by Alice Walker
And that is all she said to me for months. We lived in silence. She worked, hard and long. She fed us, kept us clothed and clean. She drew her strength from a small circle of Nunga women similarly situated in the city, far from their folks. At first I missed my visions of freedom, the weightless pleasure of abandoning myself. I also wanted to talk, to dribble at the mouth with words as I had done on petrol. But she was like a stone.
I watched her face, broad and flat and black, as aboriginal faces are described so often in literature, and I saw how tired she was. This frightened me. For it made me think how useless her struggle was. How impossible and absurd. To try to have a life in a place your life was considered worthless. To my shame, I used to laugh at her. But it was my fear that was laughing. And she did not even look at me. She would not respond. Each day she got up off her mat on the floor, made tea for us. Left me two slices of bread. And went out to serve bread with jam, coffee with cream, bacon with eggs, to the owners of the big house that we saw no matter where we looked, standing or lying in our own small room, and that in fact blocked the sun.
When her employers and their children saw me they related to me as to an oddity. My blond hair might have gotten me points, but I remembered what my sister had said. I was not to watch them. No matter with what curiosity they watched me, I was to watch her. I understood that the fulfillment of this requirement was my share of the food, the rent. It was also my education.
For what did I see? My sister’s devotion, saving me, showed me myself. Someone worth saving, someone, in the female form that was my sister, who would save himself.
He paused.
There was no God involved, he ended thoughtfully, though the evangelicals have arrived in Australia with the same force they’ve arrived among the oppressed all over the globe. My sister embodied all that we thought lost. She had become the land, the sea, the freedom of the Dreamtime. Her behavior said: Though we have been taken from Her, yet I am Her.
He glanced around the circle, embracing everyone with his eyes. He looked at his friend. An impish look passed between them.
We’re off petrol, he said, smiling. But now we’re both inactive without coffee.
Everyone in the circle laughed.
Toward the Middle of Their Stay
Toward the middle of their stay in the jungle Armando and Cosmi invited them to dinner in the compound in which they’d received their very first meal. It was the place the two of them stayed. There was a handsome thatched dining area with a rough-hewn wooden table, a stove made out of stones and cement, and, in the corner of the ceiling nearest the huge trees that stood outside, there was a large iguana. This thick-waisted creature with its glittering eyes watched every move they made and caused everyone at the table to think of the varied critters they were sharing quarters with. Every hut, it turned out, had its nonhuman resident.
I have an iguana too, said Missy, only thank God it’s smaller than Godzilla there.
And does it watch your every move? asked Lalika.
I don’t think so, said Missy. It seems mostly to sleep.
This one thinks we’re television, said Rick, making a face at it.
Rick had been having the most trouble, Kate thought, of everyone. He could not let himself enter the world of Grandmother. He was fighting it tooth and nail. Instead of submitting, finding the “brick” or “scale of the serpent” that opened like a door into the experience, Rick turned aside. Turning aside at the crucial moment meant he was left in a kind of limbo. Laughing, crying, jumping around, disturbing everybody else’s trip.
What creature lives in your house? Kate asked him.
He thought. Moths, he said finally. Lots of moths as large as bats.
Wow, said Hugh. And they don’t bother you?
He shrugged: According to Carlos Casteneda, Don Juan said that moths are the ancestors.
Really, said Missy. But if they’re big as bats I don’t know if I’d want to see them.
There’s no choosing of who or what visits you when you come here, said Armando. It is only important that something does.
A gecko seems to be the only thing in my tambo, said Kate. But every time I say something or think something with any degree of certitude it makes that weird gecko sound.
It is agreeing, said Armando. Geckos always do that. You will notice that when you tell a lie or try to evade an issue it will not second you.
Everyone turned to Hugh.
I have not one bat but a family of them, he said. I just close myself up in my mosquito netting at night and hope their teeth are not sharp.
These are the creatures in whose homes you are living, said Armando. Think how patient they are with you.
During the second half of your visit notice who comes to visit you. By the way, he asked, has anyone been disturbed by the jaguar sounds?
I wasn’t so disturbed by the screeching right outside my hut, said Hugh, but I did lose some sleep listening to the men trying to chase it away. They were crashing through the jungle like a bunch of elephants.
Armando laughed. Usually a jaguar is a good thing, but sometimes it is the spirit of a sorcerer who is up to no good. That is why it was chased out. We did not send for it.
Where did you find chicken? asked Lalika, who was beginning to sleep so soundly that she heard nothing. Gingerly she lifted her spoon to her mouth and blew on the steaming broth.
Is there such a thing as jungle hen? asked Rick, seriously. He was studying his bowl, which was made of wood, and inhaling the aroma of the broth before drinking it.
There is a small farm not very far from here, said Armando. The woman raises chickens to eat and to sell. We brought chickens into the forest with us, only you did not see them.
