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

about the Black Power Movement?” he fumes. He is angry at his wife for knowing him so long and so well. She knows, for instance, that because of the Black Power Movement (and really because of the Civil Rights movement before it), and not because he was at all active in it, he holds the bourgeois job he has. She remembers when his own hair was afroed. Now it is loosely curled. It occurs to him that, because she knows him as he was, he cannot make love to her as she is. Cannot, in fact, love her as she is. There is a way in which, in some firmly repressed corner of his mind, he considers his wife to be still black, whereas he feels himself to have moved to some other plane.
    (This insight, a glimmer of which occurs to him, frightens him so much that he will resist it for several years. Should he accept it at once, however unsettling, it would help him understand the illogic of his acceptance of pornography used against black women: that he has detached himself from his own blackness in attempting to identify black women only by their sex.)
    The wife has never considered herself a feminist—though she is, of course, a “womanist.” * A womanist is a feminist, only more common. (The author of this piece is a womanist.) So she is surprised when her husband attacks her as a “women’s libber,” a “white women’s lackey,” a “pawn” in the hands of Gloria Steinem, an incipient bra-burner! What possible connection could there be, he wants to know, between her and white women—those overprivileged hags now (he’s recently read in Newsweek ) marching and preaching their puritanical horseshit up and down Times Square!
    (He remembers only the freedom he felt there, not her long standing before the window of the plastic doll shop.) And if she is going to make a lot of new connections with dykes and whites, where will that leave him, the black man, the most brutalized and oppressed human being on the face of the earth? ( Is it because he can now ogle white w omen in freedom and she has no similar outlet of expression that he thinks of her as still black and himself as something else? This thought underlines what he is actually saying, and his wife is unaware of it.) Didn’t she know it is over these very same white bodies he has been lynched in the past, and is lynched still, by the police and the U.S. prison system, dozens of times a year even now!?
    The wife has cunningly saved Tracey A. Gardner’s essay for just this moment. Because Tracey A. Gardner has thought about it all, not just presently, but historically, and she is clear about all the abuse being done to herself as a black person and as a woman, and she is bold and she is cold—she is furious. The wife, given more to depression and self-abnegation than to fury, basks in the fire of Gardner’s high-spirited anger. She begins to read:
Because from my point of view, racism is everywhere, including in the women’s movement, and the only time I really need to say anything about it is when I do not see it…and the first time that happens, I will tell you about it.
    The husband, surprised, thinks this very funny, not to say pertinent. He slaps his knee and sits up. He is dying to make some sort of positive dyke comment, but nothing comes to mind.
American slavery relied on the denial of the humanity of Black folks, and the undermining of our sense of nationhood and family, on the stripping away of the Black man’s role as protector and provider, and on the structuring of Black women into the American system of white male domination.…
    “In other words,” she says, “white men think they have to be on top. Other men have been known to savor life from other positions.”
The end of the Civil War brought the end of a certain “form” of slavery for Black folks. It also brought the end of any “job security” and the loss of the protection of their white enslaver. Blacks were now free game, and the terrorization and humiliation of Black people, especially