Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Never Shut Up, book club edition. Book thoughts, thinking about the book club. Today we're going to continue reading Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy.
I'm getting so much out of reading it out loud that I thought I would have done that. I'd read some more. We read the first 87 pages. If I can read the next 87, then we'll basically only have 87 to go.
If you missed part one, it's on our feed right now. You can go back. So with that, let's get started, yeah? Part 5, Bolivia.
Early days, just after independence, black people moved into them, but moved out again as soon as they were able to construct larger and more private compounds further out from the town, which was already becoming a hodgepodge of a typical African city. White Lady's Lane, for instance, soon led not to an immaculately kept by African peon to park, used only for strolling or sunning one's pale offspring, but to the market with its colorful, ramshackle stalls, smoky braziers from which appetizing aromas arose, vendors hawking their wares in a cacophony of persuasive voices, and the squeal of resistant, small animals being sold for matter-of-fact slaughter. One side of the prison, from a distance, looks down on this, over the rooftops of several rows of shanties and the row of government offices. One reason it had been built on a hill, according to the legend about it that, in the earliest post-colonial days, had been posted near the entrance but was now barely decipherable from age, was because it was also a garrison and command post designed to intimidate and to actively suppress any uprising among the Africans.
There had been bunkers around its base and artillery stations, right in amongst the dusty shrubbery, bougainvillea, jacaranda, and hibiscus blossoms. I had never even seen the prison before I went without him to visit Tashi. From outside, its formerly white exterior now streaked with brown, with patches of grey cement and bits of black girders poking through at the corners, many of its windows broken or gone entirely, it hardly seemed habitable. And of course it really was not.
Still, it was crammed to the rafters with prisoners, all sizes, all shapes, all ages, both sexes. One left the comparative silence of the street and immediately encountered a wall of noise and stench. The second floor had been turned over to a mounting number of AIDS victims, sent to the prison rather than to hospital because the hospital, being small, was swamped. For almost a year the government had said no such thing as AIDS existed in the country.
Now its presence was acknowledged grudgingly, though there was no official speculation about what might have caused it printed in the news. There was no noise whatsoever from this floor as men, women, and children, all stricken, dragged themselves about, attending each other, or else lay quietly, so emaciated as to appear already dead on straw mats on the floor. When we looked in, no one appeared to notice. As we ascended the steps to the third floor, I turned to Adam and said, attempting a joke, I want to go home.
So do we all, he replied grimly, with the downcast, helpless look of a man bound to a woman, and to circumstances perpetually beyond his control? Bentu Moraga, Benny. It is only money that changes anything, or makes anything happen, I said to my mother, glancing at my notes. You mustn't think that, she said, gazing out the window.
It's so new African. But look at what you have here, I said, gesturing at the freshly painted walls of her cell, her bright red plastic chair, her desk, writing materials and books. I can't be guilt-tripped, she said smiling. I'm already in prison.
I smiled with her. I liked the person my mother was in prison. She was warm and comfortable, as if she were an entirely different person than the driven, frowning mother I'd always known. Not many of the other prisoners have a private cell.
No, she agreed. Only the bigwigs who will soon buy their way out and escape punishment altogether. She frowned, and for a moment, looked like her other self. We heard the bigwigs down at the other end of the corridor.
All day long, they played cards, kept their radios blaring, and drank beer. Unlike my mother's, their cells were never locked, and so they visited each other far into the night. They would sometimes visit us and bring my mother an occasional beer, which she accepted. I had not understood bigwig until I saw the judges at my mother's trial.
Sure enough, they wore huge white wigs with corals at the side and a cue down the back. My mother laughed at them, which I thought they certainly noticed, and which I felt sure they'd punish her for. I wrote a note to myself about this, as I sat observing the proceedings in the courtroom. There are a lot of things I can't do, drive a car, for instance, or even think about.
I used to feel there was something mysterious about the way I could never quite keep up in school. I almost made it, but then there would come a point at which I felt myself literally slipping back down the slope. It was a relief, finally, to have it explained to me, not by my mother and my father, but by a teacher, that I was a bit retarded, something to do with memory, which meant that just as some people are tall and some people are short, some people can think longer or shorter thoughts than others. Not to worry, said my teacher, Miss McMillan, laughing.
You have the attention span of the average American TV viewer. And so I was spared the feeling of being, as my father phrased it, negatively unique. And yet, there were times when I wished I could remember the name of something for which my mother sent me to the store. I wished I could do without the lists.
A list for the market, a list for school, a list of what things to take and bring back in the afternoon of playing in a neighbor's yard, a list of street names by which to steer myself home. Nothing that I was asked to do stayed in my mind, nor could I even remember I'd been asked. Only the look of exasperation on my mother's face held my attention, but only for a moment. Then I forgot even that.
