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

survived. As human. In any case, the three of us left the throng that had filled the reading venue and went next door to a café that specialized in fried oysters and grits. The food was bad when we lived in Mississippi. Remember? We used to drive all the way to New Orleans, a four-hour trip, just to eat decent food once a month. But here, in the town of Oxford, a bicycle ride from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s old plantation house, the food is exquisite, and I stuffed myself with oysters, while thinking of my father, whose taste buds I seem to have inherited, and who adored oysters, raw, stewed or fried.
    Ernesto and Rosa ate heartily. I would not have guessed tragedy was such a part of their life if they had not hugged me so deeply, as if my body were a kind of raft.
    You are one of the few people who knew our parents, said Rosa, after explaining that both she and Ernesto were completing degrees at the university.
    We lost them, you know. Said Ernesto.
    No, I said. I don’t know.
    Reverend Bing looked at me quizzically. I shrugged. I have dropped out of so much of the world that I am aware I miss news I should have heard. Did you know of their deaths? Did you read about it in the paper? Did someone tell you? I pushed away the remains of my lavishly buttered grits.
    Nowadays, when everywhere you look there is so much tragedy, so much sadness, whenever I am about to hear more of it, I scrutinize the person or persons who are about to speak. I am looking to see if they are still beautiful, regardless of the tale they are about to tell. And if they are still beautiful, before they say anything, I tell them that they are. This is because Greatness of Beauty is how I see God. God being the common name given by many people to that which is undeniably unsurpassable, obvious and true.
    You could not be more beautiful, I said to them. And this is so.
    Did you know that Dianne wanted to be a writer? I had no idea.
    But that was the first thing Rosa told me. Ernesto chimed in to say that Harold had not permitted her to publish anything. Blinking a bit nervously he said Dianne had spoken admiringly of my work, but that Harold had ridiculed it. He thought, said Rosa, that because you wrote about your own life, that you were shameless. He was terrified to think our mother would write about herself.
    And now we know why, said Ernesto.
    Yeah, said Rosa, throwing her napkin over her plate.
    You have always pestered me to tell you where I was the night before I moved in with you
.
    This first line from Dianne’s diary conjured up her face for me. It is a funny line, no? A great opening statement for the novel she might have written, had Harold let her.
    How did I end up living with a white man from Idaho? The first time I saw you I hated your guts. I thought all blond people were stupid and that white skin looked diseased. We were taught that white people smell funny. Like wet dogs. But thank the Lord you didn’t have blue eyes, those hard glass eyes that might as well be playing marbles, and never show emotion and never even show fear. And you were busy trying to teach people how to vote and being impatient because, in their fear of you as a white man, they had a hard time hearing anything you had to say. If you’d cursed them and called them dumb niggers they would have heard you perfectly. But you were so polite, even while impatient, and called them Sir and Ma’am, and you just about shocked them out of their clothes
.
    What was kissing you like, the first time? I remember feeling fear, because I was thinking Good Lord, where are this man’s lips? What must have happened to them? I mean long ago, maybe when the earth’s climate or something changed. I have kissed a lot of men in my life, and they all had lips, sometimes more than enough lips to tell you the truth. But kissing you I felt my mouth just kind of spreading all over your face looking for lips to match up to mine. I was seriously worried that I was
blocking your nose. But you