by Alice Walker
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness.
HELPED are those who know.
ARVEYDA READ THE PAMPHLET The Gospel According to Shug over and over again. Carlotta sat quietly by his side. She did not think she still loved him; she did not even want to consider it. She was attracted, she felt, to what he knew and to how he knew it; and to his music, always. She was visiting him at the new house he’d bought on his return from Central and South America: a spacious, low-slung acoustically perfect bungalow that jutted out of the hills over Berkeley and had been inspired by houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. There was a soundproof, state-of-the-art recording studio on the bottom floor, from whose windows could be seen the Golden Gate Bridge in its misty splendor, and the sunsets from all three levels of the house were spectacular. By comparison, her own house seemed viewless, cluttered, run-down, and, for three people, absurdly small. It was also in less fashionable Oakland. He had invited her to move in with him, and also the children, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She found she enjoyed living in her own, and the children’s, mess.
“Who’s Shug?” asked Arveyda. One foot was raised and crossed over his knee. He had a habit of jiggling the raised foot, which made him seem impatient.
Carlotta kicked off her shoes and tucked one foot underneath her. She enjoyed these visits, which were similar, she imagined, to the visits one might make to a father or an older brother. As always, Arveyda offered luxurious surroundings and fresh, healthful food. Both children were in school from eight-thirty to three-thirty these days, and, because of spring recess, she was free from teaching for the week.
“While you were gone,” she said, “I used to go to a place called Fanny’s Massage Parlor. It was near the campus. Fanny gave very good massages.”
She drew in her breath; but why should she hesitate or be in the least afraid? “She was the wife of the man I was interested in, the one about whose existence you once inquired, whose name is Suwelo.”
“Suwelo?” said Arveyda. “Same as the rune?”
“Yes,” said Carlotta. “The rune for wholeness. But I don’t think it applied to Suwelo—not, anyway, when I knew him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because he was in fragments.”
Arveyda gave her a quizzical look, which Carlotta ignored. In her own time, perhaps, she would tell him all about her intimate experiences with another. But not now.
“Shug, as near as I could understand it, was Fanny’s grandmother, or something like that. Like your mother, she founded a church.” What exactly did that mean, she wondered now. She tried to picture Arveyda’s mother, who had named him after a bar of soap. Was she a big, dark woman like some of the aging black women she saw on the street? No; he’d said something about her stylishness. Well, but big, dark women were often the most stylish of all. Did she have a church, a real church, with stained-glass windows and everything? Carlotta had never been to church of her own volition. Zedé had taken her to the Catholic church around the corner from their house when she was growing up. They’d understood little of the sermons and had gradually stopped going. Zedé never conceded that there were any such people as heathens. So much for Catholicism.
Arveyda was smiling at her as she thought about those days. “Well,” he said, “but my mother never wrote her own beatitudes!”
“I went to Fanny because I had known her at the college. Not known her, exactly, but I saw her from time to time. She’d moved to the Bay Area from New York, along with Suwelo. They were both teachers. He taught American history, she taught women’s studies. But then she got frustrated teaching and moved on to administration. Why she thought that would be easier, I can’t imagine. Of course it wasn’t. She walked around with a look of such unmistakable distress it was almost comical. Then next thing I knew she’d quit the college altogether and enrolled in the San Francisco School of Massage. She opened her own little parlor down the street from the college, and many of her former colleagues, laboring under the stress she’d left, became her clients.
“From the moment I learned about you and Zedé I had a migraine, and the whole of my body was one clenched knot of pain.” Carlotta said this very slowly, in an almost inaudible voice. Now she speeded up, her voice firm and casual. “In the beginning I had no designs on her husband—he wasn’t actually her husband any longer, but I didn’t know that. They were always together. Where you saw one you almost always saw the other.” Carlotta giggled. “I was attracted to their closeness. I see that now. How absurd life is! Together they represented home, a family, warmth, a place to belong. Her massage parlor was convenient,” she went on soberly, “her prices were reasonable. She passed out free gift certificates to her friends and people from the college. I went. She treated me the same way she treated everyone else. After one two-hour massage that included forty-five minutes of acupressure, I was addicted.
