The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "She was born in Chicago," continued Fanny, "and when she grew up she went to visit her mother's people in Denmark. Her mother had by that time married a regular American white man, and Helga/Nella, as the dark child in the family, had a very hard time of it."

  "Of course," said Ola.

  "When she got to Denmark she was surprised to find herself virtually 'lionized.' Everyone 'loved' her. She was painted by a famous local painter, who wanted to marry her. But she couldn't stand being the object of the Danes' expectations of what such an 'exotic'-looking woman must be. She couldn't stand the flamboyant 'African' dresses her relatives bought for her and insisted she wear. Nor did she enjoy being on display for strangers to admire. Besides, she found the country and the people very unlike the ones she'd left back home in Harlem. And she realized she preferred the ones in Harlem. This surprised the shit out of her. There's something about the old Harlem, the Harlem of the twenties, that had a tremendous hold on people's loyalties," mused Fanny. "I think it was the great music, the parties. The Emancipation Proclamation finally in action."

  "I've read about Harlem," said Ola. "In Langston Hughes. And it's true, his love of the place shines in every line."

  "But if you didn't marry the Swede," said Fanny, puzzled, "whom did you marry? Who is Mary Jane?"

  "An American," said Ola. "And an interesting woman. You must make it your business to meet her before you go back."

  "I didn't come all the way to Africa to meet American white women," said Fanny dryly.

  Ola chuckled, and leaned back on an elbow. "I have to admit the first time I met Mary Jane I was also skeptical. This was at a time when whites were being urged to emigrate. Not every white person, you know, but those who had no visible means of support, other than their African serfs. There were vast numbers of parasites to be got rid of. People who'd come into the country with nothing, when it was run by the white regime, and who now had large plantations, or at the very least had nice houses and their pick of well-paying jobs. It was a custom of the country, actually one of the 'items' in the advertising that lured white people to settle here, that every white man, woman, or child was assured of having at least one African servant. Most households had two or three. Many had five. They paid these people less than one percent of their own wages, and 'made up' the rest in old clothing and leftover food.

  "Some of the country's food came from America, by the way. The natives' food, I mean. Yes. I have myself seen stacks and stacks of American grain piled high on the wharf. 'A Gift from the American People,' stenciled on the side of each sack. You mean you never knew you were feeding us?" Ola asked Fanny. "The people in the underground used to make a joke about those sacks of grain, mainly corn; they said that America and the other white countries gave Africa a sack of vermin-infested corn for a sack of gold and diamonds, and considered it fair."

  Fanny laughed.

  "So we were asking whites to leave," continued Ola. "If they wanted to stay, and many of them did, they had to make a formal, legally binding commitment to assume all financial responsibilities for the health care, education, and housing of their former workers and their workers' children. They were to agree to a seven-year plan; at the end of which, the people who had served them for nothing for years and years must be certified to be in good health, to have a good education, or be well on the way to getting one, and they must be settled in decent houses that they owned. An international certification team would be put together, and it would go from house to house. Estate to estate. Plantation to plantation. And so on.

  "This was an insult to most whites, of course, many of whom were astonished not only that the new 'monkey' government, as some of them called it, demanded this--which is really very reasonable, considering the unearned wealth of the whites, wealth they were now trying desperately to get out of the country; and in lieu of having their houses and property confiscated outright, which is what they'd claimed they feared for years--but that good health, education, and decent housing were things Africans wanted! Some of these people went into shock at the realization that when the African who cooked their food and nursed their children smiled at them, she or he was smiling in spite of who they were, not because of who they were.

  "This was a very hectic time. There were people who took their quite large houses apart, piece by piece, and shipped them to other countries. They ripped up their own trees and gardens. They burned whole neighborhoods, exactly like the black rioters in the U.S. did during the sixties.

  "There were thousands of whites who grew too depressed to function; there were suicides, especially among the young. There were people who revealed that they thought being master of black people somewhere on earth was simply their destiny, as white people. Scads of this lot emigrated to Australia and New Zealand, where the black populations are small and weak.

