Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

by Alice Walker

  You’re really beautiful, said Kate.

  Naw, said Lalika.

  Yeah, said Kate.

  They sat together, shoulders touching. The mosquitoes began to sound like airplanes. Lalika shared her insect repellant but the critters licked it off like icing before plunging their needles into them. They were so big and healthy killing one made Kate feel guilty.

  They gathered their things and ran.

  Thinking about yagé and how it no longer worked on her, Kate remembered a talk she’d heard by Ram Dass. He’d been a devotee of LSD and had thought it the most powerful tranformative substance in the world. He’d taken a lot of it to India the first time he went, thinking he’d try it on some of the gurus there. Kate appreciated his irreverence. He’d met “Baba,” as he called the tiny Indian who became his guru, and within days Baba had asked about the “medicine” he’d brought. Ram Dass had never thought of it as that. Surprised that the old man even knew he had brought something, Ram Dass decided to give him a dose of LSD large enough to disorient several elephants. At last, he thought, I will be told what LSD really is. He hung around the tree under which Baba sat for hours, waiting to see what would be the effect. He waited and he waited.

  Every once in a while Baba would look at him and smile, a twinkle in his eye.

  Toward nightfall Ram Dass realized this was his answer. The powerful drug had no effect whatsoever on Baba; to him it was absolutely nothing.

  Kate’s first session with Grandmother had been seven hours long. She’d lifted the “brick,” which was more like a scale on the side of a very large reptile, and gotten inside the world where Grandmother lived. It was as if Grandmother had been waiting thousands of years to take her onto her lap. The teaching had begun immediately.

  But underneath the palapa in the jungle the same dose of yagé left her unmoved; she’d sat out the entire session wondering when it would begin for her. Other people were clearly on their trips. Armando and his apprentice shaman, Cosmi, were busy with their songs and rattles and fans and agua florida. She watched it all as if it were a play.

  Lalika was holding herself rigidly, as if sitting in a runaway train, when Kate looked at her. The white woman next to her, short and slender with light brown braids wound around her head, was tossing about in her seat, eyes closed, moaning and crying. She had been incested from the time she could barely crawl. She had never been able to own this until she worked with Anunu. Now she owned it at every opportunity and had discussed it quite calmly in the dugout canoe that brought them to the camp. There was a deeper layer of suffering to be explored though, apparently, and she, already battered, was resisting it.

  Kate was moved by the tenderness with which Armando and Cosmi held everyone. She thought about how, five hundred years before, the Spanish conquistadors might have encountered this same scene, almost exactly, as they hacked through the jungle looking for gold. Except all the participants would have been Indians, not just the shaman and his helpers. How surprised they’d be, she thought, if they could peek up at us from hell. She was certain that’s where they were because that is what they had believed in. Coming upon the Indians prayerfully attempting to heal themselves, their healers as patient and loving as mothers, the smelly, unwashed, metal-plated, unwanted desperadoes of medieval Spain had set upon them with swords and dogs, killing them in the name of God. How many shamans, perhaps even more gifted than Armando, had the Spanish slain? How many had they taken captive, pressed into slavery? How many had died in the gold and silver mines?

  And yet, here they were, tending the sick descendents of the people who’d almost destroyed them. Even their bodies, for hundreds of years, had not belonged to them. Armando and Cosmi carried the Indian spirit of their ancestors, but their bodies showed traces of the long Spanish domination, as did their last names.

  A sick person has no history and no nationality, said Armando when they were discussing the past.

  If you cannot feel that way there is no possibility of becoming a curandero.

  Kate pondered this. She was still plagued by those ancestors of hers who’d lived and died miserably. They wanted her to rectify their wrongs, she felt. There were weeks when they seemed to visit her every night. For instance, there was the man with no teeth. A bloody mouth. He’d appeared to her in dreams but even more in wakeful visions.

  Oh, no, she’d groaned, catching a glimpse of him the first time.

  But there he was. Eventually she had to look.

  And when you did look, asked Armando, gazing warmly into her eyes, what did you see?

  Kate was quiet. Finally she said: I saw someone with a story to tell. Someone with a story to tell and someone who chose me, or was trying to choose me, to tell it.

  The problem was, she continued, I did not want to relay any more sad messages from the other side.

  L’otro lado? asked Armando.

  You know, the Other World. Ancestor territory.

  Oh, he said, and laughed. We do not get to decide something like that!

  I know, she said, with a sigh.

  He wanted me to know, especially, how good-looking he’d been. How handsome. He was vain, had been born that way. Even as a slave with no idea who his parents had been, he’d been pleased with how he looked. He’d sneak into the mistress’s sewing room, where there was a mirror, and admire himself!

  The inner spirit is never enslaved, said Armando.

  I guess not, said Kate.

  The way we are born, in that area, is just the way we are, he chuckled. Take it or leave it.

  He was so beautiful, he thought. The mistress thought so too.

  How do you say, Oops, said Armando.

  Right, said Kate.

  And unfortunately her husband, the master, was old and ugly and had those horrible English teeth. Rotted right down to the crooked roots. The English always had bad teeth during those centuries. They had such bad food and poor dental hygiene. The whole of Europe was constipated.

