Anything We Love Can Be Saved

by Alice Walker

  Well, there ahead of us was the gate. It was standing wide open. The driver stopped and we all got out of the car.

  Since he’d brought us where we wanted to go, we tried to pay him and send him on his way, asking him to return for us in a bit. But no. He asked us, “Don’t you want to go inside the gate?” “More than anything,” I said. But even after coming so far, I couldn’t bring myself to trespass. I stood craning my neck and standing on tiptoe, trying to get a glimpse of something, anything, through the trees.

  “No, no,” our guide said, dismissing my efforts. And off he went through the gate and down to the house. In a few minutes we heard him knocking on a door. Voices. Soon we saw him striding back, smiling and beckoning us forward.

  Suddenly, there it was. The lake, the thick stone walls of the tower. The door to the courtyard. Once more I hesitated. Perhaps the people inside had said yes to the guide. Perhaps they’d say no to us. I felt we should give them a second chance. I asked the guide to knock again. A voice said, “Come in.” Robert and I stood in the doorway long enough to be denied admittance, but there was no sign of that. Four young people, two men and two women, lazed about in the small yard by the lake, basking like geckos in the warm sun. We asked if we might look around. They said sure. And look around we did. Inside and outside the tower. In the loggia, Robert photographed me sitting in the sun in the doorway of the main house, and again with my fingers just grazing Jung’s hand-carved alchemical stone,* the stone that represents both transformation and transcendence. The guide/taxi driver photographed both of us. I stood transfixed before the symmetry of Jung’s woodpile.

  We stayed for half an hour, admiring more carved stones, stone towers, and lakeside view. Then, after thanking the young people, who seemed somewhat dazed by the sun, we were whisked to the Bollingen train station and sent on our way to Zurich. We were back in Amsterdam the same night.

  We fell asleep in our quiet hotel room overlooking a canal, exhausted but content. I felt especially fulfilled; I knew this was the last journey I had to make before beginning to write Possessing the Secret of Joy, a story whose subject frankly frightened me. An unpopular story. Even a taboo one. An ancient story. A modern story. A story in which I would call on Jung’s spirit to help me confront one of the most physically and psychologically destructive practices of our time (and of thousands of years before our time), a practice that undermines the collective health and wholeness of great numbers of people in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East and is rapidly finding a toehold in the Western world: the genital mutilation of women and girls.

  * This image would form the basis for the painting on the cover of Possessing the Secret of Joy.

  Frida, the Perfect Familiar

  Poking a Hole Through

  Five years ago I decided I was ready to share my life with a cat. I had had cats before, but things had gone wrong. When I was seven, we moved away from the house where my cat and I lived. She could not be found as my family packed, and so she was left behind. I missed her terribly, and hardened my heart against future attachments to creatures who might disappear. Since any creature one loves is likely to disappear, this was a major disservice to my heart. It was closed down, made smaller. The next cat I had was given to me and my daughter by a friendly publicist at my publishing company. Her name was Willis and my friend Hilda had rescued her from the Willis Avenue Bridge in New York City. As one would expect, given the heavy traffic on the bridge and the horrendous noise of its rattles and creaks, Willis was thoroughly traumatized. No matter. She was a living gift and therefore not returnable. It is fair to say that for the duration of our time with Willis we suffered right along with her. Feeding her, attempting to pet her, providing a place for her to sleep, murmuring sweet cajolings and endearments while she looked over her shoulder in terror, as if she expected at any moment to be run over.

  She would also cry. After several years our relationship became unendurable. One day as I was working and she was loudly crying, I picked her up, took her outside the building I was living in, in San Francisco, and left her. When my partner came home that evening, there she was, sitting in the flowerbed, still crying, still haunted. I looked very much a villain. I didn’t care. Noting this, my partner offered to take Willis to live with his sister, a saintly woman who loved animals, especially wounded ones, and who had as well the saintly name Teresa. This was good news to me. Willis retired to the Sierra foothills, where Teresa lived, and according to my partner, who visited his sister often, in the utter peace of spacious woodlands and sunny skies Willis mellowed into a rather laid-back country cat.

