by Alice Walker
I always thought perhaps it was to make sexual love between women impossible that men destroyed their external sexual organs.
I still think that is partly true, says Pierre. But there is also my experience with Queen Anne.
Queen Anne? Your friend was named after Queen Anne Nzingha, the African warrior?
No, he says. After Queen Anne’s lace, the wildflower.
Later on in the hike, stopping at a pipe for water, Pierre still muses. Is it only woman who would make love to everything? he asks. Man too, after all, has external sexual organs. But does man seek oneness with the earth by having sex with it?
You mean Queen Anne wasn’t simply masturbating?
No. She said she never masturbated, except with herself. And even then she was making love. Having sex. Her partner just happened to be something other than another human being.
Was it with Queen Anne that you discovered your duality? I ask.
Yes, he says. Until I met her I was never sexually attracted to women. I imagined all women mainly suffered from sex. Meeting her was a great relief. I realized that even bisexuality, of which I’d always felt myself capable but of which I’d had no real experience, was still, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, like lesbianism, only a very limited sexuality. I mean, here was someone who was pansexual. Remember Pan? he asks, laughing. Well, Queen Anne was Pan’s great-grandmother!
An image of Pan, the Greek god, merrily playing his flute in the forest rises up. His human head rests on a body composed of the parts of many different animals. Clearly his ancestors had related sexually, at least in imagination, to everything. And before him Queen Anne’s ancestors had related sexually to the earth itself. I am really too old to use the expression “wow” gracefully. But “wow” is what I hear myself say. Which makes Pierre laugh again.
But in a moment he has returned to the thread of his thought. In pornography, he says ruefully, this ability of woman’s to take pleasure in diverse ways is projected in a perverted way. I have seen films in which she is forced to copulate with donkeys and dogs and guns and other weapons. Oddly shaped vegetables and fruits. Broom handles and Coke bottles. But this is rape. Man is jealous of woman’s pleasure, Pierre says after a while, because she does not require him to achieve it. When her outer sex is cut off, and she’s left only the smallest, inelastic opening through which to receive pleasure, he can believe it is only his penis that can reach her inner parts and give her what she craves. But it is only his lust for her conquest that makes the effort worthwhile. And then it is literally a battle, with blood flowing on both sides.
Ah, I say, the original battle of the sexes!
Exactly, he replies.
Well, I say, some men turn to animals, and each other. Or they use the woman as if she were a boy.
If you are at all sensitive to another’s pain, he says, grimacing, or even cognizant of your own, not to mention the humiliation of forcing yourself inside someone whose very flesh has been made into a barrier against you, what else can you do?
PART THIRTEEN
EVELYN
FOR YEARS I WATCHED a television program called “Riverside.” It was about a hospital for psychiatric disorders that reminded me of the Waverly. When Amy Maxwell was introduced to me by Raye, and closely resembled the woman who played the tough, compassionate matriarch and physician emeritus of the hospital, I felt immediately relaxed with her. She was elderly, bony and silver-haired, with a mouth full of straight white teeth which appeared to be wired into a permanent grin. She peered at me over silver half-glasses and stuck out her hand.
Raye sat as usual in her maroon wingback chair, a bemused look on her face. I could not fathom why Amy and I were being brought together. As a joke to myself I wondered: Could this woman be Mzee’s belated bag of clay?
I learned something from Amy recently that I thought might interest you, said Raye, leaning forward.
There was a long silence, during which I was highly conscious of the powdered pinkness of Amy’s face and the mock-orange scent of her perfume. At last she began to speak. She spoke of her son, Josh—a word which in Olinka means turban—and of how he had been for many years a patient of Raye’s. She spoke his name softly, tentatively, as if unsure she had a right to it. He had danced with a major ballet company throughout his twenties, after which he had had a hard time keeping up. Aging, out of work, depressed, he’d killed himself while still in his thirties.
Almost from birth he suffered from depression, said Amy. And almost from birth, she continued, with a self-deprecating look from Raye to me, I hauled him off to the shrink. Like the dutiful little soldier he was, he went unprotesting to have his head and heart examined by a succession of psychiatrists in an effort to adjust to my incessant cheerfulness: a sunniness so persistent it drove his father, a man of normal, up-and-down emotions, away. No matter what happened to me, I rose above it, said Amy, as my own mother had taught me to do, and as she herself had always done. She was a Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. Poor for much of her life, but then fabulously wealthy finally because she married my father, who owned a lot of downtown New Orleans.
Here she paused and looked out the window. It was February; across the street the acacias were in bloom. The three of us were quiet, enjoying the look of the fine yellow fuzziness against the new and tender green. I was more puzzled than ever. I glanced sidelong at Raye, but she was sitting back in her chair, her eyes warmly encouraging as she gazed at Amy’s face. I realized this was not her first time hearing this.
Amy laced her thin fingers together and cleared her throat. How old was she? I wondered. Seventy-five? Eighty? Older? She seemed remarkably fit, whatever her age. It was only when he wound up here, with Raye, she said, that he began to suspect the depression he’d always carried was mine.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean, said Amy, sighing, that when I was a very little girl I used to touch myself…there. It was a habit that mortified my mother. When I was three years old she bound my hands each night before I was put to bed. At four she put hot pepper sauce on my fingers. At six years of age our family doctor was asked to excise my clitoris.
