The Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  “What about your own courses?” asks Suwelo.

  “It’s true,” she says, “I loved them. I love teaching women’s literature. But I got tired of teaching it there. I wanted to teach it—if I continued teaching it—sitting in a circle in a meadow, where cows could just casually come up and look. Even join in.”

  “I’m learning carpentry now, myself,” says Suwelo. “Though there the question is how does the carpenter relate to the worldwide exploitation, slaughter, and waste of trees.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Carlotta.

  “Well, wood comes from trees. Trees are alive. They have a purpose separate from becoming houseboats, firewood, and decks.”

  “What did you teach?” asks Arveyda.

  “American history,” says Suwelo. He chuckles. “But I had to be stoned or drunk to pass on such lies. It was really a no-win situation.”

  “But you were a guerrilla historian,” says Carlotta, loyally. “The same way I was a guerrilla literaturist. It isn’t impossible to teach the alternative reality, especially when it’s your own.”

  “But exhausting,” says Suwelo. “And I was always mad. Think of the history books I’ve read that say, in so many words, these are all the folks you need to know about to understand America; and there’s no one in them who relates to what you personally know of reality in any way.”

  “You always lost your Indian students,” muses Carlotta. “I know I did. I finally began to say, at the very first class, ‘Go out and find a story or poem by Joy Harjo or Leslie Silko. This class will study these writers before we’re done, I promise you.’ “

  Arveyda laughs, admiring Carlotta. He reaches over and pulls her foot up in his lap; he has to walk his stool over to hers in order to do this.

  “I don’t know much about literature, or history,” he says apologetically, and sounds enough like an old Sam Cooke song that all three burst out laughing. “I read and read but I’m such a slow reader! I will never catch up!”

  He is rubbing the back of Carlotta’s leg. She is as contented as a cat.

  Carlotta smiles. “Don’t worry about it, chico mio,” she says. “What all of us are trying to learn is what you already know.”

  Suwelo looks at him, this humble man who gives pleasure, unasked, to so many. Of the three of them he’s the only one who has gained, not lost, weight. This comfortable, rather short, almost little man. With his kind eyes and graying, flyaway hair. Yes, Suwelo thinks, that is true. Perhaps.

  “WHAT IS TRULY REGRETTABLE is how, as a musician, you tend to lose people as you go along. They want you to keep playing music that made them feel something once, something they think your old music will help them recapture. But really, if you are at all alive as an artist, you are somewhere else, other than where you were, almost constantly.”

  As he talks, Arveyda flings a glob of dough on the counter with shocking gusto. Flour flies up and dusts his beard. Opposite him, Suwelo lifts his lump of dough and brings it down just as hard. He is wearing a Bugs Bunny T-shirt and a red-and-black FSLN bandanna on his head. His jeans have slipped a bit and hang just at the level of his hip bones. He is also covered with flour and has an expression of severe and earnest intent.

  “Relax,” says Arveyda, taking a sip of fresh grape juice. “This is serious work, it’s true; but, you know, most serious work can be fun.”

  Suwelo thinks of making love to Fanny. How there is always a point now at which she laughs.

  Arveyda is moving about the messy kitchen, tossing eggshells into the compost pot, mopping up spills, clearing a space on the counter next to the oven, greasing bread pans, and continuing to mutter, to whistle, and to talk.

  He puts on a tape that is all bells and chimes and hums a bit as he resumes pounding his loaf. There is a heavy yeast smell in the air. And then, from pure whimsy it seems to Suwelo, Arveyda reaches into a bin and pulls out raisins and walnuts and begins folding them into the dough.

  Suwelo, happily conscious of being an apprentice, follows suit.

  “They say, ‘Oh, you have betrayed us! Why don’t you play the stuff we’re used to and that we expect from you? This shit you play now sounds like Elton John! What about your fucking roots?’”

