You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online

me, those women. She cannot say she is jealous of pictures on a page. That she feels invisible. Rejected. Overlooked. She says instead, to herself: He is right. I will grow up. Adjust. Swim with the tide.
    He thinks he understands her, what she has been trying to say. It is Jiveboy, he thinks. The white women.
    Next day he brings home Jivers, a black magazine, filled with bronze and honey-colored women. He is in the bathroom another luxurious ten minutes.
    She stands, holding the magazine: on the cover are the legs and shoes of a well-dressed black man, carrying a briefcase and a rolled Wall Street Journal in one hand. At his feet—she turns the magazine cover around and around to figure out how exactly the pose is accomplished—there is a woman, a brownskin woman like herself, twisted and contorted in such a way that her head is not even visible. Only her glistening body—her back and derriere—so that she looks like a human turd at the man’s feet.
    He is on a business trip to New York. He has brought his wife along. He is eagerly sharing 42nd Street with her. “Look!” he says. “How free everything is! A far cry from Bolton!” (The small town they are from.) He is elated to see the blonde, spaced-out hookers, with their black pimps, trooping down the street. Elated at the shortness of the black hookers’ dresses, their long hair, inevitably false and blond. She walks somehow behind him, so that he will encounter these wonders first. He does not notice until he turns a corner that she has stopped in front of a window that has caught her eye. While she is standing alone, looking, two separate pimps ask her what stable she is in or if in fact she is in one. Or simply “You workin’?”
    He struts back and takes her elbow. Looks hard for the compliment implied in these questions, then shares it with his wife: “You know you’re foxy!”
    She is immovable. Her face suffering and wondering. “But look,” she says, pointing. Four large plastic dolls—one a skinny Farrah Fawcett (or so the doll looks to her) posed for anal inspection; one, an oriental, with her eyes, strangely, closed, but her mouth, a pouting red suction cup, open; an enormous eskimo woman, with fur around her neck and ankles, and vagina; and a black woman dressed entirely in a leopard skin, complete with tail. The dolls are all life-size, and the efficiency of their rubber genitals is explained in detail on a card visible through the plate glass.
    For her this is the stuff of nightmares—possibly because all the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity. He will return, another time, alone. Meanwhile, he must prevent her from seeing such things, he resolves, whisking her briskly off the street.
    Later, in their hotel room, she watches TV as two black women sing their latest hits: the first woman, dressed in a gold dress (because her song is now “solid gold!”) is nonetheless wearing a chain around her ankle—the wife imagines she sees a chain—because the woman is singing: “Free me from my freedom, chain me to a tree!”
    “What do you think of that?” she asks her husband.
    “She’s a fool,” says he.
    But when the second woman sings: “Ready, aim, fire, my name is desire,” with guns and rockets going off all around her, he thinks the line “Shoot me with your love!” explains everything.
    She is despondent.
    She looks in a mirror at her plump brown and black body, crinkly hair and black eyes and decides, foolishly, that she is not beautiful. And that she is not hip, either. Among her other problems is the fact that she does not like the word “nigger” used by anyone at all, and is afraid of marijuana. These restraints, she feels, make her old, too much like her own mother, who loves sex (she has lately learned) but is highly religious and, for example, thinks cardplaying wicked and alcohol deadly. Her husband would not consider her