One of my mother's favorite expressions was, it's a wonder you don't forget I'm your mother. But I never did. Perhaps it was because I felt connected to her scent, which was warm, lovely, soft. I felt I could quite happily have spent my lifetime under one of her arms.
This, however, I never mentioned because I sensed it would offend her. My mother bathed constantly as if to rid herself of any scent whatsoever. To her, an agreeable odor was that of palm oil of soap, pond cold cream, or Nivea lotion. To smell like herself seemed beyond her ability to accept.
Even now, in middle age, I like to snuggle her, though contorting my lanky body into a shape that fits cuddly under her neck is something of a feat. She barely tolerates it, though, and immediately moves away. If I want to talk to her or to my father about anything, I have to write notes about the subject to myself. I have to practice what I want to say and how I want to say it.
As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks. Adam. It was summer, and we sat on chai longs under the linden trees in the garden behind Lissette's house. Lissette was knitting gossamer blue wool in the heat, and I made the comment that changed my life forever.
It is so hot, I said, to be knitting wool. Unless, I added, smiling at her, you are expecting to have very cold feet this winter. Very cold petite feet, she said without looking up. And that is how I learned of petite Pierre.
I had always been careful with Lissette. More often than not, when we were making love, I did not penetrate her. Ours was a friendship of shared sadness as well as passion, but a friendship first of all, and I spent many nights in her fluffy white bed, holding her in my arms, but so distraught about my own life with Evelyn, all I could yearn for was sleep. You won't have it, of course, I said.
Lissette's neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson. It was not your affair, she said knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye.
In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame de Farge would have, had someone sat in front of her and blocked her view of a guillotine. Not my... I couldn't finish. I looked at her speechless.
Perhaps it isn't even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several during the months we are apart, and you are with your crazy wife in America. That was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.
The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor's bees, passing in and out of their wooden hives. They made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea, our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly, life goes on. The pain of it, so sure.
The sweetness of it, so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us that you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own. It is mine, I said at last.
Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours. When, I asked. Unfortunately, I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness.
On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship. She shrugged. When you were here before, of course. In April, when you came to tell me Tasha had run away from you, even from your kisses.
Lissette. I had Petit-Pierre at home in my grandmother's bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of Frenchwoman to vote, the low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it, the bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day.
My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism, and shock, chowered me with advice and affection. It was recognized in almost a formal way. Allo, nothing can be done, said my mother, shrugging at last after a bitter bout of tears, that I had inherited the genes of my mother's mother, who had had affairs but no children with gypsies and Turks and the occasional Palestinian Jew, and, even worse, with penniless artists who could be found living in the literal garret of her tiny house and subsisting, again literally, on jars of jam and crusts of bread. I had the most sought-after midwife in France, my competent and funny aunt Marie-Therese, whose radical idea it was that childbirth, above all, should feel sexy.
I listened to nothing but gospel music during my pregnancy, a music quite new to me and to France, and, it's a highway to heaven, nothing can walk up there but the pure of heart, was playing on the stereo during the birth, the warmth of the singer's voices, a perfect accompaniment to the lively fire in the fireplace, my vulva oiled and massaged to keep my hips open and my vagina fluid. I was orgasmic at the end. Petit Pierre practically slid into the world at the height of my amazement, smiling serenely even before he opened his eyes. My aunt placed him on my stomach the moment she lifted him from between my legs, waiting to sever the umbilical cord until he could breathe on his own, and so, our heartbeats continued together as they had while he was in my womb.
Seeing his sleek tan body and wet curly hair, I missed Adam, but, sighing with completion, I soon sank into the pleasure of the miracle I felt I and the universe alone had made. He felt shut out, he said, when he was finally free to come to us, because he was not there. But why? I asked.
You knew when he was to be born? So did Evelyn, he said. Part 6 Tashi, Evelyn It is hot inside the courtroom. The ceiling fans, as they turn, sound like horse throats trying to clear themselves.
The louvered windows are open fully to admit any semblance of breeze. I am dressed in cool white cotton from head to foot. Olivia shops for me in the tourist boutiques. Still, I feel perspiration beating at the center of my back, then slipping down in quicksilver rivulets to rest in an already sodden waistband.
It has been a morning spent listening to the words of those who saw me on my journey. The man who sold me the razors, a squat roomy-eyed fellow who admits he overcharged me because I was a foreigner. Although I spoke Olinka, he could tell I was American by my dress, he said. Next, a woman who sold me an orange, as I was getting into the bus at Amory Station.
She was old and toothless. Her rags obviously smelled, for both attorneys kept their distance as she sweated and drooled a bit there in the witness stand. It was a young woman, however, whose words appeared to nail me. She was thin and dark, with curious light pink, almost white lipstick lips, and painted nails.
