by Alice Walker
“There was a girl I liked, who liked me back. This was a miracle. And at the proper time, the day before the coming up of the full moon, she and I were sent to pick plums together. I remember everything about that day: the warmth of the sun on our naked bodies, the fine dust that covered our feet... . Her own little familiar, a serpent, slid alongside us. Serpents then were different than they are now, Suwelo. Of course almost everything that was once free is different today. Her familiar, whom my friend called Ba, was about the thickness of a slender person’s arm and had small wheellike extendable feet, on which it could raise itself and whir about, like some of those creatures you see in cartoons; or, retracting these, it could move like snakes move today. It could also extend and retract wings, for all serpents that we knew of at that time could fly. It was a lovely companion for her, and she loved it dearly and was always in conversation with it. I remember the especially convoluted and wiggly trail Ba left behind in the dust, in its happy anticipation of eating fresh plums... . Later that day there was the delicious taste of sun-warmed plums in our mouths. We were, all three of us, chattering right along, and eating, and feeling very happy.
“I was not to be happy long; none of us was. Eventually I had my friend in my arms, and one of her small black nipples, as sweet as any plum and so like my mother’s, was in my mouth, and I was inside her. It was everything I’d ever dreamed, and much more than I’d hoped. But it was not, I think, the same for her. When I woke up, she was wide awake, simply sitting there quietly, stroking Ba, who was lazily twisting his full self around and around her beautiful knees. The sun was still above the treetops, for I remember that the light was golden, splendidly perfect, but even as I watched, it began rapidly going down.
“And then, when I looked down at myself, I saw that while I was sleeping she had rubbed me all over with the mixture of dark berries and nut fat my mother always used, which I realized had been hidden beneath the plum tree. And for the first time I could ask someone other than my mother what it was for. My mother had said it was to make my skin strong and protect it from the sun. And so, I asked my friend. And she said it was to make me look more like everyone else.
“‘You look like you don’t have a skin, you know,’ she said. ‘But you do have one.’
“I was thrown completely by this, coming as it did after our first lovemaking. It seemed to indicate a hideous personal deficiency that I didn’t need to hear about just then, on the eve of becoming a man in the tribe of men. Right away I thought: Is this how they’ll see me as well?
“She took me gently by the hand and we walked to a clear reflecting pool not far away. We’d often bathed there. And she scooped up a handful of water and vigorously scrubbed my face; then we bent down over the water, and there my friend was, looking very much like my mother and her mother and the sisters and brothers and aunts of the village—all browns and blacks, with big dark eyes. And there was I—a ghost. Only, we knew nothing of ghosts, so I could not even make that comparison. I did look as though I had no skin.
“It was the first time I’d truly seen myself as different. I cried out in fear at myself. Weeping, I turned and ran. My friend came running after me. For it had not been her intention to hurt. She was taking over my mother’s duty in applying the ointment, and was only trying to be truthful and help me begin to face reality.
“All I could think of was hiding myself—my kinky but pale yellow hair, the color of straw in late summer, my pebble-colored eyes, and my skin that had no color at all. I ran to a cave I knew about not far from the plum tree. And I threw myself on the floor, crying and crying.
“She came in behind me, the mess of berries and nut fat in a bamboo-joint container in her hand. She tried to talk to me, to soothe me, to spread the stuff over me. I knocked it away from me; it rolled over the earthen floor. During this movement, I suddenly caught sight of my member and saw that the color that had been there before we made love had been rubbed off during our contact. The sight shamed me. I ran outside the cave and grabbed the first tree leaves I saw and slapped them over myself.
