Meridian, Page 3

  But now television became the repository of memory, and each onlooker grieved alone.

  It was during the first televised Kennedy funeral that Anne-Marion Coles became quite conscious of Meridian Hill. She had seen her around the campus before, but never really to speak to. Meridian appeared so aloof she could sit at a table for four in the dining room and never be asked to share it; or, if she were asked, the question would be put timidly, with deference. This barrier she erected seemed to astonish her, and when finally approached—whether in the dining room, the chapel, or under the campus trees—she was likely to seem too eager in her response, too generous, too friendly, her dark face whipped quickly into liveliness, and dark, rather sad eyes crinkled brightly into gladness.

  Anne-Marion had the audacity of the self-confident person who, against whatever odds, intends to succeed. Hers was an exploitative rather than an altruistic nature, and she would never have attempted penetrating Meridian’s reserve if she had not sensed behind it an intriguing and valuable inner life—an exploration of which would enrich her own existence. That she would learn to care for Meridian she did not foresee.

  She sat across from Meridian as she and the other honor students watched the Kennedy family stride off toward Arlington National Cemetery behind the shattered body of their dead John. Jackie Kennedy, it was suggested by a newsman, had been given something that helped her not to cry. The students had been given nothing, and so they cried small floods. Meridian’s face, grayish-blue from the television light, glistened with tears that dripped off her chin onto her blue cotton shirt. Slumped forward with grief, she did not bother to raise her hands from her lap, where they lay palms up, empty. She shivered as if she were cold.

  Earlier that same year, when Medgar Evers was assassinated, Meridian had planted a wild sweet shrub bush among the plants in the formal garden in front of the honors house. Each day the jealous gardener had pulled a bit more of its delicate roots to the surface, so that it too soon died. Remembering this, seeing her shiver, Anne-Marion held out her sweater to Meridian. Scarcely looking at her, Meridian took it and wrapped herself up tight.

  The Wild Child

  THE WILD CHILD was a young girl who had managed to live without parents, relatives or friends for all of her thirteen years. It was assumed she was thirteen, though no one knew for sure. She did not know herself, and even if she had known, she was not capable of telling. Wile Chile, as the people in the neighborhood called her (saying it slowly, musically, so that it became a kind of lewd, suggestive song), had appeared one day in the slum that surrounded Saxon College when she was already five or six years old. At that time, there were two of them, Wile Chile and a smaller boy. The boy soon disappeared. It was rumored that he was stolen by the local hospital for use in experiments, but this was never looked into. In any case, Wile Chile was seen going through garbage cans and dragging off pieces of discarded furniture, her ashy black arms straining at the task. When a neighbor came out of her house to speak to her, Wile Chile bolted, not to be seen again for several weeks. This was the pattern she followed for years. She would be seen scavenging for food in the garbage cans, and when called to, she would run.

  In summer she wore whatever was available in castoff shorts and cotton tops. Or she would wear a pair of large rayon panties, pulled up under her arms, and nothing else. In winter she put together a collection of wearable junk and topped it with a mangy fur jacket that came nearly to the ground. By the age of eight (by the neighbors’ reckoning) she had begun to smoke, and, as she dug about in the debris, kicking objects this way and that (cursing, the only language she knew), she puffed on cigarette butts with a mature and practiced hand.

  It was four or five winters after they first spotted her that the neighbors noticed Wile Chile was pregnant. They were critical of the anonymous “low-down dirty dog” who had done the impregnating, but could not imagine what to do. Wile Chile rummaged about as before, eating rancid food, dressing herself in castoffs, cursing and bolting, and smoking her brown cigarettes.

