by Alice Walker
So that is how you have changed, he said to her, when she returned. That is the one change I would never have guessed!
They were lying cozily in bed, her leg over his. In the old days this position itself would have been an invitation.
Are you sure? he asked.
It isn’t, as it must seem, a mental decision, she said.
He waited.
And I don’t think it’s forever. But what do I know?
Please don’t be too angry with me, he said. But I’m not ready. Would you consider tapering off gradually? I’m not ready to lose this part of our life yet.
She lay, only a moment, reflecting.
I’m not ready either, I think.
He grinned.
Oh, don’t be so cocky, she said.
Making love, tapering off, was a way of being gentle to them both.
And now when she lay in his arms she savored and grieved the richness, the sweetness, the sharp edge of intimacy she would be leaving. She felt she would be leaving the body itself. But there was a land beyond the sexual body, and friends like Sue proved it. They were out there in it, already, inhabiting new forests, sailing new seas.
And Sure Enough
And sure enough, almost the first words out of the shaman’s mouth were: no sex. He was short and brown and round with an open and friendly face. Young. She was surprised. She’d thought shamans had to be old, thin, a bit haggard by their wisdom. A trifle gloomy. But no, Armando Juarez was in his forties, and, though he had grandchildren, he seemed as jolly and nimble as a boy. His straight black hair was cut just below his ears, his black eyes gazed merrily back at the group. They were seven. Five women, ages forty to sixty-five; two men, a slender New Yorker of a youthful, ambiguous age and an older man, perhaps forty-five, from Utah.
Not with yourself, he joked. And not with each other.
Could we ask why? asked Kate.
Maybe the medicine is jealous, said the man from Utah, chuckling.
Armando was serious. It is because that is how it is, he said. From time before time. Making love is something we enjoy, of course. But it has its place and time that is not the same place and time as the Grandmother medicine. This medicine, you will see, is from the Grandmother. That is its spirit. Grandmothers are not sexy.
That’s what you think, muttered one of the women, and everyone smiled. Including Armando.
You’re right, that’s not the reason, he said. Don’t tell my wife I said something so stupid. She would kill me.
There was a long silence.
It is to pay respect, he said finally, reflectively. It is to have an experience of the soul that is undistracted by desire.
Oh me, oh my, said the youngish New Yorker.
Kate had met this group at the airport only hours before. It was the first time any of them had visited this country. The first time any of them had traveled to South America. At the airport they’d recognized one another immediately as Medicine Seekers. There they stood, speaking only a halting, basic Spanish, those who spoke it at all. Loaded down with backpacks, baseball caps and straw hats, waterproof duffels, sturdy sandals or boots.
They had the look of people deliberately distancing themselves from the center of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart. At least they hoped so.
Again Kate found herself in a tiny boat, thousands of miles from anyone she knew, on a river, the Amazon this time, heading for the forest.
He had watched her go. This time, because he was going somewhere too, they’d parted at the airport at home. He’d carried her brown duffel and her faded mauve backpack, and she’d carried her bag of oranges. They stood at the back of the line as people boarded the plane, their bundles around their feet, their bodies touching. At last it was time for her to board. He hugged her, she raised herself a bit, they kissed.
Enjoy Hawaii, she said. I almost wish I were going with you. Somewhere safe: mellow people, danceable music, beautiful girls.
He laughed. No, you don’t, he said.
I don’t even know why I’m going the other way, she said, with a mock grimace, as the flight attendant took her ticket.
You have to, he said.
Who knew! she said, shrugging, disappearing toward the plane.
Apparently enlightenment of any sort required a lot of regurgitation. Kate remembered telling a friend about her experience with magic mushrooms. How much they’d helped her when she’d been overwhelmed with grief. It had been a time in the seventies when she finally got it that the earth was being destroyed; that human beings were living in a time when Time was running out. She’d taken the medicine with no idea it would help her. It had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, an odd visitor had brought it. Really she’d taken it because she didn’t care anymore. Any reality seemed better than the one she was in. That of knowing humans had fouled their nest so badly it would no longer nurture them. And the first thing that happened was she’d gotten rotten sick. Nausea. Worse than being pregnant. And she’d thrown up.
She’d urged her friend to try the medicine. But the friend dismissed it. I can’t bear being nauseous, she’d said.
But there’s the other side of being nauseous, Kate said. You get to the other side. And that is where you want to get. It’s not just about being sick to your gills.
No, thanks, said the friend. I couldn’t do it.
Kate thought of this as she sat, shivering, hunched over a hole that had been dug in front of her in the ground.
They’d been asked to drink half a gallon of a frothy liquid that tasted like soapsuds. This was to provoke the vomiting and the diarrhea that would clean them out. You could never put a sacred medicine into a polluted body. The heavy meat eaters, if there were any, were especially warned. Fortunately, for this trip, unlike all the others in her life, she’d read everything she could find on what this experience with plant medicines might be. She’d even gone to a local shaman at home, surprised that one lived within driving distance of her. What was happening in the world, she had wondered, that it was possible to call up a shaman who spoke your language and whose voice mail said yes, call again, there might be a space for you? She had gone, taken the horrible-tasting medicine, and for the next seven hours, after the gut-wrenching nausea and diarrhea, had sat wearing a black mask over her eyes, and watched the pictures her plant friends drew for her. It was exactly like being in school, but with fascinating text material. The teacher however was unique. She was Grandmother. The oldest Being who ever lived. Her essence that of Primordial Female Human Being As Tree. Surprisingly, she was not angry. Or even, apparently, perturbed. It was as if she were explaining how a pet project she’d personally sponsored had somehow gone wrong. But this was only the tiniest part of it.
