by Alice Walker
I gazed at the foot. Lame, subservient, mindless—as if disconnected from the body of the woman above it. M’Lissa. Here the serenity of my mind sharply decreased. I felt my emotions surge painfully toward the hem of her wrapper. Overcome with grief, I shifted my tearfilled gaze at just the moment Adam’s handsome head appeared at the door, followed by Mzee, who carried a tray.
They brought oxtail soup, rye bread, carrot sticks, a sprig of parsley, a cup of warm cider and a bouquet of flowers. They propped me up in bed with gentleness and a mildly expectant air. As I ate they entertained me by telling of the culinary adventure they’d had preparing the meal. The Old Man had concocted the soup, from his memory of his mother’s recipe; Adam had made the bread. The parsley, carrots and flowers were from the garden behind the house. Mzee apologized for the woodiness of the carrots that had been left in the earth too long; but I enjoyed them best of all. Their fibrousness scrubbed and refreshed my mouth in a coolly resistant, pleasant way.
I must apologize for all this, I said, indicating my beast.
It is certainly large, said Adam. He was quiet after saying this, because he knew the two of us would talk later.
You must not apologize, said Mzee. He looked at it close up, then turned and walked to a chair by the window across the room. From there he looked at it again.
Remarkable, he said, after nearly an hour contemplating it.
He came forward, finally, and took the tray. I had eaten everything, and this pleased him. He was wearing one of his cotton aprons, and there were signs of his soup-making from his mother’s recipe all over it. A small bloodstain glowed maroon near his waist. I looked at it calmly. I had been afraid of the sight of blood for such a long time. And then there had been a period when, if I cut myself, whether accidentally or on purpose, I didn’t notice it.
This is the way I should have been working all along, said Mzee, as if to himself, after Adam had left us. Healing is not a bourgeois profession. Sighing deeply, he sat next to me on the bed and reached for my hand.
The silvery blackness of my hand against the parchment rosiness of his was pretty. He looked at our hands thoughtfully for a moment.
I am curious about something, he said.
Ja? I said, in my fake Swiss accent, which always tickled him. Except for The Old Man, I thought the Swiss sounded quite unintelligent when they spoke. But perhaps that is because the rest of the world pokes fun at them for their peculiar accent and curious yodeling. Anyhow, I liked to say ja. It sounded ridiculous in my mouth and made Mzee smile.
He was searching now for his pipe, which stuck out of the breast pocket of his apron.
Are you better for having done it? he asked, finding and lighting his pipe. Do you feel better in yourself?
Immeasurably, I said without hesitation. The tears that had evaporated at Mzee’s and Adam’s appearance now drained heavily from my chin. By the time I finished painting it, I continued in a steady voice, quite as though I were not weeping, I remembered my sister Dura’s…my sister Dura’s…. I could get no further. There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane. I had been going to say, before the boulder barred my throat: my sister’s death; because that was how I had always thought of Dura’s demise. She’d simply died. She’d bled and bled and bled and then there was death. No one was responsible. No one to blame. Instead, I took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking my throat: I remembered my sister Dura’s murder, I said, exploding the boulder. I felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew. I began to wail, there in Mzee’s old arms. After a long time, he dried my face, stroked my hair, and comforted me with a motherly squeeze that coincided with each of my hiccups, as my weeping subsided.
They did not know I was hiding in the grass, I said. They had taken her to the place of initiation; a secluded, lonely place that was taboo for the uninitiated. Not unlike the place you showed us in your film.
Ah, said Mzee.
She has been screaming in my ears since it happened, I said, suddenly feeling weary beyond expression.
The Old Man was relighting his pipe, which seemed to have been doused by my tears.
Only I could not hear her, I sighed.
You didn’t dare, said The Old Man.
I did not understand him; yet what he said somehow made sense.
He stroked my forehead thoughtfully, got up quietly and left me to the continuation of a very long sleep.
MZEE
NO ONE HAS CALLED ME Mzee since the natives of Kenya did so spontaneously over a quarter of a century ago. Even then my hair was graying, my back beginning to stoop. I wore glasses. And yet, somehow I felt it was something other than my age that they were noting, when they called me “The Old Man.” Some quality of gravity or self-containment that they recognized. Perhaps I flatter myself, as whites do when blacks offer them a benign label for something characteristically theirs, but which they themselves have failed to acknowledge; deep in our hearts perhaps we expect only vilification; the name “devil,” to say the least. It used to amaze me that, wherever I lectured, anywhere in the world, the one sentence of mine which every person of color appreciated and rose to thank me for was “Europe is the mother of all evil,” and yet they shook my European hand, smiled warmly into my eyes, and some of them actually patted me on the back. The Africans chose names for us that were suggested to them by our behavior. “Impatient” became the name of a colleague who was always hurrying. “Eats a Lot,” the name of the greediest of our crew. “Night Moon,” they called the blackest man in their own group, and, indeed, it was the brightness of his blackness that one saw.
