by Alice Walker
“I didn’t go to Ola’s funeral,” Miss B was saying. “I couldn’t bear to sit there while all the people who hated his guts went on about how much they’d valued him and how much he’s going to be missed! Like hell he’s going to be missed,” she said, taking a drink of whiskey from the water tumbler she held in her hand. “He’s going to be missed, all right. There’s no one left to speak up to the government now. Nobody with any power, anyhow; the women will always rouse themselves to tell the boys what time of day it is... . I didn’t need to go to the funeral; Ola and I had already said our good-byes. He died here, at my house. You didn’t know?”
“No,” said Fanny, “I didn’t.”
“He was in the middle of rehearsals for his new play, the one about the Olinka, black and white, middle class. About how these people, with the government’s blessing, are permitting the country to grow as divided along class lines as it was under the whites along color lines. It was to be the first of his outright satires, he said.” She laughed. “He always claimed the middle class wasn’t suitable material for drama; only comedy, or, not even comedy but satire and farce.
“That’s what he was saying when he had the heart attack. A pretty innocuous comment, but I suppose it called into question his own life.
“Later, when we brought him up here to the house—rehearsals take place in the school gym—and placed him on the couch—yes, where you’re sitting—he was still trying to talk, to joke. But at the very end he said a very sober thing to me, and to the actors who’d gathered around. He said that at the moment he was speaking he had a sudden realization of how endless struggle is. That it is like the layers of an onion, and smelly, too, he said, and made one cry, and that each time he sat down to write a play he was surprised, and a bit disheartened, to see he’d simply arrived at a new layer of stinking suffering that the people were enduring. They’d had such dreams, he said, when he and his friends went off to join the Mbeles. They thought that removing the whites from power would be the last of their work to insure a prosperous future for their country. Instead, it had proved only a beginning. Not, however, a small one; for that he was grateful. But still, only a start.
“Now, he saw, it was not racism alone that must be combatted, but also stupidity and greed, qualities which, unfortunately, had a much longer human history.” Miss B paused.
“He’d been particularly upset,” she said, and then pressed her lips together as if she’d rather not continue, but did, “in the weeks just before he died, by a rumor going around that Western Europe and the Soviet Union were clandestinely selling, for burial in Africa, millions of tons of radioactive waste to dozens of poor countries, Olinka included.” She drew in a long breath, expelled it. She glanced at Fanny to see how she would take the blow.
Fanny groaned, and tears of hurt and rage leaped to her eyes. It had never occurred to her that this news might be only a rumor. As soon as she’d heard it, she knew it was true, just as Ola would have known.
“Ola was incensed that Africans could be collaborators in this long-term—forever, really—destruction of their continent and their children,” Miss B said. “If true, he considered the buying and burying of this material a worse crime against Africa than even the selling of Africans by Africans during the slave trade.” Miss B looked at Fanny, then looked quickly out the window toward the mountains. “And of course,” she added, “the motives of the white governments involved are, as always, unspeakable.”
Fanny spread her fingers over the edge of the cushion on which she sat. It was a tawny velvet sofa, like the hide of a lion. She thought of Ola, stretched out there, talking. Perhaps struggling for breath.
“In which direction was he facing?” she asked.
“Toward the window,” said Miss B. “He was a frequent visitor here and had favorite views. He was my husband, legally; did you know that?”
Fanny nodded that she did.
“From the couch you can easily see the Dgoro mountains. He loved to lie here, look out at them, and think of his plays. I would make tea, and we’d sit and sip, in silence.”
Fanny wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Your hair,” she said, for something to say, “is the most startling shade of blue.”
“I know it,” said Miss B, laughing. “I assure you it isn’t at all natural. Not at all. It’s a color I’ve always loved and, as a painter, I learned to mix it myself. The one thing I liked about my old life in America was the deep blue of the delphiniums in our garden. Well, delphiniums won’t grow here, but the color seems to do quite well on my head. It gives me something of the feeling of being a delphinium.” She laughed again. “And my students, especially the little new, scared ones, who’ve never been anywhere but in the alleys or the bush, tend to like it. They like the strangeness of it. It’s a kind of human zebra to them. I believe if there’s one thing given us as human beings strictly as a play toy, it’s hair,” she said.
“Thank you for all that you’ve meant to my father,” said Fanny. “I’d no idea a white person, especially a white woman, would touch upon my own life so—meaningfully.”
Miss B returned Fanny’s scrutinizing look with a searching look of her own. Perhaps she could see, Fanny thought, what stuntedness of perception North America had taught her in regard to other human beings, who might be white.
“We all touch upon each other’s lives in ways we can’t begin to imagine,” Miss B said dryly.
“Yes,” said Fanny, rising from the tawny sofa, preparing to go. In the back of her knees she suddenly felt the spring of her father’s scrawny legs. She looked out at the mountains he’d loved, and worshiped them with his eyes.
As if she suddenly saw Ola himself standing before her, Miss B embraced her. Fanny was both startled and pleased.
“How long will you be in Africa?” she asked.
