Possessing the Secret of Joy

by Alice Walker

  As Pierre reads I study his face seeking signs of Adam, signs of Lisette. He seems a completely blended person and as such new. In him “black” has disappeared; so has “white.” His eyes are a dark, lightfilled brown; his forehead is high and tan; his nose broad, a little flat. He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as of two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain. His brother sits across from him as he reads, sunk in admiration. They have stolen many hours to be together, roaming the Berkeley campus and the city’s streets, happy to have found each in the other his own best friend.

  Now he stops reading, suddenly, and looks at me. This is from a book by a French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, he says, turning it so I can see its orange cover and read its title, Conversations with Ogotemmêli. I am under the influence of a new, mild and quite pleasant drug. It is as if I’ve smoked marijuana. I have not grasped the meaning of the passage, which Pierre has read to me so earnestly; nor do I completely comprehend how it is he is sitting in my living room reading to me from this strange book. Have I stopped hating him? I gaze at Benny, who looks so happy, and then down into my lap. My eyes sting the way they do when I’m drugged; closing them brings relief. Pierre is reading as if I am listening: “God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps of any kind, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the former disorder.” I feel him stop, rustle the pages, and look over at me. I raise my eyes and attempt a bright look in his direction. I am awake, I say. Indeed, I am listening. However, as he resumes reading, the words, on touching my ear, bounce back into his mouth, as if they’re made of India rubber. This is a distracting sight, and I look at Benny to see if he has noticed it. He hasn’t. He sits enraptured, his notepad on his lap. Who taught him to write, I ask myself, if he can never remember anything?

  “The spirit drew two outlines on the ground, one on top of the other, one male and the other female. The man stretched himself out on these two shadows of himself, and took both of them for his own. The same thing was done for the woman. Thus it came about that each human being from the first was endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris.”

  Here I looked up. Pierre continued: “Man’s life was not capable of supporting both beings: each person would have to merge himself in the sex for which he appeared to be best fitted.” So, said Pierre, closing the book but keeping his finger between its pages, the man is circumcised to rid him of his femininity; the woman is excised to rid her of her masculinity. In other words, he said, leaning forward in his chair, a very long time ago, men found it necessary to permanently lock people in the category of their obvious sex, even while recognizing sexual duality as a given of nature.

  How long ago was this? I ask, my focus somewhat blurred.

  Pierre shrugged, and I fancied I saw his mother’s body in the fluid ripple of his shoulders.

  Even Cleopatra was circumcised, he says. Nefertiti, also. But some people think the people in this book, the Dogon, are from a civilization even older than theirs, and that this civilization spread northward, from central Africa up toward ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean. He paused, musing. My mother used to say genital mutilation, which predates all the major religions, was a kind of footbinding.

  After he leaves the house to accompany Benny to a basketball game, I am left with the book, whose pages he has thoughtfully marked, and with the puzzle of his last comment. Suddenly I see Lisette very clearly. She is sitting by a window in front of which there is a desk. She is thinking of me as she looks into a thick brown book in front of her, and her white brow is puckered in a frown. She is gazing at a drawing of a tiny, putrid, Chinese woman’s foot, and reading the notation that says the rotten smell was an aphrodisiac for the man, who liked to hold both small feet helpless in his large hand, raising them to his nose as he prepared to ravish the woman, who could not run away. This immobility most satisfying to his lust. The pain of her hobbling attempts to escape pure incentive to relish the chase.

  His mother has been conjured by the odd, unAmerican movement of Pierre’s shoulders, as much as by his words. Why, I wonder, do we assume people who think deeply about us ever die?

  As I open the book, my eye falls on a passage Pierre had not read: “The man then had intercourse with the woman, who later bore the first two children of a series of eight, who were to become the ancestors of the Dogon people. In the moment of birth the pain of parturition was concentrated in the woman’s clitoris, which was excised by an invisible hand, detached itself and left her, and was changed into the form of a scorpion. The pouch and the sting symbolized the organ: the venom was the water and the blood of the pain.”

  I read the passage over again, my eye always stopped by the words “an invisible hand.” Even so long ago God deserted woman, I thought, staying by her just long enough to illustrate to man the cutting to be done. And what if pain wasn’t what she felt at the moment of parturition? After all, pain was what I felt, having given birth, and I did not have a clitoris for it to be concentrated in.

  I read further: “The dual soul is a danger; a man should be male, and a woman female. Circumcision and excision are…the remedy.”

  But who could bear to think of this for long? I closed the book, wandered unsteadily across the room, flopped heavily onto the couch, and lost myself in a rerun of “HeeHaw” on TV.

  ADAM

  IT SADDENS ME that Pierre has never married, and that he seems content to pursue his career as an anthropologist and to spend much of the time he has for himself with Benny. This petit (for a man) curly-haired, teak-colored person is my son! I am as astonished as he approaches middle age as I was when he was two. Though his voice is deep, deeper than mine, a person of color’s voice, it still seems at times, because of his accent, the voice of a stranger. I see his mother in him. Lisette, who took so long to die, bravely determined to hold on to her dignity, her self, to the end; her thick, fierce French neck wasting away as she struggled. Only to beg, finally, for morphine and more and more morphine. Seeing her in Pierre makes the memory of my last visits with her bearable, and reactivates happier thoughts of our earlier days.

