by Alice Walker
“It was a long time before they began demanding these gifts, just as it was a long time before the men noticed that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves. Strangely, the men did not like the children; it was as if the children made them nervous, even the boy children, whom they were always given or who almost always ran off to join them and whom they, in a manner of speaking, raised. For centuries the male community revolved around the female one, and the women hardly noticed it, except to make demands about the amount and number of things they were given.
“Many grandmothers lived and died during this time. Bowed down to, feared, worshiped, spoiled. And then, one day, there was a rebellion. The men grew sick of the women they worshiped. And by now they had made an important discovery about woman’s ability to produce life. That discovery was—and it had been kept well hidden by woman for a very long time—that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had, as had been suspected (and of course many strange things had been tried with that one!), but a different one. Then it was thought that anyone with such a hole at his or her bottom could produce life through it.
“And here is where the sadness comes in. For the women, though easily bored, made a great deal of fun out of life. Dressing themselves up, they giggled. Looking into the still mirrors of the jungle pools, they laughed. There was very little pain in their lives except for the discomfort they experienced in childbirth, and they soon forgot that. They died relatively young, too, either from attacks by animals or because their natural life span was short, so there was none of the creaking pain of old age. In short, it was during this period of rebellion that the men decided they could and would be priests. That they could be the ones through whom life passed! They began to operate on themselves, cutting off and flinging away their maleness, and trying to fashion a hole through which life could come.
“They died like flies. This is why, even today, there is a certain sadness a family feels when a boy decides to become a priest. Here is the origin of celibacy, of forfeiting children of one’s own. For to become a priest in the old days meant one must do without one’s very genitals!
“But listen, chico mio,” said Zedé, stroking Arveyda’s brow, “this is how it was even when I was a child. No. Not the whole of the genitals, because they gradually learned something from the numbers of men who died—their deaths making them more and more holy!—but they cut off the balls. They forgot about the hole through which life passes. They forgot this was what they were trying to make. It hurt too much to think of this, and to do it, and it didn’t work, as well. The futility nearly prostrated them. What they remembered was that they must be like women, and if they castrated themselves at a certain age—the time of puberty, when they chose or were chosen for the priesthood—they could sound like woman and speak to the universe in woman’s voice.
“But, oh, the pain! The operations, which were rarely done right. The heat and the flies and the sweat! The hatred of woman, whose pain was confined to childbirth and maybe a few cramps every month. And who kept producing life and adorning herself and thinking very little of it.”
“LISSIE MEANS ‘THE ONE who remembers everything,’” Miss Lissie said to Suwelo, her black eyes, under wrinkled eyelids, as brilliant and as steady as a hawk’s, “but I am old now and my brain cells—brain cells are like batteries, you know—are dying, millions of them at a time. Of my earlier lives in Egypt and Atlantis I recall nothing. I only mention these places because everyone does, mostly people who need to feel better about themselves in this present lifetime but cannot. To be truthful, I never remembered anything about those places, and if it were not for the existence of pyramids and the evidence of drowned ancient civilizations now coming to light, I’d doubt they’d ever been. Since I know they did exist, in my rational mind, I have to assume that those brain cells I would need to remember them, being so many thousands of years, and more, old, have atrophied. But on the other hand, I do not remember with my brain itself anyway, but with my memory, which is separate, somehow, yet contained within it. Charged, I feel my brain is, with memory. Yes, as I said, like a battery.”
Suwelo was enchanted by the hundred or so silvery white locks of hair on Miss Lissie’s finely shaped head, making an aureole for her dark brown face and causing it to look, even in the shadows of Uncle Rafe’s house, kissed by the sun. These locks grew out in all directions from her skull, but fell gently over her shoulders and down her very straight back, like a mantle of the brightest fleece. When he had first seen her, among the other old women in Uncle Rafe’s front parlor, she, like the rest, had had her head covered. He would never have imagined, on so old a person, such wild, abundant, glorious hair. It gave her the curious look of some ancient creature, which, even at rest, is about to spring.
He had the unaccountable sensation that she was his true grandmother, and that his actual grandmother, who dyed her white hair blond in order to enhance a distant resemblance to Patricia Nixon, was an imposter. This puzzled Suwelo, who, in the abstraction of his thoughts, had been staring fixedly at Miss Lissie’s reggae singer’s locks since she started talking and wondering how many there were.
“Exactly one hundred and thirteen,” she said, as if he’d spoken, before continuing her story.
“It is not, then, the very ancient past that I was conversant with as a child, even as a baby, but with the recent past of up to a few thousand years ago. I have always been a black woman. I say that without, I hope, any arrogance or undue pride, for I know this was just luck. And I speak of it as luck because of the struggle others have trying to discover who they are and what they should be doing and finding it difficult to know because of all the different and differing voices they are required to listen to. I have a friend in this lifetime who reminds me of myself, someone who has always been, in every lifetime, a black woman. Every word she speaks reveals this experience and is based on the ancient logic of her existence as who she is, and when she tries to manufacture the voices of others that were not there in her ancient being you hear it immediately in her voice. It becomes the voice of an almost disembodied person, though her words remain incisive, lucid, brilliantly skilled. But then, whenever she is free to speak as herself, everything has jagged edges, and listening to her is like hard walking with pebbles in your shoes. And you feel that if she judged you she would be very harsh. But underneath the armor of her voice and her skin there is this gentle person. But how many years have gone into creating the gentleness!
