Winnie’s Secret

There is a gun in Winnie’s story.

It was Chekhov who said that you should never put a loaded gun on a stage if it isn’t going to be fired. Make no promises you can’t keep. But Winnie’s life is not a play, and you will have to decide if the gun has earned its keep in her story. Anyway, the gun is not the real secret of Winnie’s story. The secret is the slow burn that lies beneath Winnie’s measured exterior.

Winnie does not feel permission to express anger, shout or rail against the world, risk losing control. However, we have seen signs of her rage, faint smoke billowing from the top of her head, but it always disappears into the ether, enveloped by her quiet calm. So we keep wondering, what will happen if just once that rage bubbles over her perfect edges? Shopping for a gun, therefore, seems to be an apt symbol of the controlled woman pushed to the very edge of exploding.

Winnie is the kind of elegant woman who if she were to really let go, everyone would freeze like children in trouble. Her voice is honey, and if she were to say, “Be careful. I have a gun,” it would sound like an invitation more than a threat. And she has a way of holding herself, tilting and gesturing upward, as if she had once been a professional dancer, making it almost impossible for us to imagine her holding a gun with more than two delicate fingers.

When we first heard the story about the gun, it was an aside, something that just popped up when we were discussing the latest news story about yet another unarmed black man shot by cops. Juda had already served us baked salmon on a bed of greens, and we were not ready to start work. But what was work and what was just aimless conversation in these dangerous times? We were writing about Morrison and our lives as they related to current events. And everything had started blurring, and into this blur was Winnie’s mention of a gun.

“Did you and your husband decide,” Juda asked, pausing for effect, “to buy a gun?”

“You know,” Piper interjected, “more people are killed by their own guns than are protected by those guns.”

“I don’t know what we’ll do.” Winnie leaned toward Piper. “But I feel uneasy and just thinking about it makes me even more nervous.”

“You have to write about the gun,” Cassandra added, and everyone nodded in agreement except Winnie.

“What if there is no gun?” she asked. “You’re talking like I put on a wig and sneaked off to a pawnshop last night.” She chuckled to herself.

“It does sound like we’ve been dropped into a Madea Goes to Jail movie,” Cassandra added, and that made everyone giggle, but the laughter had an edge to it.

“Okay. Whether you get a gun or not, you cannot intellectualize about the precarity of black life without personalizing it. You need to share with our readers your own dilemma of whether to buy a gun or not,” Juda said.

“Yeah. It’s not even about the gun. It’s more about NOT wanting a gun. About having to think about whether you need a gun.” Piper was fired up, letting the words explode from her mouth in a mini-sermon, and the rest of us nodded in agreement.

“Well, what’s also important,” Cassandra said, changing the topic abruptly, “are these cupcakes!” She pointed to a box on the counter, and Juda jumped up to retrieve them, placing the box on the table. And so we moved on, as we had recently learned to move so fluidly, from what was deadly serious to purely frivolous.

Maybe we were putting off talking about our rough drafts. It is difficult to say because we were letting the meetings happen organically, with minimal rigidity, and we were going to have to eat dessert at some point anyway.

With the box of goodies, a gift from Winnie, now at the center of our attention, the cupcakes (not rough drafts) were what we were happily committed to: Cassandra snatched an Oreo cupcake, Piper a carrot, and Juda a red velvet. Winnie just watched. We waited. We frowned. Was she really not going to eat one?

It was Juda who shouted with fake outrage, “Can you tell me what kind of person shows up with a box of gooey treats and lets the rest of us grow fat while she watches?”

“Enjoy,” she said brightly, “but I’m counting calories.”

Her accent, the best barometer of her mood, was hovering somewhere between Jamaica and England. She was resolute. If only it would lean Jamaican, we might be able to convince her to indulge in a cupcake, but there was no Jamaican in that short refusal. Only the smile was full of island charm.

“But the Lose It! app says we are both under budget for calories,” Piper said, tilting the box toward her.

