by Alice Walker
You shouldn’t have done it, I said coldly. It was stupid of you.
But she only chuckled, grimacing painfully as she did so. Don’t be mad because my choosing this kind of pain seems such a puny effort, she said. In America it’s the best I can do. Besides, it gives me a faint idea. And it was something I needed to do anyway.
I was angry because I was touched. I realized that though Raye had left Africa hundreds of years before in the persons of her ancestors and studied at the best of the white man’s schools, she was intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. How theatre was born? My psychologist was a witch, not the warty kind American children imitate on Halloween, but a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill. Suddenly, in that guise, Raye became someone I felt I knew; someone with whom I could bond.
In my heart I thanked Mzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where he could not. And that she would.
PIERRE
IT WAS A RAINY DECEMBER AFTERNOON and we sat by the fire, reading. My mother sat; I lounged on the sofa across from her. Earlier that morning she had permitted me to sleep late, missing school, and had brought her gifts to me and spread them across the foot of my bed. Each year since my birth she’d knitted me a sweater. Each year I watched the piece of knitting grow between her flashing needles; each year I was charmed by the result. This year, as every year, she’d outdone herself. The new sweater wrapped me in gold and chocolate; near the center of my chest, just above my heart, there was a petroglyphic spirit head in a rich, mossy green.
I was reading a book by Langston Hughes, the laughing spellbinder whose sadness almost hid itself in the insouciance of his prose. I had already devoured several novels by James Baldwin, the guerrilla homosexual genius whom I had met once when he came to speak at our school, and two volumes of essays by Richard Wright, the tortured assimilationist and great lover of France. These men, “uncles” from my father’s side, would be my guides on my American journey. I glanced over at my mother, expecting to find her still reading, or staring thoughtfully into the fire, but finding instead that her warm brown eyes were fixed on me.
I was just thinking, she said. It has been sixteen years since you were born. I can’t believe it.
That long? I said, smiling at her.
Her brown hair was dusted with more gray than I’d noticed before, and her face seemed thinner than usual, and more pale. I sighed with the contentment of the spoiled only child, and pondered my good fortune. I felt the greatest possible security with my mother. As she often said, our hearts had beat as one since before my birth. No matter who else was not in my life, there was always my mother: reading, knitting, preparing for her classes at the lycée. It was true that I was beginning to feel ready to separate from her, but gently, as a fruit drops from the tree. One more year of school, of Paris, and I would be gone.
If you go to America, she said—as if I might not after all our years of planning—and spend time with your father, there’s something you should know.
What? I asked.
Something minor, perhaps. But he won’t remember it. And I do.
How mysterious, I said.
Not so mysterious! she said. It’s just that I’ve realized with your father that men refuse to remember things that don’t happen to them.
Full of the passionate words of Baldwin, Hughes and Wright, which rang in my heart as if already inscribed there, I leaned forward to protest. My mother put out her hand and covered my lips.
For as long as I could remember, my father came to see me and my mother once in fall and once in spring; for two weeks each visit. He never came on my birthday, because coming at that time seriously distressed his wife. Each time he came he showed me photographs of his other son, Benny, and at least one photograph of his wife, Evelyn, or, as he sometimes called her, Tashi. Benny was nearly three years older than me, with bronze satiny skin and a sweet, tentative smile. Whenever I saw a new photo of him I wondered if he’d like me. If we could ever be friends. Once, my father told me that Benny wasn’t as “quick” as I. This pleased me enormously, though I hadn’t the words to ask him what a lack of “quickness” like mine might mean.
My mother began to tell me the story of how she met my father, years ago in Africa. I’d heard it before. I nodded complacently as she talked about the hours she spent with my father in Old Torabe’s hut, as the old man waited for death. But I soon realized my mother was adding a more adult twist than usual to the tale.
You have to understand, she said, there was a reason why Old Torabe lived alone, way outside the village, and why none of the villagers came to care for him. Your father certainly didn’t enjoy caring for him, either; your grandfather Samuel assigned Torabe to him.
My mother uncrossed her legs, pressed her palms against the arms of her chair in order to stretch her back and glanced from me to the fire, which would soon need another log.
In his youth Torabe had had many wives. A few of them died. In childbirth. From infection. One died from snakebite. In any event—and I learned this from Adam, who liked to recount the old man’s, as he called them, “negative blessings”—at last Torabe married a young woman who ran away from him, and could not be brought back. He’d been notorious for tracking and bringing back his runaway wives before. This one drowned herself, in water that didn’t even reach her knees, rather than return.
She’d gone to her parents and asked them how they expected her to endure the torture: he had cut her open with a hunting knife on their wedding night, and gave her no opportunity to heal. She hated him. Her parents had no answer for her. Her father instructed her mother to convince her of her duty. Because she was Torabe’s wife, her place was with him, her mother told her. The young woman explained that she bled. Her mother told her it would stop: that when she herself was cut open she bled for a year. She had also cried and run away. Never had she gotten beyond the territory of men who returned her to her tribe. She had given up, and endured. Now her mother stood in the shadow of the girl’s father, a man she despised, waiting for death, but, in the meantime, longing for grandchildren, which she hoped this errant daughter would provide. There is nothing in the world to kiss but small children, said the mother, turning away from her daughter’s tears.
