The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "'This behavior was not understood, and seriously backfired,' my mother said. And the students laughed.

  "However, it was at the Africa Center that we learned my father has been arrested. You would think that, never having seen the man, I would not be in a dither. I am, though. Having read my father's books and now, in London, having seen one of his plays--a small student production, poorly acted and badly staged--I can imagine why the authorities have arrested him. My mother says what surprises her is that he wasn't arrested before. The students were discussing this after the lecture. They mentioned the International Alternative Peace Prize that my father received last year, apparently just at the moment the government was about to lock him up. As it was, they had run a bulldozer through the latest of his plays and razed the theater.

  "This last play was called The Fee, and is about taxation. It is an antitaxes play, in other words; the kind of play no playwright in America would write and that no producer would produce, though everyone there cries about taxes. I've been trying to imagine it, and thinking how nice it would be. Anyway, some of the students at the lecture had already received copies of The Fee and are planning to mount a production. Apparently liberation has not lowered the people's taxes at all, nor has it increased their income. Arggh! Since they can't see their taxes at work for them--the roads are frequently ruts, the hospitals lack medicine, and the schools lack pencils, not to mention how nearly everyone lacks sufficient food--the folks are saying hell no, they ain't gonna pay the friggin' taxes! My father got the idea for the play from an actual protest--'riot,' according to the local government-controlled paper, which the students say is funded by the CIA--staged by women and children, who stormed the house of the president the day they learned how much of their money went to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for weapons their children are too poorly educated and weak from hunger to operate, assuming they wanted to do such a thing. But the catch is that for those who join the military, there is food, though no education. My father's position is that the reason millions of Africans are exterminating themselves in wars is that the superpowers have enormous stores of outdated weapons to be got rid of. Only the women seem to notice that everyone's children are suffering.

  "But this is the concern of the African mother the world over, isn't it? The education of her children, the inevitable school fees pinched somehow out of the money earned from washing, ironing, fieldwork, minework. Any kind of work.

  "The students don't call my father by his tongue-twisting name, Abajeralasezeola, which is only slight improvement over 'Dahvid,' to my mind, and which I can never get right either. They call him 'Ola.' Ola has this to say. Ola writes thus and so. Ola is right or wrong on such and such a question. In other words, he is theirs. They are resigned about his arrest. One of two things will happen, they say: He will be imprisoned for a long time, possibly tortured, or shot outright. 'No one in the country has the brains to try to "rehabilitate" him,' one young man said; or he will have to flee the country. 'Yes,' said a young woman exile from Kenya, who had sung for my mother a beautiful welcome song, 'he will come and join the rest of us; the African continent abroad.'

  "'So many exiles,' my mother said on the way back to our wretched hotel. 'There are as many now as before liberation. How can this be?' She was tired and feeling very sad. Her eyes were full of tears. I put my arms around her shoulders and marveled at the way my head towers over hers. How is it that mothers shrink and shrink? And her little hands!

  "At the airport outside the capital, my father came to meet us. He and my mother were cordial. They shook hands solemnly but looked warmly, if somewhat cautiously, into each other's eyes. I thought: Yes, my mother doesn't get into a car with just anybody! I was surprised that he looked so ordinary. A small dark man with prominent eyes and rather unkempt graying close-to-his-head hair. He looked exhausted, in fact, and as if he'd just tumbled out of bed. Or out of jail.

  "Since he and I were strangers, there was a certain amount of awkwardness, but I felt, with his sensitivity, he would be conscious of my thoughts. Consequently I tried to censor those about his knobby knees and the way his oversize khaki shorts flapped in the wind as we walked.

  "He gave me, though, just as we were about to get into his car, a swift, determined, and very shy little hug--Suwelo, I'm also taller than he is--and stuck a ring on my thumb. It was his ring; I'd noticed it on his finger. I understood the gesture, too. It was something I myself might have done. Overcome with confusion and emotion, he'd simply wanted to give me something tangible, immediately, to try to make up for the lost years. It was interesting, the emotion I suddenly felt; for, as you know, I've never been conscious of missing a father, and certainly not him in particular.

