by Alice Walker
“They burned us first—well, we were so visible. Even after centuries of living among the Europeans. You can think of Desdemona and Othello, if you can’t come at it any other way, in trying to catch even a glimpse of our presence in Europe. The Inquisition eventually traveled where they were, too, to watery Venice, a dank and still somehow beautiful place, and there were screams and firelit shadows bouncing off the walls of the Doges’ Palace in St. Mark’s Square for months on end.
“But did you never wonder why, in the little bit of the story the whites could not prevent Shakespeare, at least, from trying to tell (that ‘mysterious’ playwright about whom so very little is known), that there are only Moors (defined as men) and no Mooresses? I can tell you, we were there, somewhat paler than when we were in Africa, yes, but imagine Desdemona’s and Othello’s children. We were there, for sure, and brought up to be our fathers’ daughters, our fathers who loved learning more than any other thing, and who embraced a religion that had terrorized them in Africa, and who traveled the world and married strangers and barbarians in order to learn more about their curious, alien ways. Our poor fathers, whose only crime was that they loved their Mother, but who, in seeking to protect Her and themselves, helped to change us all, finally, into another spirit and another race.
“The Inquisitors slaughtered our fathers and took their property for the church, as was done also to the Jews. Our African fathers, who, fleeing the religious dictatorship of Islam, while dressed in its cloak, had come into Spain, caught their breath, found themselves and their incredible handsomeness and learning admired, and, for the most part, settled there. Some of them pushed on into France and Germany, Poland, England, Ireland, Russia. One or two settled in Venice and inspired a famous play. Well, you get the picture. If I am not mistaken it is only in Poland that Our Black Lady, the Great Mother of All—Mother Africa, if you will—is still openly worshiped. Perhaps that is why it is said of the Poles that they are none too bright.
“But during the time of which I am speaking,” the letter continued, and the smell of the tallow candle seemed suddenly to hurt Suwelo’s nose, “and which I have tried to drop from memory because it is so horrible, they obliterated us. They said the mother of their white Christ (blonde, blue-eyed, even in black-headed Spain) could never have been a black woman, because both the color black and the female sex were of the devil. We were evil witches to claim otherwise. We were witches; our word for healers. We brought their children into the world; we cured their sick; we washed and laid out the bodies of their dead. We were far from evil. We helped Life, and they did not like this at all. Whenever they saw our power it made them feel they had none. They felt themselves the moon to our sun. And yet, as every woman knows, the moon also has great power. We are connected to all three planes—past, present, future—of life; so is man, but he will not let himself see it. He has let himself be taught that his own mother is evil and has joined religions in which her only role, after nurturing and rearing him with her blood, is to shut up.”
Suwelo imagined Miss Lissie’s frown.
“Can you believe it?” the letter continued. “It is as if each man forces every other man to go out into the night without a candle, to go out among the speaking without a tongue, to go out among the seeing without an eye, to go out among the standing without a leg.
“‘If you want to join the company of men,’ they are told, ‘you must do something about your mother.’ Meekly man says, ‘What must I do?’ Teeth already chattering from the cold he will feel without the warmth of his best friend. Hah! ‘We want you to shut her up,’ he is told. ‘Don’t pay any attention to anything she might suggest. In return, we will help you pretend that you created yourself. Just ignore her. Don’t hear her. Let her weep, let her moan, let her starve.’ This is what they have done to their own mothers; it is certainly what they have done to Mother Africa.
“They burned us so thoroughly—the dark women so recently, relatively speaking, from Africa—that, unlike the Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies and artists and rebels they also burned, not to mention the rich women whose property they stole even before their ashes cooled, we did not even leave a trace of smoke. The connection between black woman and white was broken utterly; the blood sisterhood that African women shared with European women was gone as if it had never been. In France, there is nothing. Notre-Dame. Our Lady. Not our Black Lady. In England, nothing; unless you find it among the remnants of the Celts, their own way of life smashed to bits. In Ireland, rumors of ‘the little people’ and all those ignorant jokes about ‘black Irish.’
