Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  “You live in San Francisco, with all that seafood, and never had gumbo?” Mr. Hal was incredulous.

  Suwelo had invited them for the weekend. Deep in his heart he was probably pretending they were his parents, but he didn’t mind. They’d showed up first thing that morning in Mr. Hal’s truck and hauled in a half-dozen bags of stuff: tomatoes, peppers, onions, okra and filé, a couple of chickens, slabs of bacon and beef, a hunk of pork, long tubes of dark, savory-smelling sausage, crabs almost overrunning a basket, a colorfully stenciled croker sack of rice, and jugs of ready-made lemonade and iced tea.

  As soon as they started turning about in the kitchen, opening drawers, sharpening knives, complaining that “that devilish” salt shaker had never worked, Suwelo knew they belonged there. Miss Lissie kicked off her shoes and padded about in bare feet, and Mr. Hal made himself comfortable by unbuttoning the front of his short-sleeved white shirt to reveal a peach-colored T-shirt, which said, across the front, “Ecstasy Is Forever.” His hair was whiter and longer than when Suwelo first met him, and with his soft brown eyes, his courtly manner, even in the kitchen, he resembled a comfortable, gentle, and altogether happy George Washington Carver.

  “What I mean about her having no substance is that she was all image. She was all image when I first saw her, all image when I met her, and all image ...”

  “After you went to bed with her,” said Miss Lissie, completing the thought for him. “Give me the crab shells you’ve finished with. I need to boil them down for stock.” Suwelo passed them over.

  From time to time he had told them small stories from his life; though they never asked. He felt he knew them more intimately than he knew his own parents—who had been killed in a car wreck, the result of one of his father’s drunken rages, when Suwelo was in college—and that not to attempt to share his life with them made him feel like a thief. Besides, he needed some help with Fanny.

  “When Fanny came back from Africa that first time,” said Suwelo, “we knew it wasn’t going to work, us being married when she really didn’t want to be. She hated it. She hated the institution of marriage. She said the ring people wore on their fingers symbolizing marriage was obviously a remnant of a chain. She didn’t hate me. That much, at least, I was beginning to see. For one thing, when she came back from Africa, where she’d been for six months—the only time in her life she was able to be with both her mother and her father—her love for me was unmistakable. We fell on each other in an orgy of reconciliation that lasted for weeks. And this was only possible because when I picked her up at the airport I told her straight out that I loved her and that getting a divorce was just fine with me.”

  “Umm hmm ... ” said Miss Lissie. She turned the pan so Suwelo could see the dark caramel color of the roux. Mr. Hal crossed the kitchen, his hands full of chopped onions and peppers, which he dropped into the pot. There was a searing, sizzling sound, and Miss Lissie said, “Oh, shit, the okra should have gone in first. But what the hell,” she added. “The making of gumbo is like the making of the best music, an improvisational art.” She poured herself a glass of wine and sipped as she stirred.

  “We also knew,” Suwelo continued, “we couldn’t live on the East Coast in the suburbs of New York City. We lived, if you can believe it, in a little middle-class enclave called Forest Hills. The houses were nice, and there were trees and broad lawns, but everybody was always trying to make things look older—the houses, the trees. Sometimes I had the feeling that at night our neighbors went outdoors and beat on the walls of the houses with sticks and tugged on the bushes and trees, trying to stretch them to a more imposing height. They kept trying to pin some famous person’s birth to the place but, since people moved away every few years and always had, this was hard to do. They finally found a famous baseball player who’d rented a house there once, and there was talk of putting up a plaque. Our house was actually the oldest one there. We had no trouble selling it. Once we let it be known we wanted to sell, even some of our neighbors, moving up and moving older, wanted to buy. We sold to another black family, because we knew that one of the reasons our neighbors wanted to buy our house was to keep other black people out.

  “But where to go? Fanny had spent a summer in Iowa, so she knew she couldn’t breathe in the Midwest. Too far from oceans, she said. And that bullshit about the prairie being oceanlike is for the birds. There’s about enough prairie left to piss in.

  “I had once spent five minutes in Wyoming. Another five in Montana. In fact, on the bus once, on my way to Seattle to a friend’s wedding, I spent five minutes in each of those northwest states. Too isolated. Not enough colored. Not enough concrete, either.

