by Alice Walker
“While I was there I saw that letters from her parents gathered dust on the big desk of the gringos. I was so surprised to see in one of the letters that her father tried to stick in here and there a word or two of Spanish. At least he referred to Mary Ann as ‘mi hija.’ I myself wrote a letter telling them their daughter’s fate. I did this partly because I grew to like Mary Ann, but also to rebel against the gringos and assert who I was. That I could read and write. That I knew reading and writing to have great power. That I was not a dumb Indian maidslave; that I was not Consuelo. I felt real pleasure seeing my own handwriting, the writing of a university-trained person, and the whiteness of the envelope gave me a feeling of dignity. Her parents flew in by helicopter in less than a month and snatched their daughter home. I was glad to see her freed. As I said, I had come to like her, though she so often failed to make sense; her brain was quite scrambled by then. She was a naturally sweet person who had no understanding of how to be rich in a world like this one, where great wealth immediately makes one think of great crimes. The gringos did not suspect me of alerting her parents, and they continued to fuss over Carlotta and to treat me as if I were a breathing piece of wood. They made much money from people like the parents of Mary Ann. And sometimes the little alumnos-prisioneros would die of the loneliness and poor food, the awful boredom and the dirt; and the letters with the checks for their care continued to arrive. This made me sad, but I never wrote another letter.
“One night I dreamed I would be rescued from the life I lived there, that I would be taken away by boat. But La Escuela was in the mountains, nowhere near the ocean, which I had heard of but never seen, and besides, the only boats I’d seen were small boats that my mother used to say looked like the dried pods of vanilla beans. But one day as I was cleaning one of the huts in the student barrio I heard someone call my name. My real name. I looked up, and it was Mary Ann! She was wearing a black shirt, attached somehow to pants, and very pretty pink lace-up boots. I had never imagined such zapatos! Two men carrying guns were with her, and she was sparkling with the life of before I knew her, ready for a fight! Her curious pale blue eyes, that made the Indians cross themselves, were full of light. She embraced me and told me to run and get Carlotta. This I did, without a moment’s hesitation. On the way out we passed the bodies of the dogs, whose throats had been cut, just as the barbed wire had been. This made me sad, because I had liked the dogs. They were my only friends in that place and never barked at me. But I was happy about the barbed wire. ‘It is like TV!’ Mary Ann said over and over, giggling. I had never seen TV; I did not know what she meant. Now I know how right she was. Still, her action, though TV for her, made for me and mija all the difference in the world.
“In a tourist-type vehicle—muy grande, casita-like—we drove near the beach and parked underneath some trees. Just at sunset a beautiful ship, all gleaming wood, glinting brass, and white sails, a ship that seemed to be softly singing in the water, came into view. Our two gunslingers pulled a small boat from the brush, and that is how we made it to the yacht. A yacht owned by Mary Ann and called ‘Recuerdo.’
“Que lástima que there was a huge storm off the coast of Norte California the day before we were to land. The mast broke in half, the boat rolled over, all our saviors were lost! The Coast Guard saw us go down and arrived in time to rescue me and Carlotta. Another yacht had been near us at the start of our difficulty, but, strangely, it had disappeared.
“On the boat I had asked Mary Ann how she had found the courage to do what she did, and she explained to me that while clearing herself of the drugs on which she’d leaned for years she had had a religious conversion of a sort. It had been based on something she vaguely remembered from Sunday school, something Christ was reported to have said. Something about ‘the least of these.’ She had not even bothered to look it up, she said. Her mind whispered, ‘the least of these, the least of these,’ until she ‘spaced out’ on it, she said, ‘like on a mantra,’ and beamed us—me and Carlotta—in! Then, too, she had begun to dream of seeing us again, happy, on a beautiful boat. She saw that her politics had not been wrong—for as a radical she had tried to stand with ‘the least of these,’ but she had tried to help people she did not know, with whom there was no reciprocidad; she had tried to ease the suffering of those who could not see that she, too, suffered, or even believe that she could. She loved me, she said, because I had seen this. It was true I had been able to see this, but even more true was the gratification I felt when in striking a blow for her I liberated the one called Chaquita, Connie, and Consuelo in myself.
“Alas, the suffering of the rich is seen by very few. When the parents of Mary Ann came, I could see nothing except that they held hands. They questioned me about the voyage, the nature of the storm; they asked if Mary Ann had seemed happy. I told them she had gone down like a shooting star. They convinced la migra that Carlotta and I should be permitted to remain in Norte America. They asked to have a picture made of me and Carlotta, a copy of which was later sent to us. They disappeared. I have not heard from them since. I sometimes think of them very old, seated on a raft made out of their money, floating on a massacred river, looking for somewhere to land. But no, these personas ricas, all of them, have taken to the air. It is out there, in what they call ‘space,’ that they expect to find a home.
“I was very glad that I had spent some of my time on the boat sewing a little pouch for Jesús’ feathered earrings and the stones. This I wore around my neck, and it was not lost. Gracias a Dios!”
