Advancing Luna & Ida B. Wells
By ALICE WALKER
I met Luna the summer of 1965 in Atlanta where we both attended a political conference & rally. It was designed to give us the courage, as temporary civil rights workers, to penetrate the small hamlets farther South I had taken a bus from Sarah Lawrence in New York & gone back to Georgia, my home state, to try my hand at registering voters. It had become obvious from the high spirits & sense of almost divine purpose exhibited by black people that a revolution was going on, & I did not intend to miss it. Especially not this summery, student-studded version of it. And I thought it would be fun to spend some time on my own in the South.
Luna was sitting on the back of a pickup truck waiting for someone to take her from Faith Baptist where the rally was held, to whatever gracious black Negro home awaited her. I remember because someone who assumed I would also be travelling by pickup introduced us. I remember her face when I said, "No, no more back of pickup trucks for me. I know Atlanta well enough, all number of real event walks.”
She assumed of course (I guess) that I did not wish to ride beside her because she was white, & I was not curious enough about what she might have thought to explain it to her. And yet I was struck by her passivity, her patience as she sat on the truck alone & ignored, because someone had told her to wait there quietly until it was time to go.
This look of passively waiting for something changed very little over the years I knew her. It was only four or five years in all that I did. It seems longer, perhaps because we met at such an optimistic time in our lives. John Kennedy & Malcolm X had already been assassinated, but King had not been & Bobby Kennedy had not been. Then too, the lethal, bizarre elimination by death of this militant or that, exiles, (flights to Cuba, shoot-outs between former Movement friends, sundered forever by those planted by the FBI, the gunning down of Mrs Martin Luther King, Sr., as she played the Lord's Prayer on the piano in her church (was her name Alberta?), were still in the happily unfathomable future.
We believed we could change America because we were young & bright & held ourselves responsible for changing it. We did not believe we would fail. That is what lent fervor (revivalist fervor, in fact; we would revive America!) to our songs, & lent sweetness to our friendships (in the beginning almost all interracial), & gave a wonderful fillip to our sex (which, too, in the beginning, was almost always interracial).
What first struck me about Luna when we later lived together was that she did not own a bra. This was curious to me, I suppose, because she also did not need one. Her chest was practically flat, her breasts like those of a child. Her face was round, & she suffered from acne. She carried with her always a tube of that "skin-colored" (if one's skin is pink or eggshell) medication designed to dry up pimples. At the oddest times - waiting for a light to change, listening to voter registration instructions, talking about her father's new girlfriend she would apply the stuff, holding in her other hand a small brass mirror the size of her thumb, which she also carried for just this purpose.
We were assigned to work together in a small, rigidly segregated South Georgia town whose city fathers, incongruously & years ago, had named Freehold, Georgia. Luna was slightly asthmatic & when overheated or nervous she breathed through her mouth. She wore her shoulder-length black hair with bangs to her eyebrows & the rest brushed behind her ears. Her eyes were brown & rather small. She was attractive, but just barely & with effort. Had she been the slightest bit overweight, for instance, she would have gone completely unnoticed, & would have faded into the background where, even in n revolution, fat people seem destined to go. I have a photograph of her sitting on the steps of a house in South Georgia. She is wearing tiny pearl earrings, a dark sleeveless shirt with Peter Pan collar, Bermuda shorts, & a pair of those East Indian sandals that seem to adhere to nothing but a big toe.
The summer of '65 was as hot as any other in that part of the South. There was in abundance of flies & mosquitoes. Everyone complained about the heat & the flies & the hard work, but Luna complained less than the rest of us. She walked ten miles a day with me up & down those straight Georgia highways, stopping at every house that looked black (one could always tell in 1965) & asking whether anyone needed help with learning how to vote. The simple mechanics; writing one's name, or making one's "X" in the proper column. And then, though we were required to walk, everywhere, we were empowered to offer prospective registrants a car in which they might safely ride down to the county courthouse. And later to the polling places. Luna, almost overcome by the heat, breathing through her mouth like a dog, her hair plastered with sweat to her head, kept looking straight ahead, & walking as if the walking itself was her reward.
