by Alice Walker
“The morning of our sailing they led us to the shore of the ocean and there, in small coffles of three, they dragged us through the salt water to cleanse our skins. Then they dragged us to the ship. At the plank that led up onto the deck, our last remaining garment, the strip of cotton around our hips, was snatched away, and we were forced onto the ship bald, branded, and naked as we came into the world. I fought to hold on to that last small badge of modesty, but a white man struck me a blow to the head almost without looking at me—and because he had blue eyes, I fancied he must be blind—and I reeled onto the ship with the rest.
“Of the style of packing slaves, you’ve read, and unfortunately all that you have read, and more, is true. We were packed as if we were sardines, for this two-month-long journey. Truly, sardines should not be packed so, and if it were in my power they never would be again. Our heads were in each other’s laps, a long chain connecting us by the feet along one row, riveting us to the wall of the ship, and there was no movement uncontested by one’s neighbors, of which one had four. In fact, an almost daily ritual was the cutting of the nails on hands and feet because there was, as you can imagine, much scratching in a quite futile effort to protect some small degree of one’s space.
“Those who lived were thankful to those who died, and many, especially among the children, died almost as soon as we left the African continent. Lack of sufficient food, lack of air and exercise—never had any of us been away from air and light!—all contributed; but many of us died from anger. I was, myself, consumed with anger, and helpless even to scratch the person next to me. My heart was strained, bruised. I felt it so! And I was glad when, for reasons of their own, the slavers switched us to the other side of the hold, and I could lie on my right side, thus relieving, to a degree, the pressure and congestion about my heart.
“After a month and a half of really quite unrelatable horror—the rats, the smell of a dead head covered with sores in your lap, the screams of women and men violated for the sport of the devils that passed as crew, the painful menstrual periods of the women and the blood running over one, the miscarriages, the pleas for mercy from everyone, not simply those suffering from dysentery and claustrophobia—after an eternity, we were taken up on deck for longer than our usual half-hour-a-day run, while they swabbed out the hold, during which several women and men fairly danced over the side of the ship and into the sea. Now we were encouraged, suddenly, to remember our culture—which to the whites meant singing and dancing—and to demonstrate it. Drums appeared. An infirmary suddenly existed to look after the sick. Buckets of salt water were splashed over us. Our bald heads were darkened with boot blacking if there were signs of gray. Men and women were given such garments as could be scrounged from the ship’s closets, so that you would see a tall broad-chested man wearing nothing but a much too small frilly pirate’s shirt or a cloth hat, held by a string, over his privates. Or you might see a young girl wearing a handkerchief. I was given a faded piece of rag that looked as though it had been used for sailcloth, and this I thankfully put around myself as I watched the somber merriment of those suddenly set “free” upon the sun-splashed, yet chilly deck. To warm ourselves we were ordered to dance, a whip striking at our feet providing the sole source of inspiration.
“Within days we were in sight of land, the young women among us pregnant by force and too young to know it, or to know that because we were delivered to our new owners already pregnant we earned a bonus for the master of the ship, many of whose sons and daughters—for he was a violator, with the rest of his crew—entered into American slavery with us, long before they actually issued from our bodies. The slavers did not care. Color made their own seed disappear to them; the color of gold was all they saw. But not if gold was the color of a child. We were left with this bitter seed, and—unfair to the children—burdened with our hatred of the fruit.
“I was sold to one planter, my sisters and brother to others. We never saw or heard from each other again. I bore a freakish-looking, gray-eyed girl child eight months after leaving the ship. The young mistress of Croesus plantation wanted her brought up as slave companion to the child she herself was expecting. This earned us a closetlike room under the back verandah. When my baby was two years old I ran away from the house and into the woods, only to step, almost at once, into a trap that the master had, he was to claim, set for bear. It crushed the bone in my left leg. The master saved my beating—for running away, but also for stupidity: no one, he declared, could be stupid enough to step into so large and obvious a trap, although I’d never seen or heard of such a hideous thing before—until I was strong enough to bear it. He waited nearly a month; he was drunk, and his anger over being still poor in spite of his dreams of riches drove him on. The strain of losing a part of my body, namely, my leg and foot, accompanied by the loss also of my child—given to another woman to bring up—whom, against all nature, I had grown to love, was a condition a heartless beating could only exacerbate. Underneath it, my weakened body gave up the ghost—in other words, I died.”
