Meridian Read Free Page A

need them. I fell down only when I was out of the children’s sight.”
    “And they folded your arms?”
    “They folded my arms.”
    “And straightened your legs?”
    “They’re very gentle and good at it.”
    “Do they know why you fall down?”
    “It doesn’t bother them. They have a saying for people who fall down as I do: If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls. Don’t you think that’s perceptive?”
    “I don’t know what to think. I never have. Do you have a doctor?”
    “I don’t need one. I am getting much better by myself....” Meridian moved her fingers, then lifted her arms slightly off the floor. “See, the paralysis is going away already.” She continued to raise and lower her arms, flexing her fingers and toes as she did so. She rolled her shoulders forward and up and raised and twisted her ankles. Each small movement made her face look happier, even as the effort exhausted her.
    Truman watched her struggle to regain the use of her body. “I grieve in a different way,” he said.
    “I know,” Meridian panted.
    “What do you know?”
    “I know you grieve by running away. By pretending you were never there.”
    “When things are finished it is best to leave.”
    “And pretend they were never started?”
    “Yes.”
    “But that’s not possible.”
    Meridian had learned this in New York, nearly ten summers ago.
    “You are a coward,” one of the girls said then, though they knew she was not a coward.
    “A masochist,” sniffed another.
    And Meridian had sat among them on the floor, her hands clasping the insides of her sneakers, her head down. To join this group she must make a declaration of her willingness to die for the Revolution, which she had done. She must also answer the question “Will you kill for the Revolution?” with a positive Yes. This, however, her tongue could not manage. Through her mind was running a small voice that screamed: “Something’s missing in me. Something’s missing!” And the voice made her heart pound and her ears roar. “Something the old folks with their hymns and proverbs forgot to put in! What is it? What? What?”
    “Why don’t you say something?” Anne-Marion’s voice, angry and with the undisguised urgency of her contempt, attempted to suppress any tone of compassion. Anne-Marion had said, “Yes, I will kill for the Revolution” without a stammer; yet Meridian knew her tenderness, a vegetarian because she loved the eyes of cows.
    Meridian alone was holding on to something the others had let go. If not completely, then partially—by their words today, their deeds tomorrow. But what none of them seemed to understand was that she felt herself to be, not holding on to something from the past, but held by something in the past: by the memory of old black men in the South who, caught by surprise in the eye of a camera, never shifted their position but looked directly back; by the sight of young girls singing in a country choir, their hair shining with brushings and grease, their voices the voices of angels. When she was transformed in church it was always by the purity of the singers’ souls, which she could actually hear, the purity that lifted their songs like a flight of doves above her music-drunken head. If they committed murder—and to her even revolutionary murder was murder— what would the music be like?
    She had once jokingly asked Anne-Marion to imagine the Mafia as a singing group. The Mafia, Anne-Marion had hissed, is not a revolutionary cadre!
    “You hate yourself instead of hating them,” someone said.
    “Why don’t you say something?” said another, jabbing her in the ribs.
    This group might or might not do something revolutionary. It was after all a group of students, of intellectuals, converted to a belief in violence only after witnessing the extreme violence, against black dissidents, of the federal government and police. Would they rob a bank? Bomb a landmark? Blow up a police station? Would