  "But back to Mary Jane ... One day she turned up at my office in the Department of Entertainment and Culture--the people who ran this department prior to our taking over had had a special fondness for local productions of things like Show Boat, My Fair Lady, The Nutcracker, and, on the risque side, Cabaret. This was also before there was a Ministry of Culture. We were attached to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which was, at that time, just after our takeover, run by a man who had been out of the country while the fight for our independence was going on, and who now, upon his return, did everything he did out of guilt. He had been in America, hiding out in one of the universities there--I like to say this; it is not totally fair--and was militantly antiwhite. He especially disliked white women. Mary Jane was angry because this man had told her she'd be, for certain, one of the first white people 'required,' as he put it, to leave the country.

  "She explained to me that she'd started and now ran an art school, the M'Sukta School. Perhaps I'd heard of it?

  "Heard of it!" said Ola, suddenly sitting up and taking off his sandals. "It was not only the best art school we had in Olinka. It was the only art school. Certainly I'd heard of it. She was supporting seventy boys and girls at the school, she said. They lived there, as well. Her ambition was for the work of her artists to become part of what Olinka was known for. She even thought that somewhere down the line there might be some money for her students, and for the country, in it.

  "In any case, she said, she'd staked her life on the students, the school, the country, and, being no longer young, and with no desire to go back to America or to emigrate to New Zealand or Australia, she didn't see what there was left for her to do. All her money had gone into the school, which, our department head had told her, the government would confiscate. One thing she'd done was to put the school in the names of all the people who worked there.

  "'You'll get something for it,' I assured her.

  "'Yes,' she said. 'So I hear. Enough to buy a one-way ticket "back" to England. Well, I'm not from England.'

  "I went out that evening to have a look at her school, the M'Sukta School. It was located on the outskirts of town and was very modest. The girls and boys slept in separate barracks, and there was a huge communal studio that was mostly windows. Each bed was neatly made, with a locally woven woolen blanket, like the Pendleton blankets in America that are based on Indian designs, folded neatly at its foot. It was the first time I realized how similar Native American and Native African symbols and designs are. Beside each bed stood a small brightly painted wardrobe for the students' things.

  "These were all disturbed children. I hadn't realized that, until I met them. A number of them had lost their parents in the rebellions against the white regime. Some of them had lost their reasoning under beatings while in detention. A good number of them had glaring physical disabilities. There were those who limped, breathed oddly, squinted, or flapped useless stumps and arms. They were the most battered and deprived of our citizens. Mary Jane had gone about collecting them pretty much off the streets. Such as they were--'streets,' that is--in 'our' part of town.

  "'Tell me,' I asked her, 'are you a nun?'

  "She smok
ed cigarettes that were made of rolled-up eucalyptus leaves. She took a puff from the one in her hand and blew out the smoke.

  "'Why?' she said. 'Do I look like one?'

  "In truth, she looked like a gangster's moll from one of those old Hollywood movies of the thirties. But only a nun would do this sort of thing. Surely.

  "I was on excellent terms with the nuns who'd taught Nzingha," said Ola. "They were a radical lot, who believed with all their hearts that Jesus was a flaming revolutionary and that Mary and Martha were no better. None of them would ever fire a weapon, but when we were in hiding, we counted on them to transport weapons to us. So this was my notion of nuns.

  "'I was very rich, once,' said Mary Jane. 'Also very poor.' And that is all she said.

