The Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  I held the razor and looked out over Lake Zurich. Marveling that after our long trip, Adam and I had indeed arrived there.

  We had flown first to London, where Olivia was speaking before the Theosophy Society, and then to Paris, and then on to Zurich, a remarkably clean and somnolent city. In fact, from the airplane window the whole of Switzerland seemed to be quietly sleeping. Everything neat and trim, safe. There was an air of thrift, of husbandry, even before one touched the ground. I could see that the forests were carefully tended: where trees were taken out, seedlings were put in. It seemed a country in miniature, where every slight wrong might be corrected, without much trouble.

  I remarked to Adam how odd this was: that the people’s characteristics, easily discerned, were imprinted on the landscape.

  But that is true everywhere, he said. Everywhere some people go they wreck the land, he said. But this is the land of people who’ve stayed home. Mountains, he said, gesturing at the magnificent Alps, make a wonderful fence.

  We were circling the airport. It was in the middle of a field. There were cows and, as we descended closer to the ground, white clover and yellow wildflowers.

  There was a train to Bollingen, and we took it. It ran noiselessly on its track, its conductor a redfaced, jovial fellow with graying flaxen hair. We looked out the window at the chalet-style houses, the acres of grapes, the family plots of corn. Gardens everywhere.

  I had never imagined a warm Switzerland. In my imagination it was always snowing. People were on skis. The ground was white. There was hot chocolate. To feel the intense heat of the sun, to see people in summer pastels, to glimpse an ice cream vendor in one of the stations, amused me. I felt that my child self, who’d so loved to imagine snowy northern landscapes, especially while I was growing up in equatorial Africa, was experiencing a treat.

  Adam seemed somewhat nervous as the train neared the station. Departures and arrivals always upset him. I remembered when we first arrived in America. His excitement to be, finally, “safe” and back home. And his shock at being constantly harassed because he was black.

  No, no, he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I’m black but because they are white.

  It seemed a curious distinction at the time. I was in love with America. I did not find Americans particularly rude. But then I had not been steeped in the history that Adam’s father had insisted he and Olivia study, in preparation for their return home. I felt I was able to see everything in a much more expansive way. For I saw everything fresh, and with wonder that I was in America at all. If a white person was rude I simply turned and stared. I never acknowledged the system that sanctioned rude behavior, but always responded directly to the person. How uncivilly you have been brought up! was the message of my stare.

  We were so intent on reaching the end of our long journey that we missed the station and rode on, oblivious, to the one beyond it, Schmerikon, a pleasant hamlet close to the shore of the lake. Hot and flustered, we clambered down from the train and made our way to a small cafe just by the station. Adam ordered a sandwich—for we’d had no food all day—and I ordered cheese on a roll, a green salad, and lemonade.

  There we sat, in the shade of a linden tree, two rotund black people in advanced middle age, our hair graying, our faces glistening with sweat. We might have been models for a painting by Horace Pippin.

  ADAM

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED was the flatness of her gaze. It frightened me.

  As soon as we returned from England, my aunt and father securely married, I tore off across the country in search of Tashi. It was a long journey that took several months, because I was frequently on foot and had little idea where I was going. During the final month I found myself following a trail whose markers consisted of crossed sticks and odd configurations of rocks piled near watering holes. Then, when I finally dragged my ragged and weary body into the Mbele camp, I was seized by the warriors who stood watch over the encampment, and taken to an isolated compound for interrogation.

  Such a possibility—that I might be captured by some of Africa’s liberators—had not occurred to me, innocent that I was. I had thought, also, that the Mbeles, if they existed at all, would all speak Olinka, or at least KiSwahili, a smattering of which I knew. But no, these freedom fighters were obviously from different parts of Africa. There was even, I was to learn later, a European woman, a European man and several American blacks of both sexes in the camp. Since my interrogators spoke neither Olinka nor English, it was a long time, perhaps a week, before I was able to make them understand I meant no harm but was merely looking for someone. Even after a week of sign language and the drawing of figures on the ground I could see they were not convinced. For one thing, they were suspicious of my shoes. A pair of stout English sandals I’d brought from London. And of course my wrist-watch, with its gold Spandex band, was the kind of luxury item only a white person, in their opinion and experience, could afford to wear. I offered to give them both watch and shoes in exchange for my freedom. But it soon became clear that if they decided I was indeed harmless, that is to say, not a spy, they planned to recruit me. Once I realized this, I rested a bit easier. For I discovered that, face-to-face with these cold black men, I was stricken with the most craven fear. They were all “business.” They neither joked among themselves nor smiled. I had never seen blacks like my captors before.

  There was a flicker in the eye of one of them one day when I rambled on to them in Olinka. I think it was the word for water that caused it. In Olinka the word for water is barash, and I was constantly having to ask them for more. It was hot where we were, in a canyon surrounded by massive rock cliffs that soaked up the broiling sun all day long. I felt I would die of thirst. I knew they resented bringing the heavy jar of water to my hut. Partly because it was heavy, and had to be brought a good distance from the river, but also because the carrying of water was not a man’s job. It was a woman’s job. However, since I was a prisoner, and interrogating a prisoner in strictest secrecy was a man’s job, the bringing of the water had also, of necessity, become a man’s job.

