by Alice Walker
“THEY CALLED HIM JESúS,” whispered Zedé, clutching Arveyda’s hand, though her back remained turned to him, “because they would not have been able to pronounce his real name even if he had told them what it was, which he did not, and he was a slave like the rest of us. Only, it was his own village in which we were kept. They also called him ‘indio loco’ because everyone else from his tribe had run away, but he could not run away. He would run a little away and hide out in the jungle, which he knew intimately, just as the animals knew it. He had always been there, you know. There was no time in life when he had not been there on that piece of the earth. So he would hide, and then he would sneak back and walk about the village in the dead of night. Nothing would be stolen, not even food, and this was very puzzling to everyone, our enslavers and ourselves alike.
“The reason he came back, a reason our enslavers never knew and would not have understood anyhow, was that he was the protector of the sacred stones of the village. These stones were three simple, ordinary-looking rocks that must always be in a certain area of the village’s center. If no one ever told you they were special, believe me you’d never know it. They blended into the earth perfectly. And yet, once Jesús had pointed them out to me, and showed me the sacred configuration— Δ —which was the same as the nuclear-bomb-shelter symbol, the stones leaped out at me, and I was hard-pressed to be silent when they were kicked about or simply trod upon. When they were kicked, as by the soldiers in their sullen idleness, or when some poor soul was beaten and blood was spilled upon them, or when a morsel of food that someone dropped touched them—well! This meant another definite visit from Jesús, who would have to risk life and limb to restore the stones’ position, wash off the blood, brush off the food, and so on. When I knew him better, I knew it would never have occurred to him to save himself if it meant abandoning his duty to the three small stones—about the size and color of brown pigeon eggs. As a dog is inevitably drawn back to where a bone is buried, Jesús returned to the stones. The keeping of them was his whole life, and it had been for thousands of years! He fully believed that if the stones were not kept, his people, the Krapokechuan, or ‘human beings,’ would remain dispersed forever and never again find a home. Because where the stones were was their home, you understand. Nowhere else. It is something not understood by norte-americanos; this I know.
“At last they captured him. How sorry we were! For though most of us were ashamed of the Indian part of ourselves, his presence was like that of a guardian spirit, an angel, and the times we managed to glimpse him, as he stole through the village at odd hours of the night, convinced us he was indeed wholly benign. He was so young! With a bush of hair to his waist. He wore only a cloth around his loins and beautiful red parrot feathers in his ears.
“Our captors did not understand his language, and when they beat him he was silent. They made him work with the rest of us, clearing the forest with a machete. The men used machetes and pickaxes and saws to fell and uproot the trees and vines, and the women used hoes and rakes to complete the slaughter of the earth. This was our work, day in, day out, from the crow of a rooster at dawn until dark. The guards forced the women to mate with them, and before long each guard had chosen his favorite slave ‘wife.’ The one who chose me did not force me, but bided his time. He was someone who beat and burned and killed without emotion or remorse, yet still managed to cling to the belief that someone would want to sleep with him without the use of force. It was a matter of pride to him. I only knew I was chosen because of how he looked at me and because the other men left me alone, and I would often hear their slave women screaming or sobbing prayers into the night.
“I did not plan to love Jesús. But how unlike them he was! There is in me, deep, always somewhere, the love of the priest, but the true priest, the one who watches over, the one who protects. Above all, the one who is more than his fancy dress. If there is any spirit that I find wholly erotic it is that one. Aiiee! Jesús was such a priest I used to feel as if the trees fell before him to be blessed, because, clearly, cutting them down was for him a torture comparable to being cut down himself. They were sobbing all the while, Jesús and his trees. He had known them his whole life. And for all his lifetimes before.
“Like it was with us, querido, I did not know what was happening or what to do about it. His eyes spoke. My womb leaped. Don’t laugh! Though expressed in the language of imbeciles, this is the way it was! We discovered I knew a few words of his strange language. The word for water, ‘ataras,’ the word for wood, ‘xotmea,’ the word for love, ‘oooo.’ The word for love, truly, four o’s! They could not watch us every minute. During an hour they could not witness and will never own, I made love to him. He made love to me. We made love together. They had bound him by the feet so that he could not move his legs apart. I crept into his hut and without speaking caressed and kissed him for a long time before taking him into my mouth. When I placed myself on top of him he was crying, and I was crying, and he held one of my breasts in his mouth, and his damp hair was like a warm fog on my face. Ai, they will never own passion!
