"Buried in Guano": Race, Labor, and Sustainability

Abstract

Alice Walker’s debut novel Meridian (1976) opens with an African-American photographer, Truman, searching for his former lover from the days of the Movement. Pulling his Volvo into the gas station of a tiny Mississippi town, he hears of a woman “staring down” a tank in the town square and realizes it must be Meridian (2). True to form, she has orchestrated a group of children to protest their exclusion from a free set-aside day for one of the town’s few entertainments. The attraction, a “mummified white woman” advertised as one of the “Twelve Human Wonders of the World,” scarcely seems worth fighting for. A flyer details her sordid tale: the woman, once a faithful wife, had begun to prostitute herself to satisfy a desire for “furs” and “washing machines” (5). Humiliated, her husband strangled her and then tossed her into a saltwater lake, but she washed ashore miraculously “preserved” years later. He decided to display her “dried up” and “blackened” remains in a final act of revenge and profit (5). If confronting a tank were a courageous act during the Movement, in this context, it appears an outsized gesture performed from habit rather than political exigency. Truman is further confused to learn that not all of the children are black, as the square’s “sweeper” explains: “[T]his is for the folks that work in that guano plant outside of town. Po’ folks. . . . The folks who don’t have to work in that plant claim the folks that do smells so bad they can’t stand to be in the same place with ’em. But you know what guano is made out of.