  It was not long after I saw the flicker in the guard’s eye that a young man from Olinka was brought to talk to me. He said his name was Banse, and when we’d talked a bit I remembered him slightly. It was really his parents I remembered, for they were staunch Christians and supporters of my father and the church. When last I’d seen Banse he was a small boy. He was still quite young, fifteen or so, with a high square forehead and wary, veiled eyes. He said there were many Olinkans in the camp. Women as well as men. He said of course Tashi was among them, but he believed her to be indisposed.

  It was difficult to maintain my composure when I heard this. I clenched my teeth with the effort. It was enough that she was alive, I thought. After the grueling journey, which I had feared I’d never complete, it was nearly impossible to imagine that Tashi, riding her donkey and walking, had survived it as well.

  When I had been vouched for by Banse, the manner of my guards immediately changed. Their stiff, absurdly militaristic posture—as if learned from Hitler himself—collapsed into the graceful melted-bones stride of the ordinary unhurried African. They smiled, they joked. They offered me tea.

  Tea, they explained, came from the Europeans in the camp, one of whom was a son of the owner of a vast tea plantation that had displaced the homes of a thousand nomadic Africans. Bob, this son, had grown up on the plantation until he was ten, then had been sent to England to boarding school. The only blacks he’d ever seen around their place had been servants.

  This was all I learned of Bob, the bringer of tea. I found it bizarre that he knew exactly where they were and had access to their hiding place. Indeed, I was to learn he had his own hut among them and lived in it most of the time.

  Good tea! My captors laughed, liberally lacing it with sugar, and toasting me with their overflowing mugs.

  The Mbele camp was a replica of an African village, though considerably spread out and camouflaged. No hut w
as in the open, but rather each was nestled close to the base of large trees or towering rocks. The pens of the animals likewise hugged the base of the cliffs. It was all reminiscent of the ancient settlements of the cliffdwelling Dogonese, photographs of which I had seen. Nothing, however, except a wisp of smoke perhaps, would have indicated human habitation, if one were in a plane looking down from above.

  Tashi was in a rough bower made of branches. Lying on a mat made from the grass that grew around the camp. And as she lay there, her head and shoulders propped against a boulder that resembled a small animal, she was busy making more of these grass mats. I could not tell if she was happy to see me. Her eyes no longer sparkled with anticipation. They were as flat as eyes that have been painted in, and with dull paint. There were five small cuts on each side of her face, like the marks one makes to keep score while playing tic-tac-toe. Her legs, ashen and wasted, were bound.

  Her first words to me were: You should not be here.

  My first words to her were: Where else should I be?

  This reply appeared to leave her speechless. While she struggled to control her expression, so revealing of her hurt, I crawled on my knees to where she lay, took her in my arms, and sighed.

  TASHI

  HE HAS COME FOR ME, I thought. He has finally come, God alone knows how. He is ragged and dirty and his hair is that of a savage, or of a crazy person isolated in the bush. He is here. And I can see as he looks at me that he does not know whether to laugh or cry. I feel the same. My eyes see him but they do not register his being. Nothing runs out of my eyes to greet him. It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.

  I am like a chicken bound for market. The scars on my face are nearly healed, but I must still fan the flies away. The flies that are attracted by the odor coming from my blood, eager to eat at the feast provided by my wounds.

  PART THREE

  EVELYN

  YOURS IS THE PAIN of the careless carpenter who, with his hammer, bashes his own thumb, says The Old Man.

  He is no longer actively practicing his profession as doctor of the soul. He is seeing me only because I am an African woman and my case was recommended to him by his niece, my husband’s friend and lover, the Frenchwoman, Lisette. It is hard for me to think about the conversations Adam and Lisette must have had about me over the years, on his twice-yearly visits to Paris and her annual visit to California. Often, while she is visiting, I have had to be sedated. On occasion I have voluntarily checked myself into the Waverly Psychiatric Hospital, in which, because it is run by a man affiliated with Adam’s ministry, I am always given a room.

  I liked The Old Man immediately. Liked his great, stooping height; the looseness of the ever-present tweed jacket that hung from his gaunt shoulders. Liked his rosy pink face and small blue eyes that looked at one so piercingly it was difficult not to turn one’s head to see what he was viewing through it. Liked, even, that he himself had at times a look of madness to match my own—though it was a benign look that seemed to observe a connection between whatever held his gaze and some grand, unimaginably spacious design, quite beyond one’s comprehension. In other words, he looked as if he would soon die. I found this comforting.

  ADAM

  AT FIRST SHE MERELY SPOKE about the strange compulsion she sometimes experienced of wanting to mutilate herself. Then one morning I woke to find the foot of our bed red with blood. Completely unaware of what she was doing, she said, and feeling nothing, she had sliced rings, bloody bracelets, or chains, around her ankles.

