by Alice Walker
I did know all those things, yet none of them worked when I visited M’Sukta, which I began to do, regularly, after that first visit with T. The history I knew was not hers, the geography I knew placed an elephant herd where her village had been, the science I knew did not teach me how to make dyes and medicines and the other things M’Sukta could do; the literature I read talked about savages and blackamoors, and that was when it was being polite. The languages I knew failed me entirely when I stood before her. ME TAO ACHE DAKEN SOMO TUK DE. This was etched in the wall of the compound as it approached the granary door. I puzzled over it each time I came. Was it Latin? Was it Greek? T. once said laughingly that, as I strained to decipher it, I looked quite pixilated. Then he showed me the brochure in which it was translated. It was an ancient saying of M’Sukta’s people, a people always under siege for one reason or another: THEY CANNOT KILL US, BECAUSE WITHOUT US THEY DIE. Hardly what one would expect from the primitive philosophy of “The Savage in the Stacks,” as a local paper referred to M’Sukta, assuming, ignorantly, that a museum is a library. Now I had a new quandary: What kind of people would have this thought as a life guide? The more I pondered it, the more of a riddle it became.
Now the effects on the diary of years of humidity, moths, existence in the bottoms of trunks and traveling cases in distant countries began, abruptly, to show. There were whole pages impossible to read because of faded ink; some sections were literally eaten away. Mary Jane tried to subdue her frustration by remembering that she hadn’t even known there was a diary by Eleandra; she hadn’t known Eleandra existed. She made herself thankful for the snippets of the diary she could read.
“Only my painting tutor [something, something, something—this was faded] showed outright impatience with me. I had always thought him rather sullen, and an indifferent painter. I was lamenting that I had no freedom, as a woman, to paint. I could not go to Italy, for instance, as he had done, and he was poor! “Don’t pity yourself, please,” he said acidly. “I can go to Italy by working every single day with people like you” (here, he bowed!), “saving all my earnings, living on rusks. I can stay two months, I can paint what I like, in two months. You are a woman, but you are rich. People may laugh but they will not harm you if you paint. You can paint all day. You can paint for months, even years, on end. Anything you like. And ...” (he softened not at all, but appeared to look at me with an even deeper disgust) “you have some talent.”
“But what good thing have I done?” I asked. I painted because I loved it, not because I had any dream of being good. He reminded me of a little thing I had done that, in truth, puzzled me even as I did it. It was a still life—all my paintings were—called “Tombstone and Fruit.” A grave, a stone, fruit covering the mound like flowers. I had no idea where the image came from. I told him this.
“It came from you. From you, trying to tell yourself something.” I had studied with this man, middle-aged and not unattractive, I now saw, for three years. I had never really noticed him. His jaundiced skin, his white, white hands and muscular wrists. The look in his eyes. He had worked for my family, for me, while his own dreams of growth and development as an artist faded. Two months in Italy! I knew they were, in reality, his life. This, then, was the power people like us had. The power to enslave others and to frustrate their dreams. And I had never even taken my painting seriously, whilst his life—living on rusks, he said—bled slowly away.
Another tattered page:
“Those words are all that kept me going,” said M’Sukta years later, when we could, haltingly, converse. “They were truly my ancestors’ gift to me. Not even song meant as much to me—and I used to sing all the time just to hear my own language—or knowing how to weave the tribal cloth, the magic of which is that as long as it is woven, the tribe exists; as long as you know how to weave it, so do you. These words never bored me (‘made my head heavy as rice grains in a gourd’) all the years I lived in the museum (‘granary for humans’). Those words called me back when sickness and sadness (‘heaviness of centre chest’) threatened to carry me away (‘eat down my soul’). It is a miracle (‘the end of rainbow’) that they should have been there at all, etched in the mud wall beside the granary door; for our people did not read or write; instead they placed their trust (‘open chest, sun shining’) and their history (‘kisses and kicks to the ancestors’) in the memory (‘head granary’) of human beings (‘those alone on the earth who think of what is just’—just, ‘two hands holding equal amounts of grain’). They believed that all that has ever happened is stored as memories within the human mind, or in the head granary of those who alone on earth think of what is just. The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget; your thing granaries (‘museums’), and not yourselves, are full. I can tell you truthfully (‘eyes steady, heart calm’) that meeting your people was a terrible shock (‘small children running away’). Your people are most afraid of what you have been; you have no faith that you were as good as or better than what you are now. This is not our way (‘path’). Not only were we as good in the beginning as we are now, but we are the same (‘two grains of sand, identical’).”
When she said this, I thought of that night long ago in London, when I sat watching the ballet with T., the scandalous one from which Mother and Father withdrew. I had thought I had merely been titillated by the “savage” dissonance of the music, the thunderous, herdlike cacophony of the dance, which was certainly not the ballet, not the formal, precise, unnatural movements that one was used to. I thought I was responding to the bizarre clothing. Skimpiness on the one hand, outrageous costumes and colours on the other. So barbaric, so savage. But perhaps T. and I were both responding to our first glimpse of ourselves before we, and all Britain, all Europe, became pressed into the forms created for us by civilization. Perhaps the maiden dancing herself to death in her “marriage” to the sun struck some deep chord in us. Perhaps she was expressing a feeling for nature that English people subsequently only expressed politely, with restraint, in their gardens and in their insistence on large parks.
