Alice Walker’s second novel, “Meridian” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), appears twenty-five years after Albert Camus’s “The Rebel,” a book that grew from Camus’s conviction that in the modern world every political act leads directly to murder. Camus sought a way out through the idea of rebellion. Rebellion, he argued—the act of one who says no, who says, “There is a limit beyond which you shall not go”—brought the idea “We are” into the world. This was so, Camus said, because the rebel ultimately takes his stand not merely out of personal suffering but in the name of “right”: in the name of something larger than himself. Thus the act of rebellion implies—philosophically, it calls into being—the human community, and reveals a common good. But the recognition of a common good invalidates the means that may be necessary to defend it: murder.
Those lines come from the final chapter of “The Rebel,” which Camus called “Thought at the Meridian.” Its subject is moderation: action with limits. Murder has a limit: if the rebel commits murder, it is implicit that he must then sacrifice his own life, to show that even though murder is sometimes necessary, it can never be justified. “He who does not know everything cannot kill everything.” The ethic of rebellion, in other words, means that murder, even in defense of that “right” which links all men and women, cannot be permitted to survive itself. Camus, dead and superseded by more “radical” thinkers like Sartre, has long been out of fashion, but it is perhaps not a coincidence that Alice Walker’s novel shares a title with him. The questions he raises are at the heart of “Meridian,” a story about the civil-rights movement, and a spiritual and political biography of the character for whom it is named—Meridian Hill, a black woman who determines to live out the movement long after it has faded away.
Alice Walker, a black writer born in Georgia in 1944, has herself been a civil-rights worker. Her first novel, “The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” appeared in 1970, and she has also published two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and much nonfiction. She reminds us, with a page of definitions, that the word “meridian” has varied meanings. The most striking recalls both Camus’s concept of moderation and the clarity on which he always insisted: “meridian” as it refers to the sun at noon, in the middle of the day, when the light is brightest and there are no shadows. (This recalls as well the quote from Camus with which Miss Walker opened “Once,” her first book of poems: “Poverty was not a calamity for me. It was always balanced by the richness of light . . . circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference I was placed halfway between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.”) The word “meridian” also refers, in a “definition” Miss Walker does not give but in a connection that cannot be coincidental, to a specific place: Meridian, Mississippi, the home of James Chaney, one of three civil-rights workers murdered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in nearby Neshoba County, Mississippi, in June of 1964.
One begins to get a sense of Meridian Hill a few pages into the novel, with a scene set perhaps two years after that triple murder—an event that, along with others like it, forced the civil-rights movement beyond the limits it had set for itself. In New York, a group of black women, veterans of marches and voter-registration campaigns in the South, are recommitting themselves to their rebellion, putting rebellion as they had understood it behind them. The question each must answer is whether she will kill for the revolution. It seems like an easy, necessary question: Anne-Marion, Meridian’s friend from their days at a black women’s college in Atlanta, presses Meridian to say yes, but Meridian can’t get the word out. She doesn’t really know why; there is some depth of knowledge she lacks, will perhaps always lack, which she senses is a prerequisite to murder.
What kind of knowledge? She thinks back to herself as a girl in church, with her steadfast but cold and stolid mother urging her, as she revelled in gospel music, to accept Jesus as her Saviour, which she could never do. (Couldn’t she just listen to the music? Did she have to believe to really hear it? Or earn the right to listen?) She thinks about her father, who, as a Georgia farmer, is obsessed by what America—not “the white man” but America, of which he thinks he is a part—has done to the Indians, some of whom once lived on his land. Her father is consumed by debts owed to the dead which he will never find a way to pay. And there is the history of the women her mother came from: a great-great-grandmother who, as a slave, repeatedly stole back her children each time they were sold away from her, and who, when finally allowed to keep them, starved to death trying to feed them; a great-grandmother, also a slave, who painted faces on barns across Georgia; Meridian’s grandmother, who killed herself working to get her daughter through school; and her mother herself, who got through school and helped four of her brothers and sisters do the same.
And more still. On her college campus, there was a giant magnolia tree that Meridian loved (and, in a campus riot, her fellow-students destroyed). There was a story behind it. When the campus was a plantation, a slave named Louvinie, born in West Africa, would entertain the children, black and white, with horror stories. In the midst of one such story, the youngest child of the plantation owner dropped dead.
The master kicked Louvinie’s tongue to her. Later, during an eclipse, “she buried it under a scrawny magnolia tree on the Saxon plantation.”
If the question of murder is a question of knowledge, and if experience is knowledge, then inherent in Meridian’s genealogy and in the legends to which she has attached herself is a knowledge she cannot match. All this, along with the connections that her parents have made and the connections that Meridian is being asked to make—connections to the grace of gospel music, to damnation by the crimes of history, to the purgatory of committing oneself to murder—is out of her reach. She says no to her group, and the group expels her.
