By the Light of My Father's Smile

by Alice Walker

  What Is Left

  What is left of it doesn’t really work anymore, said Manuelito. Them crazy Cong shot it just about off.

  I am sorry, I said.

  He laughed, suddenly. Who would have thought we’d end up like this, eh, Magdalena?

  Oh, I don’t know, I said, raising my leg through the folds of my low-cut silk nightie; I think some parts of us still look pretty good. The moment Manuelito had gotten out of the tub and I had dried him and he had leaned down to kiss the ankle of my left foot—and then had been unable to get up again without help—I had felt my spirits lightening. My legs are still very good, wouldn’t you say?

  Oh, I agree absolutely, he said, leaning over to kiss my knee.

  Your lips are fairly unscathed, I said, leaning back in his arms to study them.

  Really, he said, poking them out.

  Sure, I said. Kissing them with a big smack.

  You’re beautiful still, he said, just big. More of you to appreciate.

  We had been hurrying before; now I knew we would take our time. Remember how I used to brush your hair? he asked.

  No, I said.

  I used to brush it, he insisted. I used to like the way it curled around my fingers. It is curious about the Mundo: some of us have managed to keep our dark skin, so you can tell we are connected to Africa, but our hair is hopelessly straight. Indians have strong straight-hair genes, he said, chuckling.

  It won’t snap now, I said, as I watched him search for the brush.

  Grinning, he placed himself behind me in the bed. Lean back your head, he said. I did. There was the most delicious feeling of rest, just to have my head on his chest. Slowly he began to brush. I thought he might comment on the green streak, but he did not.

  It is much thinner, no? he said. Tugging at the length of hair on the very top of my head.

  I did not answer. Billie Holiday was singing very softly. Something merry and hip. I feared the sound of her voice would make Manuelito want a drink. It was that kind of music, that kind of voice. But no, he brushed serenely, shifting his body frequently to keep it loose. He brushed for so long, I began to doze. But the moment I did, he laid the brush aside, and I felt his fingers kneading my shoulders and my neck. I felt them brush the gown covering my breasts.

  I love big breasts, he said into my ear.

  Well, lover, I grew these melons just for you. I said this as I reached up and guided his hands toward each audacious nipple. Very gently, wincing slightly, he removed the chains. And that is how we began.

  Every time a lover leaves you and you are still in love with them, you fantasize about having them once more in your arms. But it is always a fantasy of how it used to be. Your bodies are the same that you had before. Manuelito and I were the same people, but our bodies seemed to be those of two other people. We kissed. We licked. We rubbed. (He deftly removed the spike from my bellybutton.) But mostly we prayed that our strangers’ bodies would come to their senses and find each other again. At first it did not seem possible that this would happen. At one point Manuelito mumbled something about needing a drink. I would have died for a burger and fries. But we persevered. I thought I had to find on his body those few remaining places where he could still be quickened sexually. He thought he had to battle to find my center by pushing aside the fat. But when we became very tired, we abandoned strategy. We napped. And when we awoke it seemed to me the energy of the apartment had changed. When we left my bed hours later, both of us were satisfied.

  Magdalena, he said as we ate a magnificent breakfast at Burger King, I want to marry you.

  But you are already married, I said.

  He looked surprised. This made me laugh.

  I am married, you are right. And I love my wife, Maria.

  Maria? I said. Her name’s Maria? Goddess, I thought, how predictable.

  There is not the same magic between us, he said, sadly. There never was. Do you know what I believe? I believe there is one soul in all our time on earth that just matches our own. We are always looking for it, moving in its direction, but so often it is never found. He paused. We found each other not just once, but two times! Not just when we were young and beautiful, but even now, when we are like this.

  I stuck a french fry into my mouth. Eating with you feels like eating alone, I said.

  That’s what I mean, he said.

  Even so, Maria is your wife. She’s been through too much to let go of you now.

  What should we do? he asked.

  We should be lovers, of course, I said.

  But we must tell Maria everything, he said.

  Yes, I said, I remember that is your way.

  He nodded.

  Will she despise us, or will she have pity on us?

  I do not know, he said. I have been a drunk for years; it is hard to have pity for a drunk. We are so disgusting over such long and messy episodes of life.

  For me, for us, I knew Manuelito would stop drinking. Just as I knew I would immediately begin noticing my weight. But like the Manuelito and Magdalena of old, we did not say anything of the sort to each other, and in fact had stiff drinks and a hearty dinner that very same day.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, Manuelito, singing drunkenly, and turning first toward me and then swinging his arms up as though to embrace the rising bright moon, was hit by a bus. The bus dragged him for half a block. By the time I got to him, he was gone.

  To Be a Sister

  And that is why I am coming down the mountain, the place of refuge where I write left far behind me. The guardian spirit I am gradually beginning to feel, which hovers there, left on the oak tree swing. I am going to be a sister to Magdalena, June, Mad Dog, MacDoc, as she is submerged by another flood of pain.

