Living by the Word (3 page)

For years I have held on to another early memory of my life between the ages of two and four. Every afternoon a tired but jolly very black man came up to me with arms outstretched. I flew into them to be carried, to be hugged, to be kissed. For years I thought this black man was my father. But no. He was my oldest brother, Fred, whose memories of my father are, surprisingly, as painful as
my
memories of him, because as my father’s first child, and a son, he was subjected to my father’s very confused notions of what constituted behavior suitable for a male. And of course my father himself didn’t really know. He was in his late teens, a child himself, when he married. His mother had been murdered, by a man who claimed to love her, when he was eleven. His father, to put it very politely, drank, and terrorized his children.

My father was so confused that when my sister Ruth appeared in the world and physically resembled his mother, and sounded like his mother, and had similar expressions, he rejected her and missed no opportunity that I ever saw to put her down. I, of course, took the side of my sister, forfeiting my chance to be my father’s favorite among the second set of children, as my oldest sister, Mamie, was favorite among the first. In her case the favoritism seemed outwardly caused by her very light color, and of course she was remarkably intelligent as well.

In my case, my father seemed partial to me because of my “smartness” and forthrightness, but more obviously because of my hair, which was the longest and “best” in the family.

And yet, my father taught me two things that have been important to me: he taught me not to bother telling lies, because the listener might be delighted with the truth, and he told me never to cut my hair. Though I have tried not to lie, the sister he rejected and I loved became a beautician, and one of
 
the first things she did—partly in defiance of him—was to cut my shoulder-blade-length hair. I did not regret it so much while in high school and college (everyone kept their hair short, it seemed), but years later, after I married, I grew it long again, almost as long as it had been when I was growing up. I’d had it relaxed to feathers. When I walked up to my father, as he was talking to a neighbor, I stooped a little and placed his hand on my head. I thought he’d be pleased. “A woman’s hair is her glory,” he’d always said. He paid little attention. When the black power movement arrived, with its emphasis on cropped natural hair, I did the job myself, filling the face bowl and bathroom floor with hair and shocking my husband when he arrived home.

Only recently have I come to believe he was right in wanting me to keep my hair. After years of short hair, of cutting my hair back each time it raised its head, so to speak, I have begun to feel each time as if I am mutilating my antennae (which is how Rastafarians, among others, think of hair) and attenuating my power. It seems imperative not to cut my hair anymore.

I didn’t listen to my father because I assumed he meant that in the eyes of a
man,
in his eyes, a woman’s hair is her glory (unfortunately, he wore his own head absolutely cleanshaven all his life); and that is probably what he did mean. But now I begin to sense something else, that there is power (would an ancient translation of glory
be
power?) in uncut hair itself. The power (and glory) perhaps of the untamed, the undomes- ticated; in short, the wild. A wildness about the head, as the Rastas have discovered, places us somehow in the loose and spacious freedom of Jah’s universe. Hippies, of course, knew this, too.

As I write, my own hair reaches just below my ears. It is at the dangerous stage at which I usually butt my forehead against the mirror and in resignation over not knowing “what to do with it” cut it off. But this time I have thought ahead and have encased it in braids made of someone else’s hair. I expect to wear them, braces for the hair, so to speak, until my own hair replaces them. Eventually I will be able, as I was when a child, to tie my hair under my chin. But mostly I would like to set it free.

My father would have loved Jesse Jackson. On the night Jesse addressed the Democratic convention I stayed close to my radio. In my backwoods cabin, linked to the world only by radio, I felt something like my father must have, since he lived most of his life before television and far from towns. He would have appreciated Jesse’s oratorical gift, and, unlike some newscasters who seemed to think of it primarily as technique, he would have felt, as I did, the transformation of the spirit of the man implicit in the words he chose to say. He would have felt, as I did, that in asking for forgiveness as well as votes and for patience as well as commitment to the Democratic party, Jackson lost nothing and won almost everything: a cleared conscience and peace of mind.