“WHEN YOU ASK ME about peace, Suwelo,” said Miss Lissie, “if I’ve ever in all my lifetimes experienced peace, I am nearly perplexed. Could it be possible that after hundreds of lifetimes I have not known peace? That seems to be the fact. In lifetime after lifetime I have known oppression: from parents, siblings, relatives, governments, countries, continents. As well as from my own body and mind. Some part of every life has been spent binding up my wounds from these forces. In the memory, I would have to say, there are only moments—at most, days—of peace, except for the times I have been shaman or priest and have lived, for months on end, in a kind of trance. But as you probably know, these blessed periods are a vacation, in a sense, from life, and one screaming infant or barking dog can force one home again.
“In the dream world of my memory, however, there is something. I do not remember this exactly, as I remember the other things of which I have told you. But the memory, like the mind, has the capacity to dream, and just as the memory exists at a deeper level of consciousness than thinking, so the dream world of the memory is at a deeper level still. I will tell you of the dream on which my memory, as well as my mind, rests. When I think of it I realize there was at least a peaceful foundation.
“In the dream memory we are very small people, all of us, not just the children, who are really small, and the children live with the mothers and the aunts; our fathers and uncles are nearby, and we visit and are visited by them, but we live with the women. We are in a forest that, for all we know, covers the whole earth. There is no concept of finiteness, in any sense. The trees then were like cathedrals, and each one was an apartment building at night. During the day we played under the trees as urban children today play on the streets. Our aunts and mothers foraged for food, sometimes taking us with them and sometimes leaving us in the care of the big trees. When you knew every branch, every hollow, and every crevice of a tree there was nothing safer; you could quickly hide from whatever might be pursuing you. Besides, we shared the tree with other creatures, who, in raucous or stealthy fashion—there was a python, for instance—looked out for us. Well, our aunts and mothers were often tired after a day gathering food—roots and fruits, mostly—and occasionally cross. Those were the times they could not stand us children, and so we were sent to our cousins’ trees. Our cousins, like our fathers and aunts, lived in different trees from ours, and it was fun to visit them.
“Our cousins were big—as big as we were small—and black and hairy, with big t
eeth, flat black faces, and piercingly intelligent and gentle eyes. They seemed strange to us because they lived together as a family; that is, the fathers and uncles lived with the mothers and aunts, and all of them played with and looked after the children. They loved us, too, and would chatter with joy when we crept up on them. We crept because they were so serene, their trees so quiet that loud noises startled and frightened them. We were, by comparison, regular din makers. The only analogy I think of in this lifetime would be the experience, as small children, of being sent south to your grandparents’ for the summer. Grandpa and Grandma might be old and decrepit, quiet, mellow, and unused to noise. They know a visit from the ‘grands’ might do them in for a while, but they let you know every day they’re thrilled you are there. Same with our cousins. And I loved the little baby cousins, with their hairless pale faces, who were always clinging to somebody’s back.
It was a lovely feeling to hold a little cousin under one’s chin, and how the parents delighted at this means of holding it! We had no hair on our bodies, you see, for the little fingers to clutch. It was from these cousins that I learned to love babies and to want to grow up and give birth.
“There was such safety around their trees. The fathers and uncles were gigantic and mean-looking when provoked, with a roar that hurt your ears. The mothers and aunts could bare their teeth viciously. They could bite through the fiercest neck. I used to practice baring my teeth and biting the way they did. My imitation tickled them very much. But they were menacing only when someone or something came into their domain uninvited. We—our mothers and aunts, fathers and uncles, too—were always welcome, and almost always, if there was anything to fear, we gathered at our cousins’ trees. They had long sharp nails on their hands and feet, strong arms, and hard teeth, and they ripped rather large animals apart with one swipe. They protected us, and seemed to have great fun doing it. After they destroyed an attacker they chattered gaily and slapped each other on the back.
“They liked to feed us children, too. They did everything as if it were a game. I liked to go on the hunt with them because, unlike our fathers and mothers, who ate meat and therefore killed small game all the time, the cousins ate only plants. They would hide roots they’d already dug, just for us, who were clumsy and had hopelessly weak hands, to find.
“My mother, whose name was Guta Ru, was often angry with me; consequently, I spent a lot of time with the cousins. The days were long and full, with food gathering and grooming taking up a good part of each day. But what adventures there were during the hunt for food; what fascinating other relatives, besides the cousins, one saw, and grooming was the most satisfyingly sensual experience I’ve ever had, in the dream memory or not. Because I lacked body hair—which I regretted no end!—I had a very short groom period, compared to theirs, which could last most of the day. The big cool teeth clicking over my steamy little body felt wonderful. The rough-tongued licking for lice, too. At least I had hair on my head, a ton of it. They could work on that for an hour or two, and I was, beneath their teeth and tongues, perfectly content.
“They were always trying to dress me. Leaves, skins from dead animals, moss, tree bark. It was funny. But it was from their experiments that I learned to dress and to want to be dressed; I learned to fasten a couple of pieces of leopard or panther skin fore and aft, and this pleased them, though I could tell they thought of my costume as a sort of prosthetic device. They seemed nearly unable to comprehend separateness; they lived and breathed as a family, then as a clan, then as a forest, and so on. If I hurt myself and cried, they cried with me, as if my pain was magically transposed to their bodies.