Were they in a separate boat? asked Kate.
Yes, said Armando. They came in the boat that also brought the platanos and the grains.
The banana and quinoa diet is getting a little boring, said Missy.
That is why tonight we have broth, said Armando. But tomorrow, just like always, our one meal of the day will be one boiled platano and one bowl of grain. If you are tired of quinoa you can have rice or millet or oatmeal.
Missy made a face.
We will all be so slim, said Kate. We will be like Bette Midler in Ruthless People.
Oh, I loved that movie! said Missy.
You are all talking a bit too much, said Armando, who had cautioned them from the beginning to stay out of popular culture and in their own interior worlds.
When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else’s dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center. You would not drive a car looking out the side window, would you? Yet that is what it has come to for many human beings; they are driving their lives forward while watching what is happening along the road or even in the rearview mirror.
So on this retreat with Grandmother, not only will we observe as much silence as possible, we will also spend our time in connection with our interior world.
I find I am talking with everyone, Kate said to Armando when he visited her after the light, delicious meal. Is it a problem?
Armando had brought her a pitcher of green water in which to wash herself. It was purified water in which leaves of a plant had been crushed. She was to pour it over herself, from head to toe. The bits of leaves were to be left on her skin to dry. Armando explained to her the reason shamans knew which plants were good to use to help people heal. It is simple, he said, the plants themselves tell us. Either in dreams, or in meditation or by accident. He
laughed. Sometimes you will find yourself chewing something, a leaf or plant stem you picked up in the forest, that makes you feel so much better!
This will cleanse your skin so deeply you will feel your pores breathing, he said. You will breathe with the forest. Actually all of the body was meant to breathe, naked, with the environment, he added. Not just the face.
I do not think it is a problem if you talk with everyone, he added, after showing her how to rub the medicine over her skin. Do you realize that in every group there will be one person who is afraid to go to Grandmother and one person Grandmother does not want to talk to anymore? She does not need to tell you anything more. She has told you everything you need to know. What you need to do now is listen. To accept. I have observed you with the others; they seem to talk far more than you. I think it is okay, he said. We never are sure how the medicina is going to work. What it will call forth. If you maintain respect for the medicina and for the sacred space of healing and also for the story you are hearing, all will be well.
His Streaked Reddish Hair
His streaked reddish hair was beginning to reveal dark roots.
Each morning before sitting in circle Rick jogged through the jungle to a wide place in the river, ripped the towel from around his neck, his only attire, and plunged in.
Aren’t you afraid? they asked.
Nah, he said, I’ve been swimming with piranhas all my life. I just didn’t know it. He laughed. He had a ragged, feral look when he laughed because his teeth, polished to a high gloss, were uneven. A wispy mustache in which there were glints of gray belied his youthful look. Even in repose he appeared tense and driven.
After Kate had “seen” him he began to unwind, rather quickly, to her mind. And yet, when she spoke of this to Armando he reminded her it was the yagé. And that she, Kate, had needed to be present in the circle, alert, in order to do this particular dance that Grandmother required.
He laughed. I was getting a bit weary of Mr. Young Man Let Me Stay.
What do you mean? asked Kate.
He wants to stay young forever, said Armando. Like a Dracula or like these bats we have sometimes in the jungle. They drink so much blood! From animals, from people. And only because they have a fight with old age and with death, which of course will win. He shrugged. Mr. Young Man Let Me Stay, he said again, and chuckled. Grandmother has a message for him.
I don’t know how long it took me to realize my family’s wealth came from the sale of narcotics to black people, but I think it was a long time, he said one day as Kate and Lalika crowded into Lalika’s hammock for the afternoon siesta. Because the hammock was narrow they couldn’t actually lie down; they sat facing each other, their legs touching. Rick sat near them on a mat on the floor.
Kate and Lalika had taken a liking to Rick, who had bought a charango made of armadillo hide and sometimes in the afternoons attempted to play it. He had no musical talent whatsoever, which amused them. He had surprised them by saying their liking him was both predictable and uncanny. Puzzled, they had teased him and played with him and pursued the hidden thread that connected them to this rather scrawny, bespeckled, youthful-appearing man.
Black people always like us, he said, and that is why, in my opinion, it was easy to sell dope to them. My uncles have told me that they always had black friends, but after a while it was as if they didn’t know what to do with them. They were in America, not in Italy. They didn’t know how to do hospitality to strangers as they might have done at home. And at that point I think they remembered where to draw the line. That in fact there was a line. They could sell drugs to blacks but they were not themselves to be hooked on the stuff because if they became hooked on the stuff they couldn’t move up in American society and moving up in American society was what they wanted the most. After such a long sentence Rick let out a breath. To be respectable, he added.
So they hooked their black friends?
The friends were willing, said Rick. At least at first. Only later did they realize they had to hook others in their communities, they couldn’t push drugs to white people, in order to stay medicated.