It is a new experience having a patient staying across the hall from me, in my own house. In my own retreat! The secret place I come to heal myself. Only your entreaties could have gotten me into this. Yet now that Adam and Evelyn are here, it is as if they were meant to be here from the beginning. Sometimes, when I am sitting outside by the lake and happen to glance into the gloom of the house, at just the moment Evelyn is looking out, I am struck by the rightness of seeing her black face at my window. Watching Adam attempt to fix the spring in the grandfather clock, as he sits in a flood of sunlight on my doorstep, awakens in me a yearning that is practically a memory.
They, in their indescribable suffering, are bringing me home to something in myself. I am finding myself in them. A self I have often felt was only halfway at home on the European continent. In my European skin. An ancient self that thirsts for knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. Needs this knowledge, and the feelings that come with it, to be whole. A self that is horrified at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A truly universal self. That is the essence of healing that in my European, “professional” life I frequently lost.
In any event, I must ask Evelyn why she does not seem to fear my turret/tower, and what she would say to the gift of a very large bag of clay!
Yours in wonder,
Your uncle Carl
PART FIVE
OLIVIA
THE PRISON TO WHICH TASHI was taken was built during the colonial period, some thirty years before independence. It was old even before it was made, as African-American Southerners of a certain age say about Death. It was built on the “native” side of town at a time when the town was quite small. A few short streets of wooden houses built in the Victorian plantation style—with deep, shady verandahs—around a small central square where, one imagines, white ladies in silk dresses and carrying matching parasols endlessly paraded. What else was there for them to do, having conceived and then reproduced the master of the house? There is, in fact, running diagonally across from the park in the direction of the more imposing houses, a passageway that is still called White Ladies Lane, though few white people o
f any sort, other than tourists, stroll on it now. The houses are used as offices by government officials and civil servants. In the early days, just after Independence, black people moved into them but moved out again, as soon as they were able to construct larger and more private compounds further out from the town, which was already becoming a hodgepodge of a typical African city. White Ladies Lane, for instance, soon led not to an immaculately kept (by African peons) park used only for strolling or sunning one’s pale offspring, but to the market, with its colorful, ramshackle stalls, smoky braziers from which appetizing aromas arose, vendors hawking their wares in a cacophony of persuasive voices, and the squeal of resistant small animals being sold for matter-of-fact slaughter.
One side of the prison, from a distance, looks down on this, over the rooftops of several rows of shanties and the row of government offices. One reason it had been built on a hill, according to the legend about it that, in the earliest postcolonial days, had been posted near the entrance but was now barely decipherable from age, was because it was also a garrison and command post designed to intimidate and to actively suppress any uprising among the Africans. There had been bunkers around its base, and artillery stations, right in amongst the dusty shrubbery, bougainvillea, jacaranda and hibiscus blossoms.
I had never even seen the prison before I went with Adam to visit Tashi. From outside, its formerly white exterior now streaked with brown, with patches of gray cement and bits of black girders poking through at the corners, many of its windows broken or gone entirely, it hardly seemed habitable. And of course it really was not. Still, it was crammed to the rafters with prisoners. All sizes, all shapes, all ages. Both sexes. One left the comparative silence of the street and immediately encountered a wall of noise. And stench. The second floor had been turned over to a mounting number of AIDS victims, sent to the prison rather than to hospital because the hospital, being small, was swamped. For almost a year the government had said no such thing as AIDS existed in the country; now its presence was acknowledged grudgingly, though there was no official speculation about what might have caused it printed in the news. There was no noise whatsoever from this floor, as men, women and children, all stricken, dragged themselves about, attending each other, or else lay quietly, so emaciated as to appear already dead, on straw mats on the floor. When we looked in, no one appeared to notice.
As we ascended the steps to the third floor, I turned to Adam and said, attempting a joke, I want to go home.
So do we all, he replied, grimly, with the downcast, helpless look of a man bound to a woman and to circumstances perpetually beyond his control.
BENTU MORAGA (BENNY)
IT IS ONLY MONEY that changes anything or makes anything happen, I said to my mother, glancing at my notes.
You mustn’t think that, she said, gazing out the window. It’s so New African.
But look at what you have here, I said, gesturing at the freshly painted walls of her cell. Her bright red plastic chair, her desk, writing materials and books.
I can’t be guilt-tripped, she said, smiling. I’m already in prison.
I smiled with her. I liked the person my mother was in prison. She was warm and comfortable, as if she were an entirely different person than the driven, frowning mother I’d always known.
