The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You

by Dorothy Bryant

  “How can we help?”

  “We try to take some of the pain on ourselves, to share it. We try to give some of our strength for the hard work. We try to make the girl feel happy that, once she has done this, she need no longer carry the burden of the child alone. Then she will labor in joy. At the least, we give the warmth of our bodies surrounding her.”

  When we entered the la-ka, the girl was standing near the fire-pit with three boys. Each person who entered stopped by her to embrace her or to kiss her. She was smiling and seemed quite relaxed, but every two or three minutes her eyes blinked rapidly and she trembled as if gripped and shaken by a great fist. Sometimes she would sit down or lie down. Then she would get up and walk around, leaning on two of the boys.

  “Who are those three boys?” I asked.

  “They are the fathers,” said Chil-sing.

  “They can’t all be the father,” I retorted.

  Chil-sing shrugged. “One must be, but how can they know which one? So all must do their part. She lay with all three.”

  The walking and sitting went on for hours, while everyone sat in silent concentration.

  Then, as she stood leaning on a boy, a great gush of water poured from under her tunic. The boys tipped her back, supporting her so that she lay half sitting up. Sounds of gutteral straining came from her throat, no screams, but moans of the agony of an effort which reached the limits of human endurance. Groans were rising all around me, and tears poured down contorted faces.

  It lasted for about half an hour, and it seemed like forever. I had never seen a birth. I felt sick and ashamed of my weak stomach, but when we heard the cry of the baby, Salvatore turned to me and said, “Fine, my kin, you did your part well.”

  “I have never seen this before,” I said.

  “Why not? Many, many more children are born in the outside world.”

  “But not where they can be seen.”

  “That must make it very hard for the mother.”

  “No, no, it is not …”

  “How do you know if you have never seen?”

  Everyone was taking deep breaths now and leaning back or stretching. The girl who had given birth raised her head and nodded. Then everyone began to get up. They all went straight down to the place where she lay, and everyone helped to clean up the blood and to make a fresh place for her and the baby to lie near the fire pit. She would stay in the la-ka, Salvatore told me, constantly attended by the fathers of the child, near the warm fire, for three days, then would take her baby and walk back to her ka.

  As we left Augustine took my hand.

  “You should not have been here,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I could not say anymore. I was terrified for her. She was no longer young, and in these crude conditions, anything could happen. “Your … your mother …”

  “… died in childbirth here? Yes, but she had just come from the world and was greatly weakened by it. I will not die.”

  “How many fathers attended you in your first birth?” She looked at me. Then I saw her eyebrow rise and her mouth curve into a smile.

  “How many?” I demanded.

  She laughed outright and pinched me. Her greenish butterfly seemed to dance around her ear. Then she pretended to count on her fingers, exhausting all of them and then starting again.

  I laughed. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I should be afraid for your safety and I’m jealous over something that happened years ago.”

  “I would rather have you suffer jealousy than fear, but rather you not suffer at all, my love.”

  I was faithful to Augustine during this time. It was the first time I had ever denied myself sex for any reason. I jokingly told myself that it would be a new experience, and that maybe the deprivation would start me dreaming again, if only the sex dreams of an adolescent. I wavered from time to time when I saw the young girls smiling invitingly at every male they saw. But I could not look at one of those children without seeing the straining face of the girl in childbirth. Somewhat surprisingly to me, I found that I did not want to be the cause of that.

  And the older women, less likely to become pregnant, stuck to one partner. Now that I knew the people better, I could identify couples, some of whom slept together in the same ka, some of whom did not. I gradually learned that such “marriages” might last one season or many, or even—but rarely—for a lifetime. But there was no promiscuity among the mature, and no parenthood, except for me.

  “I seem to have upset the natural order of things,” I told Salvatore.

  He smiled. “When outsiders come, they often conceive children. That is what varies our physical type. That is healthy. But in general our numbers remain the same and not many children are born. No woman wants to go through pregnancy and birth again once she knows what it is. Too many children are donagdeo.”

  I nodded. “Starvation.”

  “Much worse. Children are … they are bundles of appetites, hungers. They come straight out of the dream, yet are farthest from it. Their humanity is so raw, so …”

  I laughed. “Screaming egotists. It’s interesting you admit that. We don’t, out in the world. We call them innocent, pure …”

  “They are pure desire. And they must not be thwarted, for if they are they will never grow. They must give up gradually of their own free will. To force is donagdeo.” I remembered that my gang had been made up of children. “They must try everything, have everything—too many would destroy our way of life faster than any invasion from outside.”

  “So that’s why you play down sex, dress alike, and cover yourselves.”

  Salvatore shook his head. “Why would we want to play down the creative force of the universe?”

  I tried to explain to him what I meant, making comparisons between Ata and the outside world, but he kept insisting that what I called an emphasis on sex outside was really a total loss and de-emphasis by Atan standards. When he saw that I was talking about the physical act of sex he looked shocked. “But is that all you mean by sex?” And we didn’t seem to be able to get beyond that; we got bogged down in translation.