“I was never a gentle person. Maybe in the lifetimes I don’t recall, but in all the ones I do recall I was a fighter, someone who started trouble. Someone who was easily bored by other people and was offended if they tried to present their feeble point of view. For most people, as you know, remember nothing of other lifetimes, and no matter how old they get they never remember any better. They honestly think that when they were born their brain was a clean slate. I’ve actually heard this said! That babies have no memories; that they are empty of knowledge and experience; that, in fact, there is no one there. This is insane. Of course, the memories that they have appear to babies as dreams indecipherable to themselves because they are no longer in those contexts, and because babies lack the ability to speak any language, not simply the languages they spoke before. Of all the periods in one’s life, babyhood is the most pitiful and the most confusing. There you are, without anyone you know, surrounded by giants you may never have imagined existed. They are blowing their objectionable breath on you, oiling your skin with God knows what strange mixture, giving you food to eat that, in an earlier lifetime, might have been taboo. It is hideous! And as you lie there looking about, you summon just enough intelligence to understand this is the next classroom, these people are the next lesson you will be required to learn. Oh, the horror of it! That is the real reason babies sleep so much. Imagine where and to whom so many of them are born. They sleep to avoid the shock of the cruel thing that’s been done to the
m and to avoid the inevitable feeling of utter helplessness.
“I did not like my parents at all. My mother was rather clumsy and obviously untutored; she seemed to speak not only in a language I’d never spoken, but in a language newly invented. She spoke of ‘taters’ and ‘rotgut,’ ‘hog killin’ and ‘sugar tits.’ She seemed to exist in a trance, and when I cried she responded with an absent-mindedness that left me breathless. I used to lie on the bed and watch her going back and forth through the house in her slovenly wrappers, her steps dragging, almost shuffling, from front porch to kitchen. She dipped snuff. Every so often she’d drag herself to the side of the porch and spit off into the weeds. I knew I’d never seen, in any of my lifetimes, a more stupid person.
“Then there was my father. Where my mother was merely clumsy—she had a habit of changing me in such a way that the old soiled diaper always came in contact with my head—my father was hopeless. He was every stereotype of the inept father of a newborn baby rolled into one. He spoke the same odd language as my mother—rather, he mumbled it—and it would take me years to master it, whereas in other lifetimes I was able to master new languages in a matter of minutes, though it was months before I could speak. For years I literally could not speak, and out of that frustration over the language I would also fight.
“The worse thing was, I’d never known these particular people before! Never. They were complete strangers to me. I didn’t recognize their scent, I didn’t recognize their body movements, their rhythms—of which they made so much—I didn’t, as I said, recognize their speech. God knows, I didn’t recognize the diet! These people lived on corn bread, lima beans, and the occasional head of boiled cabbage. That was during times of plenty. The rest of the time they lived on grease, sorghum syrup, and biscuits.
“Those first weeks and months, I slept as much as I could. And even as a big child I would fall asleep. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the diet of the children on the Island was improved. I kept falling asleep in Miss Beaumont’s class, and one day the visiting health nurse noticed it. They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time. In those days, in slavery, the people were whipped for tasting the milk or stealing the greens or eating the fruit; consequently, nearly fifty years later they had to be almost forced to eat those things. And they detested fish! Many a time I heard my mother complain that fresh fruit gave her wind, milk broke her out in hives, and only the whitefolks, she reckoned, would eat ‘rabbit food’—which was how she viewed raw greens. My mother and the other women on the Island had to be prodded into going back to planting little kitchen gardens. At one time they’d all had them, as well as pigs and chickens, but somehow or another they lost their animals and their seeds, maybe in one of the big floods that sometimes came as a result of coastal storms. Beautiful storms, I might add. Just deadly. Then for many years they couldn’t afford to buy seeds or animals, and being on an island didn’t help, because every little thing had to be brought over on one or two small flimsy boats, and it was about a ten-hour trip. The plantation overseer would pull up any vegetable growing in their yards that looked like anything planted in the field. And you could lose your house, because nobody owned their houses.
“But this little woman—she was a white woman, and she had a black woman helping her—she started to agitate on the mainland about the condition of the Island children, and pretty soon whole big boatloads of white people came to look us over. It was the first time I’d seen so many! They were in many different shapes and sizes and very healthy from having eaten our food all their lives. I didn’t know this then, of course: how they had sound teeth because mine were rotted; how they could afford glasses to help them see, while my friend Eddie couldn’t see beyond his nose and would never learn to read; how they ... well, you get the picture. They all had a distinct quality of being apart from real life. It was like they were on one side of a glass and we were on the other, and we could have no real impact on what happened on their side, the side of the unknown, but they could have a great deal of impact on us. And I felt that was because we were where life was. For even in our frailty, we laughed. So much was so funny to us! They could not laugh freely. Their faces were like fists. When they almost touched you, they grew confused and looked about to see what others in the group did. We gathered in clumps, digging our bare toes into the sand, and looked at them as if they were a zoo. Only one man, short, fat, and disheveled, had come to be alive with or without us. He headed for the beach out in front of the school and took off most of his clothes, never looking at us. He took out a jar of liquid soap and started blowing bubbles. Pretty soon we were all out there with him chasing the bubbles and watching them float out into the bay.
