The Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  He couldn’t stand it.

  “And was this a real person?” asked Kesselbaum. “In history, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Suwelo. “I feel lucky when they are real people, for then we can talk about them somewhat. It’s harder when she’s possessed by a spirit but doesn’t know who or what it is.”

  “And does this happen often?”

  “Once every couple of years or so. But sometimes there’ll be just a slight infatuation. We’ll be going along happily enough. We’ll be like two people holding hands and wading across a shallow river. Then she’ll step into a deep current that seems there only for her and be swept away. While she’s carried by the current, I’m left alone, holding ... nothing. If she remembers to say good morning most days, it’s a wonder. Making love is a disaster. I never know who’s there. I’m certainly not, as far as she’s concerned, though she claims otherwise.”

  For a long time Fanny had not experienced orgasm with him; she learned how it was accomplished from some of her women friends.

  This was at a time when every conscious woman carried a speculum and mirror in her backpack, and, it seemed to Suwelo, at the drop of a hat they were flopping down on their backs in circles together and teaching each other the most astonishing things. Still, when he asked her what she’d experienced during orgasm, she was as likely to claim she’d experienced a sunrise or a mountain or a waterfall as that she’d experienced him. Sometimes she just whispered, “Adventure,” or “Resistance,” or “Escape!” This was a great puzzle to him.

  “Many people have passionate interests in historical figures,” said the shrink.

  This was true. But Fanny Nzingha found the spirit that possessed her first in herself. Then she found the historical personage who exemplified it. It gave her the strange aspect of a trinity—she, the spirit, the historical personage, all sitting across the table from you at once.

  The intensity wore him out.

  As he did with all her spirit lovers, he snuck behind her back and did detective work on John Horse. He was helped in this by William Loren Katz’s book Black Indians, in which John Horse’s story is told in some detail. Somewhat sheepishly, he gave the volume to Fanny for her birthday. Chief John Horse, he’d read, safely dead a hundred years. Hah! Obviously these old spirits like Horse’s never died. Had had an Indian partner called “Wild Cat.” Had married a pure Seminole woman. Then a Mexican one. Probably Indian as well.

  “What do you love about these people,” he’d asked her once.

  “I dunno,” she said. “They open doors inside me. It’s as if they’re keys. To rooms inside myself. I find a door inside and it’s as if I hear a humming from behind it, and then I get inside somehow, with the key the old ones give me, and are, and as I stumble about in the darkness of the room, I begin to feel the stirring in myself, the humming of the room, and my heart starts to expand with the absolute feeling of bravery, or love, or audacity, or commitment. It becomes a light, and the light enters me, by osmosis, and a part of me that was not clear before is clarified. I radiate this expanded light. Happiness.”

  And that, Suwelo knew, was called “being in love.”

  “OLA TOLD US LAST night,” Fanny wrote in her next letter, “that a play he is thinking of writing somewhere down the line—‘though admittedly,’ he joked, ‘my line may be quite short!’—is about Elvis Presley.

  “‘The Elvis Presley?’ my mother queried. ‘Our Elvis Presley?’

  “‘Mr. Rocket Sockets himself?’ I chimed in.

  “‘Precisely,’ said Ola, smiling.

  “‘You see,’ Ola said, enjoying our bemusement, ‘in our country we, too, have many different tribes, just as you have in America. You know, you have Black and Indian and Anglo and Jewish tribes; Asian, Chicano, and Middle Eastern tribes. And so on. Here we have the Olinka, the Ababa, the Hama, and the white tribe, of which there are several sub or mini tribes.

  “‘Now all of these tribes try to maintain their own tribal identities, and that is natural to man, who perpetuates his genetic identity by controlling the woman he uses for production of his children, but it is not necessarily natural to nature, who will produce for anyone. So over time a lot of racial boundaries are crossed and new people created. What is fascinating is to see the love or hatred that is expressed for these new people, who don’t, after all, have a firm tribal category in which to be imprisoned.’

