Free The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker

against self-destruction.

    She massaged Barbara but she knew her touch was that of a stranger. At what point, she wondered, did you lose connection with people you loved? And she remembered going to visit Barbara when she was in college and Barbara lived a short bus ride away. And she was present when Barbara’s husband beat her and called her names and once he had locked both of them out of the house overnight. And her sister called the police and they seemed nice to Rosa, so recently up from the South, but in fact they were bored and cynical as they listened to Barbara’s familiar complaint. Rosa was embarrassed and couldn’t believe anything so sordid could be happening to them, so respected was their family in the small town they were from. But, in any event, Barbara continued to live with her husband many more years, and Rosa was so hurt and angry she wanted to kill. But most of all, she was disappointed in Barbara, who threw herself into the inevitable weekend battles with passionately vulgar language that Rosa had never heard any woman, not to mention her gentle sister, use before. Her sister’s spirit seemed polluted to her, so much so that the sister she had known as a child seemed gone altogether. And once gone, she had never come back.
    Was disappointment, then, the hardest thing to bear? Or was it the consciousness of being powerless to change things, to help? And certainly she had been very conscious of that. As he punched out her sister, Rosa had almost felt the blows on her body. But she had not flung herself between them wielding a butcher knife as she had done once when Barbara was being attacked by their father, another raving madman.
    Barbara had wanted to go to their brother’s grammar school graduation. Their father had insisted that she go to the funeral of an elderly church mother instead. Barbara had tried to refuse.But
crack
, he had slapped her across the face. She was sixteen, plump and lovely. Rosa adored her. She ran immediately to get the knife, but she was so small no one seemed to notice her, wedging herself between them. But had she been larger and stronger she might have killed him; for even as a child she was serious in all she did—and then what would her life, the life of a murderer, have been like? Thinking of that day she wept. At her love, her sister’s anguish. Barbara had been forced to go to the funeral, the print of her father’s fingers hidden by powder and rouge.
    She was little and weak and she did not understand what was going on anyway between father and sister. To her, her father acted like he was jealous. And in college, after such a long struggle to get there, how could she stab her brother-in-law to death without killing her future, herself? And so she had lain on her narrow foldaway cot in the tiny kitchen in the stuffy apartment over the laundromat and had listened to the cries and whispers, the pummelings, the screams and pleas. And then, still awake, she listened to the silibant sounds of “making up,” harder to bear and to understand than the fights.
    She had not killed for her sister. (And one would have had to kill the mindless drunken brutalizing husband, a blow to the head might only have made him more angry.) Her guilt soon clouded over the love, and around Barbara she retreated into a silence that she realized was very like her grandfather’s. The sign of disappointment hinged to powerlessness. A thoughtful black man in the racist early-twentieth-century South, he probably could have told her a thing or two about the squeaking of the hinge. But had he? No. He’d only complained about his wife,and so convincingly that for a time Rosa, like everyone else in the family, lost respect for her. It seemed her problem was that she was not mentally quick, and because she stayed with him even as he said this Rosa and her relatives were moved to agree. Yet there was nowhere else she could have gone. Perhaps her grandfather had found the house in which they