by Alice Walker
“Ah, so!” Fanny could only utter, in delight.
“African angels, of course! That’s just what’s been missing from everyone’s life, right?” said Nzingha, a hand on her hip and her black eyes ablaze.
“I immediately visualized them,” she continued, “my mother among them, not as she was in her final days, but as she was when she and I shared the same mat. Her kind face, her sweet breath and tender voice. Her psychic connectedness to events and people hundreds of miles away. I knew that Notre-Dame was built on the site of a shrine to Isis, who was later called the Black Madonna, and I hurried there as soon as I arrived in Paris, for my teachers, the nuns, had said I must. There is no trace of Isis there, of course, nor anywhere in Paris; certainly not today in the souls of its people. But at least I stood there, in Notre-Dame, where her ancient, more likely preancient, worshipers had also stood. Except, they had stood with their feet on the bare ground, under trees, and it was this feeling of being connected with the Universe directly that I missed. Notre-Dame to me was no different from the Louvre. It had been built for the same purpose. Only it had been built to colonize the spiritual remains of a goddess, as the Louvre had been built to colonize the material remains of devastated cultures.
“Dutifully I sent the nuns a postcard showing this somber edifice, and they wrote back to remind me that the Goddess is not confined in the monuments men allegedly create for her to dwell in, and which are really erected to themselves. That She—the spirit of Mothering, of Creating, of Blessing and Protecting All—lives within us, and is confined neither to shrines nor to any particular age.
“But,” said Nzingha, “back to the professor. The story he was telling was about the ugliness of the face of the African Goddess, with her dreadlocked hair—snakes, ugh, right?—and its tendency to turn men to stone. And so this brave white man, Perseus the Greek, takes on the challenge of slaying her, as he would any other ‘dragon,’ for it is as if the only invitation the white man accepts from anything that is powerful is that he come at once to kill it. And so he cuts off her head, and in all his stories says the face is hideous, and the hair like writhing snakes, and that there is nothing redeemable about her whatsoever.”
There was a look of deep sadness on Nzingha’s face. “Except,” she said, in a whisper, “if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa’s wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa; and what you realize you are seeing is the Western world’s memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa.” She paused for a moment, as we considered this. “Actually,” she continued thoughtfully, “the earliest known ‘Athene,’ though Greek, has snaky hair. Only later did they give her those flowing blond locks that the black-haired Greeks even today pretend they had.” Nzingha had the last swallow of wine from the glass in her hand and shrugged, looking, for just a moment, very French. “It was hardly a challenge,” she said, “to move on to my Western literature class and discover that Athena was created to be a flunky of the male order that created her. That one of her first acts, in The Orestia, was to deny that there is any bond between a mother and her child, other than that of a letter to its envelope. According to her, at Orestes’ trial for the murder of his mother, woman merely carries the seed, the child is totally the fruit of its father. She herself, she declares, never had, nor ever needed, a mother, having sprung full blown from the forehead of her father, the God Zeus!”
Nzingha pulled herself upright and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs. For a moment she looked remarkably like Ola. Fanny didn’t think either of them had a hangover yet, but it was clear that their wine-induced euphoria, what there had been of it, was short-lived. Nzingha’s story made her think of universities in the United States, and all the lies in academia that had driven her to the practice of massage.
“So what did I attempt to argue,” Nzingha said wearily, sounding a bit like Ola too, “there in the Sorbonne, in one of the foremost bastions of Western civilization: that the reason Athena had sprung ‘full blown’ from the mind of Zeus was because she was an idea, given by Greek men to their God; and that ‘idea’ was the destruction of the African Goddess Isis and the metamorphosis of Isis into the Greek Goddess Athena. But since no one at the Sorbonne had been taught anything about Isis, it was impossible for them to connect her with Athena. I must have appeared to be simply another raving African.