I’ve never understood it, said Kate, to be medicated on drugs, heroin or cocaine or whatever, what is the appeal? Do people just want to get high, fly away from their troubles? Are they trying to knock themselves out? What?
Rick was thoughtful for a moment. They just want to feel normal, he said. The way they used to feel. They can still remember that feeling, you know, like a sense of home within, and they keep trying to get back to it.
I certainly understand that, said Lalika. Sometimes I feel like if I can’t get back to the wholeness of myself I’d rather be dead. I feel like being dead might even approximate that feeling, you know, of being at one with myself again, of being whole.
Kate took one of her feet and began to massage it.
Umm, said Lalika.
Kate chuckled. If you’re dead you can’t feel massage.
It’s true that some people, especially on cocaine, like to feel powerful and smart, if only for a few minutes or a couple of hours. Rick laughed. But that’s because for a moment sometime in their lives they felt this way naturally, and subsequently lost it. That feeling of being powerful and smart they had, maybe after winning a spelling bee in third grade, is the most “normal” and “at home” in themselves they’ve ever felt. They long to have it again.
There had been only two sessions with Grandmother left. During the circle before, Rick had acted out as usual, pretending to be an orangutan, grunting and rutting around the floor. Everyone else was quiet, immersed in their own journeys. Kate sat as usual completely still, as though she had also taken the medicine. Her eyes were open though. She watched as Rick rose from his seat, a low-slung, rope-backed, wooden chair like all the others, and, after studying it for a moment, deliberately turned it over. He then proceeded to sit on the floor and to attempt to sprinkle dust from the floor over his head. There was little of this because the earthen floor was covered with a thick straw carpet. He kept his right arm looped over his head, however, which gave him a distinctly simian look. Only it wasn’t amusing. He was disturbing the other participants who, distracted by the noise and movement of Rick, began to squirm in their seats. Armando and Cosmi tried during each session to work with Rick, to ease him along on his journey, a journey it was clear he was afraid to make. They did not wish to exclude him from the circle because, as they had explained to the group, what makes a circle sacred is that those who show up for it are the ones who belong in it. Casting anyone out, no matter how bizarre their behavior, drained the energy of the circle. However, Kate could see they were getting fed up with Rick. After singing to him and blowing smoke over him and finally sprinkling him with agua florida, Armando strode away in disgust. Rick was now starting to drool and to make motions that suggested other forms of regression.
Kate closed her eyes for a moment and let the image of Rick as he was crawling around on the floor before her merge with the cool, tense, intellectual Rick who always seemed to have control of himself. What she saw was an empty space. Rick was invisible. Or at least he thought he was.
When she opened her eyes he was on his knees, like a two-year-old, right in front of her. He was looking at her with a look that dared her to do something. Instinctively, she knew what it was.
Looking him directly in the eye she had said to him, enunciating very clearly: I see you.
A shock went through his body, and the selves or pieces of selves that had internally been lying all over the floor coalesced.
She repeated: I see you.
He made one last crawling turn around the floor as if to escape the radar of her gaze, but the circle was very small and eventually he was right in front of her again.
I still see you, she said.
Rick stood up, looked self-consciously around the circle, and departed. He was gone all the next day.
It was my father who Anglicized our name, he said. Richards, he said, when he thoughtfully and q
uietly joined them again.
What was it before? asked Kate.
I’m embarrassed to tell you, he said. Not Corleone.
Oh, I remember them, said Lalika. Those people in The Godfather. They thought selling dope to black people didn’t matter because we’re animals.
There was silence. Kate took Lalika’s other foot and tugged at her toes.
I have a friend who had a heart attack from crack, Lalika continued. She said crack kept her from remembering.
Saartjie? Kate asked.
There was a long silence, as Kate stroked the sides of Lalika’s foot.
Yes, said Lalika, sighing. I told her to try to hold on, to remember Saint Saartjie. She paused. The people who got us out of jail kept wanting us to tell our story. So we could raise money to pay for the huge legal expense. We must have told it to a couple of hundred different groups and to television and the newspapers. How the policeman tried to rape us both. How I defended Gloria. How they beat us, locked us up. Raped us over and over, jailers and inmates alike. Filmed everything. Sold the film all over the world, as far as we knew. The sadness on her beautiful face made tears come to Kate’s eyes. Saint Saartjie disappeared and just the regular old Saartjie, dragged around for folks to look at and poke fun at, was left. She couldn’t stand it, Gloria said.
How did you?
I could still see Saint Saartjie in her even though she couldn’t see Her in herself. I felt like I was doing something to help all the Saartjies in the world. Lalika thought for a moment. Maybe it’s because I had a grandmother once. One time when I was very small, I remember I was living with a very old lady and they told me she was my grandmother. And even though she was old and sick and soon died she seemed to give me a strong shot of something.