by Alice Walker
“She was never no angel. Fact of the matter, she was mean. Always had to have her own way. But not always with me. I could usually get her to show her good side. Sometimes she took food from some of the littler kids and gave bites of it to me, and we’d stand there eating whatever it was and watching the little fellow she’d taken it from cry. Lissie got more whippings than anybody at school. She was a born ringleader. Even as a little thing she spoke right up. Other little girls had trouble with the boys bullying them. Not Lissie. She ruled over the boys, the same way she did over the girls, and she would fight at the drop of a hat. I mean fight like the very devil. She had these big white teeth, and when she got in a fight with anybody she just chopped away at them. She bit a boy’s ear near about off that tried to beat up on her, and after that she was like a queen. She’d speak and the waters parted.
“I was a little afraid of Lissie, to tell the truth. She was ruthless. And she would tell lies on people just to laugh at the confusion she made. She could really be wicked. One time Mr. Beaumont almost shut down the school ’cause Lissie said, loud enough for him to hear: ‘Henry Aiken’—a big hulking brute that looked like a horse seated at a desk—‘look like he lost something under Miss Beaumont’s desk.’ It was true he always had his eyes on what he could see of Miss Beaumont’s ankles, but he was harmless, and Miss Beaumont’s behavior was beyond reproach. There was a big to-do in the school. Miss Beaumont and Henry were made fun of. Mr. Beaumont eventually looked like a jackass, especially because Miss Beaumont temporarily left him, left the community, and nearly lost that teaching job. Mr. Beaumont had to go to her mama’s house and beg her to return. Lissie, my own little Lissie, just laughed.
“There never was enough going on to suit her, so she tended to look on people’s lives as if they was plays. She was always moving people around. But she was good to me. She protected me. For one curious thing about me was that, unlike the other fellows, I couldn’t fight. I just couldn’t. It seemed so rude and crude. I would always rather run from a fight. And, you know, running from fights attracts ’em. I use to think there had to be some other way of settling differences. But nobody on our island seemed to have heard of it. The grown-ups sometimes talked things through, but then, come Saturday nights, they’d get to swinging at each other, too. So Lissie took up for me. She’d stand there flat-footed—barefooted, too, ’cause none of us had school shoes, just the ones we wore on Sundays to church—and she’d stick out her bony chest and bare her big white teeth and she could blow like the best and baddest of the boys, even if they was twice her size. It just didn’t faze her. She never showed fear. In fact, when Lissie started to tot up all the limbs she planned to chop through and all the gashes she planned to rub sand in, her voice took on a cool disinterested quality and her eyes seemed to be looking way off in the distance just beyond her opponent’s head. It was spooky. She was so little. So black. She was, like, concentrated, if you know what I mean. Like, anywhere you were likely to grab her would be resisting you and whipping you, too—’cause, well, her bored look said she’d dealt with your kind before and she’d really hoped for something more interesting to do than mopping up the ground with your sorry ass that afternoon. Where did it come from? This particular concentrated form of energy that was Lissie? When she told me, I was and I wasn’t surprised.”
THEY WERE EXACTLY AS Carlotta had imagined them. Standing close together at the railing of a ship. Not quite a ship; only Arveyda’s olive-green sailboat, with its black-and-yellow sails, which he steered with the same meditative masterfulness with which he played his flute. On this small boat he traveled the waters of the world whenever situations on land became too intense. The quiet of the boat was soothing, and when he grew tired of sailing, he turned on the boat’s motor, which droned energetically, like a large, persistent fly, or he simply permitted the boat to list as it would, in the wind.
They traveled south.
Under the open sky, the reflections of the turquoise water near her country’s shoreline brightening her sad eyes, Zedé became a different woman. Gone the hesitant English that was a result of shyness, passionate excitement, or fear. Though her voice often cracked with the effort not to weep from the pain of relived experiences, she spoke with an eloquence that startled Arveyda, who held on to her as she talked, not as a lover, but as the ear that might at last reconnect her to her world.
“Of the way of my country you can have no comprehension,” she said, “especially as it was when I was a child. Everything was changing, it is true, but still many of the old ways were everywhere on view. Our mothers taught us about lovemaking and babies when we became señoritas, of course, but all along also they taught us the history of our civilization.
“I will always remember there was a gigantic waterfall,” Zedé continued, “like the one I have seen in pictures of Jamaica. This was a magic place. We went there to bathe while we had our period, whole groups of girls and their mothers. It was always on the full moon. It was warm. Even the water; but refreshing, too, on our skins and in our long hair. There was no one, in the old time, who did not have long hair. You just did! That was that! No one gave any thought to it much, either. You could wear it hanging or propped up on your head or pulled back by bits of string or flower stems, any way you could. Yes, and some of the women made these headbands of beads that were pretty and very slippery, like the hide of an iguana. Yes!
“Anyway, we would all gather by Ixtaphtaphahex, the Goddess, for that’s what her name meant, and our mothers would prepare food, and the young girls went up and down the sides of the falls collecting bits of wood for a fire. After eating and bathing we drew up in a circle near the fire, and if someone was nursing a tattoo, her mother would work on it, rubbing in the dye, while someone else’s mother told stories of long ago.