“In Venice, where Othello was a nobleman, there are today endless statues of Moors, dressed in the livery of slaves. In Spain—well, there’s all that ‘Moorish’ architecture, too exuberantly colored to be easily explained.
“When they burned me at the stake I cursed them; what else is a dark woman to do? I did not mind that they coveted my house and the land my father left me. I would have given it to them, to save at least the lives of my children, who were grouped around me, and whose screams burned in my ears more piercingly than the fire. But what I refused to give up was my essence; nor could I. For it was simply this: I do not share their vision of reality, but have, and cherish, my own. And when you look at the world today, it fits my curse exactly, but with one exception: Those I cursed do not suffer alone; everything and everyone does. This I would not have had. It was a long time in the learning, that lesson: You cannot curse a part without damning the whole. That is why Mother Africa, cursed by all her children, black, white, and in between, is dying today, and, after her, death will come to every other part of the globe.”
Now there was an abrupt change in tone, and Suwelo noticed, with some alarm, that as he read each line, it completely disappeared; Miss Lissie had written her story not only in invisible ink, but in invisible ink that could not be read twice. He moved the page closer to the flickering candle to make sure of this observation. He lifted other sheets to the flame. They were blank. He sighed, shook his head, and read on.
“Now woman,” the letter continued, “by hook and by crook, and with a strong memory of African Eden in her batteries, kept alive some feeling for the other animals, though she was reduced usually to the caring and feeding of one small house cat. Well, there she was, black, with her broom and her cat, her hair like straw. Ever wonder why witches’ clothes are always black, and their hair every which way?” Suwelo knew Miss Lissie, in writing this, had laughed out loud.
“We never forgot it should be possible to communicate with anything that had big enough eyes! So there we were, the dark women, muttering familiarly to every mouse or cow or goat about the place. Their writers of fairy tales would make much of this tendency. We were shoved into the beds of men old enough to be our grandfathers, in countries where, unlike in Africa, bathing was simply not done; on estates far from human beings of any kind. The animals and our children were our world. Foolishly we thought the animals and our children, at least, would not be taken from us. But the Inquisitors, set in place to control us, declared ‘consorting’ with animals a crime, punishable by being burned at the stake! And our children fell into the hands of their fathers, their ‘masters,’ who traded them for gold, as they traded flour and land and cloth.
“The Inquisitors claimed we were fucked and suckled by bulls and goats and all manner of malformed animal creatures. For good measure, they gave their devil—the black thing that represented the people they most despised and wished to be perceived as separate from—sharp cloven hoofs and pointed horns, a tail. They made it seem not only natural but also righteous to kill, as brutally as possible, without any feeling but lustful self-justification, any animal or dark creature that one saw.
“There was something about the relationship she had with animals and with her children that deeply satisfied woman. It was of this that man was jealous.
“The animals can remember; for, like sight, memory is renewed at every birth. But our language they will never speak; not from lack of intelligence
, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them. And that is why, in a nutshell, Suwelo, goddesses and witches exist.”
SOME MONTHS AFTER ARVEYDA came back from his travels with Zedé and told Carlotta the heartrending story of her mother’s life, she noticed that the red parrot-feather earrings had fallen apart; there were still wispy gold threads that went through her ears, but these had fallen free of the feathers themselves, which were bedraggled shreds that had to be smoothed flat with an iron. Taking the red, tissue-thin blots of color with her one day, she stopped at a shop in San Francisco where anything at all, depending on size and flatness, could be encased in plastic. Within hours a necklace had been made for her, and so, around her neck, enclosed in clear, hard plastic, she began to wear the feathers. In her jewel box at home she continued to keep the stones, until one day she realized they had spent their entire existence, in the thousands of years before they came into her care, in the open air. She took them out and casually placed them in their original formation—which she now saw as a pyramid or triangle, or the women’s sign for peace—beneath the arching overhang of a giant California live-oak tree in the San Francisco arboretum. Beneath this tree she began, quite frequently, to eat her lunch, do yoga stretches, run in place, and meditate and pray.