She explained, in English, with a word or two of Olinka sprinkled through it, that she was proprietress of the paper shop, hard by the square where one caught the bus. She remembered me because I had come into the shop looking for, and then asking her to find for me, sheets of thick white paper on which to print signs. However, I had changed my mind about wanting the white paper, she said, as soon as she brought some out to me. No, she said, I had said.
Why does not the culprit this time? Bring me out paper of the colors of our flag. There was a sort of collective gasp in the courtroom when she said this. I felt even more eyes boring holes in the back of my neck.
The judges surreptitiously scratched the natural kinky hair at the edges of their straight brush wigs. And is this the paper, miss, that the defendant bought? The prosecuting attorney stands before the young woman in the dock, the vivid red, yellow, and blue paper held out in front of him. There was a time the colors alone made me weep with pride.
Now I look at them as dispassionately as if they were crayolas in a child's coloring box. Surprisingly, there are a few older people near the back of the courtroom who, on seeing the colors for which they, as young bush revolutionaries fought, stand, their hands over their hearts. Of course I cannot see them. I only hear faintly their movement, the creaking of joints, the shifting of feet.
I don't even wonder about it at the time. Later, Adam and Olivia will tell me. I think instead of the flag of my new home, America. I see, with my mind's eye, that red and blue and white flag, the meaning of whose colors is unknown to me, a flag a woman sewed.
Reluctantly, I refocus on the young woman giving testimony. I think of the meaning of the word testimony. Originally, I named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust. Later, to metamorphose and to the handshake.
I imagine the woman's soft black hands copying the young attorney's balls, her shell pink nails deep in the tangles of his pubic hair. What are we doing in this sweltering courtroom, she is saying, brushing the ebony tips of her breasts against his smooth hairless chest. It's actually a beautiful day outside. The attorney's face has that curious look of concentration sexually aroused men have.
He. But I must pay attention, I think, rotating my head slowly on my neck. If I'm not careful, I will have a torrid romance going, and miss, as Olivia says, my own trial. The woman says I bought the paper and a magic marker pen and sat down immediately to draw my signs.
What signs did you see the defendant draw, asks the prosecutor. Only one, she says. Would you be good enough to tell the court how you happened to read this sign and also what was written on it? She showed it to me, said the young woman.
She showed it to you? Yes. She said to me, you are a young woman and your life is still before you. I am an old woman and my life is already over.
All I am good for now is alerting you to disaster. Here, the young woman paused as if the emotion of this experience had momentarily pierced her. She raised a palely painted nail to the corner of her eye. Of course I didn't understand, she said, as if to clear herself of any hint of collaboration.
Of course you did not, said the attorney. Please continue. Well, said the young woman. She put down her bag, her suitcase, that is, and sat on it, over in the corner of the shop out of the way of traffic.
Because it was rather early in the day, she was the only customer. She simply sat there and proceeded to make these signs. And the one you saw, prompted the attorney. The first one she drew, said the young woman.
She held it out in front of her, gravely, and scanned it, then turned it toward me. There was a silence. I was surprised to read what it said, and of course I couldn't understand what it meant. Right, said the attorney, waiting.
Quote, if you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it. That is what the sign said, in big black letters, said the young woman. If you lie about your pain, you will be killed, repeated the attorney. To yourself, said the young woman, if you lie to yourself.
This was obviously the part of the message that ripped her. Yes, yes, said the attorney. And after she showed the sign to you, what did she do? I believe she made several more.
She explained to me that where she lived in America, people make signs and buttons for everything they want to say, and no one ever arrests them for it. I warned her to be careful, said the young woman. And why did you do that? asked the attorney sharply.
The young woman gave him a frightened look. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she replied. I don't know, she said. But of course she knew.
Everyone in the room knew. Half the people in prison in Alinka were there for expressing their discontent with the present government. An audible groan escaped me. The judges glared.
I had felt happy, sitting on my red Chinese pigskin suitcase in the corner of the shop, scribbling my big letters as if I were a child. It had occurred to me on the plane that never would I be able to write a book about my life, nor even a pamphlet. But that writes something, I could and would. And when the plane touched down, all I saw was a billboard shouting out to the people that they must buy Fanta and Coca-Cola and Dotsons and Fords and chocolate and whiskey and sugar and more sugar and coffee and more coffee and tea and more tea.
And I thought, of course, this excrement is the reading matter of the masses. I'm only one old and crazy woman, but I will fling myself against the billboards. I will compete. And the next day, before leaving the city, I went bustling into the paper shop.
Why the colors of our flag? The attorney now asked. But the young woman's blank expression was answer enough. Why the colors of our flag indeed?
Red, for the blood of people spilled in resistance to the white supremacist regime. Yellow, for the gold and minerals in which our land is still rich even though the whites have carted mountains of it away. Blue, for the sea that laps our shores, filled with riches and the wonders of the deep. Blue also for the sky, symbol of our people's faith and the forces of the unseen and their optimism for the future.