The waves of nausea were like real waves, bending her double by their force. Into the hole went everything that wasn’t internally attached. And though the waves were powerful, her dislike of them was not. This was different; even vomiting so violently that her body was bathed in sweat, Kate noticed this. She saw that even though throwing up is itself revolting, she had, after many sessions with Grandmother, learned to do it well; almost elegantly. She smiled, even as another wave rocked her off her rough-hewn log seat and to her shaken knees. She did not care anymore about the discomfort of this phase. She knew a phase was all it was. That beyond this three hours of drinking soapsuds and vomiting and going to the bushes, Grandmother waited, just as she had waited for indigenous people sick with disease and fear for thousands of years.
I am an American, Kate thought. Indigenous to the Americas. Nowhere else could I, this so-called Black person—African, European, Indio—exist. Only here. In Africa there would have been no Europeans, no Native Americans. In Europe, no Africans and no Indians. Only here; only here, she said, as the waves of vomiting continued past the three hours and into the evening. I will bear this as long as it takes. This old medicine surely must care for, belong to, me.
She was grateful when Armando brought a new drink, pinkish, and lifted it to her lips. It calmed her stomach immediately. He gave her water. For dinner that night, the last meal they would have for fourteen days, he boiled fish from the river and gave them its broth.
She had read many books about the rainforest, and had longed to meet it. She thought like this. That whenever you go someplace, you meet it, as if it were alive, which of course it is. Now she rested in her hut a few steps from the river and listened to this Being, the rainforest. Why had she ever thought it would be silent? It was the loudest thing she’d ever heard. Like trains and planes and the New York City subway at rush hour. It was so loud, in fact, it actually did remind her of New York. And she thought about the aptness of calling the city “the jungle.” Little did they know! Or perhaps they did. And every sound she heard that was not made by the vegetation, giant trees and tree-sized vines, groaning as they rubbed against one another, was made by creatures. Every Being was chatting, talking, whistling, singing. Singing. Lots of that. And everything was in motion. If she listened closely she could distinguish slithering, sliding, jumping, hopping, ambling, crawling, flying. The cry of a jaguar sent a ripple of fear through their little camp; she could feel it, even though their huts were spread out in the forest, out of sight of one another. It was so loud and offered with such proprietary authority she knew it would make most of them want to run. She thought about running, but where would she go? After a hot and dusty four hours to the river, in a grime-encrusted Toyota that seemed older than Japanese culture, it had taken them half a day on the river, to push off, paddle, and motor to the camp. The boat, an ancient dugout with a rusty outboard motor, had deposited them and left. The boatman promised to return in two weeks. The river was full of crocodiles and piranha. She watched the crocodiles slithering from river bank to river all along their route; though she’d read piranha ate you up only if you were already bleeding. Just her luck she’d tripped on a rock, in the seconds between changing boots for sandals to wear around the camp, and cut her big toe. Kate rummaged around beneath her mosquito net for her night bag. Finding it, she extracted crimson earplugs.
Yolo
Yolo? asked the desk clerk? That’s a name?
You betcha, said Yolo. And the other part of it is Day.
He thought, surely living in Hawaii with all these weird Hawaiian names for everything, including people, haoles should have no trouble with something as short and sweet as Yolo.
The guy was wearing one of those shirts every haole who goes to Hawaii buys at the airport. Red with white hibiscus flowers. His blond hair, very pale skin, and eyes just did not look Hawaiian. But Yolo decided not to be critical. He’d come to Hawaii on one of those cheap flights the average working artist can afford, and it had come with this hotel, which did sit, miraculously, right at the edge of the sea. It was ugly, the hotel, the same beige of office buildings in Washington, D.C., but sitting by the water his back would be to it.
He missed his old lady. He imagined her stoned out of her mind, hanging in a hammock in a jungle so far away he couldn’t even imagine it. Why do some people put themselves through it! he thought. Stumped by her persistence.
Up in his room, which faced the beach, he stripped. Throwing off his mainland clothes as if they were infested with lice. Instead of unpacking he simply dumped everything from his suitcase onto the floor. There in the pile was his new palm-green bathing suit. He put it on, facing the mirror that reflected the entire room, and grinned to see how trim and, well, cute he was. He had Frederick Douglass kind of hair, wiry and energetic, and looked a bit like him, because his ancestry was the same: His mother was mostly Anglo-Indian, his father mostly African. This mixture gave you really good skin, he thought, vainly admiring his own, and medium bushy hair that was actually manageable. His hair was long and, released from the braids he usually wore it in, hung nicely down his back. Some of the other mixtures could cause a couple of bad hair days. He smiled, looking for his suntan lotion. Not suntan. He always forgot. Sunblock. Horrible, that now humans had to block the rays of the sun. But hey, with his mixture, he got a whopping dose of natural sunblock, from his dad: Thank you, Mother Africa! While from his mom, not to leave out her European contributions, he got a nice reflective quality. He imagined the too strong sun rays bouncing off the mica of her white genes. All things considered, he didn’t expect to suffer from skin cancer.
