Bessie for no reason except misdirected rage, the hero added insult to injury by stuffing her body down an air shaft, rendering her
invisible.
Ezola’s point was beginning to dawn on me.
“That white woman I worked for had that book in her library for some reason. Maybe one of her kids brought it home from college. I don’t know. She didn’t have any other black books I ever saw, but she had that one, and one day it was out on the table, and before I dusted it off and put it back up where it belonged, I opened it up and read a little of the first page. I had never read a book written by a Negro before. I knew there were some, but I quit school after the tenth grade, so I never actually saw one. But that
Native Son
book just grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I sat right there all afternoon and read almost that whole book. When it was time to go, I put it in my purse and I read it all the way home on the bus, ate my dinner, and kept reading until I was done.
“That next morning, I couldn’t get Bigger and Bessie out of my head. I understood about Mary, him being so scared and all, but why had he killed Bessie? I took the book back, and after I gave her breakfast, I asked Mrs. Wyndom, that was her name, if she’d read it. She said she had, and I said then maybe she could help me understand why Bigger killed that woman. She always liked to think she was helping me improve my mind, so she gave me this long explanation about how dangerous it would be for a black man to be in Mary’s bedroom like I didn’t know that, and on and on until I realized she wasn’t thinking about Bessie at all. That poor colored woman never crossed Mrs. Wyndom’s mind.”
I was fascinated with Ezola’s line of reasoning and sorry that my first reaction had been the same as the clueless Buckhead matron’s. It reminded me of traveling with my parents to one small Caribbean island or another when I was just a kid, newly alive with a passion to right the world’s wrongs and full of a reformer’s zeal. I was amazed and ashamed at how they could ignore the poor people who were always around the fringes of the tourist zones we frequented, looking for a chance to sell you something, or begging a few coins. Even the people who were working at the hotels were invisible to my mother and father as they dressed in their beautiful clothes, kissed me good night after telling the babysitter what time to put me to bed, and swept out to the gangster-owned casinos for a night of high-stakes gambling that would probably have financed the babysitter’s family for a year or two.
It made me feel guilty that we had so much while other people had so little, and one night, as my father was putting on his white dinner jacket, I asked him if it didn’t make him feel bad to ignore them.
“They’re not my responsibility,” he said, shrugging them off like a cheap suit, “and they’re certainly not yours. Why don’t you go down to the pool and leave the people’s revolution to the people?”
After that, I stayed home in Atlanta when they traveled outside the country. Neither one of them pressed me for the real reason why. I think they were relieved not to have to drag me along, trailing my privileged American guilt behind me like a whiff of Jungle Gardenia.
“That white woman didn’t see me or Bessie,” Ezola was saying, “and it made me mad, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got. No wonder these women worked their maids so hard. They never even saw us. By the time I got off work that day and walked that long, uphill stretch from Mrs. Wyndom’s house to the bus stop, I had decided one thing. I wasn’t going to be invisible anymore. I was a full-grown woman and I figured it was time to start acting like one. I owed it to myself, and I owed it to Bessie.”
She came back and sat down across from me again. I’m sure she told that story a lot, but it moved me. I forgave her for the
black bitches
test question and waited for her to
invisible.
Ezola’s point was beginning to dawn on me.
“That white woman I worked for had that book in her library for some reason. Maybe one of her kids brought it home from college. I don’t know. She didn’t have any other black books I ever saw, but she had that one, and one day it was out on the table, and before I dusted it off and put it back up where it belonged, I opened it up and read a little of the first page. I had never read a book written by a Negro before. I knew there were some, but I quit school after the tenth grade, so I never actually saw one. But that
Native Son
book just grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I sat right there all afternoon and read almost that whole book. When it was time to go, I put it in my purse and I read it all the way home on the bus, ate my dinner, and kept reading until I was done.
“That next morning, I couldn’t get Bigger and Bessie out of my head. I understood about Mary, him being so scared and all, but why had he killed Bessie? I took the book back, and after I gave her breakfast, I asked Mrs. Wyndom, that was her name, if she’d read it. She said she had, and I said then maybe she could help me understand why Bigger killed that woman. She always liked to think she was helping me improve my mind, so she gave me this long explanation about how dangerous it would be for a black man to be in Mary’s bedroom like I didn’t know that, and on and on until I realized she wasn’t thinking about Bessie at all. That poor colored woman never crossed Mrs. Wyndom’s mind.”
I was fascinated with Ezola’s line of reasoning and sorry that my first reaction had been the same as the clueless Buckhead matron’s. It reminded me of traveling with my parents to one small Caribbean island or another when I was just a kid, newly alive with a passion to right the world’s wrongs and full of a reformer’s zeal. I was amazed and ashamed at how they could ignore the poor people who were always around the fringes of the tourist zones we frequented, looking for a chance to sell you something, or begging a few coins. Even the people who were working at the hotels were invisible to my mother and father as they dressed in their beautiful clothes, kissed me good night after telling the babysitter what time to put me to bed, and swept out to the gangster-owned casinos for a night of high-stakes gambling that would probably have financed the babysitter’s family for a year or two.
It made me feel guilty that we had so much while other people had so little, and one night, as my father was putting on his white dinner jacket, I asked him if it didn’t make him feel bad to ignore them.
“They’re not my responsibility,” he said, shrugging them off like a cheap suit, “and they’re certainly not yours. Why don’t you go down to the pool and leave the people’s revolution to the people?”
After that, I stayed home in Atlanta when they traveled outside the country. Neither one of them pressed me for the real reason why. I think they were relieved not to have to drag me along, trailing my privileged American guilt behind me like a whiff of Jungle Gardenia.
“That white woman didn’t see me or Bessie,” Ezola was saying, “and it made me mad, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got. No wonder these women worked their maids so hard. They never even saw us. By the time I got off work that day and walked that long, uphill stretch from Mrs. Wyndom’s house to the bus stop, I had decided one thing. I wasn’t going to be invisible anymore. I was a full-grown woman and I figured it was time to start acting like one. I owed it to myself, and I owed it to Bessie.”
She came back and sat down across from me again. I’m sure she told that story a lot, but it moved me. I forgave her for the
black bitches
test question and waited for her to
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