Where had the passion of praise gone, then, among my own people? It certainly was not in the church, neither the Catholic nor the Church of England. The Roman conquerors seemed to have rid us of it, and yet, I thought, in the passionate dance of the young virginal maiden one could glimpse part of the truth of who we English people were. There was our passion and our savagery before it became tamed. But it had not really become tame, only repressed—and the worship of nature turned into its opposite, and the end result was wilderness ravaged and despoiled, and people in chains, and a little black woman shut up in a museum beneath a fake sky.
It was Sir Henley Rowanbotham who had had the words M’Sukta lived by carved into the mud wall beside the granary. He was a commander in the British army sent to administer to the needs of the Royal Colonial Exploitation Company, Ltd. The men under his charge assured safe passage throughout Africa to those explorers and entrepreneurs from England who boasted, if they lived long enough—for there were such things as fevers, quicksand, and mambas—of making quick fortunes in Africa, buying and selling among the natives, claiming huge tracts of land and all the minerals and diamonds and whatnot they might contain. The slave trade had not yet ended, though it was on its last legs, at least as far as the West was concerned, and there was still money to be made. Rowanbotham had been deeply influenced by the adventures of Sir Richard Burton, another army man, whom he accepted as his personal guide re: things native. Like Burton, he was once thought to be deeply in love with a native woman—African, not Persian—and like Burton, he, in other ways, immersed himself in native life and native affairs. He was, again like Burton, adept at learning languages and was genuinely fascinated by them, and whiled away the long damp tropical evenings of the rainy season ensconced at a window table in the Royal Colonial Club, working up a native alphabet.
It was from his notes that I began to gather an understanding
of M’Sukta’s people and their history, besides the things I learned from her. M’Sukta’s tribe, the Balawyua, or the Ababa, colloquially, had been, since time immemorial, a matriarchy. Rowanbotham, brought up in East London by a mother and three older sisters who adored him beyond reason, had a special affinity for matriarchies. It was he who, when all her tribe was sold into slavery or killed, rescued M’Sukta and made provision for the Museum of Natural History to shelter her; and because she alone could pass on the history of her people’s ancient way of life, and because, except for her and the young boy who came with her, there was no one who understood her language, Rowanbotham had dubbed her “the African Rosetta stone.”
Here there was the most maddening evidence of the work of tiny, tiny teeth. Moths had chewed away the rest of the page; indeed the rest of the diary now began to fill the air around Mary Jane’s chair in the form of a cloud of dust. It made her sneeze. That was it, then. All she was likely to know of Eleandra Burnham Peacock, at least from her own pen.
But surely one mark of moral progress and spiritual maturity is the ability to be grateful for half a gift? Mary Jane kept this thought firmly in mind later that week as she stood over the empty bed of her great-aunt Eleanora. She had died while Mary Jane was sitting in “her room” at the library, going through her things.
There were only Mary Jane and the librarian, the chancellor of the college, her nurse, and the London solicitor at the funeral. There was a longish obituary, mainly about her years in Africa—her writing was dismissed in half a line—but also about her similarity to an earlier Lady Burnham, the Lady Eleandra Burnham Peacock.
That name brought to the obituary writer’s mind the names of two other Englishwomen, “outrageous in their day” who’d “gone native” in the grand anti–Victorian England style: Lady Hester Stanhope and the fascinating and stunningly beautiful Lady Jane Digby El-Mezrab. The most memorably distinctive thing about the latter’s life was, apparently, that not only had she left England and settled in Arabia, but she had wed an Arab.
The day after Lady Burnham’s funeral, it was reported that she had left the bulk of her estate to an American great-niece, Mary Ann Haverstock, who was, unfortunately, also deceased. She was described as having been “a political radical with a fondness for blacks, and a mental psychotic with a fondness for drugs.” Relieved that this misfit was no more, the obituary writer rushed on with the information that Lady Burnham’s estate would go to fund an anthropological group of which she had been fond, in Africa.
Obituary writers were funnier in England than in America, Mary Jane thought. But how had Eleanora even known she existed? Perhaps during the times she was involved in scandal in the United States, her aunt had got wind of her, and found something—news of Mary Jane’s blackened bare feet, her uncombed locks, her hanging out with colored lumpen—to applaud.
Back at the library for the last time, she discovered on the shelves double sets of Eleanora’s five volumes, their leaves uncut. She took a set, slipped the books into her capacious shoulder bag, and smiled her way past the recently somewhat thawed librarian. Mary Jane knew she was off to Africa, and was thinking of the two Eleandras, one so eager for experience in life, one married off meekly into oblivion; seven decades had failed to dull her twin’s contempt for her. She also thought of Eleanora, whose books, she hoped, would reveal her to Mary Jane, as the diary of Eleandra, “the Lady Peacock,” had, in a major way, revealed Mary Jane to herself.