  “So Oakland really appealed to us. Not San Francisco. Because everybody knew it was full of queers and the parks were overrun with perverts, and besides, it was cold in the summer. But we knew people who lived in Oakland, and whenever they came east they always seemed real jolly at the prospect of going back to Oakland. This impressed us. We almost always dreaded coming home to New York. Pedestrians were rude. Taxi drivers were impossible. We were on edge every minute of our existence, outside our own front door.

  “In Oakland, what happened? We couldn’t find an apartment. Fanny didn’t like the heat, and the streets, she said, made her think of L.A., which she had visited once and loathed. Trembling with trepidation we crossed the Bay Bridge. The fog was just rolling back off the city, as if pulled by a giant hand. The sun glanced off the white buildings so that we were practically blinded. All around us there was water. The weather was bracingly cool and the light was peculiarly bright. ‘We looked at our hands and our hands looked new, we looked at our feet and they did too!’” Suwelo sang the words to this old black spiritual about deliverance, which made Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal laugh.

  “We found a large flat on Broderick Street, up high, with a view of a tiny corner of the red Golden Gate Bridge, and a glimpse of the hills beyond it, which we discovered were not in San Francisco but in Marin County. Immediately we started thinking of things to do we’d never done before: tai chi, hiking, learning to sail out at Lake Merced. All this time our divorce was coming along, and we were extremely happy. Then it became final, and I became depressed.

  “‘I no longer have a wife!’ I cried.

  “‘You have a friend,’ she said. ‘And your friend is moving into her own rooms.’

  “‘What?’ I said.

  “‘Remember how upset you were when I wanted a divorce?’ she said.

  “‘Yes!’ I said.

  “‘Well,’ she said, ‘all that suffering you did was for nothing, right?’

  “‘But, but, but,’ I said.

  “‘But what?’ She smiled.

  “‘Does this mean we won’t ever sleep together?’

  “‘Always your first concern,’ she sighed. And then she said, ‘No. I hope it means that when we do sleep together, we won’t be sleeping apart.’

  “But I was angry, I was confused. I was very, very hurt. I felt she’d tricked me. I felt she was rejecting me.

  “I tried to get her to say she wouldn’t move into her ‘rooms’—she was taking the back three rooms of the house, leaving me the sunnier, lonelier, ones in front—until I was weaned. She laughed. I was trying to make it funny.

  “‘Just till I’m weaned,’ I said, creeping into her arms and putting my hands up under her blouse. I loved her tits.” Suwelo looked up at Miss Lissie, who was frowning into the gumbo pot. “I couldn’t bear to think of them moving away.”

  Miss Lissie took the rest of the crab shells and the crab meat. Suwelo watched as she added them to separate pots. Mr. Hal was now dredging cubes of beef in a small mound of flour. Miss Lissie handed Suwelo a knife and a tube of the sausage. He whacked off a penis length.

  “You sounding mighty innocent,” said Miss Lissie.

  What did she mean by that, Suwelo wondered. Did she mean this story made it sound like Fanny didn’t love him? Didn’t want to be with him? That he was an innocent victim? Did it
make Fanny sound like a lesbian?

  “Lesbians were all around us, you know,” said Suwelo, in a tone of facing up to the ultimate challenge. “Beautiful, beautiful women, quite a lot of them, though some of them didn’t look so hot. Just seeing them on their outings together, climbing the hills, sunning in the parks, eating noisily at the largest tables in restaurants in Berkeley, made you want to cry. They’d left us! Hell, these bitches were so tough, they’d left God! This was when they were just discovering the Goddess, and it was all the time Goddess this and Goddess that. I once asked a black woman on the street where the new bus stop was—the city was repairing the old bus stop part of the street we were on—and she just looked at me, shrugged, and said an easy ‘Goddess knows.’ It blew me away.”

  “Hah,” said Miss Lissie.

  “So I was afraid she was going to leave me for a woman,” said Suwelo. “Listen, I’m not alone. It’s the cry of the times, in case you haven’t noticed it. The only men who don’t have this fear are living in caves and jungles somewhere with their women still tethered to the floor at night by their nose rings.”