“She was in a little cottage, the ‘mother-in-law’s cottage,’ at the back of someone’s house. You got there by following a curving flagstone path through flowering shrubs and vines—hibiscus and jasmine, I think. I remember bright colors and a lovely scent; though these two just might not bloom at the same time. I know nothing about flowers. But I liked it that she had them. Her massage table was encircled by trailing green plants that formed a living curtain and made me think of the out-of-doors, of a waterfall. There was a tiny wood-burning stove in the corner on which she occasionally laid a stick of sandalwood incense or into which she poked a braid of sweet grass. She laid a huge crystal at your head and smaller ones at your feet. I didn’t know a thing about crystals at the time, and when she talked about their soothing or healing qualities the information went right past me. I was connected to nothing, you see. Not to my own body, not to the children, not, certainly, to inanimate objects. ‘When you are better,’ she said, putting a small amethyst crystal in my hand, ‘you will be able to feel its vibration.’ This kind of talk seemed the very babble of witches to me. We never became friends, or even particularly friendly. We were cordial, I guess you could say. I couldn’t understand why she’d taken such a service-oriented, low-prestige job when she had such solid academic credentials. I asked her this once, politely, without the bluntness of my bewilderment. She shrugged and said, ‘Oh, academia?’ That was all.
“‘Why did you take up this particular work?’ I asked her another day as she worked to loosen the cramped tendons in my legs.
“Her answer seemed impossible, given the serenity of her surroundings and her own calm expression: ‘I took it up so that I would be forced to touch people, even those I might not like, in gentleness, and be forced to acknowledge both their bodily reality as people and also their pain. Otherwise,’ she said, ‘I am afraid I might start murdering them.’
“I’m sure my body stiffened perceptibly. Whose wouldn’t have? There I was, naked in her hands. With designs on her man; not that she ever seemed to think of Suwelo that way. But who knew? Maybe she suspected that he and I were starting to have a lot of chance meetings at the water cooler.
“Regardless of this, she kept working on my legs and attempting to flex my nearly rigid toes. My bent toes were so ugly. I’d never noticed before.
“‘You should throw out those high heels, you know,’ she said.
“But she’d said that before.
“‘I know,’ I said, just as I’d said before.
“‘You’re doing penance, huh?’ she asked.
“‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ I said. What could she mean? She didn’t know you, didn’t know us. Didn’t know Zedé. Would never have dreamed what had happened. Still, I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I felt people could tell what had happened just by looking at me. I felt I’d been in a terrible accident that had scarred me; often I assured myself my scars were at least invisible. But what is invisible to a masseuse?
“‘Oh,’ she said, ‘women wear things that hurt them to atone for the sin of loving s
omeone they’d rather not. Someone they may actually consider unworthy of them. It’s sometimes called “seduction,”’ she added grimly.
“Maybe it was true, I thought. I wore the kind of shoes you’d liked me to wear, though they hurt and you’d left me for my mother, who always wore flats.” This was funny, and Carlotta laughed. “It’s like an episode from Soap,” she said. “It didn’t make any sense, wearing the shoes. They were killers. But even if they destroyed my feet and crippled my legs, I knew I wasn’t giving them up. I liked the way men looked at me in high heels. The look in their eyes made me forget how lonely I was. How discarded.”
“And what did you see when you looked back at them?” Arveyda interjected, sadly.
“Oh, God,” said Carlotta, “I wasn’t going to think about that... . Fanny would massage you, and soon your body would feel yours again. And she would look satisfied, as if she’d achieved a sweet, if temporary, victory, and you’d wonder if you’d really heard this mild woman say anything about murdering anybody.
