by Alice Walker
At this juncture in his story Suwelo abruptly stopped talking, got up from his chair, and went upstairs. When he returned he was carrying a small photo album. He passed it to his friends, who flipped through it quietly. They saw snapshots of Suwelo, looking as if on a lark, sitting on the ground and apparently preparing wild vegetables to eat; a funny-looking dwelling that made them think of the little crooked houses in children’s fairy tales; and a shapely, sun-brown woman with a look of the most intense anticipation of good on her face. It was a face that expected everything in nature to open, unresistingly, to it. A face that said Yes not once but over and over again. It was one of those faces that people have when they’ve been sufficiently kissed as very young babies and small children. Though her hands were at her sides in the pictures, one had the sense that they were raised and open, offering or returning an embrace.
“Can you believe that that face is ever gloomy or defeated?” asked Suwelo, chuckling. He couldn’t believe it himself, and he’d seen it so often.
“‘I want a garden,’ Fanny said. “But there was not a drop of water on the land from May to November. The water we didn’t haul from the park materialized out of a long black plastic pipe connected to a well that two women on the ridge over from us, who had a vineyard, personally helped us lay down.
“Sometimes I felt swept along in a rush of experiences that felt seriously magical. I came to believe that whatever Fanny wished for would happen, and that whatever she was even remotely against, would fail. In a way this made me feel afraid in any angry confrontation with her. You know the expression ‘being withered by a look’? I think Fanny could wither with a look. But, fortunately, she was not the least bit interested in withering. No, her way was to ignore, to withdraw. Suddenly she simply was not available to interact with whatever ignorance she perceived. And when she came back, there was always a definite remoteness, a feeling coming from her of ‘Well, we are different, after all. I have my way, you obviously have yours. We shall simply coexist. If I can share space with bobcats, bucks, otters, and snakes, I can certainly live with you.’ A week of this. Then we would talk. We’d laugh. And we’d decide my poor behavior and her stubbornness were getting in the way of celebrating the imminent rising of the full moon. We could not have that! And our lives moved right along.
“I have to laugh when I think of what I told you earlier: that Fanny didn’t know about my playing around because she was a space cadet. It wasn’t because she was a space cadet that she didn’t know. It was because she trusted me. Trusting me, she simply didn’t tune in to a lot of the signs the way she could have. And, too, there were all the other signs, from all over the place, that she was getting and trying to relate to. What did it mean, for instance, that a bird one day walked backward slowly and carefully down a big oak tree in our clearing, hopped over to Fanny, looked up at her, and climbed up and sat on her head? This made her think of Queen Nut. Of course it did! And of the ideogram of the vulture on her head. Maybe Nut was trying to tell her something? Who could know? Well, in this case, Nut was trying to tell her something, which she found by talking to a friend of ours who is a Goddess worshiper and an Egyptologist. Her favorite saying of Nut’s, said our friend one day as we sat looking at a drawing of her on a tarot card, is: ‘Whatever I embrace, becomes.’ ‘That’s it!’ said Fanny. ‘That’s what?’ I asked. She didn’t explain. But I think now that what she meant was that we must, all of us, turn toward whatever it is that we do want, in our lives, in our loves, on the planet, and whatever we don’t want, just have sense enough to leave alone. But I didn’t know that then.
“I remember when I tried to get her to wear Frederick of Hollywood—type lingerie. Fanny has a beautiful body. But you’d never know it. I knew she’d look just as good or better than the women I fantasized. But she covered herself from head to foot in the most unappealing stuff. Long gowns, long, thick gowns, at night. Flannel. With high necks. She wore long Johns. Long Johns. At least they were cheerful. She dyed them all kinds of colors. Red and yellow and orange. She looked cute in them, though, rather than sexy.
“‘But I get cold in that stuff you like,’ she said. ‘And I feel ridiculous. It’s too flimsy to wear. Why do you want me to wear this?’ she asked, looking at me so piercingly that I wanted to drop the whole thing.
“She reluctantly put on some red satin-and-net underwear I’d bought and came out of the yurt and showed herself to me.
“‘I feel like a neon sign,’ she said.
“And I had to admit that there, in the forest, in the middle of nowhere, she looked like one.
“‘But lust loves neon,’ was my feeling.
“Afterward, as they say in early twentieth-century novels, I felt okay, at least I thought I felt okay. She felt terrible. She cried and said she felt degraded. I never saw the red satin and net again.