  "He laughed when he saw my mother's wide-eyed appraisal of the car. It was not the jalopy of a jailbird. It had a flag. It had a crest.

  "'Of course I have a nice car,' he said. 'I am, after all, minister of culture.'

  "My mother knew this.

  "'Oh, Dahvid,' she said. 'We are so very proud of you. At least it isn't a Mercedes,' she added, smiling.

  "'Only because the Germans were not our masters!' said Ola. And there was only humor, I thought, not a trace of bitterness, in his voice.

  "As if he read my thoughts he said, 'It does no good to be angry. I will just drive my nice little car until they take it away from me.'

  "'We heard you were in jail,' my mother said.

  "'And so I was!' he shouted over the noise of the killer taxis zooming by. I looked out the window at the parched African countryside. My mother says the climate has changed drastically over the years. It rains only sporadically now, and in large areas of the country there is severe drought. All up and down the road there were women walking. Some were carrying babies on their backs and basins on their heads. 'They let me out this morning. I told them I had important visitors from America.' He paused. 'A good friend and ... my daughter.' They are not completely hardened criminals yet, these thugs in office. I know all of them very well. They are not ready to get rid of me yet. Who will greet the literate visitor? In fact, I don't think they've hit on just what to do. They want the world to think well of them, you see.'

  "He laughed, almost merrily, at the absurdity of this.

  "I laughed with him. What can I tell you, Suwelo? It was like hearing my own self laugh. I knew exactly the region of the soul from which his laughter came. They were breaking my father's heart, and he saw himself small, beetlelike in his industrious work at undermining them, and there was still a little part of him that did not feel outmatched. 'As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope,' someone once said to me; and I thought of that while looking at the back of my father's graying head. 'For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance.' And today truth is still beautiful, as Keats knew, but so frightening.

  "The neighborhoods we drove through were poor, dry, dusty, and the houses were behind adobe walls. These walls were painted in the most vivid abstract designs. The women, my father explained, did this. It was a tradition that, as he put it, failed to let them go.

  "'I love it!' I said.

  "'I'm glad you do,' he replied. On the outskirts of one of these communities, but on an abruptly more prosperous block, was my father's compound, and it is painted in the loudest colors of all! Only in San Francisco would my father's house be appreciated. I got out of the car and immediately touched the colors, a half dozen or so of them: orange, yellow, blue, green, purple, red, and brown, white, and tan. More than a half dozen. What it looks like, really, is a design from a truly beautiful rug, but on an adobe house!

  "My father's, Ola's, house is very simple. Because he is the minister of culture ... 'Because I am the minister of culture,' he says, drawing himself up loftily, 'I have to live in a native-style house!' He laughs. It has all the conveniences, though. Two baths, four bedrooms, a large ceremonial living room, a verandah that goes completely around the inner courtyard. There are flowers, and, because he is also a farmer, a la
rge vegetable garden. He has servants. A small, shy woman and her daughter, who cook and clean; a tall, skinny young man, who tends the gardens; and two or three other people, who just hang about, presumably as bodyguards, or--as Ola says--'presumably as spies.'

  "Well. I'm sitting here on the verandah with a gin-and-tonic, as Isak Dinesen might have done, writing to you. Here's to all the children who grow up without their fathers. The world is full of us ... and some of us have managed anyhow!"

  THE NIGHT BEFORE SUWELO heard from Fanny Nzingha about her first meeting with Ola, he'd had a confusing dream about going to the market to get enough food to last him forever, only to discover when he got there that he had nothing with which to transport the mountain of food he chose--and that his pockets were abnormally small. There he stood in the Great Supermarket of Life, cartless, with pockets that wouldn't hold a penknife.