“The second, and last, time was like the first, only even more intense. I knew the instant Carlotta was conceived. The seed flew into me where I was so open, and I fell off Jesús already asleep. It was asleep together that they found us. The first thing he did, the guard that had chosen me to want to sleep with him, was to cut off Jesús’ hair. He did it slowly, coldly, methodically, as if he had been thinking of doing it for a long time. He did it with a very sharp machete, and when the long, thick, rough black hair covered his dusty boots, he stamped his feet free of it as if stamping out desire.
“He never touched me himself, not even to beat me. That night the other men, the guards, one after the other came to the little hut in the forest in which they placed me. While this was happening to me, they killed Jesús. At dawn, as I lay bleeding, they brought his body and threw it in with me. Then they nailed shut the door, which was the only opening. Jesús’ throat had been cut. They had also removed his genitals. He had been violated in every conceivable way. There was not even a scrap of cloth to cover him. I was naked.
“Days and nights went by. The flies came by the hundreds. The rats. The smell. I beat on the door until my hands, covered with flies also, were dripping blood. I screamed. There were only the jungle sounds outside. I had nightmares, when I could sleep, about the body of the man I had loved. He was so silent. I cursed him now for being the death of me.
“And then one night I heard a noise outside the door—soft, almost not a noise. And then the door slowly opened, and the mournful and barbaric-looking tribesmen of Jesús filled the little hut. They wrapped his body in a large blanket before they turned to me, naked, shivering, dying on the dirt floor. Then I saw there was also a blanket for me.
“I would have stayed with them if I could. They understood, as no one else ever would, the form of my brokenness. I was broken, utterly: in that I could trust no one, that I could never again reach out to love, that it must be brought to me. But they were always on the run, and the soldiers always after them. When Carlotta was born, they made me understand I must go away in order to save her, in order to save Jesús. They took me to a house where there were Indians living the way the gringo lets Indians live; they were all busy making trinkets for the tourist dollar, of which the white man who controlled and ‘protected’ them from the soldiers got the largest share. They hid me and my baby. I learned to make their vivid green pottery. Since I knew Spanish, I helped the women hawk their wares on the streets of a not-too-distant town, full of the well-to-do descendants of the Spanish conquistadors and the blank-eyed americanos. I did not earn anything beyond enough for food. My friends told me of a school run by gringos where I might be able to get a job as maidslave. That was the beginning of my flight to Norte America.
“My parting from Jesús’ people was one the rest of the world will never see, nor will they understand its meaning. I am not sure I understand its meaning myself. I only know
that they gave me the last remaining symbols of who they were in the world—feathers from the red African parrot for my ears, this parrot that had been brought to their village so many hundreds of years ago by the men with rough hair, from a continent they called Zuma, or Sun, and they gave me, for Carlotta, the three pigeon-egg-size stones.”
“IT WAS AT LA Escuela de Jungla that I first saw that the norte-americanos are muy dementes. There were many acres of grass and trees at this place, and you have never in life seen such flowers and such fruits! A little paradise, it seemed, and I was sure I and mi cariñito would be happier there. There was a hacienda with red tiles on the roof and long white rooms with many ferns touching the ceiling, and sofas and chairs never imagined, so deep, so soft. Such contours and colors. The floor, even on the verandah, was also made of tiles, huge square blocks, the color of muddy sunsets, that I was to know very well because mine was the job of cleaning them every day. It was in this hacienda, in the spacious rooms upstairs, that the gringos stayed when they brought their children to the school. When they left, they thought their children would remain in one of these rooms—large, airy, full of greenery and dark old polished furniture, a caged parrot in the window. But no. Far behind the hacienda, in a clearing in a bamboo thicket was el barrio de los alumnos. They lived in huts like the poorest campesinos, and they were drugged and shut in most of the time.