My father was never able to vote for a black candidate for any national or local political office. By the time black people were running for office and occasionally winning elections, in the late sixties and early seventies, he was too sick to respond with the exhilaration he must have felt. On the night of Jackson’s speech, I felt it for him; along with the grief that in neither of our lifetimes is the United States likely to choose the best leadership offered to it. This is the kind of leader, the kind of evergrowing, ever-expanding spirit
you
might have been, Daddy, I thought—and damn it, I love you for what you might have been. And thinking of you now, merging the two fathers that you were, remembering how tightly I hugged you as a small child returning home after two long months at a favorite aunt’s, and with what apparent joy you lifted me beside your cheek; knowing now, at forty, what it takes out of body and spirit to go and how much more to stay, and having learned, too, by now, some of the pitiful confusions in behavior caused by ignorance and pain, I love you no less for what you were.

1984

* From
Once
by Alice Walker. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968.)

On June 16, 1975, two black women were hitchhiking through the small town of Lyons, Georgia. They were returning from a visit to nearby Reidsville prison, where the brother of one of them was incarcerated and ill. They had been beaten and jailed overnight by local police, who had accused them of vagrancy and public drunkenness when one of them fainted, from the heat and the effects of her low-blood-pressure medication, along the road. Now the women were tired, humiliated, and hungry, sweaty from the severe heat, and scared. They had discovered there was no bus service back to Atlanta, where they lived.

Sometime before midnight, a white man who said he was a policeman, and who sported all the regalia of a Georgia police officer, offered them a ride. While driving them to a restaurant for a bite to eat, he implied that their troubles were over. This man was not a policeman, but an insurance agent; he had a history of accosting black women; and he had called his associate on his CB radio to meet him at the restaurant to look the two women over.

After a fight with his associate at the restaurant, the insurance man, still posing as a cop, drove the two women deep into the woods, telling them he intended to have sex with both of them. When they pleaded to be let out of the car, he threatened them with the gun he carried next to him on the seat. He wanted them to “service” him, and made other gross verbal sexual assaults that thoroughly horrified and repelled the women.

As soon as he stopped the car, one of the women jumped out and ran. The man drew his gun and pointed it after her. The other woman threw her five feet two inches against the five-foot-nine, 215-pound man and struggled to take the gun. In the process of that struggle, the gun went off twice. The man was killed by two bullet shots to the head.

The women took some money from his wallet, but left his gun, and made their way, terrified, back to Atlanta. They were arrested the following day and charged with theft and murder. The woman who ran was eventually given a five-year sentence, with three and a half years on probation. The woman who saved her life, and saved them both from rape, was given twenty-two years, later reduced to twelve.

That woman is Dessie Woods.

There is no story more moving to me personally than one in which one woman saves the life of another, and saves herself, and slays whatever dragon has appeared. And I know that, on a subconscious level, if not a conscious one, this is work black women wish they were able to do all the time. Dessie Woods is a hero. But it is her photograph, really, as much as her story that moves me. She looks exactly like some of the women I write about, in stories and poems, and, looking at her picture, I “recognize” her life. She is a very
black
black woman (as many of those in prison and those remaining in the ghetto are), with the stunned, outraged eyes of the intelligent poor. From the photograph alone one guesses she is the sole support of her children, for her neck is as stiff as her countenance is soft, as if rubbed down, burnished, blurred by the swift, unrelenting rush of irregular events. She wears a necklace that looks like a chain; and with her short hair, the deep blackness of her skin glistening from the swampy Southern heat, she easily becomes, in imagination, the first of our mothers dragged, abused and resisting, to America.

In 1976, when I lived in New York, I began to keep a file on Dessie Woods. When I moved to San Francisco in 1978, I gave it to a friend at a feminist magazine, with the hope that she would publish something about the case. Two years later, after nothing happened there, I began a second file, and eventually contacted Dessie Woods’s defense committee in San Francisco. I wanted to interview Ms. Woods, I said, in order to help publicize her case. Did they think this possible? Yes, was the reply. Two journalists from Copenhagen had interviewed her recently; why not I?

