by Alice Walker
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 sautéed 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 habitués 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.
“There was laughter and cold lemonade and flowers and always lots of children and older people, too, that Big Mama had helped raise. You know there had to be some folks in the community who’d have nothing to do with our house. They called Mama Celie and Mama Shug ‘bull-daggers.’ But I always thought the very best of the men and women were our friends, for they were usually so busy living some odd new way they’d found, and were so taken up with it, they really didn’t give a damn. And then, too, Mama Shug especially had real high standards; and if you stepped on an ant in Mama Celie’s presence and didn’t beg forgiveness, you were just never invited to her house again. Though this sensitivity to animals was not always Mama Celie’s way. It was something she learned, as she learned so many things, from Mama Shug.
“But there was really no place for me there. Not really. I was welcome and I was loved, but I was also grown. After a few years I began to feel smothered by their competence, their experience in everything, their skills that caused me to feel my own considerable attributes were not required. And they simply took over the task of raising you. By this time, too, Mama Shug had decided to found her own religion, for which she used the house, and sometimes this was very hard, because of the way she structured it. Six times during the year, for two weeks each time, she held ‘church.’ Ten to twenty ‘seekers’ would show up, and they had to sleep somewhere. Usually it was on the floor, or, when there was an overflow, in the barn or the shed. Everyone who came brought information about their own path and journey. They exchanged and shared this information. That was the substance of the church. Some of these people worshiped Isis. Some worshiped trees. Some thought the air, because it alone is everywhere, is God. (‘Then God is not on the moon,’ someone said.) Mama Shug felt there was only one thing anyone could say about G-O-D, and that was—it had no name.
“I don’t know how they were able to talk about it, finally, if it had no name, or if everyone had a different name for it. Oh, yes, I do remember! I was telling them, Mama Celie and Miss Shug, about how the Olinka use humming instead of words sometimes and that that accounts for the musicality of their speech. The hum has meaning, but it expresses something that is fundamentally inexpressible in words. Then the listener gets to inte
rpret the hum, out of his own experience, and to know that there is a commonality of understanding possible but that true comprehension will always be a matter of degree.
“If, for instance, you say to someone in jail who is feeling low: ‘How are you?’ He or she can say, ‘Ummm, ugh,’ and you more or less get it. Which is the way it really is. If the person replied, ‘Fine’ or ‘Terrible,’ it would hardly be the same. No work would be required on your part. They have named it.
“So that is how they resolved it. They would hum the place G-O-D would occupy. Everyone in the house talked about ummm a lot!
“And so, to make a long story manageably short, I left you there with these ummm-distracted people and went to Atlanta to enroll in the Spelman nursing school. My adoptive mother had gone there, you see, and that made it very attractive to me. She was such a lady! A word I know your generation despises, but back then it had substantial meaning. It meant someone with implacable self-respect. Besides, ‘woman’ meant, well, someone capable of breeding. It was strictly a biological term and, because it was associated with slavery, was considered derogatory. I had been sent to England to study nursing while we lived in Africa, so I already knew quite a lot. I’d also assisted the young African woman doctor at home, who’d trained in England; an eccentric Englishwoman writer had paid for her education. Still, I needed accreditation to work in the U.S. It wasn’t easy. I was older than the other students and had a child, but they were interested in my life in Africa, and I was several times asked to speak at vespers. Come to think of it, no one ever asked me whether I was married, but they automatically called me ‘Mrs.’ and behaved as if they thought I was. Very respectfully. But then, everyone—I mean the students—was respectful. Too respectful, I often thought. They were so grateful to be there—one of the few places a young colored girl could go for training—they acted as if their teachers and the college administrators were gods. They acted, in fact, precisely like the colonized Africans who were educated at our mission in Olinka. Too much respect for people who are not always respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity, and their abject gratitude rather depressed me. Well, I wasn’t there to agitate. I got my accreditation in due course and applied for a job at the black hospital on Hunter Street, Harrison Memorial. I sent for you as soon as the job came through.
“It was a wonderful place! Not simply because it was there that I met your stepfather. Of course I was too dark for his family, and practically an African, a real African, to boot—but that’s getting ahead of my story. By the time Lance—his parents named him Lancelot—had graduated from medical school he’d had enough of prejudice among black people; he just couldn’t tolerate it. All the cadavers they’d worked on were from a certain range of shades between dark brown and black, and this had radicalized him about the amount of economic disparity that existed along intraracial lines. He started to think there were no poor, really destitute lightskin black people, and this made him very sad. And the marks of hard knocks on the bodies he and the other students were required to work on! His heart was broken, he said, every day. There was a woman, for instance, who walked seventy miles carrying her sick child to a doctor whose existence was only a rumor to her. She died of heart failure; the baby, of dehydration caused by diarrhea. Both these bodies became the property of Lance’s medical school.
“There they were cut up while some of Lance’s colleagues told jokes and others talked of the food they expected to have for dinner.
“Everyone thought a doctor’s life was so glamorous! I never understood it. When I went to work at the hospital and had the chance to work with him, I could see it was, very often, a depressing, soul-killing job. There were people who were sick simply because of the way they lived, and ate: a diet of fatback, biscuits, syrup, and hard fried meat. There were colon cancers, ulcers, liver and artery congestion. The ignorance of proper diet was astounding. There were people so addicted to Coca-Cola that this drink was all they consumed all day long, with salted peanuts, bought by the nickel bag. And they boasted of this! That this was ‘good.’ That this was what they liked; and by golly, this was what they would eat! Don’t talk about green leafy vegetables in the same room with them, and only rabbits ate carrots, and cauliflower didn’t grow in the South, to their knowledge, so there!