“There was, at the time, a big to-do about giving us cod-liver oil, because somebody noticed that me falling asleep was the least of it. Many of the children had legs that looked like pretzels. We had people on that Island with legs so bowed they made people with straight legs look deformed. That’s what we needed the cod-liver oil for, to prevent something called ‘rickets.’ It was funny, too, because by then, on the Island, bow legs in women were considered sexy, and you actually had people grumbling about how straight-legged women ‘didn’t do a thang for ’em.’ Meaning sexually. My mother actually had the nerve to try to tell me I didn’t have to take the stuff if I didn’t want to. But I remembered sick and deformed children from hundreds of years before, and I was disgusted that this should still happen. But I did demand that the cod-liver oil be given to us in orange juice. Because, once the parents were asked if the children should take it straight or with orange juice, they got into a debate over it and tried to make it a moral issue. Their children weren’t sissies, by God and his grandmother! Their children could take anything dished out to them ‘like a man’! Can you believe that shit? It really made you wonder about the general thoughtfulness of the divine universal plan.
“Well, I wasn’t a man. Never had been one. Unless I had orange juice, I said, I wouldn’t take the cod-liver oil. If I didn’t take the cod-liver oil, nobody else in the school would either. Everybody knew this to be the unvarnished truth. And besides, the cod-liver oil, taken straight, tasted like shit.
“There are few things more confusing to people than the process of regaining or attaining health. It is one of the great mysteries. And when I think of my dear mother as her mind began to clear—for she, too, was gradually induced into reinstating the kitchen garden, getting a few chickens for the eggs, and eschewing the syrupy-sweet coffee she loved—even now, long after her old head is cold, I have to laugh! She started, for the first time since she was a girl, to remember her dreams. And it was—that first morning after so many dead nights and one live one—as if she’d seen a ghost. For weeks her dreams were all she could talk about. The people and events in them, the fabulous lands she saw—she never understood they were her lands—the houses she visited that ‘just felt so familiar,’ the food she ate. In fact, she was always eating in her dreams, milk and fruit and greens! And everything she dreamed herself eating she searched for until it was found. She enlarged her garden and her livestock and sold her surplus to the neighbors; she bought her own little boat. Off she went to the mainland with her bag of nickels and dimes. She would mentally prostrate herself before an orange. A banana drove her wild.
“Her speech remained strange, but ceased to be unintelligible as she added more of herself to it. She stopped dragging her feet. Her taste for snuff left her. I began to see her in quite a new light, with less impatience and contempt. It was from this time that we became more than mother and daughter. We became friends.”
“HAL, NOW. HAL. THANK God for Hal. He was the only person I felt I had known before. He likes to tell stories about us as babies slobbering over each
other’s faces and trying to get ourselves together enough to crawl away. This is the Lord’s truth! When I first made contact with Hal, when my little chubby fingers got hold of a handful of his fat face, my juices (those in my mouth, of course) started to flow. Here, at last, was something, someone familiar. Now I know some folks like to tell you that the man they married, or the woman, was once their grandmother. I can’t claim anything like that. I don’t know who Hal was, and all these years I haven’t had any success in either remembering or figuring it out. What I can tell you is that he was familiar, comfortable; and what’s more, emotionally recognizable. And he felt the same way. I don’t have many memories of this life that don’t have Hal somewhere in the middle of them. I had to see him every day. When he had to go off anywhere—for instance, the time he went into the army—I like to have died.
“None of us ever becomes all that was in us to be. Not in the majority of our lifetimes, anyway. You take Hal, well, he was an artist. A painter. All he ever did really well was draw, on anything he could. From a baby! He’d get him a little stick and be out there in the sand digging and drawing, happy as a little clam. But his daddy hated that in him, and I’ve seen him take the stick away and stomp out the drawing—and Hal was a baby! Drawing was something his father wanted to do himself, something maybe he had a real talent for, but you can’t draw pictures for a living, is I reckon what he thought, and maybe his own daddy had broken him early, forbidding him to try. Before that it would have been the overseer on the plantation during slavery time. But it was so cruel! Like seeing someone forced to blind himself. And also very illogical. Mr. Jenkins, Hal’s daddy, became a great furniture maker, mostly chairs. He carved the most beautiful designs on them. It was from the sale of these chairs that he and his family were able to live better than the rest of us. It was beautiful, too, seeing those tall, polished, shining chairs, one to the small boat, floating out to sea! Still, he hated the tendency to art in his son. Why? Hal spent a lifetime in the dark about his father’s fears.