  The glistening food swayed in seductive mounds well over his head as, gradually comprehending that he was in hell, he--a short babylike man in his dream--sank to the floor, his thumb and forefinger in his mouth. When Suwelo woke from this hellish dream he was crying, much to his surprise. He rarely cried. He lay in bed trying to think of his morning classes, but through every thought there rolled a glistening new shopping cart.

  Then he remembered.

  It was in the house they had bought in the suburbs back east; and before Fanny felt comfortable driving there. She was like that: skilled at driving, swimming, running even. But then there would be long periods when she simply couldn't seem to do any of them. Her running knees rusted, her swimming arms creaked, her driving eyes clouded over. She moved slowly, cautiously, like a tortoise, as if at any moment she expected to feel the heavens fall down about her head.

  There was public transportation, luckily. Actually, it was quite reliable and was one of the reasons they chose the house. That and the little creek that meandered behind it. And the one oval window in the front of the house, with mauve-tinted beveled glass. And the large space for the garden (already composted by the departing inhabitants) in back. And they had loved, simply loved the house, although the work they'd done "restoring" it--new plumbing, new wiring, new walls, and so on--nearly did them in. There was also a supermarket five blocks away.

  One day when he came home, Fanny was all smiles, and from the hall closet she cheerfully dragged a bright new shopping cart. The kind of cart old women and matrons with young babies are seen dragging behind them or bumping up over a curb. He smiled to think of Fanny Nzingha using the thing.

  "You like?" she said. "From now on, no more pretzel-stick arms from carrying three bags of groceries. No more curvature of the spine. These things are wonderful!" And she trundled it back and forth over the bright rug from Guatemala a friend had given them that stretched the length of the hall.

  For weeks she was content. She liked the walk to the market. It permitted her to meet her neighbors. She liked getting up early in the morning and getting the freshest food. Even if it meant the maddest dash back in order to get to work on time. This housewifely contact with the early morning was preparing her to take up once again the daily morning ritual of running. She could now see, too, wheeling the little cart, which she was learning to do expertly, how she might be able to drive around the neighborhood. And one day on the way to market, she'd passed a public pool she'd never noticed from the car. Well.

  From time to time she tried to get him to do the marketing, using the little cart. He would quickly take her shopping list, throw on his coat, and dash out to the car. He'd drive the five blocks, toss the items he bought into the backseat of his car, and be back home in a matter of minutes. Fanny was slightly puzzled but, on the whole, grateful, though she reminded him what a great walk he was missing and that, as a matter of fact, a fast walk back and forth to the market, pushing the little cart, was just what might be needed to trim any incipient flab. Hint. Hint.

  One day, as luck would have it, the car was at the shop for its routine checkup. He had not been able to pick it up because all that day he'd been running late. The traffic was such that he was almost glad not to have a car, temporarily, to add to it. He took a bus home.

  There was Fanny, who'd also taken a bus home, in her little apron with the cat on it, busily making bread: a mound of dough was rising under a moist towel by the sink, and with flour-covered hands she was making a list.

  Suwelo groaned inwardly.

  "Make it a short list. A one-bag list," he said.

  "But we're out of everything," said she, busily scribbling. "We should never have parties at which we serve our own food. Our friends ate all of it."

  He'd forgotten the party they'd thrown the night before. Yes indeed, even the peanut butter was gone.

  Suwelo went over and kissed her on the back of the neck. "One bag, okay?" he said.

  She kept writing. He noticed she'd put down two dozen oranges (they both loved fresh orange juice in the morning) and a gallon of milk!

  "My back won't be able to stand all that," he said.

  She looked up from her list, not such a long one, after all, and gave him a quizzical look.

  "But don't you remember ... ?" she began.

  And they finished in unison: "We have the cart!"

  The time had finally come to explain himself. "Fanny," he said, "sit down."

  She did. On his knee.

  "I have a confession to make."

  She looked ready to hear it.

