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

lived, but she, her grandmother, had made it a home. Once the grandmother died, the house seemed empty, though he remained behind.
    Aunt Lily was handing out the remaining odds and ends of her grandfather’s things. Barbara got the trunk, that magic repository of tobacco and candy when they were children. Rosa received a small shaving mirror with a gilt lion on its back. There were several of the large, white “twenty-five-cent hanskers” her grandfather had used. The granddaughters received half a dozen each. That left only her grandfather’s hats. One brown and one gray, old, worn, none too clean fedoras. She knew Barbara was far too fastidious to want them. Rosa placed one on her head. She loved how she looked—she looked like him—in it.
    It was killing her, how much she loved him. And he’d been so mean to her grandmother, and so stingy too. Once he had locked her out of the house because she had bought herself a penny stick of candy from the grocery money.
    But then when Rosa knew him he had been beautiful. Peaceful, mystical almost in his silences and calm, and she realized he was imprinted on her heart just that way. It really did not seem fair.
    To check her tears she turned to Aunt Lily.
    “Tell me what my father was like as a boy,” she said.
    Her aunt looked at her, she felt, with hatred.
    “You should have asked him when he was alive.”
    Rosa looked about for Barbara, who had disappeared into the bathroom. By now she was weeping openly. Her aunt looking at her impassively.
    “I don’t want to find myself in anything you write. And you can just leave your daddy alone too.”
    She could not remember whether she’d ever asked her father about his life. But surely she had, since she knew quite a lot. She turned and walked into the bathroom, forgetful that she was thirty-five, her sister forty-one, and that you can only walk in on your sister in the toilet if you are both children. But it didn’t matter. Barbara had always been accessible, always protective. Rosa remembered one afternoon when she was five or six, she and Barbara and a cousin of theirs about Barbara’s age set out on an errand. They were walking silently down the dusty road when a large car driven by a white man nearly ran them down. His car sent up billows of dust from the dirt road that stung their eyes and stained their clothes. Instinctively Rosa had picked up a fistful of sand from the road and thrown it after him. He stopped the car, backed it up furiously and slammed on the brakes, getting out next to them, three black, barefoot girls who looked at him as only they could. Was he a human being? Or a devil? At any rate he had seen Rosa throw the sand, he said, and he wanted the older girls to warn her against doing such things “for the little nigger’s own good.”
    Rosa would have admitted throwing the sand. After all, the man had seen her.
    But—“She didn’t throw no sand,” said Barbara, quietly, striking a heavy womanish pose with both hands on her hips.
    “She did so,” said the man, his face red from heat and anger.
    “She didn’t,” said Barbara.
    The cousin simply stared at the man. After all, what was a small handful of sand compared to the billows of sand with which he’d covered them?
    Cursing, the man stomped into his car, and drove off.
    For a long time it had seemed to Rosa that only black people were always in danger. But there was also the sense that her big sister would know how to help them out of it.
    But now, as her sister sat on the commode, Rosa saw a look on her face that she had never seen before, and she realized her sister had heard what Aunt Lily said. It was a look that said she’d got the reply she deserved. For wasn’t she always snooping about the family’s business and turning things about in her writing in ways that made the family shudder? There was no talking to her as you talked to regular people. The minute you opened your mouth a meter went on. Rosa could read all this on her