“Some of them were mad and came from families so ashamed of madness they would not even put them away in a crazy house anywhere in Norte America. Some of them were disabled or retarded or deformed or blind. These, only the poorest of the Indian servants ever saw. But then there were those who had been politicos extremistas in Norte America. For they were all grown, these ‘students’; did I tell you that? And some nearly middle-aged. There were the sick-in-the-heart radicales—a word I heard often from the gringa who helped me escape—who believed nothing their parents did was right, and sometimes, this gringa said, she herself would not come to her parents’ dinner table dressed or with her hair combed, or even wearing shoes! She was very rich, you know. Such behavior grieved her parents to the heart. Nor could they find it in their hearts to ignore it.
“When I met this gringa, she was very dirty, barefoot, and wearing rags. She was sweeping out the room of one called ‘The Disabled,’ a hairy lump of a gringo from the Korean-American war, who smelled terrible. She was very glad to hear a word of Spanish, because she had contact mainly with los indios, and the Disabled had been fed so many drugs his tongue was lost. She was cleaning the Disabled’s room because the india embarazada was sitting underneath a nearby tree having labor pains. She was muy immensa, also poor, ragged, barefoot, though not dirty, and her children’s father was away in a war she did not understand.
“I asked the gringa her name, and she looked at me long before she gave it. The centers of her eyes were big in her dirty face and she seemed to turn many pages in a book mentally before she found the symbol for who she was. ‘Mary Ann,’ she said. ‘Me llamo Zedé,’ I said. She laughed. She was very high.
“I laughed with her. It was so very long since I laughed.
“I was there, let me see, two years. And it was there that Carlotta proved a great help to me. She was a wonder to everyone we met because she never cried. I don’t mean she never shed tears; no, she never cried so that anyone could hear her. She cried the way one smiles. The mistress of the hacienda liked to see her crawling about the tile floor, naked except for her wrist beads, as I washed and then polished it. They did not know I could read and write and tried all the time to speak to me in what they thought was the language of the Indians or in the Spanish reserved for servants and slaves. They called me Consuelo. Connie, for short. Do this, Connie. Do that, Connie. No, I never gave them my right name, either. I told them it was Chaquita. Like the banana, the gringa said, laughing, to her husband. Like the banana! Still, when guests were there she called me Consuelo, because she liked the sound of herself saying it.
“Mary Ann had befriended los politicos extremistas in Norte America, but they were poor. No matter what she—‘the rich bitch’—did, it was, by them, ridiculed. When one of these negros radicales was sent to prison, his girlfriend tried to murder her; just walked up to her door one day with a large knife and began to chop away at her. After that attack, which scarred her neck, arms, and chest, Mary Ann left her small apartment near the black ghetto in San Francisco and retreated to Fox Hollow Farm, her parents’ estate in New Jersey. There she began to talk openly of doing away with her parents, on whom she became dependent, and to take, as she herself put it, cases of drugs. With sorrow her parents watched her decline. They were not good people—they had too much money to have ever been good people—but they loved Mary Ann. Mary Ann described them as people who had personally assassinated six rivers and massacred twelve lakes, because they manufactured a deadly substance that was always swimming away from them. In their own way they were glad she refused to learn how to rob and cheat and create deadly things. Even so, she would inherit just under a billion dollars, earned from the filth they made, and they wanted her to be at least competent; not a scarred, drugged, disheveled mess, plotting assassinations and muttering into her blond locks that looked like sheep’s wool. In their luck, at a party for the Republicanos that they gave at their estate, someone told them of La Escuela de Jungla. It seemed the answer to their dreams, especially because, when they asked about it among their friends, no one had heard of it, or at least they said they had not. So off they flew, right away, a bundled and bound Mary Ann between them, and in three days she shared a lovely big room with massive dark furniture and a caged red parrot. Her parents disappeared. The nice room disappeared. Even her clothing disappeared. The drugs did not disappear. They increased.
