by Alice Walker
Gazing at them now from the safety of the prison chapel, from the safety of my impending death, I can see they are shells, empty of life. It is they who are being stuffed with food, while nothing but oppressive verbal diarrhea comes out. The child, taught to respect these elders above all others, could not have recognized this. The old men discussing her and all the females of the village did not care that she heard them. They knew she would not be able to figure out what they were talking about. They were discussing her, determining her life, and at the time she did not, could not, know. And yet, there in her unconscious had remained the termite hill, and herself trapped deep inside it, heavy, wingless and inert, the Queen of the dark tower. From my seat in the chapel, Adam’s hand still in mine, I glance down at the feet of the child as she leaves the old men, belching in contentment, sitting in the dust. Idly, she kicks a stone. There is grace in her aim and no hesitation in her thrust.
PART EIGHTEEN
EVELYN-TASHI
BUT WHAT DID YOU THINK, I ask M’Lissa. When I came into the Mbele camp asking to be “bathed.”
I thought you were a fool, she says without hesitation. The very biggest.
But why? I ask.
Because, first of all, there were no other women in the camp. Didn’t you have eyes in your head? Didn’t anyone ever teach you that the absence of women means something? Or were you so wrapped up in yourself you didn’t notice?
You were there, I say. And you told me the other women were all out on raids of liberation.
Huh! she scoffs. I lied. It was the camp itself that needed liberation. When the women came they were expected to cook and clean—and be screwed—exactly as they had been at home. When they saw how things were, they left. Even I would have left, M’Lissa says, glancing down at her lame leg.
Suddenly she laughs.
They sent for me, you know, just as they sent for you. I was also sent a donkey to ride. They were constructing a traditional Olinkan village from which to fight, and therefore needed a tsunga.
They sent for me?
To give the tsunga something to do. To give the new community a symbol of its purpose.
Which I became, I say, dumbstruck.
Which you became, M’Lissa hisses. Lying on your mat of straw, making other little mats of straw. The same work your great-great-grandmother would have done!
But you encouraged it, I say, puzzled and hurt.
Do fools need encouragement? she asks the ceiling. They encourage themselves.
But Our Leader informed us…. I think rapid thoughts with which to defend myself. But M’Lissa is quicker.
Did Our Leader not keep his penis? Is there evidence that even one testicle was removed? The man had eleven children by three different wives. I think this means the fellow’s private parts were intact.
I am horrified to hear such a disrespectful view of Our Leader. M’Lissa, I say, behind that face you show to those who come asking about tradition, you are bitter.
Even the sweetest mango in my mouth is bitter to me, she says. But women, she sneers, women are too cowardly to look behind a smiling face. A man smiles and tells them they will look beautiful weeping, and they send for the knife.
They have reason to be afraid, I say. You, especially, cannot deny this.
Their biggest fear is that they will have to kill their sons, she says angrily. Even if they themselves almost died the first time a man broke into their bodies, they want to be told it was a minor hurt, the same that all women feel, that their daughters will barely notice, and cease, over time, to remember. If I tell them that, it makes it almost possible for them not to completely despise their sons.
For the pain they inflict.
Yes. Breaking into someone else’s daughter. Just as another woman’s son breaks into theirs.
But the sons know nothing of what is done to women. They only know they’re supposed to be men enough to break into the woman’s body. They often hurt themselves trying. I learned this from Adam, I say, whose father used to treat them for bruises and lacerations.
M’Lissa looks at me coolly.
I squirm under her gaze.
It was also very hard for Adam and me, I say. You’d sewed me so tight, an ant would have had difficulty crawling in.
Oh, M’Lissa says, You were not so tight as that! There are women walking around today who’ve paid the tsungas to make them tighter than that! After each birth of a child they do it. More than once, more than twice, more than three times, they’ve had it done. Each time tighter than before.
But it hurts so much, I say.
The bitches are used to it, she says. And it is true, you know, the men like it tight. Fighting. Don’t think the women never receive pleasure, either, says M’Lissa.
I never have, I say.
That is your own fault, she says. The pleasure a woman receives comes from her own brain. The brain sends it to any spot a lover can touch.
Then why is it that it is a woman’s vulva that is destroyed? I ask. “Bathed,” as they say, “cleaned off,” I ask. And not her shoulders or her neck? Not her breasts?
While M’Lissa is pondering this, I recall the feeling of a banished sensation.
I did have pleasure, once or twice, after my “bath,” I say.
Yes? she says.
But my pleasure shamed me.
Ah, says M’Lissa, your man gave it to you from behind. What is shameful about that? That is how boys do it to each other while waiting for the girl’s dowry to be raised. Dowry raising takes such a long time, what can you expect them to do?
My pleasure angered me, I say. It made me hate my husband.
It was pleasure, wasn’t it?
I felt I had been made into something other than myself.
You had been made into a woman! says M’Lissa. It is only because a woman is made into a woman that a man becomes a man. Surely you know that!
My husband was a man already.
True, says M’Lissa, but perhaps he did not know it.