“I must leave soon,” said Fanny. “There is a man back in California with whom I share a bond. But I will be back. Perhaps he will come with me. My sister, Nzingha, will want to mount productions of Ola’s plays, and write her own, I suspect. She says I must come back to help her. Two Nzinghas, you see, being better than one. She swears she expects to have to fight this government for forty years, just as our namesake fought the Portuguese.”
“She knows whereof she speaks,” said Miss B.
“Do you think they’ll harm her if she produces Ola’s plays?” asked Fanny, frowning, and turning back at the door.
Miss B considered this. “Maybe not,” she said, in her flat North American voice. “After all, Ola himself is dead; the plays already written will benefit, as far as the government is concerned, from his absence. To expose the authenticity of their grief over his demise, and to impress the world community that loved him, they will probably beg Nzingha to mount some of Ola’s plays in his memory. Some of those not about taxation without representation, not about the oppression of women, not about violence by the government against the people, not about the smug middle class, not about the brutalization of the poor, not about the barbarity of the military, not about the nuclear-waste dumpings ...” she said, “it’ll be interesting to see what they do want produced.”
Fanny laughed. She could just imagine Ola running down this list and making the same observation.
“The plays that are likely to enrage the censors—none of whom, no doubt, will ever have read a play—will probably be Nzingha’s own. Or yours, if you decide to come back and write some. Nothing is harder for the men in power than to contemplate what the African woman knows. And to have two African women tell them!” She laughed.
“Well,” said Fanny. “I guess that’s that! The only question remaining is this one: If and when Nzingha and I do write the sons and daughters of our father’s loathsome plays, can we perform them in your gymnasium?”
“Surely,” said Miss B, smiling and waving good-bye to Fanny as she drove away in one of the government’s little gray cars. She was thinking that perhaps she would also, when Nzingha and Fanny were producing t
heir works, write a play. For her own amusement. Just for her students and herself. Just to surprise Nzingha and Fanny. She would name it something like “Recuerdo,” or perhaps “The Coming Age,” or perhaps “Eleandra and Eleanora,” or maybe “M’Sukta,” or “The Savage in the Stacks,” or maybe “Zedé and Carlotta.” Or perhaps—just “Carlotta.”
“Hello, son.”
IT WAS MISS LISSIE’S voice, yet deeper, and weaker, older, than Suwelo remembered it. He adjusted the volume on the cassette player and sat down on the couch in front of it. On the left side of the sofa he’d set up his projector and filled it with the slides of Miss Lissie’s work that Mr. Hal had sent him. After listening to her speak, he would have a look.
“By the time you get this,” Miss Lissie’s deep voice continued, “I will be somewhere and someone else. I have asked Hal to send it to you only upon my death, to which I almost look forward, knowing as I do that it is not the end, and being someone who enjoys hanging around, in spite of myselves. I regret leaving Hal, and am anxious as to our chances of coming together again; but that is all I do regret, and I have every faith we will meet again, and no doubt soon. For Hal and I have a lot more stuff to work out, and though we have been at it for so many years, and it’s been hard labor, I can tell you, we’ve only just begun.
“Remember that song? I’ve come to believe that people’s songs are their most truthful creations, when they’re real songs, not pap. Or sometimes, even when they’re pap, they tell the truth, but it isn’t the truth the singers think they are telling. But before I talk about me and Hal, let me make a few observations about you.
“After you left us last summer and went back to California, I kept thinking about you, and looking at the painting of you that I’d done—Hal did one almost identical to it—that showed you surrounded by all the beauties of this life, the flowers, the corn, the ivy, the trees, the welcoming and sheltering house of your two old friends, you, asleep. Well, you were asleep; so there’s truth, fidelity to reality in our pictures. But as I thought more about you and your time in Rafe’s house and your time spent with us, I began to think about the ways in which both Hal and I feel you really are asleep.
“Terribly damaged human beings, especially if they were once beautiful and whole, are hard for people to remember by talking about. So it has been with you about your father. The war, the loss of much of his soul, the loss of his arm. The wearing down of your mother. What I’m saying, Suwelo, is that Hal and I are sorry we did not encourage you to speak to us about your parents; we regret we did not offer whatever memories we have—they are few, unfortunately—or anything that we’d heard or knew. That you did not speak of your parents, of the ‘accident’ that made you an orphan while you were still such a young person, seemed to us very odd, when we thought about it. I know you are caught up now in this knottedness with Fanny, and both Hal and I agree that the work with her is what has to be done. But part of your work with Fanny is the work you must do with your parents. They must be consciously called up, called upon, re-called. How they lived; but why and how they died, as well. Even the make and model of the car in which they died. Even the style of your father’s haircut, the color of your mother’s dress. The last time you stood over them.