Torabe was thrown out of the village because he lost control of his wife, a very evil thing to do in that society because it threatened the fabric of the web of life. At least the web of life as the villagers knew it. He died deserted, filthy and in tatters. The girl’s family too was ordered out of the village, and the girl herself was dragged from the river and left to rot, her body food for vultures and rodents.
Now, said my mother, rising to place a log on the fire, your father always mentions the fact that he and I had “lively” conversation there in Torabe’s hut, as he reluctantly washed the old man, but he never remembers what our conversation was about.
It was, said my mother, about a young woman in Algeria who worked for us, and who nearly suffered the same fate as Torabe’s wife. It was about how, at last, I recognized the connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of the domination of women in the world. Her name was Ayisha, and she ran to us one night screaming from the sight of the variety of small, sharp instruments her anxious mother had arranged underneath a napkin on a low seating cushion that rested beside the bridal bed.
My mother suddenly shuddered, as though watching a frightful scene. It’s in all the movies that terrorize women, she said, only masked. The man who breaks in. The man with the knife. Well, she said, he has already come. She sighed. But those of us whose chastity belt was made of leather, or of silk and diamonds, or of fear and not of our own flesh… we worry. We are the perfect audience mesmerized by our unconscious knowledge of what men, with the collaboration of our mothers, do to us.
After a long pause she said: This episode with
Ayisha, who was returned to her family, who beat her for running away—and actually we never knew what became of her—is at the root of my refusal to marry; even though in France there are no instruments of torture beside the bed.
And the Marquis de Sade? I asked.
Thankfully only one man, she said, and thankfully not in this century. She laughed. And thankfully not beside my bed.
Perhaps, I said. But surely his cruelty to women is lodged in the collective consciousness of the French? Like the zest of Rabelais, the wit of Molière?
Perhaps, she murmured, and seemed to lose herself gazing into the fire.
PART NINE
EVELYN
I FELT NO COMPUNCTION about opening letters that came from Lisette to Adam, letters which sometimes contained copies of letters she’d received from her uncle Mzee touching on my case; or even, sometimes, copies of letters from Adam himself; she seemed often to need to jog his memory about something or other. There was an occasional copied page of her diary in which she appeared contented, and self-possessed: autonomous in a way I could not imagine for myself. She also had the nerve occasionally to address a letter to me. These always sounded as if she were feeling her way through fog. I trampled them. I routinely, and leisurely, read those from her which Adam left lying open at the back of his bottom desk drawer, the key to which I had long since duplicated. It was from one of her letters that I learned their son, Pierre, was coming to America.
Informing me he was going to a gathering of progressive religieux, Adam flew to Boston to meet him and was gone a week, helping Pierre settle into the life of Cambridge and Harvard. The boy was still far away, the breadth of the continent, so I did not worry. He remained in Cambridge for three years.
It was from her letters that I learned of Lisette’s illness. Diagnosed first as stress brought on by her political activity: she was active in the movement against French nuclear power plants, which, she wrote, dotted like dangerous pustules the once pristine countryside; later diagnosed as an ulcer. Then as a hernia. Then, finally, as stomach cancer. She petitioned Adam to permit Pierre to live with him and to attend Berkeley after her death. This Adam apparently agreed to do; I refused to let him bring up the subject with me.
It was during a period when I could not eat and was emaciated as a scarecrow; my clothes hung on me, and I wore nothing that wasn’t black. The week before, someone introduced to me by Adam said, with a snigger: “Ah, Adam and Evelyn. How cute!” And I slapped him.
I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home. Even inside it I frequently and with little cause, no cause, boxed Benny’s ears. If I made him squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief.
I was watching the street when the taxi came. A boxy, bright yellow, child’s cartoon of a taxi. The kind of taxi the world expects all American taxis to be. I glimpsed Pierre’s curly head before he got out, as he leaned forward to pay the driver. He was skinny and short, as if still a child. I watched the two of them, chatting like old friends, go around to the boot to take out his bags.
Still chatting, they did not notice the dark spectre floating near them: first to the door, then to the porch, then to the steps, alighting to stoop beside a large pile of stones I had begun to collect the very day I learned of Pierre’s birth. Large oblong stones from the roadside; heavy flat stones from the riverbank; sharp jagged shale stones from the fields.
As Pierre thanked the driver and turned toward the house, he saw me, and smiled. A large jagged stone, gray as grief, struck him just above the teeth. Blood spurted from his nose. I began to throw the stones as if, like Kali, I had a dozen arms, or as if my arms were a multiple catapult or a windmill. Stones rained upon him and upon the cab, which had started to pull off but screeched to a stop as the driver realized Pierre was under attack and sinking to one knee. I did not let up, but floated nearer, cradling an armful of stones. Pierre began to speak in a gibberish of French, which infuriated me. I dropped the stones in order to close my ears with the palms of my hands. During this interlude, the cabbie ran up to Pierre, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him out of sight.
