by Alice Walker
“A band?”
“Sometimes a prayer band. Sometimes a band of angels, sometimes a band of devils. ‘Band’ was what renegade black women’s churches were called traditionally; it means a group of people who share a common bond and purpose and whose notion of spiritual reality is radically at odds with mainstream or prevailing ones. But Mama Shug had been a great singer who’d been part of a musical band. To want to become part of a spiritual band was natural to her.”
“Wasn’t it unusual for both of your grandmothers to be present, in the same house, raising you?”
“One was my biological grandmother, my mother’s mother. The other was her ‘Special Friend.’”
Robin raised an eyebrow.
Fanny laughed. “I can’t tell you how many raised eyebrows I’ve encountered in telling about them.”
“But this was in the South ... in the fifties? Do you mean to say they lived together as ...”
“Consorts,” said Fanny. “They were very happy, though they used to disagree with or stray away from each other a lot. And they had incredible fights, which made me think of storms. They liked to throw things; flashes of ‘lightning’ in the form of china were always brightening up the house. Temperamentally they were very different—Shug, direct; Celie, somewhat sly. They lived to be very old, then died within a year of each other. My grandmother, Celie, died first. Shug spent the remaining months of her life working on her beatitudes, which my mother helped her translate into a language somewhat more ‘Biblical’ than Mama Shug’s own. Mama Shug’s sounded more like: ‘Rule number one: Don’t ever mess over nobody, honey, and nobody will ever mess over you!’” Fanny laughed. “She felt that spirituality was, above all, too precious to be left to the perverted interpretations of men.”
“Perhaps it’s she who put the sword in your hand?”
“Perhaps,” said Fanny. “And how did you know it is a sword? It really is a sword, with a great golden handle and shining blade. But it is in my look, not in my hand. I look at a blond head and, zip, it’s in the gutter.”
“And then what?” asked Robin. “Does doing this make you feel better.”
“No,” said Fanny. “I am always feeling better before. Besides, it’s the next step that’s barfingly gruesome.”
“Which is?”
“That I’m down in the gutter grabbing the head and reaching for the body, which is still walking along, by the way, and furiously fastening the head back on. I won’t be a racist,” said Fanny grimly. “I won’t be a murderer. I won’t do to them what they’ve done to black people. I’ll die first.”
She would die first. (And she felt at times that this was happening.) The sword in her look would blind her first of all. Nothing could prevent the roll into the gutter of her own head. This much she knew. It was after she knew better and her fantasies changed not at all that she began to panic.
There were times when she came to Suwelo and crept into his bed and said, “Please hold me.” Times when he thought they would make love. But no. She would lie in his arms shuddering and weeping.
“What’s the matter?” he would coax.
It would be a long time before she could answer. Then she’d say: “I’m afraid I’ll murder someone.”
In the beginning he chided her. “Just because of those assholes at the college? Come on! They’re not worth murdering.”
“Not just those,” she whispered, her tears dripping onto his neck.
“Well, who?” he’d ask. “Not me, I hope.”
“Not you,” she said.
One night she said: “If it is true that we commit adultery by thinking it, then is it also the same with committing murder? What about the way it is so easy, when you watch a plane take off, to imagine it blown to bits? Does this count? Are we collectively responsible for disasters because we image them and therefore shape them into consciousness? Do all human beings nowadays automatically have murder in their eyes?”
“But why do you think of these things?” he said, holding her close, his erotic interest having died.
“Doesn’t everyone? Now that they see how elusive the freedom is we’ve struggled so hard for in the world.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. Well, I do, sometimes. But I know they’re just fantasies. They’re meaningless.”
“I don’t believe fantasies are meaningless. They are as meaningful and powerful as dreams.”
“You’re so gentle,” he said.
“I fear it’s only a facade.” She sighed. “Underneath, there’s this raving maniac. Sometimes I see myself in the faces of the weeping, screaming, completely mad women shown every day on TV. A bomb has fallen through their roof; their children are bleeding to death; there is no ambulance for them. I hate white people,” she said. “I visualize them sliding off the planet, and the planet saying, ‘Ah, I can breathe again!’”