“THEY CALLED HIM JESúS,” whispered Zedé, clutching Arveyda’s hand, though her back remained turned to him, “because they would not have been able to pronounce his real name even if he had told them what it was, which he did not, and he was a slave like the rest of us. Only, it was his own village in which we were kept. They also called him ‘indio loco’ because everyone else from his tribe had run away, but he could not run away. He would run a little away and hide out in the jungle, which he knew intimately, just as the animals knew it. He had always been there, you know. There was no time in life when he had not been there on that piece of the earth. So he would hide, and then he would sneak back and walk about the village in the dead of night. Nothing would be stolen, not even food, and this was very puzzling to everyone, our enslavers and ourselves alike.
“The reason he came back, a reason our enslavers never knew and would not have understood anyhow, was that he was the protector of the sacred stones of the village. These stones were three simple, ordinary-looking rocks that must always be in a certain area of the village’s center. If no one ever told you they were special, believe me you’d never know it. They blended into the earth perfectly. And yet, once Jesús had pointed them out to me, and showed me the sacred configuration— Δ —which was the same as the nuclear-bomb-shelter symbol, the stones leaped out at me, and I was hard-pressed to be silent when they were kicked about or simply trod upon. When they were kicked, as by the soldiers in their sullen idleness, or when some poor soul was beaten and blood was spilled upon them, or when a morsel of food that someone dropped touched them—well! This meant another definite visit from Jesús, who would have to risk life and limb to restore the stones’ position, wash off the blood, brush off the food, and so on. When I knew him better, I knew it would never have occurred to him to save himself if it meant abandoning his duty to the three small stones—about the size and color of brown pigeon eggs. As a dog is inevitably drawn back to where a bone is buried, Jesús returned to the stones. The keeping of them was his whole life, and it had been for thousands of years! He fully believed that if the stones were not kept, his people, the Krapokechuan, or ‘human beings,’ would remain dispersed forever and never again find a home. Because where the stones were was their home, you understand. Nowhere else. It is something not understood by norte-americanos; this I know.
“At last they captured him. How sorry we were! For though most of us were ashamed of the Indian part of ourselves, his presence was like that of a guardian spirit, an angel, and the times we managed to glimpse him, as he stole through the village at odd hours of the night, convinced us he was indeed wholly benign. He was so young! With a bush of hair to his waist. He wore only a cloth around his loins and beautiful red parrot feathers in his ears.
“Our captors did not understand his language, and when they beat him he was silent. They made him work with the rest of us, clearing the forest with a machete. The men used machetes and pickaxes and saws to fell a
nd uproot the trees and vines, and the women used hoes and rakes to complete the slaughter of the earth. This was our work, day in, day out, from the crow of a rooster at dawn until dark. The guards forced the women to mate with them, and before long each guard had chosen his favorite slave ‘wife.’ The one who chose me did not force me, but bided his time. He was someone who beat and burned and killed without emotion or remorse, yet still managed to cling to the belief that someone would want to sleep with him without the use of force. It was a matter of pride to him. I only knew I was chosen because of how he looked at me and because the other men left me alone, and I would often hear their slave women screaming or sobbing prayers into the night.
“I did not plan to love Jesús. But how unlike them he was! There is in me, deep, always somewhere, the love of the priest, but the true priest, the one who watches over, the one who protects. Above all, the one who is more than his fancy dress. If there is any spirit that I find wholly erotic it is that one. Aiiee! Jesús was such a priest I used to feel as if the trees fell before him to be blessed, because, clearly, cutting them down was for him a torture comparable to being cut down himself. They were sobbing all the while, Jesús and his trees. He had known them his whole life. And for all his lifetimes before.