  Really? said Armando, immediately thinking of a cure, Kate was sure.

  And our man, not so long out of Africa where his people were accustomed to a really good diet, had perfect teeth. Though a slave he had perfect teeth. And these perfect teeth were praised by the mistress, who, not being brave enough to try to fuck him (excuse me), could and did rave about his big, strong white teeth.

  Needless to say, Old Master was not amused. Being both almost toothless and entirely impotent.

  Kate felt she could not go on. Though Armando was listening to her with a tenderness that encouraged each word. They were sitting on the ground near the palapa. He’d spread a large straw mat for them and while they waited for her to continue he leaned back on his elbow. She noticed some gray hairs on the side of his head and in his small mustache. His hair had grown since they arrived and was almost to his shoulders. Very strong, thick, glistening hair that had always flourished in this latitude, this humidity, this air.

  He—the Master—had them pulled out, Kate said flatly. His beautiful white teeth. One by one, with the pliers they used for horses, without anesthesia. As she said this, she felt physically sick, her whole body went into shock, like a plant being pulled up by the roots.

  Armando nodded. Take my hand, he said.

  Kate placed her hand in his.

  Armando began to sing.

  He sang low and solemn, holding Kate’s hand, until everyone in the camp had come out of their huts or their spots by the river, and gathered silently around them. Everyone listened to the amazing thing Armando’s singing was. Most of them knew not one word of the language he was singing in. Perhaps Kechua or Mayan. It didn’t matter. They felt the soul of it. They intuitively felt it was that rare, audacious yet respectful song that dared to ask mercy of the ancestors. Reminding them that those of us still living already have many burdens to bear. That a time comes when we have done all we can do. We have done enough. That it is perhaps not entirely right to continue to petition the loving souls among us, those who will try to do ever
ything we are asked. There is as well the temperament of the person to be considered, the song seemed to say. Is it right to break the hearts of those who would honor us, by requiring them to sleep, without rest, with our own bad dreams?

  Kate was weeping and, astonishing to her, the tears seemed to be coursing down her arm, hot, like blood, and into Armando’s hand. When she looked, she saw it was true. Her left shoulder, her arm, her hand, were all dripping water as if Armando’s song had pierced the heavy, water-logged region of her heart. Her chest, which had been stretched high with grief and sadness, began to fall. She began to breathe. Deeply. Feeling an inner space. A clarity.

  Cosmi had arrived with a rattle and a flute. As Armando continued to sing, he offered a sweet accompaniment, first with the rattle, then with the flute.

  Kate remembered the poet Jane Stembridge, of the Movement for Black Freedom in Mississippi so many years ago. A white woman who was pushed out of the struggle in the South because some black people were so devastated by the past they could not forgive it. When they looked at Jane they never even saw her. They saw mistresses who’d caused them pain. But Jane in her book I Play Flute had asked a crucial question: Where is the sound of the flute, she had written, that ushers freedom in?

  Kate had respected Jane for not letting herself be stuck in someone else’s image of her, but recognized instead that her very Being, white and female and descended from slave owners though it was, might be a note of freedom. And the Women’s Movement, emerging later, which uncovered and named the camouflaged enslavement at the root of white women’s lives, had proved her right. One’s struggle against oppression is meaningless, she had known, unless it is connected to the oppression of others.

  Kate was exhausted by the time Armando’s song was completed. She wanted only to sleep. Armando turned to Cosmi and asked him to bring her a special medicine. He explained to Kate, as Cosmi approached with a pitcher full of an earth-colored liquid, that this medicine, Bobinsana, would help her have lucid dreams. And in her lucid dream tonight, she would be able to talk in the right way to her ancestor.

  You will not have fear, he said. You will not have guilt. You will be able to state clearly your love of him but also your need to be free.

  The hard work will be, he added gravely, letting go of your need not to be free. Because you see, even though today everybody talks about ancestors in a somewhat lofty way—ancestor this, ancestor that—they are actually very much like one’s siblings. He laughed. Some of them need to be negotiated.

  When the Spaniards came they made a game of slicing our people in two. We’d never seen a sword, you know. And they must have thought killing us in this way was entertaining. They fed our babies to their dogs. What they did to women is perhaps better unsaid. We are left with the record and the consequences of this behavior in our own bodies and psyches, and we must work with it. Not because it is Spanish behavior, no. Because it is human behavior. And we too are humans.

  It will never work to think we are exempt from madness. I think you will be surprised to learn what it is this ancestor wants to tell you. He merely hooked you with that stuff about vanity. And why? Because he knows you are vain. Vanity interests you. But there is more to the story, I can assure you.

  Kate was so sleepy by now that she staggered. Lalika stepped forward and placed an arm around her waist. The woman who always sat next to Lalika in circle, who was actually called Missy, came up to support her on the other side. In this odd threesome they tottered along the path, through the forest and toward Kate’s tiny hut.

  Mistress Kate, he said, you can have no idea how long it takes to die. Even if it is all over in an instant. Time is relative, and you really understand it when you’re dying.