His mind was like this. Running on a lot of the time about himself. He tried to hide this sometimes from Kate, but she only laughed. Most people are like that, she said. We are our most interesting subject. When we’re free to think about ourselves, not about the kids, not about the car, house, or payments on our various purchases, and not about our work, well, guess what? We natter on about ourselves.
They were both vain. And what do we have to be vain about? they sometimes asked themselves. We’re considered second- and third-class citizens of a country whose government never wanted us. Except as slaves. We understand by now the world will be blown to bits, doubtless by this same government, before people of color get their fair share. We can’t afford health insurance, nor will it even ever be applicable, the way things are going. Nobody but us wants to be Black. And yet, we’re vain.
We like our stubbornness, Yolo had offered.
Our contrariness, said Kate. We never want to do anything the way they do it. We think that of any two choices given they are likely to pick the most boring one.
We like being brown, Yolo said, nose-kissing her underarm. A choice they could have made easily except it frightened them. What did they do with the brown offspring they had? They sold them. What a message to send your kids, of whatever color.
And yet, “sold down the river,” his great-great-grandparents and their parents before them had somehow survived. Though how they’d managed to live without their mothers he simply could not understand. As old as he was the thought of losing his mother, for any reason, including old age and readiness, made him want to cry. Africans were said to be the most attached to their children of all peoples the Europeans encountered. You could make the mother especially do anything by threatening to harm her child.
And our unique hair, said Kate. Do you realize everybody else’s hair, on the entire planet, is straight?
Well, compared to ours, he’d said, laughing and kissing her graying locks.
At last he was blissed out on the beach, The Mists of Avalon in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. Kate had given him another book to read called Shark Dialogues, a book about, as she put it, The Real Hawaii, but he had left it in his room. The sea was azure enough to make you weep. He was in paradise. If only his woman was with him and not off in some jungle probably by now trying to communicate with a snake.
In this relaxed, bemused frame of mind, he dozed.
Hey, bradda!
Slowly and reluctantly opening his eyes he saw a very large man. Brown with a protruding belly. Dark eyes and long wavy hair. He was wearing frayed denim cutoffs and that was all. He looked like . . . Damn, he looked like something Yolo had not seen since coming to Hawaii. He looked like maybe a Hawaiian.
Hey, bradda man, for want you come oba deah. The man was pointing.
What was he speaking? Yolo dragged himself out of the land of gin and pleasant dreams and squinted toward the end of the beach where the man was pointing. He could see nothing.
What is it? he asked. What can I do for you?
The man seemed surprised.
Oh, he said. I thought . . .
Yolo was on his feet. Grabbing his straw hat and quickly shoving his feet into sandals because the sand was fiercely hot.
I’m sorry, said the man, I thought you was a bradda.
I am, actually, said Yolo.
There was silence. The man looked toward the hotel, considered something for a moment. Turned back to Yolo and said, If you don’t mind. I’m very sorry. But I need to ask you to do something. It will take only a little while. I have to go home and get someth
ing and I need to ask you to stay with something I need to leave protected on the beach.
Oh shit, thought Yolo.
Are you a fisherman? he asked.
Yes, said the man. I was fishing.
Yolo thought of being asked to guard a boatload of marijuana. He wanted to say no. He wanted to explain about his vacation. How much he needed one. How much he deserved one. He’d painted furiously all year and had made just enough to pay his bills, keep the heat going, and have this vacation!
On the other hand, he was trying to have a vacation where someone else was working. He thought: What would she do? He stepped back a bit from the man. Looked him up and down. He noticed his eyes were sad and a bit bloodshot. His hair blown every which way. Still, it was what his father would call “a good face.” Nothing menacing or malignant seemed to have ever inhabited it. He hadn’t missed any meals in his life either, which said something about his stability.
Let’s go, he said.
Down the beach they walked, the big man, who said his name was Jerry SomethingVeryComplicated, (Izkamakawiwo’ole!), leading the way. The beach was longer than it looked from where he’d lain in his incredibly comfy beach lounger. There was a narrow, shallow river emptying into the ocean that they needed to cross. On the other side of the river there were no chairs, no umbrellas. The place seemed still wild.
This part of the beach for da locals, said Jerry, as if to explain.
Does that mean you can’t go to the beach on the hotel side? asked Yolo.
Who can afford it? said Jerry, shrugging.
The beach made a curious turn to the left, around some black, deeply pitted lava rocks. Out of sight of the hotel there was anchored a small, battered fishing boat. They walked toward it. As they came closer to it and because he was looking at the boat and not at the ground, Yolo almost stumbled over a young man lying on the sand. He seemed so peaceful, napping there in the sun, that Yolo could not believe he was dead.
The shock on his face must have been apparent.