by Alice Walker
“‘My parents saw people dying all the time.’ My mother paused. ‘Do you remember, by any chance, what Haydée Santamaria said to the prison guard who, having brought her the eye of her brother Abel and the testicles of her lover, next brought her the news that her beloved brother, one of the youngest and most beautiful of the young Cuban revolutionaries, had been killed? She said—this woman who, twenty years later, would kill herself—“He is not dead; for to die for one’s country is to live forever.”’
“‘That is very beautiful,’ I said. If I’d ever read it, I didn’t remember it, or perhaps it was so painful I’d forgotten it.
“You and I, Suwelo, have, after all, come to maturity against the backdrop of the assassination of our leaders. By the time of Abel Santamaria’s death, we’d already borne, somehow, the news that Patrice Lumumba, and so many others, were no more. Or was he killed after Abel? ‘Eliminated,’ as the CIA ‘adventures’ on television described it. Like so much waste from the common imperialist body. But while I thought of this—and I really can’t bear to think of this—of all the murders, all the loss, all the pain, all the waste, my mother was continuing to whisper.
“‘My parents attended many people as they died,’ she said. ‘They noticed that some people died utterly. They went, they left, they vacated their space. There was nothing left. This was not true of everyone.’
“‘What are you saying?’ I asked.
“‘Some of the people died in a kind of rapture. These were often those to whom the worst things had been done. Some of them died with the same passion with which they’d lived, and, at the very end, appeared to see, coming to welcome them, the beloved community of souls with whom they’d kept the faith, and in whose memory they had continued to labor while on earth.
“‘My dearest daughter,’ said my mother, ‘some of them, many of them, died as who they were, as the best of who they were. As whole people. There was no talk of the kind we see on TV deathbeds of who will get the silver, who will inherit the car, who is mentioned in or omitted from the will; those things are the concern of people who have no idea why they are on earth. These people, these revolutionaries, like Haydée and her brother Abel, had given their lives, but they had also kept them; for their lives were theirs right to the end, unbroken, uncorrupted. That is what they left to us.
“‘When Abel died he could not have known that years later I would be whispering about his death to my only daughter, and hoping that she will learn from it, and be inspired by it, as her mother has been. I am not a nationalist,’ said my mother, ‘so it is not dying for one’s country that is so moving to me about Haydée Santamaria’s statement. No, what is moving to me is that when people die whole, a wonderful power is released in the world; a wonderful fearlessness before death, which in turn inspires in others a more profound joyousness about life. This is what all torturers learn, and it is why, I think, torture exists. Imagine yourself eyeless, without breasts or testicles, at the mercy of those who are so broken they will have no choice when their own time comes but to die utterly, leaving not one iota of inspiration, encouragement, or joy, and you do not talk, or give information, or name other people, or lick their boots, or accept their gold, or whatever it is they are trying to get you to do. And even if you are broken by them, and you lick their boots, you understand how sick they are to need their boots licked. You think of them as they might have been as children, little children, with no one to protect them from the grown-up whose boots they were forced to lick, no one who loved them enough or was powerful enough to make them feel safe. If you tear out the tongue of another, you have a tongue in your hand the rest of your life. You are responsible, therefore, for all that person might have said. It is the torturers who come to understand this, who change. Some do, you know.’
“‘You are saying,’ I asked her, ‘that all evil, like racism or sexism, is a result of sickness?’
“‘Not only that,’ she whispered, ‘the child will always, as an adult, do to someone else whatever was done to him when he was a child. It is how we, as human beings, are made. I shudder to think what Hitler’s childhood was like,’ she said. ‘But anyone can see that the Palestinians and their children are reliving it under the Israelis today.’
“‘But wait,’ I said. ‘This isn’t true of everyone. I mean, some people who’ve had horrendous childhoods don’t turn out to be vicious adults.’
“‘How do you know?’ she asked.
“‘Well, we can use your mother, Big Mama Celie, as exhibit A. A more gentle, loving person it would be hard to imagine.’
“There was a long silence before Mom spoke again.
“‘One of the most disturbing things I noticed about black people in the South, when we returned home near the end of the war, was the mistreatment—casual, vicious, unfeeling—of animals. Your grandmother’s behavior was no exception. She had a dog—everyone had packs of hounds—whose name was—don’t laugh—Creighton. He worshiped her; he was her absolute slave. He had the most wounded, pained, saddened, completely expressive eyes I ever saw. My mother obviously never looked into them. She treated him with a detached, brutal disregard. I never saw her pet him. I never heard her mutter a kind word in his direction. Her treatment of Creighton was the only thing I remember my mother and Miss Shug coming to blows about. Miss Shug loved animals as she loved people. She could not bear it that Celie, whom she had prevented Celie’s husband, Albert, from beating, beat, and beat unmercifully, the cringing dog, who, even as she swung at him with one of her husband’s old belts, or somebody’s old belt, tried, unsuccessfully, to lick her hand. She would kick him out of her way even when he wasn’t in it.
