by Alice Walker
Confronted by our parents we stick to the lie agreed upon. They place me on a bench on the porch and I close my left eye while they examine the right. There is a tree growing from underneath the porch that climbs past the railing to the roof. It is the last thing my right eye sees. I watch as its trunk, its branches, and then its leaves are blotted out by the rising blood.
I am in shock. First there is intense fever, which my father tries to break using lily leaves bound around my head. Then there are chills: my mother tries to get me to eat soup. Eventually, I do not know how, my parents learn what has happened. A week after the “accident” they take me to see a doctor. “Why did you wait so long to come?” he asks, looking into my eye and shaking his head. “Eyes are sympathetic,” he says. “If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too.”
This comment of the doctor’s terrifies me. But it is really how I look that bothers me most. Where the BB pellet struck there is a glob of whitish scar tissue, a hideous cataract, on my eye. Now when I stare at people—a favorite pastime, up to now—they will stare back. Not at the “cute” little girl, but at her scar. For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head.
Years later, in the throes of a mid-life crisis, I ask my mother and sister whether I changed after the “accident.” “No,” they say, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
What do I mean?
I am eight, and, for the first time, doing poorly in school, where I have been something of a whiz since I was four. We have just moved to the place where the “accident” occurred.
We do not know any of the people around us because this is a different county. The only time I see the friends I knew is when we go back to our old church. The new school is the former state penitentiary. It is a large stone building, cold and drafty, crammed to overflowing with boisterous, ill-disciplined children. On the third floor there is a huge circular imprint of some partition that has been torn out.
“What used to be here?” I ask a sullen girl next to me on our way past it to lunch.
“The electric chair,” says she.
At night I have nightmares about the electric chair, and about all the people reputedly “fried” in it. I am afraid of the school, where all the students seem to be budding criminals.
“What’s the matter with your eye?” they ask, critically.
When I don’t answer (I cannot decide whether it was an “accident” or not), they shove me, insist on a fight.
My brother, the one who created the story about the wire, comes to my rescue. But then brags so much about “protecting” me, I become sick.
After months of torture at the school, my parents decide to send me back to our old community, to my old school. I live with my grandparents and the teacher they board. But there is no room for Phoebe, my cat. By the time my grandparents decide there is room, and I ask for my cat, she cannot be found. Miss Yarborough, the boarding teacher, takes me under her wing, and begins to teach me to play the piano. But soon she marries an African—a “prince,” she says—and is whisked away to his continent.
At my old school there is at least one teacher who loves me. She is the teacher who “knew me before I was born” and bought my first baby clothes. It is she who makes life bearable. It is her presence that finally helps me turn on the one child at the school who continually calls me “one-eyed bitch.” One day I simply grab him by his coat and beat him until I am satisfied. It is my teacher who tells me my mother is ill.
My mother is lying in bed in the middle of the day, something I have never seen. She is in too much pain to speak. She has an abscess in her ear. I stand looking down on her, knowing that if she dies, I cannot live. She is being treated with warm oils and hot bricks held against her cheek. Finally a doctor comes. But I must go back to my grandparents’ house. The weeks pass but I am hardly aware of it. All I know is that my mother might die, my father is not so jolly, my brothers still have their guns, and I am the one sent away from home.
“You did not change,” they say.
Did I imagine the anguish of never looking up?
I am twelve. When relatives come to visit I hide in my room. My cousin Brenda, just my age, whose father works in the post office and whose mother is a nurse, comes to find me. “Hello,” she says. And then she asks, looking at my recent school picture, which I did not want taken, and on which the “glob,” as I think of it, is clearly visible, “You still can’t see out of that eye?”
“No,” I say, and flop back on the bed over my book.
That night, as I do almost every night, I abuse my eye. I rant and rave at it, in front of the mirror. I plead with it to clear up before morning. I tell it I hate and despise it. I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty.
“You did not change,” they say.
I am fourteen and baby-sitting for my brother Bill, who lives in Boston. He is my favorite brother and there is a strong bond between us. Understanding my feelings of shame and ugliness he and his wife take me to a local hospital, where the “glob” is removed by a doctor named O. Henry. There is still a small bluish crater where the scar tissue was, but the ugly white stuff is gone. Almost immediately I become a different person from the girl who does not raise her head. Or so I think. Now that I’ve raised my head I win the boyfriend of my dreams. Now that I’ve raised my head I have plenty of friends. Now that I’ve raised my head classwork comes from my lips as faultlessly as Easter speeches did, and I leave high school as valedictorian, most popular student, and queen, hardly believing my luck. Ironically, the girl who was voted most beautiful in our class (and was) was later shot twice through the chest by a male companion, using a “real” gun, while she was pregnant. But that’s another story in itself. Or is it?
“You did not change,” they say.
It is now thirty years since the “accident.” A beautiful journalist comes to visit and to interview me. She is going to write a cover story for her magazine that focuses on my latest book. “Decide how you want to look on the cover,” she says. “Glamorous, or whatever.”
Never mind “glamorous,” it is the “whatever” that I hear. Suddenly all I can think of is whether I will get enough sleep the night before the photography session: if I don’t, my eye will be tired and wander, as blind eyes will.
