Anything We Love Can Be Saved

by Alice Walker

  The White House

  Washington, D.C.

  March 13, 1996

  Dear President Clinton:

  Thank you very much for the invitation to visit the White House while I was in Washington in January. I am sorry circumstances made it impossible for us to meet. I was looking forward to experiencing the symbolic seat of North American government in a new way. In the past, I have only picketed the White House, and as a student walking up and down the street outside it, I used to wonder what might be inside. It seemed to be made of cardboard, and appeared empty and oppressive, remote from the concerns of a few black students—and their courageous white teacher* —from the Deep South.

  The first protest I joined that picketed the White House was a Hands Off Cuba rally in 1962. I was eighteen. It was very cold—snow and sleet everywhere. Our hands and feet and heads were freezing as we trudged in circles, shouting slogans to keep our minds off our misery and to encourage each other. Amazingly, someone from the president’s office sent hot coffee out to us. This compassionate gesture humanized the president and the White House for me, and made it possible for me to feel a connection that I would not otherwise have felt. When President Kennedy was assassinated, and my whole school wept, it was of those warming sips of coffee that I thought.

  I love Cuba and its people, including Fidel. The bill you have signed to further tighten the blockade hurts me deeply. I travel to Cuba whenever I can, to take medicine and the small, perhaps insignificant, comfort of my presence, to those whose courage and tenderness have inspired me practically my entire life.

  I have seen how the embargo hurts everyone in Cuba, but especially Cuban children, infants in particular. I spend some nights in utter sleeplessness worrying about them. Someone has said that when you give birth to a child—and perhaps I read this in Hillary’s book, which I recently bought—you are really making a commitment to the agony of having your heart walking around outside your body. That is how I feel about Cuba; I am quite unable to think of it as separate from myself. I have taken seriously the beliefs and values I learned from my Georgia parents, the most sincere and humble Christians I have ever known: Do unto others … Love thy neighbor … All of it. I feel the suffering of each child in Cuba as if it were my own.

  This bill you have signed is wrong.* Even if you despise Fidel and even if the Cubans should not have shot down the planes violating their airspace.† (Did you, by the way, see Oliver Stone’s Earth and Sky, about the U.S. bombing and general destruction of Vietnam? Over years and years. There was a major case of violating airspace!) The bill is wrong, the embargo is wrong, because it punishes people, some of them unborn, for being who they are. Cubans cannot help being who they are. Given their long struggle for freedom, particularly from Spain and the United States, they cannot help taking understandable pride in who they are. They have chosen a way of life different from ours, and I must say, from my limited exposure to that different way of life, it has brought them, fundamentally, a deep inner certainty about the meaning of existence (to develop oneself and to help others) and an equally deep psychic peace. One endearing quality I’ve found in the Cubans I have met is that they can listen with as much heart as they speak.

  I believe you and Fidel must speak to each other. Face-to-face. He is not the monster he has been portrayed as being; and in all the study you have done of Cuba, surely it is apparent to you that he has reason for being the leader he is. Nor am I saying he is without flaw. We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful—because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed—is made much more bearable when it is shared, face-to-face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them. Beyond any other reason for talking with Fidel, I think you would enjoy it.

  In 1962 I also went to Russia. I was determined to impress upon all the Russians I met that I was not their enemy, and that I opposed the idea my government had at that time of possibly killing all of them. I have never regretted offering smiles to the children of Russia, instead of agreeing with a paranoid government to throw bombs.

  The world, I believe, is easier to change than we think. And harder. Because the change begins with each one of us saying to ourselves, and meaning it: I will not harm anyone or anything in this moment. Until, like recovering alcoholics, we can look back on an hour, a day, a week, a year, of comparative harmlessness.

  Is Jesse Helms, who speaks of Cuban liberty as he urges our country to harm Cuba’s citizens, the same Jesse Helms who caused my grandparents, my parents, and my own generation profound suffering as we struggled against our enslavement under racist laws in the South? And can it be that you have joined your name to his, in signing this bill? Although this is fact, it still strikes me as unbelievable. Inconceivable. I cannot think his is a name you will rejoice in later years to have associated with your own. I regret this action, sincerely, for your sake.

  The country has lost its way, such as it was. Primarily because it is now understood by all that resources and space itself are limited, and the days of infinite expansion and exploitation, sometimes referred to as “growth,” are over. Greed has been a primary motivating factor from the beginning. And so the dream of the revengeful and the greedy is to retake Cuba, never mind the cries of children who can no longer have milk to drink, or of adults whose ration card permits them one egg a week. Would you want Chelsea to have no milk, to have one egg a week? You are a large man, how would you yourself survive?

  My heart goes out to you—I voted for you for president, even though I personally want compassionate feminine leadership in the world, at least for the next hundred years or so: uncompassionate woman-hating and child-forgetful masculine leadership has pretty much destroyed us—because I know the same forces that have demonized Fidel for so long are after you and especially Hillary. I wonder if you can see this? Or if you really feel secure and confident of the future, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Republicans and with Helms?