There had been much debate about the colors of this flag, debate that included everyone. Then the colors were decided by the leaders and the flag sent off to Germany to be designed, mass produced, and sold back to us. I can feel my mind trying to kick off into an alternate flag story to replace the one that happened, in fact, to the people. But surprisingly, nothing happens.
My head, like the rest of my body, remains solid in my chair. My refusing to leap imagination never makes it even as far as the open windows of the room. I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to re-inhabit completely the body I long ago left. Olivia has crept up behind me as we all stand to be dismissed.
She pushes a small paper bag into my hand. When I am in my cell again, I open a bag and extract a small doll made of clay. It has been years since I saw another like it, quite by accident one morning in Melissa's hut. She found me playing with it and boxed my ears, claiming the thing I held, a small figure playing with her genitals, was indecent.
I was too young to ask why, therefore, she had it in her hut. A note from Olivia read, This is a replica. There are women potters here who make them. Can you imagine?
Frankly, I couldn't. Part 7 Evelyn The shrink the old man sent me to, after his death, was a middle-aged African-American woman named Ray. He had met her at a conference for psychologists in London when she was just starting out. They liked each other and kept in touch ever since.
I resented her. Because she wasn't the Z. Because she was black. Because she was a woman.
Because she was whole. She radiated a calm, cheerful competence that irritated me. It was to her, however, that I found myself speaking one day about our leader. Our leader, like Nelson Mandela and Jomo Kenyatta and others before them, had been forced into exile and eventually captured and jailed by the white regime.
Still, miraculously, by word of mouth and the occasional clandestinely made audio cassette, we were able to get his surprisingly frequent messages to the people. Unlike Nelson Mandela or Jomo Kenyatta, our leader never made it to freedom himself. He was assassinated on the eve of independence as he left the high-security prison in which he'd been incarcerated under heavy guard. It was believed, in fact, that the guards assassinated him, though this was never proved.
His murderers, in any case, were never brought to justice or even identified. And so, even as a Lincoln celebrated what we thought was our freedom, there was already an internal backlash of hurt and rage that only swift justice administered to his killers might have assuaged. And a desperate need to show our remembrance and love of our leader in everything we did. But you had already left Africa by then, said Ray as I explained this to her.
Yes, I said. My body had left. My soul had not. I paused.
It seemed impossible that anyone should ever understand. Especially not this smoothly-dressed woman who walked with a spring in her step at whose brown skin, the color of cinnamon, was flawless. There was a jaunty tone she sometimes took at the most unlikely points. She used it now.
You can tell me, she said, with the look of a conspirator. But I was stuck. Our leader had died for us, for our independence, for our freedom. What could I possibly say about my insignificant life in the face of that reality?
I could feel a boulder, twin to the one that suppressed the truth of Dura's murder, begin closing my throat. I felt a lie beginning to form. A lie that said the boulder was not a rock, but rock candy. Then I remembered Mazie.
You, yourselves, are your last hope, he had said. Did I believe this or not? I cleared my throat, and began. He was Jesus Christ to us, you know, I said, after the lengthy silence.
Ray looked at me expectantly. If Jesus Christ has died for you, how can you find fault with anything else he did? Some people fault him for claiming to die for them, said Ray. But we'll let that pass.
Better to declare him perfect and be done, she added. But what if he told you to do something that destroyed you, something that was wrong? Impossible, said Ray. He was perfect, remember?
But then she smiled impishly, and I saw the trap of such reasoning, and also the joke in what she said. However, my jaws were too tight to smile. I began again. Even from prison we received our instructions, I said.
Good instructions, sensible, correct, from our leader. That we must remember who we were. That we must fight the white oppressors without ceasing, without even the contemplation of ceasing. For they would surely still be around during our children's and our children's children's time.
That we must take back our land. That we must reclaim the descendants of those of our peoples sold into slavery throughout the world. Our leader was particularly strong on this issue, almost alone among African leaders. That we must return to the purity of our own culture and traditions.
That we must not neglect our ancient customs. There was another silence as I played with the black, plastic-looking elephant hair bracelets I wore on my wrist. We thought him a god, really, I said finally, sighing. Trust suffered so much.
We knew they had tortured him. We could even imagine how, based on the mutilated bodies sometimes returned to relatives from the prison, we knew he'd spent years in solitary and been driven nearly out of his mind. But he had not broken, nor had he forgotten us. In every hut, even when I was a little girl, there was a small picture of him wrapped in plastic and carefully hidden in a special place amongst the rafters.
His eyes were laughing. Such wise, gay eyes. They seemed to speak. Whenever we received a message, we took down the picture, and while going over the message and learning it by heart, we would gaze at it.