I don’t know if we accomplished much that summer. In retrospect, it seems not only minor, but irrelevant. A bunch of us, black & white, lived together. The black people who took this in were not haply hospitable & kind. I took them for granted in a way that now amazes me. I realize that at each & every house we visited I assumed hospitality, I assumed kindness. Luna was often startled by my "boldness.”
If we walked up to a secluded farmhouse & half a dozen dogs ran up barking around our heels & a large black man with a shotgun could be seen whistling to himself under a tree, she would become nervous. I, on the other hand, felt free to yell at this stranger's dogs, slap a couple of them on the nose, & call over to him about his hunting.
That month with Luna of approaching new Black people every day taught me something about myself I had always suspected: I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class & grin for television over their "victory," i.e., the death of four small black girls. Any atrocity, at any time, was expected from them. On the other hand, it never occurred to me that black people could treat Luna & me with anything but warmth & concern. Even their curiosity about the sudden influx into their midst of rather ignorant white & black Northerners was restrained & controlled. I was treated as a relative; Luna as a much-welcomed guest.
Luna & I were taken in by a middle-aged couple & their young school-age daughter. The mother worked outside the house in a local canning factory, the father worked in the paper plant in nearby Annapolis. Never did they speak of the danger they were in of losing their jobs over keeping us, & never did their small daughter show any fear that her house might be attacked by racists because we were there. Again, I did not expect this family to complain, no matter what happened to them because of us. Having understood the danger, they had assumed the risk. I did not think them particularly brave, merely typical.
I think I had liked the smallness —only four rooms—of the house. It was in this house that she ridiculed her mother's lack of taste. Her yellow-and-mauve house in Cleveland, the 11 rooms, the heated garage, the new car every year, her father's inability to remain faithful to her mother, their divorce, the fight over the property, even more so th.in over the children. Her mother kept the house and the children. Her father kept the car & his new girlfriend, whom he wanted Luna to meet & "approve.”
I could hardly imagine anyone disliking her mother so much. Everything Luna hated in her she summed up in three words: "yellow-and-mauve.”
I have a second photograph of Luna and a group of us being bullied by a Georgia state trooper. This member of Georgia’s finest had followed us out into the deserted countryside to lecture us on how misplaced – in the South – was our energy when ‘the Lord knew’ the North (where he thought all of us lived, expressing disbelief that most of us were Georgians) was just as bad. (He had a point that I recognised even then, but it did not seem the point where we were.) Luna is looking up at him, her mouth slightly open as always, a somewhat dazed look on her face. I cannot detect fear on any of our faces, though we were all afraid. After all, 1965 was only a year after 1964, when three civil rights workers had been taken deep into Mississippi forest by local officials and sadistically tortured and murdered. Luna almost always carried a flat black shoulder bag. She is standing with it against her side, her thumb in the strap.
At night we slept in the same bed. We talked about our schools, lovers, girlfriends we didn’t understand or missed. She dreamed, she said, of going to Goa. I dreamed of going to Africa. My dream came true earlier than hers; an offer of a grant from an unsuspected source reached me one day as I was writing poems under a tree. I left Freehold, Georgia, in the middle of summer, without regrets, and flew from NY to London, to Cairo, to Kenya, and finally, Uganda, where I settled among black people with the same assumptions of welcome and kindness, I had taken for granted in Georgia. I was taken on rides down the Nile as a matter of course, and accepted all invitations to dinner, where the best local dishes were superbly prepared in my honor. I became, in fact, a lost relative of the people, whose ancestors had foolishly strayed, long ago, to America.
I wrote to Luna at once.
But I did not see her again for almost a year. I had graduated from college, moved into a borrowed apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and was being evicted after a month. Luna, living then in a tenement on East 9th St, invited me to share her 2-bedroom apartment. If I had seen the apartment before the day I moved in, I might never have agreed to do so. Her building was between Avenues B & C and did not have a front door. Junkies, winos, and others often wandered in during the night (and occasionally during the day) to sleep underneath the stairs or to relieve themselves at the back of the 1st floor hall.