  “‘But what has this to do with Elvis Presley?’ asked my mother.

  “‘My play will use him only as a metaphor. He will be a kind of vehicle for what I attempt to point out.’

  “‘Which is?’

  “‘That in him white Americans found a reason to express their longing and appreciation for the repressed Native American and black parts of themselves. Those non-European qualities they have within them and all around them, constantly, but which they’ve been trained from birth to deny.’

  “We talked on into the night about this; Ola eventually playing some of his treasured Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash records.

  “‘I don’t listen to them as you do,’ he said. ‘I listen to them to hear where commercial and mainstream cultural success takes people, a part of whose lineage is hidden even from themselves, in a world—or in this case, a country—that insists on racial, cultural, and historical amnesia, if you wake up one century and find yourself “white.”’

  “According to Ola, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash are both Indians. A foreigner sees this immediately, he says; Americans do not. He says this explains Elvis’s clothing style. His love of buckskin and fringe, of silver. And of course culturally, he says, he was as black as all the other white people in Mississippi.

  “‘But didn’t he have blue eyes?’ asked my mother.

  “‘Probably the only white things he owned,’ said Ola. ‘Blue eyes are like money; they pay your way in.’

  “So assume my father is right; what could it have meant to be as ‘successful’ as Elvis? Suppose that behind those blue eyes and full lips, and under that thick black Indian hair, there was another: the old, ancient Indian. Suppose he, too, or she, watched. If he was Indian, he would probably have been Choctaw, for that’s the tribe that existed, and maybe still does exist, in his part of Mississippi. Suppose his ancestors hid out among the white people, as so many of the Cherokee people hid out among the blacks and whites. Trying to evade the soldiers who rounded up the Indians for the long march to Oklahoma—the Trail of Tears. Suppose that little bump-and-grind the crowds loved so was originally a movement of the circle dance. That’s what it would resemble, if you watched it in slow motion. Suppose that little hiccupy singing style of his was once a war whoop. Or an Indian love call.

  “On we talked into the night, listening to the crickets and appreciating the warm brilliance of the stars. People are called ‘stars’ not only because they shine—with the glow of self-expression and the satisfaction this brings—but because the qualities they exemplify are, as far as human lives are concerned, eternal. We are attracted to their sparkle, their warmth, their light, but they will be forever distant from us. So distant we can never quite believe our inseparability. Never quite believe that we are also composed of the light that they have. Ola says he is convinced that human beings want, above all else, to love each other freely, regardless of tribe, and that when they’re finally able to do it openly—although the true essence of the person they’ve focused on is camouflaged by society’s dictation—there is always the telltale quality of psychic recognition—that is to say, hysteria; the weeping of the womb.

  “The Choctaw lad with the long black hair, full lips, and sultry eyes is the mate the pioneer maidens would have chosen, if they’d had the chance, Ola said. And for the first time I imagined Elvis as really beautiful: bronze, lithe, running lightly through the primeval forests of Mississippi, hair to his waist. Their great-great-granddaughters are still weeping over their loss. And so, to my surprise, was I!

  “If Ola is exiled, he says perhaps he will come to Am
erica, and he and I together can write this play. He said this teasingly, noticing my sniffle and that he had obviously moved me very much.

  “I never dreamed I would so enjoy having a father. It is like having another interesting mind, somewhat similar to your own but also strangely different, to rummage through.”

  “I WOULDN’T MIND DYING if dying was all,” Miss Lissie told Suwelo. “The old folks used to say that all the time down on the Island. Somebody would witness it with a heartfelt um-huh. And I used to think they knew more about life than they thought. For dying, I can tell you, is the least of it. Dying is even pleasant. You just recede from everything, including torture, and burn out quietly, like a candle. What’s not pleasant is coming back, and whether they have sense enough to know it or not, everybody, well almost everybody, does. Don’t ask me how or why. They just do. I can appreciate the idea that to come here a lot of times is no more a miracle than to come here once. That’s the truth of it.

