by Alice Walker
Ms. Head was black; there was a small snapshot of her on the back flap of the smallest book. He thought it vaguely racist that the women, both white, had left books by a black person. After a few days he thought no more about it.
Months later Fanny put one of the books, Maru, on the table beside him as he was completing the chore of check-writing to cover the monthly bills. He glanced at it warily. She was always trying to get him to read books that, to his way of thinking, had nothing to do with his own life. He was a teacher; he taught American history; he was good at it. He read enough. Besides, he had never read a book by a woman.
“Who is she anyway?” he asked. “Isn’t she African?”
“Yes,” said Fanny. “She’s amazing. Read this.”
He picked it up and flipped through the pages. Read an inscrutable line. Set it down again. “Put it on my desk,” he said. “I’ll try to get to it.”
Eventually the whole little stack was piled on his desk. One day he got tired of them being there and shifted them to the floor.
“She has changed the way I think of Africa,” Fanny said. “She’s changed the way I think about a lot of things!”
“Good writers do that,” he murmured, distracted.
But he did not want to change the way he thought of Africa. Besides, when he wanted insight into Africa, he’d read a man.
As if she heard what he was thinking, one day she brought him Two Thousand Seasons, by Ayi Kwei Armah. She had just finished reading it and was in tears.
“I can’t believe a man can understand so much!” she cried.
This book, too, gathered dust on the floor by his desk.
Much later, he noticed her rereading the same book but with a different cover. She was frowning and underlining passages.
“Why are you reading that again?” he’d asked.
“They’ve printed a second edition,” she said, furiously, “and it appears to be jumbled.”
“Are you sure? Why would they do that? You don’t think it was deliberate?”
“Did you ever read the first edition?” she asked.
“Well, no,” he admitted.
“Then you wouldn’t understand.”
She slept in the guest room, her “study,” that night.
But why should he try to read all the books that changed her life. She had the time for those kinds of books. She taught literature! He had to read the books required by his profession. The teaching of American history. This was simple enough to understand. Yet he could watch hours and hours of television, which made hash of the teachings of his profession. After the bottle of champagne the two women left, there were rivers of wine. TV, the couch, wine. If only his woman would stop reading books and changing her life, he’d sometimes think, in a wine-induced, mellow mood, and just come over and snuggle up on the sofa with him. Then Monday night NFL football, at least, would be perfect.
Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn’t read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes.
“She is about our age,” Fanny wrote. “And chubby. No, puffy. She says she hasn’t been well in a long time. She is a peculiar brown shade because of the sallowness of her skin. In her eyes you sometimes see the most astonishing glint of green, brown-pond-water green. I wanted to ask her so many questions based on things I have read in her books. But she seemed so vulnerable and the questions loomed so intrusive! I mean, there she sat, under the umbrella on the verandah, in none too new robe and slippers—flip-flops, to be precise—her short hair drying from the shower, sipping her morning tea. ‘Was your mother really a white South African woman?’ I wanted to ask. ‘Was your father really black? Tell me again how they met. I don’t remember from your book. Was it really about yourself that you wrote, and about your parents? Was she really thrown into the insane asylum? And what in the world became of him? And was it immediately after your first book was published that they kicked you out of South Africa? Where on earth is your son’s father?’ You know, Suwelo, I’ve never before met an actual refugee.
“When my father introduced us he’d said: ‘The great writer Bessie Head.’
“She’d muttered: ‘The great unheard-of writer Bessie Head.’
“‘I’ve read everything you’ve published, so far,’ I said. And it was such a kick to see her response. At first she just stared at me, as if she wasn’t sure what she’d heard. Then she was obviously pleased, like a little kid, but I also thought she felt somewhat foolish.
“‘Yes, you see,’ she said later, ‘I count on not being known. I can really make people feel uninformed and guilty.’ She has a deadpan sense of humor.
“‘Your work is known in the States,’ I said. ‘I’ve taught some of your things. I call you the Tolstoi of Africa.’
“She stiffened. ‘Have you read how he treated his wife?’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I sincerely hope you don’t have a wife.’
“She finally laughed outright.
“She is on her way to London for medical reasons. And, she said, to lend the shock of her impoverished presence to her publishers. Apparently she receives very little for her work, and I can certainly testify that her publishers do nothing to promote it. She showed us pictures of her life in Botswana, where she is one among thousands of South African refugees. There is just her hut, bare except for a small table on which her typewriter rests. There was no picture of her son.
“She says American writers are very strange. One came to visit her and also brought along numerous pictures of herself. In America, I told her, the women writers need pictures to remind everyone they exist.
“This she termed a typically American, childish, trivial pursuit. ‘If your work exists, you exist,’ she huffed. ‘Ask God.’
“Last summer at the women’s crafts festival in Vermont I bought two beautiful woolen tie-dyed shawls. One is red, with a yellow sun; the other, brown, with an orange-and-purple one. I gave the brown one to her, for ‘chilly’ London. I can just imagine her there, an ordinary colored woman from the colonies, to the people who notice her in the street. But what a writer! How else would we know all that we know about the psyche of South Africa? About the sexism of Africa? About the Bush people of the Kalahari? About Botswana? It is only because Bessie Head sits there in the desert, in her little hut, writing, that we have knowledge of a way of life that flowed for thousands of years, which would otherwise be missing from human record. This is no small thing!”
