Meridian by Alice Walker Page A

for signs of fire, watermarks, some scar that would intimate a previous life.
    “Were there other people where you were? Did you come from a planet of babies?” She thought she could just imagine him there, on such a planet, pulling the blue grass up by the handfuls.
    Now that she looked at him, the child was beautiful. She had thought him ugly, like a hump she must carry on her back.
    “You will no longer be called Eddie Jr.” she said. “I’ll ask them to call you Rundi, after no person, I hope, who has ever lived.”
    When she gave him away she did so with a light heart. She did not look back, believing she had saved a small person’s life.
    But she had not anticipated the nightmares that began to trouble her sleep. Nightmares of the child, Rundi, calling to her, crying, suffering unbearable deprivations because she was not there, yet she knew it was just the opposite: Because she was not there he needn’t worry, ever, about being deprived. Of his life, for instance. She felt deeply that what she’d done was the only thing, and was right, but that did not seem to matter. On some deeper level than she had anticipated or had even been aware of, she felt condemned, consigned to penitence, for life. The past pulled the present out of shape as she realized that what Delores Jones had said was not, in fact, true. If her mother had had children in slavery she would not, automatically, have been allowed to keep them, because they would not have belonged to her but to the white person who “owned” them all. Meridian knew that enslaved women had been made miserable by the sale of their children, that they had laid down their lives, gladly, for their children, that the daughters of these enslaved women had thought their greatest blessing from “Freedom” was that it meant they could keep their own children. And what had Meridian Hill done with her precious child? She had given him away. She thought of her mother as being worthy of this maternal history, and of herself as belonging to an unworthy minority, for which there was no precedent and of which she was, as far as she knew, the only member.
    After she had figuratively kissed the ground of the campus and walked about its lawns intent on bettering herself, she knew for certain she had broken something, for she began hearing a voice when she studied for exams, and when she walked about the academic halls, and when she looked from her third-floor dormitory window. A voice that cursed her existence—an existence that could not live up to the standard of motherhood that had gone before. It said, over and over, until she would literally reel in the streets, her head between her hands: Why don’t you die? Why not kill yourself? Jump into the traffic! Lie down under the wheels of that big truck! Jump off the roof, as long as you’re up there! Always, the voice. Mocking, making fun. It frightened her because the voice urging her on—the voice that said terrible things about her lack of value—was her own voice. It was talking to her, and it was full of hate.
    Her teachers worked her hard, her first year at Saxon. She read night and day, making up for lost time. But no matter how hard she labored she was always willing to tackle more, because she knew almost no one there, and because Saxon was a peaceful but strange, still, place to her, and because she was grateful to be distracted. She was not to pause long enough to respond to this spiritual degeneration in herself until she was in her second year.

The Driven Snow
    We are as chaste and pure as
    the driven snow.
    We watch our manners, speech
    and dress just so;
    And in our hearts we carry our
    greatest fame
    That we are blessed to perpetuate
    the Saxon name!
    S HE HAD FELT BLESSED her first year at Saxon. It was so beautiful! The tall red brick towers, the old courtyards, the giant trees— especially the greatest tree of them all, The Sojourner. This tree filled her with the same sense of minuteness and hugeness, of