  It was while she was canvassing voters in the neighborhood that Meridian first heard of The Wild Child. The neighbors had by then tried to capture her: A home for her lying-in had been offered. They failed to catch her, however. As one neighbor explained it, Wile Chile was slipperier than a greased pig, and unfortunately the comparison did not end there. Her odor was said to be formidable. The day Meridian saw The Wild Child she withdrew to her room in the honors house for a long time. When the other students looked into her room they were surprised to see her lying like a corpse on the floor beside her bed, eyes closed and hands limp at her sides. While lying there she did not respond to anything; not the call to lunch, not the phone, nothing. On the second morning the other students were anxious, but on that morning she was up.

  With bits of cake and colored beads and unblemished cigarettes she tempted Wile Chile and finally captured her. She brought her onto the campus with a catgut string around her arm; when Wile Chile tried to run Meridian pulled her back. Into a tub went Wile Chile, whose body was caked with mud and rust, whose hair was matted with dust, and whose loud obscenities mocked Meridian’s soothing voice. Wile Chile shouted words that were never uttered in the honors house. Meridian, splattered with soap and mud, broke down and laughed.

  At dinner Wile Chile upset her tablemates with the uncouthness of her manners. Ignoring their horrified stares she drank from the tea pitcher, and put cigarette ashes in her cup. She farted, as if to music, raising a thigh.

  The house mother, called upon in desperation by the other honor students, attempted to persuade Meridian that The Wild Child was not her responsibility.

  “She must not stay here,” she said gravely. “Think of the influence. This is a school for young ladies.” The house mother’s marcel waves shone like real sea waves, and her light-brown skin was pearly under a mask of powder. Wile Chile trembled to see her and stood cowering in a corner.

  The next morning, while Meridian phoned schools for special children and then homes for unwed mothers—only to find there were none that would accept Wile Chile—The Wild Child escaped. Running heavily across a street, her stomach the largest part of her, she was hit by a speeder and killed.

  Sojourner

  MERIDIAN LIVED IN a small corner room high under the eaves of the honors house and had decorated the ceiling, walls, backs of doors and the adjoining toilet with large photographs of trees and rocks and tall hills and floating clouds, which she claimed she knew.

  While Meridian was thin and seemed to contain the essence of silence (so that hearing her laugh was always a surprise), her new friend, Anne-Marion, was rounded and lush, brash and eager to argue over the smallest issues. Her temper was easily lost. When she was attempting to be nonviolent and a policeman shoved her, she dug her nails into her arms to restrain herself, but could never resist sticking out, to its full extent, her energetic and expressive pink tongue.

  “Meridian,” she would whisper through clenched teeth, “tell me something sad or funny, quick, before I kick this bastard in the balls.”

  Anne-Marion was entirely unsympathetic to daily chapel, notoriously unresponsive to preachers—though she once declared she would follow King and “that handsome Andy Young” through the deepest dark swamp—and had no intention of singing or praying in public. If she bowed her head during protest demonstrations it was to see if her shoelace had come untied, and if she sang it was a song muttered through clenched teeth. She did not see why anyone should worry about her soul, even the people she marched with. “When it gives me trouble,” she’d sneer, “I’ll call y’all.” In this, she and Meridian were exactly alike, except if some pathetic, distracted old marcher wished to bend Meridian’s ear about his or her Jesus, Meridian would stand patiently and listen. She was constantly wanting to know about the songs: “Where did such and such a one come from?” or “How many years do you think black people have been singing this?”

  Anne-Marion had also taken the first opportunity—on
ce she had actually seen a natural on another woman’s head—to cut off all her hair. For this she was called before the Dean of Women (whom she promptly christened “the Dead of Women”)—whose own hair was long, processed and lavender—and reprimanded.

  “First blue jeans before six o’clock and now this!” said the Dead of Women. “It is becoming clear you are some kind of oddity.”

  “Under the circumstances,” Anne-Marion told Meridian later, “hearing this from her was a relief!”

  Meridian agreed. A future of processed lavender hair didn’t amount to much.