  Arveyda pounds his loaf and glances off down the living room. It is a foggy day and the splendid view of the Bay is simply not there. He listens for the sounds of the children, but they’re off at the movies with Carlotta and Fanny. He thinks of Carlotta and Fanny and the children and imagines what Carlotta is saying to Fanny, at a moment when the children leave them some peace. “Well,” he imagines her saying, “when I was seeing your husband I was really going through a period of such trauma as a woman that the only way I could deal with it was to become someone other than myself. I became a female impersonator.”

  Suwelo holds up his loaf. Arveyda notes the well-distributed raisins and nutmeats, and nods.

  “Now check this out,” he says. “If you write songs, the ones you wrote when you were nineteen are the ones they want you to write at forty-five. Because”—he laughs—“you’re supposed to help a lot of forty-five-year-olds stay nineteen. And besides, you’re supposed to help them justify the scummy relationships they have with women, which are just as fucked up today as they were when they heard your first song. Only they were young then, and new at the game, and couldn’t see that what they had and what they were doing was fucked up.”

  Suwelo considers this. He thinks of how long ago it was that he and Fanny were married. Hippies at heart, they’d been married barefoot, in the spring, underneath blossoming apple trees. They had had live—and stoned—musicians. But what song had been their favorite? What song had been sung or played? Shit, he couldn’t even remember. But when they got their divorce they were both in love with Ono and Lennon’s Double Fantasy album. They played it all the time. “Give me somethin’ that’s not hard, come on, come on ...” Fanny would mimic Yoko’s insistent, knowledgeable woman’s voice, and, having pushed him down onto the bed, bank of the river, beach, forest plain, or floor, she would proceed to kiss him breathless.

  “There are songs that people want you to sing today,” says Arveyda, thinking vaguely of the unbearably repetitive crooning of Sinatra, and placing first his loaf and then Suwelo’s into the oven, “that are just inappropriate to the times. Because men and women, the ones that have any kind of life, are simply somewhere else from where they were when they were nineteen. Thank goodness.” He laughs.

  Suwelo looks at him questioningly.

  “I suddenly remembered,” says Arveyda, still smiling, “the exact moment that I knew it was time to retire even my own version of the old-fashioned ‘love ballad,’ in which the woman sits by the window pining while the guy strolls off into the world. One night, after a concert, a young woman fought her way up to the stage for an autograph, and as I was signing her arm—typically, she had neither record, ticket, nor even a scrap of paper from the floor—I glanced at her breasts and inadvertently read her T-shirt. It said: ‘A Woman without a Man Is like a Fish without a Bicycle.’”

  “I WAS A FEMALE impersonator,” Carlotta says to Fanny, as she drives down a nearly perpendicular hill in San Francisco. It is so steep Cedrico and Angelita, who’ve been talking a mile a minute in the back seat, are quiet out of sheer terror.

  “That’s why it’s so hard to remember anything that happened. Though I guess I thought I loved Suwelo. I know I wanted to marry him; that would have blotted out the marriage I had. But what I did was, I just dressed myself up like a tart and trundled my tits on out there. I thought every man that ever lived—except, possibly, for Leonard Woolf—was a fool, but I wanted them to look at me. ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,’ I used to hum under my breath, but I never bothered to think why.”

  “You did seem pretty oblivious, actually,” says Fanny, bracing for another hill. This one is so steep that, instead of sidewalks, there are steps. It isn’t just the hills themselves, but the way Carlotta drives. She charges the hills. Fa
nny looks at her. Carlotta is dressed in a fuchsia jumpsuit and seems to enjoy the challenge of driving. She handles the jeep as if it is a pony.

  “I love driving around San Francisco,” she says. “The Laguna Street hill”—which they have just come down—“is such a killer thrill.”

  “You were on automatic pilot, I thought,” says Fanny, thankful she’s on more than automatic pilot now. “Sometimes I was amazed you made it to my door and didn’t just wander into the cottage in the next yard.” Fanny says this slowly and with gratitude that they’ve come at last to Union Street, which is nice and flat.

  “I needed those massages,” says Carlotta. “In a funny kind of way, I couldn’t bear to touch my own body, myself. Not to really feel it. I just washed it, perfumed it—loudly, with tons of Joy—and dressed it. It wasn’t alive to me anymore. Maybe the perfume was supposed to act as embalming fluid.”