“When I reached an age to mate, I did so with one of my playmates, a boy I had known and loved all my life. After we mated and I became pregnant, he was expected, by custom, to move back with the men. This he refused to do. And I refused with him. We wanted very much to be together all the time with our babies, as we had seen happen in our cousins’ trees. Well, you know adults. They haven’t changed in a million years; they weren’t going to have this. The women complained that he would only be in the way and possibly throw off our common monthly menstrual cycle; the men insisted they needed him for ceremonies and hunts. They punished us by isolating us from each other. We stood it as long as we could. But when the baby was born, we ran away to stay with the cousins, who in most things took a decidedly more progressive attitude than our parents. We were happy with them. They thought it natural that we would want to live together. They made a special bed out of moss for us to sleep on.
“I realize that in our smallness we were like perpetual children to them and that our babies were like the tiniest dolls. We were so small that one of their babies was too heavy for us to carry by the time it was a week old. Meanwhile, the cousins could easily carry me and my mate in one arm or with us clinging to a hairy back.
“There was no violence in them—that is to say, they did not initiate it, ever—only thoughtfulness. I used to look at them and wonder how we, so little, so naked, so easily contentious, had splintered off.
“In the dream memory there are suddenly days and nights of terror, and the faces of fathers and uncles who looked like us but were much bigger. They carried sticks with sharp points on them, and they hurled these at our cousins, striking them in the chest. To our horror, they took our cousins’ skins and sometimes cooked and ate our cousins’ bodies. Us, so little, they brushed off as if we were flies, and we dashed to the tops of the trees screaming and crying.
“Over time and after many attacks, our cousins and we ourselves—the little people, as we now recognized ourselves—were driven into the most remote reaches of the forest. We learned to make the sharp pointed stick and to poison its tip as well. We learned to make blowguns and slingshots. The trust that had been between us now disappeared. We were perceived as helpless and cute no longer, and, for our part, there were those among us who gloried in at last having the means to make our giant cousins fear.
“But my mate and I never forgot what we learned from the cousins. We brought up our children to be as much like them as possible; and we stayed together until death, just as the cousins did. It was this way of living that gradually took hold in all the groups of people living in the forest, at least for a very long time, until the idea of ownership—which grew out of the way the forest now began to be viewed as something cut into pieces that belonged to this tribe or that—came into human arrangements. Then it was that men, because they were stronger, at least during those periods when women were weak from childbearing, began to think of owning women and children. This very thing had happened before, and our own parents had forgotten it, but their system of separating men and women was a consequence of an earlier period when women and men had tried to live together—and it is interesting to see today that mothers and fathers are returning to the old way of only visiting each other and not wanting to live together. This is the pattern of freedom until man no longer wishes to dominate women and children or always have to prove his control. When man saw he could own one woman and her children, he became greedy and wanted as many as he could get. There is a popular African singer today who has twenty-seven. Idi Amin had so many that the ones he is rumored to have killed aren’t even missed.
“My life with the cousins is the only dream memory of peace that I have. In one of the worst lifetimes, many lifetimes later, I was, by some accident, permitted to marry another man I myself actually picked and loved, and there was peace for a time, a beautiful ‘rightness’ about the world, but because I was apparently born without a hymen and therefore there were no bloodstains to show the villagers after, our wedding night—during which I had responded to him passionately, or, as he later claimed, shamelessly—he denounced me to the village and my parents turned me out. After that I was the lowest sort of prostitute for the men of the village, including the husband I’d loved, until I died of infection and exposure at the age of eighteen.”
WHAT DO HUMAN BEINGS contribute, Suwelo was thinking mor
osely, as he waited one afternoon for Miss Lissie to appear. Her story about the animal cousins had moved him, and each day he found himself more conscious of his own nonhuman “relatives” in the world.
The bees contributed honey, but not really—it was taken from them. What, he now wondered, did the bees eat themselves; surely they didn’t make honey for human beings. It was the flowers that contributed honey to both bees and people, the flowers that were always giving something: beauty, cheerfulness, pollen, and seeds. They did not care who saw them, whom they gave to. And on his feet, Suwelo also realized, with disgust, he was wearing moccasins made of leather. What a euphemism, “leather.” A real nonword. Nowhere in it was concealed the truth of what leather was. Something’s skin. And his tortoiseshell glasses. He took them off and peered nearsightedly at them, holding them at arm’s length. But they were imitation tortoiseshell. Plastic, probably. But this made him even gloomier, for he knew the only reason for imitation anything was that the source of the real thing had dried up. There were probably no more tortoises to kill. And what, anyway, of plastic? It was plentiful, cheap. But even it came from somewhere. Of what was plastic made? What died? He knew it was a product of petroleum, of oil, and so he assumed plastic was made out of the very lifeblood of the planet. When all the oil was drained, he imagined the planet quaking and shrinking in on itself, like a squeezed orange that has been sucked to death.