I began to laugh, as the taxi disappeared down the street. In their cowardly haste they’d forgotten Pierre’s luggage. The brown suitcases sat, importunate and irrevocable, where he’d dropped them; more heavy baggage for me to lift and somehow carry. I would not. I dove forward, flapping my arms and shrieking hoarsely like a crow, to kick them into the street.
PART TEN
EVELYN
THE BUS RIDE from Ombere station was long. The roads bumpy. The dust everywhere. Each twenty-five kilometers or so we stopped to use roadside facilities. These were not at all like those in America but were entirely makeshift. Smelly holes in the earth on either side of which some forward-thinking person had nailed a board. On these boards, inevitably splashed with urine, one placed one’s feet.
A week ago I would not have expected M’Lissa to still be alive. But yes, according to a year-old Newsweek I perused in the waiting room of the Waverly, she was not only alive but a national monument. She had been honored by the Olinka government for her role during the wars of liberation, when she’d acted as a nurse as devoted to her charges as Florence Nightingale, and for her unfailing adherence to the ancient customs and traditions of the Olinka state. No mention was made of how she fulfilled this obligation. She had been decorated, “knighted,” the magazine said; swooped up from her obscure hut, where she lay dying on a filthy straw mat, and brought to a spacious cottage on the outskirts of a nearby town, where she would be within easy commute to a hospital, should the need arise.
After being brought out of her dark hut and into the sunlight of her new home—with running water and an indoor toilet, both miracles to the lucky M’Lissa—a remarkable change had occurred. M’Lissa had stopped showing any signs of death, stopped aging, and had begun to actually blossom. “Youthen,” as the article said. A local nurse, a geriatrics specialist, ministered to her; a cook and a gardener rounded out her staff. M’Lissa, who had not walked in over a year, began again to walk, leaning on a cane the president himself had given her, and enjoyed tottering about in her garden. She loved to eat, and kept her cook on his toes preparing the special dishes of lamb curry, raisin rice and chocolate mousse she particularly liked. She had a mango tree; indeed, the photograph showed her sitting beneath it; she sat there happily, day after day, when the crop came on, stuffing herself.
In the photograph M’Lissa smiled broadly, new teeth glistening; even her hair had grown back and was a white halo around her deep brown head.
There was something sinister, though, about her aspect; but perhaps I was the only one likely to see it. Though her mouth was smiling, as were her sunken cheeks and her long nose, her wrinkled forehead and her scrawny neck, her beady eyes were not. Looking into them, suddenly chilled, I realized they never had.
How had I entrusted my body to this madwoman?
TASHI-EVELYN
A FLAG FLEW above her house, the red, yellow and blue vivid against the pale noonday periwinkle sky. I was not her only visitor; there were cars parked in the postage-stamp parking lot, neatly screened from the house by a rose-colored bougainvillea, and a tour bus was halted by the road. The passengers were not permitted to disembark, but were busy taking photographs of the cottage from the windows of the bus. I left my rental car out of view of the house, and when I walked up the red steps to the porch and looked back, I felt surprise that it had disappeared. Not seeing the vehicle of my arrival seemed right, however, after a moment’s reflection, for I experienced all the more a feeling I’d begun to have in the openness of the countryside: that I had flown direct, as if I were a bird, from my house to hers, and that this had been accomplished with the directness of thought: a magical journey.
I was met on the porch by a young woman who had not been mentioned in the Newsweek article: slender, with smooth dark skin and shining eyes, as lovel
y as a freshly cut flower. I explained I’d known M’Lissa all my life; that she had in fact delivered me into the world, having been a great friend of my mother and in fact mother of the entire village. I explained I had come from America, where I now lived, even though Olinka by birth, and that I hoped to spend time with M’Lissa, perhaps after her other guests had gone.
What is your name? she asked softly.
Tell her it is Tashi, Catherine’s, no, Nafa’s daughter, who went to America with the son of the missionary.
She turned. Out of habit I glanced down at her feet. As she moved away, I saw she had the sliding gait of the “proper” Olinka maiden.
Within minutes all of M’Lissa’s guests poured out of the house, as if scattered by her cane. They scrutinized me as they passed. Perhaps they thought me an important dignitary. As their car motors were turning over, shattering the quiet, the young woman returned.
You may go in, she said, with a smile.
What is your name? I asked her.
Martha, she replied.
And your other name?
Mbati, she said, her eyes twinkling.
Mbati, I said, why do the people come here?
The question surprised her. Mother Lissa is a national monument, she said. Recognized as a heroine by every faction of the government, including the National Liberation Front. She’s famous, she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking at me as if puzzled I didn’t know.
I do know that, I said. I read Newsweek.
Ah, Newsweek, she said.
But what do they talk about with her?
About their daughters. About the old ways. About tradition. She paused. It is mostly women who come. You may have noticed this by the people who just left. Women of a certain age. Women with daughters. Frightened women, often. She reassures them.