by Alice Walker
“But what did we know? There we were together in bed that night after the wedding. I was dead tired and I was leaving in the morning. Lissie was even tireder than I was, since she’d been out in the boat fishing early that morning; that’s what we had to eat at our wedding, fried fish. But somehow we thought we had to have at each other, as they say. It was a pretty fumbly minute or two, and nothing much was done, or so I thought. We cried and kissed each other a few million times and whispered all our little failings and hopes and secrets to each other, and then, lying like little children in each other’s arms—I suspect Lissie still sucks her thumb—we drifted off to sleep. The next morning I left.
“Well, I really couldn’t see that well, not even well enough to make a decent stable boy, and pretty soon I was shipped back home. Lissie and her mother had opened up a little store on the Island in part of the front porch of their house. They sold produce out of their garden and things—kerosene, matches, bluing, baking soda—her mother brought back from the mainland in her boat. They also sold fresh fish. I remember that because, when I moved back into Lissie’s little room, everything there used to smell of fish.
“Lissie was pregnant, with a passion for lemons and salt. Every time you saw her she had half a lemon sprinkled with salt stuck in her mouth. She was healthy and strong—she did the fishing in her mother’s boat—and I was soon healthy and strong with her, because fishing and crabbing became something I did, too, and did well. And with Lissie urging me on, I was also painting again, with the sun in my eyes, healing them, and the moisture from the bay. The little paintings I did, Lissie hung up in the store, and sometimes people right there on the Island just fell in love with a painting and would put it on layaway, but also white people from the mainland, who stopped by for a cold drink, bought them. I sold them for a dollar apiece, or sometimes for less than a dollar; barely enough to cover the paint. But still, it made me happy to know somebody besides me and Lissie liked what I did.
“We had both acquired a bit more knowledge by then, and our love was always strong, so we just let ourselves be free. She was already pregnant, so that wasn’t something to worry about, and well, we were just all the time fucking. If you pardon the expression. I think Lissie was happy then. I know I was. I used to love looking at her as she ran about here and there. She was like a leaf leaving a tree on wind, always in motion, quick as light. And smart. Pretty soon she’d moved us out of her mother’s house to a place of our own, and it was in our own house that our passion for each other reached a peak, and then sort of made itself a plateau. That kind of love, with the—what do you all call it these days?—the sex, is nothing like what you see on TV or in the picture show. It doesn’t even seem like such a big thing at the time. It’s just something real good, tasty, you know? It’s something very much like food. Or sleep. We’d fuck and sleep and eat and fish, and I’d paint and she’d do her work, and the sun would shine or it would rain, and the catch would be good or the fish would all have gone to visit some other part of the bay. There was no seam. It was whole cloth. So that eating a piece of bread that really rocked the taste buds made me think of fucking Lissie. Or her fucking me; God knows she could. Drinking cool water on the boat in the sun sent us to our knees. Lissie was always laughing. At her clumsiness, her heavy breasts that I loved so much to suck, her cushy butt, her belly that loomed over my head like a melon when I made love to her little ... kitten, let us say. Or the way we said it then, when I ‘twirled her on my tongue.’ I loved to have her like that in the boat. If the bay was calm, and sometimes it was like glass, we forgot about fishing, and she would stand big and naked, balanced in the boat, and spread her legs just enough. Oh.
“When we made love we never thought of anybody or anything else. I never did, anyway. Just as when I drank a glass of water I didn’t shift my mind to some other glass of water that I tried to pretend I was also drinking. This way of loving just exactly who you’re with seems totally out of reach of half the people making love in the world today. And I think it’s a shame.
“But it all ended anyway, Suwelo. That part of life. It ended because our daughter, Lulu, was born. And it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, maybe. I try to tell myself it had to end, that time when everything was pure cool water to my thirst, good bread to my hunger. That time when, really, Lissie and I were in danger of getting lost in each other and to ourselves. Because when I was with Lissie I didn’t care if neither of us was ever heard from again.
“I remember once a photographer, the first one ever seen on the Island, came over to buy a chair from my father, and seeing Lissie, asked to take a picture of her standing beside the chair. We were just fascinated by the thought of picture taking, of which we had heard, though we had never seen a live picture taker before, and he was a colored man! We tiptoed about his tripod and knocked a couple of times on the big black box that the man said made the picture, but our true feeling was, we didn’t want to be bothered; that the new picture-taking science was just fine and dandy, but we had better things to do, like lay up. I’m pretty sure we were drenched in the smell of fucking. That smell some couples have, or used to have. Now it’s all covered over with perfume. But Lissie used to smell loud, and I loved it. But not when other men noticed it and started to sniff around her. Like that picture taker. ‘You married?’ he asked her. There I was, there my daddy and mama was, there was Lissie so pregnant she could only see one foot at a time. ‘You married?’ asked that dog.
“Lulu was born on a night of such stillness it made us think the whole world was holding its breath. Both Lissie and I were looking forward to the birth. We had made up a little crib next to our bed and everything. Neither one of us knew that disaster was about to strike our love life, and that between the first labor pain and the disposal of the afterbirth I would be a changed man. But even if we had of known, what could we have done? I’ve asked myself that question a million times. But fate had us in its teeth.
