The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online

One day you said he’d told you: Her secret apparently was her expertise at oral sex. I had not warmed to Harold; now I knew why. Although it was Harold who one day said something I’ve thought about all these years: To stay alive to yourself, you must keep doing the thing that gets you kicked out. He had laughed, saying this. Every choice I make in life, he said, to my Republican family, is more abhorrent than the last. They’d almost committed suicide after meeting Dianne.
    I could imagine him up there in Idaho, on the family ranch, six thousand acres wide, his eye pressed against the aperture of the television screen, lusting after the possibility of growing a wider internal, spiritual self that seemed, at the time, to be offered by black and white confrontation in the South. As far as he knew, there were no black people in Idaho, and, curiously, it was his love of the cattle his family raised, his empathy as they were loaded onto boxcars and shipped to a market back east, that made him think the blacks he saw being beaten up on television might be people too.
    He was one of the white men who supplied me with arrowheads. It was from his ranch that the tomahawk came. He definitely thought no Indians still lived in Idaho. I think of himwhenever I give readings there, and Indians, some of them friends of mine, claim front-row seats.
    Harold and Dianne are both dead now.
    At a reading in Oxford, a shy son and daughter came up to me. I was busy hugging on Ned Bing, the indomitable white pastor whose house was firebombed and whose face was badly battered by members of the Klan. It had been years since we’d seen each other. He has no idea how much I love his face; and I didn’t tell him, as I should have, as we stood surrounded by half the town. However I did manage to kiss him just where they’d laid open his jaw, and I pulled on the big, bright pink ear that was stitched back on halfheartedly at the racist hospital, and that managed, out of sheer love, to hang on. And then I stepped back, and there they were, the grown children of Harold and Dianne. Black children, because she’d had them by someone else, some black high school sweetheart, long before Harold arrived. Big brown eyes, dimpled smiles, skin like warm silk. Hair in dreads.
    We are the children of Harold and Dianne, they said in unison. Clearly a line rehearsed, since they’d anticipated being shy in front of me. Goddess, I thought, who are they talking about. And please ma’am, I pleaded with Her, let me soon remember. They were that impressive. I wanted to be worthy of them. My face, you always said, was completely readable. It must have been so then, as I rummaged through my Mississippi memory bank, because they laughed. Bust out laughing, in fact. And I saw Dianne’s lips, her rarely glimpsed dimple—and realized she’d almost never smiled—and what her hair would have looked like if she’d ceased to straighten it, and just let it grow. I even saw, especially in the boy, some of Harold’s supercilious cockiness. Theway, in Mississippi, he seemed arrogant even just standing on a corner. He was a hard white man for blacks to cotton to, so to speak. Ah, I said, seeing now what he might have looked like as a black man, and opened my arms.
    They flowed into me, both of them, in an embrace that seemed to last forever. They flopped and draped, one to a shoulder, about my body, which met them as if it were a tree. Not a stiff tree, but one that just bends to the ground when there’s a wind. A weeping willow. Do you ever wonder, old lover of mine, where so much love comes from? I wonder this often, because no matter how distressing the world is, wherever I am, there never seems to be a shortage of love. Is this true, as well, for you? We hugged for so long, in fact, that Reverend Bing returned, and gathered the three of us close to him.
    Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up wherever we perceive that another human has