“I left France that night. I refused to be taught that ‘Black’ Africa—‘Negro’ Africa, as they called it—was unconnected to ‘Colored’ Africa, that is, Egypt, or that a civilization founded on the destruction of the black woman as Goddess in her own world was superior to what I had at home, no matter how ‘backward’ or impoverished.”
“And you were right,” Fanny said emphatically, kissing her cheek.
“Father was badly disappointed,” Nzingha said regretfully, putting her fingers to the spot Fanny had kissed. “He had such dreams for me! That I would know not only French and English, but also German. So he fussed quite a bit when he saw I would never go back. I learned to educate myself in the way I’m sure it must have been done in the days of old. Whenever I met someone who seemed to know a lot about a subject, and who evinced, moreover, a certain happiness in his or her being, and if I were interested in the subject, I asked to be taught what they knew. To my father I said one day: ‘Show me how you write plays. Take me with you so that I can learn how they are performed. Tell me what to study in order to help develop our culture.’ To the village people I said: ‘Tell me about the war, tell me about the old days; show me how you made things; tell me the stories so that they will not be lost.’ One thing I know,” said Nzingha decisively. “Learning from one’s elders does not permit pessimism. Your day is always easier than theirs. You look at them, so beautiful and so wise, and you cannot help trying to emulate them. It is courage given by osmosis, I think.” She fell silent for several minutes, gazing out over the lake, which had turned maroon from the deep red rays of the setting sun.
“You give me courage, Nzingha,” Fanny said, after a while.
Nzingha sighed, looked at her sister without any of the resentment of the long-lost sibling Fanny once or twice had glimpsed in her eyes, and smiled.
“It was the play Ola wrote about your mother that brought him around,” she said. “He remembered how much he’d learned from the missionaries, but he also remembered how learning from them and not from his own people made him feel inferior. This had caused him to become almost mindlessly aggressive, especially against females, over whom he exerted power because of his size and because he was a man. It was when I started to work with him, first learning to write plays and then as his assistant at the Ministry of Culture, that I began, like everyone else, to call him ‘Ola.’”
Nzingha gathered the food scraps and numerous empty wine bottles and put them back into the picnic hamper. Fanny rose from her mat and began to roll it up.
Isis, Athena. Egypt, Greece. There on the shores of enormous Lake Wanza it was easy to think of them, shimmering just above the horizon, Egypt itself a kind of place angel, ever beckoning on those in need of reassurance of their beauty, their worthiness, their goodness. Their place in history. And yet, as Fanny said to Nzingha, as they brushed off each other’s skirts, “the fact that one felt so involved with the black and mixed-race Egyptians was not so much because of their rulers, or even their gods or their religion, but because of their artists. It is the art, above all, that is exquisite,” she murmured, “and no doubt the music was beautiful also.”
She should not have worried about the white paint. She dressed in the simple white informal clothes she had and rode to her father’s village with Nzingha and Metudhi. When they arrived, the village women took them in hand, and within minutes Fanny’s face and hands and legs had been plastered with white mud.
“In the United States,” she told Nzingha, “my grandmother us
ed to whitewash her fireplace with this stuff.”
Nzingha looked puzzled, and Fanny could see she couldn’t visualize it.
“Never mind,” she said.
This funeral was as long on chanting and singing as the one in the capital had been on speeches. Fanny preferred it. It had been hard to sit still as one unctuous government official followed another, praising Ola for his “bold,” “revolutionary” work. She felt that most of them were simply relieved he’d had the tact to die of a heart attack while at home—right in the middle of an antigovernment quip, she’d been informed—and not bloodied, on the floor, in one of their jails.
“I realize,” she whispered to Nzingha, “that there is not a single government in the world I like or trust. They are all, as far as I’m concerned, unnatural bodies, male-supremacist private clubs.”
Nzingha yawned. “Yes,” she said, making no attempt to disguise her restlessness, “and by this time we are too bored to want to join.”