  Prior to this, while I still lived in New York, I had been given another cat. My husband and I had divorced; we shared custody of our daughter, and she took Willis with her when she stayed with him for a while. A well-meaning friend, seeing me catless, lonely, and crazed with the unexpected grief that only divorce can leave you, thought she had the answer to my needs. I named this cat Tuscaloosa, which means “Black Warrior” in Choctaw. As is clear from his name, I felt extremely vulnerable, suddenly all alone in the big city, and very much in need of protection. I have only good memories of him. We lived in a tiny three-room, second-story flat in Park Slope, Brooklyn; our landlords were civil and understanding gay white men who sometimes let Tuscaloosa play in their garden. Often, as I worked at my desk, which overlooked the street, Tuscaloosa sat at my feet. More often I wrote propped-up in bed; he snoozed, placid and warm, by my knees. Alas, after a year or so, I knew it was time to leave that apartment, leave Brooklyn, leave New York and the East Coast. I knew I would move to San Francisco, but not where I would live. I also knew, because my daughter told me, that Willis would soon be back in my life. Fortunately, Tuscaloosa had made friends with Chad, the little boy who lived upstairs, whose father was never around, and after discussing it with his mother, I decided to leave Tuscaloosa with him.

  For many years after the departures of Willis and Tuscaloosa I felt delightfully cat free. I had learned to meditate while still in Brooklyn; it was the only thing, other than time, that helped me recenter after my divorce. But I had also learned that any still, calmly breathing, warm object with a lap immediately attracts the leap of a cat. I could not shut Tuscaloosa away in another part of the flat. During my twenty minutes, morning and evening, of meditation, he’d scratch and complain until, exasperated, I opened the door. Nor could I ask my landlords to let him play in their garden every day. So now, as I sat in my new study in San Francisco, on a worn but sturdy couch I got from a salvage warehouse, and blissfully meditated without fear of intrusion or distraction, I was deeply conscious of being at peace. A cat, I thought, would ruin it.

  Years went by.

  Shortly after arriving in San Francisco I had been fortunate, with the help of my partner, to find a place in the country in which to dream, meditate, and write. A year or so after being there I reconnected with the world of animals and spirits—in trees, old abandoned orchards, undisturbed riverbanks—I had known and loved as a child. I became aware that there is a very thin membrane, human-adult-made, that separates us from this seemingly vanished world, where plants and animals still speak a language we humans understand, and I began to write about the exhilarating experience of regaining my childhood empathy.

  I discovered that not only is there an adult-made membrane separating us from animals, rocks, rivers and trees, ocean and sky, there is one separating us from our remote ancestors, who are actually so near that they are us. I began to write The Temple of My Familiar, a book that immediately became my home, just as the land I lived on became the home of more and more animals, who, I sometimes joked with my partner, had somehow gotten word that this was going to be a breakthrough book. They seemed to know I had managed to poke a hole through the membrane that separated me from them, and they roamed the land: slithering, crawling, stalking, flying, in a steady, amazing wave. I’ve written elsewhere of the captive horse looking for refuge that suddenly appeared, the flocks of wild turkeys, the f
eral pigs. The eagles, the snakes, and the hawks. It really did seem as if word had gone out: There’s harmlessness over at Alice’s! I was in heaven and I knew it; I realized that this experience and others like it are “the gold and diamonds and rubies” of life on radiant earth. On the day I finished the book, and while I still lived in it as an ancestor who was very tight with a lion, and as an even earlier ancestor who was a lion, I saw a miniature “lion” lying in the grass as I walked up the hill to my studio. I knew it was time to invite into my life another cat.

  My partner was skeptical, reminding me of my poor track record. That I was often on the road; that I can abide only a certain amount of responsibility or noise. The yearning persisted. I was only too aware of my limitations, and hesitated a year or more. I asked my daughter what she thought: Was I mature enough to have this anticipated companion in my life? She thought yes. And so the two of us began making the rounds of shelters, looking at cats. Most had been abandoned, most were starved. Most were freaked-out but exhibited some degree of calm in whatever shelter they were in, where they were fed and kept dry and warm, and where, at the shelter we especially liked, there were young women and men who periodically opened the cages and brought the cats out for brushing, claw clipping, or a cuddle. It was here that we found Frida, a two-year-old long-haired calico with big yellow eyes and one orange leg. She was so bored with shelter life that on each of our visits she was sound asleep. Still, even in sleep, she had presence. We woke her up and took her home.