At night in bed with my lover I think up reasons why I should not appear on the cover of a magazine. “My meanest critics will say I’ve sold out,” I say. “My family will now realize I write scandalous books.”
“But what’s the real reason you don’t want to do this?” he asks.
“Because in all probability,” I say in a rush, “my eye won’t be straight.”
“It will be straight enough,” he says. Then, “Besides, I thought you’d made your peace with that.”
And I suddenly remember that I have.
I remember:
I am talking to my brother Jimmy, asking if he remembers anything unusual about the day I was shot. He does not know I consider that day the last time my father, with his sweet home remedy of cool lily leaves, chose me, and that I suffered and raged inside because of this. “Well,” he says, “all I remember is standing by the side of the highway with Daddy, trying to flag down a car. A white man stopped, but when Daddy said he needed somebody to take his little girl to the doctor, he drove off.”
I remember:
I am in the desert for the first time. I fall totally in love with it. I am so overwhelmed by its beauty, I confront for the first time, consciously, the meaning of the doctor’s words years ago: “Eyes are sympathetic. If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too.” I realize I have dashed about the world madly, looking at this, looking at that, storing up images against the fading of the light. But I might have missed seeing the desert! The shock of that possibility—and gratitude for over twenty-five years of sight—sends me literally to my knees. Poem after poem comes—which is perhaps how poets pray.
ON SIGHT
I am so thankful I have seen
>
The Desert
And the creatures in the desert
And the desert Itself.
The desert has its own moon
Which I have seen
With my own eye.
There is no flag on it.
Trees of the desert have arms
All of which are always up
That is because the moon is up
The sun is up
Also the sky
The stars
Clouds
None with flags.
If there were flags, I doubt
the trees would point.
Would you?
But mostly, I remember this:
I am twenty-seven, and my baby daughter is almost three. Since her birth I have worried about her discovery that her mother’s eyes are different from other people’s. Will she be embarrassed? I think. What will she say? Every day she watches a television program called “Big Blue Marble.” It begins with a picture of the earth as it appears from the moon. It is bluish, a little battered-looking, but full of light, with whitish clouds swirling around it. Every time I see it I weep with love, as if it is a picture of Grandma’s house. One day when I am putting Rebecca down for her nap, she suddenly focuses on my eye. Something inside me cringes, gets ready to try to protect myself. All children are cruel about physical differences, I know from experience, and that they don’t always mean to be is another matter. I assume Rebecca will be the same.
But no-o-o-o. She studies my face intently as we stand, her inside and me outside her crib. She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyerlike as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” (As in, “Don’t be alarmed, or do anything crazy.”) And then, gently, but with great interest: “Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?”
For the most part, the pain left then. (So what, if my brothers grew up to buy even more powerful pellet guns for their sons and to carry real guns themselves. So what, if a young “Morehouse man” once nearly fell off the steps of Trevor Arnett Library because he thought my eyes were blue.) Crying and laughing I ran to the bathroom, while Rebecca mumbled and sang herself off to sleep. Yes indeed, I realized, looking into the mirror. There was a world in my eye. And I saw that it was possible to love it: that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, I did love it. Even to see it drifting out of orbit in boredom, or rolling up out of fatigue, not to mention floating back at attention in excitement (bearing witness, a friend has called it), deeply suitable to my personality, and even characteristic of me.
That night I dream I am dancing to Stevie Wonder’s song “Always” (the name of the song is really “As,” but I hear it as “Always”). As I dance, whirling and joyous, happier than I’ve ever been in my life, another bright-faced dancer joins me. We dance and kiss each other and hold each other through the night. The other dancer has obviously come through all right, as I have done. She is beautiful, whole and free. And she is also me.
1983
ONE CHILD OF ONE’S OWN: A MEANINGFUL DIGRESSION WITHIN THE WORK(S)
It is an honor for me to speak on a day that honors Muriel Rukeyser.* And the creation of the address I am about to give is especially indebted to Muriel—after all these years since I was her student—because it is about something always dear to her; something she did not teach from texts, but with her own life … that is, not merely the necessity of confirming one’s self in a time of confrontation, but the confirmation of the child, the Life of One’s Child, against the odds, always.
I THINK MURIEL WAS the only teacher I ever had who brought the fundamentally important, joyous reality of The Child into the classroom. There to exist at ease among Wordsworth’s daffodils, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hopkins’s Pied Beauties … She taught no separations where there are, in fact, none—which so much of the instruction in the world is expressly for. If the world contains War, it also contains The Child. If the world contains Hunger, Nuclear Reactors, Fascists, it nevertheless contains The Child.
To some of us—artists, writers, poets, jugglers—The Child is perceived as threat, as danger, as enemy. In truth, society is badly arranged for children to be taken into happy account. How many of us can say we have never forgotten The Child? I cannot say this.
But I can say I am learning not to forget.