Cassandra took a slow bite and then rolled her eyes. “If anyone with a real weight problem catches your skinny asses using that Lose It! app, you’re gonna get bitch slapped.”

We were having fun, laughing and enjoying this playful banter about inconsequential matters like dieting and cupcakes but knowing that things would get serious when the last of the sweets were stuffed away.

It was Cassandra who shifted the conversation, with an announcement that she hadn’t been able to get shit done since seeing a video of the police murder of Philando Castile.

“I knew I shouldn’t have watched it, but I was writing a conference paper about videos of black folks dying at the hands of cops, and I was thinking about Morrison and madness, and all the reasons black folks go crazy, and then I clicked on it.”

Juda jumped in, admitting that he had been repeatedly watching the video of Alton Sterling being shot by law enforcement in Baton Rouge.

“It is all too fresh for us,” Piper said as she proceeded to describe how Tamir Rice’s face kept coming to her every time her son left the house.

This is when we saw a glimpse of Winnie’s anger, and the second idea for what Winnie should write came flying out of her mouth.

“My son,” she announced, putting her elbows on the table and her hands on her face, “wanted to go knock on our neighbor’s door the other day, confront that white man about dumping a dead animal on our property, and I told him, ‘You can’t do that. You don’t understand: you just can’t do that!’”

Here was the flash of her anger. Was it directed at the white man’s offense or her son’s recklessness? Or was she angry with herself for instructing her only son, whom she had always taught to be brave and strong, to now be cautious and maybe even fearful?

We know that anger is a secondary emotion, and we could see past it already to the primary one, what she felt in that exact moment that her son looked into her eyes and said, “I’m going over there to talk to him,” and she responded in a flash, “No you won’t!” And in her account, we all recognized the anxious worrying of a mother for her child. But, secondary or not, rage was the thing we wanted her to let out. We recognized it as action—something that can ignite, fuel, and burst forward. But before anyone could name it, it was gone.

There was an uncomfortable silence where we took in Winnie’s perfectly bobbed hair and her conservative summer blouse that tells everyone that she is indeed a grown-ass woman, and we wondered where she hid it—the rage that was there just a minute ago. But when do any of us let the full force of our anger out?

This, we told her, is the story she must tell—the dead deer, the gun, the fear . . . all of it.

She cracked a smile. “You really think so?”

We knew so—the tilt of our chins said this. Then she called us crazy in a way that meant thank you. But her body, stiff and straight, betrayed her discomfort.

We wanted more of Winnie’s anger, but instead she told us a story that she had told no one outside her family. And suddenly we understood what was at stake in keeping her anger a secret—a time when she was still a girl and the safety of her whole family was riding on her self-control and her silence. And this story, she must also confess. But this moment of telling the secret behind her controlled exterior was also a kind of truce, a recognition that our desire for her anger and her deep training in self-control could coexist and perhaps even thrive together.

If we were to sum up this difference in two Morrison quotes, it would look like this:

 

Winnie, channeling Morrison: “Anger . . . it’s a paralyzing emotion . . . it’s absence of control—I have no use for it whatsoever.”

The rest of us, channeling Pecola in The Bluest Eye: “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

 

So while we were looking to hear Pecola’s anger, Winnie gave us Morrison’s wisdom, or maybe there is a little of both in her accounts. As you read her chapters you might discern the rips and tears in her stories where there are brief flashes of anger. If you cannot see it, try this. Imagine a very elegant woman. Her bearing is remarkable for its ability to float through space without displacing anything. Her eyes sparkle with kindness, even as she might find herself one sunny day shopping for a gun with her handsome husband. Imagine her whispering something in his ear (is it a question or a statement?), and he nods yes. Her voice is like honey. It betrays nothing. It has a musical lilt to it. But don’t be fooled. It is strong. It holds so much power in its timber. And who knows whether there is—in the undertones—a gun.