  EVELYN

  I DID NOT FEAR HIM partly because I did not fear his house. Though medieval European in its outer aspects, particularly its turrets and small slate courtyard, it had at its center a stone hut, round, with a large fireplace and flagstone hearth. He knelt there, his old knees creaking, to light the morning and evening fire, over which he cooked; and seemed to me, at times, an old African grandmother, metamorphosed somehow into a giant pinkfaced witchdoctor on this other, colder continent. He almost always wore an apron of some kind. Of leather, when he chopped wood or carved the stone pillars that stood near the lake across from the loggia, or a thick cotton one when he cooked the wonderful Swiss pancakes and sausages with which he delighted to feed us.

  His hair was as wispy and pale as thistle; I would sometimes, late in our visit, creep up behind him—as he sat smoking with Adam and looking out over the lake—and blow it. This caused him to reach up behind him, grasp both my arms, pull me forward against his large back and shoulders, hug me to him with my head like a moon above his own, and laugh.

  We used to tell him, Adam and I, Mzee (Old Man), you are our last hope!

  But he would only look from one to the other of us—a grave look—and in his heavily accented English he would say, No, that is not correct. You yourselves are your last hope.

  EVELYN

  HE SET ME TO DRAWING. The first thing I drew was the meeting of my mother and the leopard on her path. For this, after all, represented my birth. My entrance into reality. But I drew, then painted, a leopard with two legs. My terrified mother with four.

  Why is this? asked The Old Man.

  I did not know.

  EVELYN

  BENNY TELLS ME there is a lot of discussion now in the newspapers and on the street about whether, since I’ve been an American citizen for years, the Olinka government even has the right to put me on trial. He thinks there is a possibility I’ll be extradited back to the United States. He sits tensely, reading me notes he has made on the subject.

  Sometimes I dream of the United States. I love it deeply and miss it terribly, much to the annoyance of some people I know. In all my dreams there is clear rushing river water and flouncy green trees, and where there are streets they are wide and paved and in the night of my dreams there are lighted windows way above the street; and behind these windows I know people are warm and squeaky clean and eating meat. Safe. I awake here to the odor of unwashed fear, and the traditional porridge and fruit breakfast that hasn’t changed since I left. Except my dishes are fresh and appetizingly prepared, thanks to Olivia, who has made herself welcome, through bribery, in the prison kitchen.

  And if I am extradited to America, I say, will I have a second trial?

  Benny says he does not know for sure, checking his notes, but that he thinks so. He is tall and gangly, a radiant brown, usually. At the moment, fear has dulled him.

  To go through all of this again in America doesn’t appeal to me.

  The crime they say I committed would make no sense in America. It barely makes sense here.

  EVELYN-TASHI

  THE OBSTETRICIAN BROKE two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Benny’s head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissors used ordinarily to sever cartilage from bone. All this he told me when I woke up, a look of horror lingering on his face. A look he tried to camouflage by joking.

  How did that big baby (Benny was nine pounds) even get up in there, Mrs. Johnson? That’s what I’d like to know. He grinned, as if he’d never heard of the aggressive mobility of sperm. I attempted a smile I was incapable of feeling, first in his direction and then down at the baby in my arms. His head was yellow and blue and badly misshapen. I had no idea how to shape it properly, but hoped that once the doctor left, instinct would teach me. Nor could I imagine asking him for any instructions at all.

  Adam stood beside the bed, too embarrassed to speak. He coughed whenever he was embarrassed or nervous; now he cleared his throat repeatedly. With my free hand, I reached for him. He moved closer, but did not touch me; the sound in his throat causing my own to close. After a moment, I withdrew my hand.

  TASHI-EVELYN

  I FELT AS IF there was a loud noise of something shattering on the hard floor, there between me and Adam and our baby and the doctor. But there was only a ringing silence. Which seemed oddly, after a moment, like the screaming of monkeys.

  TASHI-EVELYN

  SO THIS IS HOW there could have been an immaculate conception
, he’d said bitterly, when I told him I was pregnant; meaning it literally, Bible scholar that he was. After three months of trying, he had failed to penetrate me. Each time he touched me I bled. Each time he moved against me I winced. There was nothing he could do to me that did not hurt. Still, somehow, I became pregnant with Benny. Having experienced the pain of getting Benny “up in there,” we were terrorized waiting for his birth.

  No matter how sick I became during the pregnancy, I attended myself. I could not bear the thought of the quick-stepping American nurses looking at me as if I were some creature from beyond their imaginings. In the end, though, I was that creature. For even as I gave birth, a crowd of nurses, curious hospital staff and medical students gathered around my bed. For days afterward doctors and nurses from around the city and for all I know around the state came by to peer over the shoulder of my doctor as he examined me. There was also the question of what to do with “the hole,” as I overheard him call it, making no attempt to be euphemistic for my sake.

  At last Adam put a stop to the sideshow my body had become and for the last three days in the hospital I held Benny close, gently and surreptitiously stroking his head into more normal contours (work I instinctively felt should be done with my tongue); or, when the nurse had taken him away, I turned my face to the wall and slept. I slept so long and so hard it was always necessary for the nurse to shake me when it was time for a feeding.