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

just kept going ummm, ummm, ummm, and pretty soon I quit worrying about it
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    Who would have thought? That very morning my daddy had reminded me that white men are lower than snakes. But he wasn’t too high off the ground his own self. And the black men who fathered my children didn’t exactly fly among the clouds. Still, it was with a black man, the father of one of my children, that I spent the last night of my life as a pure black woman. He was out on bail, or maybe he’d run away from the jail, black men often did; and he’d come to see me and the children and one thing led to another. He was the one my mama always liked; you know how mothers sometimes be. And she came by, just as nice, and took all the children over to her house. And Daniel and me just fell in the bed together and hugged each other a long time and just started crying. And he asked me if it was true that I was going out with a white man, and I said yes. And he asked me if I thought he and I could ever get together again, even though he was set to go to prison for twenty-something years, and I said I didn’t think so. And then he asked me if he could spend the night. And I said no. But then we cried so much we tired ourselves out and went to sleep. And then around midnight we woke up, and just started to make love. And we made love over and over for the next six or seven hours, until the children came back and he had to leave
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    The next night I moved in with you. And I wouldn’t make love with you because I could still smell Daniel in my body. And the next night I said I had my period. And when we finally did make love, I felt like I had just given up
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    Every time you got mad with me about something, you always yelled that I didn’t really love you. I think it upset you that all
my children were so dark. But you felt like this because until you were twenty-seven years old the thought of a black person’s life never entered your head. It was news to you that us poor black folks down in Mississippi had even survived. You thought we were just like the Indians you said no longer existed in Idaho. Sometimes, even when you were looking me straight in my face, I could see you were still surprised. I used to think I should gain a lot of weight and put on a head rag to make you feel more at home
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    I knew you were jealous of black men. And envious at the same time. You’d heard things about black men, growing up. Sexual things, that made you feel inferior. And after you saw a picture of Daniel in the newspaper, after he’d escaped from prison and was thought to be hiding out in New York City, you were evil for weeks. I was happy he’d got away. Every day of my life it hurt me to think of him in a cage. But you never understood about prison in the South. That prisons were just the modern version of the plantation. That if someone like Daniel stole something because he was hungry, he shouldn’t be forced to work cotton for the rest of his life
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    I feel somehow embarrassed, reading Dianne’s diary. I protested when Ernesto and Rosa (after Ernesto Che Guevara and Rosa Parks, of course) sent it to me. At first, I wouldn’t even open it; I was almost afraid. Afraid of what? Of seeing the writing self, my own, that might not have become. After all, there we all were, in Mississippi, at the same time, encountering the same violence, racism, sweltering heat. Only you supported me in the work I chose to do in the world. Harold did not support Dianne; though he was, apparently, a good father to her children. Whenever I think of Ernesto I actually see Harold; the way he used tostand, legs spread, his arms folded across his chest, his glasses pushed up on his head, glinting in the sun atop his turbulent blond hair.
    No, no, she wanted you to read what she was writing, even while she was writing it and you lived a few miles away! She was desperate for someone to share her writing with. This is what the children tell me. Rosa is herself thinking of writing a