  Sometimes, when I don’t know what to do, I imagine a little child standing beside my desk, or sometimes a small baby, kicking, on my desk. There are Cuban children—as dear as any on earth, as dear as Chelsea, or my daughter, Rebecca—standing beside your desk all the time now. How could this not be so? They are standing beside the desks of those in Congress, in the Senate. They are standing in our grossly overstuffed supermarkets and spying on us in Weight Watchers. One cannot justify starving them to death because their leader is a person of whom some people, themselves imperfect, human, disapprove.

  America at the moment is like a badly wounded parent, the aging, spent, and scared offspring of all the dysfunctional families of the multitudes of tribes who settled here. It is the medicine of compassionate understanding that must be administered now, immediately, on a daily basis, indiscriminately. Not the poison of old patterns of punishment and despair. Harmlessness now! must be our peace cry.

  I often disagree with you—your treatment of black women, of Lani Guinier and the wonderful Joycelyn Elders in particular, has caused me to feel a regrettable distance. Still, I care about you, Hillary, and Chelsea and wish you only good. I certainly would not deprive you of food in protest of anything you have done!

  Similarly, I will always love and respect the Cuban people, and help them whenever I can. Their way of caring for all humanity has made them my family. Whenever you hurt them, or help them, please think of me.

  Sincerely,

  Alice Walker

  * Radical historian Staughton Lynd, who was also valiantly active in opposing the Vietnam War.

  * The Helms-Burton bill would make it possible for complainants to sue foreign companies and exclude their executives from U.S. soil if these entities profit in any way from property that was seized during the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and whose former owners are now U.S. citizens.

  † On February 24, 1996, the Cuban air force shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes which, it claimed
, had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace.

  My Mother’s Blue Bowl

  Visitors to my house are often served food—soup, potatoes, rice—in a large blue stoneware bowl, noticeably chipped at the rim. It is perhaps the most precious thing I own. It was given to me by my mother in her last healthy days. The days before a massive stroke laid her low and left her almost speechless. Those days when to visit her was to be drawn into a serene cocoon of memories and present-day musings and to rest there, in temporary retreat from the rest of the world, as if still an infant, nodding and secure at her breast.

  For much of her life my mother longed, passionately longed, for a decent house. One with a yard that did not have to be cleared with an ax. One with a roof that kept out the rain. One with floors that you could not fall through. She longed for a beautiful house of wood or stone. Or of red brick, like the houses her many sisters and their husbands had. When I was thirteen she found such a house. Green-shuttered, white-walled. Breezy. With a lawn and a hedge and giant pecan trees. A porch swing. There her gardens flourished in spite of the shade, as did her youngest daughter, for whom she sacrificed her life doing hard labor in someone else’s house, in order to afford peace and prettiness for her child, to whose grateful embrace she returned each night.

  But, curiously, the minute I left home, at seventeen, to attend college, she abandoned the dream house and moved into the projects. Into a small, tight apartment of few breezes, in which I was never to feel comfortable, but that she declared suited her “to a T.” I took solace in the fact that it was at least hugged by spacious lawn on one side, and by forest, out the back door, and that its isolated position at the end of the street meant she would have a measure of privacy.

  Her move into the projects—the best housing poor black people in the South ever had, she would occasionally declare, even as my father struggled to adjust to the cramped rooms and hard, unforgiving qualities of brick—was, I now understand, a step in the direction of divestiture, lightening her load, permitting her worldly possessions to dwindle in significance and, well before she herself would turn to spirit, roll away from her.

  She owned little, in fact. A bed, a dresser, some chairs. A set of living-room furniture. A set of kitchen furniture. A bed and wardrobe (given to her years before, when I was a teenager, by one of her more prosperous sisters). Her flowers: everywhere, inside the house and outside. Planted in anything she managed to get her green hands on, including old suitcases and abandoned shoes. She recycled everything, effortlessly. And gradually she had only a small amount of stuff—mostly stuff her children gave her: nightgowns, perfume, a microwave—to recycle or to use.

  Each time I visited her I marveled at the modesty of her desires. She appeared to have hardly any, beyond a thirst for a Pepsi-Cola or a hunger for a piece of fried chicken or fish. On every visit I noticed that more and more of what I remembered of her possessions seemed to be missing. One day I commented on this.

  Taking a deep breath, sighing, and following both with a beaming big smile, which lit up her face, the room, and my heart, she said: Yes, it’s all going. I don’t need it anymore. If there’s anything you want, take it when you leave; it might not be here when you come back.

  The dishes my mother and father used daily had come from my house; I had sent them years before, when I moved from Mississippi to New York. Neither the plates nor the silver matched entirely, but it was all beautiful in her eyes. There were numerous paper items, used in the microwave, and stacks of plastic plates and cups, used by the scores of children from the neighborhood who continued throughout her life to come and go. But there was nothing there for me to want.

