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there were none that would accept Wile Chile—The Wild Child escaped. Running heavily across a street, her stomach the largest part of her, she was hit by a speeder and killed.

Sojourner
    M ERIDIAN LIVED IN a small corner room high under the eaves of the honors house and had decorated the ceiling, walls, backs of doors and the adjoining toilet with large photographs of trees and rocks and tall hills and floating clouds, which she claimed she knew.
    While Meridian was thin and seemed to contain the essence of silence (so that hearing her laugh was always a surprise), her new friend, Anne-Marion, was rounded and lush, brash and eager to argue over the smallest issues. Her temper was easily lost. When she was attempting to be nonviolent and a policeman shoved her, she dug her nails into her arms to restrain herself, but could never resist sticking out, to its full extent, her energetic and expressive pink tongue.
    “Meridian,” she would whisper through clenched teeth, “tell me something sad or funny, quick, before I kick this bastard in the balls.”
    Anne-Marion was entirely unsympathetic to daily chapel, notoriously unresponsive to preachers—though she once declared she would follow King and “that handsome Andy Young” through the deepest dark swamp—and had no intention of singing or praying in public. If she bowed her head during protest demonstrations it was to see if her shoelace had come untied, and if she sang it was a song muttered through clenched teeth. She did not see why anyone should worry about her soul, even the people she marched with. “When it gives me trouble,” she’d sneer, “I’ll call y’all.” In this, she and Meridian were exactly alike, except if some pathetic, distracted old marcher wished to bend Meridian’s ear about his or her Jesus, Meridian would stand patiently and listen. She was constantly wanting to know about the songs: “Where did such and such a one come from?” or “How many years do you think black people have been singing this?”
    Anne-Marion had also taken the first opportunity—once she had actually seen a natural on another woman’s head—to cut off all her hair. For this she was called before the Dean of Women (whom she promptly christened “the Dead of Women”)—whose own hair was long, processed and lavender—and reprimanded.
    “First blue jeans before six o’clock and now this!” said the Dead of Women. “It is becoming clear you are some kind of oddity.”
    “Under the circumstances,” Anne-Marion told Meridian later, “hearing this from her was a relief!”
    Meridian agreed. A future of processed lavender hair didn’t amount to much.
    Like Meridian, Anne-Marion was a deviate in the honors house: there because of her brilliance but only tolerated because it was clear she was one, too, on whom true Ladyhood would never be conferred. Most of the students—timid, imitative, bright enough but never daring, were being ushered nearer to Ladyhood every day. It was for this that their parents had sent them to Saxon College. They learned to make French food, English tea and German music without once having the urge to slip off the heavily guarded campus at five in the morning to photograph a strange tree as the light hit it just the right way—as Meridian had—or to risk being raped in a rough neighborhood as they attempted to discover the economic causes of inner-city crime, as had Anne-Marion.
    Meridian and Anne-Marion walked together, as they had many times before. Only now they moved slowly, carefully, their dark dresses down to the tops of their polished shoes, and their hands, underneath the narrow coffin, nearly touched. The mourners in front of them stopped, and a few stepped out of the line to stare at what appeared to be a commotion at the gate.
    “I never would have guessed Wile Chile had so many friends,” said Meridian dryly. Even in her heavy black dress and thick braided hair Meridian weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her