It was after she began wearing the new necklace that she started, for the first time in years, to dream. In her very first dream she was a young child in a cave with her mother, only this mother was not Zedé but someone much larger and darker, and that mother was busily painting something on the walls in bright colors. Carlotta, too, was encouraged to paint, and so she painted the walls and herself. Her mother was dark bronze, with black wavy hair that bushed to her waist, but now, behind her, looming up against the very topmost reaches of the cave softly came her father, a giant of a man, bearded and fierce. But no, he was smiling. He was darker even than her mother, and his hair was dull. Then the three of them stood together in the mouth of the cave, exactly as a small San Francisco family would stand in their doorway peering out into a rainy day. Only now that they stood in the light, Carlotta saw that if they were in a cave, it was not a natural one; the sides of the entrance, where her fingers rested, were smooth as glass. Looking up, she saw that the cave entry was indeed a door, and that the lintel was made of smooth stone into which a strange beast with the head of a very ugly, big-nosed and long-lipped person was magnificently and scarily carved. But Carlotta felt no fear.
Part Three
“LIBERATING ZEDÉ AND CARLOTTA was the last act I did as Mary Ann Haverstock,” the playwright Mary Jane Briden, after three decades of living in Africa, would tell her American and African friends. “It was one of the more exciting things I’d ever done, and I was lucid! My mind had been clouded with drugs for such a long time that when I went back into the jungle to get them, everything, every tree, every bush, every star, the sun, seemed to me as if just created. As we tore through the bush, I was oohing and aahing over every little fern bank, every little streamlet, the tiniest points of light captured in the droplets of condensed dew on the leaves. I was smiling the whole time. Admiring with each step my pretty pink boots, so bright and flowerlike against the dark verdant tropical earth.
“It was easy to kill the dogs and steal into the compound of the school. Easy to grab Zedé and Carlotta, easy to reach the coast and my boat the Recuerdo. The voyage to San Francisco was smooth and beautiful. Zedé, exhausted from excitement and the escape itself, slept as if she were dead. I looked after Carlotta, who had grown into a fat little Buddha of a girl. The crew and I had not anticipated the storm. We’d planned a much simpler disappearing act. We would contact the Coast Guard and tell them the Recuerdo had a broken mast. By the time they arrived, we would be long gone on my other boat, which shadowed our journey the whole time. But the storm did come, and after calling the Coast Guard, we made our escape, never dreaming the Recuerdo, the most seaworthy of sloops, would capsize and fling its occupants into the sea. But I had made sure Zedé and Carlotta always wore their life vests on deck, and so I suppose that is what saved them.
“I read the newspapers later, with the story of my sunken boat and the two odd boat people hauled up out of the ocean and brought ashore. My parents, I also read, flew out to meet them. This was in a second article, after the newspapers discovered whose daughter it was who owned the boat. And there was an enchanting picture of Mom and Dad holding hands and walking back to their limousine. It made me sad to see them; they seemed so old, and so lost. The papers had spared them nothing and raked over my ‘youthfully misguided, race-mixing radic-lib escapades’ with typical Hearstian reacto-conservative glee. Mom was still as frail as a sparrow from years of starving herself so that she might appear a child’s size next to Dad’s lumbering six feet four. I could never, once I understood how love was made between men and women, bear to imagine them making love, with him on top. I could feel how the breath would be crushed out of her as her tiny rib cage supported his heavy abdomen, chest, shoulders, and neck. Yet it wasn’t likely that she’d complain. This was all she knew. Her own father had been huge and her mother even smaller and frailer than she was. The family had liked to say, about my mother’s mother, that she weighed maybe a hundred pounds, soaking wet. I had actually been pointedly reminded of this fact, growing up, as I sat at the table refusing to eat anything but buttery mashed potatoes with a side order of chocolate milk.