  But I am not sad, Susannah, she said when I arrived on her doorstep. Frazzled from the flight, the midday traffic, and lack of sleep, I gazed at her through bloodshot eyes. Big as I remembered her, she seemed now twice her usual size. Her green hair was lank and her nose rings unpolished. But there was definitely something different about her. What was it?

  It was a miracle, our finding each other again, but it was not meant to last, she said. I felt, even as we made love, that Manuelito was on loan to me from someplace else. Not just from Maria, his wife, and their children. There was a pause. Actually, she continued, glancing at the bottom of her teacup, I think he was killed in Nam.

  Oh, darling, I said, you make it sound like The Twilight Zone.

  There is a twilight zone, she said softly. Where do you think the one on television comes from?

  Come on, I said.

  Oh, I understand it isn’t rational. She put down her cup. But look at the world, she said. Should any of us give a shit that something’s not rational? Nothing out there looks rational to me.

  So you met him on a plane from Las Cruces. What was he doing? Where was he going?

  Oh, she said. Get this. The “job” the government found for him was to make speeches to high school students. Speeches about the Army. About Nam.

  Wow, I said.

  Right. She said. So there he traveled, a kind of Indian Flying Dutchman, only alighting at home to get drunk, bully his family, and change into a fresh uniform. A nightmare.

  Well, what could he possibly tell the youth? I asked sarcastically.

  Magdalena laughed. Exactly. There he was in his neat little Army suit. His body stitched together with metal thread … did I tell you the metal detectors in stores always went crazy when he passed by? He had a special travel document that he presented to the guards at airports.

  No kidding, I said. Still pondering the change in my sister’s character. She had eaten nothing since we came from the airport. She’s dieting, I thought; perhaps that explained a certain ethereal radiance that surrounded her.

  He wanted desperately to tell the youth the truth, of course. He wanted to tell them to run like hell, from him and from anybody else in uniform. But there he was, stuck to his Purple Heart and Congressional Medal of Horror,
I mean Honor, like a fly stuck to a piece of cheese.

  So what did he do? I asked.

  He tried to tell them how to stay alive. That, he said, was his field of expertise. The only thing he felt he knew how to do. But they weren’t Indians. They were soft American farm boys and even softer and sillier urban ghetto youth. Besides, he and they knew the military was the only job they were ever likely to get. The farm youth were bored to death with peace and television; the urban youth risked death several times a day just walking to the corner. He would talk to them all morning, then go back to his hotel room and drink.

  He didn’t know how to stay alive, I said. Accepting the cup of coffee she handed me.

  She shrugged. He died singing, she said.

  Oh, I said.

  Yes. He died singing his initiation song. When we lived in the mountains he taught it to me, and I used to sing it all the time.

  Magdalena began to hum, then to sing softly under her breath:

  Anyone can see that the sky is naked

  and if the sky is naked

  then the earth must be naked

  also.

  I remember that, I said. I almost do.

  I’m telling you, I used to sing it all the time. Or hum it. It drove Daddy crazy, which was part of the reason I did it. At some point, I realized years ago, he really did change himself into a priest; it was as if all his Bible reading and acting to fool the Mundo became part of who he was. I used to think of it as his having been overtaken by his ancient reptilian brain.

  It was odd, wasn’t it? I said. Both Mama and Daddy were atheists.

  They were colossal liars, said June. Always spying on the Mundo and scribbling in their evil gray notebooks.

  Their work would have been funded today, I said. Some anthropological society, integrated by now, would certainly spring to the aid of such a fresh, spunky, intelligent-sounding black couple, interested in the doings of a mixed-race tribe like the Mundo.

  The church enslaved them, in a way, said June. Forcing them to do its work in order to do their own.

  It’s hard to imagine that they pulled it off, I said. Daddy preaching about stuff he hardly knew, or cared, a thing about. Mama pretending to be pious.

  Fucking kept them going, my sister said bitterly.

  Oh yes, I said, laughing. You would never believe how long it took me to understand why it did!

  Why the Mad Dog Is Considered Wise

  I remember when Magdalena asked me why in my tribe we consider the mad dog wise. It was like her to ask such a question. Her little sister, Susannah, hardly asked anything. She was content to trail sedately behind her parents. In truth, her father spoiled her. It was clear he thought her beautiful only when she was moving very slowly, or when she was still. He would gaze at her as if she were a flower, with no more mobility than a flower possesses. Not so Magdalena. She was all over the place, sticking her nose everywhere. All the elders loved her, because she was still wild. They would tell her stories for as long as she could sit still, and she would run errands for them.

  The mad dog is considered wise because it has lost its mind, I said. Which is one of the most difficult things in the world to do. Our people take herbs once a year to lose their minds all together, at once. Instead of thoughts, we have visions, and that is how we guide ourselves.

  But why would you want to lose your mind? she asked bluntly, frowning. That sounds stupid to me.

  No, no, I said. In the world that you come from, people put too much emphasis on the mind. You could even say they have become mind only.

  What do you know about the world I come from? she asked.

