"WE ARE THE DEAD..."
The Black woman’s driveling song continued, forever…until Monroe Stahr stretched himself and got out of bed.?“Let’s make hot chocolate…Damn!” He complained, “The stove’s out.”?There was no oil.
“We can get some I expect.”?
Cathie got up and walked toward the window, listening to the indomitable woman sing on:
“A place in thy memory, Dear One
Is all that I claim,
To pause and look back when thou
Hearest
The sound of my name ----!”
The sun had gone down behind the forest; it was not shining into the courtyard any longer.?The cobblestones were wet, as though they had been washed.?So fresh and pale was the blue sky.
Tirelessly, the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more of them.?
Cathie wondered whether this woman took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of thirty grandchildren.?Monroe came across to Cathie's side and together they gazed at the sturdy figure down below.
?As Cathie peered at her (the powerful mare-like buttocks protruding) it struck her this woman was beautiful.?It had not occurred to her that the body of a seventy-year old Black woman, blown up to monstrous dimensions by child-bearing, hardened, roughened by work ‘til it was coarse in the grain, like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful.
It was so, and after all, Cathie thought --- Why not??The solid, contour-less body bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.?Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower??“She’s beautiful,” Cathie murmured.
“She’s a yard across at the hips,” Monroe laughed, holding Cathie’s supple waist, encircled by his arm.?From the hip to the knee, her flank pressed against his.?
That woman down there, Cathie thought, had strong arms, a warm heart and a once fertile belly.?She had her momentary flowering, a year perhaps of wild-rose beauty, and then she had swollen like fertilized fruit and grown hard and rasping and coarse, and her life had become laundering, scrubbing---first for children, then for Grandchildren; …over thirty unbroken years. But at the end of it all, she was still singing.
The reverence Cathie felt for her was mixed with the pale, cloudless sky, stretching behind the forest of trees, into interminable distance.
?It was curious to think the sky was the same for everybody.?And people under it were the same --- thousands, millions just like this woman; held apart by walls of lies and yet they were storing in their hearts and bellies and muscles, the power to change the world. The future belonged to them!?
Sooner or later it would happen.?The unconscious would become the conscious.?The concept of Freedom was immortal.?Cathie could not doubt this when she looked at that valiant Black woman in the courtyard.?
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Awakening would come.?But until then, it might take a thousand years!?Conscious people must stay alive against the odds, like birds passing secrets from body to body.
“Do you remember…!” Cathie spoke aloud to Monroe… “that Skylark we saw in the woods of Panther Hollow?”
?Monroe answered solemnly, “That bird wasn’t singing to us, it was just singing.”?
Yet birds sang, Cathie thought, as this woman sang.?The sort of Freedom authority discouraged.?People --- in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of endless Russian plains, in the Bazaars of China and Japan --- everywhere stood that unconquerable symbol:?a woman made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death…yet still singing --- out of whose loins a race of conscious beings would one day come.?
This was the journey of Passion!
Cathie could share this passion by keeping alive her mind, as Black people kept alive the body.?She could pass on her secret to others; that LOVE is the path toward Freedom.
“We are the Dead,” she spoke suddenly, aloud.
“We are the Dead,” Monroe echoed, understandingly.
At the end, their passion for Freedom together…their entire Boomer Generation, would one day pass away.
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