Is New Orleans America? I asked suspiciously. For this was all I could think to say.
Yes, said Amy, I assure you it is. And yes, I am telling you that even in America a rich white child could not touch herself sexually, if others could see her, and be safe. It is different today, of course. And even back then not every parent reacted as my mother did. But that I was not the only one this happened to I am sure.
I don’t believe you, I said, rising to go. For I saw the healthy green leaves of my America falling seared to the ground. Her sparkling rivers muddy with blood.
Raye rose also and placed a hand on my arm. I was angry with her, and I knew the look in my eyes expressed it. How dare she subject me to such lies!
Wait, she said.
I sat.
Amy smiled, a small, modest smile, in spite of her tense mouth that was shaped into a wider grin. You think you are the only African woman to come to America don’t you? she asked.
Actually, I did think this. Black American women seemed to me so different from Olinka women, I rarely thought of their African great-great-grandmothers.
Many African women have come here, said Amy. Enslaved women. Many of them sold into bondage because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage circumcised and infibulated. It was these sewed-up women who fascinated the American doctors who flocked to the slave auctions to examine them, as the women stood naked and defenseless on the block. They learned to do the “procedure” on other enslaved women; they did this in the name of Science. They found a use for it on white women…Amy laughed, suddenly. They wrote in their medical journals that they’d finally found a cure for the white woman’s hysteria.
Well, somebody had to, said Raye, with a straight face. And the two of them actually sat there laughing.
I could not take it in. I stared at Amy.
It had been done to the grandmother of our cook, she said. Many operations, when she was a girl. She couldn’t have children of her own; she’d adopted Gladys, my mother’s childhood companion and maid, whose own clitoris had been excised; though she had not, like her mother, been infibulated. Gladys was docile in the extreme, not legally a slave, but superbly slavish in spirit. She just had no spunk. No self. This “gentleness of spirit,” as my mother called it, was always held up as exemplary and the way my mother wanted me to be.
Raye and I watched as tears coursed down cheeks that even then held their grin shape. My first year in America, Adam and Olivia had taken me to the circus and there’d been a weeping clown with a wide white smile painted on his face. That was what Amy’s face was like.
I was to be controlled all my life, she said, by my mother’s invisible hand. And it was invisible, she cried, striking the arm of her chair with a clenched fist. Because I forgot!
You were a child, said Raye firmly. A child who was told your tonsils were being removed. A child who did not know such a thing as your mother did to you was possible. A child ignorant of what was so wrong about touching yourself. Too young to think something that felt so comforting could be wrong.
Amy wiped her eyes with a tissue. Sniffled. Her gray eyes were red, and appeared to perspire rather than tear.
I was sore for a long time, she said. My mother let me stay in bed and brought me lemonade to soothe my throat—for she convinced me it was my throat in which the work had been done and therefore where I felt the pain. And I could not touch my fingers to where the pain actually was, for fear of contradicting her. Or offending her. I never touched myself—in that way— again. And of course when I accidentally touched myself there I discovered there was nothing left to touch.
I became cheerful. I went in for sports because I enjoyed the high achieved by competitive exertion. My body was hard, lean, fit. Nothing missing. I had sex with practically anyone. Screwing madly, feeling nothing; in order not to feel my rage. I smiled even as, years later, I laid Mother in her grave. But I did not begin to remember until Josh died, when my own life was virtually over; because suddenly I had to start feeling my own feelings for myself. I had tried to live through Josh’s body because it was whole. I’d pushed him to be a dancer; I can only imagine his sadness when he could no longer dance for me.
After this distressing conversation, from which I angrily extricated myself by slamming out of Raye’s office, I ceased watching “Riverside.” I now read everything I could find on Louisiana and New Orleans. I learned Louisiana had once belonged to France. Maybe, I thought, reliving the hostility anything French always provoked in me, Amy’s mother had had trouble communicating with her doctor, who was perhaps like me a stranger from another tribe; perhaps her troubles stemmed from a complication encountered in the language. Perhaps Amy’s mother had meant her daughter’s tonsils after all.
PART FOURTEEN
EVELYN-TASHI
EVERY DAY NOW, down below my window in the street, there are demonstrations. I can not see them, but the babble of voices rises up the wall of the prison and pours right through the iron bars.
What I am really hearing, says Olivia, is the cultural fundamentalists and Muslim fanatics attacking women who’ve traveled from all parts of the country to place offerings beneath the shrubbery that is just below and around the corner from my view. The women bring wildflowers, herbs, seeds, beads, ears of corn, anything they can claim as their own and that they can spare. They are mostly quiet. Sometimes they sing. It is when they sing that the men attack, even though the only song they all know and can sing together is the national anthem. They hit the women with their fists. They kick them. They swing at them with clubs, bruising the women’s skins and breaking bones. The women do not fight back but scatter like hens; huddling in the doorways of shops up and down the street, until the shopkeepers sweep them back into the street with their brooms.