WHILE THE GUMBO HAD cooled a bit, Mr. Hal had set the table with beautiful linens, crystal, and cutlery that belonged to Uncle Rafe, and that Suwelo had never seen. There was, first of all, a thick snowy-white tablecloth; over this was laid an old cream-colored square of handmade lace. There were lace-edged napkins to match. Then there were settings of bone china that resembled alabaster and that rang when hit with a spoon. Suwelo struck his teacup over and over with his spoon, with the charmed expression of a child. There were blue crystal goblets that pinged. There was richly glinting silver everywhere, picking up the flames of the candles in the heavy silver candelabra that Miss Lissie set on the table with a graceful flourish.
Suwelo had sat in what would have been Uncle Rafe’s chair at such an occasion, at the head of the table. Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal were on either side of him. They raised their glasses of iced tea or lemonade to the spirit of Uncle Rafe, and set to with real appreciation and undisguised gusto. Rafe had loved himself some gumbo, Miss Lissie allowed.
The gumbo, which Mr. Hal hid assured Suwelo would be even better tomorrow, and the next day and the next and the ... was so good Suwelo could hardly believe he was tasting this dish for the first time. It had the kind of flavor that made you feel as though you were tasting all of life; there was, well, an almost sexual flavor to it. He loved the slick gumminess of it, its spicy fullness. Not one flavor that had gone into its creation was any longer distinct.
An hour later, after the dishes had been washed and they were still feelingly praising the gumbo, made even more special because the three of them had prepared it, the friends sat in the living room attempting to read different sections of the newspaper. There were the usual reports of murders, rapes, torture, wars, abandoned children, trashed apartments, and new cars. It was Miss Lissie who first threw her section to the floor.
“There’s nothing I can do about any of this madness today,” she said. “And just thinking about it spoils my digestion.”
“You’re right,” said Mr. Hal, neatly folding his section and placing it beside him on the couch.
“I’d rather keep hearing about you and Fanny.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hal, “if they’re going to blow us up, or make us freeze to death and starve in the dark, we might as well be enjoying ourselves by hearing a good story.”
Suwelo found himself in the seat next to the television set. In a gesture he now recognized as ritualistic, he turned slightly in his chair and tugged at the corners of the blue shawl, which did not really need straightening. He sat back and began.
Suwelo had thought that if he ever sat in the “hot seat” beside the television, he would never be able to talk about his life as Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie talked about theirs. His own life felt too modern, too current—who knew how his and Fanny’s story would turn out?—too ... personal. He felt a bit of the shyness he’d suffered as a small boy when asked by an adult to give an accounting of himself, and he felt exposed in a way he had not while helping to make dinner in the kitchen. Talking to them then had been indirect, somehow. They’d each been absorbed in the task before them. It seemed he was mostly talking to the crabs he was cleaning, and only incidentally had Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie heard. He cleared his throat and slid his long fingers up and down his corduroy-covered thigh. His eyes, which had lost their unreflective look, seemed both candid and full of feeling.
“The yurt that Fanny and I had,” he said, in a firm, clear voice, “and our five acres, were on a ridgetop that overlooked a valley of sheep ranches and vineyards. The opening faced east, so that each morning we were awakened by the rising sun. Though we were in a small clearing, there was forest all around, and we shared the land with deer, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and birds of all description. There were enormous hawks playing—actually looking for food, but hovering, and appearing to play—against the wind, and the most graceful vultures, with huge wingspans, and owls—which, Fanny always said, I resembled, and so perhaps the owl was my totem—and sometimes sea gulls, for we weren’t too far from the sea. If you ever come west, and I certainly hope you do, I’d love to show you this place. It really is special. We were not the first people to think so; we often found bits of chiseled flint and an occasional potsherd.