  Alas, like Willis, Frida was afraid of everything, even of caresses. She jumped at the slightest noise. For months she ran and hid whenever anyone, including me, came into the house. Brushing her was difficult because she could not abide being firmly held. Her long hair became shaggy and full of burrs. The guests who tried to pet her were scurried from; to show her dislike of them, she pooped on their bed. Much of her day was spent on the top shelf of a remote closet, sleeping.

  I named her Frida, after Frida Kahlo. I could only hope she’d one day exhibit some of Kahlo’s character. That despite her horrendous kittenhood she would, like Kahlo, develop into a being of courage, passion, and poise.

  When Frida wasn’t sleeping, I discovered the Universe had played a very serious joke on me. Ever since I was a child I have needed the peace and quiet of morning. Everyone in my life, since I became an adult, has respected this. No one calls me, no one dares intrude for any reason, before noon. Frida made herself the exception. She was an exceedingly garrulous cat. She set out every morning to tell me the latest installment of her sad, heartrending tale, six or seven lives long, and she chatted steadily for an hour or so. When I was thoroughly rattled, she stopped, went upstairs, and took a nap.

  This was our entirely inauspicious beginning.

  Being an activist means I travel, a lot. Sometimes to other cities and countries, but also between my city and country homes. I took to carrying Frida, when I could catch her, with me. I have memories of careening around mountain curves with Frida, terrified, stuck to my neck. I was unable to endure the piteous cries she emitted when I secured her in a cage. When not stuck to my neck or in my hair, she sought safety underneath the brake pedal. I eventually resolved to leave her in the country—she hid when she saw me packing to return to the city. I did this reluctantly, acknowledging defeat. I asked M, the caretaker, to make sure she had water, food, and surrogate affection.

  Time passed. Sometimes I would be away for a month or more. When I returned, Frida would have taken up at a neighbor’s house. After a few days, she’d return. Distant and cool. I would struggle to renew our bond, beating myself up in my guilt. By the time we were back to the point of Frida’s warily permitting a tentative stroke, I’d be off again. Sometimes when I came home she’d be hiding in the oak tree by the drive, or in the bay tree off the deck. If I brought anyone with me, she’d sit and watch us but never deign to appear. Sometimes when I returned she’d simply cry. And cry and cry. It was a sound that went straight to my heart.

  And yet, this was my life. I thought perhaps Frida would one day simply get tired of it and leave me. She is very beautiful, very smart; I didn’t think it impossible that she would, on her own, find a more suitable home. There were also times, after cleaning poop off the rug or the guest bed, that I wanted to help her relocate.

  More time passed. One day I noticed that Frida understood English. If I said, “I don’t want you to lie on my chest because there’s a book there at the moment that I’m reading,” and if I patted the spot by my thigh that was okay, she immediately settled there. If she knocked at the window and I said, “Just a minute,” she’d wait before coming to the door. I noticed that instead of dodging my caress, she sought it. On our walks, if I sat down to enjoy a view, she did too. Around that same time I stopped criticizing myself constantly for not being home all the time, or even most of it. If I was in too bad a mood to stroke or brush her and if, God forbid, I forgot to give her milk, which I always brought and which she expected, I didn’t think I was an awful person. I stopped worrying that somewhere there was probably a better companion than I was. We were the companion each of us had found, and I began to see that, in fact, we had a relationship.