“Once, later, I asked Suwelo about it. He was evasive. He said she was seeing a therapist, but that essentially she was one of those victims of racism who is extremely sensitive and who grows too conscious of it. It had become like a scale or a web over her eyes. Everywhere she looked, she saw it. Racism turned her thoughts to violence. Violence made her sick. She was working on it.
“Anyway, she had this stack of pamphlets on a table by the door. Everyone who came in was encouraged to take one. I felt sorry for her, that she had apparently fallen back into the grip of her grandmother’s religion. And was able to find peace doing work that was almost menial, in the smallest possible space. Yes, I pitied her; if I was doing penance by wearing high-heeled shoes, she was doing it in spades, working on my cramped legs and toes. Still, I like parts of Shug’s gospel; at least she doesn’t go on about blessed are the poor. And I love the next to the last line, where she talks about blessed are those who love and support diversity because, in their differentness, they shall be secure. But the last line baffles me. Blessed are those who know. Know what, I ask myself. And then I think of how I don’t, in fact, know, and wonder if I ever will.” Carlotta said this with almost childish petulance.
Arveyda looked at his wife, who had, without intending it, given the mystery of his own mother back to him; and to whom, despite the existence of their children, he felt he had never made love; and he thought, simply because of the magic she had just performed, in conjuring up an almost forgotten Katherine Degos, that she could not fail.
“You are beginning to know, Carlotta,” he said, with such tenderness that both of them blushed. And then: “How it becomes you.”
In Shug’s pamphlet, illustrated back and front by several large, serenely alert elephants, the pamphlet that Carlotta had brought home ages ago from a massage parlor run by a woman whose husband had become her lover, and that she had casually given him and he had as casually read, Arveyda recognized a spiritual kin of his own mother. His mother. Any remembrance of her pained him. So he never thought of her. Reading the Gospel was the first time since his long-ago meeting with Zedé that he’d seen anything that made him feel curious about her, or that he missed something of her spirit in the world. Why had his mother loved a photograph? Whose was it? “Your father,” she’d always said; but now that he was a father himself he knew how much more there was. Why had she removed it from beside his bed? Why had she become a “whirling dervish”? Why had she never been able to affirm all that he was? Why had she formed a church? And had it been like this, like Shug’s pamphlet, not a building or any kind of monument, but simply a few words gleaned, like spiritual rice grains, from her earthly passage?
THERE WAS A JUAN Fuentes poster of Nelson Mandela in the window of a picture-framing shop near her therapist’s office. It was beautiful, vibrant, with many small images of Mandela’s head imposed, smiling, over a huge red ribbon. The same kind of ribbon Fanny wore, in solidarity with the South African struggle, on her denim coat. She decided she would buy the poster on her way home.
Her therapist’s name was Robin Ramirez, and Fanny liked her. She was small, quiet, intense—and dark-haired, which was a relief. When a friend recommended her to Fanny, the first thought that came to mind was: Was she or wasn’t she? For Fanny did not, in the compulsive fantasy that was driving her insane, slice off the heads of dark-haired people.
She’d told this to Robin on the first visit.
“Well, I guess I’m lucky to be a Chicana after all,” said Robin, and asked her to say more.
“There isn’t much to it,” said Fanny. “Let’s just say that in my fantasies blonds don’t have more fun.”
“Why blonds?” asked Robin, who more than once had considered bleaching her hair. Didn’t people have more respect for what blond-haired people did and said? This certainly seemed to be the case among an awful lot of Chicanos she knew; her other patients, for instance.
“I think because they represent white people, really white people, to me, and therefore white oppression.”
“You mean domination?”
“Yes. I mean Nazis, Klansmen, the white people and their children one has to worry about on the street.”
“Did you know any blond children when you were growing up?”
It was curious, when Fanny considered the question, to realize that the only blonds she remembered seeing as a child were other children. All the white adults that she remembered had brown hair.