We loved him. We believed everything he said. We thought he knew best about everything. The missionaries had made a big campaign against what they called the scarring of our faces with Yowinka tribal markings.
But our leader had these same markings and was obviously proud of them. And so it was difficult to hear the missionaries' objections, or to care about the missionaries themselves. Though we gave them our mumbled prayers and conversions, with which they seemed so easily like mothers of docile children satisfied. Ray was leaning forward in her chair.
As I spoke, I became aware that I had covered both my cheeks with my fingers. I had also crossed my legs. I took my hands down and placed them in the folds of my dress. A light blue dress with aquamarine dots.
It reminded me of the sea and of tears. As for the thing that was done to me, or for me, I said, and stopped, because Ray had raised her eyebrows quizzically. The initiation? Still, she looked at me in the same questioning way.
The female initiation? I said. Into womanhood? Oh, she said, but looked still as if she didn't understand.
Circumcision, I whispered. Pardon? She said, in a normal tone of voice that seemed loud in the quiet room. I felt as if I had handed her a small and precious pearl, and she had promptly bitten into it and declared it a fake.
What exactly is this procedure? She asked briskly. I was reminded of a quality in African-American women that I did not like at all. A bluntness.
A going to the heart of the matter even if it gave everyone concern a heart attack. Rarely did black women in America exhibit the graceful subtlety of the African woman. Had slavery given them this? Suddenly, a story involving Ray popped into my mind.
I saw her clearly as she would have been in the 19th century. The 18th, the 17th, the 16th, the 15th. Her hands on her hips, her breasts thrust out. She is very black, as black as I am.
Listen, cracker, she is saying, did you sell my child or not? The cracker whines. But listen, Lorella, it was my child too. The minute he turns his back, she picks up a huge boulder, exactly like the one that is in my throat, and… But I drag myself back from the scene.
Don't you have my file? I asked, annoyed. I was sure the old man sent it before he died. On the other hand, this was a question he had never asked me.
I'd said circumcision to him, and he'd seemed completely satisfied, as if he knew exactly what was implied. Now I wondered, had he understood? I have your file, said Ray, tapping its bulging grey cover with a silver painted nail and ignoring my attitude. I'm ignorant about this practice, though, and I would like to learn about it from you.
She paused, glanced into the folder. For instance, something I've always wondered is whether the exact same thing is done to every woman. Or is there variation? Your sister Dura's clitoris was excised, but was something else done too that made it more likely that she would bleed to death?
Her tone was now clinical. It relaxed me. I breathed deeply and sought a necessary and familiar distance from myself. I did not get as far away as usual, however.
Always different, I would think, I said, exhaling breath, because women are all different, yet always the same because women's bodies are all the same. But this was not precisely true. In my reading I had discovered there were at least three forms of circumcision. Some cultures demanded excision of only the clitoris.
Others insisted on a thorough scraping away of the entire genital area. A sigh escaped me as I thought of explaining this. A slight frown came between Ray's large, clear eyes. I realized it's hard for you to talk about this, she said.
Perhaps we shouldn't push. But I am already pushing, and the boulder rolls off my tongue, completely crushing the old, familiar, faraway voice I'd always used to tell this tale, a voice that had hardly seemed connected to me. It was only after I came to America, I said, that I even knew what was supposed to be down there. Down there?
Yes. My body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the function of the breasts to almost everyone I knew. From prison our leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we have been since time immemorial by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they'd soon touch her thighs.
She'd become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way. You believed this? Everyone believed it.
Even though no one had ever seen it, no one living in our village anyway, and yet the elders particularly acted as if everyone had witnessed this evil and not nearly a long enough time ago. But you knew this had not happened to you. But perhaps it had, I said. Certainly to all my friends who'd been circumcised, my uncircumcised vagina was thought of as a monstrosity.
They laughed at me, jeered at me for having a tail. I think they meant my labia majora. After all, none of them had vaginal lips. None of them had a clitoris.
They had no idea what these things looked like. To them, I was bound to look odd. There were a few other girls who had not been circumcised. The girls who had been would sometimes actually run from us as if we were demons.
Laughing, though. Always laughing. And yet, it is from this time before circumcision that you remember pleasure. When I was little I used to stroke myself, which was taboo.
And then when I was older and before we were married Adam and I used to make love in the fields. Which was also taboo. Doing it in the fields, I mean. And because we practice cunnilingus.
Did you experience orgasm? Always. And yet you willingly gave this up in order to? No relationship to him.
I was never trusted, considered a potential traitor even. Besides, our leader, our Jesus Christ, said we must keep all our old ways and that no Lincoln man, in this he echoed the great liberator Kenyatta, would even think of marrying a woman who was not circumcised. But Adam was not a Lincoln, said Ray, puzzled. I sighed.