  “You take the way things are going in the world today. You have your poisoned rivers and your poisoned air and your children turning into critters before your eyes. You have your leaders that look like empty canons and the politicians who look drugged. You have a world that scares everybody to death. You can’t go nowhere. You can’t eat anything. You can’t even hardly make love. And that’s just today. There are days when the best thought you can have is that one day you’ll die and leave it all behind.

  “Suwelo, let me tell you, you can’t leave it behind. The life in this place is your life forever. You will always be here; and the ground underneath you. And you won’t die until it does. It is dying, and the people are, too—but, Suwelo, my fear is not that we people and the earth we’re on will die. Everything eventually dies, maybe. But it looks like it will take a long time and death will be painful and slow. It’s the difference between being blindfolded and shot dead in the first volley of bullets and being tortured to death very slowly by men paid by the hour for their work. It is not simply a struggle between life and death. That is too easy, I guess. It’s between life everlasting and death everlasting, and everlasting is a very long time.

  “I am tired of it. Not tired of life. But afraid of what living is going to look like and be like next time I come.”

  Now Suwelo was on the train going back home to California. He crossed the Rockies and he crossed the desert. He thought of his months in Uncle Rafe’s house and almost crossed himself. He thought of Fanny. Of who she was, really, and of what each of her previous selves must have been. Though Fanny had left San Francisco, and wrote that she had no desire to see him, he wished that he could meet her all over again, from the perspective of someone who believed true love never died and that you only suffer if you struggle—and that as surely as struggle led to suffering, suffering led to a knowledge of how not to. There were, after all, lifetimes and lifetimes, and love alone was healing and balm. Love alone, mother’s milk.

  He had finally sold the house and would now have money on which to live while he perhaps wrote an “oral” history—one of those unofficial-looking books, full of “he said” and “she said,” that he’d always despised—about Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie. Before he left Baltimore, he’d driven to Miss Lissie’s address, only to find it was also the address of Mr. Hal. These two elderly friends were quietly painting in the backyard, a narrow strip of pink verbena separating their easels. They did not stop as he sat on the back steps watching them. They painted, with loving strokes, what was directly in front of them: the back of their own small, white-clapboard house, a large ivy-encircled pecan tree towering over its front, a garden along one side with flowers and fruits growing all together. There were giant dahlias and blue morning glories decorating both house and corn. The sun was warm and the day eternity itself, and Suwelo soon lay back on the porch and drifted off to sleep.

  When the two old friends had sat beside him, as he was rousing himself from sleep, he felt as if he knew all about them and yet knew nothing. He knew that they had sent Anatole to Fisk University and that he became a professor of German at Tuskegee. He knew that Lulu, talented and audacious, a singer and dancer par excellence, had gone off, in high spirits, with a musical-comedy team to Paris. Paris, unfortunately, had fallen to Hitler while she was there. Lulu and many of the other black and colored performers working in Paris at the time were never heard from again. He knew that his uncle Rafe had loved Miss Lissie and loved also his best friend, and hers, her soul mate and sometime husband, Mr. Hal. He knew they had lived together more or less harmoniously for many years and had remained friends until Uncle Rafe’s death. He knew that Miss Lissie was indeed an extraordinary person, whose rarity would be known and appreciated only by those people least likely to be believed, even if they spoke of it to others—and apparently Uncle Rafe and Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie herself had kept mainly mum. But they were all three of them rare people, Suwelo thought, for they had connected directly with life and not with its reflection; the mysteries they found themselves involved in, simply by being alive and knowing each other, carried them much deeper into reality than “society” often permits people to get. They had found themselves born into a fabulous, mysterious universe, filled with fabulous, mysterious others; they had never been distracted from the wonder of this gift. They had made the most of it.

  “I’m leaving,” said Suwelo, stretching and getting to his feet.