  I changed the subject. “But is there never any jealousy, any possessiveness, any …”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes, we are of the human race, aren’t we? Look around you, my kin, and you will see all the emotions and desires of the world being battled. Jealousy is such an ugly feeling. One would do anything rather than be filled with that sick feeling. We struggle against it. Sometimes it can ruin dreams for a whole season. So we do our best to avoid it if we can, to lose it if we have it.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “My kin, we are as weak as all people. But when we fall, we get up again to live for the dream.”

  The other two girls gave birth within a week. During the second birth, Augustine remained in a hol-ka, where she had been for two days. No one said anything when I sat beside her hol-ka waiting. At dusk, Augustine came out. “It is time for me to go to the Life Tree,” she said.

  I said she should go directly to the la-ka, where a warm fire would be blazing, but she refused. All night she sat under the Life Tree. I stayed with her, and at times I asked if she needed anything or if there was something I could do. Then I saw that I was only interrupting her concentration. She had put herself into a trance, was quite warm, and made no sign of feeling the pains.

  Just as the sky was becoming gray, she opened her eyes, got up, and went into the la-ka. Within a few minutes all the people of the village were there, though no one had been sent to get them. I helped her to lower herself to the bed of clean grass that had been made beside the fire, and I held her in my arms as she lay back against me, her knees bent and her feet flat on the ground. She seemed to be looking at the fire from between her knees, over her great belly. I saw the belly suddenly flatten somewhat and heard the rush of water. Then I watched it heave in great, steady, constant contractions, like the heaving of earth in an earthquake. I wished with all my might to take some of the pain from her. I looked at her face, expecting to see
it contorted with the effort, but her face was still, serene, gleaming in the glow of the fire on which her narrowed eyes fixed in deep concentration.

  I heard the baby cry. Augustine’s belly heaved again. Then her eyes blinked; she looked down to the pool between her legs, picked up the baby and lay it across her belly. She winced slightly as the afterbirth was expelled, then looked up at me and smiled. Her eyes closed and she fell into a deep sleep, there in my arms.

  I cannot describe the feeling I had during those few minutes when she slept in my arms with the slimy little baby lying across her. Sweat and tears ran down my face as I held her and the people came to clean up, to wash the baby and to prepare a clean place for us to rest beside the fire. The baby was a girl, like Augustine, but the color of brown sugar.

  We stayed in the la-ka for three days, and I had Augustine entirely to myself, like a child with a favorite toy. It was like a honeymoon, except that instead of sex play, I fed her and watched her nurse the baby, a voluptuous experience for both of them, after which Augustine lay like a woman satiated with sex. I fed her and petted her and held the baby when she was not nursing. On the third day Augustine bounced up in a very businesslike way, as if we had indulged ourselves long enough, and I followed her back to the ka, carrying the baby.

  As we entered it early in the morning, Augustine said to everyone, “Now we are twelve again, a complete sleeping wheel.”

  I did not get to enjoy my lugubrious paternity for long. Except when Augustine was nursing the baby, she seldom touched it, nor did I. The others took turns caring for the infant, rocking it, holding it, cleaning it. The baby never cried. At her first restless grunts of hunger, someone heard and brought her to Augustine to nurse. At any other stirrings, she Was held and rocked. Her first sound was a coo of pleasure at recognizing Chil-sing’s face as he bent over her.

  After a few weeks, the baby was held and played with by the older children from different kas. She was truly, from the beginning, not our baby. She belonged to everyone.

  To my increasing astonishment, I remained celibate until one day Augustine took me by the hand and led me to our place by the river where I gently made love to her.

  During the period of her nursing, Augustine did no work in the fields, but tended the herbs inside the village with the old and young, or wove mats. A good deal of the time she simply sat in front of the ka in rapt concentration, with a look on her face that seldom left it even when she did other work. There was always a circle of children and animals around her, drawn to her as were the constant attendant butterflies whose size and colors increased as the days grew warmer.

  I helped in the planting, and every afternoon, came to take Augustine to our place by the river. She told me that while she was nursing there was no danger of conceiving; we could make love any time. Our lovemaking was different now, not so passionate as before, but steady as the stream that ran beside us. And it was after lovemaking, after our bodily orgasm, that the best of the lovemaking began. After a nap of a few moments, we both awoke to caresses and kisses, long dreamy silences curled in each other’s arms, touching that led to no heat of passion but held us as if floating in a warm ocean. Sometimes we forgot to make love at all and simply lay together suspended.

  At these times she was more willing to talk, if I started. This was how I learned about names.

  “What shall we name the baby?” I asked her one day.

  “We do not name it.”

  “Who does?”

  “The child, kin itself must find a name.”

  “In a dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “When does this dream come, the dream that gives her a name?”

  “It varies. Jamal dreamed his name, but that is rare. My name came only shortly before you came here. Some are very old before they learn their name.”

  “I am still nameless.”

  “Yes. Some have many names before they die. A few have died nameless.”