It wasn’t. And yet, for just a moment, Suwelo wanted it to be. He wanted American history, the stuff he taught, to forever be the center of everyone’s attention. What a few white men wanted, thought, and did. For he liked the way he could sneak in some black men’s faces later on down the line. And then trace those backward until they appeared even before Columbus. It was like a backstitch in knitting, he imagined, the kind of history teaching that he did, knitting all the pieces, parts, and colors that had been omitted from the original design. But now to have to consider African women writers and Kalahari Bushmen! It seemed a bit much.
“Ola drove Ms. Head to the airport himself,” Fanny continued. “As she was getting into the car I told her I had a confession to make: Though I had loved all her stories, and especially Maru, I had not really understood her fattest book, A Question of Power.
“‘Oh,’ she said, in her Cape Colored accent, ‘I’m not surprised atall. It is the map of a soul being destroyed, and the demons that one usually only imagines behind one’s eyelids have been given names and faces. They’ve left the skull of the sufferer and actually lounge about in her rooms. There are some people who immediately connect with the book, but that is because they’ve been there.’ She turned to embrace my mother and say good-bye to her. Then she said: ‘Those people who understand it right off don’t even need to read it. They’re all staring out into space quite peacefully by now.’
“Overall, I would have to say I felt she didn’t quite approve of me. I felt I appeared too solid,
too complacent. Too sane. Most writers, I imagine, really worship the glint of madness in other people; torture, to them, must be people who always speak and act in monochrome. She is one of the wariest people I’ve ever met. She actually looked over her shoulder as we talked. She has light, obviously, tons of it, but it’s definitely diffused.
“When Ola came back from the airport, he told us she’d had a complete nervous breakdown some years ago. That she was simply crushed. She got her health back by taking care of an experimental community garden. In Botswana she has to report to the authorities every day.
“‘What a life,’ said my mother.
“‘Yes,’ said Ola, ‘it makes the little trouble I manage to cause here seem small mangoes indeed. She is paying for who she is with her life. But, don’t we all?’”
“In every book you write there’s a chap called Francis,” Ola was saying to a local white writer one morning as Fanny came in to breakfast. “Is this accidental or is there some sort of inscrutable meaning the reader is supposed to get?”
“Come on,” said the man, “there’s only one Francis, in my first book. Later on there’s a Frances with an e, and then in my last book a Frank.”
“But aren’t they all the same name, more or less?” he asked.
“Good morning, Ola,” Fanny said. She kissed the top of his head, and he flung an arm around her. He was in the jovial mood, as he sometimes phrased it, of the literarily inclined escaped convict.
“This is my daughter from America,” he said proudly. “Fanny, meet Henry Bates, a founding member of our writers’ guild, come to warn me away from harm.”
Henry Bates was small and pasty-faced with light-colored hair and a beer paunch.
“I’ve been telling him,” he said, “just because he knows or is related to everyone in the government doesn’t mean they won’t get tired of him.”
“She doesn’t know we’re related to anyone,” Ola said. He turned to Fanny, “We’re not really related to those imbeciles in the government, because obviously we’re not in progression. You know the Hindu saying that you’re only related to those with whom you are in spiritual progression? But a few of your uncles are in positions of authority. And do you know, when they arrested me, after running the bulldozer through my play—a hell of a final curtain, you have to admit!—two of them came to my cell just for ‘a little chat.’ Politics gives them a headache, so they wanted to talk soccer. Soccer. These are men who’ve never read a book in their lives. Never stayed awake through a complete play. If they didn’t read it or see it by form five, they don’t know anything about it.
“‘What are you trying to do,’ one of them said, ‘make us look bad in the eyes of the world?’ He was serious.
“‘Obenjomade, listen to me,’ I said. ‘Look at my mouth, and clean out your ears, I CANNOT MAKE YOU LOOK WORSE. I am only a human being, after all.’
“‘But Abajeralasezeola,’ he says, patiently, ‘the government is trying as hard as it can.’
“‘Only the president, his wives, his mistresses, his ministers, his relatives, and the army have enough to eat. Only their children can afford to go to school. The government should try harder. You know, pave a road now and then. Build a hospital. And by the way, why is it that after curfew every night the only people one sees are in army uniform? Among other things, you would think we are an all-male country. And you know what the rest of the world would think of that. And why a curfew, come to think of it? One thing, at least, that Africans always owned before was the night. With “freedom” they seem to have lost even that.’
“‘Go ahead, be funny. Everyone always laughs at your plays. But you shouldn’t make fun of people who are trying hard to make something of the country now that the white man has left.’
“‘Look at my mouth, Obenjomade, second son of my father’s third wife; clean out your ears: THE WHITE MAN IS STILL HERE. Even when he leaves, he is not gone.’