PART NINETEEN
OLIVIA
IN THE PRISON, now that the date of execution is set—the appeal failed; no word from America—Tashi is treated less like a condemned murderer and more like an honored guest. Within the prison she is permitted freedom. Her days are busy. There are visits from women’s groups and the foreign press. Photographers from every part of the world come to snap her picture.
Through it all, she flourishes, her alert face kind and reflective, angry and disgusted by turns. Each morning she works with me on the AIDS floor, feeding, bathing or simply touching the patients. It is so crowded there’s barely room to squat between mats. Adam and the boys have taken responsibility for feeding the children; bringing in hot meals from the kitchen of our rented house. This is a relief to their parents and older siblings, those that are left, and they thank us gravely with their eyes.
No one has any idea why he or she is sick. That’s the most difficult thing. Witnessing their incomprehension. Their dumb patience, as they wait for death. It is their animal-like ignorance and acceptance that most angers Tashi, perhaps because she is reminded of herself. She calls it, scornfully, the assigned role of the African: to suffer, to die, and not know why.
Why, she wants to know, do mainly homosexual men and intravenous drug users get the disease in America, while here there are as many women dying as men? Who infects the children? Why are there more little girls dying than boys?
Among the wealthy Olinkans there is widespread denial that anything is wrong. They keep their dying relatives at home. It is mainly the poor we see. A gaunt mother staggers in, her emaciated, fifty-pound husband on her back, her children trailing behind. If there is room on the floor—if someone has died during the night—she and her family receive that space. If no one has died, she must make a space somehow in the hallway or on the landing of the stairs. People die quickly, once they get here, having waited so long before seeking help. That becomes a blessing for those faced with destitute victims who’ve travel
ed great distances in search of medicine and cure.
By now they know there is no cure. And no medicine, either, other than food, which is in short supply. Watery porridge twice a day.
Among the students who’ve been stricken there is a belief in all kinds of plots against them, hatched by foreigners. Or by their own government. It is bitter to watch them die: their country’s future doctors, dentists, carpenters and engineers. Their country’s fathers and mothers. Teachers. Dancers, singers, rebels, hell-raisers, poets.
Adam spends most of his time talking with the students, the intellectuals. He tells them he has heard that people in a neighboring country were first infected by scientists who injected them with a contaminated vaccine against polio. The vaccine had been made from cultures taken from the kidneys of the green monkey. The vaccine, though presumably a prophylactic against polio, had not been purified, and carried with it the immune deficiency virus that causes AIDS.
One dying student disagrees with this. That’s not the story I heard, he says. I heard Africans caught AIDS not from the green monkey’s kidney but from his teeth! There are helpless derisive snorts at this modern version of the dog-bites-man story. The intellectuals conclude it must have been an experiment, like the one conducted on black men in Alabama, who were injected with the virus that causes syphilis, then studied as they sickened and died. The kind of experiment that would not have been hazarded on European or white American subjects. That they die holding this belief, that an African life is made for experiments, and is expendable, is almost more than I can bear.
Tashi is convinced that the little girls who are dying, and the women too, are infected by the unwashed, unsterilized sharp stones, tin tops, bits of glass, rusty razors and grungy knives used by the tsunga. Who might mutilate twenty children without cleaning her instrument. There is also the fact that almost every act of intercourse involves tearing and bleeding, especially in a woman’s early years. The opening that is made will never enlarge on its own, but must always be forced. Because of this, infections and open sores are commonplace.
The anal intercourse kills women too, Adam says sadly one day, after a sweet-faced, woeful-eyed young woman has died. Her husband, distraught, and also stricken with the disease, explained to Adam that although they had been married three years they had no children because he had been unable to sleep with her as a man does normally with his wife. She had cried so, and bled. He had loved her, he said, but not like a man. His fear of causing her pain, he said, had cost them children. He had no understanding that the way in which he had made love to her had cost her, and him, her life. Though she was but one wife, of four, the number sanctioned by Islam and the Prophet, still it had been as though she were the only wife he had, he said, weeping. Because she alone had been capable of making him laugh. Even her name, Hapi, had sounded, he thought, something like the American word for fun.
OLIVIA
BUT WHY DID YOU CONFESS? I ask Tashi. I know you didn’t do it. You couldn’t have.
Olivia, she says, laughing with all her teeth, it would kill me to get any older. There is nothing more of this life I need to see. What I have already experienced is more than enough. Besides, she says soberly, maybe death is easier than life, as pregnancy is easier than birth.
TASHI
BUT TASHI, Olivia says, clinging to my neck.
Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do it to your son. Don’t do it to Adam. Don’t do it to me.
Olivia, I say, listen to yourself. Surely you remember having said those words to me before.
She looks blank.
When I was on the donkey, half-naked, I remind her. On my way to the Mbele camp.
Yes, she fairly shouts. And look what happened. You’ve paid for not listening to me all your life.
And I intend to keep on paying, I say.
But why? she asks. Forgive me for saying so, please. But it seems so stupid.