“That is how I first learned about the priests. The priests of our village lacked any sign of joy. They always seemed, from their sour expressions, to be hurting and as if they had given up something that now plagued them with anxiety. Of course they were feared, if not respected, and of course the fear looked like respect, I guess. Doesn’t it usually? For wherever they went, the people bowed to them, and the people worked to keep them in food. The people built their houses for them. But then, people also did all these things without joy. And it was only when the priests led the parades in the ceremonies, blessing the village, the crops, and the beasts, that the people received any satisfaction from them. And the reason for this was—their costumes! Their costumes were made by women like my mother, who sometimes worked the whole year on the feathered and beaded and shell-bedecked outfits the priests wore. And every year when the priests swept by the crowd, their garments were more resplendent than the outfits made the year before. Sometimes, I tell you, they dazzled the eyes, and the heart grew immense from just the notion that such beauty could be made and could exist. You just could not believe anything so gorgeous was made by human hands, and especially not by these poor bent little women like my mother, sitting on the dirt floor of her hut.
“My mother had a special hut with mud walls and a grass roof for her work. There she would be, sometimes for days at a time. We could watch her from our main house, but we learned early not to bother her when she was doing holy work, making the costumes for the priests. I used to hide in the taraba bushes that grew beside the large mango tree in our yard and watch her as she worked. Some days she did nothing at all. My mother, you know, smoked a pipe, a little clay one with feathers along the stem, and she would sit with her back against the hut and smoke and stare out into the distance, as if she were blessing the thousands of acres of bananas. Sometimes, yes, she muttered to herself, quite loudly, and then I thought she’d discovered me hiding and watching her. But no, even if I had walked in front of her at such times, I doubt she would have seen me.
“Then eventually she would knock out her pipe—she had a set of chimes, very low, very sweet—and she would knock the pipe against these chimes, which hung beside the door, and she
would listen to the sweet, light sound. And then, if she agreed with the sound, she would nod, once, and then she would begin.
“She made capes and headdresses of great beauty, and she did it truly as if by magic. There were no squinting lines around my mother’s eyes, as there are around mine, because she rarely looked at what she was doing. Her fingers seemed to know just what to do, and her face remained as if she were dreaming. Only her back, from so long bending, was slightly crooked.
“Over a long stretch of work, she would sometimes lose this precious state. She would come back to our main house and cook and clean and scold like a regular mother. And we were always so glad to have her back, too, though she’d never been farther away than a few steps across the yard. My father, especially, was happy to have back his wife. And he was glad to hear if the work was going well, because then my mother smiled at him. If it was going well, she tolerated him as a burden and an intrusion and all her words to him—and they were always few—were harsh. If he tried to speak to her when her mind was on her work, she answered him with the expression of someone who has stomach ache.
“She was someone who could not be rushed. This seems a small thing. But it is actually a very amazing quality, a very ancient one. She did everything at just the same pace as before, she could tell the time of day or night by the moisture in the atmosphere, and she went about her business as if she would live forever, and forever was very, very long. That is the kind of mujer my mama was. When you look at me you see her, but I have lost ‘forever’; therefore I sometimes hurry.
“Now the story of the priests is a sad one, and I don’t think the men of my village realized that the women knew it to its smallest details. Unfortunately, even in my poor village women were considered inferior and kept out of the secrets the men felt it necessary to have. But we knew! Everything! We always had secrets of our own.
“Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added—only women had been priests. Yes! This is what they said. But really, in the beginning they were not priests to themselves; it was the men who made them so. But then the men forgot that they had made them so. Well, what happened is that in the beginning, at about the same time the toucan was created, there was also woman, and in the process of life and change she produced a being somewhat unlike herself. This frightened her. Still, she kept the little hombre with her for a long time, until he grew anxious to discover whether there existed, somewhere else, more of his own kind. Off he went and, sure enough, there were others like himself, among whom he lived. These first men were so new to each other that all they did was stare into each other’s eyes—for centuries! They were so glad to be found. But this meant they had no self-consciousness about how they looked, beyond the dangling evidence of maleness, the elongated clitoris. They had no concept of dress.
“Woman was entirely used to herself, while man was still infatuated with his relative newness. Woman was already into adornment. In truth, she was already into high fashion! Yes! You can laugh, and I know this is a funny way now to put it. But! Woman did not know she was even interested in high fashion. She was more, you know, like playing with herself. Making interesting to herself and other women what she already had. So she had tits, sticking out to there! She had a soft brown belly and strong brown legs. So what, that she had hair to her ass that glistened like the wings of a bird. Woman was bored with it. And so she began to play with how she looked. She used feathers, shells, stones, flowers. She used leaves, bark, colored sand. She used mud. The toenails of birds! For days she and her sisters hung over the edge of the reflecting pools in the jungle, trying this and that. The rest of the time they spent gathering food. Occasionally they were host to a man, whom they played with, especially sexually, until they tired of him; they then abandoned him.