  Mr. Hal laughed.

  Suwelo noticed his own agitation. He sat back, took a sip of the beer Miss Lissie had poured him, and tried to control his breathing. It was hard, remembering what he’d suffered.

  “Fanny was always going out with these people,” he said.

  “With what people?” said Miss Lissie, sautéeing the beef cubes in oil, into which she’d put flakes of garlic. “Surely not the people with the nose rings.”

  Mr. Hal guffawed.

  “Naw, Lissie,” he said. “The other people. Them that said shit on the nose-ring question.”

  “Oh, them,” she said, smiling.

  This was the first time, oddly enough, that Suwelo felt Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal liked him, not because he was kin to Uncle Rafe, but just because he was himself.

  His story took on a somewhat more humorous aspect in his own mind.

  Mr. Hal allowed as how he actually did believe—and he hoped the reality wouldn’t make him out a liar—but he thought that just maybe it was possible he had some ... reefer.

  But then he couldn’t find it.

  “Oh, well,” he said, to Suwelo, “continue the operation without anesthesia.”

  “But what I meant by innocent,” said Miss Lissie, “was, what were you doing with yourself while Fanny was in Africa? If you’re a man”—she said “man” exactly as she’d say “dog”—“you played around.”

  “I got into pornography,” said Suwelo promptly. “I was lonely. I got into prostitutes. But I’m too soft-hearted. I always wanted to know all about the lives of the prostitutes—the one I liked best had five children—and in the end I got this terrible dose of claps.” He liked saying “terrible dose of claps;” it sounded the way Mr. Hal or Miss Lissie would put it.

  “Ooo wee!” they said simultaneously.

  And Suwelo thought: When was the last time I heard anybody say “Ooo wee!” He hadn’t heard this expression since he was a little boy. He felt he’d been given something precious—an old photograph, an old letter, or a scent from a time that otherwise did not exist.

  “I didn’t tell Fanny. Of course not. What would have been the point? Fortunately I was able to be cured a few weeks before she came home. I gave up prostitutes. Or, rather, my member gave them up for me: it refused to function in what it feared might be contaminated territory. But I was hooked on girlie magazines, naked women in quarter-to-peek glass cages, bondage films, and ‘live’ sex acts on stage. When I thought of what Fanny’s six months in Africa gave me, it was the enjoyment, without guilt, of pornography. My woman had left me, you see, taken my rightful stuff off to another continent, totally out of reach of my dick, and left me high and dry. Well, I knew how to get off without her. There were plenty of other women in the world. This was my attitude.”

  “Have another beer,” Miss Lissie said curtly.

  “I recovered from this depravity,” Suwelo said. “Don’t get too disgusted. It took a while, but ...”

  “What kills me,” said Miss Lissie, “is that men think women never know.”

  “Fanny didn’t know,” said Suwelo. “But you’d have to know Fanny. Fanny”—Suwelo thought long and hard about how he could describe Fanny simply, so the two old people would get it—“Fanny, well, Fanny,” he said, “is like a space cadet.”

  Miss Lissie was cutting up one of the chickens. Its yellow fat lay in a heap beside her hand. As always, naked chickens looked like naked babies to Suwelo, and he averted his eyes.

  “You are a spirit that has had many bodies, and you travel through time and space that way,” said Suwelo. “Fanny is a body with many spirits shooting off to different realms almost every day. If she could fall in love with a Russian poet who died fighting for the Russian Revolution of 1917, it hardly concerned her that I was going out one night a month with ‘the boys.’ Though there were never any ‘boys,’” he added quickly. “I always went out alone, furtively, like a criminal, once she’d come back. I read all the modern women’s stuff on politics and men. I knew what I was doing was frowned upon. Hell, I even knew it was wrong. I could feel it was. But one night I was so angry with Fanny’s distractedness that I actually harassed a young woman in a glass cage. I could see she wasn’t paying attention to me, even as she twisted and moaned and puckered her lips. I knew if she had really looked, I would have seemed big and black and burly, and she would have been frightened, since she was just a pubescent half-white kid, chewing gum, naked, and no doubt strung out, in the little smudged cage. I started to shake the cage and bare my teeth like King Kong. She was scared out of her wits. I think I made her swallow her gum.

