by Alice Walker
How do you keep believing in your own thoughts? I asked her. How do you continue to have faith in your own beliefs?
She had been building a fire in the corner fireplace of our dusty adobe dwelling. Shrugging her sexy shoulders, she said: I believe my own senses, she said. I feel others because I feel myself. Nobody would freely choose to slit her own lip. Nobody would freely choose a neck rubbed permanently raw and chewed on by flies. I had to force myself to stay under the same roof with the missionaries, she said. I couldn’t join the Nuer because I would have had to classify myself as male to receive any respect, from the men or the women.
Ah, my love, I had said, suggestively, while opening wide my arms, how regally you manage to sit on the horns of any dilemma. I have a small dilemma here that I believe you could help me with. But this was one of the few times my wife absolutely refused to make love. Instead, rising from the hearth, with a weariness in her movements she almost never showed, she gave me what I’d come to classify as simply “the look.”
We have heard, said Manuelito, that there are people who, just before the young are to be married, cut them there. In the place where the Mundo kiss.
This is true, I said. Parts of the body are cut off and, with a curse, thrown away.
Manuelito’s face was a study in disbelief.
Even our dead do not know this, Señor, he said.
Anthropologists, like the priests and the missionaries, have known about this for a long time. Without protest, I added.
How hard life is to understand! said Manuelito. Death should be much easier, don’t you think, Señor?
Crossing
I had never dreamed I would one day have to go to Magdalena’s apartment and pack up her things. That she would be dead, and I would be left, the last one of our family, alive. Daunted by the huge pieces of heavy furniture and by the tall piles of gross, unwashed clothes I encountered everywhere, I started by cleaning out the refrigerator, on the front of which was taped a snapshot of me. Typed above my head were the words “Suffering Makes You Thin.”
I stared at the photograph in a trance. The woman in it looked out at me smiling. It was true that she was thin; I noted the bones that showed above the neckline of her black dress. The finger she was pointing at the camera was a bony one. The photo appeared to have been taken at a party; I was clowning. It must have been taken by one of Magdalena’s students the week I stayed with her and attempted to help get her deteriorating body in shape. We’d gone to Weight Watchers, to the gym, to a spa. Nothing had made much of an impression on her.
She had simply kept singing. Sometimes audibly, sometimes under her breath. Sometimes humming the melody of the song she had learned in her youth. The song Manuelito taught her.
One day, weighing her, we noticed she had lost two whole pounds. I’d clapped my hands and said merrily, thoughtlessly, stupidly: You see, suffering makes you thin!
She had looked at me as if she didn’t care if she ever saw me again.
In the end, I hired movers to clear out Magdalena’s stuff. I gave her clothes and furnishings to charities. I gave her papers to the university where she had taught. I kept the copies of our parents’ anthropological articles that they’d published in the Fifties.
It saddened me that Magdalena had died alone. Was she singing? I wondered. Which was all she seemed at the end to hope for. I asked this question of the men who were first on the scene; men in white coats, distracted and brusque. They did not want to tell me at first how she was found. A can of beer locked in one hand, a hunk of chocolate cake squashed in the other. The sweet and the sour, commingling forever in her mouth. No, if she was stuffing her face, she couldn’t have been singing, they finally said.
Closing the apartment for the last time, removing her galoshes and umbrella from beside the door, tossing them into the trash as I walked down the street, I felt an emptiness, a lightness actually, that was not unpleasant. I could not pretend I would miss a sister I never really had. Ours had been a sistership that was fatally blighted one sultry afternoon in the mountains of Mexico. I would have loved having a sister; but Magdalena wasn’t the sister I would have loved having.
A few days after her death I received a package, addressed in Magdalena’s loping, rather sloppy hand. Inside there was a photograph of a very cute, young Manuelito riding Vado, and a beautiful if crudely made black leather belt decorated with small, oxidized silver disks. There was a letter that began with the stanza of a song:
At the crossing
it is the right way
to release those who
have taken comfort
from our torment.
It is the right way
to leave this place
with a heart
softer than stone.
At the crossing
it is the right
way
to forgive.
It is the right way to release
all hostility toward those
who wound us
by their hapless presence
alone.
It is in forgetting
the trespass
of others
that the vado
at last
becomes home.
Dear Susannah, she wrote, imagine! If the Mundo are right there will be no reason for us to see each other ever again, even after we are dead. Our relationship, ostensibly as sisters, was in fact a relationship of strangers. I successfully killed all sisterly feeling in myself toward you, in any case. Perhaps if people do reincarnate, as some believe, we will find ourselves once again in each other’s lives. I will be your butler or you will be my father-in-law.
I tolerated you, but no, I never loved you. Even before your transformation at the keyhole, I thought you were a wimp. You bored me, Susannah. Your “goodness,” like your thinness, seemed a cowardly hesitation before the banquet life. Of which you should get one, and stop just writing about it. In fact, the letter continued, you are vain and cowardly; the life you have chosen for yourself, trashy and contemptible.…
But this is not true, Susannah said to herself as she read, glancing at the long, rambling pages of vituperation still to come. This person, this “other” that Magdalena has constructed to be her rejected sister, is not me. None of my friends would see me this way. Nor is this the way I see myself.