  In the dream they were in the countryside, a countryside that showed no signs of modernity. Kate was standing on a road, a rough dirt road, quite narrow, and he was sitting beside it, not on the ground, but suspended in the air. His bloody gums, which had always seemed to lunge toward her out of his mouth, were now barely visible, though flashes of a ragged redness revealed nothing had changed. He didn’t seem to be showing her his wound. But was intent, instead, on telling her something he knew.

  Why am I Mistress Kate? she asked primly.

  He shrugged. You are not a slave. You are wearing shoes.

  Oh, she said, looking down at herself. It was true; on her feet were Birkenstock sandals. And she was wearing a frilly white dress.

  Here’s a parasol, he said, handing her an acorn.

  She laughed because there was a parasol on its top. Every acorn was shaped that way; to protect itself from the rain. Rain rot.

  My death took several lifetimes, he said. During which I felt every moment of my life in which I could have been better. Horrible. And yet, I was shot through the heart. Killed instantly, they said. They hated I’d been killed instantly, they’d hoped to have some fun with me.

  By “they” do you mean . . . ?

  Night riders, he said.

  Even though she knew she was dreaming, and could see her dreaming body lying under the mosquito net on her narrow bed, Kate felt herself draw back.

  It is not what you think, he said. He paused. Rather, it is exactly what you think. Yes, there were centuries of terrorism, and this was a common incident. The nigger running, the white fiends chasing. The sound of the dogs. They were curiously inept at creating entertainment for themselves that didn’t center around us. I imagine this has not changed.

  Aw, naw, you shot ’im through the heart. One of them said this, as they stood looking down at me. And you know what, so disappointed was he to be robbed of the good time he’d looked forward to, of torturing me, that he turned on the man who shot me and hit him. Right there, as I was dying, they began to fight.

  This is what I want you to remember, he said. Not how painful having my teeth pulled out must have been.

  Kate shook her head.

  I don’t understand, she said.

  We are very old, our people. Not many could have suffered as we have and survived. We have had many lifetimes as human beings to learn of the many, many ways we do not wish to be.

  But we are human, she said, and therefore we already are every way there is.

  That’s true, he said, but there is still a bit of room for choice. Which is why it is worthwhile to remain in contact with your ancestors.

  They were now walking on the same road, side by side. A pale, full moon was setting.

  Did you realize ancestors have jobs? he asked.

  I bet the slaves who died didn’t want to hear that! she said, and laughed.

  He smiled, and a bit of blood dropped in the red dirt.

  Do you think when a tree dies all its work is finished? Of course not. It then has the work of decomposing, of becoming soil in which other trees grow. It is very careful to do this, left to itself, and not hauled off to a lumberyard. If it is hauled off to a lumberyard and if nothing is left to decompose and nurture the young trees coming up . . . Disaster!

  She thought of clear-cutting. Clear-cuts she had seen along the Klamath River in northern California. The landscape that had been so lush and powerful was left bare and desolate; the young trees coming up had no shade to protect them from the blistering sun that baked the earth to ash. They were as brittle as matchsticks and unable to grow tall. They would never know the grandeur of the parents and grandparents who preceded them. How would they ever guess what their true nature was?

  Our job is to remind you of ways you do not want to be, he said. Sometimes I think this message is the hardest to get across because it flies in the face of our need to have revenge. There is also the question of loyalty to the dead. We feel we need to avenge, to make right. To heal by settling a score. Healing cannot be done by settling a score.

  As he said this, he laughed, as if the very thought were absurd. Blood flew all over the place, some of it flecking her white dress. But in just that moment her dress changed into a buffalo skin and the flecks of blood didn’t sho
w. Hmmm . . . she thought. Looking down, for just a moment, there was a hoof.

  What’s your name, by the way? she asked.

  Remus, he said.

  Remus? Like Uncle Remus? You’re kidding.

  No, he said. I know that name is considered a joke by some people. It was a common name for slaves. The masters liked it because it made us seem ridiculous.

  The original Remus was suckled by wolves, she said, and with his brother Romulus, he founded the city of Rome.

  Really, he said. I’ve never been to Rome.

  Where have you been? she asked.

  Only here, he said. Only with you.

  They were now passing an enormous field of corn. Remus was barefoot and wearing ragged gray cotton trousers. Kate walked behind him looking at his footprints. Each time he lifted his foot one print would fill with water and the other with blood.

  In the one that filled with water she saw her own face.

  They sat abruptly at the side of road near the cornfield. Kate found an ear of corn in her hand. She began to strip its husk.

  I used to have to plant, harvest, shuck, and shell a field of corn this size every year, said Remus. After shucking so much corn it took the rest of winter for the palms of my hands to heal, to grow new skin. Consequently, I hate corn.

  No, you don’t, said Kate. You hate having been forced to deal with it. Corn is innocent. It had nothing to do with enslaving you.

  Remus looked down at her. Who’s the ancestor here? he joked.

  We living have jobs too, she said, beginning to pull the silver hairs from the gleaming pearl-colored ear of corn in her hands. It did not surprise her that as she did this, the ear of corn became hard as a rock. Or rather, hard as dried corn. She knew immediately what she was to do.

  She took the hand of Remus, a hand as dry and scratchy as the bark of a tree.