Summary
The novel begins with Truman Held, an African-American man, driving into the small Georgian town of Chicokema. Truman asks a couple of gas-station attendants where he can get his car cleaned—he’s driven all night from New York Cit—-but before he can get an answer, a younger boy rushes in to tell the attendants that a woman in a cap is facing an army tank. Curious, Truman walks downtown to find a strange gathering. An African-American woman in a railroad worker’s cap guides a line of children to a circus wagon; the wagon is protected by the town’s tank and a phalanx of armed policemen. From a street sweeper, Truman learns that the circus wagon is a gimmick: a white man advertises that his wife’s body is inside, preserved in lifelike condition twenty-five years after her death. Led by the mysterious woman, the children are protesting their right to view the corpse, even though the white man told them they couldn’t see it until Thursday. The woman, whom Truman recognizes as his longtime friend, Meridian, leads the children right up to the tank; rather than firing, the police disarm and allow the children to go inside.
Truman finds Meridian’s house. It’s mostly empty, except for her sleeping bag, and she has pinned angry letters from her mother and her college friend, Anne-Marion, to the wall. As Truman naps on the porch, four men bring Meridian back home, carrying her as if she were a corpse. When Meridian wakes up, Truman confronts her about the severe illness she appears to be suffering from—her body is temporarily paralyzed after the stress of confronting the tank. Meridian thinks that Truman looks like Che Guevara, the legendary leader of Latin American revolutions. She tells Truman that he grieves by running away and pretending the past doesn’t exist, but she thinks this isn’t going to work because of an experience she had while she was a student at Saxon College in Atlanta.
We flashback to Meridian's college days. Meridian was involved with a radical group of female students who wanted to fight for black liberation. When taking a vow of loyalty to the group, Meridian promises that she would die for the revolution, but she is unable to promise that she would kill someone else for the cause. As the other girls in the group chide her, Meridian thinks back to her past, growing up in rural Georgia: she was deeply moved by the singers in church, especially her father, but she refuses to commit to Catholicism and thus creates a rift with her religious mother that is never resolved. After leaving the revolutionary group, Meridian returns to the South and moves from one small town to another, descending into poverty.
The narrative returns to Meridian’s house in Chicokema; Meridian mentions Truman’s wife and daughter, but he quickly changes the topic. Meridian tells Truman that the reason she keeps Anne-Marion’s hateful letters pinned on her wall is so that she can look at her old friend’s handwriting. Meridian met Anne-Marion, a bold and self-confident girl, at Saxon during the televised funeral of President John F. Kennedy.
The book's next section, “Wild Child,” describes a homeless girl who lived in the slums surrounding Saxon College, scavenging dumpsters for food and running away from any of the neighborhood folks who tried to approach her. Eventually, people notice that Wild Child is pregnant, although she still refuses all help. Meridian manages to lure the Wild Child back to the honor students’ house where she lives; she helps bathe her and takes her to dinner. However, the house mother protests that the Wild Child cannot stay in the house; while Meridian telephones shelters to see if they have space, the Wild Child runs out of the house and is struck and killed by a passing car.
Meridian and Anne-Marion carry Wild Child’s coffin to her funeral; the service, which many students and neighborhood citizens have shown up for, is supposed to be held in the college chapel. Across the street from the procession is an enormous magnolia tree known as The Sojourner. Campus legend holds that the tree was planted by a slave name Louvinie, back when Saxon College was Saxon Plantation. Louivinie’s West African parents had made a living by spiritually determining the culprits of murders. In the United States, Louvinie had inherited her parent’s storytelling flair; she told the plantation children gruesome stories of fictional murders. Louvinie wasn’t aware that one of these children, a seven-year-old boy, had a weak heart, and during one of her storytelling sessions he had a heart attack and died. The plantation master punished Louvinie by cutting her tongue out. She buried her tongue beneath a magnolia tree, and from then on it grew excessively and was rumored to possess magical powers. This became The Sojourner.