“In those days pregnant women like Lissie didn’t go to the doctor just because they were pregnant. It would have been like going to the hospital because you started to get breasts. It was a natural something that happened to women, and a good woman, meaning a sensible one, always had a granny to help her see after herself. Lissie actually had two. She had her mother, Eula—Eula Mae—and the woman Lissie was most like in the world, Dorcy—Dorcy Hogshead—her grandmother. Dorcy was a devil. The most contentious, cantankerous old witch that ever lived. However, a genius at delivering babies. Her people always claimed that Lissie took after her and that that was the reason she was so mean. They never believed in Lissie’s memory, you see. I never understood how they could not believe in it myself. Lissie remembered and reported on stuff nobody’d ever heard of, stuff nobody ever could have told her. Stuff she’d never read because it wasn’t in the books she had. But then that left dreaming. So her folks said she dreamed instead of remembered, and the stuff she didn’t dream, she got from Granny Dorcy.
“So Granny Dorcy had been checking Lissie right along. And she remembered a lot, too, and it gave her a lot of power, just like it did Lissie, but she didn’t have Lissie’s kind of faith in herself, so she would content herself with the belief that she could interpret her own and other people’s dreams. But really what she was doing was putting together the past in some kind of pattern so that it could be understood in the present. I think she was probably scared shitless by her gift. So many people are. She was an old woman that looked like she could have remembered seeing the warships that passed the Island on the way to firing the first rockets against Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, which she said she did. She looked a lot like Sojourner Truth—you know that picture you sometimes see of her with her bonnet and her long dress and her shawl and her white clay pipe. Granny smoked a pipe and sometimes, some people said, she would blow smoke on her babies to get them to sneeze and come alive. I know she used to say that, mean as people said she was, she’d never hit one of the little ones she brought int
o the world, and you know slapping a newborn baby was and is something that’s just automatically done. Granny Dorcy thought it was barbaric.
“She lived on the other side of the Island from us, and sometimes she rode a mule over to see Lissie, and sometimes Lissie’s mother went and got her and brought her back by boat. Eula was good to have around, too, while Lissie was pregnant, because she had become a food fool and would always double-check anything that went into Lissie’s mouth. When she was pregnant herself, Eula had lived mostly on a diet of fatback, syrup, and white chalk that pregnant women dug out of a pit up in the hills, but she wouldn’t let Lissie have but the occasional thimbleful because she said that craving it was a sign that Lissie needed to eat beets, which she often fixed for her, and that eaten in excess, the chalk, which was full of iron that the body couldn’t absorb anyway, locked the bowels and weakened the blood vessels in the lower extremities. So both of these women seemed underfoot all the time near the end of Lissie’s term.
“Then one day, about a week before they thought she was due, they took the boat out to catch some fish. I think it must have been the season for croaker; that was old Dorcy’s favorite fish. Just after they left, Lissie had the first pain, and I ran down to the beach and tried to wave them back to shore. They thought I was waving good-bye, and so they waved good-bye back to me, and off into the horizon they rowed. I knew they’d be back in two or three hours at the most, so I didn’t worry; Lissie didn’t worry either. But what do you think happened?
“Out in the boat, Eula Mae and her mother got into an argument over which side of the boat to fish from, and as the talk got more and more heated and hearkened back to more and earlier disputes, mother and daughter almost came to blows. Dorcy’s temper was a frightful thing; it lacked foresight. At some point she swung her oar at Eula, and Eula took it away from her and flung it into the bay. Then Dorcy took the other oar and threw it away too. Now how do you like that? I’m just glad me and Lissie didn’t know anything about it at the time. So there they were, with no fish, no wind, mad as two hatters, sitting fuming at each other with their arms folded and their lips poked out, in a boat that went neither forward nor backward nor sideways, and wouldn’t for the rest of the day.
“At the house Lissie was beginning to worry. Not so much about herself as about her mother and grandmother. After about three hours Lissie said she’d discharged her plug and that her waters had broke. That was my first understanding that if the two women didn’t hurry and get back, I would have to deliver our baby. Now you can laugh if you want to, but though I could see plain as anything that Lissie was big with the baby and even beginning to sweat from the pain, and the baby was lunging about inside her, as far as I was concerned there still didn’t seem any possible way she could have a baby; it just seemed farfetched. I don’t know what I thought then. Nobody ever told you anything, if you were a boy, about childbirth. They just didn’t. And whenever a woman was having a baby on the Island, the husband was sent out of the house. He usually hung around the potbellied stove we had in the store. After a while one of his oldest children would come get him and, with a scared and sheepish look, off he’d go back home. I think somewhere in me I still believed fairies brought babies—I sure was praying they did—so I was beginning to wonder what I would do if that was just a rumor and fairies really didn’t. Come to think about it, I didn’t have the faintest notion of what fairies were supposed to be like either.
“Lissie had been walking up and down the room, but pretty soon the pains got so bad she had to lay down, and then, too, there was a trickle of something like watery mucous coming out of her. I helped her lie down on the rubber pad with a sheet over it, and I held her hand and kissed her about a thousand times every time she let out a whimper, which really just wrung my heart. Then she told me: ‘You have to deliver the baby, Hal. It’s a girl,’—she knew this because the baby always had hung low—‘and I want you to know, in case anything happens, I want to name her Lulu.’