  They both laugh.

  Fanny thinks of the years during which her sexuality was dead to her. How, once she began to understand men’s oppression of women, and to let herself feel it in her own life, she ceased to be aroused by men. By Suwelo in particular, addicted as he was to pornography. And then, the women in her consciousness-raising group had taught her how to masturbate. Suddenly she’d found herself free. Sexually free, for the first time in her life. At the same time, she was learning to meditate, and was throwing off the last clinging vestiges of organized religion. She was soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved into the cosmic All. Delicious.

  But when she tried to share this new spaciousness with Suwelo, he’d almost destroyed it. “Think of me! Me! My body, my cock!” he was always crying. At least this is what she felt, even when he didn’t say anything. She’d accused him of trying to colonize her orgasms.

  He had laughed and pretended he didn’t understand.

  His own sexuality was colonized, in Fanny’s opinion, by the movies he saw and the books he read. The magazines he thumbed through on street corners.

  “I don’t see how you couldn’t be angry with me when you found out,” says Carlotta.

  They are in her little guest house, which reminds Fanny of her massage parlor. It is small but has a spacious feeling. There is very little furniture: pillows and mats on the floor, a couple of round tables made of wood. Candles. Incense holders. Fresh flowers in vases attached to the walls. Each room is a different color: blue, green. olive, gold. There is a peacockish feeling somehow.

  “I only found out when it was over,” says Fanny. “I was informed you had been dropped, for me. I knew there had been other women, but I never knew them. Suwelo told me about you because he was afraid I’d find out from you or from one of the women in my consciousness-raising group. ‘Those bitches know everything!’ he used to say.

  “They did too!” Fanny laughs. “I feel sorry for any woman who missed that phase of women’s collective growth. There we all were, speculums shining, labyrises dangling from everybody’s neck, colossal dykes blooming suddenly on motorcycles, whisking one away! Oh”—she smiles, remembering—“the anxiety all this used to cause poor Suwelo!”

  “I was angry,” says Carlotta, “to be dropped. He didn’t even say good-bye. He just stopped showing up. Suddenly you were back, and everywhere I looked, there you were together. I could have murdered him; and, as Frida Kahlo might have said, ‘eat it afterward.’” She pauses. “And all along he was just a figment of my imagination. A distraction from my misery. He was just ‘something’ to hold on to; to be seen with; to wrestle with on the kitchen floor.”

  “Oh, my,” says Fanny, dryly. She thinks how Suwelo believes he took advantage of Carlotta and how this is what she herself had thought. They were both wrong. There had not been a victim and an oppressor; there’d really been two victims, both of them carting around lonely, needy bodies that were essentially blind flesh.

  “It’s harder for me to get angry these days,” says Fanny, as they walk to Arveyda’s house. “I don’t know why.” She waits beside the bedroom door as Carlotta finishes tucking a nodding Angelita into bed. Angelita looks like a very tired, amber-colored miniature Madonna, and her chopped-off punkish hair, dyed, apparently, with black shoe polish, clashes with the frilly pastel-pink pillow on which her weary head rests.

  “Maybe,” she continues, “I’ve used it all up. I get sad, instead.”

  “Of course,” says Carlotta. “Repressed anger leads straight to depression. Depression leads straight to suicide.” She turns off Angelita’s light and gently closes the door.

  “No,” says Fanny. “I don’t feel depressed. It’s a different kind of sadness. It’s more like ...” She thinks; turns the feeling over in her mind. “More like sorrow. People just seem insane to me, more than anything. Everyone seems to have been tortured by the world in which we live into a perfect state of madness. Besides, I don’t consider that anger, expressed against people, as opposed to conditions, is necessarily a good thing.” She thinks of white feminists she knows who are happy that they can at last express their anger. In their opinion, this is something white women have never done. They think the ability to express anger is something the white woman has to reclaim. But this seems like a delusion to Fanny. For she knows the white woman has always expressed her anger, or at least vented it, as some of her friends liked to say—and usually it was against people, often men, but primarily women, of color. And what did that get her? Well, today it made it hard for black women to talk to her, because they not only remember the white woman’s ability to express anger, but they expect a replay of this anger any minute.

  These same women, interestingly, thinks Fanny, always claim they fear the black woman’s anger, and for that reason say they are afraid to struggle seriously with her.

  “Maybe the problem is too large for anger,” says Carlotta. They are standing between the dining room and the kitchen, and over Arveyda’s and Suwelo’s heads they can see the TV. An Israeli soldier, aided by a fat civilian, who, when he opens his mouth, reveals he is from Brooklyn, is pounding senseless, with a large stick, a young and terrified, bloody-faced Arab boy who looks like Cedrico.

  “They’ve lost it,” says Arveyda sadly, with a sigh.

  FANNY FINDS TALKING TO Arveyda is very easy. It is like talking to one of her women friends. He is always right there, present, emotional, sometimes barely fumbling along, mumbling and muttering his thoughts; but he does not use his mind as something to hide behind. She likes the way he often says, “I think so ... but then again, maybe not.”

  For some reason, this simple uncertainty and hesitation is moving to her.

  She discovers he falls in love with people dead long ago, usually musicians, just as she does; he tells her that one of these “old buddies,” as he calls them, is helping him write a new song, the first line of which is “Sex is the language that leaves so much unsaid.” He loves this line and hums it and shows Fanny how he thinks the lyrics will sound, when he sings them accompanied by the piano.

  Fanny sits beside him on the piano bench and shares his excitement. He is so happy to have this one little line to begin a new song that he bounces up and down like a child. He tells her he is trying to still his impatience (“the assassin of art”) as he waits for the rest of the song to come.

  But they are both confident the rest of the song will come; and they share this sense of connectedness with other worlds as if it is a marvelous secret between them.

  Fanny tells him about the play she is writing with her sister, Nzingha. Immediately he says he will write music for her sister’s name. “Nzingha,” he says, “how beautiful!” Fanny says it is also her name. Then she must tell him all about Ola and his “wives” and the coincidence of being given the same name as her sister. “Well,” she says, “it proves my parents were never very far apart, either politically or culturally.”

  “But the name itself has such power,” says Arveyda, already familiarizing his mind with its melodic possibilities.

  Arveyda wants to know about
the play. Fanny shows him a page. The play is titled “Our Father’s Business,” and on the page she shows him, Ola, whose name has been changed to Waruma, is seen sitting on a mat on the floor of his cell and scribbling on the margins of an old newspaper.

  Fanny tells Arveyda how she and Nzingha plan to present this play, which will include sections from three of the most controversial of her father’s plays, at the next anniversary of his death, which is fast approaching.

  Arveyda is curious about Africa. His music is well known there. He tells Fanny that if she and her sister are arrested for presenting their play, he will come to Olinka, in the spirit of Bob Marley, and chant down the walls of their cells.

  “There is a good chance we will be arrested,” says Fanny. “But if Africa is ever to belong to all its people, the women as well as the men ...” She does not finish, but looks sad.

  Arveyda feels very American. Too American to ever think of Africa as something that has to be rewon. Only a part of him came from there, after all.

  He tells Fanny about his mother, Katherine Degos, and how little he knew her. And how this ignorance caused him to stumble blindly in the world.

  “Katherine Degos wasn’t even her real name!” he says, still incredulous. There is residual pain around the old wound caused by her indifference to him as a child, some emotional awkwardness. But he is healing.

  “Carlotta and I went back there, to Terre Haute,” he says, “and went out, with my aunt Frudier, to see my mother’s grave. The stone says, big as life, ‘Katherine Degos.’ But my aunt says to us, with a sniff of her big nose, ‘Her real name was Georgia Smith.”

  “Georgia Smith!”

  Fanny flashes on her own mother, who isn’t well these days. She is back in Big Mama Celie’s old house in Georgia. She reads, watches TV, gardens, talks to Fanny on the phone. There is, Fanny believes, a gentleman caller, or callers.