“Like it was with us, querido, I did not know what was happening or what to do about it. His eyes spoke. My womb leaped. Don’t laugh! Though expressed in the language of imbeciles, this is the way it was! We discovered I knew a few words of his strange language. The word for water, ‘ataras,’ the word for wood, ‘xotmea,’ the word for love, ‘oooo.’ The word for love, truly, four o’s! They could not watch us every minute. During an hour they could not witness and will never own, I made love to him. He made love to me. We made love together. They had bound him by the feet so that he could not move his legs apart. I crept into his hut and without speaking caressed and kissed him for a long time before taking him into my mouth. When I placed myself on top of him he was crying, and I was crying, and he held one of my breasts in his mouth, and his damp hair was like a warm fog on my face. Ai, they will never own passion!
“The second, and last, time was like the first, only even more intense. I knew the instant Carlotta was conceived. The seed flew into me where I was so open, and I fell off Jesús already asleep. It was asleep together that they found us. The first thing he did, the guard that had chosen me to want to sleep with him, was to cut off Jesús’ hair. He did it slowly, coldly, methodically, as if he had been thinking of doing it for a long time. He did it with a very sharp machete, and when the long, thick, rough black hair covered his dusty boots, he stamped his feet free of it as if stamping out desire.
“He never touched me himself, not even to beat me. That night the other men, the guards, one after the other came to the little hut in the forest in which they placed me. While this was happening to me, they killed Jesús. At dawn, as I lay bleeding, they brought his body and threw it in with me. Then they nailed shut the door, which was the only opening. Jesús’ throat had been cut. They had also removed his genitals. He had been violated in every conceivable way. There was not even a scrap of cloth to cover him. I was naked.
“Days and nights went by. The flies came by the hundreds. The rats. The smell. I beat on the door until my hands, covered with flies also, were dripping blood. I screamed. There were only the jungle sounds outside. I had nightmares, when I could sleep, about the body of the man I had loved. He was so silent. I cursed him now for being the death of me.
“And then one night I heard a noise outside the door—soft, almost not a noise. And then the door slowly opened, and the mournful and barbaric-looking tribesmen of Jesús filled the little hut. They wrapped his body in a large blanket before they turned to me, naked, shivering, dying on the dirt floor. Then I saw there was also a blanket for me.
“I would have stayed with them if I could. They understood, as no one else ever would, the form of my brokenness. I was broken, utterly: in that I could trust no one, that I could never again reach out to love, that it must be brought to me. But they were always on the run, and the soldiers always after them. When Carlotta was born, they made me understand I must go away in order to save her, in order to save Jesús. They took me to a house where there were Indians living the way the gringo lets Indians live; they were all busy making trinkets for the tourist dollar, of which the white man who controlled and ‘protected’ them from the soldiers got the largest share. They hid me and my baby. I learned to make their vivid green pottery. Since I knew Spanish, I helped the women hawk their wares on the streets of a not-too-distant town, full of the well-to-do descendants of the Spanish conquistadors and the blank-eyed americanos. I did not earn anything beyond enough for food. My friends told me of a school run by gringos where I might be able to get a job as maidslave. That was the beginning of my flight to Norte America.
“My parting from Jesús’ people was one the rest of the world will never see, nor will they understand its meaning. I am not sure I understand its meaning myself. I only know that they gave me the last remaining symbols of who they were in the world—feathers from the red African parrot for my ears, this parrot that had been brought to their village so many hundreds of years ago by the men with rough hair, from a continent they called Zuma, or Sun, and they gave me, for Carlotta, the three pigeon-egg-size stones.”
“IT WAS AT LA Escuela de Jungla that I first saw that the norte-americanos are muy dementes. There were many acres of grass and trees at this place, and you have never in life seen such flowers and such fruits! A little paradise, it seemed, and I was sure I and mi cariñito would be happier there. There was a hacienda with red tiles on the roof and long white rooms with many ferns touching the ceiling, and sofas and chairs never imagined, so deep, so soft. Such contours and colors. The floor, even on the verandah, was also made of tiles, huge square blocks, the color of muddy sunsets, that I was to know very well because mine was the job of cleaning them every day. It was in this hacienda, in the spacious rooms upstairs, that the gringos stayed when they brought their children to the school. When they left, they thought their children would remain in one of these rooms—large, airy, full of greenery and dark old polished furniture, a caged parrot in the window. But no. Far behind the hacienda, in a clearing in a bamboo thicket was el barrio de los alumnos. They lived in huts like the poorest campesinos, and they were drugged and shut in most of the time.