  Like Meridian, Anne-Marion was a deviate in the honors house: there because of her brilliance but only tolerated because it was clear she was one, too, on whom true Ladyhood would never be conferred. Most of the students—timid, imitative, bright enough but never daring, were being ushered nearer to Ladyhood every day. It was for this that their parents had sent them to Saxon College. They learned to make French food, English tea and German music without once having the urge to slip off the heavily guarded campus at five in the morning to photograph a strange tree as the light hit it just the right way—as Meridian had—or to risk being raped in a rough neighborhood as they attempted to discover the economic causes of inner-city crime, as had Anne-Marion.

  Meridian and Anne-Marion walked together, as they had many times before. Only now they moved slowly, carefully, their dark dresses down to the tops of their polished shoes, and their hands, underneath the narrow coffin, nearly touched. The mourners in front of them stopped, and a few stepped out of the line to stare at what appeared to be a commotion at the gate.

  “I never would have guessed Wile Chile had so many friends,” said Meridian dryly. Even in her heavy black dress and thick braided hair Meridian weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her deep-brown skin was filmed slightly with perspiration that reddened it. When she was thoughtful or when she was unaware of being observed, her face seemed deeply sad, as if she knew there was no hope, in the long run, for anyone in the world, and that whatever she was doing at the time was destined for a short, if perfect, life. When she smiled, as she did often when talking to her friends, this look of anticipated doom was almost wiped away, though traces of it always lingered in the depths of her eyes.

  She was never thought of as a pretty girl. People might say she looked interesting, mysterious, older than her years and therefore intriguing, but she was considered approaching beautiful only when she looked sad. When she laughed, this beauty broke; and people, captivated by the sad quality of her face, seemed compelled to joke with her just long enough to cause her to laugh and lose it. Then, freed from their interest in her, they walked away. After these encounters, her mouth still quivering and contracting from her laughter of a moment before, she would curl her toes and stand on one foot, leaning like a crane into the space around her, rocked by the thump-thump of her bewildered—and, she felt then, rather stupid—heart.

  Anne-Marion, seeing this happen too frequently to Meridian without anything being learned from it, always felt the urge, at the point where Meridian leaned on one foot, to rush forward and kick her.

  Now Meridian strained upward on her toes in an effort to improve her view, but could see nothing beyond the milling about of the people at the gate.

  “That flaky bastard,” said Anne-Marion, her dark eyes flashing. “That mother’s scum is going to turn us around.”

  “He wouldn’t,” said Meridian mildly.

  “You wait and see. He’s scared of us causing a commotion that could get in the cracker papers, just when he’s fooled ’em that Saxon Knee-grows are finally your ideal improved type.”

  Anne-Marion wiped her brow and heaved the coffin more firmly against her cheek.

  “He ain’t nothing but a dishrag for those crackers downtown. He can’t stand up to’em no more than piss can fall upward. His mama should’ve drowned him in the commode the minute he was born.”

  “Leave folks’ mamas alone,” said Meridian, although Anne-Marion made her smile. She was relieved that the line had begun, slowly, to move again. Wile Chile was getting heavier with each pause. Soon they were abreast of the guards at the gate. “Hey, brother,” she called to the good-looking one.

  “Y’all gon’ run into trouble,” he called back nonchalantly.

  It still surprised her to see a black man wearing a uniform and holstered gun. What was he protecting? she wondered. If he was protecting the campus, how silly that was, because nobody would ever dare harm the lovely old campus buildings; and he couldn’t be protecting the students, because they were only just now coming onto the campus, following the six young women who sweated under the casket (which they had paid for) that held The Wild Child’s body; and he couldn’t be afraid of the crowd of Wile Chile’s neighbors, whose odors and groans and hymns drifted up to them pungent with poverty and despair. Humbly, they were bringing up the rear.

  Anne-Marion, having given up on winning over the guards long ago, refused now even to look at them. She could not see policemen, guards and such. “I have uniform blindness,” she explained.