Because when I disobey you, the outsider, even if it is wrong, I am being what is left of myself. And that sliver of myself is all I now have left.
They’ll kill you, she says. And you are innocent!
Well, I say. Yes and no.
I am puzzled, she says, frowning.
You are right, Olivia, that I did not kill M’Lissa. I am grateful, I say, for your confidence in me. M’Lissa did die under her own power, which, even at the end, was considerable; she seemed to get stronger, rather than weaker, with age. Hers was an evil power, barely acquainted, any longer, with good. It is for not killing her—in the name of the suffering she caused—that I am guilty. I do not, by the way, want this known.
What? That you didn’t kill her? But why?
Because women are cowards, and do not need to be reminded that we are.
M’LISSA
THE DEATH OF YOUR SISTER—what was her name?—was your stupid mother Nafa’s fault. It was not absolutely sure the chief would make us return to circumcision. After all, he was always grinning into the faces of the white missionaries and telling them he was a modern man. Not a barbarian, which he could have been, for they called the “bath” barbaric. He was chief, they said, he could stop it. Or was he chief? So of course he stopped it, to prove to them he was chief. His decision had nothing to do with us. One heard his own wives screaming when their time came. Did he care? No. Every man’s wife screamed at the appropriate time.
Her name, I say, was Dura. She was small, thin; there was a crescent-shaped scar just above her lip; when she smiled it seemed to slide into her cheek.
I could lie, says M’Lissa, and tell you I remember her. After all the years I did this work, faces are the last thing I remember. If she’d been hermaphroditic, then perhaps.
No, I say. I believe she was normal.
It is all normal, as far as that goes, says M’Lissa. You didn’t make it, so who are you to judge?
I am nobody, I say. You made sure of that.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself! she says. You are like your mother. If Dura is not bathed, she said, no one will marry her. She never seemed to notice no one had ever married me, and that I lived anyway. This was even before the white missionaries left. Being bathed did not kill me, she said. And my husband has always been patient with me. Well, M’Lissa snorts, your father spread himself among six wives; he could afford patience.
As soon as she heard the new missionaries were black, she felt certain the village would be returned to all its former ways and that uncircumcised girls would be punished. She could not imagine a black person that was not Olinkan, and she thought all Olinkans demanded their daughters be bathed. I told her to wait. But no. She was the kind of woman who jumps even before the man says boo. Your mother helped me hold your sister down.
Stop, I say. Even if she were lying, as I now knew she often did, I could not bear to hear it.
But she says, No, I will not stop. You are mad, but you are not mad enough. Don’t you think your mother might have told you how Dura died? She didn’t, did she? That she was that one in a hundred girls so constructed that the slightest scratch made her bleed like a stuck cow. She had noticed this herself, from trying to stop the bleeding of the scratches your sister got while playing. When I bathed you, this was something of which I thought.
And yet you said nothing, I say, though you might have killed me just as you killed Dura.
You’d come so far, and were so foolish, says M’Lissa. Besides, by then I did not care.
PART TWENTY
ADAM
FATHER, HEAR MY CONFESSION.
It is in vain that I tell the young man I am not a priest. He has been waiting among the rest to die, since we first visited Tashi in the prison. His face is covered with purple lesions, his head is bald, his slight frame little more than bones. What distinguished him from the beginning, when I hunkered down to speak to him, was his insistence that he was a medical student: “With many years in university,” he’d said, with a weak, superior flutter of his hand. This, and the fact that as he grew even weaker, his large
brown eyes bruised with fear, he took to drawing himself up on his haunches and crossing his elbows on top of his head. He would remain in this odd position, whimpering, for hours; until he fell over in weariness or was pushed over by someone moving past.
I had always resisted intimacy with the victims. It was as if my heart, under the burden of my own suffering, and having already witnessed so much human devastation, had gone numb.
However: My name is Hartford, he said, with a grimness to match my own. And yet, because of the unexpected associations evoked by his name (an elk, an American city in Connecticut and an insurance company), I smiled. He seemed charmed, as a child might be, by this response, and appeared to savor it, as a little child might a sweet. Wonderingly he withdrew the clawlike hand that had snagged my sleeve, and placed it against his own cracked, unsmiling lips.
Everything he said and did was in slow motion; it was several minutes before he spoke again.
In the old days, he said, whispering, there was more harmony in the world between man and creature. I have heard this said: in truth, how can I know? In the not so old days we people were hunted down and killed or stolen from our land and families to work for other people far across the sea. Hunted we were, like we hunt the monkey and the chimpanzee.
Here Hartford groaned and closed his eyes. Bubbles of perspiration burst on his skin. It was as if, suddenly, his body became a fountain. I mopped his skin with the tattered towel I carried with me, and when the sweating stopped, placed my hand on his swollen knee, which, protruding beneath the skin of his leg, was like a black coconut.
Father, he said, I am not a medical student. That is a lie I have told to salvage my self-respect.
I patted his knee, somehow startled at the intensity of his remorse; how difficult it was for him to disgorge these few words of shame. Besides, I honestly did not care.