“‘But Abajeralasezeola,’ he says, ‘why don’t you help us instead of sitting back criticizing? Why don’t you write plays that show everyone at his best? You could show how the government is trying to feed and clothe and educate people, even though the whites left everything in a shambles. Why not write a play about how they blew up their own university, their own radio station, and their own hospitals and bridges rather than turn them over to us?’
“‘Obenjomade, cup your endearingly large ears: EVERYONE ALL OVER THE WORLD KNOWS EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE WHITE MAN. That’s the essential meaning of television. BUT THEY KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT THEMSELVES.’
“‘The white man?’ he asked.
“‘No, the people,’ I said.
“‘But Abajeralasezeola,’ he finally said, laughing, ‘you are the only one who thinks the way you do.’
“‘You are wrong, Obenjemade,’ I said, ‘THE WOMEN THINK AS I DO.’
“‘But Abajeralasezeola,’ he said, shrugging, ‘WHO CARES WHAT WOMEN THINK?’”
Henry Bates and Fanny were both laughing at the faces Ola made as he talked. He didn’t look his sixty years. He looked boyish, even impish, as he heartily laughed himself.
In prison he had slept on the floor, he said, and he thought it had cured his neuritis. Actually, that was a line in his next play, he added.
Henry Bates threw up his hands.
Ola was suddenly sober. “Oh, Henry Bates,” he said, “watch my mouth: WHERE WERE YOU AND YOUR WORRIES WHEN I WAS IMPRISONED AND TORTURED BY THE WHITES? When my people stop acting like the white man, I can write plays that show them at their best!”
HE COULD NOT TELL the shrink that he was in love with a woman who periodically fell in love with spirits.
“But why can’t you tell him?” Fanny asked him once, as he was trying to explain his sense of inadequacy, of shame, to her. “What good is a shrink who doesn’t understand about spirits?”
In so many ways, in most, she was an ordinary person. Suwelo had gazed at her hopelessly as she asked this. She had her arms raised and was arranging and rearranging her long, braided hair, turning this way and that in her chair. In her feminine self-absorption and present indifference to other world views she made him think of Cleopatra.
The shrink was a middle-aged Jewish man who never said anything about himself, which made it hard to say anything to him. Week after week Suwelo waited for some sign that there was a bona-fide struggling human being across from him. Someone who had the least chance of comprehending his plight. But—nothing.
“Spirits?” he asked, moving a paperweight, like the one in Citizen Kane, ever so slightly on the papers that formed a neat pile on his desk.
“Yes,” Suwelo said. “At the moment ...” He paused. It seemed farfetched. It seemed futile. What would Dr. Bernie Kesselbaum know?
“Yes?”
“At the moment it’s a man named ... Chief John Horse.” There, he’d got that much out. He nearly wept from the effort. “But it doesn’t have to men,” he said quickly. It didn’t even have to be people, but he thought he’d save Fanny’s attachment to trees and whales until he could see further.
Kesselbaum’s face was impassive. Suwelo hated the impassivity.
“Who is Chief John Horse?”
There was a long silence.
“Guess who I discovered today!” she’d cried happily.
“Who?” he’d asked, stirring the cream of asparagus soup as she came flying through the door.
“Chief John Horse!”
He was used to these enthusiasms, yet each one managed to hurt. He always felt he wasn’t enough for her and envisioned months of loneliness to come, when he would seem barely to exist.
“Oh!” he’d said, with faked interest, “and where does—who was it? Chief John Horse?—live?” But he could see that, for the time being, whoever Chief John Horse was lived in his wife.
Ramblingly she had told him of this man who was a chief, a black Indian chief, among the Seminoles of Florida, before it became a state (“Of course, before it was
a state,” he’d murmured, thinking how hard it was to imagine the existence of land before it was a state), of how the Seminoles refused to enslave the black people who had escaped from slavery and how they were accepted into the Seminole nation. There had been innumerable fights, she said (eyes flashing, as if she’d been present), when the white slavers pursued them. There had been a long march to Mexico. Years of working for the Mexican government, fighting Mexican bandits. Then, after slavery had ended in the United States, Chief John Horse and his people—men, women, children—returned to Texas. This was in the eighteen-seventies, she said, and Suwelo was again surprised, as he often was, that even though he was a historian he had heard nothing of this. There, because the U.S. army had never been able to beat them and saw that it never would, it hired them to help rid Texas of the same kind of bandits that John Horse and his gang had fought in Mexico.
Suwelo spun this story out for Kesselbaum to the best of his memory.
He’d said to Fanny disdainfully, “Oh, he was a buffalo soldier.” By which he meant a killer of Indians. For the white man.
She’d looked at him strangely. Then said quietly, “Yes, and no. All his life he was looking for a little bit of land the whites didn’t covet, a little bit of peace. He got neither. But that was the dream.”
“And what became of him?” he’d asked.
She’d shrugged. “Rode off into the sunset, of course. Back to Mexico. At least in Mexico the government appreciated his skills as a soldier and offered him some land. More than this country ever did. Here, he didn’t even get a pension!”
Her eyes had taken on that faraway look that said she was riding back to Mexico with John Horse; that they were busy picking up women and children and bright-faced black men who dreamed of living free along the way.