Luna’s apartment was on the 3rd floor. Everything in it was painted white. The contrast between her three rooms and kitchen (with its red bathtub) and the grungy stairway was stunning. Her furniture consisted of two large brass beds inherited from a previous tenant and stripped of paint by Luna, and a long, high-backed church pew which she had managed somehow to bring up from the South. There was a simplicity about the small apartment that I liked. I also liked the notion of extreme contrast, and I do to this day.
Outside our front window was the decaying neighbourhood, as ugly and Ill-lit as a battleground. (And allegedly as hostile, though somehow, we were never threatened with bodily harm by the Hispanics who were our neighbours, and who seemed, more than anything, bewildered by the darkness and filth of their surroundings.) Inside was the church pew, as straight and spare as Abe Lincoln lying down, the white walls as spotless as a monastery’s and a small unutterably pure patch of blue sky through the window of the back bedroom. (Luna did not believe in curtains, or couldn’t afford them, and so we always undressed and bathed with the lights off and the rooms lit with candles, causing rather nun-shaped shadows to be cast on the walls by the long-sleeved high-necked nightgowns we both wore to bed.)
Over a period of weeks, our relationship, always marked by mutual respect, evolved into a warm and comfortable friendship which provided a stability and comfort we both needed at that time. I had taken a job at the Welfare Department during the day, and set up my typewriter permanently in the tiny living room for work after I got home. Luna worked in a kindergarten, and in the evenings taught herself Portuguese.
It was while we lived on East 9th St that she told me she had been raped during her summer in the South. It is hard for me, even now, to relate my feeling of horror and incredulity. This was some time before Eldridge Cleaver wrote of being a rapist/revolutionary; of ‘practicing’ on black women before moving on to white. It was also, unless I’m mistaken, before LeRoi Jones(as he was then known; now of course Imamu Baraka,[later Amiri Baraka (1934 – 2014)] which has an even more presumptuous meaning than ‘the King’) wrote his advice to young black male insurrectionaries): “Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers.” It was clear that he meant this literally & also as: to rape a white girl is to rape her father. It was the misogynous cruelty of this latter meaning that was habitually lost on black men (on men in general, actually), but nearly always perceived & rejected by women of whatever color.
"Details?” I asked.
She shrugged. Gave his name. A name recently in the news, though in very small print.
He was not a Movement star or anyone you would know. We had met once, briefly. I had not liked him because he was coarse & spoke of black women as "our" women. (In the early Movement, it was pleasant to think of black men wanting to own us as a group; later it became clear that owning us meant exactly that to them.) He was physically unattractive, I had thought, with something of the hoodlum about him: a swaggering, unnecessarily mobile walk, small eyes, rough skin, a mouthful of wandering or absent teeth. He was, ironically, among the first persons to shout the slogan everyone later attributed solely to Stokeley Carmichael - Black Power! Stokeley was chosen as the originator of this idea by the media, because he was physically beautiful and photogenic and articulate. Even the name - Freddie Fye - was diminutive, I thought, in an age of giants.
"What did you do?”
"Nothing that required making a noise,"
“Why didn't you scream?” I felt I would have screamed my head off.
"You know why.”
I did. I had seen a photograph of Emmett Till's body just after it was pulled from the river. I had seen photographs of white folks standing in a circle roasting something that had talked to them in their own language before they tore out his tongue. I knew why, all right!
"What was he trying to prove?”
"I don't know. Do you?”
"Maybe you filled him with unendurable hate, I said.
"I don't think so," she said.
Suddenly I was embarrassed. Then angry. Very, very angry. How dare she tell me this! I thought.
Who knows what the black woman thinks of rape? Who has asked her? Who cares? Who has even properly acknowledged that she & not the white woman in this story is the most likely victim of rape?