Closing her eyes, she felt Magdalena watching her as she struggled to suppress the love she had felt for her hapless (yes) father. “I do not care for any,” she heard Magdalena’s maturing voice, as it had sounded that long-ago day in the car. She saw again the green-apple jellybeans, fresh and bright in her father’s outstretched palm. Saw herself refusing to raise her hand or her eyes to return his warm look. Saw and then felt herself betray her own love. Among the Mundo the greatest crime one can commit against oneself.
Without her being aware of it, tears were flowing down Susannah’s cheeks, off her chin. A pain of loss so sharp it caused her to cry out sent her to the floor. She lay sobbing, pressing her face into the carpet. Like a fool, she had murdered something that had been strong and beautiful within herself, the unconditional love she felt for her father; Magdalena had wanted it to die, and had coldly helped it along. Never caring about the wounds, on both sides, she had left.
Susannah cried until she could cry no more. Daddy, Daddy, I’m sorry, she whispered tiredly. I didn’t know what it meant to give you up. I didn’t know what it meant not to forgive. And now it is too late!
And yet, just as she was thinking this, she felt Peace itself enter the room. She envisioned it as a naked dark-skinned man holding a bouquet of peacock feathers. He did not stay but swept through, on his way across the room and right through the opposite wall. Humm, said Susannah to herself, rising, and swabbing at her wet cheeks and runny nose.
Was that Daddy before I knew him? she wondered.
Magdalena’s letter was still clutched in her hand. Encouraged by her new feeling of serenity, Susannah began to force herself to contin
ue reading it. In fact, she tried to begin again at the beginning. But she discovered, immediately, that there was no need to. She simply felt no interest any longer in anything her sister had thought.
I will not let her manipulate me into feeling the same way that she does about my life or her death, she whispered to herself, feeling more sane than she’d felt in a long time.
Amazingly, because one never thought this is how growth happened, or at any rate, at long last announced itself, in the hushed moment of thinking these thoughts, while blowing her nose on her skirt and not minding the snot, Susannah felt herself complete the process of becoming an adult. She was grown up. She could handle her own life. Magdalena ceased to be a manipulative and mangled psychic twin, stuck to her by pain. Unfinished, the letter slipped from her hands to the floor.
For Every Little Sickness …
How long it takes to understand something! Colonization, for instance, or war. Pauline was speaking passionately through a haze of sinsemilla smoke. Susannah nodded as Pauline passed the joint to Irene. The three women sprawled on velvet cushions on the floor in Susannah’s sunroom and the late afternoon sun of a warm spring day lit up their faces and their hair.
So is it true that the CIA helped to drug the black people in America? Irene asked, suppressing a cough and tapping her rounded chest with a pale and fragile hand.
Everyone thinks so, of course, said Susannah.
There was a silence as a bird, just outside the windows, trilled a sweet note.
Pauline laughed.
Susannah looked at her.
I am just thinking, she said, that all over America black folks are having this same conversation, while they are toking away.
Susannah shrugged. It’s a natural conversation that grows out of toking.
Yes, I think so, said Irene. I had to give up cigarettes because they were giving me cancer, but I can still toke. Actually, you know, I learned how to toke from the little people. Everywhere they live, every single camp, has its own ganja garden. It grows wild everywhere in the forest, but because the Forest People make camp in clearings where there is sun, that is where you always find the healthiest marijuana.
No shit! said Pauline. And are they always stoned out of their minds?
Irene took another puff. Of course not, she said, exhaling. As with everything else, they use just enough. To them it is a sacred plant, perhaps the most sacred.
Why is that? asked Susannah. If all their plants, the trees, the whole forest, are considered sacred.
Pauline had turned on her stomach and was raptly following the struggle of a large beetle that had flown in the window. Hitting the wall, it had fallen to the floor and now lay on its back, waving its half-dozen orange legs.
A creature as handsome as you must have a mate waiting somewhere, she said to the beetle, turning it over with a finger and urging it to fly off.
It is considered the most sacred because it is the plant that permits humans and trees, nature, to talk. It is the translator, so to speak.
Wow, said Susannah. I always felt that, you know.
Here they claim it leads to crack cocaine addiction, mayhem and murder, said Pauline. But that’s probably only if it’s grown by peasant slaves in Honduras or Colombia, and all their tears and blood get mixed in with the fear and pesticide.
The perfect ganja, in my experience, said Susannah, is always grown by women. It is always grown with love. It is a plant that responds to feelings.
How do you know? asked Pauline.
Susannah winked. Writers experiment.
I see, said Pauline, dropping the butt as it burned to her fingers.