On the day I was sentenced to death the men did not bother the women, who, according to Olivia, simply sat, spent, hidden as much as they could be, at the base of the dusty shrubbery. They did not talk. They did not eat. They did not sing. I had not realized, before she told me of their dejection, how used I had become to their clamor. Even with my family beside me, cushioning the blow of the death sentence, without the noise of the battle from the street I felt alone.
But then, the next day, the singing began again, low and mournful, and the sound of sticks against flesh.
BENNY
I CAN NOT BELIEVE my mother is going to die—and that dying means I will never see her again. When people die, where do they go? This is the question with which I pester Pierre. He says when people die they go back where they came from. Where is that? I ask him. Nothing, he says. They go back into Nothing. He wrote in huge letters in my notepad: NOTHING = NOT BEING = DEATH. But then he shrugged, that curious movement of his shoulders that caused my mother finally to like him, and wrote: BUT EVERYTHING THAT DIES COMES AROUND AGAIN.
I ask him if this means my mother will come back. He says, Yes, of course. Only not as your mother.
He said, Look at it this way. In the year nine hundred and twelve the people of Olinka had a stupid leader who put people to death by hanging. Now their stupid leader puts them to death by shooting. Now he is driven everywhere in a Mercedes. In nine hundred and twelve he was carried on the shoulders of four strong slaves everywhere he went. You see?
I did not.
ADAM
WHEN SOMEONE INFORMS YOU your wife is to be assassinated publicly, it is a very bitter thing. I am always thinking of it, worrying it like a pip at the tip of my tongue. Olivia tells me not to read the papers, that they are filled with lies. I can not help it. I have become morbidly interested in this country’s problems as they are revealed by inept and corrupt journalists. All the credible journalists have by now been beaten into silence, bought off, murdered, or chased into exile. The ones that are left have but one function: tell the people lies that flatter the president. In every edition of the two remaining papers there is a huge photograph of him: roundfaced, chuckleheaded, beaming like an evil moon. He is president for life, and that is that. The people are reminded over and over of his exploits as a youth against the white colonialists. They are told how, daily, he fights the neo-imperialists, who are still intent on stealing their country from them. They are told how frugally he husbands their dwindling resources and of how, during the latest interminable drought, he permits the lawn of his palace to be watered but once a week. Of course it is practically the only lawn in Olinka—lawns not being an African tradition—but no matter.
He has been rabid in his insistence on the death penalty for Tashi. It is said all of his wives, except for the one from Romania, were circumcised by M’Lissa. The few professional women who sought a meeting with him to beg for Tashi’s life were turned away by his secretary and warned they would lose their jobs if they pressed their interest in the case further. There was a photograph of the women as they were dismissed. They looked ashamed, and their eyes did not meet the camera. One easily imagined their sliding feet.
At night I dream of Tashi as she was when she was a girl. In one of my dreams I recovered what was at one time a favorite expression of hers: But what is it? she would say, as my father or mother brought out some odd item they’d brought over or had sent to them from America. She’d never seen a kaleidoscope, for instance, and even while turning it round and round before her startled eye, and oohing and aahing at the fantastic colors and shapes it made, she would say, in a voice so filled with wonder it made us laugh: But what is it?
In my dream I see this child, scrawny, dusty, blood trailing her heels, approach the gallows. The noose dangles before her face, rapt and curious. It is placed round her neck by the president of the republic. Still she marvels, fingers it with reverence. But what is it? she cries, as the noose is tightened and she is dropped into oblivion.
TASHI-EVELYN
NOW THAT JUSTICE
is to be served and I am to be put to death, I am permitted visitors other than my family. One morning Olivia brings in the potters who are replicating the ancient fertility dolls.
But they are not fertility dolls, apparently. One of the women, as stout as I am now from my sedentary life and the starchy prison food, and as solid as a tree trunk, informs me that the word “doll” is derived from the word “idol.” The figures that have come down to us as mere dolls were once revered as symbols of the Creator, Goddess, the Life Force Itself. She proffers a stack of photographs of paintings she has discovered among caves and rocks in the driest parts of the country. Where, when we were children, we were told witches and hobgoblins lived. The people who actually lived there, I discovered later on as an adult, were impoverished nomads who resisted being settled, and of whose filth and flies the government, which desperately imitated its British predecessors, was ashamed. In ancient times, says the potter, pursing her lips as if sucking on a seed, the people repainted the paintings year after year. She chuckled. They lived in a vast art gallery, one could say. Now—she grimaces—they are so faded as to be barely visible. Still, with effort, as I take one of the photographs from her hands, it is possible to recognize the little figure from M’Lissa’s hut, smiling broadly, eyes closed, and touching her genitals. If the word “MINE” were engraved on her finger, her meaning could not be more clear. She is remarkably alive. Nor is she alone. Another photograph shows a figure with her hand around the penis of the figure next to her. She is also smiling. Another shows a figure with her finger in another woman’s vagina. She too is smiling. So is the other woman. So, indeed, are they all. Other photographs show women figures dancing, interacting with animals, nestled cozily underneath sheltering trees, and giving birth.