The boulder was gone, but speech itself suddenly felt quite hopeless. I never thought of marrying Adam, I said firmly, and watched the surprise in her eyes. I married him because he was loyal, gentle, and familiar. Because he came for me.
And because I found I could not fight what the wound tradition had given me. I could hardly walk. But who? Ray began, even more perplexed.
At last I found a cool smile forming on my tense face. I smiled at the young, innocent, ignorant girl I'd been. The boulder now not only had rolled off my tongue, but was rolling quite rapidly away from me toward the door. Like every Olinka maiden, I said, I was in love with the perfect lover who already had three wives.
The perfect lover, and father, and brother who had been so cruelly taken from us, but whose laughing eyes we saw in the photographs he left us, and whose sweaty, tempting voice we heard on cassette in the night. Poor Adam. He couldn't hold a candle to our leader. The real, to us, Jesus Christ.
Adam. The Olinkans spoke of our leader with exactly the fervor we wished them to speak of our Lord. There were always tales of his exploits drifting through the village, his miracles of ambush and daring do against the whites. He seemed like Christ to the villagers except for one thing, his acceptance of violence as a means to the end of African oppression.
He was called our leader because the white regime made it a crime to say his name out loud. There were men walking about in every Olinka village whose backs bore the scars of their forgetfulness or defiance of this edict. And when those men spoke of our leader, an especially harsh protectiveness and anger blazed in their eyes. In fact, it became increasingly frightening to try to talk to them about Christ at all.
Our Christ. Our white, pacifist leader. Safely dead. Part 8.
Lasset. When Pierre turned 17 and had completed his studies on the Lasset, nothing could prevent him from going to America to be nearer his father. He is thoughtful, curly-haired, golden. In France, people assume he is Algerian.
If Pierre is my only expense, I can afford to be lavish with him. But it is more than that. Because he has grown up virtually without a father, I feel compelled to compensate. When Evelyn learned of my pregnancy with little Pierre, as Adam and I and my parents used to call him, she flew into a rage that subsided into a years-long deterioration and rancorous depression.
She tried to kill herself. She spoke of murdering their son. I felt badly for Adam. He had not intended to have a child with me.
It was I who wanted a baby. I, who did not want, except occasionally, a man. Perhaps I was simply swept along by the winds of change that were blowing over women's lives in France, thanks to women like my suffragist grandmother and writers like Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex put the world I knew into a perspective I could more easily comprehend, if not control. Prior to reading her book I felt doomed to incomprehension regarding the universal subjugation of women.
Doomed to ignorance in spite of having listened from babyhood to the flaming speeches of Grandmother Beatrice as she labored for the rights of French women. Doomed, even, to a kind of insanity that I believe the pampered oppressed always feel, and for which there seems to be no remedy except enlightenment regarding their plight, followed by active exercise of the insights of their awareness. It was hard enough to have been forced to leave Algeria, our house and gardens and servants, and friendships with the servants, there. But the French were killing the Algerians' body and soul, and the Algerians grew sick of being treated worse than dogs.
They fought back. There seemed to be a rising tide of blood across the land, and even clergymen like my father would not exempt. We left in tears, for we considered ourselves Algerians, French Algerians of course, members of the ruling class and race, bien sûr, the elite, and yet I especially felt native to the land, because I was. I was reborn there.
Hot sun even now is the kind I prefer. I am never so happy as when enveloped by a scorching Parisian summer, when most true Parisians make sure to be someplace else, someplace cooler, the ocean or the mountains. There were places, restaurants, nightclubs, schools, neighborhoods, that Algerian natives could not go. The old colonial story, and yet the people were so beautiful, hospitable as Africans are always, especially our servants and playmates.
The children taught me games, and they and their parents taught me Arabic. There was no way I could understand what was happening, when they arrived for work with their eyes veiled, even hostile, and their faces swollen from grief. Some loved one would have been picked up by the French security forces in the night, grilled, imprisoned, tortured, killed. Loving my nurse, my playmates, and the servants, I naturally hated France, and suddenly to have to return there.
As the newspapers said of us, I protested to my parents that France was a place I'd never been. How therefore could I return? My parents, like most settler parents, had no answer. They were far from happy about the turn of events themselves.
They'd left France in the first place because French society had no place for them. All prominent spots, my father joked, having been occupied. And though in Algeria my father suffered as a Christian minister surrounded by a world of Muslims, he felt he'd discovered and enlarged a niche for himself that was rewarding. He had more power in Algeria and a more conspicuous place in society than he ever could have had in France.