  Pierre laughs at my concern, gracefully refraining from observing aloud that my own marriage has been hellacious.

  I am married to my work, he says.

  But your work does not produce children, I counter.

  He smiles. Mais oui, he says, my work will produce children! Children who will at least understand why they are afraid. How can a child be a child if she is afraid?

  I cannot argue. Since the moment, as a small boy, Pierre heard of Tashi’s dark tower and her terror of it, he has never put her suffering out of his mind. Everything he learns, no matter how trivial or in what context or with whom, he brings to bear on her dilemma. The conversations we have as adults predictably include some bit of information that he has stored away to become a part of Tashi’s puzzle.

  The only girl he ever loved, for instance. A Berkeley student with whom he often went horseback riding.

  She rode bareback, always, he tells me, as we sit on a boulder in the park in the middle of an afternoon hike. She experienced orgasm while riding the horse.

  Are you sure? I ask.

  Yes, he says. She swooned. And when I asked her, she admitted it.

  I am speechless at the thought that any woman’s pleasure might be found so easily, I stammer; so, in a sense, carelessly.

  The word you are looking for, says Pierre, is wantonly. Loosely. A woman who is sexually “unrestrained,” according to the dictionary, is by definition “lascivious, wanton and loose.” But why is that? A man who is sexually unrestr
ained is simply a man.

  Well, I say, was she loose?

  Pierre shifts his weight on the boulder and frowns up at the sky. Now, he says, in the scholarly tone that still strikes me as amusing in one so childlike in size, we can begin to understand something about the insistence, among people in mutilating cultures, that a woman’s vagina be tight. By force if necessary. If you think of being wanton, being loose, as being able to achieve orgasm easily.

  How did this happen? I ask. To your friend, I mean.

  She’d been brought up by pagan parents, earth worshippers, on a little island somewhere in Hawaii. She could experience orgasm doing almost anything. She said that at home there were favorite trees she loved that she rubbed against. She could orgasm against warm, smooth boulders, like this one we’re sitting on; she could come against the earth itself if it rose a bit to meet her. However, says Pierre, she’d never been with a man. Her parents had taught her early on that it wasn’t absolutely necessary, unless she wanted to have children.

  And with you? I ask.

  I’m afraid my lovemaking had a dampening, no, a drying effect, he says. No matter how I tried, it was hard not to approach her from a stance of dominance. When making love with me, she became less and less wet. His face is sad for a moment, then he grins. She went off to India. I think she left me for an elephant she learned to ride, or perhaps for a slow, warm trickle of water from a waterfall, of which there were many amorous ones on her Hawaiian island.

  I always thought perhaps it was to make sexual love between women impossible that men destroyed their external sexual organs.

  I still think that is partly true, says Pierre. But there is also my experience with Queen Anne.

  Queen Anne? Your friend was named after Queen Anne Nzingha, the African warrior?

  No, he says. After Queen Anne’s lace, the wildflower.

  Later on in the hike, stopping at a pipe for water, Pierre still muses. Is it only woman who would make love to everything? he asks. Man too, after all, has external sexual organs. But does man seek oneness with the earth by having sex with it?

  You mean Queen Anne wasn’t simply masturbating?

  No. She said she never masturbated, except with herself. And even then she was making love. Having sex. Her partner just happened to be something other than another human being.

  Was it with Queen Anne that you discovered your duality? I ask.

  Yes, he says. Until I met her I was never sexually attracted to women. I imagined all women mainly suffered from sex. Meeting her was a great relief. I realized that even bisexuality, of which I’d always felt myself capable but of which I’d had no real experience, was still, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, like lesbianism, only a very limited sexuality. I mean, here was someone who was pansexual. Remember Pan? he asks, laughing. Well, Queen Anne was Pan’s great-grandmother!

  An image of Pan, the Greek god, merrily playing his flute in the forest rises up. His human head rests on a body composed of the parts of many different animals. Clearly his ancestors had related sexually, at least in imagination, to everything. And before him Queen Anne’s ancestors had related sexually to the earth itself. I am really too old to use the expression “wow” gracefully. But “wow” is what I hear myself say. Which makes Pierre laugh again.

  But in a moment he has returned to the thread of his thought. In pornography, he says ruefully, this ability of woman’s to take pleasure in diverse ways is projected in a perverted way. I have seen films in which she is forced to copulate with donkeys and dogs and guns and other weapons. Oddly shaped vegetables and fruits. Broom handles and Coke bottles. But this is rape. Man is jealous of woman’s pleasure, Pierre says after a while, because she does not require him to achieve it. When her outer sex is cut off, and she’s left only the smallest, inelastic opening through which to receive pleasure, he can believe it is only his penis that can reach her inner parts and give her what she craves. But it is only his lust for her conquest that makes the effort worthwhile. And then it is literally a battle, with blood flowing on both sides.