The school president refuses to allow Wild Child’s service to take place in the chapel, so the students take the coffin to The Sojourner instead, holding a service beneath its branches. Angry at the president, they decide to have a protest, but they end up chopping down The Sojourner in their rage, despite Meridian’s complaints.
Growing up, Meridian felt a constant, inexplicable sense of guilt. Her mother, a former schoolteacher, was excited about the possibilities of her life as a young woman, but once she married and had children, she felt constricted. Meridian believes that her sense of guilt is due to the fact that her mother believes having children ruined her life. As a child, Meridian found a gold bar and tried to show it to her mother, father, and brothers, but they dismissed her finding as a fake. Meridian buried it beneath a tree and eventually forgot about it.
Analysis
The novel’s opening depicts race relations in the South in a realistic and negative fashion. Although the Civil Rights Act has been passed, the stark realities of racism and the potential of violence persist in the stereotypical small town of Chicokema. The fact that the town owns a tank and flaunts a statue of a Confederate soldier means that the scars of the Civil War and Jim Crow are far from healed. This racism is intimately tied up with economic inequality: the (mostly white) citizens of the town who don’t work in the guano plant look down upon the (mostly black) workers, saying that they smell bad. The character of the street sweeper epitomizes this negative state of affairs. He cynically believes that rights come and go, casting doubt on the possibility of progress.
This dire state of race relations makes the African Americans in Meridian turn to drastic measures to express their frustration. Meridian’s revolutionary group is one such example. In the wake of civil rights activism that has failed to ensure widespread fairness, they believe that nonviolence has essentially failed. Frustrated and dissatisfied, they turn to violence, accepting even the necessity of murder. While Meridian can’t bring herself to accept this extreme level of retaliation, she too believes that nonviolence is ineffective in the face of the widespread discrimination that she and her classmates experience.
These opening chapters also explore poverty in America and issue of empathy. The Wild Child is a stark example of the harrowing poverty that can exist in the Atlanta slums; the Wild Child is so completely neglected that she can hardly grasp the concept of language. She has barely any clothes, and must feed herself by digging in garbage. While some neighbors try to help, Meridian is the only one who can muster the empathy and energy necessary to take Wild Child under her wing. The episode reveals Meridian to be strong, compassionate, and independent. She ignores her housemates’ disgust at the Wild Child. The novel doesn’t shy away from reality, however: Meridian’s attempt to make things right goes wrong. However, the neighbors and students who might have been horrified by the Wild Child’s behavior nevertheless pay their respects at the funeral, demonstrating a capacity for empathy even though it is too late.
The legend of the Sojourner reaches back in history to the roots of the discrimination that Meridian and her friends face: slavery. Saxon College exists on land that was once a plantation, pointing to the indelible way that slavery is tied up with the history of American institutions. Furthermore, the story of Louvinie shows just how cruelly slaves were treated in plantations. Even though Louvinie wasn’t told the plantation master’s son had a weak heart, and thus can’t truly be blamed for his death, she was punished with unimaginable evil. Her tongue was cut out at the roots, a castigation that struck particularly hard because of its relationship to West African lore. Louvinie’s injury is symbolic of the ways that slaves and African-Americans have been literally and figuratively silenced through the systemic oppression they have experienced.
Finally, Meridian’s mother’s experience explores the broad topic of women and the children they bear. Gender roles in the mid-1900s dictated that the majority of child-rearing responsibility fell to the mother. Unaware that her children would take up almost all of her time and independence as a relatively young woman, Meridian’s mother grows uncontrollably resentful of her daughter. She feels like crying out about how unfair it is that she is expected to have children and, once she has, is expected to devote her entire life to them. The feelings that Meridian’s mother has to cope with are indicative of the repression and constriction that many women felt in this time period. In the end, she is unable to feel joy in her teaching profession because the trials of child-rearing have led her to resent children in general.
