You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Read Online Free PDF

textbooks, in the newspapers and on t.v.
    Everywhere she looked there was an Uncle Albert (and many Aunt Albertas, it goes without saying).
    But she had her jar of ashes, the old-timers’ memories written down, and her friends who wrote that in the army they were learning skills that would get them through more than a plate glass window.
    And she was careful that, no matter how compelling the hype, Uncle Alberts, in her own mind, were not permitted to exist.

The Lover
    For Joanne
    H ER HUSBAND had wanted a child and so she gave him one as a gift, because she liked her husband and admired him greatly. Still, it had taken a lot out of her, especially in the area of sexual response. She had never been particularly passionate with him, not even during the early years of their marriage; it was more a matter of being sexually comfortable. After the birth of the child she simply never thought of him sexually at all. She supposed their marriage was better than most, even so. He was a teacher at a University near their home in the Midwest and cared about his students—which endeared him to her, who had had so many uncaring teachers; and toward her own work, which was poetry (that she set very successfully to jazz), he showed the utmost understanding and respect.
    She was away for two months at an artists’ colony in New England and that is where she met Ellis, whom she immediately dubbed, once she had got over thinking he resembled (with his top lip slightly raised over his right eyetooth when he smiled) a wolf, “The Lover.” They met one evening before dinner as she was busy ignoring the pompous bullshit of a fellow black poet, a man many years older than she who had no concept of other people’s impatience. He had been rambling on about himself for over an hour and she had at first respectfully listened because she was the kind of person whose adult behavior—in a situation like this—reflected her childhood instruction; and she was instructed as a child, to be polite.
    She was always getting herself stuck in one-sided conversations of this sort because she was—the people who talked to her seemed to think—an excellent listener. She was, up to a point. She was genuinely interested in older artists in particular and would sit, entranced, as they spun out their tales of art and lust (the gossip, though old, was delicious!) of forty years ago.
    But there had been only a few of these artists whose tales she had listened to until the end. For as soon as a note of bragging entered into the conversation—a famous name dropped here, an expensive Paris restaurant’s menu dropped there, and especially the names of the old artist’s neglected books and on what occasion the wretched creature had insulted this or that weasel of a white person—her mind began to turn about upon itself until it rolled out some of her own thoughts to take the place of the trash that was coming in.
    And so it was on that evening before dinner. The old poet—whose work was exceedingly mediocre, and whose only attractions, as far as she was concerned, were his age and his rather bitter wit—fastened his black, bloodshot eyes upon her (in which she read desperation and a prayer of unstrenuous seduction) and held her to a close attention to his words. Except that she had perfected the trick—as had many of her contemporaries who hated to be rude and who, also, had a strong sense of self-preservation (because the old poet, though, she thought, approaching senility, was yet a powerful figure in black literary circles and thought nothing of using his considerable influence to thwart the careers of younger talents)—of keeping her face quite animated and turned full on to the speaker, while inside her head she could be trying out the shades of paint with which to improve the lighting of her house. In fact, so intense did her concentration appear, it seemed she read the speaker’s lips.
    Ellis, who would be her lover, had come into the room and sat down