“Some of them were mad and came from families so ashamed of madness they would not even put them away in a crazy house anywhere in Norte America. Some of them were disabled or retarded or deformed or blind. These, only the poorest of the Indian servants ever saw. But then there were those who had been politicos extremistas in Norte America. For they were all grown, these ‘students’; did I tell you that? And some nearly middle-aged. There were the sick-in-the-heart radicales—a word I heard often from the gringa who helped me escape—who believed nothing their parents did was right, and sometimes, this gringa said, she herself would not come to her parents’ dinner table dressed or with her hair combed, or even wearing shoes! She was very rich, you know. Such behavior grieved her parents to the heart. Nor could they find it in their hearts to ignore it.
“When I met this gringa, she was very dirty, barefoot, and wearing rags. She was sweeping out the room of one called ‘The Disabled,’ a hairy lump of a gringo from the Korean-American war, who smelled terrible. She was very glad to hear a word of Spanish, because she had contact mainly with los indios, and the Disabled had been fed so many drugs his tongue was lost. She was cleaning the Disabled’s room because the india embarazada was sitting underneath a nearby tree having labor pains. She was muy immensa, also poor, ragged, barefoot, though not dirty, and her children’s father was away in a war she did not understand.
“I asked the gringa her name, and she looked at me long before she gave it. The centers of her eyes were big in her dirty face and she seemed to turn many pages in a book mentally before she found the symbol for who she was. �
��Mary Ann,’ she said. ‘Me llamo Zedé,’ I said. She laughed. She was very high.
“I laughed with her. It was so very long since I laughed.
“I was there, let me see, two years. And it was there that Carlotta proved a great help to me. She was a wonder to everyone we met because she never cried. I don’t mean she never shed tears; no, she never cried so that anyone could hear her. She cried the way one smiles. The mistress of the hacienda liked to see her crawling about the tile floor, naked except for her wrist beads, as I washed and then polished it. They did not know I could read and write and tried all the time to speak to me in what they thought was the language of the Indians or in the Spanish reserved for servants and slaves. They called me Consuelo. Connie, for short. Do this, Connie. Do that, Connie. No, I never gave them my right name, either. I told them it was Chaquita. Like the banana, the gringa said, laughing, to her husband. Like the banana! Still, when guests were there she called me Consuelo, because she liked the sound of herself saying it.
“Mary Ann had befriended los politicos extremistas in Norte America, but they were poor. No matter what she—‘the rich bitch’—did, it was, by them, ridiculed. When one of these negros radicales was sent to prison, his girlfriend tried to murder her; just walked up to her door one day with a large knife and began to chop away at her. After that attack, which scarred her neck, arms, and chest, Mary Ann left her small apartment near the black ghetto in San Francisco and retreated to Fox Hollow Farm, her parents’ estate in New Jersey. There she began to talk openly of doing away with her parents, on whom she became dependent, and to take, as she herself put it, cases of drugs. With sorrow her parents watched her decline. They were not good people—they had too much money to have ever been good people—but they loved Mary Ann. Mary Ann described them as people who had personally assassinated six rivers and massacred twelve lakes, because they manufactured a deadly substance that was always swimming away from them. In their own way they were glad she refused to learn how to rob and cheat and create deadly things. Even so, she would inherit just under a billion dollars, earned from the filth they made, and they wanted her to be at least competent; not a scarred, drugged, disheveled mess, plotting assassinations and muttering into her blond locks that looked like sheep’s wool. In their luck, at a party for the Republicanos that they gave at their estate, someone told them of La Escuela de Jungla. It seemed the answer to their dreams, especially because, when they asked about it among their friends, no one had heard of it, or at least they said they had not. So off they flew, right away, a bundled and bound Mary Ann between them, and in three days she shared a lovely big room with massive dark furniture and a caged red parrot. Her parents disappeared. The nice room disappeared. Even her clothing disappeared. The drugs did not disappear. They increased.