Whenever interracial rape is mentioned, a black woman's first thought is to protect the lives of her brothers, her father, her sons, her lover. A history of lynching has bred this reflex in her. I feel it as strongly as anyone. While writing a fictional account of such a rape in a novel, I read Ida B. Wells' autobiography three times, as a means of praying to her spirit to forgive me. My prayer, as I turned the pages, went like this:
“Please forgive me. I am a writer.” […] The writer is guilty not only of always wanting to know – like Eve – but also of trying – again like Eve – to find out.) […]
I know, Ida B Wells, you spent your whole life protecting, and trying to protect, black men accused of raping white women, who were lynched by white mobs, or threatened with it. You know, better than I ever will, what it means for a whole people to live under the terror of lynching. Under the slander that their men, where whit women are concerned, are creatures of uncontrollable sexual lust. You made it so clear that the black men accused of rape in the past were innocent victims of white criminals that I grew up believing black men literally did not rape white women. At all. Ever. Now it would appear that some of them, the very twisted, the terribly ill, do. What would you have me write about them?
Her answer was; "Write nothing. Nothing at all. It will be used against black men & therefore against all of us. Eldridge Cleaver & LeRoi Jones don't know who they're dealing with. But you remember. You are dealing with people who brought their children to witness the murder of black human beings, falsely accused of rape. People who handed out, as trophies, black fingers & toes. Deny! Deny! Deny!”
And yet, I have pursued it, "some black men themselves do not seem to know what the meaning of raping someone is. Some have admitted rape in order to denounce it, but others have accepted rape as a part of rebellion, of 'paying whitey back.' They have gloried in it.”
"They know nothing of America," she [Ida B Wells] says. "And neither, apparently, do you. No matter what you think you know, no matter what you feel about it, say nothing. And to your dying breath"
Which, to my mind, is virtually useless advice to give to a writer.
Freddie Pye was the kind of man I would not have looked at then, not even once. (Throughout that year I was more or less into exotica; white ethnics who knew languages were a peculiar weakness; a half-white hippie singer; also, a large Chinese mathematician who was a marvelous dancer & who taught me to waltz.) There was no question of belief.
But, in retrospect, there was a momentary suspension of belief, a kind of hope that perhaps it had not really happened; that Luna had made up the rape, "as white women have been wont to do.” I soon realized this was unlikely. I was the only person she had told.
She looked at me as if to say; 'I’m glad that part of my life is over.” We continued our usual routine. We saw every interminable, foreign, depressing, and poorly illuminated film ever made. We learned to eat brown rice and yogurt and to tolerate kasha and odd-tasting teas. My half-black hippie singer friend (now a well-known reggae singer who says he is from ‘de I-lands’ and not Sheepshead Bay) was ‘into’ tea and kasha and Chinese vegetables.
And yet the rape, the knowledge of the rape, out in the open, admitted, pondered over, was now between us. (And I began to think that perhaps – whether Luna had been raped or not – it had always been so; that her power over my life was exactly the power her word on rape had over the lives of black men, over all black men, whether they were guilty or not, and therefore over my whole people)
Before she told me about the rape, I think we had assumed a lifelong friendship. The kind of friendship one dreams of having with a person one has known in adversity; under heat and mosquitoes and immaturity and the threat of death. We would each travel, we would write to each other from the three edges of the world.
We would continue to have an ‘international list’ of lovers whose amorous talents or lack of talents we would continue (giggling into our dotage) to compare. Our friendship would survive everything, be truer than everything, endure even our respective marriages, children, husbands – assuming we did, out of desperation and boredom someday, marry, which did not seem a probability, exactly, but more in the area of an amusing idea.
But now there was a cooling off of our affection for each other. Luna was becoming mildly interested in drugs, because everyone we knew was. I was envious of the open-endedness of her life. The financial backing to it. When she left her job at the kindergarten because she was tired of working, her errant father immediately materialized. He took her to dine on scampi at an expensive restaurant, scolded her for living on East 9th St, and looked at me as if to say, “Living in a slum of this magnitude must surely have been your idea.” As a cullud, of course.
For me there was the welfare department every day, attempting to get the necessary food & shelter to people who wouldn't always have amid the dirty streets I knew I most soon leave. I was, after all, a Sarah Lawrence girl "with talent.” It would be absurd to rot away in a building that had no front door.