“While I was there I saw that letters from her parents gathered dust on the big desk of the gringos. I was so surprised to see in one of the letters that her father tried to stick in here and there a word or two of Spanish. At least he referred to Mary Ann as ‘mi hija.’ I myself wrote a letter telling them their daughter’s fate. I did this partly because I grew to like Mary Ann, but also to rebel against the gringos and assert who I was. That I could read and write. That I knew reading and writing to have great power. That I was not a dumb Indian maidslave; that I was not Consuelo. I felt real pleasure seeing my own handwriting, the writing of a university-trained person, and the whiteness of the envelope gave me a feeling of dignity. Her parents flew in by helicopter in less than a month and snatched their daughter home. I was glad to see her freed. As I said, I had come to like her, though she so often failed to make sense; her brain was quite scrambled by then. She was a naturally sweet person who had no understanding of how to be rich in a world like this one, where great wealth immediately makes one think of great crimes. The gringos did not suspect me of alerting her parents, and they continued to fuss over Carlotta and to treat me as if I were a breathing piece of wood. They made much money from people like the parents of Mary Ann. And sometimes the little alumnos-prisioneros would die of the loneliness and poor food, the awful boredom and the dirt; and the letters with the checks for their care continued to arrive. This made me sad, but I never wrote another letter.
“One night I dreamed I would be rescued from the life I lived there, that I would be taken away by boat. But La Escuela was in the mountains, nowhere near the ocean, which I had heard of but never seen, and besides, the only boats I’d seen were small boats that my mother used to say looked like the dried pods of vanilla beans. But one day as I was cleaning one of the huts in the student barrio I heard someone call my name. My real name. I looked up, and it was Mary Ann! She was wearing a black shirt, attached somehow to pants, and very pretty pink lace-up boots. I had never imagined such zapatos! Two men carrying guns were with her, and she was sparkling with the life of before I knew her, ready for a fight! Her curious pale blue eyes, that made the Indians cross themselves, were full of light. She embraced me and told me to run and get Carlotta. This I did, wit
hout a moment’s hesitation. On the way out we passed the bodies of the dogs, whose throats had been cut, just as the barbed wire had been. This made me sad, because I had liked the dogs. They were my only friends in that place and never barked at me. But I was happy about the barbed wire. ‘It is like TV!’ Mary Ann said over and over, giggling. I had never seen TV; I did not know what she meant. Now I know how right she was. Still, her action, though TV for her, made for me and mija all the difference in the world.
“In a tourist-type vehicle—muy grande, casita-like—we drove near the beach and parked underneath some trees. Just at sunset a beautiful ship, all gleaming wood, glinting brass, and white sails, a ship that seemed to be softly singing in the water, came into view. Our two gunslingers pulled a small boat from the brush, and that is how we made it to the yacht. A yacht owned by Mary Ann and called ‘Recuerdo.’
“Que lástima que there was a huge storm off the coast of Norte California the day before we were to land. The mast broke in half, the boat rolled over, all our saviors were lost! The Coast Guard saw us go down and arrived in time to rescue me and Carlotta. Another yacht had been near us at the start of our difficulty, but, strangely, it had disappeared.
“On the boat I had asked Mary Ann how she had found the courage to do what she did, and she explained to me that while clearing herself of the drugs on which she’d leaned for years she had had a religious conversion of a sort. It had been based on something she vaguely remembered from Sunday school, something Christ was reported to have said. Something about ‘the least of these.’ She had not even bothered to look it up, she said. Her mind whispered, ‘the least of these, the least of these,’ until she ‘spaced out’ on it, she said, ‘like on a mantra,’ and beamed us—me and Carlotta—in! Then, too, she had begun to dream of seeing us again, happy, on a beautiful boat. She saw that her politics had not been wrong—for as a radical she had tried to stand with ‘the least of these,’ but she had tried to help people she did not know, with whom there was no reciprocidad; she had tried to ease the suffering of those who could not see that she, too, suffered, or even believe that she could. She loved me, she said, because I had seen this. It was true I had been able to see this, but even more true was the gratification I felt when in striking a blow for her I liberated the one called Chaquita, Connie, and Consuelo in myself.