So your government floods your communities with drugs, horrible ones, said Irene, dreamily, like the British did with opium in China, and then it comes in and arrests the young men for having them.
That’s about it, said Susannah.
And then the people with money to invest, invest it in the building of prisons. They’ve been kicked out of South Africa and other places where their profits kept them in power for hundreds of years. And so all your young men are imprisoned.
Do we really want to go there? said Pauline, sourly, thinking of Richard, her son, and of her grandsons, Bratman and Will.
But Susannah and Irene laughed. You know how you can’t get off the stream of consciousness you’re on when you’re stoned! said Susannah, poking at her arm.
All right, then, said Pauline. Let’s fucking play it out.
But having said that she seemed to forget what the conversation was about, as did Susannah and Irene.
They shifted their bodies on their cushions, leaned against the wall of the room, closing their eyes against the setting sun, and drifted into separate reveries.
Irene had arrived two days before. She’d docked her boat at the city marina and arrived by limousine at Susannah’s door.
Susannah was standing in the doorway of a small gray-shingle cottage, overgrown with roses and night-flowering jasmine.
Although she was expecting a visit from Irene, she was still astonished to see the enormous black car pull up to her gate. Two huge men got out and stood at attention as tiny Irene was helped from the backseat by a third.
Are those bodyguards? Susannah whispered, after she and Irene had briefly hugged.
Yes, Irene said. What a drag it is to have them. But I was warned your neighborhood is not safe.
Not as safe as your church, said Susannah, a bit stung.
Don’t be upset, said Irene. I go everywhere with them. She shrugged. I inherited them from my father. They come with the boat. Their fathers used to be bodyguards for him. He was such a reprobate he needed to be guarded.
And you are so tiny, Susannah finished the thought in her mind, that you need to be protected.
Irene was indeed small. Smaller than when Susannah had visited her in her church in Greece. She seemed much older, too, though only five years or so had passed. Her hair was white-orchid white. The lines were deep in her face. Such a good face! Inquisitive and open. Susannah felt her heart warm as she ushered her into her house.
Pauline had been dying to meet her.
I’ve never met a dwarf before, she’d said. What do I do, bow?
This had made Susannah laugh.
You’ll have to bow, just to shake her hand, she’d said. But it’s not a big deal. Her small size is not the most important thing about Irene.
What is it, then? Pauline had asked.
Susannah pondered the question. After a moment she said: It is her intelligence, her will. It is also her courage. She has managed to live by herself, with herself, for two-thirds of a century without losing her mind.
Oh, I could do that! said Pauline, jokingly.
You could not, said Susannah. And neither could I.
And now, as the light faded, Pauline stirred.
In the prisons they force them to work for nothing, she said.
What? asked Irene.
In the prisons where the young men are kept—and young women too, lest we forget—they are forced to work; to make clothing, baseballs, batteries, what have you, for peanuts.
They are a huge pool of exploitable labor, said Susannah.
Why, said Irene, it reminds me of something. Something from television, something from American films.
It’s a plantation, said Susannah. The prisons are a contemporary plantation, and what is produced is produced by slave labor.
Our children are in there forever, said Pauline.
Not Richard, said Susannah, warmly. And not Bratman and Will.
Maybe I shouldn’t offer joints to their mother, said Pauline, suddenly sober, as Susannah smiled. Seriously. I don’t want to be a menace to them. Teach them bad habits.
I believe in the essential goodness of marijuana, said Susannah, even if all the world turns against her. The occasional toke is not a bad habit. Except for idiots.
As I was saying, said Pauline, maybe I shouldn’t tamper with my grandsons’ mother.
Irene, Susannah, and Pauline laughed.
The only bad thing is that it makes you want to eat, said Irene. But, she said, reaching deep into a bulging string bag that rested on the floor beside her, for every little sickness there is a little cure. Saying this, she pulled from the bag an exquisitely wrapped box of Perugina chocolates. Upon which the three women ravenously fell.
Getting the Picture
I like Pauline [Paul-een-nay], said Irene next day. To get over their hangover she and Susannah walked slowly through the community rose garden, stopping frequently to sniff a fragrant rose.
Although, Irene continued thoughtfully, she is unfortunately named for a man who, through the church, caused extensive oppression of women, although most people are taught that he was all about charity and love.
Who is that? asked Susannah, stopping by a trellis on which a white rose draped its profuse flowers in scented drifts.
St. Paul, of course. The one who hated women so much he demanded their silence in the church and obedience to their husbands forever.
Gosh, said Susannah, and I thought she was named for her father. His name’s Paul.
Your Indians here are right to let their children’s names come to them long after they are born, said Irene. I learned this is what they do from reading. Everyone’s name should be special to them. If you’re not careful you can be hauling around a name that insults you every time it’s used.
Oh, Susannah, oh don’t you cry for me! Susannah began to sing.
Yes, said Irene, I know that song. For I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee!
Hearing the familiar song in Irene’s accent made Susannah smile.