Muriel viewed The Child as, I think, she viewed herself: as teacher, student, poet, and friend. And to The Child, she held herself, her life, accountable. I do not know what struggles brought Muriel to her belief in the centrality of The Child. For me, there has been conflict, struggle, occasional defeat—not only in affirming the life of my own child (children) at all costs, but also in seeing in that affirmation a fond acceptance and confirmation of myself in a world that would deny me the untrampled blossoming of my own existence.
Not surprisingly, I have found this to be political in the deepest sense.
For those of us who both love and fear The Child—because of the work we do—but who would be lovers only, if we could, I propose and defend a plan of life that encourages one child of one’s own, which I consider a meaningful—some might say necessary—digression within the work(s).
It is perfectly true that I, like many other women who work, especially as writers, was terrified of having children. I feared being fractured by the experience if not overwhelmed. I thought the quality of my writing would be considerably diminished by motherhood—that nothing that was good for my writing could come out of having children.
My first mistake was in thinking “children” instead of “child.” My second was in seeing The Child as my enemy rather than the racism and sexism of an oppressive capitalist society. My third was in believing none of the benefits of having a child would accrue to my writing.
In fact, I had bought the prevailing sexist directive: you have to have balls (be a man) to write. In my opinion, having a child is easily the equivalent of having balls. In truth, it is more than equivalent: ballsdom is surpassed.
Someone asked me once whether I thought women artists should have children, and, since we were beyond discussing why this question is never asked artists who are men, I gave my answer promptly.
“Yes,” I said, somewhat to my surprise. And, as if to amend my rashness, I added: “They should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one.”
“Why only one?” this Someone wanted to know.
“Because with one you can move,” I said. “With more than one you’re a sitting duck.”
The year after my only child, Rebecca, was born, my mother offered me uncharacteristically bad advice: “You should have another one soon,” said she, “so that Rebecca will have someone to play with, and so you can get it all over with faster.”
Such advice does not come from what a woman recalls of her own experience. It comes from a pool of such misguidance women have collected over the millennia to help themselves feel less foolish for having more than one child. This pool is called, desperately, pitiably, “‘Women’s Wisdom.” In fact, it should be called “Women’s Folly.”
The rebellious, generally pithy advice that comes from a woman’s own experience more often resembles my mother’s automatic response to any woman she meets who pines for children but has been serenely blessed with none: “If the Lord sets you free, be free indeed.” This crafty justification of both nonconformity and a shameless reveling in the resultant freedom is what women and slaves everywhere and in every age since the Old Testament have appropriated from the Bible.
“No thank you,” I replied. “I will never have another child out of this body, again.”
“But why do you say that?” she asked breathlessly, perhaps stunned by my redundancy. “You married a man who’s a wonderful fatherly type. He has so much love in him he should have fifty children running around his feet.”
I saw myself sweeping t
hem out from around his feet like so many ants. If they’re running around his feet for the two hours between the time he comes home from the office and the time we put them to bed, I thought, they’d be underneath my desk all day. Sweep. Sweep.
My mother continued. “Why,” she said, “until my fifth child I was like a young girl. I could pick up and go anywhere I wanted to.” She was a young girl. She was still under twenty-five when her fifth child was born, my age when I became pregnant with Rebecca. Besides, since I am the last child in a family of eight, this image of nimble flight is not the one lodged forever in my mind. I remember a woman struggling to get everyone else dressed for church on Sunday and only with the greatest effort being able to get ready on time herself. But, since I am not easily seduced by the charms of painful past experience, recalled in present tranquillity, I did not bring this up.
At the time my mother could “pick up and go” with five children, she and my father traveled, usually, by wagon. I can see how that would have been pleasant: it is pleasant still in some countries—in parts of China, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, Greece, and other places. A couple of slow mules, ambling along a bright Southern road, the smell of pine and honeysuckle, absence of smog, birds chirping. Those five, dear little voices piping up in back of the wagon seat, healthy from natural foods: Plums! Bird! Tree! Flowers! Scuppernongs! Enchanting.
“The other reason I will never have another child out of this body is because having a child hurts, even more than toothache (and I am sure no one who has had toothache but not childbirth can imagine this), and it changes the body.”
Well, there are several responses from the general supply of Women’s Folly my mother could have chosen to answer this. She chose them all.
“That little pain," she scoffed (although, caught in a moment of weakness, she has let slip that during my very own birth the pain was so severe she could not speak, not even to tell the midwife I had been born, and that because of the pain she was sure she would die—a thought that no doubt, under the circumstances, afforded relief. Instead, she blacked out, causing me to be almost smothered by the bedclothes). “That pain is over before you know it.” That is response number one. Number two is, “The thing about that kind of pain is that it does a funny thing to a woman [Uh-oh, I thought, this is going to be the Women’s Folly companion to the women-sure-are-funny-creatures stuff]; looks like the more it hurts you to give birth, the more you love the child.” (Is that why she loves me so much, I wonder. Naturally, I had wanted to be loved for myself, not for her pain.) Number three: “Sometimes the pain, they say, isn’t even real. Well, not as real as it feels at the time.” (This one deserves comment made only with blows, and is one of the reasons women sometimes experience muscle spasms around their mothers.) And then, number four, the one that angers me most of all: “Another thing about the pain, you soon forget it.”