“But this particular struggle, which I lost—the struggle to get her to wear sexy lingerie, and to enjoy it as I did—went on for a number of years. I was being influenced in my private life with Fanny by the hidden sexual life I lived elsewhere. She would have realized this, and I’m sure it hurt her. Once, she even sat straight up in bed out of a sound sleep, or so I had thought, screaming, ‘Who are all these women in this bed with us? Who are they? Who are they?’ And she began to batter me with a pillow, and to weep. But we made a joke of this. For she wasn’t supposed to be aware of what I was doing, and I wasn’t supposed to be, as far as she was concerned, doing anything.
“Her tolerance wore thin, finally. ‘Listen, Suwelo, you like that stuff, you wear it,’ she said. And she actually bought me a little red bikini with a cut-out space in front, a little vee, and I pranced about in it happily. And then I did start wearing skinny, scanty, colorful underwear, because I did like it, and she got a little better when she shopped for herself, but always her choices were tasteful, understated, nunnish. I had to face the fact that to Fanny the cut of her underwear and of her gowns didn’t matter very much. She wanted comfort, warmth, sturdy pieces of clothing that were well made. To be truthful, she much preferred shopping for sweaters and boots and items like that in the men’s department; she said they were much better made, more generously cut, than in women’s wear. Occasionally she bought something we both liked; something usually expensive, and very sexy, but it was nothing that could ever be confused with neon.
“So, yes, I think she knew. Knowing Fanny, she probably knew before I did. Maybe she stayed away in Africa for such a long time because she wanted me to have the freedom to fuck around.
“It was a freedom I’d never had. And I was brought up on Playboy, in which the goal of every red-blooded man is to pierce as many women as possible, and to think of their minds, their creative gifts, and their professional abilities as added sexual stimulation, nothing more. I loved that joke inspired, I’m sure, by the Playboy mentality: What did you do with the female scientist who discovered a cure for the common cold? You screwed her. Yuk, yuk.
“It wasn’t as if she wasn’t free to sleep around too. She was. And she fell in love at the drop of a hat with all kinds of people, not all of them spirits. But sleeping with them didn’t seem that important to her. She tried to explain this to me, using her relationship to the planets, yes, the planets, as an example. ‘I live on Earth,’ she said. ‘I love it; I see that it really needs me, whether it knows this or not.’ She smiled. ‘Now I know there are all those other beautiful planets out there somewhere, and they may be infinitely more exciting, but Earth is where I am, and the longer I relate to it, the more interesting and exciting it becomes. We know almost nothing about Earth. You do realize, don’t you?’ As it happened, at this very time Fanny confessed she had never experienced orgasm during our lovemaking, and there I was fancying myself the compleat lover, if only she’d dress properly for her role; though she regularly experienced what she later told me was ‘a kind of ecstasy.’ But no orgasms. For sure I knew almost nothing about ‘Earth’ and should have held off trying to get to the other ‘plan
ets.’”
“Woman is a mystery,” commented Mr. Hal, encouragingly. It was, Suwelo felt, the only appropriate response.
Miss Lissie said nothing.
“And another odd thing, too,” Suwelo continued, overjoyed, actually, to be talking to them, “was how many of her old lovers were still sort of ‘around.’ Even the one who’d been drowned in a boating accident off the coast of South Carolina when she was in high school. I don’t think anyone she cared about ever left Fanny; and she was incapable of feeling sad when someone died. She felt sad about the way people died, or sad about their illness or whatnot, but, in a way, the living and the dead, once they were dead, were pretty much the same to Fanny, and present to her in about the same way.
“This was bound to give me a certain feeling of insecurity. There were times when, if she wasn’t there, and I could see she was not, though her body was sitting quietly beside me in a chair, I wasn’t sure whether I was. I always seemed to be chasing Fanny even when she was literally locked up tight in my arms. Carlotta didn’t understand this; who could have? I used to tease Fanny that she brought a new meaning entirely to the word ‘bondage.’ Sometimes I felt so disillusioned, so full of self-pity and futility, so married—but in a way that seemed totally different from ‘marriage’ as it is commonly known—I was just sick. The nights I’ve spent rummaging about in this house”—Suwelo looked up, toward the stairs—“thinking over these things! Other men marry women and say they love them and within five years, though they still live with them, you can see they have essentially separated themselves. There is no longer a spiritual or even an authentic physical connection. Instead, they are connected by house payments, a car, children, political expediency, whatever. Over time, Fanny and I shared none of these things. The divorce was merely our first shedding of any nonintrinsic relatedness. After that, it was as if we just had to see how far we could go. Could we be two people who met anew each time, for instance? ‘I couldn’t stand feeling bored when I saw you coming,’ she said. As for me, I couldn’t bear the thought of a loss of autonomy or freedom causing her to lose her magic. Because I came to appreciate and love this aspect of her more and more.