I slept late one Sunday morning with a painter I had met at the welfare department. A man who looked for all the world like Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, but who painted wonderful surrealist pictures of birds & ghouls & fruit with teeth. The night before, three &f us-me, the painter, & "an old Navy buddy" who looked like his twin & who had just arrived in town - had got high on wine & grass.
That morning the Navy buddy snored outside the bedrooms like a puppy waiting for its master. Luna got up early, made an immense racket getting breakfast, scowled at me as I emerged from my room, & left the apartment, slamming the door so hard she damaged the lock. (Luna had made it a rule to date black men almost exclusively. My insistence on dating, as she termed it "anyone," was incomprehensible to her, since in a politically diseased society, to "sleep with the enemy" was to become "infected' with the enemy's "political germs.” There is more than a grain of truth in this, of course, but I was having too much fun to stare at it for long. Still, coming from Luna it was amusing, since she never took into account the risk her own black lovers ran by sleeping with "the white woman," & she had apparently been convinced that a summer of relatively innocuous political work in the South had cured her of any racial, economic, or sexual political disease.)
Luna never told me what irked her so that Sunday morning, yet I remember it as the end of our relationship. It was not, as I at first feared, that she thought my bringing the two men to the apartment was inconsiderate. The way we lived allowed us to be inconsiderate from time to time. Our friends were varied, vital, & often strange. Her friends especially were deeper than they should have been into drugs.
The distance between us continued to grow. She talked more of going to Goa. My guilt over my dissolute if pleasurable existence coupled with my mounting hatred of welfare work, propelled me in two directions. South, or to West Africa. When the time came to choose, I discovered that my summer in the South had infected me with the need to return, to try to understand, & write about, the people I’d merely lived with before.
We never discussed the rape again. We never discussed, really, Freddie Pye or Luna's remaining feelings about what had happened. One night, the last month we had together, I noticed a man's blue denim jacket thrown across the church pew. The next morning, out of Luna's bedroom walked Freddie Pye. He barely spoke to me - possibly because as a black woman I was expected to be hostile toward his presence in a white woman's bedroom. I was too surprised to exhibit hostility, however which was only a part of what I felt, after all. He left.
Luna & I did not discuss this. It is odd, I think now, that we didn’t. It was as if he was never there; as if he and Luna had not shared the bedroom that night. A month later, Luna went alone to Goa, in her solitary way. She lived on an island and slept, she wrote, on the beach. She mentioned she'd found a lover there who protected her from the local beachcombers and pests.
Several years later, she came to visit me in the South and brought a lovely piece of pottery, which my daughter, much later dropped & broke, but which I glued back together in such a way that the flaw improves the beauty & fragility of the design.
Afterwards, Afterwords.
Second Thoughts.
That is the "story.” It has an ‘unresolved’ ending. That is because Freddie Pye and Luna are still alive, as am I. however, one evening, while talking to a friend, I heard myself say that I had, in fact, written two endings. One, which follows, I considered appropriate for such a story published in a country truly committed to justice, and the one, above, which is the best I can afford to offer to a society in which lynching is still reserved, at least subconsciously, as a means of racial control.
I said that if we in fact lived in a society committed to the establishment of justice for everyone (‘justice’ in this case encompassing equal housing, education, access to work, adequate dental care, etc), thereby placing Luna and Freddie Pye in their correct relationship to each other, i.e., that of brother and sister, campaneros, then the two of them would be required to struggle together over what his rape of her had meant.
Since my friend is a black man who I love and who loves me, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing what this particular rape meant to us. Morally wrong, we said, and not to be excused. Shameful; politically corrupt. Yet, as we thought of what might have happened to an indiscriminate number of innocent young black men in Freehold, Georgia, had Luna screamed, it became clear that more than a little of Ida B Wells’ fear of probing the rape issue was running through us too. The implications of the fear would not let me rest, so that months and years went by with most of the story written but with me incapable, of at least unwilling, to finish or to publish it.
In thinking about it, over a period of years, there occurred a number of small changes, refinements, puzzles, in angle. Would these shed a wider light on the continuing subject? I do not know. In any case, I returned to my notes, hereto appended for the use of the reader.