  “But Carlotta was a space cadet, too, in her own way,” said Suwelo, taking another sip of beer. “She was so superfeminine, in the old style, that it was as if she’d never noticed there was any other way a woman could be. She wore these three-inch heels every day. I’m talking serious stiletto. She even cooked—and I saw this after she let me go home with her—in three-inch heels. Three-inch heels are designed to make a man feel like all he needs to do is push gently and a woman is on her ass. Three-inch heels say ‘Fuck me.’ Carlotta taught women’s literature—which Fanny wondered if she ever read—in three-inch heels. She wore sweaters that followed every curve of her luscious body. Sweaters that dipped. Skirts that clung. Short skirts. Makeup. Earrings. False eyelashes sometimes. Her husband, a musician—she never told me his name—had left her, and left the country. She had no relatives, no friends. Only the two children, a boy and a girl. I took them on outings, to ballet and soccer. They grew dependent on me really quickly. Fanny was in Africa again. I knew Carlotta wanted to marry me. She knew I was already married, and Fanny and I never talked about our divorce; what was the point? It was a private matter, really. And she knew about Fanny. The college where Carlotta and I taught was a very uptight place. After ranting and raving about how uptight it was, Fanny had quit her part-time administrative job there and opened a little massage parlor right down the street. Everybody, students and teachers alike, went to her. Even Carlotta went. Fanny never knew Carlotta didn’t like her. Fanny that year was into the notion that Jesus was a masseur, that that’s what the original healing by touch that Jesus did in the Bible meant! She was into the laying on of hands. She took courses in massage at the San Francisco School of Massage. She also learned to do acupressure.

  “Carlotta disliked Fanny’s style. Fanny had given up so much that Carlotta still clung to. The respectable job, the dresses and skirts, the beauty parlor—Fanny cut her hair very short—the high heels, the lipstick. She dressed in T-shirts, sandals, and chi pants. Fanny was mentally in Jerusalem, at the Dead Sea, strolling in Galilee. She was, for about a year and a half, really into being Christ. Or, as she would put it, ‘a Christ,’ which she said anyone could be. Everybody loved her massages because she enjoyed them so much herself. They never stopped at the appointed hour, but could go on and on, and the
re were some bodies she worked on that she said made her feel inspired. Soft music would be playing—you never had any idea who the musicians were; you just knew you never heard them anywhere but there—the incense would be burning, the room would be warm, Fanny’s hands would be warm and slippery from the fragrant oils she used. Sweet almond was my favorite. I used to go to her myself, especially after faculty meetings. Faculty meetings always left me tight as a drum. All those white male heads of departments, pretending white people get everything on merit, and of course the college wasn’t racist just because no one there had ever heard of George Washington Carver; how could one think so?

  “Really, Fanny gave up everything for a long, long time. She even gave up books, which she loved!

  “You know what she said? ‘I’d rather read the trees. It’s not book burning that people need to worry so much about; it’s the trees that are disappearing.’

  “She gave up listening to music, except when she was giving a massage. Even Mozart, whom she adored. ‘I find I like silence,’ she said. ‘It’s music to me. I like the eternal nature of silence. It’s music you can have living or dead.’

  “Then, when her father died, she went back to Africa. It was a terrible time for her. She’d just gotten to know him, and her sister, as well. And she liked him. He was funny and irreverent and a rebel. He made her laugh. Her mother, she said, who had been a missionary in Africa for many years, when young, had always told her Africans were rather sad people. Her father was so much like her, she felt, it tickled her just to see part of herself out there in the world in someone else. And he was her father! She hadn’t even known she had one.

  “Carlotta couldn’t understand her leaving me alone for so long. She said she felt sorry for me. She flipped her hair from off her tinted glasses, where it always flopped, and pushed out her breasts. She fingered her fuchsia-colored cleavage. She extended her legs, her three-inch heels. I’d seen women like her, lissome, tan, with tiny flat waists and high breasts, in magazines and naked onstage. In a way, whenever I looked at her, I saw those other women. The first time I kissed her she left lipstick all over my face.