Meridian by Alice Walker

day—with all her other children neatly dressed and combed—in church. (She was a large “bald-headed” woman, with massive breasts and a fine contralto singing voice. Her husband had been lost in France during the Second World War, and though only two of her children were his—Nelda and the next oldest child, a boy—they all carried his name. She had lost her hair, bit by bit, during each pregnancy.) Nelda was allowed to spend the day at home washing her hair, making dinner and doing her homework (she made it to school perhaps six times a month, and no truant officer ever knocked on her door), and in the late afternoons she went, with Meridian and Delores, to a movie in town, where the three of them sat in the gallery above the heads of the white movie goers and necked with their boyfriends of the moment.
    Meridian knew the father of Nelda’s first baby. He was an older boy, in high school, a gentle boy who treated Nelda as if he loved her more than life, which he might have. He bought her combs and blouses and Bermuda shorts, and her first pair of stockings—all from the three-dollar allowance his mother gave him each week plus his earnings from cutting lawns during the summer. While her mother was at work he often came by to cut their grass and stayed to help Nelda give the children supper, baths and put them to bed. Nelda was well into her third month before she realized something was wrong. It started, she confided to Meridian, by her noticing her pee smelled different.
    “What do you mean, your pee smells different?” Meridian laughed.
    “I don’t know,” Nelda giggled, “but this ain’t its usual smell.”
    They sat on the toilets at school and laughed and laughed.
    “You should want Eddie Jr.,” said Mrs. Hill. “Unless you’re some kind of monster. And no daughter of mine is a monster, surely.”
    Meridian closed her eyes as tight as she could.
    Delores cleared her throat. “The only way Meridian can take care of Eddie Jr. is if she moves in here with you and gets a job in somebody’s kitchen while you take care of the kid.”
    “Of course I’ll help out,” said Mrs. Hill. “I wouldn’t let either one of ’em starve, but—” she continued, speaking to Delores as if Meridian were not present, “this is a clean, upright, Christian home. We believe in God in this house.”
    “What’s that got to do with anything?” asked Delores, whose face expressed belligerence and confusion. “The last time God had a baby he skipped, too.”
    Mrs. Hill pretended she wasn’t angry and insulted. She smiled at this girl she wanted to hit. “You’re not from around here,” she said, “everybody knows people from up Atlanta have strange ideas. A lot of you young people have lost your respect for the church. Do you even believe in God?”
    “I give it some thought,” said Delores.
    Mrs. Hill drew in her stomach and crossed her plump arms over it. “I just don’t see how you could let another woman raise your child,” she said. “It’s just selfishness. You ought to hang your head in shame. I have six children,” she continued self-righteously, “though I never wanted to have any, and I have raised every one myself.”
    “You probably could have done the same thing in slavery,” said Delores.
    “Let’s all be monsters!” Delores joked as she and her friends left Mrs. Hill’s house, but Meridian and Nelda did not laugh.
    She might not have given him away to the people who wanted him. She might have murdered him instead. Then killed herself. They would all have understood this in time. She might have done it that way except for one thing: One day she really looked at her child and loved him with as much love as she loved the moon or a tree, which was a considerable amount of impersonal love. She wanted to know more about his perfect, if unplanned-for, existence.
    “Who are you?” she asked him.
    “Where were you when I was twelve?”
    “Who are you?” she persisted, studying his face