  “I’ll never get a name. I seem to have stopped dreaming since the winter fast.”

  She didn’t answer. I was getting so that I could tell when she drifted away from me. I could call her right back again and usually did, but sometimes I just watched her instead. Gradually I stopped being jealous of her drifting to some place where I could not follow, and simply enjoyed watching her face. For if I let her stay there, instead of calling her back to me, I seemed to get some echo, some reflection of what it was that drew her away. It was like a warm glow coming from her blue eyes.

  Except for the hour or two I spent with her every afternoon, my days were filled with activity. My first thought was to try to increase the food supply so that the winter fast need not be so severe. I was told that last winter had been longer than usual, but that all had come through very well. No one tried to stop me from making their agricultural methods more efficient. No one even mentioned the fact that I knew nothing about agriculture.

  The planting, like the layout of the village, was done according to dreams. There was what looked like a hodge-podge of growth, nothing planted in rows as I was used to seeing it, an incredible variety of plants all mixed together, planted in rotation at times and in places suggested in dreams. Some plots were individually planted, according to someone’s dream of the night before, and large areas beyond the hills, which I felt should be cultivated, were left alone because they had not yet appeared in anyone’s planting dreams. Sometimes an area was abandoned for a season or more because it was, in a dream, shown unfit, and that area became the latrine area for the time. I suppose we were fertilizing the soil and helping it to recover for more planting.

  The first task of small children was to pick bugs off the plants or keep away the animals, like my little goat. The rest of us planted and tended the soil with our hands and feet and the crudest of sticks or bones. When I described the farm machinery of the world, the people only smiled. “You mean you must dig up metal, and prepare it, and design machinery, and build machinery and …” They made the process sound like enormously more work than we were doing.

  It was only much later that I came to any realization of the intricate pattern of cultivation. Plants which needed a great deal of sun formed umbrellas over those that needed shade. Certain plants attracted bugs antagonistic to those attracted by the nearest other plants. Seemingly irregular swirls of planting patterns repeated themselves, year after year, possibly following lines of underground channels of water. Crops flourished where dreams directed they be planted.

  The people were right. They operated with knowledge far deeper than I could ever reach—I who could not even dream.

  There was constant work to do. But if everyone helped there was never too much to do. There was always time for the hol-ka or for a long walk around the island to gather wild grass for the weaving. And the yield was always enough. During that year, Augustine came out to the fields three times. Each time she pointed out an area that had appeared in her dreams and suggested we plant one or two varieties there. Those crops did especially well.

  I need hardly add that I knew better than to suggest that we eat birds or animals, or even fish. They would have reacted the same way as if I had told them we should eat the children. When animals died, their bones and skins were taken (after the birds had picked them clean) and used for many things. But no one would have thought of killing any of them.

  Some of the bones we used as tools looked suspiciously like those of a human rib cage. “They are,” answered Chil-sing. At the next funeral I learned that bodies were taken to a high cliff over the sea where they were picked clean by large birds within a couple of days. Then the skull was buried and the rest of the bones taken back to the village and thrown into the pile of tools, used until broken and the chips buried in the fields. I might once have been shocked by this. But now it seemed very sensible and in no way disrespectful of the dead. How could there be disrespect toward those who, these people believed, had simply been wholly liberated into their dreams, freed from the bones that now dug
the soil?

  That funeral was a very interesting one. The boy who died could not have been more than twenty and stood out from the others because he was an exception to their general good health. He was somehow a bit lopsided, incapable of much work, and he hardly spoke at all. He was frail and subject to some kind of seizures that resembled epilepsy. When he came out of a seizure, he could talk without interruption for an hour, listened to intently by the people of his ka, who sometimes told the blazing visions of his seizures to others. He died during one of these seizures.

  After the procession to the cliff, where his naked body was laid with arms outstretched and torches burning at the head and the feet, I asked Sbgai about him.

  “He was that way from birth,” said Sbgai as he lumbered on ahead of me back to the village.

  “It was a sickness from birth,” I said. “An imperfection.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No, definitely.”

  Sbgai turned and looked at me. “Perhaps,” he declared decisively. Then he went on walking.

  “In the world,” I said, “he would have been put into a hospital and cared for until he died.”

  “Hidden from sight,” said Sbgai.

  “Well, he wasn’t a pretty sight,” I answered.

  “A pretty sight!” Sbgai growled and the dirt seemed to fly from his thumping steps. “A pretty sight! We are here for more than a pretty sight. How do we know the way into the deeper dream? Or the price to pay for it. How can we know anything, we who see so little. Maybe he saw more, maybe less. Who can know?”

  “What you’re saying is that you can’t discriminate between the messages of a prophet and the ravings from a damaged brain.”

  “Right.”

  “You know, Sbgai, you are not a primitive people. I think you are a very advanced people. But you have beliefs that I associate with very primitive, unknowing people. Such people often, in their ignorance, consider the crippled or the insane sacred. Such an idea, I’m afraid, could lead to many blind alleys in our search for deeper dreams.”

  “All are sacred.”