“But then I realized it was my whole body that needed covering, not just my penis. My friend was still running around behind me, trying to comfort me. She was crying as much as I was, and beating her breasts. For we learned mourning from the giant apes, who taught us to feel grief anywhere around us, and to reflect it back to the sufferer, and to act it out. But now this behavior made me sick. I picked up a stick and chased her away. She was so shocked to see me use a stick in this way that she seemed quite happy to drop her sympathies for me and run. But as she turned to run, her familiar, seeing her fright and its cause, extended both its clawed feet and its wings and flew up at me. In my rage I struck it, a brutal blow, with my club, so hard a blow that I broke its neck, and it fell without a sound to the ground. I couldn’t believe I had done this. Neither could my friend. She ran back, though she was so afraid, and scooped Ba’s broken body up in her arms. The last I saw of her was her small, naked, dark brown back, with Ba’s limply curling tail, which was beginning to change colors, dangling down her side.
“I never made it into the men’s tribe. I never went back to my mother. The only one from my childhood I ever saw again was Husa. Perhaps he came to look for me as a courtesy to my mother. He found me holed up in a cave far, far from our encampment, my hair in kinky yellow locks, which resembled his, actually; my stone gray eyes wild with pain. He came up to me and rested a warm paw on my shoulder and breathed gently into my face. The smell made me almost faint from love and homesickness. Then he proceeded to lick me all over, thoroughly, as he would wash one of his cubs, with his warm pink tongue. I realized that night, sleeping next to Husa, that he was the only father I had ever known or was ever likely to know. And so, I felt, I had left my mother to join the men after all.
“Of course Husa could not stay forever. But he stayed long enough. Long enough to go on long walks with me, just as he did with my mother. Long enough to share fires—which I knew he loved, and so forced myself to make. Long enough to share sunrises and sunsets and to admire giant trees and sweet-smelling shrubs. For Husa greatly appreciated the tiniest particle of the kingdom in which he found himself. He taught me that there was another way of being in the world, away from one’s own kind. Indeed, he reconciled me to the possibility that I had no ‘own kind.’ And though I missed my mother terribly, I knew I would never go back. It hurt me too much to know that everyone in our group had always noticed, since the day I was born, that I was different from anyone
“One day, after a kill, Husa brought the remains, a draggle of skin, home to me. With a stone I battered it into a shape that I could drape around myself. I found a staff to support me in my walks and to represent ‘my people.’
“Husa left.
“And now I gradually made a discouraging discovery. The skin that Husa gave me, which covered me so much more effectively than bark or leaves, and which I could tie on in a manner that would stay, frightened all the animals with whom I came in contact. In vain did I try to explain how I came by it, how much I needed it. That it was a gift, a leftover, from Husa the lion, who harmed no creature, ever, but was only the angel of mercy to those things in need of death. But what animal could comprehend this new thing that I was? That I, a creature with a skin of its own—for though I looked skinned, they could smell I was not—was nonetheless walking about in one of theirs? They ran from me as if from plague. And I was totally alone for many years, until, in desperation, I raided the litter of a barbarous dog, and got myself companionship in that way.”
THE TAPE RAN ON and on, without Miss Lissie’s voice. Suwelo rose from the couch and peered at the spinning cassette. He was about to stop it, and see if it should be turned over, when Miss Lissie’s voice continued. She sounded somewhat rested, as if she’d taken a long break.
“You may wonder,” she said, “why I repressed this memory. And, by the way, I don’t know what else became of me, or of my dog. It is hard to believe my mother nev
er searched for me, never found me. That I lived the rest of my days in that place without a mate. Perhaps my mate did come to me, and perhaps she brought our child, which must have been odd-looking; for she loved me, of that I had no doubt, and perhaps we began a new tribe of our own. That, anyway, is my fantasy.” She laughed. “It is also the fantasy upon which the Old Testament rests,” she said, “but without any mention of our intimacy with the other animals or of the brown and black colors of the rest of my folks.