I liked to watch my father with Petit Pierre, his namesake. They were physically much alike, short, thin-bodied, and serious, rather slow and low-key among the coffee-crazed, perpetually cranky Parisians. I knew that when my father looked at Pierre, he saw the innocent, that is to say apolitical, Algerian boys of his congregation whom he'd left behind to an uncertain fate, caught as they were between the French security forces, to whom all Arabs looked alike, and the Mackies, the NLA, and the more militant Muslim fanatics to whom Christian Arabs looked not at all like themselves, which is to say, like true Arabs. The young boys who had appeared deeply moved by the non-violence preached by the Jesus Christ of my father's church, the Jesus they inevitably identified as a rebel Algerian, for not only did the Jesus Christ of the Christian religion look like an Algerian, but for a long time there was a tradition of Arab martyrdom in Algeria, of which they were well aware as young Arab terrorists after young Arab terrorists, sometimes boys no older than themselves, went up barehanded or with stones and rusty swords against the machine guns and hand grenades of the French.
Petit Pierre, appearing years later, after my parents had resettled completely into French life and I had settled for the first time, became both our remembrance of our Algerian experience, which in Paris seemed suddenly never to have existed, and our solace. This became true even for my mother. mother, who cared, to a much greater extent than either my father or I, what other people thought. She did not have her own mother's firm belief in her right to enjoy life as she pleased, and in such company as she alone chose.
But she had loved Algeria, and the warmth of the people had impressed itself upon her. Her bourgeois French racism, all Arabs steal, the women are no better than they should be, the children are born with a criminal streak, etc., etc., etc., had all been severely shaken by the suffering of her servants and friends. She adored Pierre. When he left for America, I thought her heart would break.
She who saw him as a light of her waning existence, and the light of her memory of an earlier phase, in which he had had no part, but rather was like a belated son in the evening of her life, illuminating some new truth she now knew, pointing backwards with its rays. She, who, since he could walk, had strolled hand in hand with him in every Paris square, protectively wary at first of the covert glances of strangers, then boldly in solidarity with Petit Pierre, then lost, happily, in the grandmotherly joy of his golden hand in hers. Evelyn. I told Ray about my lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the realm of fantasy and storytelling.
Without this habit, I said, it would be impossible for me to guess anything out of the ordinary it happened to me. What do you mean? she asked. I mean, if I find myself way off into an improbable tale, imagining it or telling it, then I can guess something horrible has happened to me, and that I can't bear to think about it.
Wait a minute, I said, considering it for the first time. Do you think this is how storytelling came into being? That the story is only the mask for the truth? She looked doubtful.
I grew to trust Ray. One day when I went in to see her, I found her with her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. Her skin was ashen, and she looked awful. What's the matter?
I asked. She grimaced. Gum mutilation, she said with her lips pursed. Later, when she could speak more clearly, she told me how it had bothered her that the kind of pain I must have endured during circumcision was a pain she could hardly imagine.
And so, having been told by her dentist that she had several pockets of gum disease in an otherwise healthy mouth, she'd had her gums turned down like socks around her teeth, their edges clipped and insides scraped, and then sewed up again, tight, around the roots of her teeth. I could not prevent an involuntary shudder of disgust. But of course I had anesthesia, she said, still speaking as if her gums were stitched. And of course in a few days I'll be better than before.
But you are obviously in pain now, I said. Yes, she admitted. And it is nearly impossible for me to bear it, and also talk. Not surprisingly, making love to anyone at all is the furthest thing from my mind, she laughed.
And this is only in my mouth. You shouldn't have done it, I said coldly. It was stupid of you. But she only chuckled, grimacing painfully as she did so.
Don't be mad because my choosing this kind of pain seems like such a puny effort, she said. In America it's the best I can do. Besides it gives me a faint idea. And it was something I needed to do anyway.
I was angry because I was touched. I realized that though Ray had left Africa hundreds of years before, or the acting out, of empathy. How theater was born. My psychologist was a witch, not the warty kind American children imitate on Halloween, but a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill.
Suddenly in that guise, Ray became someone I felt I knew, someone with whom I could bond. In my heart I thanked Mazzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where he could not. And that she would. Pierre It was a rainy December afternoon, and we sat by the fire reading.
My mother sat, I lounged on the sofa across from her. Earlier that morning she had permitted me to sleep late, missing school, and had brought her gifts to me and spread them across the foot of my bed. Each year since my birth, she'd knitted me a sweater. Each year I watched a piece of knitting grow between her flashing needles.
Each year I was charmed by the result. This year, as every year, she'd outdone herself. The new sweater wrapped me in gold and chocolate. Near the center of my chest, just above my heart, there was a petrific spirit head in a rich, mossy green.
I was reading a book by Langston Hughes, the laughing spellbinder whose sadness almost hit itself in the insouciance of his prose. I had already devoured several novels by James Baldwin, the gorilla homosexual genius whom I had once met when he came to speak at our school, and two volumes of essays by Richard Wright, the tortured assimilationist and great lover of France. These men, uncles from my father's side, would be my guides on my American journey. I glanced over at my mother, expecting to find her still reading, or staring thoughtfully into the fire, but finding instead that her warm, brown eyes were fixed on me.