  “And we know we go with you,” said Miss Lissie, handing him, with a smile, a small flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. She stuffed a fat pink envelope into his breast pocket. A mouse came out of the house and stopped, blinked at the sun, and hurried back inside. A bird dropped, stunned, to the porch; it had flown into a windowpane, in which it no doubt saw a reflection of the sky.

  When Suwelo walked back to the street, passing by Mr. Hal’s ancient truck, parked neatly next to Miss Lissie’s smart gray Datsun, he carried with him the image of the two old people waving him on, holding hands and smiling, it seemed, at the very word “goodbye.”

  And they had painted him, a part of their life, lying on their back porch, surrounded by all the things they loved. Asleep.

  But what was in the package? What was their gift? Suwelo took a deep breath as he carefully pulled off the string. The brown paper crackled as he ran his fingers underneath it. He thought at first they’d given him a stack of albums, for the package was just that size, though quite light. But no, there were paintings. He lifted them out and stared at them, first one, then the other, for a long time. They were obviously self-portraits. Perhaps not obviously, though, for on one painting was written “Self-portrait, Lissie Lyles,” and on the other, “Self-portrait, Harold D. Jenkins.” The background of the paintings showed all the familiar things the two friends loved to paint: their trees and corn and morning glories, the pink-and-cream spider flower. It was the center of the paintings that was different from anything Suwelo had ever seen. For instead of faces, as in a portrait, there were merely the outlines of their upper bodies, a man’s shape and a woman’s shape, and these outlines surrounded blue, infinite space, painted with such intensity, depth, and longing that it was as luminous and as inviting as the sky. Wonderingly, Suwelo turned the paintings over, as if that infinite space might have leaked through to the other side. What he saw made him smile and hug the paintings to his heart, as the train shot through a long gray tunnel into an even blacker dark. On the back of Lissie Lyles’s self-portrait were the words, in emerald lettering, “Painted by Hal Jenkins.” On Hal’s self-portrait, in bright red, were the words “Painted by Lissie Lyles.”

  SUWELO, NOW AT HOME, was intrigued by the fat pink envelope, which he lifted to his nose and sniffed. It smelled like Miss Lissie—old-fashioned white roses under a hot summer sun. Turning it over, he was surprised to see, in Miss Lissie’s ancient script, all sharp points and decisively rounded o’s: “They burned us so thoroughly we did not even leave smoke.” He did not know what he expected to find on opening the letter, but the blank page
s that lay in his hand, over a dozen of them, struck him as an odd missive, even from Miss Lissie.

  It was days before he understood, and then, in the middle of the night, it came to him. This part of Miss Lissie’s story was written in invisible ink. At the moment he realized this he also knew that all he needed to read her letter was a candle. Heaving himself out of bed, he went in search of one. Luckily he found a box of them—an earlier gift from Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal—on top of the fridge. Still in his nightshirt, hunched over the kitchen table, the candle close up behind the first sheet of paper, and the chill of the San Francisco fog seeping into his bones, he began to read ... what at first seemed to be some kind of religious raving.

  “The religion I was taught as a child, growing up on the Island,” wrote Miss Lissie, “is a thing that causes people to try to eat up the earth, since we were taught ‘everything is for man,’ while man was never asked to be for anything in particular. Well, for ‘God,’ but who knew what that was?”

  “Hmmm,” said Suwelo, yawning, and scratching his chin.

  “The first witches to die at the stake were the daughters of the Moors.” Moors? he mused skeptically. “It was they (or, rather, we) who thought the Christian religion that flourished in Spain would let the Goddess of Africa ‘pass’ into the modern world as ‘the Black Madonna.’ After all, this was how the gods and goddesses moved from era to era before, though Islam, our official religion for quite a long time by now, would have nothing to do with this notion; instead, whole families in Africa who worshiped the Goddess were routinely killed, sold into slavery, or converted to Islam at the point of the sword.

  “Yes,” and here Suwelo imagined a long, hesitant breath, “I was one of those ‘pagan’ heretics they burned at the stake.