  Today Frida recognizes the sound of my car, a sluggish black Saab convertible that chugs up the hill to our house, and on whose warm cloth top she likes to sleep. When I approach our gate, after the long drive from the city, I see her huge yellow eyes staring out beneath it. By the time I am out of the car she is at my side, chatting away. She accompanies me into the house, asking for milk, and as soon as I’ve put my things away, she stretches out on the rug in anticipation of a cuddle and a brush. If I’m not into her yet, she understands, and goes back to her milk or, with a querulous complaint, “Where were you, anyhow? What took you so long?” she claims her favorite spot on the couch—which is everybody else’s favorite too.

  When she sees me putting on boots and grabbing my walking stick, she leaps up, tail like a bushy flag, and beats me to the door. At first she talks as we walk, but then she falls silent, running alongside me exactly as a dog would. Sometimes she’s distracted by field mice, but usually she does her hunting and gathering while I’m in the house; she likes to bring fresh mouse and leave it by the door. The little corpse, its neck chewed through, is, I know, Frida’s bouquet. At night she watches me make a fire, plump the sofa pillows, lie down and cover myself with a quilt. She climbs promptly onto my chest and gives my breast a thorough kneading. This always makes me think of Frida’s mother and wonder about her fate. As the fire dances we listen to stories: Clarissa Pinkola Estés or Joseph Campbell; or music: Salif Keita, Youssou N’dour, Rachel Bagby, Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner, or Al Green; Labi Siffre, Digable Planets, or Archie Roach; Phoebe Snow or Deep Forest; Sade. She likes music, except when it’s loud. Purring, she stretches her considerable length—she is quite a big cat—and before falling asleep she always reaches up, with calm purpose, to touch my face. “Watch those claws,” I always say.

  When it is bedtime I pick her up, cuddle her, whisper what a sweet creature she is, how beautiful and wonderful, how lucky I am to have her in my life, and that I will love her always. I take her to her room, with its cat door for her après-midnight exitings, and gently place her on her bed. In the morning when I wake up she is already outside, quietly sitting on the railing, eyes closed, meditating.

  PART FIVE

  The Growth of

  Understanding

  Giving the Party

  Who Do You Think

  One thing that never ceases to amaze me, along with the growth of vegetation from the earth and of hair from the head, is the growth of understanding. It isn’t something you have to run after with a net, and you don’t exactly stumble over it. It just seems to wait inside to be uncovered in leisurely fashion, at the most unexpected moments.

  My mother was large when I was a child, her weight averaging around two hundred pounds, and because of her Cherokee and Scotch-Irish ancestry she was paler of skin than man
y of the mothers in our rural community. She was a maid, though, like some of them, and worked in the homes of white people. Because of this work and her size, and her broad smile—when she smiled, for she also had a frown that could make you sit down—I must have been reminded of her the first time I encountered a likeness of “Aunt Jemima.” I would have seen Aunt Jemima first on a box of grits, which my mother cooked in quantity and ladled out lavishly. Later I would see her in films about the antebellum (“before de war”) South, playing a truly described “supporting role” to skinny white stars like Bette Davis, her huge bulk demonstrating what would happen if white women didn’t limit their appetites and submit to having their stays pulled tight. I’m sure we laughed, my siblings and I. After all, she was so ridiculous. Her teeth so many and so white, her eyes so wide. Her devotion to her whitefolks so extreme.

  Through the years, because of the unspoken connection I felt between Aunt Jemima, “Mammy,” and my mother, I’ve struggled with this image. For generations in the South it was the only image of a black woman that was acceptable. You could be “Aunt” Jemima, sexless and white-loving, or you could be unseen. There were Aunt Jemima dolls that sprawled in shops where black women could not try on dresses. There were ashtrays, cookie jars, lemonade dispensers. Everywhere you looked, that open, beaming, fat black face. Guileless. Without any attempt to fool you. Here I am, the smile said. I will neither reject nor judge you. After all, I am yours.

  For many years I did not make the connection that “mammy” was derived from “mammae,” that is, breasts. And that when white people had an Aunt Jemima around the house and called her Mammy, it was the same as calling her Tits. Go ask Tits to give you a drink of milk, they were really saying to their children. Go ask Tits for a sip of water or a piece of bread. Tits. It was Tits who had wet-nursed many of these people as infants because their own mothers, not wanting to ruin their stick figures, refused.