Luna: Ida B Wells – Discarded notes
Additional characteristics of Luna: At a time when many in and out of the Movement considered ‘nigger’ and ‘black’ synonymous, and indulged in a sincere attempt to fake Southern ‘hip’ speech, Luna resisted. She was the kind of WASP who could not easily imitate another’s ethnic style, nor could she even exaggerate her own. She was what she was. A very straight, clear-eyed, coolly observant young woman with no talent for outside her own skin.
Imaginary knowledge
Luna explained the visit from Freddie Pye in this way:
“He called that evening, said he was in town, and did I know the Movement was coming North? I replied that I did know that.”
When could he see her? he wanted to know.
‘Never,’ she replied.
He had burst into tears, or something that sounded like tears, over the phone. He was stranded at wherever the evening’s fund-raising event had been held. Not, in the place itself, but outside, in the street. The ‘stars’ had left, everyone had left. He was alone. He knew no one else in the city. Had found her number in the phone book. And had no money, no place to stay.
Could he, he asked, crash? He was tired, hungry, broke – and even in the South, had no job, other than the Movement, for months, etc.
When he arrived, she had placed our only steak knife in the waistband of her jeans.
He had asked for a drink of water. She gave him orange juice, some cheese, and a couple of slices of bread. She had told him he might sleep on the church pew and he had lain down with his head on his rolled-up denim jacket. She had retired to her room, locked the door, and tried to sleep. She was amazed to discover herself worrying that the church pew was both too narrow and too hard.
At first, he muttered, groaned and cursed in his sleep. Then he fell off the narrow church pew. He kept rolling off. At 2 in the morning, she unlocked her door, showed him her knife, and invited him to share her bed.
Nothing whatever happened except they talked. At first, only he talked. Not about the rape, but about his life.
“He was a small person physically, remember?” Luna asked me. (She was right. Over the years he had grown big and, yes, burly, in my imagination, and I’m sure in hers.) “That night he seemed tiny. A child. He was still fully dressed, except for the jacket and he, literally, hugged his side of the bed. I hugged mine. The whole bed, in fact, was between us. We were merely hanging to its edges.”
At the fund-raiser—on Fifth Avenue & Seventy-first Street, as it turned out—his leaders had introduced him as the unskilled, hardly literate, former Southern fieldworker that he was. They had pushed him at the rich people gathered there as an example of what "the system" did to "the little people" in the South. They asked him to tell about the 37 times he had been jailed, The 35 times he had been beaten. The one time he had lost consciousness in the "hot" box. They told him not to worry about his grammar. "Which, as you may recall," said Luna, "was horrible" Even so, he had tried to censor his "ain’ts" & his "us’es.” He had been painfully aware that he was on exhibit, like Frederick Douglass had been for the Abolitionists. But unlike Douglass he had no oratorical gift, no passionate language, no silver tongue. He knew the rich people & his own leaders perceived he was nothing: a broken man, unschooled, unskilled at anything .. .
Yet he had spoken, trembling before so large a crowd of rich, white Northerners—who clearly thought their section of the country would never have the South’s racial problems—begging, with the painful stories of his wretched life, for their money.
At the end, all of them-the black leaders, too-had gone. They left him watching the taillights of their cars, recalling the faces of the friends come to pick them up: the women dressed (n African print that shone, with elaborately arranged hair, their jewelry sparkling, their perfume exotic. They were so beautiful, yet so strange. He couldn’t imagine that one of them could comprehend his life. He did not ask for a ride, because of that, but also because he had no place to go. Then he had remembered Luna.
Soon he would be required to talk. She would mention her confusion over whether, any black community surrounded by whites with a history of lynching blacks, she had a right to scream as Freddie Pye was raping her. For her, this was the crux o/ the matter.
And so, they would continue talking through the night.
This Is another ending, created from whole cloth. If I believed Luna's story about the rape, & I did (had she told anyone else I might have dismissed it), then this reconstruction of what might have happened is as probable an accounting as anyone's is able to be. Two people have now become "characters.”
