part of it, everybody’s been a part of it for a long time.”
    “I know,” said her mother, scornfully, “and you would just fly away, if you could.”
    Meridian’s father said that Mr. Longknife had killed a lot of people, mainly Italians, in the Second World War. The reasons he’d done this remained abstract. That was why he was a wanderer. He was looking for reasons, answers, anything to keep his historical vision of himself as a just person from falling apart.
    “The answer to everything,” said Meridian’s mother, “is we live in America and we’re not rich.”
    One day when she was helping her father tie up some running beans, three white men in government-issued trucks—army green with white lettering on the side—came out to the farm. They unloaded a large wire trash basket and two brown picnic tables. They said a bulldozer would be coming the next day. The Indian burial mounds of the Sacred Serpent and her father’s garden of prize beans, corn and squash were to be