You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781453223987
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1993-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Laurel

IT WAS DURING THAT SUMMER in the mid-sixties that I met Laurel.

There was a new radical Southern newspaper starting up…it was only six months old at the time, and was called First Rebel. The title referred, of course, to the black slave who was rebelling all over the South long before the white rebels fought the Civil War. Laurel was in Atlanta to confer with the young people on its staff, and, since he wished to work on a radical, racially mixed newspaper himself, to see if perhaps First Rebel might be it.

I was never interested in working on a newspaper, however radical. I agree with Leonard Woolf that to write against a weekly deadline deforms the brain. Still, I attended several of the editorial meetings of First Rebel because while wandering out of the first one, fleeing it, in fact, I’d bumped into Laurel, who, squinting at me through cheap, fingerprint-smudged blue-and-gray-framed bifocals, asked if I knew where the meeting was.

He seemed a parody of the country hick; he was tall, slightly stooped, with blackish hair cut exactly as if someone had put a bowl over his head. Even his ears stuck out, and were large and pink.

Really, I thought.

Though he was no more than twenty-two, two years older than me, he seemed older. No doubt his bifocals added to this impression, as did his nonchalant gait and slouchy posture. His eyes were clear and brown and filled with an appropriate country slyness. It was his voice that held me. It had a charming lilt to it.

“Would you say that again?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, making it two syllables, the last syllable a higher pitch than the first. “I’m looking for where First Rebel, the newspaper, is meeting. What are you doing?”

The country slyness was clumsily replaced by a look of country seduction.

Have mercy! I thought. And burst into laughter.

Laurel grinned, his ears reddening.

And so we became involved in planning a newspaper that was committed to combating racism and other violence in the South…(until it ran out of funds and folded three years and many pieces of invaluable investigative journalism later).

Laurel’s was not a variation of a Southern accent, as I’d at first thought. His ancestors had immigrated to the United States in the early 1800s. They had settled in California because there they found the two things they liked best: wine grapes and apples.

I’d never heard anything like Laurel’s speech. He could ask a question like “How d’you happen t’ be here?” and it sounded as if two happy but languid children were slowly jumping rope under apple trees in the sun. And on Laurel himself, while he spoke, I seemed to smell apples and the faint woodruffy bouquet of May wine.

He was also effortlessly complimentary. He would say, as we went through the cafeteria line, “You’re beaut-ti-ful, reel-i,” and it was like hearing it and caring about hearing it for the first time. Laurel, who loved working among the grapes, and had done so up to the moment of leaving the orchards for Atlanta, had dirt, lots of it, under his nails.

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