“But you can’t cause that. Actually they come closer to doing that to themselves, closer to causing all of us to slide off the planet than you ever will. They, not you, should be feeling the crisis you imagine.”
“Then why am I imagining it?”
“Obviously because we share the planet.”
“They don’t want to share the planet; they don’t even want to share villages, towns, rivers, beaches, and bus stops,” she said.
“No, they don’t,” said Suwelo. “But they’ll have to. It’s either share or destroy.”
“I think they’re too clever to destroy themselves intentionally,” said Fanny. “But not clever enough to avoid doing it by accident.”
“And we go with them,” said Suwelo.
“And we go with them,” echoed Fanny. “I can’t stand it! After all we’ve been through”—and here she remembered Nzingha’s comment on Jeff, the young white Southerner: “What? Poor? And after all that!”—“to die horribly because of their pharaonic arrogance. I feel so abandoned,” said Fanny. “As if my very self is leaving me.”
“The whole world is freaked out,” said Suwelo, “not just you, not just us. Prior to this time in history, at least we thought we’d have a future, that our children would see freedom, even if we never did. Now they’ve made sure that none of our children will ever live the free and healthy lives so many generations of oppressed people have dreamed of for them. And fought so hard for. I very often think of violence, but any violence I could do at this point would seem, and be, so small.”
“You’re large,” she said. “You’re a man. If you feel violent toward someone, you can do something about it. You can be more direct. And you give yourself permission to feel it. Women are given no such permission.”
“I approve of self-defense,” said Suwelo.
“Isn’t sliding them off the planet self-defense?” she asked. “I’ve marched so much by now and been arrested so many times, I’m really quite weary.”
Suwelo laughed. “A benign and gentle wind, out of nowhere, blows. All the ungodly lose their connection to gravity and float away into the ether. Besides, you know as well as I do that not all white people are responsible for, among other things, the high cost, on the nuclear black market, of plutonium, or the way that it is slowly finding its way into the drinking water... . What about your friends? What about Karen and Jackson and John ...”
“Yes, I know. Georgia O’Keeffe and Van Gogh and all of the O’Keeffes and Van Goghs to come. Pete Seeger and Dr. Charlie Clements certainly tip the scale. It’s racism and greed that have to go. Not white people. But can they be separated from their racism?” Fanny sighed. “Can I? And how much time do we have?”
“But yours, Fanny, unlike theirs, is all in your head. They are not affected by your fantasies, nightmares, or dreams. Racist oppression and nuclear terrorism are two things your magic won’t be enough to stop. I’m sorry, but fantasizing opening the doors of Pollsmoor prison will not bring Mandela out.”
“But maybe I can stop racist oppression before it starts in myself?” And she had, next morning, made her first appointment to see Robin.
Those had been hard times for both of them. In her fear of the murderer within, Fanny withdrew, to the extent that it was possible, from human contact. She abandoned the classroom; too provocative. Heads rolled there every day. Stupid, innocent, childish heads, whose parents had taught them nothing of how not to make other people detest them in the world. She moved next to administration. Bureaucracy and racism were a deadly combination. Her silver blade was always in the air. She thought she’d never be able to scrub all the blood off her knees. Her blood pressure, like that of so many black people, reached alarming highs. Her mother, apprised of her condition by Suwelo, had suddenly called Fanny one day and encouraged her to accompany her on a quiet, restful, celebratory trip to Africa. She would meet her father, whom she had never seen, who had helped win freedom for his country through war.
“IT’S AN INTERESTING QUESTION,” Ola had mused, a few months after Fanny and her mother had come to visit, as they’d sat idly one day over their afternoon tea.
“What’s an interesting question?” asked Fanny, who, while sipping her tea and thinking of Suwelo, had forgotten what she and her father were talking about. She’d looked at him closely after he spoke, in some alarm. He’d spent the morning “haggling” over one of his plays with an illiterate government censor; the exercise had left him drawn and gray, and as if he wouldn’t be able to tolerate such foolishness long.