  The street outside the gate was ordinary enough, with patched potholes and a new signal light just in front of the gate. The fence that surrounded the campus was hardly noticeable from the street and appeared, from the outside, to be more of an attempt at ornamentation than an effort to contain or exclude. Only the students who lived on campus learned, often painfully, that the beauty of a fence is no guarantee that it will not keep one penned in as securely as one that is ugly.

  A dampness peculiar to the climate was turned lightly warm by the clear sunshine, and blossoms on apple and pear and cherry trees lifted the skeptical eye in wonder and peace. Running through so much green the road was as white as an egg, as if freshly scrubbed, and the red brick buildings, older than anyone still alive, sparkled in the sun.

  “I’d like to wreck this place,” Anne-Marion said, unmoved.

  “You’d have to wreck me first,” said Meridian. She needed this clean, if artificial, air to breathe.

  There was, in the center of the campus, the largest magnolia tree in the country. It was called The Sojourner. Classes were sometimes held in it; a podium and platform had been built into its lower branches, with wooden steps leading up to them. The Sojourner had been planted by a slave on the Saxon plantation—later, of course, Saxon College. The slave’s name was Louvinie. Louvinie was tall, thin, strong and not very pleasant to look at. She had a chin that stuck out farther than it should and she wore black headrags that made a shelf over her eyebrows. She became something of a local phenomenon in plantation society because it was believed she could not smile. In fact, throughout her long lifetime nothing even resembling a smile ever came to her poked-out lips.

  In her own country in West Africa she had been raised in a family whose sole responsibility was the weaving of intricate tales with which to entrap people who hoped to get away with murder. This is how it worked: Her mother and father would be visited by the elders of the village, who walked the two miles to their hut singing the solemnest songs imaginable in order to move her parents’ hearts, and to make it easier for the spirits who hung around the hut to help them in their trouble. The elders would tell of some crime done in the village by a person or persons unknown. Louvinie’s parents would ask a few questions: How was the person murdered? What was stolen, other than the life? Where were the other villagers at the time? etc., all the while making marks on the floor of the hut with two painted sticks. The sticks had no meaning except as a distraction: Louvinie’s parents did not like to be stared at.

  When the elders left, Louvinie’s mother would change her face with paint and cover up her hair and put on a new dress and take up residence in the village proper. In a few days she would come back, and she and her husband would begin to make up a story to fit the activities of the criminal. When they completed it, they presented it to the villagers, who congregated in the dead of night to listen. Each person listening was required to hold a piece of
treated fiber plant under his or her arm, snugly into the armpit. At the end of the story these balls of fiber were collected, and from them Louvinie’s parents were able to identify the guilty party. How they were able to do this they had never had the chance to teach her.

  On the Saxon plantation in America Louvinie had been placed in charge of the kitchen garden. She was considered too ugly to work in the house, and much too dour to be around the children. The children, however, adored her. When pressed, she would tell them stories of bloodcurdling horror. They followed her wherever she went and begged her to tell them all the scary, horrible stories that she knew. She was pleased to do so, and would tell stories that made their hair stand on end. She made up new, American stories when the ones she remembered from Africa had begun to bore.

  She might have continued telling stories had there not occurred a tragedy in the Saxon household that came about through no real fault of her own. It had never been explained to her that the youngest of the Saxon children, an only son, suffered from an abnormally small and flimsy heart. Encouraged by the children to become more and more extravagant in her description, more pitiless in her plot, Louvinie created a masterpiece of fright, and, bursting with the delight she always felt when creating (but never smiling at all—which seemed curious, even to the children), she sat under a tree at the back of the garden just as the sun was sinking slowly through a black cloud bank in the west, and told the children the intricate, chilling story of the old man whose hobby was catching and burying children up to their necks and then draping their heads—which stuck up in rows, like cabbages—with wriggly eels clipped in honey. Long before the culprit received his comeuppance, young Saxon had slumped dead to the ground of a heart attack. He was seven years old.