“I will tell you why I repressed this memory. I repressed it because of Hal. But, Suwelo, there is more; for that is not the only lifetime I have given up, or, I should say, that I have deliberately taken away from myself. In each lifetime I have felt forced to shed knowledge of other existences, other lives. The times of today are nothing, nothing, like the times of old. The time of writing is so different from the so much longer time of no writing. People’s very eyes are no longer the same. The time of living separate from the earth is so much different from the much longer time of living with it, as if being on your mother’s breast. Can you imagine a time when there was no such thing as dirt? It is hard for people to comprehend the things that I remember. Even Hal, the most empathetic of fellow travelers, up to a point, could not follow some of the ancient and pre-ancient paths I knew. I swallowed past experiences all my life, as I divulged those that I thought had a chance, not of being believed—for no one has truly, truly believed me; at least that is my feeling, a bitter one, most of the time—but of simply being imagined, fantasied.
“Suwelo, in addition to being a man, and white, which I was many times after the time of which I just told you, I was also, at least once, myself a lion. This is one of those dream memories so frayed around the edges that it is like an old, motheaten shawl. But I can still sometimes feel the sun on my fur, the ticks in my mane, the warm swollen fullness of my tongue. I can smell the injured and dying kin who are in need of me to bring them death. I can feel the leap in my legs, the stretch in my belly, as I bound toward them and stun them, in great mercy, with a blow. I can taste the sweet blood as my teeth puncture their quivering necks, breaking them instantly, and without pain. All of this knowledge, all of this remembrance, is just back of my brain.
“But the experiences I best remember were sometime after the life in which I knew Husa. It was, in fact, a terrible, chaotic time, though it had started out, like the eternity everyone knew, peacefully enough. Like Husa I was friends with a young woman and her children. We grew up together and frequently shared our favorite spots in the forest, or stared by night into the same fire. But this way of life was rapidly ending, for somehow or other by the time I was fully grown, and big, as lions tend to be, the men’s camp and the women’s had merged. And they had both lost their freedom to each other. The men now took it on themselves to say what should and should not be done by all, which meant they lost the freedom of their long, undisturbed, contemplative days in the men’s camp; and the women, in compliance with the men’s bossiness, but more because they now became emotionally dependent on the individual man by whom man’s law now decreed they must have all their children, lost their wildness, that quality of homey ease on the earth that they shared with the rest of the animals.
“In the merger, the men asserted themselves, alone, as the familiars of women. They moved in with their dogs, whom they ordered to chase us. This was a time of trauma for women and other animals alike. Who could understand this need of men to force us away from woman’s fire? And yet, this is what they did. I remember the man and the dog who chased me away; he had a large club in one hand, and in the other, a long, sharply pointed stick. And how sad I was to leave my friend and her children, who were crying bitterly. I think I knew we were experiencing one of the great changes in the structure of earth’s life, and it made me very sorrowful, but also very thoughtful. I did not know at the time that man would begin, in his rage and jealousy of us, to hunt us down, to kill and eat us, to wear our hides, our teeth, and our bones. No, not even the most cynical animal would have dreamed of that. Soon we would forget the welcome of woman’s fire. Forget her language. Forget her feisty friendliness. Forget the yeasty smell of her and the warm grubbiness of her children. All of this friendship would be lost, and she, poor thing, would be left with just man, screaming for his dinner and forever murdering her friends, and with man’s ‘best friend,’ the ‘pet’ familiar, the fake familiar, his dog.
“Poor woman!
“But to tell you the truth, Suwelo, I was not sorry to go. For I was a lion. To whom harmony, above everything, is sacred. I could see that, merged, man and woman were in for an eternity of strife, and I wanted no part of it. I knew that, even if man had let us remain beside woman’s fire he would be throwing his weight around constantly, and woman being woman, every so often would send pots and pans flying over our heads; this would go on forever. An unbearable thought; as a lion, I could not bear loud noises, abrupt changes in behavior, voices raised in anger. Evilness. No lion could tolerate such things. It is our nature to be nonviolent, to be peaceful, to be calm. And ever to be fair in our dealings; and I knew this would be impossible in the present case, since the animals, except for the barbarous dogs, clearly preferred woman, and would always have been attempting to defend her. Lions felt that, no matter the circumstance, one must be dignified. In consorting with man, as he had become, woman was bound to lose her dignity, her integrity. It was a tragedy. But it was a fate lions were not prepared to share.