  "'Why is it called the M'Sukta School?' I asked her. 'M'Sukta' is not an Olinka word, but an Ababa one," Ola explained to Fanny. "The Ababa are a sister tribe. And Mary Jane proceeded to tell me the most astonishing tale about an Ababa woman who'd been taken to England and shut up for nearly fifteen years in the British Museum of Natural History. She'd spent her time there weaving. Mary Jane's great-great-aunt had sprung her--Mary Jane wasn't sure just how--and brought her back to Ababaland. Unfortunately, she was the sole survivor of her tribe. Mary Jane's great-aunt had inherited her great-great-aunt's diaries about this episode. The great-aunt, when she was grown, had also come out to Africa. She'd actually lived among the Olinka and done many good works: she'd educated a number of women who became doctors and social workers and agronomists and whatnot. An amazing number of these women died in the struggle against the white regime. She was living here at the time the whites destroyed our villages and forced us onto reservations. Like your Indian tribes, you know. Like our own wild animals.

  "Mary Jane inherited a huge dose of gumption and the 'can do' spirit. She came to Africa and taught herself to paint. She'd dabbled before, she said, just for something useful to do, but this time she was serious. She had some money, so she bought land well away from the city--which, unfortunately, crept out, she said, to swallow her--and in complete solitude, with neither maid nor 'boy,' she painted. Sometimes as much as twelve hours a day. She had a horse, and days when she didn't paint, she'd ride. She came to know the people in the countryside, and the country itself, very well. Her paintings began to please her."

  "How admiringly you speak of her," said Fanny, somewhat grudgingly. She had started to do yoga postures as she listened to Ola. Now she formed her body into the shape of a plow and gave her back a good long stretch.

  "Yes," said Ola, watching her maneuvers on the grass, "wait until you meet her. She looks exactly like that actress you have in America, the one with the flat voice, blond hair, and gray eyes who is married to a man who looks like her twin. She could not be whiter-looking. I'd always thought if I ever met such an American woman, I'd be speechless. But no. Of course, by then, to help her run the school, she had a staff. I was so impressed with them. She'd sent them off, here and there--to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Berlin--to study art and psychology, and how to run a top-flight boarding school for disturbed youngsters. They were all eager-eyed, bright as pennies, affectionate toward the students and toward their headmistress. I took my cue from them and was soon chattering along a mile a minute. I immediately found an ulterior motive for trying to help her save her school. It was a fabulous place to rehearse and perform my plays!

  "I'd never seen anything like it. Did I say that every inch of every wall of the buildings, outside and inside, was covered with paintings? Whenever the school ran out of paper and canvas, which was regularly, Mary Jane explained, they simply whitewashed over an old mural on one of the walls and started a new mural over it. She said the students had complained in the beginning because their barracks and the common studio had mud walls and a thatched roof. It reminded them too much of the sterile thatched huts the white regime had erected for their parents and grandparents on the reserves. But, said Mary Jane, in my great-aunt's books--she'd come to Africa to write books, you know--she'd talked about the art created by the people before their villages were bulldozed. Art they just casually did in the painting of their houses every year after the rainy season, and as casually lived in. So she'd felt the housing construction and decoration were right.

  "To make a sprawling tale reasonably cogent," said Ola, "Mary Jane and I, along with her seven-member staff, the cook and the gardener, and some of the mothers of the children, and, to be fair, an older brother and a father or two, brainstormed together for many days and decided there was nothing left to do to save the school but for Mary Jane and me to marry.

  "It was bound to cause trouble. There I was, one of the 'best' and most visible of the black men in Olinka, educated in the West, with a nice house and car and whatnot, and, many suspected, and a few actually knew, with a wife stuck away in the bush; there I was, an undisputed leader of our country, pointing out its needs and glories and its transgressions right and left. Occasionally pillorying the white man and his woman with well-deserved viciousness. How could I, of all people, marry a white woman? And not even one who was young, like those in the girlie magazines that were suddenly flooding the countryside and that one saw absolutely everywhere.

  "For this was one of many parting ploys used by the vanquished white regime. The use of the white woman's body. The white woman's body, so long off limits, was suddenly everywhere. Her very private parts splayed out for all to see. The young boys carried the rolled-up magazines in their back pockets. This became a status symbol, like T-shirts and blue jeans. Part of their style. Their fathers and uncles kept stacks of the magazines under lock and key at home under their beds, or in the office. There was a lively black-market trade in these magazines. Our women were being encouraged to lighten their faces with bleach, to go blond. Suddenly it was understood that nudity did not denote barbarity. The very women who'd been stoned, practically, for going without their blouses were now told they must take them off in order to be modern.

