Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement

Had Lynne known her own Jewish grandparents or great grandparents, their culture, their spirituality, perhaps she would have felt less deprived. If she had learned from them about their poverty and suffering, she would not have been able to think of any people as "Art." Had her grandparents or great grandparents seen the rural South, they might have seen in it things to remind them of the shtetl they had fled. The terror against blacks by the Klan in the South was like the pogroms against the Jews in late Tsarist Russia, and many in the Civil Rights Movement compared the treatment of blacks in the South at that time to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany (Gardens 225; Moody 280; Sutherland 10).

Alice Walker has observed: "There is a close often unspoken bond between Jewish and black women that grows out of their awareness of oppression and injustice, an awareness many Gentile women simply do not have" (Gardens 347). This is not to suggest that the experience of Jewish women and African American women in the United States today is the same. Anti-Semitism is much less blatant than the racism directed against black people, and Jews share the privileges and may share the racist attitudes of other white Americans.

In Meridian, it is because of Lynne's "awareness of oppression and injustice" and because they share a love for the South and for rural Southern black people that Lynne and Meridian can be "like sisters" (173). But their sisterhood is precarious. One of the reasons Meridian has to try "very hard not to hate" Lynne (175) is Truman, but another reason is rape. Lynne is raped by Tommy Odds, a black civil rights worker, after his arm is shot off by racist whites, because his "thin defense against hatred [of white people] broke down under personal assault" (162). He rapes Lynne because, as a white woman, she is a symbol of the power white men have over him. Lynne resists him at first but does not fight him off because "She lay ... thinking of his feelings, his hardships, of the way he was black and belonged to a people who lived without hope; she thought about the loss of his arm. She felt her own guilt" (159). Lynne's thoughts and her guilt are white liberal thoughts, white liberal guilt. She sees Tommy Odds's blackness as a misfortune, like the loss of his arm. She thinks black people live without hope, despite the freedom struggle. She feels guilty because she is white. But Lynne also thinks as she does and fails to act because she has been raised to consider the feelings and needs of men before her own. And she also fails to act, to scream or to go to the police, because of her political understanding: she knows that they would use her cry of "rape" to terrorize or kill innocent black men.

Lynne also knows that Tommy Odds has chosen the perfect victim: not a powerful Southern white man or his wife--"she would scream and put him away for good" (162)--not another black man or a black woman, but "A white woman without friends. A woman the white community already assumed was fucking every nigger in sight" (163). When Lynne marries Truman she gives up the security and privileges of the white world. Her own parents consider her dead, and she is an outcast in the white South, because a white woman seen with a black man at this time was considered a whore by white Southerners. During Freedom Summer, a young Northern white woman was subjected to the following abuse, before a white mob, by a Southern sheriff, when her car and two others carrying civil rights workers and driven by black men were stopped: "which one of them coons is you fuckin'? ... Slut, I know you fuckin' them niggers. Why else would you be down heah?" (qtd. in Rothschild 35). Walker is sensitive to this kind of abuse of white women in the Movement by white Southerners. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland she writes: