by Alice Walker
“Sure she did,” Mr. Hal says, almost laughing. “You forget how many changes I’ve seen Lissie go through. But I didn’t see a sign of her in any of those last paintings.” He pauses. “There’s not even a sprig of verbena or a stalk of corn from our yard... .” He is almost bitter. It is as if he feels, in her very last paintings, that Miss Lissie went off without him. Left him there alone in the little morning-glory-covered house even before she died. Something she’d never done before. Mr. Hal is very mad at her.
“I couldn’t recognize anything in them,” he says flatly.
At that moment, Suwelo realizes one of the reasons he was born; one of his functions in assisting Creation in this life. He also realizes he will need a higher authority than his own to convince Mr. Hal of anything to do with Miss Lissie. Mr. Hal’s heart is hurt, and his mind, consequently, is closed.
Out of his pocket, Suwelo takes the small cassette player that he carries with him now whenever he is likely to encounter elderly people. Miss Lissie’s tape is already in it. All he has to do is place the earphones over Mr. Hal’s ears and turn the machine on.
At first Mr. Hal is apprehensive and seems bothered by the wires. Suwelo adjusts everything, more than once, until Mr. Hal is comfortable. Mr. Hal also calms down when he hears Miss Lissie’s voice.
They sit, the middle-aged man and the very old man, sometimes looking into each other’s faces, sometimes not, as the tape spins. Suwelo is intensely conscious of the sunlight now coming through the window above the bed and the way it falls, like a blessing, on the little green plant he brought. He gets up, goes down the hall, and brings back a cup of water, which he pours over the plant. He stands and watches as the water soaks into the soil. “Say ‘ahhhh,’” he whispers to the little plant. And he imagines it does so.
After half an hour, and after he’s turned over the tape for Mr. Hal, Suwelo hears the schlop, schlop of old and hesitant feet coming down the room between the double rows of beds. A few minutes later, old Mr. Pete, whom he had seen on the front porch, is craning his hairy red neck into Mr. Hal’s cubicle. “Whar’s Hal?” he asks in a braying, panic-stricken voice. He is looking right at Hal, but because Mr. Hal is absorbed in listening to the tape and, furthermore, has his eyes closed, the old man can’t see him. At least this is how it appears to Suwelo, who is amused.
Miss Rose comes up out of nowhere and hustles Mr. Pete away. Suwelo gets up from his chair and tiptoes down the walkway after them. Mr. Pete is one of those old tall, blue-eyed, rawboned white men who look as though they’ve lived long lives of perfect crime. He is leaning heavily on Miss Rose’s shoulder, and she is chattering away at him. “Hal’s busy right now,” she says.
“What you say?” says old Pete.
“He’s got company!” she shouts up at his ear.
“What’s he got?” he says. “Not got a cold, is he?”
“No,” she yells, “company.”
“What’s he got?”
Miss Rose says, “Got a Co’Cola that he told me to give to you. Here”—she hands him a Coke from the machine in front of them—“have a cold drink.”
Suwelo laughs and laughs. He thinks, Well, what do you know, there’s life, even in nursing homes!
When he gets back to Mr. Hal’s bed, after walking all over the nursing home and seeing more of its life, he finds Mr. Hal in tears.
“Oh,” he moans, when Suwelo sits next to him on the bed. “She loved Rafe so much better than me!”
Suwelo takes one of his old smooth hands in his own. He is tempted to kiss it. What the hell, he thinks. What does it mean to be a man if you can’t kiss when you want to? He lifts Mr. Hal’s hand to his lips and kisses it, as he would kiss the mashed finger of a child.
“She loved you very much,” he says. “It’s you she’ll be coming back to.”
“Who am I kidding?” says Mr. Hal. “It’s my own fault Lissie couldn’t love me more. Rafe let her be everything she was. I couldn’t do that.”
“But how were you to know all that she was?” says Suwelo, comfortingly. “She never told you, did she?”
“People don’t have to tell you every little thing,” he says. “Making them tell you every little thing is brutal.”
“Well,” says Suwelo, pressing his hand, “she did try to tell you at the end.”
“Yes,” says Mr. Hal. “She did.” He begins to cry afresh. “And do you know what I did?” he asks. “I ridiculed what she’d done. I laughed. I looked at the little white fellow in the tree and I said, ‘Looks like you forgot to paint that one.’ And Lissie just looked at me and said, ‘No. That’s his color.’ But she looked so sad. And would I ask her what was the matter? No.”
Mr. Hal blew his nose in a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand.
“And I was even worse about the lions. I told her that just the thought of a cat that big gave me the creeps.”
He pauses, wondering.
“But when I said that, she just laughed. You know how Lissie could sometimes laugh. It made you feel like a perfect idiot, but because she seemed so merry you had no idea why.
“And to think ...” Mr. Hal choked. “And here I am, out here at the home, and being out here I’ve had to learn so much. Why,” he says, sitting up taller and straining his neck, as if he’s listening for something, “my best friend is an old cracker named Pete. He ought to be shuffling over this way any minute now. We sometimes have our meals together.”
Suwelo tells him Pete has been there and gone.
“He was a jerk all his life, you know,” says Mr. Hal. “Only the lord and his ledger keeper know how much misery he’s caused. But he’s here now, and he’s scared. And he’s deaf, and he’s old.”
“He’s funny, too,” says Suwelo.
“The heart just goes out to the man,” says Mr. Hal. “Besides, I can’t see him.”
“Oh,” says Suwelo, “he’s white, all right. You couldn’t mistake it.”
“I’m still afraid of cats, though.” Mr. Hal sighs. “But I’m willing to work on it.”
Suwelo looks at the paintings on the wall. Mr. Hal says he may take any or all of them. There are a dozen more stacked along the floor. Among those on the floor he finds Miss Lissie’s last two paintings. The one of what he has come to think of as the tree of life, with everything, including “the little white fellow” in its branches, and the last one in a series of five that she did of lions.
He sits on the edge of Mr. Hal’s bed and studies these two paintings. They are lush and clear and dreamlike and beautiful, and remind him of Rousseau.
“I could always see Lissie,” Mr. Hal says fussily, with stubborn propriety, reaching over to take one of the paintings Suwelo holds.
Suwelo muses, guiding a painting into Mr. Hal’s hand. Was it Freud who said we can’t see what we don’t want to see? He watches Mr. Hal strain his eyes as if they are muscles, as he tries to see the painting in his hand. It is the tree-of-life one. Groaning from frustration, he soon throws it down in despair.
Suwelo, however, begins to feel hope. And he thrusts the other painting, of the great maned lion, into Mr. Hal’s hands. He does not notice he has handed it to him upside down.
“Humm ...” says Mr. Hal, after a few minutes, “what’s that reddish spot up in the corner?”
Mr. Hal is shifting the painting back and forth in front of his eyes, trying to get the reddish spot into the light that comes from the window over his head.
Suwelo sits very still, as one ought to do in the presence of miracles.
But apparently the reddish spot is all that Mr. Hal can see. This painting, too, is flung to the bed with a frown.
Suwelo takes up the painting, which he loves, turns it right side up, and looks straight into Miss Lissie’s dare-to-be-everything lion eyes. He knows, and she knows, that Mr. Hal will be able to see all of her someday, and so she and Suwelo must simply wait, and in the meantime—if this is one of the paintings Suwelo takes home with him—she and he can while away the time contemplating the
“reddish spot,” which marks the return of Mr. Hal’s lost vision. For on Lissie’s left back paw, nearly obscured by her tawny, luxuriant tail, is a very gay, elegant, and shiny red high-heeled slipper.
Acknowledgments
For their cheerful support and independent attitudes during the writing of this novel, I thank my daughter, Rebecca Walker, and our friend Robert Allen. For editing this book with gracefulness and skill, I thank John Ferrone. For being a first reader—along with Rebecca and Robert—I thank Gloria Steinem. For their sensitive criticism of the manuscript, I thank Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal. For the inspiring example of her personal chutzpah and her unflappable calm in pursuit of our common interests, I thank my agent, Wendy Weil. I thank Ester Hernandez for correcting my Spanish.
I thank the Universe for my participation in Existence. It is a pleasure to have always been present.
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker
Contents
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve
Part Thirteen
Part Fourteen
Part Fifteen
Part Sixteen
Part Seventeen
Part Eighteen
Part Nineteen
Part Twenty
Part Twenty-One
This Book Is Dedicated
With Tenderness and Respect
to the Blameless
Vulva
PREFACE:
THE MOTHER’S BUSINESS
I LIKE TO TELL THIS STORY because it sounds unlikely. There we were, filmmaker Pratibha Parmar and I, on a plane from Tamale to Accra, in Ghana, West Africa. We had boarded this plane because there was no other, and the alternative to flying to the capital was a seven-hour drive over so rough a road that on our way to Tamale by car a few days earlier we experienced every imaginable discomfort. We had arrived at our destination faint from heat and hunger and covered in red dust.
The plane was an old army transport, painted in brown and dull green camouflage; Pratibha mentioned on entering that it seemed to be made of tin. Inside the plane there were no seats. We found places on the floor for our parcels and her various cameras, and found ourselves surrounded by other adults who had also impassively entered the plane, attached to their children, their chickens, and their goats. Actually the feeling of being a village flying through the air was quite restful.
What struck us as the plane took off, however, was that it had no windows. Rather, there were window holes but no panes of glass or plastic in them, just strips of rubber; we immediately stuck our hands right through. We also soon noticed that the plane didn’t fly very high, cruising after climbing just a few hundred feet above the treetops.
We didn’t dare look toward the front of the plane to locate the pilot, whom we could hear joking with someone behind him. I think we prayed. As the plane lumbered along we looked each other in the eyes. One of us said: Well, here we are. This may well be our last flight together. Or, separately, the other no doubt replied: Is it worth it? Yes, said the other, for we are on the Mother’s business; if we stand She supports us and however we fall She will catch us. We then turned our attention to our neighbors, exchanging greetings and smiles and passing out the Polaroids Pratibha took, and almonds, while accepting bananas and groundnuts. It was a short flight.
No doubt the presence of groundnuts reminded Pratibha of an earlier time she and I had traveled to Africa on the Mother’s business, some years before when we were making our film, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. Then too we had had a memorable experience. Traveling by van from the Gambia to Senegal on a road so treacherous most vehicles chose to bump alongside it rather than on it, we had come upon a huge lorry that had been piled impossibly high with groundnuts and had overturned. Pratibha could not believe my glee—not that the lorry had overturned; thankfully, no one was hurt—but to see so many groundnuts. For me, it was peanut heaven to sit and lie beside a veritable mountain of these nuts that I have adored since I was a child.
Now, half a decade later, we were returning from a meeting of Female Genital Mutilation abolitionists held in the tiny, dusty town of Bolgatanga, Ghana, a gathering attended by women and men dedicated to the eradication of the millennia-old practice in many African countries and cultures of genital cutting of female children and young women. It had been three days of intense testimony, much sadness, anger, weeping. Understanding. Pratibha and I had been among the weepers several times during the gathering, because it was overwhelming to see that so many Africans, from many and diverse places, had come to discuss ending something that so deeply scarred and undermined the health and well-being of the continent of Africa itself. We cried at everything, really. The anger of the young woman whose parents had thrown her out for refusing to be cut: holding her child in her arms, she challenged her parents and all parents to have the courage to support their daughters’ right to be whole. The sorrow of our best friend at the gathering, a tall, thin, gentle Ghanaian man, head of the local Amnesty International, whose story of being facially cut as a child pierced our hearts. The regal, beautifully dressed woman, a judge from Mali, who spoke eloquently of her daughters’ mutilation under the traditionalist eyes of her mother, their grandmother, while the judge was away from home. The awakened look on the faces of all who attended was well worth the journey to get there. To our great relief and happiness, we were welcomed and embraced by almost everyone. After Pratibha screened our film, there was the joyous feeling of being on a journey together, and sharing with the women in the film the certainty that, though probably not in our lifetimes, we will, through our descendents, see the end of it.
I was just twenty when I first overheard something about female genital mutilation (FGM) while helping to build a school (out of sisal stalks, all that these very poor, dispossessed-by-British-colonialists people had) for children near Thikka, Kenya. I was then too young and ignorant of patriarchal control of women even to grasp what I had heard. Besides, what was there to be cut off? And why? It would be another twenty-odd years before I felt empowered, by study, travel, conversations with mutilated women, and years of being an editor at Ms. Magazine—the feminist magazine that dared to encourage public discussion about FGM by occasionally publishing pieces that protested it—to begin the work that, in all honesty, felt like it was mine to do from the start. Even in that moment of overhearing “something” about the practice of cutting young girls. Why me? Because such information caught my ear, snagged my imagination, and never left me, not once, in all those years? I believe in such gifts.
And so, with the blessings of my Africans-in-America ancestors in the form of the massive bestseller The Color Purple, and after writing The Temple of My Familiar—a long, loving, thank-you novel to said ancestors—I wrote the book that began the journey toward my seat on the floor of the Ghanaian plane, Possessing the Secret of Joy. I would have written this novel in any case, but what a delight to have enough money, space, and time to give it my complete attention. I did not have to teach or do speaking engagements, as I had done while writing The Color Purple. I did not have to worry about heating bills or car notes. Or school fees. Whether to buy winter boots this year or wait. Could I afford new glasses? It was heaven to feel the support of the women and men in this novel as they gathered themselves into flesh that walked around on the page after living for so long as shadows and tortured spirits in my consciousness.
The world is teaching us more every day of earth’s hard realities; it seems that part of my mission is to encourage a closer look. Many who read this novel will not be prepared for the world that it exposes. I understand. I recall my own innocence at the age of twenty, with nowhere to put information about previously unheard-of
violence against women that so shocked me. However, for those who wish to feel with the people who are immersed in the suffering through and occasional triumph over female genital cutting, this book is a good place to start, if only to criticize my approach (which has been done by some readers, and which—understanding an instinctive need many feel to protect the people of Africa, battered for so long by misrepresentation and disdain—I accept without resentment. I have done the best that I could with a challenging subject; perhaps my writer’s shortcomings might be viewed against the magnitude of the calamity).
After writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, I asked Pratibha to make a film with me about the practice. Warrior Marks became a vigorous and fruitful adventure, as did our touring of it over several countries in Africa and Europe, and also in England, Japan, Cuba, and the United States. We talked ourselves hoarse on the subject in city after city for a couple of years. Going into my tenth year of giving the campaign against female genital cutting virtually all of my activist energy, I realized I needed to retreat. During the trial in Paris of a Gambian woman whose infant daughter bled to death after being cut by a “circumciser” she met in the park, the ongoing, increasingly global nature of the struggle impressed itself upon me. It wasn’t as simple as burnout; it was a deep recognition that, as with many of the planet’s urgent crises, it will take all of us working together to turn things around. It was also extremely draining to find that I, rather than the eradication of FGM, was becoming the subject of many people’s discourse. Years after I wrote and published Possessing the Secret of Joy there were those who claimed I made the whole FGM thing up, and protests met me at more than one college campus where I was accused of maligning Africa and men (and women of African descent). There were those who assumed I sought control of the subject and jealously guarded their “turf” as the discussion became debate in some places. Two doctors whom I was later told had performed female genital cutting procedures in the United States were some of my most persistent critics. One of them sent me a photograph of a child whose incision had healed to show me how smoothly and “cleanly” it was done.