I have forced them to talk and they heard the stumbling tale of the rape, which they vn¾it remove themselves, before proceeding to a place from which it will be possible to insist on a society in which Luna's word alone on rape could never be used to intimidate an entire people, and in which an innocent black man's protestation of innocence of rape is unprejudicially heard. Until such a society is created, relationships of affection between black men & white women will always be poisoned—from within as from without—by historical fear & the threat of violence, & solidarity among black & white women is only rarely likely to exist.
POSTSCRIPT: HAVANA, CUBA, NOVEMBER 1976
I am in Havana with a group of other black American artists. We have spent the morning apart from our Cuban hosts bringing each other up to date on the kind of work (there are no apolitical artists among us) we are doing in the United States. I have read "Luna.”
High above the beautiful city of Havana I sit in the Havana Libre pavilion with the muralist/photographer in our group. He is in his mid-thirties, a handsome, brown, erect individual, whom I have known casually for a number of years. During the sixties he designed & painted street murals for both SNCC & the Black Panthers, & in an earlier discussion with Cuban artists he showed impatience with their explanation of why we had seen no murals covering some of the city's rather dingy walls: Cuba, they had said, unlike Mexico, has no mural tradition. "But the point of a revolution," insisted Our Muralist, "is to make new traditions!" & he had pressed his argument with such passion for the use of this, for revolutionary communication, of his craft, that the Cubans were both exasperated & impressed. They drove us around the city for a tour of their huge billboards, all advancing socialist thought & the heroism of men like Lenin, Camilo, & Che Guevara, & said, "These, these are our 'murals’"
While we ate lunch, I asked our Muralist what he’d thought of "Luna.”
Especially the appended section.
"Not much," was his reply. "Your view of human weakness is too biblical," he said. "You are unable to conceive of the man without conscience. The man who cares nothing about the state of his soul because he's long since sold it. In short," he said, "you do not understand that some people are simply evil, a disease on the lives of other people, & that to remove the disease altogether is preferable to trying to interpret, contain, or forgive it. Your 'Freddie Pye,'" & he laughed, "was probably raping white women on the instructions of his government.”
Oh ho, I thought. Because, of course, for a second, during which I stalled my verbal reply, this comment made both very little & very much sense.
"I am sometimes naive & sentimental," I offered. I am sometimes both, though frequently by design. Admission in this way is tactical, a stimulant to conversation. "And shocked at what I’ve said," he said, & laughed again. "Even though," he continued, "you know by now that blacks could be hired to blow up other blacks, & could be hired by someone to shoot down Brother Malcolm, & hired by someone to provide a diagram of Fred Hampton's bedroom so the pigs could shoot him easily while he slept, you find it hard to believe a black man could be hired by someone to rape white women. But think a minute, & you will see why it is the perfect disruptive act. Enough blacks raping or accused of raping enough white women & any political movement that cuts across racial lines is doomed.
"Larger forces are at work than your story would indicate," he continued. "You're still thinking of lust & rage, moving slowly into aggression & purely racial hatred. But you should be considering money-which the rapist would get, probably from your very own tax dollars, in fact-and a maintaining of the status quo; which those hiring the rapist would achieve. I know all this," he said, "because when I was broke & hungry & selling my blood to buy the food & the paint that allowed me to work, I was offered such 'other work.'"
"But you did not take it.”
He frowned. "There you go again. How do you know I didn't take it? It paid, & I was starving.”
"You didn't take it," I repeated.
"No," he said. "A black & white 'team' made the offer. I had enough energy left to threaten to throw them out of the room.”
"But even if Freddie Pye had been hired by someone to rape Luna, that still would not explain his second visit.”
"Probably nothing will explain that," said Our Muralist. "But assuming Freddie Pye was paid to disrupt-by raping a white woman-the black struggle in the South, he may have wised up enough later to comprehend the significance of Luna's decision not to scream.”
"So, you are saying he did have a conscience?”
I asked. "Maybe," he said, but his look clearly implied I would never understand anything about evil, power, or complicated human beings in the modern world.
But of course, he is wrong.