  One day, however, looking for a jar into which to pour leftover iced tea, I found myself probing deep into the wilderness of the overstuffed, airless pantry. Into the land of the old-fashioned, the outmoded, the outdated. The humble and the obsolete. There was a smoothing iron, a churn. A butter press. And two large bowls.

  One was cream and rose with a blue stripe. The other was a deep, vivid blue.

  May I have this bowl, Mama, I asked, looking at her and at the blue bowl with delight.

  You can have both of them, she said, barely acknowledging them, and continuing to put leftover food away.

  I held the bowls on my lap for the rest of the evening, while she watched a TV program about cops and criminals that I found too horrifying to follow.

  Before leaving the room I kissed her on the forehead and asked if I could get anything for her from the kitchen; then I went off to bed. The striped bowl I placed on a chair beside the door, so I could look at it from where I lay. The blue bowl I placed in the bed with me.

  In giving me these gifts, my mother had done a number of astonishing things, in her typically offhand way. She had taught me a lesson about letting go of possessions—easily, without emphasis or regret—and she had given me a symbol of what she herself represented in my life.

  For the blue bowl especially was a cauldron of memories. Of cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying, too small barrack meant to house the itinerant tenant workers on a prosperous white man’s farm.

  Slogging through sleet and wind to the sagging front door, thankful that our house was too far from the road to be seen clearly from the school bus, I always felt a wave of embarrassment and misery. But then I would open the door. And there inside would be my mother’s winter flowers: a glowing fire in the fireplace, colorful handmade quilts on all our beds, paintings and drawings of flowers and fruits and, yes, of Jesus, given to her by who knows whom—and, most of all, there in the center of the rough-hewn table, which in the tiny kitchen almost touched the rusty wood-burning stove, stood the big blue bowl, full of whatever was the most tasty thing on earth.

  There was my mother herself. Glowing. Her teeth sparkling. Her eyes twinkling. As if she lived in a castle and her favorite princes and princesses had just dropped by to visit.

  The blue bowl stood there, seemingly full forever, no matter how deeply or rapaciously we dipped, as if it had no bottom. And she dipped up soup. Dipped up lima beans. Dipped up stew. Forked out potatoes. Spooned out rice and peas and corn. And in the light and warmth that was Her, we dined.

  Thank you, Mama

  For your bravery,

  commitment

  and love,

  your daughter

  thanks you.

  Your belief in the love

  of the world,

  against all odds

  and evidence,

  is the fire

  that lights

  my path.

  Vencerémos!*

  * We shall overcome.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Curtis Brown Ltd.: “The Place in the Ways” from The Green Wave by Muriel Rukeyser (New York: Doubleday, 1948). Copyright © 1948 by Muriel Rukeyser. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

  Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group: “Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts,” “Confession,” “On Stripping Bark from Myself,” and “Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning” from Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning by Alice Walker (Dial Press). Copyright © 1975, 1977, 1979 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group.

  Harcourt Brace & Company: “Expect Nothing,” “Be Nobody’s Darling,” “Sunday School circa 1950,” “While Love Is Unfashionable,” “Baptism,” and “Reassurance” from Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems by Alice Walker. Copyright © 1970, 1972, 1973 by Alice Walker. “The Diamonds on Liz’s Bosom,” “We Alone,” and “Torture�
� from Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful by Alice Walker. Copyright © 1984 by Alice Walker. “Some Things I Like About My Triple Bloods,” “Natural Star,” “a woman is not a potted plant,” and “We Have a Beautiful Mother” from Her Blue Body Everything We Know by Alice Walker. Copyright © 1991 by Alice Walker. Excerpts from The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Copyright © 1982 by Alice Walker. All material reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

  Houghton Mifflin Company: Eight lines from “Saint Francis and the Sow” from Mortal Acts, Mortal Wounds by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Ocean Press: Excerpt from Cuba at the Crossroads by Fidel Castro. Reprinted by permission of Ocean Press, Melbourne.

  The following essays have appeared previously:

  “My Mother’s Blue Bowl” was originally published in Family Circle. Copyright © 1997 by Alice Walker.

  “The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven,” a speech given at Auburn Theological Seminary on April 25, 1995, was originally published in On the Issues, Spring, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Alice Walker.

  “You Have All Seen” was originally published in Ms. Copyright © 1997 by Alice Walker.

  “Anything We Love Can Be Saved,” a speech given at the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival on January 26, 1990, was originally published in Zora! (Sentinel Communications Company). Copyright © 1991 by Alice Walker.

  “The Sound of Our Own Culture” was originally published in We Who Believe in Freedom by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Sweet Honey in the Rock (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Alice Walker.

  “How Long Shall They Torture Our Mothers?” was originally published in the May/June 1991 issue of Ms. Copyright © 1991 by Alice Walker.