  Ah, I say, the original battle of the sexes!

  Exactly, he replies.

  Well, I say, some men turn to animals, and each other. Or they use the woman as if she were a boy.

  If you are at all sensitive to another’s pain, he says, grimacing, or even cognizant of your own, not to mention the humiliation of forcing yourself inside someone whose very flesh has been made into a barrier against you, what else can you do?

  PART THIRTEEN

  EVELYN

  FOR YEARS I WATCHED a television program called “Riverside.” It was about a hospital for psychiatric disorders that reminded me of the Waverly. When Amy Maxwell was introduced to me by Raye, and closely resembled the woman who played the tough, compassionate matriarch and physician emeritus of the hospital, I felt immediately relaxed with her. She was elderly, bony and silver-haired, with a mouth full of straight white teeth which appeared to be wired into a permanent grin. She peered at me over silver half-glasses and stuck out her hand.

  Raye sat as usual in her maroon wingback chair, a bemused look on her face. I could not fathom why Amy and I were being brought together. As a joke to myself I wondered: Could this woman be Mzee’s belated bag of clay?

  I learned something from Amy recently that I thought might interest you, said Raye, leaning forward.

  There was a long silence, during which I was highly conscious of the powdered pinkness of Amy’s face and the mock-orange scent of her perfume. At last she began to speak. She spoke of her son, Josh—a word which in Olinka means turban—and of how he had been for many years a patient of Raye’s. She spoke his name softly, tentatively, as if unsure she had a right to it. He had danced with a major ballet company throughout his twenties, after which he had had a hard time keeping up. Aging, out of work, depressed, he’d killed himself while still in his thirties.

  Almost from birth he suffered from depression, said Amy. And almost from birth, she continued, with a self-deprecating look from Raye to me, I hauled him off to the shrink. Like the dutiful little soldier he was, he went unprotesting to have his head and heart examined by a succession of psychiatrists in an effort to adjust to my incessant cheerfulness: a sunniness so persistent it drove his father, a man of normal, up-and-down emotions, away. No matter what happened to me, I rose above it, said Amy, as my own mother had taught me to do, and as she herself had always done. She was a Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. Poor for much of her life, but then fabulously wealthy finally because she married my father, who owned a lot of downtown New Orleans.

  Here she paused and looked out the window. It was February; across the street the acacias were in bloom. The three of us were quiet, enjoying the look of the fine yellow fuzziness against the new and tender green. I was more puzzled than ever. I glanced sidelong at Raye, but she was sitting back in her chair, her eyes warmly encouraging as she gazed at Amy’s face. I realized this was not her first time hearing this.

  Amy laced her thin fingers together and cleared her throat. How old was she? I wondered. Seventy-five? Eighty? Older? She seemed remarkably fit, whatever her age. It was only when he wound up here, with Raye, she said, that he began to suspect the depression he’d always carried was mine.

  What do you mean? I said.

  I mean, said Amy, sighing, that when I was a very little girl I used to touch myself…there. It was a habit that mortified my mother. When I was three years old she bound my hands each night before I was put to bed. At four she put hot pepper sauce on my fingers. At six years of age our family doctor was asked to excise my clitoris.

  Is New Orleans America? I asked suspiciously. For this was all I could think to say.

  Yes, said Amy, I assure you it is. And yes, I am telling you that even in America a rich white child could not touch herself sexually, if others could see her, and be safe. It is different today, of course. And even back then not every parent reacted as my mother did. But that I was not the only one th
is happened to I am sure.

  I don’t believe you, I said, rising to go. For I saw the healthy green leaves of my America falling seared to the ground. Her sparkling rivers muddy with blood.

  Raye rose also and placed a hand on my arm. I was angry with her, and I knew the look in my eyes expressed it. How dare she subject me to such lies!

  Wait, she said.

  I sat.

  Amy smiled, a small, modest smile, in spite of her tense mouth that was shaped into a wider grin. You think you are the only African woman to come to America don’t you? she asked.

  Actually, I did think this. Black American women seemed to me so different from Olinka women, I rarely thought of their African great-great-grandmothers.

  Many African women have come here, said Amy. Enslaved women. Many of them sold into bondage because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage circumcised and infibulated. It was these sewed-up women who fascinated the American doctors who flocked to the slave auctions to examine them, as the women stood naked and defenseless on the block. They learned to do the “procedure” on other enslaved women; they did this in the name of Science. They found a use for it on white women…Amy laughed, suddenly. They wrote in their medical journals that they’d finally found a cure for the white woman’s hysteria.

  Well, somebody had to, said Raye, with a straight face. And the two of them actually sat there laughing.

  I could not take it in. I stared at Amy.

  It had been done to the grandmother of our cook, she said. Many operations, when she was a girl. She couldn’t have children of her own; she’d adopted Gladys, my mother’s childhood companion and maid, whose own clitoris had been excised; though she had not, like her mother, been infibulated. Gladys was docile in the extreme, not legally a slave, but superbly slavish in spirit. She just had no spunk. No self. This “gentleness of spirit,” as my mother called it, was always held up as exemplary and the way my mother wanted me to be.