“‘I watched this strange behavior a long time before I realized what I was watching. Before I saw it. She was my mother, and Mama Nettie had instructed me about all the pain she had endured in her life. She was wonderful to me and to Adam and Tashi and their son, Benny. She was droll, playful, creative, and fun. And so harmless. People often said of her, “Why, Miss Celie wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Well, she murdered zillions of flies, as everyone does in a hot climate. But it was her mistreatment of Creighton that no one seemed to notice. Quite the opposite. In fact, because she treated Creighton so badly, other people did the same. Many nasty jokes were made at Creighton’s expense; anything missing was assumed to have been stolen by him, even if it was a hairbrush or a spool of thread! Anything knocked over or spilled was his fault. He was considered stupid, lazy, clumsy, ugly, and inferior. He was a stray dog who’d simply “taken up” there, as they said. Where he came from, no one knew. I don’t even know how he got the name Creighton.’
“‘What happened to him?’
“‘Miss Shug,’ whispered my mother, with a smile of admiration in her voice. ‘She liberated him.’
“‘No,’ I said.
“‘She did. She took him away with her to Memphis. She kept her own house there, always, you know.’
“‘And what did she do with him?’
“‘They were gone a whole summer. I don’t know what she did. But when they came back, Creighton had been rehabilitated.’
“‘No,’ I said.
“‘Yes,’ said Mom. ‘Creighton was no longer a slave; he was a dog. Not only that, Creighton knew the difference. The next time Mama Celie tried to beat him, he bit her. And Miss Shug laughed. Mama Celie never dared attempt to beat or humiliate Creighton again. It was Miss Shug’s laughter, I believe, that prevented it.
“‘It was the laughter, from someone she loved with her whole being, that ripped through the callus on Mama Celie’s heart. She began to feel for everything: ant, bat, the hoppy toad flattened on the road.’”
“WHY IS YOUR NAME Robin?” Fanny asked.
“Because it does not sound Mexican. My mother’s name is Esperanza. When we came here and she worked for the gringos—as she called them; a word that I, as a professional analyst must never use—they claimed they couldn’t remember it or pronounce it, and anyway it meant Hope, didn’t it? So
that’s what they called her. Her personal name for me was Alamo, which means poplar. And Alamo is still what I am called at home. But enough about me,” said Robin. “Have you ever been hypnotized?”
“Yes,” said Fanny. “Sort of. I was in Ohio one summer looking for work—this was when I was in college—and there wasn’t much for people like me. I saw an ad in the paper that said the local medical school was hiring subjects to be used in an experiment that studied the effects of hypnosis.”
“Oh?” said Robin. “And what happened?”
“I was taken back to my six-year-old self. I was asked to write as I did then. When I returned to consciousness, after having been hypnotized, I saw my name on the piece of paper they’d given me, and it was my six-year-old, second-year-of-public-school scrawl.”
“And did they know what questions to ask you, while they had you under their spell?”
“Of course not,” Fanny said. “They were young white men who’d probably never spoken to a black woman other than the ones who cleaned their houses.”
Now, there was the sensation of falling very fast inside herself; as if her interior chest and back were those coral and faded indigo walls of a desert canyon. Inside, she thought dreamily, I’m desert color. How nice. There was no bottom where she landed. Only space. Dark, comfortable space.
“What do you think of white people?” asked Robin’s voice. But for all Fanny knew, it was the voice of God.
Her own voice seemed not to belong to her. In any case it barely escaped her lips. Was she speaking? “I am afraid of them,” was her reply.
“When you look at them,” said the voice, “how do they look to you?”
“Very fat,” she said. “They are always eating, eating. Everywhere you go, they are sitting down eating. In Paris, they are eating. In London, they are eating. In Rome. They eat and eat. It makes me feel afraid,”
“Why do you feel afraid?”
“When I see them eating, I feel myself to be very hungry. Skin and bones. And I feel their teeth on my leg. But when I look down, sometimes it is not their teeth on my leg, only a cold chain. I am relieved to see it is not their teeth, only a chain. I think that when they called us ‘cannibals’ they were projecting.”
“But why are you so afraid? If it is only a chain that is on your leg, and not their teeth; it can be broken. It can be filed away.”
“Sometimes I see myself joining them at the table and I am eating, eating, eating, too. And we are all bloated and fat. We have chins down to our sternums, our eyes are clamped shut with fat. But the self that I was is still there, too. Right by the table, smelling the food. And she’s as poor, as emaciated, as ever. She and her babies. Nothing but eyes and skin and bone. And I am afraid, because I love her so very much, and she is the self I have lost. And the eating goes nowhere. It is endless gluttony to no purpose whatsoever. And I am afraid because aren’t those my teeth on her leg?”