Not many of the other prisoners have a private cell, I said.
No, she agreed. Only the bigwigs who will soon buy their way out and escape punishment altogether. She frowned, and for a moment looked like her other self.
We heard the bigwigs down at the other end of the corridor. All day long they played cards, kept their radios blaring and drank beer. Unlike my mother’s, their cells were never locked, and so they visited each other far into the night. They would sometimes visit us, and bring my mother an occasional beer, which she accepted.
I had not understood “bigwig” until I saw the judges at my mother’s trial. Sure enough, they wore huge white wigs, with curls at the sides and a queue down the back. My mother laughed at them, which I thought they certainly noticed and which I felt sure they’d punish her for. I wrote a note to myself about this as I sat observing the proceedings in the courtroom.
There are a lot of things I can’t do—drive a car, for instance—or even think about. I used to feel there was something mysterious about the way I could never quite keep up in school. I almost made it, but then there would come a point at which I felt myself literally slipping back down the slope. It was a relief, finally, to have it explained to me—not by my mother or my father but by a teacher—that I was a bit retarded, something to do with memory, which meant that just as some people are tall and some are short, some people can think longer or shorter thoughts than others. Not to worry! said my teacher, Miss MacMillan, laughing. You have the attention span of the average American TV viewer. And so I was spared the feeling of being, as my father phrased it, negatively unique.
And yet, there were times when I wished I could remember the name of something for which my mother sent me to the store. I wished I could do without the lists. A list for the market. A list for school. A list of what things to take and bring back from an afternoon of playing in a neighbor’s yard. A list of street names by which to steer myself home. Nothing that I was asked to do stayed in my mind. Nor could I even remember I’d been asked. Only the look of exasperation on my mother’s face held my attention, but only for a moment. Then I forgot even that.
One of my mother’s favorite expressions was: It’s a wonder you don’t forget I’m your mother! But I never did. Perhaps it was because I felt connected to her scent. Which was warm, lovely, soft. I felt I could quite happily have spent my lifetime under one of her arms. This, however, I never mentioned because I sensed it would offend her. My mother bathed constantly, as if to rid herself of any scent whatsoever; to her an agreeable odor was that of Palmolive soap, Pond’s cold cream or Nivea lotion. To smell like herself seemed beyond her ability to accept. Even now, in middle age, I like to snuggle her, though contorting my lanky body into a shape that fits cuddly under her neck is something of a feat. She barely tolerates it, though, and immediately moves away.
If I want to talk to her or to my father about anything, I have to write notes about the subject to myself. I have to practice what I want to say and how I want to say it. As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.
ADAM
IT WAS SUMMER, and we sat on chaises longues under the linden trees in the garden behind Lisette’s house. Lisette was knitting gossamer blue wool in the heat, and I made the comment that changed my life forever.
It is so hot, I said, to be knitting wool. Unless, I added, smiling at her, you are expecting to have very cold feet this winter.
Very cold petits feet, she said, without looking up.
And that is how I learned of petit Pierre.
I had always been careful with Lisette. More often than not, when we were making love, I did not penetrate her. Ours was a friendship of shared sadness as well as passion, but a friendship first of all, and I spent many nights in her fluffy white bed, holding her in my arms, but so distraught about my own life with Evelyn, all I could yearn for was sleep.
On the other hand, there had been an occasional weak moment, which is, after all, all one needs.
You won’t have it, of course, I said.
Lisette’s neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body, beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson.
It is not your affair, she said, knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye. In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame Defarge would have, had someone sat in front of h
er and blocked her view of the guillotine.
Not my… I couldn’t finish. I looked at her, speechless.
Perhaps it isn’t even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several, during the months we are apart and you are with your crazy wife in America.
This was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.
The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor’s bees, passing in and out of their wooden hives; they made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea; our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly: Life goes on. The pain of it so sure. The sweetness of it so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us that you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own.
It is mine, I said at last.
Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours.
When? I asked. Unfortunately I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness. On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship.
She shrugged.
When you were here before, of course. In April. When you came to tell me Tashi had run away from you. Even from your kisses.
LISETTE
I HAD PETIT PIERRE at home in my grandmother’s bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of French women to vote. The low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it. The bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day. My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism and shock, showered me with advice and affection. It was recognized, in almost a formal way—“Alors, nothing can be done!” said my mother, shrugging at last after a bitter bout of tears—that I had inherited the genes of my mother’s mother, who had had affairs, but no children, with Gypsies and Turks and the occasional Palestinian Jew, and, even worse, with penniless artists who could be found living in the literal garret of her tiny house and subsisting, again literally, on jars of jam and crusts of bread.