“In subsequent periods lions moved farther and farther away from humans, in search of peace. There were tribes with whom we kept connections, in that we taught, and they learned from us. What did they learn? They learned that rather than go to war with one’s own kind it was better to pack up and remove oneself from the site of contention. That as long as there is space in which to move there is a possibility of having uncontested peace. There are tribes living today in South Africa who have never come to blows with each other for a thousand years. It is because of what they learned from the lions.
“For thousands of years our personalities were known by all and appreciated. In a way, we were the beloved ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’—interesting visitors, indulgent playmates, superb listeners, and thoughtful teachers—of the human tribe, which, fortunately, could never figure out, not for a long, long time, anyhow, any reason why we should be viewed as completely different from them and separate from them. Only gradually did we fade into myth—all that was known of us previously, that is. The last people on earth who had any real comprehension of our essence are themselves faded into myth, but at least before they faded completely they erected the sphinx... . There are also”—Miss Lissie chuckled—“those accounts one hears of the free-roaming lions that frequently startled visitors to Haile Selassie’s palace in Ethiopia. It never occurred to anyone of his ancient lineage that lions should be anything but free. Dreadlocked Rastas who made it inside the courtyard were sometimes so frightened on meeting one of these lions—their ancient totem, strolling about like they were—that their locks literally stood on end.
“I realize, too, that there are more ... intermediate stories,” continued Miss Lissie, “that is to say, between the ancient and the current ones; such as ‘Androcles and the Lion’ and ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den,’ but already in those stories you can see that no one understood what was happening from the lion’s point of view. It would have been unthinkable for the lion who had the thorn removed from his paw by Androcles to hurt the friend who removed it; it would never have crossed his mind to hurt him, period, whether he removed the damn thing or not. Likewise with Daniel. Even though the Romans were into torturing lions, so brutalizing them that in their hunger and rage they attacked the hapless Christians, to the frenzied cheers of the crowds, whenever they had the least chance to reflect, to remember who they were, they did nothing that could remotely be termed violent. Even though they were all hungry, starved almost to fainting by the Romans, Daniel had a perfectly safe and comfy night’s slee
p, with his head resting against one of their sides. They would also have objected to the rank odor of Daniel’s toxicity.
“Now,” said Miss Lissie, whose voice was again becoming tired, “there were but two things on earth Hal truly feared. He feared white people, especially white men, and he feared cats. The fear of the white man was less irrational than the fear of cats, but they were both very real fears to Hal. You could make him back up twenty miles simply by asking him to hold a cat. And he arranged his life so that if he ever saw a white man, it was by accident, and also very separate from his personal life, an unheralded and unwelcome event. So how could I tell him all of who I was? By now Hal is like my son to me, and I couldn’t bear it if he hated me. For such fear as Hal’s is hatred.
“And so, I never told him. How could I say it? Yo, Hal, I was a white man; more than once; they’re probably still in there somewhere. Yo, Hal, I was also, once upon a time, a very large cat.”
Miss Lissie chuckled. Then laughed and laughed. Suwelo did too. Her laughter was the last sound on that side of the tape.
“But if you love someone, you want to share yourself, or, in my case,” said Miss Lissie—and Suwelo imagined her wiping her eyes, still smiling—“you want to share yourselves. But I was afraid. When Henry Laytrum brought the pictures that showed me faded almost to a ghost, pictures that lightened my hair and washed out my eyes, I tore them up; I said he’d used defective film. When he took other pictures in which I looked feline, really like Dorothy’s companion in The Wizard of Oz, I tore them up too. Maybe there’s always a part of the self that we hide, deny, deliberately destroy.