“MAKE NO MISTAKE,” OLA had said, “the people themselves must help one struggle with the truly eternal questions. That is why a resistance movement is invaluable.” He and Fanny had been sitting on the verandah having breakfast: papaya juice, fruit, coffee, buttered bread, with several kinds of jam; Ola, she had thought, seemed to get his best ideas over food. “There you are in the inhospitable and, you hope, hidden caves of the countryside, having grass scones and lizard tea; your skin is welted from mosquito bites, your shoes rotted from the humidity, but you are sometimes very happy because everyone has the exact same questions about it all that you do. Or variations on them. Do you know what guerrilla fighters do more than they do anything else? Skirmishes and battles occupy a very small portion of their time. They talk.” Ola stopped talking long enough to have a spoonful of fruit. “Talk,” he continued, chewing rapidly and swallowing, “is the key to liberation, one’s tongue the very machete of freedom. We are the only species, some say, who have created speech. But that is only because, being far less intelligent than the majority of the other animals, and more prone to disastrous blunders, in our relationships with others, speech is so necessary.”
Fanny bit into a small hard roll that showered her blouse with crust flakes.
“We must have a world language,” said Ola, reaching over to dust her off, and making Fanny feel like a small child, “before we can have world peace. But imagine how people will fight over which language it must be!” He laughed. “Of course it should be something elegant, but relatively simple, and you must not be able to say ‘I despise your kind,’ or ‘I do not respect your god’ in it; in short, it should be Olinka. I’m joking,” said Ola.
“No, you’re not,” said Fanny, smiling.
“This frustration with the whites,” Ola said, thoughtfully, and not responding to her smile, “is a natural reaction to what they have, collectively, done to you, not simply as an individual, but as a people, a culture, a race. The instinct for self-defense and self-preservation is innate, although there was a time, and very recently, too, when white scholars actually did studies that ‘proved,’ in their eyes, these instincts were innate in all people except us. They’d put us so far down, you see, they thought we’d never get up again, so they advanced theories that showed our innate love of being down.” He sipped his coffee, added a dollop of cream to it, and frowned. “I have been responsible for the deaths of whites,” said Ola. “It did not ‘liberate’ me psychologically, as Fanon suggested it might. It did not oppress me further, either. I was simply freeing myself from the jail that they had become for me, and making a space in the world, also, for my children.”
And Fanny thought: Right. Even fifteen years ago I could not have come here. I could not walk or drive on the roads of my father’s country in peace. He could not have met me at just any gate at the airport. He could not have protected me from white viciousness on the street.
“You must harmonize your own heart,” said Ola. “Only you will know how you can do that; for each of us it is different. Then harmonize, as much as this is ever possible, your surroundings.” He thought for a moment, sighed. “Whatever you do,” he said, “stay away from people who pity themselves. People who are always complaining have a horrifying tendency to spread their own lead into everybody’s arse.”
Fanny smiled at this.
“You must try not to want ‘things,’ too,” said Ola, “for ‘thingism’ is the ultimate block across the path of peace. If everytime you see a tree, you want to make some thing out of it, soon no one on earth will even have air to breathe. Trees that are already dead are fine,” he added. “Old logs dug up out of the mud are okay.” He chuckled softly, as if at a private joke.
“Make peace with those you love and that love you or with those you wish to love. These are your compañeros, as the Latin Americans say. Above all, resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.”
“Even in the consciousness of those who have fallen down the drug barrel?” asked Fanny, skeptically.
“Especially those,” said Ola. “The struggle with the eternal questions, the ones not definitively answered by the rebel or revolutionary in his or her late teens or early twenties, when one thinks all problems can be solved—the thoughts that so trouble you, the eternally nagging furies—these things are what probably pushed many of our people over the edge. But they can be retrieved. If they do not die from their addictions—their attempts to banish all intelligence about what is really happening to the world, while inhaling the rotten fragrance of the lotus of their ‘escape’—they will have to see that they are killing themselves. Their teeth are gnawing on their own legs.”
SUWELO HAD AT LAST driven up from San Francisco to see Fanny. She was then living by herself in the little yurt they’d once shared during summers.
“My father told me, shortly before he died,” said Fanny, as they warmed themselves by her small fire, in which pinecones occasionally popped,
“to harmonize my relations with you.” As she thought about Ola she identified with Zindzi Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s daughter, whom she had recently heard on the radio, trying to keep alive the words of her father, imprisoned for twenty-five years. “Of course it takes two to harmonize,” she said firmly, gazing into the fire. “But I am to struggle with you in the faith that harmonizing is possible. This has nothing to do with the question of whether or not we sleep together.”
Suwelo sighed. What a difficult woman this was!
“And what does your mother say?” he asked, sardonically. Fanny seemed very small, and young, despite the threads of silver at her temples that had appeared since he last saw her.
Fanny smiled. “As you know, my mother counsels forgiveness. It is the spring castor-oil tonic of the soul.”
“And why are these the messages we are given?” asked Suwelo, feeling little hope. “Why is this what they say, and not something a wee bit more probable?”
Fanny shrugged. “Let’s face it, Suwelo,” she said; “it is because we are the people we are and not some other people. We are not white people, for instance. This is the message not simply from my parents, but it is the message from the beginning. We can trace this message from our earliest contact with the sun.”