“Whether the better fighter against the white man is someone who has actually experienced him firsthand,” said Ola. “I once knew a great fighter who’d never seen a white person in her life but who nonetheless felt their oppression in every aspect of her existence, and so, traveling on foot, she covered a thousand miles to join the fight against them. She was excellent. Quite curious about them as people, I think, for she was always asking questions, about their whiteness and their children and their ways. But she was also steady as a rock in attacking them. And ruthless.”
“What do you mean, ruthless?”
Ola frowned. “It was as if she were mopping up a very foul and troublesome spill.”
“And what was she like otherwise?”
“Oh, very quiet. Gentle. A wonderful person, really. Even to animals; of all the stories about revolutionaries that were told around the campfires in the mountains, gorges, and caves of our exile, the one she liked best was that one about Sandino and the monkeys. Do you know it?”
Fanny shook her head.
“Well,” said Ola, “the men in his guerrilla band were capturing the little monkeys that lived in the forest where they were hiding, and eating them. Sandino made impassioned speeches in the monkeys’ defense; he pointed out, among other things, that it was the monkeys’ screeches that always saved the men from the surprise of enemy attack. ‘They are our little brothers,’ said Sandino, ‘our loyal compañeros. How can you even think of eating them?’” Ola paused, thinking of the woman. “Small children adored her. I adored her. Her vision of the future, after the overthrow of the white regime, was very broad; it would include everyone, and everything. That is why she liked Sandino; even though he was as famished as the rest of his men, he held to the vision of the future he wanted to have, a future that would include even the monkeys.”
“This woman,” said Fanny, “she didn’t frighten you?”
“She did frighten me,” said Ola. “But I had to realize she was me. We mirrored each other almost exactly, I didn’t want to be an assassin either. I didn’t want to be ruthless. There seemed no other way, however. The whites had done terrible things to us; many of them would claim later that they’d done nothing of the kind, simply because they knew nothing about it. But beyond what they were doing to us, as adults, they were destroying our children. Who were starving to death—their bodies, their minds, their dreams—right before our eyes. We fought the white man as we fought pestilence.”
“It is more honest to fight as you did, perhaps,” said Fanny. “In the United States there is the maddening illusion of freedom without the substance. It’s never solid, unequivocal, irrevocable. So much depends on the horrid politicians the white majority elects. Black people have the oddest feeling, I think, of forever running in place.”
Ola nodded. “Of course,” he said, “that could simply mean you’re remaining who you are. And that’s not a bad thing.”
“I don’t know if that’s it,” said Fanny. “To me, we seem to be losing who we are. We don’t understand white people; that’s the crux of the matter. Not that we really want to anymore; it’s too frightening. We can’t comprehend them at all. We pretend we do from time to time, but that’s just to reassure ourselves. If we ever confront our fear at being surrounded by so many people whose ways are incomprehensible to us, I don’t know what will happen. They don’t do anything the way we would do it. Making those tall buildings that deaden the earth underneath them, for instance” (here she thought of the Indians who considered the weight of a teepee too heavy, and who had had chants that included the exhortation to “shift your teepee, relatives, so that Mother Earth might have sunlight!”) “or digging out and claiming everything that’s buried in the ground. People’s bones and funerary objects, gold, diamonds, silver, and God only knows what else—uranium, plutonium. Most of what’s buried in the earth, people of color would never have found, because they’d never have bothered to look for it.” Fanny shrugged. “But we’re savages,” as Chief Seattle said, “what do we know?”
“Here’s a theory of evolution you’ll like,” said Ola, who knew that many African-Americans hated to think of the ancient Africans as early industrialists. “The first iron, so far as is known, was smelted in Africa; so there were, at least in theory, a couple or three diggers around here, since the ingredients for iron must be dug out of the ground. The people who did this, however, were not approved of. Like the Hopi in your country, most ancient Africans thought of the earth as a body that needs all its organs and bones and blood in order to function properly. The ore miners were forced out, the theory goes. They went north.”