“She moved out of the bedroom and into the back half of the house. Then she moved out altogether. Some of our friends thought surely this meant we’d separated. And they knew nothing of the divorce. But no, separate spaces increased our harmony. Eventually. I don’t mean to make this sound easier than it was. It was often hell. We’d begun to get a glimmer of a way of life that gave us both direct sunlight, in a manner of speaking. Neither of us wanted to overshade the other. Yet we wanted a degree of stability, a degree of coziness. We wanted to be the forest and the tree. Separate development that enhanced whatever we were creating separately and together in our ... journey; that is what we were after.
“Marriage simply hadn’t fit us. Fanny thought it probably didn’t fit anybody. She thought it unnatural. I wasn’t so sure, being a man within a patriarchal system. I could see some privileges. She thought the words ‘whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder’ spoken at weddings missed the point. To her, ‘marriage’ was a bonding of souls that was eternal, anyway; it was presumptuous, therefore, for anyone to think it could be put asunder. Then there was the preacher standing in front of people as they were married, pretending to represent ‘God,’ but in fact representing the state. She was insulted by the hypocrisy. Besides, in her view, joining with another was such a sacred affair there was almost no way it could be done with other people present, a good number of them strangers, friends of friends, relatives you didn’t like, and others who couldn’t possibly appreciate the significance of the moment.
“From this you can easily see how Fanny and I never lacked topics of conversation. Sometimes we were so far apart in our ideas that I became quite exasperated. She always seemed to be putting people down, their little customs, their little ways. Behind every little custom, every little way, she saw an institution, and one she herself would never have devised. ‘Why do you even love me, if you do love me?’ I’d cry. And she’d think a moment and say, ‘I love you for your breath.’ Typically, the least substantial thing about me! ‘Also the least colonized,’ she’d say sweetly. Something unseen, indeed, invisible. Not my brains, not my cock, not my heart—no, my breath. But to her, as she explained it to me, my breath represented not only my life, but also the life force itself; and what this boiled down to in day-to-day reality is that she could, and did, kiss me all the time. We kissed for hours. Hours. She’d hold my tongue in her mouth and, with a shiver of pleasure that unfailingly caused me to rise almost beyond the occasion, she’d draw in my breath. Her own breath, sweet, delicious, the very essence of her soul’s vitality, would enter me. I’d had no idea, before being with Fanny, how steadily, increasingly seductive this kind of kissing is. We started out kissing like everyone else, a minute or two at a time, but then ... It is a bond based on air, on nothing; nothing you can see, or save or take off or put on, in any event; and I found it to be the strongest bond of all. It was really funny, and we laughed about how much we both loved to kiss. The mingling of our breaths as we kissed for that second half hour, as we liked to joke, could nearly bring us to ... ah ... climax.”
“Some of us have heard of that,” said Miss Lissie wryly, and Mr. Hal laughed.
Part Five
The Gospel According to Shug
HELPED ARE THOSE who are enemies of their own racism: they shall live in harmony with the citizens of this world, and not with those of the world of their ancestors, which has passed away, and which they shall never see again.
HELPED are those born from love: conceived in their father’s tenderness and their mother’s orgasm, for they shall be those—numbers of whom will be called “illegitimate”—whose spirits shall know no boundaries, even between heaven and earth, and whose eyes shall reveal the spark of the love that was their own creation. They shall know joy equal to their suffering and they will lead multitudes into dancing and Peace.
HELPED are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.
HELPED are those who find something in Creation to admire each and every hour. Their days will overflow with beauty and the darkest dungeon will offer gifts.
HELPED are those who receive only to give; always in their house will be the circular energy of generosity; and in their hearts a beginning of a new age on Earth: when no keys will be needed to unlock the heart and no locks will be needed on the doors.
HELPED are those who love the stranger; in this they reflect the heart of the Creator and that of the Mother.
HELPED are those who those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with trees.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are tho
se who risk themselves for others’ sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the world in which no one’s gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator’s magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves shall be despised.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another—plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.