  "At the same time, the government, after throwing out a majority of the white man's laws, because they oppressed the native population, decided that the one law they would assuredly keep was the one forbidding interracial marriage. This proved they had as much race pride as the white man, you see. On the other hand, they had reinstated polygamy, which I was against, and which women were against. After all, polygamy is a clear forerunner of the plantation system, with the husband as 'master' and the wives as 'slaves.' Well, it wasn't a government that listened to women. Everyone knew that by then.

  "If I married Mary Jane, I could harass the lawmakers twice.

  "They disapproved of interracial marriage but approved of and encouraged polygamy. I would take a second wife, but she'd be white.

  "The more down-to-earth reason for marrying, though, was to make Mary Jane a citizen of the country and therefore ineligible for deportation, and to keep her and her school in Olinka.

  "The government was distressed by my decision. I didn't care. They needed the plays I was writing. They needed my popularity with the masses. It was only through my plays that the government could speak to the people about a way of life our country was struggling to achieve, and not frighten them to death.

  "Mary Jane got to stay on in Olinka; her school grew. The people made allowances for my behavior and essentially forgave me, as they are wont to do. Besides, they came to appreciate Mary Jane's contribution to their children's and their country's future. But the government, really just the idiot head of the Ministry of Home Affairs, visited the M'Sukta School and demanded that the buildings be constructed of 'modern ingredients.' Tin and plywood. This was his perverted response to our successful maneuvers. All the children's murals were smashed, and with them the traditional character of the school. But Mary Jane and her staff were undaunted. Oh, they cried, we all cried, for weeks. But they had a vision of what the future they were working toward must be. It looked an awful lot like what they already had together every day. This was a hard spirit to smash. I was delighted t
o be a small part of it.

  "And," said Ola finally, with a deep sigh, getting to his feet, as Fanny, coming out of the eagle pose, stood solidly once more on hers, "there I was married to a white woman I barely knew, who rapidly became less white to me. We became staunch friends and allies, and so we remain to this day."

  "And you never ... tried anything?" asked Fanny, smiling, but with an insatiable curiosity about her father's life.

  "Tried anything!" said Ola. "I wouldn't have dared. Mary Jane--wait till you meet her--she's got a glance that could chop one off at the knees."

  MARY JANE BRIDEN--MISS B to all--was a dead ringer for Joanne Woodward as she'd appeared in the last movie of hers Fanny had seen--something about a husband falling in love with a younger woman, and sharing a secret life with her, and a child, and dying, and leaving his wife with this betrayal on her hands. She had that same wide mouth, flat teeth, and level, controlled voice. Under which, though, the hearer could suspect a layer or two of hysteria. She had cool gray eyes, and her white hair was cut in a bob that looked a great deal like a wig, slightly askew, and dyed an almost gentian blue.

  "I didn't go to Ola's funeral," Miss B was saying. "I couldn't bear to sit there while all the people who hated his guts went on about how much they'd valued him and how much he's going to be missed! Like hell he's going to be missed," she said, taking a drink of whiskey from the water tumbler she held in her hand. "He's going to be missed, all right. There's no one left to speak up to the government now. Nobody with any power, anyhow; the women will always rouse themselves to tell the boys what time of day it is... . I didn't need to go to the funeral; Ola and I had already said our good-byes. He died here, at my house. You didn't know?"

  "No," said Fanny, "I didn't."

  "He was in the middle of rehearsals for his new play, the one about the Olinka, black and white, middle class. About how these people, with the government's blessing, are permitting the country to grow as divided along class lines as it was under the whites along color lines. It was to be the first of his outright satires, he said." She laughed. "He always claimed the middle class wasn't suitable material for drama; only comedy, or, not even comedy but satire and farce.