“Yes,” said Fanny, frowning, “and unfortunately in about 1492 they continued west.”
She wrote to Suwelo:
“I feel like a child, asking my father what I should do. But I confess it is a great relief, having a father to ask.
“Do you know what my mother’s advice is? ‘Forgive them, Fanny,’ she says. ‘Do you think they know what they are doing, when they treat us so badly? Do you think they know what they are doing when they suck all the oil out of the earth on one side of the world and complain about earthquakes on the other? Do you think they know what they are doing when they fill the sky with space junk and rockets whose important “missions” to spy on other planets are meaningless to ninety-nine percent of the people and to absolutely all of the plants and animals on earth? Do you think they know what they are doing when they invent the things they have invented and forced on the world, especially on our worlds, things that make us sick? things that kill us? No, darling. They do not know what they are doing. But you are lucky, you live in an age when even they are finding this out.
“‘When I was growing up,’ she says, ‘the white man’s word—backed by his gun—was law. His vision, the inspiration of the world. We dared not contradict him even when he said the sole reason we were put on earth was to be his slave. He was all-powerful. In fear and dread we watched him from our compounds the world over. Some of us were greedy. We believed, as he seemed to, that he was bringing something better than what we had. This never happened. Always, we were left poorer, with a lowered opinion of ourselves. He blocked the view between us and our ancestors, us and our ways; not all of them good ways, but needing to be changed according to our own light. He needed to keep us terrorized and desperately poor, in order to feel powerful. No one who was secure in himself as a person would put such emphasis on the nonpersonhood and unworthiness of another. He could not make the sounds or the movements or the cloth or the food we did. The heat was unkind to him. It was the heat that his tribe had left
Africa thousands of years ago to avoid.
“‘The white man is our brother: we have always said this. He is also the prodigal son of Africa. Easily recognizing him for who he was when he returned to us, we prepared the fatted calf. But it has never been enough. He is so empty, so ravenous for what we have that he does not have, that the fatted calf has barely served as an appetizer. He has moved on to devour us and our children, our minds and our bones. But this is not the behavior of well people. Allowances must be made for the sick.’
“But, even as my mother is speaking, I think: And what of me? I am the first to agree that I am sick. The racism of the world has infected me; I was infected as a child, before I even knew what racism was. Now, in my fantasies, I am poised to strike. But if I do strike, if I bring my fantasies to life, will ‘allowances’ be made for me? More important, can I make them for myself?
“‘We are too forgiving,’ I say to Mom. ‘I’m beginning to hate the very word.’
“‘No,’ she whispers (we are often in bed for these conversations), ‘that isn’t possible. Forgiveness is the true foundation of health and happiness, just as it is for any lasting progress. Without forgiveness there is no forgetfulness of evil; without forgetfulness there still remains the threat of violence. And violence does not solve anything; it only prolongs itself.’
“How could she have this view, which seemed not reactionary, but divorced from reality. ‘The way things are going in the United States,’ I said, ‘there will soon be more black men in prison than on the streets. In South Africa the entire black population is incarcerated in ghettos and “homelands” they despise. Look at what was done to the Indians, and still is being done. Look at the aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand. Look at Indonesia under the Dutch. Look at the West Indies. Forgiveness isn’t large enough to cover the crime.’
“‘How is a person destroyed?’ whispered my mother in her peculiar missionary-African accent. ‘Do you know? When my three parents’ (this is how she refers to her adoptive mother and father, Corrine and Samuel, and to Nettie) ‘first came to Africa they taught the gospel inherited from the Jews, who were the earliest Christians, and who therefore believed in turning the other cheek, rendering unto Caesar, and so on. Over the years they saw cheeks, heads, whole bodies bloodied and destroyed, as Caesar demanded and took everything. He took the land, everything on it and under it; he took the water. He claimed the air “space” over the land. He took the people’s children to work in his fields and mines. He destroyed and therefore “took” their culture, their connection to their ancestors and the universe—than which nothing is more serious. He took their future.