She stopped at an artists’ supply shop on her way to the dock—her ship sailed at midnight—and bought enough brushes, turpentine, and paints to last for a year.
Part Four
He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want.
—Ola
“CARLOTTA HAD NO SUBSTANCE,” Suwelo had said to Miss Lissie’s back. This was before he had sold Uncle Rafe’s house and returned to San Francisco. It was a Sunday in November, and Baltimore was beginning to have an early-morning chilliness that reminded him of Northern California. He’d sat perched on a stool beside the little chopping table in the kitchen, intently cleaning a pile of boiled Maryland crabs. Mr. Hal was at a counter chopping bell peppers and onions and weeping from the onion fumes, and Miss Lissie was attentively stirring a slowly darkening roux, which sent off a buttery, burning-bread smell that Suwelo didn’t know if he liked. He couldn’t quite see how a base of burned flour might taste good in a stew.
“You live in San Francisco, with all that seafood, and never had gumbo?” Mr. Hal was incredulous.
Suwelo had invited them for the weekend. Deep in his heart he was probably pretending they were his parents, but he didn’t mind. They’d showed up first thing that morning in Mr. Hal’s truck and hauled in a half-dozen bags of stuff: tomatoes, peppers, onions, okra and filé, a couple of chickens, slabs of bacon and beef, a hunk of pork, long tubes of dark, savory-smelling sausage, crabs almost overrunning a basket, a colorfully stenciled croker sack of rice, and jugs of ready-made lemonade and iced tea.
As soon as they started turning about in the kitchen, opening drawers, sharpening knives, complaining that “that devilish” salt shaker had never worked, Suwelo knew they belonged there. Miss Lissie kicked off her shoes and padded about in bare feet, and Mr. Hal made himself comfortable by unbuttoning the front of his short-sleeved white shirt to reveal a peach-colored T-shirt, which said, across the front, “Ecstasy Is Forever.” His hair was whiter and longer than when Suwelo first met him, and with his soft brown eyes, his courtly manner, even in the kitchen, he resembled a comfortable, gentle, and altogether happy George Washington Carver.
“What I mean about her having no substance is that she was all image. She was all image when I first saw her, all image when I met her, and all image ...”
“After you went to bed with her,” said Miss Lissie, completing the thought for him. “Give me the crab shells you’ve finished with. I need to boil them down for stock.” Suwelo passed them over.
From time to time he had told them small stories from his life; though they never asked. He felt he knew them more intimately than he knew his own parents—who had been killed in a car wreck, the result of one of his father’s drunken rages, when Suwelo was in college—and that not to attempt to share his life with them made him feel like a thief. Besides, he needed some help with Fanny.
“When Fanny came back from Africa that first time,” said Suwelo, “we knew it wasn’t going to work, us being married when she really didn’t want to be. She hated it. She hated the institution of marriage. She said the ring people wore on their fingers symbolizing marriage was obviously a remnant of a chain. She didn’t hate me. That much, at least, I was beginning to see. For one thing, when she came back from Africa, where she’d been for six months—the only time in her life she was able to be with both her mother and her father—her love for me was unmistakable. We fell on each other in an orgy of reconciliation that lasted for weeks. And this was only possible because when I picked her up at the airport I told her straight out that I loved her and that getting a divorce was just fine with me.”
“Umm hmm ... ” said Miss Lissie. She turned the pan so Suwelo could see the dark caramel color of the roux. Mr. Hal crossed the kitchen, his hands full of chopped onions and peppers, which he dropped into the pot. There was a searing, sizzling soun
d, and Miss Lissie said, “Oh, shit, the okra should have gone in first. But what the hell,” she added. “The making of gumbo is like the making of the best music, an improvisational art.” She poured herself a glass of wine and sipped as she stirred.
“We also knew,” Suwelo continued, “we couldn’t live on the East Coast in the suburbs of New York City. We lived, if you can believe it, in a little middle-class enclave called Forest Hills. The houses were nice, and there were trees and broad lawns, but everybody was always trying to make things look older—the houses, the trees. Sometimes I had the feeling that at night our neighbors went outdoors and beat on the walls of the houses with sticks and tugged on the bushes and trees, trying to stretch them to a more imposing height. They kept trying to pin some famous person’s birth to the place but, since people moved away every few years and always had, this was hard to do. They finally found a famous baseball player who’d rented a house there once, and there was talk of putting up a plaque. Our house was actually the oldest one there. We had no trouble selling it. Once we let it be known we wanted to sell, even some of our neighbors, moving up and moving older, wanted to buy. We sold to another black family, because we knew that one of the reasons our neighbors wanted to buy our house was to keep other black people out.
“But where to go? Fanny had spent a summer in Iowa, so she knew she couldn’t breathe in the Midwest. Too far from oceans, she said. And that bullshit about the prairie being oceanlike is for the birds. There’s about enough prairie left to piss in.
“I had once spent five minutes in Wyoming. Another five in Montana. In fact, on the bus once, on my way to Seattle to a friend’s wedding, I spent five minutes in each of those northwest states. Too isolated. Not enough colored. Not enough concrete, either.