I wrote to Ms. Woods at once. Six months later, having received no response, I attempted to telephone her at Hardwick prison in Hardwick, Georgia. My call was not put through. The prisoner, I was told, was not permitted to have calls. Next I called the warden’s office. His secretary said I could see Ms. Woods simply by putting my name on the visitors’ list and appearing at the prison during visiting hours. When were these hours? I asked, and made arrangements to take advantage of them. A week later, I was on my way to Georgia. I stopped off in Eatonton, my hometown, and called ahead to Hardwick to make sure I was still expected next day. I was told to call back in the morning, when the warden would be in. I was asked whether I was white or black.

Next morning, when I called the prison, a black woman, her accent unmistakable, answered the phone. My name did not appear on the visitors’ list, she said. Besides, she continued, Dessie Woods was very “picky” about who she wanted to see. Also, Dessie and the warden were “very close,” and, in any case, Dessie was in solitary confinement and could not receive visitors.

Meanwhile, on the wall of the supermarket where I shop in San Francisco there is a large “Free Dessie Woods!” sign scrawled in black paint. And each July 4th there are protests all over the country and in Europe, and thousands of people marching, holding aloft drawings of Dessie. In solidarity with them I write congressmen, the governor of Georgia, and Rosalyn Carter, knowing the effort is futile as I make it. The news from inside Hardwick is horrifying: Dessie is forced to remain nude in an unheated cell for long periods; she is psychologically brutalized by prison officials; and, most terrifying of all, she is being forced to take a powerful tranquilizer, which also could have serious side effects, called Prolixin.

A year after this first attempt to see Dessie, I enlist the aid of a woman who knows her lawyer. Since the lawyer lives in Chicago and rarely gets to Georgia, I agree to go for him, as his paralegal, to collect information from Dessie about her upcoming appearance before the prison parole board. He calls the prison this time, informs the officials I’m coming, and, in a matter of days, I am once again in the air.

On my way to Hardwick I stop in Atlanta to address members of the Georgia Alliance for Prison Alternatives. These are all strongly committed movement-oriented folk who are opposing the construction of a new $16,000,000 prison for women in the state of Georgia. I discover, to my horror, that seventy percent of all imprisoned women are black (and that one out of every four black men is in prison). The women are usually imprisoned for petty, even pathetic crimes: for stealing food or clothing or school supplies for their children, or for cashing continually bouncing checks, which they use to buy groceries. One woman, I am told, was imprisoned for stealing a can of Vienna sausage.

The Georgia Alliance considers it a waste of taxpayers’ money to build a new prison to hold the women hit hardest by the country’s economic decline. It proposes day fines or community service in place of imprisonment, thus permitting women to remain with their children, who otherwise become burdens on their relatives or on the state. Near the end of the session a woman comes forward to speak of the missing and murdered black children of Atlanta. She says that many of the children have no one to look after them, and are not even missed until their bodies are found. She says one father recognized his son’s sneaker on TV. I am told by another woman, who knows the family, that Dessie Woods’s teen-age children live in a condemned house, in poverty, with Dessie’s old and ill mother, and that Dessie’s daughter frequently runs away.

Before leaving Atlanta I accept an invitation to read poetry at a halfway house for women from Hardwick. I am told the “strange” story of Linda Rogers, a twenty-six-year-old white woman who, the women believe, was murdered by the prison doctor. She was given the same “medication” regularly given to Dessie Woods, Prolixin. She died alone in her solitary-confinement cell on February 13, 1979. She was in prison for making “harassing” phone calls.

This time I do not call ahead. I drive directly to the prison, stopping in Eatonton only long enough to tell my own old and ill mother where I am going.

Years ago, in the mid-seventies, I had visited the old Hardwick prison, on the outskirts of the sedate antebellum city of Milledgeville. I had read poetry, and marveled at the staggering indifference to the outside world of many of the women. It hadn’t occurred to me that they were drugged. Now, from what I have learned about Hardwick prison, I feel sure they were. It was night when I visited, and therefore I remembered little about it, except that it was ugly, worn, and very overcrowded. The new one, built to accommodate the steadily rising numbers of women imprisoned, and itself overcrowded practically from the day it opened, looks like a junior college. With soft-yellow brick buildings set on a hill far off the main road, it seems desolate if benign, and, in fact, no sign of human life can be seen until one is actually at the door.