“But it was these abandoned men who, over time, found each other and corroborated each other’s experience among the women, dressed so weirdly in their colors and feathers, and they spread the word among other men who lacked their experience. Then one of the men told of a birth among the women. That clinched it. Immediately they imagined a mujer muy grande, larger than the sky, producing, somehow, the earth. A goddess. And so, if the producer of the earth was a large woman, a goddess, then women must be her priests, and must possess great and supernatural powers.
“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man’s mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women. They kept their distance from them, but spied on them when they could. The finery the women wore seemed to prove their supernaturalness. The men, lacking the centuries of clothing and adornment experience of the women, were able to make only the clumsiest imitations. The women laughed at them. Perhaps the most fatal error in the whole realm of human responses to sincere effort! So, at first, to show their worshipful intent, the men, who were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat, gathered those things they knew the women liked or might be encouraged to like—feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws—and brought them, on their knees, to the women, who picked over them like housewives at a sale.
“It was a long time before they began demanding these gifts, just as it was a long time before the men noticed that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves. Strangely, the men did not like the children; it was as if the children made them nervous, even the boy children, whom they were always given or who almost always ran off to join them and whom they, in a manner of speaking, raised. For centuries the male community revolved around the female one, and the women hardly noticed it, except to make demands about the amount and number of things they were given.
“Many grandmothers lived and died during this time. Bowed down to, feared, worshiped, spoiled. And then, one day, there was a rebellion. The men grew sick of the women they worshiped. And by now they had made an important discovery about woman’s ability to produce life. That discovery was—and it had been kept well hidden by woman for a very long time—that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had, as had been suspected (and of course many strange things had been tried with that one!), but a different one. Then it was thought that anyone with such a hole at his or her bottom could produce life through it.
“And here is where the sadness comes in. For the women, though easily bored, made a great deal of fun out of life. Dressing themselves up, they giggled. Looking into the still mirrors of the jungle pools, they laughed. There was very little pain in their lives except for the discomfort they experienced in childbirth, and they soon forgot that. They died relatively young, too, either from attacks by animals or because their natural life span was short, so there was none of the creaking pain of old age. In short, it was during this period of rebellion that the men decided they could and would be priests. That they could be the ones through whom life passed! They began to operate on themselves, cutting off and flinging away their maleness, and trying to fashion a hole through which life could come.
“They died like flies. This is why, even today, there is a certain sadness a family feels when a boy decides to become a priest. Here is the origin of celibacy, of forfeiting children of one’s own. For to become a priest in the old days meant one must do without one’s very genitals!
“But listen, chico mio,” said Zedé, stroking Arveyda’s brow, “this is how it was even when I was a child. No. Not the whole of the genitals, because they gradually learned something from the numbers of men who died—their deaths making them more and more holy!—but they cut off the balls. They forgot about the hole through which life passes. They forgot this was what they were trying to make. It hurt too much to think of this, and to do it, and it didn’t work, as well. The futility nearly prostrated them. What they remembered was that they must be li
ke women, and if they castrated themselves at a certain age—the time of puberty, when they chose or were chosen for the priesthood—they could sound like woman and speak to the universe in woman’s voice.
“But, oh, the pain! The operations, which were rarely done right. The heat and the flies and the sweat! The hatred of woman, whose pain was confined to childbirth and maybe a few cramps every month. And who kept producing life and adorning herself and thinking very little of it.”
“LISSIE MEANS ‘THE ONE who remembers everything,’” Miss Lissie said to Suwelo, her black eyes, under wrinkled eyelids, as brilliant and as steady as a hawk’s, “but I am old now and my brain cells—brain cells are like batteries, you know—are dying, millions of them at a time. Of my earlier lives in Egypt and Atlantis I recall nothing. I only mention these places because everyone does, mostly people who need to feel better about themselves in this present lifetime but cannot. To be truthful, I never remembered anything about those places, and if it were not for the existence of pyramids and the evidence of drowned ancient civilizations now coming to light, I’d doubt they’d ever been. Since I know they did exist, in my rational mind, I have to assume that those brain cells I would need to remember them, being so many thousands of years, and more, old, have atrophied. But on the other hand, I do not remember with my brain itself anyway, but with my memory, which is separate, somehow, yet contained within it. Charged, I feel my brain is, with memory. Yes, as I said, like a battery.”
Suwelo was enchanted by the hundred or so silvery white locks of hair on Miss Lissie’s finely shaped head, making an aureole for her dark brown face and causing it to look, even in the shadows of Uncle Rafe’s house, kissed by the sun. These locks grew out in all directions from her skull, but fell gently over her shoulders and down her very straight back, like a mantle of the brightest fleece. When he had first seen her, among the other old women in Uncle Rafe’s front parlor, she, like the rest, had had her head covered. He would never have imagined, on so old a person, such wild, abundant, glorious hair. It gave her the curious look of some ancient creature, which, even at rest, is about to spring.