The group, in a sense, expels Meridian from history, which she has made along with its members. It cuts off the road she has been following since the movement first came to her town, when she was a seventeen-year-old child-mother with a boy-husband, apparently trapped in dull, cramped rhythms of social and economic poverty—rhythms she barely perceived. The movement gave her a chance to start life over again; there was a quality of intelligence in it, a refusal to accept most of what she took for granted, that attracted her. And she was more than fit for the work that was being done. She gave up her baby, divorced her husband, went to college, demonstrated, was beaten and arrested, took risks. In New York, out of the movement, stranded by her co-workers and estranged from the momentum of events she had helped to set in motion, she begins a third time, deciding to go back South and live with the people there. “Like Civil Rights workers used to do,” she says, in a plain and tragic line, as if she were speaking of a lost civilization and not a way of life that had made sense two or three years before. That “used to do” echoes through the novel, like some half-remembered fairy tale, as Meridian proceeds to live it out. “You’re not serious,” says her friend Anne-Marion. “Yes,” she says, “I am serious.”
At its best, that is the tone of the book: flat, direct, measured, deliberate, with a distinct lack of drama. (As in Miss Walker’s telling of the Louvinie story, which she refuses to overplay.) And the tone is right; it’s not the plot that carries the novel forward but Meridian’s attempt to resolve, or preserve the reality of, the questions of knowledge, history, and murder that Miss Walker introduces early on. The astonishing dramatic intensity that Walker brought to “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” would in “Meridian” blow those questions apart.
But such questions lead all too easily to high-flown language and to pretensions that fictional characters cannot support, which is why most “philosophical” novels are impossible to reread. Miss Walker does not always avoid this trap; though her tendency is to insist on the prosaic, to bring philosophy down to earth, Meridian at times seems to be floating straight to Heaven. The book tries to make itself a parable—more than a mere novel—or trades the prosaic for an inert symbolism that would seem to be intended to elevate the story but instead collapses it. In an early chapter, Meridian, age seven, finds a gold bar and rushes with it to her parents; they ignore her. She buries the gold (her unrecognized gifts) and finally forgets about it (and it will be years until she finds her gifts again). In college, as Meridian lies sick in bed, a halo forms around her head. Back in the South after the meeting in New York, she works alone persuading people, one at a time, to register to vote, organizing neighborhoods around local issues, and staging symbolic protests, which she calls, wonderfully, her “performances.” This is beautifully presented and utterly convincing; each incident is memorable, shaped as a story in itself. But after every “performance” Meridian falls to the ground, paralyzed, and must be carried like a corpse back to wherever she is living. A hundred years ago, an author would simply have made Meridian an epileptic if we were meant to guess that she was sainted. The problem is more than melodrama: if Meridian is a saint, the profound questions that Camus raised, which have gone out of style, and which Walker is forcefully resurrecting, are made instantly irrelevant to the rest of us. If only saints can bear such questions, we can forget them.
Meridian is interesting enough without all this—without symbolism and “higher meanings” that are one-dimensional and fixed. There is no mystery in these symbols—as there is in Meridian’s ability to get through to Southern blacks, or in the questions of the rebel, murder, and limits—and a symbol without mystery, without suggestive power, is not really a symbol at all. But most of the book’s scenes have the power its symbols lack, and its last chapters rescue Meridian’s questions from a holy oblivion. For they are resolved, after a fashion, and passed on. Ten years after leaving the group of women in New York, Meridian discovers, in church, that she can kill. It’s a strange church; the minister acts out—arrogantly, it seems—the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., long after his death, but nobody is put off.
Meridian touches, as she had not been able to touch, or live up to, the knowledge that she’d sensed, thinking back over her ancestors, when she said no in New York. For what else had she been doing with her life ever since but, like this minister and his congregation, keeping something alive, by acting it out, which everyone else had managed to put behind him?
An old man comes before the congregation, the father of a young man who, like James Chaney, was murdered in the struggle years before. Half-crazed, he lives as a hermit in the ruins of the house he destroyed when he was told his son was dead. Every year, on the anniversary of that day, he stands up for his son and for the people who want to be reminded of him. That quality of pain, the insistence on a history without gaps, and her own recognition of her well-earned place in that history, is what Meridian can kill for.
It seems clear, as Meridian makes this connection and, as time goes on, loses it, regains it, loses it again, that the spiritual necessities that make it possible for her to say yes to murder will be negated should she ever commit murder; that should she kill, her life would be over. As in that extraordinary image from Louvinie’s story, her soul would “grunt and snort through eternity like a pig.” And it might be a price worth paying. The question, crude in the form in which it opens the novel, takes on something like a final shape—a final ambiguity—at the end. In that sense, it is passed on, not only to the book’s other characters, who share Meridian’s life, but perhaps to the reader as well. Meridian’s role in the play she has devised for herself within a larger history—the speech her actions give—stands out with great tension. “Does the end justify the means?” Camus wrote in “Thought at the Meridian.” “That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historic thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.” ♦