“Fanny from time to time thought she saw Indians. The only time I ever saw any was when we ran into them camping down at the state park, with everybody else. But these were not the ones she saw. At least not back up in the hills where we were. ‘Just over there by the stream,’ she said to me once when we’d gone down to the river to swim and she’d wandered back into the woods to find the source of a small creek that fed into the river. ‘What exactly do you think you saw?’ I asked. She had that intent, slightly stoned, but joyful look she too often got, for no good reason, it seemed to me. Or, I should say, for no reason I could see. She pointed downstream. ‘Just over there, very quiet on the bank, two Pomo Indian boys, their spears raised, fishing for salmon.’ Wrong season, I said, pedantically. It was summer and very hot and very little water was left in the river; certainly not enough for salmon, which are huge fish. She wasn’t perturbed by my response. She was used to it. Generally, when I used this tone of voice, she would simply stop telling me whatever it was she had experienced. But not this time. She described them: brown skin, long black hair, very round, ‘moon’ faces, she said. Loincloths. Loincloths? I teased. She nodded. ‘As still as deer, they were,’ she avowed, ‘and as hard to see.’
“I didn’t understand or share these flights of fancy, but when I wasn’t resentful that she was the possessor of this dubious gift of—what shall I call it?—‘second sight,’ ‘two-headedness,’ whatever, I enjoyed them vicariously. They were part of what enchanted me about Fanny. And in the summers, when I had no teaching responsibilities and we were both able to ‘disappear,’ as she liked to say, from the world, they were a definite part of the entertainment. Truly that was—the ‘disappearance’—her happiest time; when she felt she didn’t exist to anyone but herself and sometimes not even to herself. I’d never known anyone who loved the thought of impermanence, invisibility, being at peace under a toadstool, more than Fanny.” Suwelo laughed at this image of Fanny, which he visualized perfectly. There she sat under her little brown toadstool, happy as a toad, and being one.
“She picked up information in ways I never understood, either. She’d given up reading in any systematic way; the information she needed simply came to her. She’d visit a friend, or someone she barely knew, for example, and knock over a vase. The water from the vase would splash on a stack of books on the floor. Fanny would carefully dry off all the books, on hands and knees, apologizing profusely the whole time. Then the information, or whatever it was, she’d been looking for, vaguely, would appear on the wettest page of one of the books. She’d be drying this page in front of the fire and right there would be exactly what she’d wanted to know. Her eye would rest on the page for only a minute, as she absorbed the information, and she would be on her way. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen hundreds of times
; and it was really, sometimes, maddening. By comparison, everything I wanted to learn, I had to work very, very hard for, spending weeks, even months, locked up in musty library stacks with decaying tomes stacked well above my head.
“Or wishes! Fanny could wish for almost anything—food, clothing, an experience, a ticket to anywhere, a phone call from a friend, anything; more otters in the river, to see a buck with really huge antlers—every September when the deer season opens, the bucks are routinely hunted down and slaughtered, yet Fanny saw not one with huge antlers, but two!—even to be taller than she was. She actually did grow taller by an inch by taking a martial-arts class twice a week... . And whatever she wished for would happen. It was her wish that got us the yurt, an authentic handmade yurt built by a modern Dutch witch from Amsterdam, passing through on her way to God knows where, a yurt that I’d certainly never have dreamed of one day living in. After all, the only yurts I knew anything about were those in photographs taken in Outer Mongolia that I’d seen in National Geographic and that were made out of yak hides. But no, the one she conjured up for us was round, yes, more or less, and made of wood. It had a tiny stove with a chimney pipe that stuck out the side, and a roof made of shingles. There were windows everywhere. She’d gone off somewhere and slept in one, after dreaming about one for months. She loved it. We have to have a yurt, she said. It wasn’t a week later that our friends called with the offer of theirs. They had built a regular, square, modern house, which Fanny considered indescribably ugly, and without a soul, and had been on the verge of demolishing the yurt. We moved in. There was about enough room to curse a cat, as they say, but since we were there only during the summer, we spent most of our time outdoors. At night it was just the perfect size for cuddling close on our futon mat and looking up into the stars.”