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

mother sexy, she thinks. Since she herself is aging, this thought frightens her. But, surprisingly, while watching herself become her mother in the mirror, she discovers that she considers her mother—who carefully braids her average-length, average-grade, graying hair every night before going to bed; the braids her father still manages to fray during the night— very sexy.
    At once she feels restored.
    Resolves to fight
    “You’re the only black woman in the world that worries about any of this stuff,” he tells her, unaware of her resolve, and moody at her months of silent studiousness.
    She says, “Here, Colored Person, read this essay by Audre Lorde.”
    He hedges. She insists.
    He comes to the line about Lorde “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love,” and bridles. “Wait a minute,” he says, “what kind of a name is ‘Audre’ for a man? They must have meant ‘ An dré. ’”
    “It is the name of a woman,” she says. “Read the rest of that page.”
    “No dyke can tell me anything,” he says, flinging down the pages.
    She has been calmly waiting for this. She brings in Jiveboy and Jivers. In both, there are women eating women they don’t even know. She takes up the essay and reads:
This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.
    He looks at her with resentment, because she is reading this passage over again, silently, absorbedly, to herself, holding the pictures of the phony lesbians (a favorite, though unexamined, turn-on) absent-mindedly on her lap. He realizes he can never have her again sexually the way he has had her since their second year of marriage, as though her body belonged to someone else. He sees, down the road, the dissolution of the marriage, a constant search for more perfect bodies, or dumber wives. He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels somehow as if her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights.
    Now she is busy pasting Audre Lorde’s words on the cabinet over the kitchen sink.
    When they make love she tries to look him in the eye, but he refuses to return her gaze.
    For the first time he acknowledges the awareness that the pleasure of coming without her is bitter and lonely. He thinks of eating stolen candy alone, behind the barn. And yet, he thinks greedily, it is better than nothing, which he considers her struggle’s benefit to him.
    The next day, she is reading another essay when he comes home from work. It is called “A Quiet Subversion,” and is by Luisah Teish. “Another dyke?” he asks.
    “Another one of your sisters,” she replies, and begins to read, even before he’s had dinner:
During the “Black Power Movement” much cultural education was focused on the black physique. One of the accomplishments of that period was the popularization of African hairstyles and the Natural. Along with this new hair-do came a new self-image and way of relating. Then the movie industry put out “Superfly,” and the Lord Jesus Look, the Konked head, and an accompanying attitude, ran rampant in the black community. Films like “Shaft” and “Lady Sings the Blues” portray black “heroes” as cocaine-snorting, fast-life fools. In these movies a black woman is always caught in a web of violence.…
A popular Berkeley theatre featured a porno movie titled “Slaves of Love.” Its advertisement portrayed two black women, naked, in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip! How such racist pornographic material escaped the eye of black activists presents a problem.…
    Typically, he doesn’t even hear the statement about the women. “What does the bitch know