  "The cart," he said, "reminds me of little old ladies with funny-colored hair, net scarves, and dowager's humps." She looked puzzled. "It reminds me," he continued, "of young women who are suddenly too stout in their jeans, frowning as they push it and drag blankface kids along at the same time. It reminds me," he said, thinking of her and her enthusiasm for it, "of bright young racehorses of women who willingly put themselves in harness." She removed herself from his lap.

  "It reminds you," she said, "of women."

  "My mother pushed a cart. My grandmother, too," said Suwelo.

  "Your wife pushes one," said Fanny.

  "I just don't see myself pushing one," said Suwelo. "I'm sorry."

  "I see," said Fanny. "I wonder if you see yourself eating?" And she lifted the mound of dough and dropped it into the blue step-on garbage can at her feet.

  Oh, they had many delicious meals together after that. But it was never the same. There had been a little murder, there in their bright, homey kitchen, where, up until that time, they'd both felt light, free, almost as if they were playing their roles. The cart disappeared, and Suwelo felt terrible about the whole episode. He found a grocery-delivery service and would often call in their orders. He began to learn to cook, fish and sauteed vegetables, or lasagne. He would rush to beat her home; she was back to being afraid of driving the car in traffic and so continued taking the bus. She neither swam nor ran. He would be there cooking, with jazz on the radio and a glass of wine for her. She'd come in, sigh, kick off her shoes, drift about the kitchen. Pick up the wine, accept his kiss. There was the little murdered thing between them, though. The more he tried to revive it, the deader it got.

  "I was raised to be a certain way," he began to say very often in conversations that were not about the little murder at all, but about other issues entirely, or so he thought.

  And she would murmur, "Yes. Yes, you were"; not with the understanding he was clumsily seeking, but with a quiet astonishment.

  "I DID NOT KNOW anything, Fanny, when you were born," said her mother, "about the United States, or any of the Americas, for that matter. It was the strangest thing to see so many white people, first off, and to see the massive heaviness of their cities. New York was horrifying. Atlanta, though smaller, also seemed uninhabitable because so much--people and buildings--was crowded together. But then we went into some of the homes people readily opened to us--our church people--and we saw that in spite of everything one could still attain a certain graciousness of living. This was remarkable, especially among black people, because it was right
at the end of World War II. Black soldiers were coming home and refusing to be segregated at restaurants and on buses, and the white men were steadily accusing them of raping white women, looking at white women--they called this 'reckless eyeballing,' and many a black man found himself in jail on this charge!--or even speaking to a white woman who was speaking to them. Needless to say, there was rarely any white woman at all involved. No American ones anyway. They knew better. The white men had simply seen red while they were fighting in Europe, in France and Italy, in particular, where the white women had not appeared to care what color American men were--their money was green. And besides, colored men do know how to have fun.

  "I learned this decisively when I settled in at my mother's house. She was afraid of men in a sexual way, but she knew how to enjoy their company. There were many men who came regularly to visit 'Miss Celie and Miss Shug.' Almost always they were men with some kind of talent. There was Mr. Burgess--'Burgie,' as he was called--who played French horn. French horn! Yancy Blake, who played guitar. Little Petey Sweetning, who played piano. Come to think of it, there must have been so many musicians because of Miss Shug, who was a great blues singer, though she rarely sang in public anymore. There were poets and funnymen, what you would now call 'comedians,' and, really, all kinds of people: magicians, jugglers, good horseshoe throwers, the occasional man who quilted or did needlepoint. 'Slavery left us with a host of skills!' one old, old optimist, who was king of the barbecue, often said. These people were remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about them, in a part of the country where there was so much oppression of black people, or of anyone that was considered 'inferior' or 'strange,' was that there was absolutely no self-pity. In fact, there was a greeting that habitues of our house used on encountering each other: 'All those at the banquet!' they'd say, and shake hands or hug. Sometimes they said this laughing, sometimes they said it in tears. But that they were still at the banquet of life was always affirmed.