“I was not looking for a husband. I sometimes thought of Dahvid; that day you were conceived was like a dream memory. I knew that the whole country was engaged in fighting. I imagined Dahvid might be fighting, too, or he might be injured or dead. Besides, you were quite a handful and quite enough companionship, I thought, for me. During the week, you went to the Spelman day nursery school, where everyone loved you; on Saturdays we went shopping for our weekly supplies. On Sundays we went to church. A nice, orderly life.
Even when Lance started to let me know he cared for me, I hung back. I was always shy, retiring—that quality that seemed so out of place in my mother’s house of laughter, horseshoe throwing, magicians sawing people into thirds, guitar players and jugglers! and with which you were so impatient. I was plain, and dark, like my mother—much darker than the other nurses—and I didn’t ‘play.’ There was always in my mind, too, the question of how any man who came around us might behave toward you. And on that score I’d heard many frightful stories from other women, and also from my own mother. It still broke my heart to think of how she was abused by her stepfather, who never even bothered to tell her, until after she was grown, that he wasn’t her father. Funny. I could never think of him as my father. The truth is, I never felt I had a biological father, apart from my adoptive father, Samuel, and when I learned I did have one I still couldn’t grasp it. So that, to this day, I feel almost as if I am a product of an immaculate conception. Like Jesus, who didn’t know who his biological father was either. I have often thought it was this lack of knowledge of his earthly father that led him to his ‘heavenly’ one, for there is in all of us a yearning to know our own source, and no source is likely to seem too farfetched to a lonely, fatherless child. This was considered a blasphemous thought when I ventured to express it; but the question of who impregnated Mary, that young Jewish girl, and under what possibly grim or happy circumstances—because of my mother’s sad experience of abuse as a young woman—was always much on my mind. If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, and ‘God in heaven’ was not, and Mary, because of custom, fear, or depression could not speak up about what had actually happened to her, who was the father?
“Well, you see how to me all daily stories are in fact ancient, and ancient ones current. And it was due to the long languid days in Africa, days that seemed to go on for weeks, that I credit this sense I have that, really, there is nothing new under the sun and that nothing in the past is more mysterious than the behavior of the present.
“I connected instead with my mother’s real father, my grandfather Simon, who was lynched when she was a baby. He was industrious, an entrepreneur. And very successful; which is why the whites killed him. They killed a lot of striving black men, for a black man’s success was much more galling to them than his failure. The failures they could turn back into slaves, entertainment for themselves, and pets. Both my mother and I take after him. Her house and tailoring shop—she made and sold the kind of pants she always wore—became the light that illuminated their town, as far as black people were concerned. And I am like my grandfather, I think, in my firm determination and faith that I can take care of myself. As soon as I had you, I knew there was no work I would not do to keep you in food and shelter and clothing.
“Lance fell in love with my determination and faith. But I was afraid of his blues. It was a sad, almost listless quality that people of obvious mixed race used to have. Not for nothing was there once a stereotype of the ‘tragic mulatto’! I think now that a lot of their energy was consumed by their effort to live honorably as who they were (and who were they?), with both sides—black and white—constantly warring against each other and despising those caught in the middle. I didn’t feel I could s
upport the heaviness; nor could I be his front in the black community or his thumbed nose to the white. Aunt Nettie used to say, ‘Don’t take on anybody’s burdens that look heavier than yours.’ And Lance’s looked heavy indeed.
“But you know the rest. We courted. We married... . How good it was to once again have a friend and confidant! Someone, besides Tashi, to finally tell about those sad last minutes with Dahvid; those first joyous moments, my little Fanny, with you. It was Lance’s idea for you to stand up with us; to decide on how you felt about the marriage and to express it that way. And he was a faithful husband and trustworthy father till the day he died. Do you remember how happy we were that day, being married on the front porch of my mother’s house? No more blues for any of us, we swore. And how not only the three of us, but also the family and guests, magicians, horseshoe throwers, jugglers, French-horn players, and what have you—all of us wore red?”
“YOU WILL NEVER GUESS who is in the bedroom down the hall,” Fanny wrote. “Bessie Head!”
When Suwelo read those words he strained to remember—something. But what he was trying to remember was a consequence of an action, not the action itself. And he wasn’t sure he knew the consequence.
Balancing the letter on his knee, he took off his glasses and closed his eyes for a moment. There rose before him a vision of the stark, empty rooms of the house they had bought. The walls were faded periwinkle trimmed in grayish white. They must paint, he felt, immediately. He preferred white walls. In fact, he could live in a totally white, buff, or eggshell interior. Strong colors oppressed him because they demanded that you notice; some kind of response. White all around you focused the color attention on yourself, or on the furnishings, on the art.
Two women had owned the house, teachers like him and Fanny, and they had left it in passable shape. Broom-swept. The upstairs carpet had been shampooed. Downstairs in the center of the living-room floor they’d left a bottle of champagne, and a note that wished them happiness in the house, as they had had. In the upstairs study one of them had left a small stack of books. He’d picked them up, one by one, looked at them. They were all by a writer named Bessie Head. There was a note saying here was someone extraordinary and not to drink the champagne and try to read her at the same time.