“There was no reason for them to think me alive or to grieve over me excessively. For months after I became old enough to inherit my own money, I had made a quietly shocking spectacle of myself by giving it away. They looked on grimly, disapproving. But really, I had so much; and sometimes I was shaken to discover that there were weeks when, simply by letting my investments alone, I earned more, sometimes as much as three times more, than I had managed in the same period to give away. There was a dreadful feeling of creeping ‘moneyism’; days when I felt for all the world like a field or forest being overtaken by kudzu. I felt I would drown in all my money, and the panic of that feeling only began to ease as I made plans to give up forever being who I was.
“How can I say this so that it doesn’t seem totally awful? I was eager to give up being who I was. I had already chosen a new name, ‘Rowena Rollins,’ which, I was later to realize, I could only use comfortably on paper. In establishing myself in Africa, I called myself ‘Mary Jane Briden,’ getting rid of ‘Ann,’ which I’d never liked, and ‘Haverstock,’ which seemed just a pseudonym for cash, and adding a name that—now that I consider it—had something of the possibility of marriage in it. Prophetically, it would be in Africa that I would become, though only in name, a bride. But I simply did not know how to get about in the world without sufficient cash. This means I did not give away all my money, as my parents thought I would, saying at various times to me that when I grew old and penniless I would regret my ‘foolish’ behavior. I opened several foreign bank accounts under my new name and under a few long numbers and under a couple of other people’s names, all deceased. I kept enough to live on, in other words, and to do whatever in the world I might modestly choose, and I left the Recuerdo sinking decisively into oblivion, like my old life, and went off in The Coming Age, the Recuerdo’s twin, except for a small turquoise snake embroidered on her sails. After years of barely conscious deliberation, this symbol had emerged as my personal emblem of spiritual expression. The snake, which sheds its skin but is ever itself, and, because of its knowledge of the secret places of the earth, free from the threat of extinction, apparently uneradicable; and turquoise, a color of cleansing of body and spirit, of the clarification of memories, and of powerful healing.
“I remember how I felt as the storm subsided and the fog began to clear. All that year I dressed in black jumpsuits, and as I sat in a deck chair with my steaming cup of camomile tea and my pink lace-up boots propped against the rail, I felt, for the first time that I could remember, not only mentally lucid and well defi
ned against the landscape of my universe, but also actually vivid; in short, free.
“I did not really know where I was going, and so I returned to the past. But the old past, not the one that I myself knew. I went to London and tramped about in the parks and museums and libraries for quite some months, listening intently, speaking when I could, until I’d developed something of a British accent. I then took the train out to Hampstead and the nursing home for the exceedingly rich and aged where she was. I couldn’t decide, as I waited in the softly colored, restfully lighted lobby, whether I should pass myself off as a journalist or a student; surely I’d need some justification for my interest in Eleanora Burnham’s life. But I had not reckoned on having been known to her in the past. The old past. The past of before I was born or even thought of.
“‘Elly,’ she croaked at me immediately. ‘You’ve finally come back home! And what did you bring me?’
“She was the oldest, frailest, most ethereal-looking human being I’d ever seen, my great-aunt Eleanora. Her bright blue sunken eyes dominated her thin, wrinkled face. Her sparse white hair hung in two lusterless pigtails over her red, ethnically decorated nightdress. Daydress, too, I supposed, for she had the look and, as I bent over her, the smell of someone who, though clean, was never out of bed.
“But why should she call me ‘Elly,’ a diminutive of her own name?
“‘Elly Peacock!’ she exclaimed happily, smiling broadly and without a tooth in her head. I sat on the edge of a chair beside the bed.
“The nurse winked at me. ‘She’s in and out of this world a great deal,’ she said, smiling. ‘Sometimes she thinks I’m her mother ... and,’ she said, looking down at her short skirt, ‘dressed indecently.’
“I looked up at the blonde, plump, matronly woman. I thought she looked a bit like me—a Slav or Russian or eighteenth-century English country version.