“There was Tanya,” she said. “I don’t remember much about her. She lived down the road from my grandmother’s house, which is where my mother and I lived part of the time I was growing up. Sometimes we played together. She was okay.” Fanny shrugged.
“Did Tanya have brothers? Parents?”
“I know she had parents. Her father was a farmer and always in the fields or, on Saturdays, in town. Her mother was always home. She baked cookies and brought them outside to us. I could play in the yard with Tanya, but I wasn’t allowed to go in the house. There was a grandmother.”
“How did that make you feel? Not being allowed inside Tanya’s house.”
“It was a dump,” said Fanny, “as I recall. I don’t remember thinking much about it. But I remember I wasn’t permitted inside, so that means I certainly noticed.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Robin. “Could you imagine why you weren’t allowed inside?”
Fanny thought about this. “It was funny, you know. My grandmother’s house was much finer than theirs. In its own simple way, it was elegant. Well, three grown, talented, creative women—my mother and my two grandmothers—lived there; it would have to be elegant. Tanya’s people were really almost what you’d call ‘poor white trash.’ But not quite. They aspired to better things.” She laughed. “You know, I think white people in the South must have had a secret campaign of uplift among themselves to make sure every white person’s house was painted—white, if possible—and every black person’s house was not. I think part of the reason they paid black people barely enough to keep body and soul together was because they were afraid that if they ever had the slightest excess of funds they would paint their houses. They already knew how black people love color and how good we look in it. As it was, black people made paint out of bluing and white mud, and with this mixture they painted their fireplaces a brilliant blue. There were only two houses in the county inhabited by colored or black people that had paint. One of them belonged to my grandmother.”
“Did Tanya ... why, by the way, was she named Tanya? It’s not a Southern name, is it?” Robin asked this in a tone that said, I know nothing whatsoever about that weird land, but this name sounds peculiar even to me.
“No,” said Fanny, “it’s as Russian as Vladimir. But only a few people ever pronounced it correctly. I always did. Most people said ‘Tan-ya,’ like the color tan. She and her mother hated it when that happened, and complained. I suggested that they replace the a in Tan with an o, but they preferred to make a lifelong habit of c
orrecting people. Whenever I thought of this later, this obstinacy, it seemed typically Southern to me. A trait as common to black as to white.
“In high school I watched the integration of the University of Georgia on television,” Fanny continued. “And I was watching the night the whole campus seemed to go up in flames, and white people raged against the enrollment of two of the palest-skinned black people anywhere. I watched the integration of Central High in Little Rock. I saw the Freedom Riders, black and white, beaten up in Mississippi. I still remember vividly the face of one of them, a young white man, who died. I saw a lot of black people and their white allies humiliated, brutally beaten, or murdered. It seemed that the people with the most integrity were assassinated. I grew up believing that white people, collectively speaking, cannot bear to witness wholeness and health in others, just as they can’t bear to have people different from themselves live among them. It seemed to me that nothing, no other people certainly, could live and be healthy in their midst. They seemed to need to have other people look bad—poor, ragged, dirty, illiterate. It was only then that they seemed to think they could look good.”
“And you thought this way as early as childhood?”
“No,” said Fanny. “Childhood for me was pretty mellow. I lived with grandmothers who had a lot of interesting friends. I was the apple of their eye. I don’t remember seeing any white people, ever, at our house.”
“So except for Tanya you had no experiences with them?”
“Not directly. But Mama Shug was often sick from her struggles with them. She’d go into town, have a run-in—it seemed inevitable—with some redneck and come home cursing up a storm.” Fanny chuckled. “But at the same time, she was trying, as she liked to phrase it, to keep her feet on the Goddam Path.”
“What path was this?”
“Oh,” said Fanny, “my grandmothers formed their own church; a tradition of long standing among black women. Only, they didn’t call it a ‘church.’ They called it a ‘band.’”