“Hal and I felt you have closed a door, a very important door, against memory, against the pain. That just to say their names, ‘Marcia’ and ‘Louis,’ is too heavy a key for your hand. And we urge you to open that door, to say their names. To speak of them, anything you can remember, freely and often, to Fanny. To trace what you can recognize in yourself back to them; to find the connection of spirit and heart you share with them, who are, after all, your United Front. For really, Suwelo, if our parents are not present in us, consciously present, there is much, very much about ourselves we can never know. It is as if our very flesh is blind and dumb and cannot truly feel itself. Intuition is given little validation; instinct is feared. We do not know what to trust, seeing none of ourselves in action beyond our own bodies. This is why adopted children will do anything to find their true parents. And, more important, the doors into the ancient past, the ancient self, the preancient current of life itself, remain closed. When this happens, crucial natural abilities are likely to be inaccessible to one: the ability to smile easily, to joke, to have fun, to be serious, to be thoughtful, to be limber of limb.
“Where Carlotta is concerned, the task is not difficult—or perhaps it will prove more difficult—because she is still alive. You are right to understand, as I know you now do, that it is a sin to behave as if a person whose body you use is a being without substance. ‘Sin’ being denial of another’s reality of who and what she or he actually is. You can still go to her, as you must, for your own growth, and ask her forgiveness. Express to her something of your own trauma, which may have its origin in your mother’s abandoned and suffering face, and the fear this caused you about knowing too much of women’s pain, and tell her something of what you have learned.
“It is against blockage between ourselves and others—those who are alive and those who are dead—that we must work. In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves off from pain. But in the long run the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than the pain, which, if we will only bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone. Long will we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at that point of intensity that made us feel as if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes its only trace. Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves.”
Miss Lissie cleared her throat.
“I am running on about this, Suwelo, because it is important, and true, but also because I am afraid to tell you how I know all this, to tell you my own news. Which is”—and here she took a long, slow breath—“that I lied when I told you I have always been a black woman, and that I can only remember as far back as a few thousand years.
“Of course I was from time to time a white woman, or as white as about half of them are. I won’t bore you with tales of the centuries I spent sitting around wondering which colored woman would do my floors. Our menfolks were bringing them in all the time. You’d go to sleep one night brotherless, husbandless, fatherless, and in the morning more than likely one of them would be back. He’d be leading a string of some of the wretchedest-looking creatures you ever saw. Black, brown, red. Sometimes they looked like Mongols or Chinese. You never knew where in the world they came from. And he wouldn’t tell you. ‘Got you some help,’ was the most he’d say, dropping his end of the chain next to where he kept the dogs tied.
“He’d stick some savagely gorgeous trinket on my neck or arm, surely made by witchcraft, I’d think, but silver or, more likely, gold, and start looking about for breakfast.
“I knew what a lady was supposed to do. I clutched the front of my wrapper shut and went to inspect the savages. I always turned up my nose and made a pukey motion toward their filthy hair. They were so beaten they could barely look at me.
“Over time, if he didn’t pawn it, the thing on my neck or arm would start talking to me. Especially whenever one of them looked at it. It took me years to understand that they knew that on my careless skinny, or fat, white arm I was wearing all the history, art, and culture of their own people that they and their children would ever see.”
There was a pause. “Gold,” said Miss Lissie thoughtfully, “the white man worships gold because it is the sun he has lost.”
There was another pause, during which Suwelo leaned forward slightly and stared into the cassette spinning noiselessly round and round. In a moment, Miss Lissie drew in a labored breath and continued.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “It is a dream memory, too, like the one I told you about my life with the cousins; but it is more tenuous even than that one, more faded. Weak. And that has been deliberate. I have repressed it for all I am worth. Regardless, it is still with me, because, like the other me
mories, it is me.”
She paused, coughed, and said, “This was very long ago, indeed.”
Suwelo leaned back against the cushions of the couch, put his feet up on the coffee table in front of him, and placed his hands behind his head.
He thought he was ready.
“We lived at the edge of an immense woods,” said Miss Lissie, “in the kind of houses, made of straw, that people built; insubstantial, really flimsy little things, somewhat fanciful, like an anthill or a spider’s web, thrown up in a hour against the sun. My mother was queen of our group; a small group or tribe we were. Never more than a couple of hundred of us, sometimes fewer. But she was not ‘queen’ in the way people think of queens today. No, that way would have been incomprehensible to her, and horrid. I suppose she was what queens were originally, though: a wise woman, a healer, a woman of experience and vision, a woman superbly trained by her mother. A really good person, whose words were always heard by the clan.
“My mother kept me with her at all times, and she was always stroking me, rubbing into my skin various ointments she’d concocted from the flesh of berries and nuts that she found. As a small child I didn’t notice anything wrong about spending so much time with my mother, nor was it ever unpleasant. Quite the contrary, in fact. Her familiar was an enormous and very much present lion; they went everywhere together. This lion also had a family of his own. There was a lot of visiting between us, and in the lion’s little family of cubs I was always welcome.
“This perhaps sounds strange to you, Suwelo. About the lions, I mean. But it is true. This was long, long ago, before the animals had any reason to fear us and none whatever to try to eat us, which—the thought of eating us—I’m sure would have made them sick. The human body has been recognized as toxic, by the animals, for a very long time.
“In the Bible I know there’s a line somewhere about a time in the future when the earth will be at peace and the lion will lie down with the lamb. Well, that has already happened, and eventually it was to the detriment of the lion.