  I will tell you about that later, I said, but right now I want to tell you about why the mad dog is wise.

  Oh, okay, she said, putting her hand on her hip and looking up at me.

  She was so pretty! Magdalena. Even when we were still only children I wanted to kiss her. Her lips were full and round; in the summer she became very brown, almost black. Her cheeks were like chocolate. I wanted to lick them. Her spirit was bold; whatever she felt never left her eyes.

  Mad dogs bite people, she said now.

  That is not the part we like, I said. Nor the drooling or frothing at the mouth, nor the fear of drinking water, either. It is only the losing-of-the-mind part.

  Aha, she said.

  It is a way of saying you must not live too much in your head. It is a way of reminding you to stay in your emotions, no matter how nutty they are; it is a way of saying, also, that craziness has value.

  But wisdom? she said. I don’t know if I see that.

  The elders say you do not see wisdom to recognize it until you are old.

  Well, she said, laughing, nobody could ever get as old as them.

  Somehow the elders heard of this retort. They found it amusing. And that is when she began to be called Mad Dog. Which her father insisted must be MacDoc. And then even this nickname embarrassed him. He did not understand that Magdalena was what we called a Changing Woman, a natural one, uninstructed and uninitiated, and therefore very rare.

  We saw this immediately. Even on the first day they came to our village. It is easy to recognize a Changing Woman–to–be, even in the person of a small girl. She will be the one who appears to look at everything, deliberately. She will be the one who appears to have no shame. For what good would shame be to someone who might become at any moment that of which she is ashamed?

  Luck

  Even as the bus dragged me, I sang. Though by then I must have been already dead. Among my people this is considered extremely lucky. It means I will continue to sing, to live, on the other side. At least until my tasks are done. That is what the initiation song promises, even though when you learn it you are so young you cannot possibly understand.

  Anyone can see that the earth

  is grandchild of

  the moon

  and the moon is mother

  of the night sky.

  When you die

  this is the song

  that will carry you

  beyond the river

  it is your small craft

  it is your horse.

  And that is why my horse’s name was Vado, which means a place in the river where it is easy to cross.

  I did not want to leave Magdalena, but now, from where I am, I can see that it was a perfect time to go. That I, in pieces, had been saved for her, returned to her. But I was like a limp rag that was temporarily starched by her love. I stood tall for a moment at her side. Long enough to tell her that I, too, understood that we were meant for each other. That what we’d shared was real. For that was also part of her hunger. To know she was not in a forsaken love alone.

  Among the Mundo there is the teaching of nonpossession of others. But I left the tribe so young that it was a lesson only partly learnt. The lesson I did learn was that there is one other soul in each of our lifetimes to which we are primarily drawn. It is a body and a soul attraction. When it is found, what one notices inescapably, is that there is no fear of what anyone thinks. You do not say, Who will like this? What offense will we give? You say only Thank Mama (our conception of God) or Thank Luck. Since to us Mama (everything that is) and Luck are the same.

  Meat

  My father worked in a meatpacking plant when I was a child, I said to Susannah. Even then, the late Forties, immigrants from Eastern Europe and undocumented workers from Mexico were beginning to be offered the dirtier, lower-paying jobs that men like my father held; he was extremely upset by this. Workers who barely spoke English, whom he’d trained on some noisy, greasy machine, soon rose above him at the plant. All his anger and selfpity was brought home to our door. A scratched and scarred door that was so hideous and forbidding, reeking as it did of the misery on the other side, that as a teenager I saved money from my baby-sitting to buy a small can of yellow paint and painted it “sun.”

  I have often told Susannah of my childhood because she is endlessly fascinated by stories of survival.

&nbs
p; How did your mother feed all of you? she asks, her eyes wide.

  In our house, I replied, nothing was ever thrown away. Not even bones.

  Not even bones, she echoes, whenever she hears this. What could she possibly do with bones?

  Make stock, I reply.

  Stock? she says, as if it is a word not found in culinary conversation.

  Stock, I reply. There was the stock of the stockyard, I explained, that was not far from the meat-processing and packing plant in which my dad worked. But this stock was a broth that my mother used as a base for making soup.

  Oh, she says. She might be brushing her long, sable-colored hair, or painting her nails. I might have just fucked her silly.

  We were poor, I’d say.

  You were poor, she’d echo, as if the concept of not having plenty was one she could not quite grasp.

  But my father’s stereotypical belligerence, hostility, maudlin and abusive bullying were not all there was to him. There was a whole other side, I said. When he was in his right mind, as my mother called it. After he’d bathed and napped and had a good dinner; after he’d reviewed our report cards and found them satisfactory; after he’d forgone a first drink and lured my mother into their back bedroom, he was a father full of funny stories and play. He was a father who loved to repair things, a father who played the guitar.

  At this notion of fatherhood Susannah always perked up. Oh, she might say, he sounds great.

  I would ponder this, perhaps while caressing the inside of her thigh.

  He was ordinary, I think, I might say.