Read Online The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker - Free Book Online Page A

knowledge reflected badly on a husband who could scarcely read and write. It was his great ignorance that sent her into white homes as a domestic, his need to bring her down to his level! It was his rage at himself, and his life and his world that made him beat her for an imaginary attraction she aroused in other men, crackers, although she was no party to any of it. His rage and his anger and his frustration ruled. His rage could and did blame everything, everything on her. And she accepted all his burdens along with her own and dealt with them from her own greater heart and greater knowledge. He did not begrudge her the greater heart, but he could not forgive her the greater knowledge. It put her closer, in power, to them, than he could ever be.
    His dreams to go North, to see the world, to give Mem even the smallest things she wanted from life died early. And in his depression he saw in his submissive, accepting wife a snare and a pitfall. He returned to Josie for comfort after his “mistake” and for money to pay his rent, leaving Mem to carry on the struggle for domestic survival any way she chose and was able to manage. He moved them about from shack to shack, wherever he could get work. When cotton declined in Georgia and dairying rose, he tried dairying. They lived somehow.
    Over the years they reached, what they would have called when they were married, an impossible, and unbelievable decline. Brownfield beat his once lovely wife now, regularly, because it made him feel, briefly, good. Every Saturday night he beat her, trying to pin the blame for his failure on her by imprinting it on her face; and she, inevitably, repaid him by becoming a haggard automatous witch, beside whom even Josie looked well-preserved.
    The tender woman he married he set out to destroy. And before he destroyed her he was determined to change her. And change her he did. He was her Pygmalion in reverse. The first thing he started on was her speech. They had begun their marriage with her correcting him, but after a very short while this began to wear on him. He could not stand to be belittled at home after coming from a job that required him to respond to all orders from a stooped position. When she kindly replaced an “is” for an “are” he threw her correction in her face.
    “Why don’t you talk like the rest of us poor niggers?” he said to her. “Why do you always have to be so damn proper? Whether I says ‘is’ or ‘ain’t’ ain’t no damn humping off your butt.”
    In company he embarrassed her. When she opened her mouth to speak he turned with a bow to their friends, who thankfully spoke a language a man could understand, and said, “Hark, mah lady speaks, lets us dumb niggers listen!” Mem would turn ashen with shame, and tried to keep her mouth closed thereafter. But silence was not what Brownfield was after, either. He wanted her to talk, but to talk like what she was, a hopeless nigger woman who got her ass beat every Saturday night. He wanted her to sound like a woman who deserved him.
    He could not stand having his men friends imply she was too good for him.
    “Man, how did you git hold of that school teacher?” they asked him enviously, looking at his bleached and starched clothing and admiring the great quantities of liquor he could drink.
    “Give this old blacksnake to her,” he said, rubbing himself indecently, exposing his secret life to the streets, “and then I beats her ass. Only way to treat a nigger woman!”
    For a woman like Mem, who had so barely escaped the “culture of poverty,” a slip back into that culture was the easiest thing in the world. First to please her husband, and then because she honestly could not recall her nouns and verbs, her plurals and singulars, Mem began speaking once more in her old dialect. The starch of her speech simply went out of her and what came out of her mouth sagged, just as what had come out of her ancestors sagged. Except that where their speech had been