“Lulu was the name Lissie had had when she was part of a harem in the northern pan of Africa, before any of that area was desert. It wasn’t called a ‘harem’ way back then, but some other name I can’t recall. ‘Weepen,’ I think. But it was really the great-great-granddaddy of all the harems we hear about or read about today. She said Lulu made her think of the green hills and the green fields where they used to put up their animal-skin tents, and of how happy she was in the harem, because the master was old and sickly and had hundreds of women it tired him just to see, not to mention to try to do anything to, and Lissie (Lulu) had had two lovers. One of them was another woman in the harem, named Fadpa, and the other was one of the eunuchs, named Habisu, whose job it was to keep the women from running away. They used to all sit around and plot about how to run away together, but Habisu was afraid to leave the safety of the harem, and he liked the sweets the women shared with him and the colorful clothing he got to wear. He was from a poor family, and he thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to give up his nuts for such pleasant room and board. Now I don’t know whether this was really the truth or whether Lissie was committing slander on poor Habisu. She used to laugh so, and shock me, too, telling me about her life as Lulu. She would talk about Fadpa and look at me and see that I didn’t quite get something, and she would just laugh and laugh. She had been a great dancer—she says she took it up out of boredom—and taught dancing to the young women who were captured or bought and brought into the harem. She had regular class hours. And she taught how to make love to a woman with just hands and tongue to all the eunuchs, who, she said, really came to love her. Of course some of them didn’t care about that sort of thing with women anyhow. There were some who just sat around and talked about clothes and food and ate, ate, ate. On her birthday they would make her cakes filled with her favorite thing: dates. She and Fadpa lived, with the other women and the eunuchs, completely cut off from the rest of society back then, and the rest of the world in general. Over time they became devoutly religious.
“They eventually got to the place they could perform miracles. Miracles, Lissie says she learned, as Lulu, are the direct result of concentration. The greatest miracle they performed was to get their freedom from the harem at the rather ripe old ages of ninety-six and a hundred and three, which was granted them by the great-granddaughter of their old master. They had prayed and concentrated on this for eighty years. This woman had been sent off somewhere far away to school, where she passed as a man, and, upon returning home, was shocked to see these old women locked up behind her grandfather’s palace. He was dead by then and had taken some of the youngest and prettiest members of his harem with him. His scowling sons had simply pitched the women into the flames on top of their father’s popping and oozing body, calmly, one by one. They, of course, were screaming and scratching and clinging to the sons’ ankles, but those, as the saying goes, were the breaks.
“Lulu and Fadpa had some good years left still, though their wrinkled faces looked like two raisins; so they set up shop as fortune-tellers and lived free, if not content, until they died—which they were happy enough to do, because what they noticed, once outside the security of the harem, was that in the world of men there is always war. They could not stand the noise and confusion of the battles that never ceased. They longed for the quiet and the peace of the harem, and the hours of cooking and eating and dancing or watching younger women dance. And when men came to them and asked their fortunes, they yawned. For every man, they saw war, a future of fighting. It was as clear as the sun. Their palms were bright red. But Lulu and Fadpa would say, instead, that they saw a hundred pretty women locked in a room to which the man in front of them, alone, had the key and at least half an evening of a man’s favorite kind of peace. This pleased the men. If they added that they also saw stores of dates, figs, silver, and gold, the men’s happiness was complete. They got used to throwing in camels, goats, and other men’s wives at random. They became quite famous.
“The name Lulu was fine with me. It wa
s more a sound than a name, but so what? When our Lulu was born, I could see that she would make anyone think of green. She was all gold and honey and amber, that made you think of pansies. She was a springtime all her own.
“Now the hardest task was before me. It was very hot. Lissie was sweating buckets. I had plenty of water boiling on the stove. This much preparation, at least, I knew you had to have. Then Lissie began to really moan. It was horrible. Timidly, and with rising fear, I managed to glance down between her legs. I expected to see the top of the baby’s head. Maybe. Since something did seem to be happening down that way. And Lissie was moaning so. But no. It looked like a cheek. Either a cheek on a little face, or a cheek on a little behind. I looked again. Lissie’s stomach rippled, as if the baby turned itself over. Now it looked more like a shoulder. I looked still again. It looked like a knee. Or was it a side?
“I tell you, I felt like Prissy in Gone With the Wind.
“Lissie was stretched so wide I didn’t see why she didn’t split. And, as I stood there watching, I saw she was just about to start to. At the same time, her moans were turning into screams. I couldn’t bear it. My instinct was just to step outside the door and do away with myself. I couldn’t stand the thought that I was causing her this pain. That making love with her caused this sad, pitiful behavior of hers. She wasn’t Lissie anymore, you see? She wasn’t even like an animal. She was out of her mind, out of control. She hurt so bad she couldn’t even tell me what to do. The baby was obviously stuck, trying to come out sideways. Lissie had turned one of the funniest of the gray shades I had ever seen.