I was just thinking, she said. It has been sixteen years since you were born, I can't believe it. That long? I said, smiling at her.
Her brown hair was dusted with more gray than I'd noticed before, and her face seemed thinner than usual and more pale. I sighed with the contentment of the spoiled only child, and pondered my good fortune. I felt the greatest possible security with my mother. As she often said, our hearts had beat as one since before my birth.
No matter who else was not in my life, there was always my mother, reading, knitting, preparing for her classes at the laissez. It was true that I was beginning to feel ready to separate from her, but gently, as a fruit drops from the tree. One more year of school, of Paris, and I would be gone. If you go to America, she said, as if I might not after all our years of planning, and spend time with your father, there's something you should know.
What? I asked. Something minor, perhaps, but he won't remember it, and I do. I'm mysterious, I said.
Not so mysterious, she said. It's just that I've realized, with your father, that men refuse to remember things that don't happen to them. Full of the passionate words of Baldwin, Hughes, and Wright, which rang in my heart as if already inscribed there, I leaned forward to protest. My mother put out her hand and covered my lips.
For as long as I could remember, my father came to see me and my mother once in fall and once in spring, for two weeks each visit. He never came on my birthday, because coming at that time seriously distressed his wife. Each time he came, he showed me photographs of his other son, Benny, and at least one photograph of his wife, Evelyn, or, as he sometimes called her, Tashi. Benny was nearly three years older than me, with bronze, satiny skin, and a sweet, tentative smile.
Whenever I saw a new photo of him, I wondered if he'd like me, if we could ever be friends. Once, my father told me that Benny wasn't as quick as I. This pleased me enormously, though I hadn't the words to ask him what a lack of quickness like mine might mean. My mother began to tell me the story of how she had met my father years ago in Africa.
I'd heard it before. I nodded complacently as she talked about the hours she spent with my father in old Tarabi's hut, as a man waited for death. But I soon realized my mother was adding a more adult twist than usual to the tale. You have to understand, she said.
There was a reason why old Tarabi lived alone, way outside the village, and why none of the other villagers came to care for him. Your father certainly didn't enjoy caring for him either. Your grandfather Samuel assigned Tarabi to him. My mother uncrossed her legs, pressed her palms against the arms of her chair in order to stretch her back, and glanced from me to the fire, which would soon need another log.
In his youth, Tarabi had had many wives. A few of them died, in childbirth, from infection, one died from snakebite. In any event, and I learned this from Adam, who liked to recount the old man's as he called them negative blessings, at last Tarabi married a young woman who ran away from him and could not be brought back. He'd been notorious for tracking and bringing back his runaway wives before.
This one drowned herself, in water that didn't even reach her knees, rather than return. She'd gone to her parents and asked them how they expected her to endure the torture. He had cut her open with a hunting knife on their wedding night, and gave her no opportunity to heal. She hated him.
Her parents had no answer for her. Her father instructed her mother to convince her of her duty. Because she was Tarabi's wife, her place was with him, her mother told her. The young woman explained that she bled.
Her mother told her it would stop. That when she herself was cut open, she bled for a year. She had also cried and run away. Never had she gotten beyond the territory of men who returned her to the tribe.
She had given up, and endured. Now her mother stood in the shadow of the girl's father, a man she despised, waiting for death, but in the meantime, longing for grandchildren, which she hoped this errant daughter would provide. There is nothing in this world to kiss with small children, said her mother, turning away from her daughter's tears. Tarabi was thrown out of the village because he lost control of his wife, a very evil thing to do in that society because it threatened the fabric of the web of life.
At least the web of life as the villagers knew it. He died deserted, filthy, and in tatters. The girl's family, too, was ordered out of the village, and the girl herself was dragged from the river and left to rock, her body food for vultures and rodents. Now, said my mother, rising to place a log on the fire, your father always mentions the fact that he and I had lively conversations there in Tarabi's hut, as he reluctantly washed the old man, but he never remembers what our conversations were about.
It was, said my mother, about a young woman in Algeria who worked for us, and who nearly suffered the same fate as Tarabi's wife. It was about how, at last, I recognized the connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of the domination of women in the world. Her name was Aisha, and she ran to us one night, screaming from the sight of a variety of small, sharp instruments her anxious mother had arranged, underneath a napkin on a low-seating cushion that rested beside the bridal bed. My mother suddenly shuddered, as though watching a frightful scene.
It's in all the movies that terrorize women, she said, only masked. The man who breaks in, the man with the knife. Well, she said, he has already come, she sighed. But those of us whose chastity belt was made of leather, or of silk and diamonds, or of fear and not of our own flesh, we worry.
We are the perfect audience, mesmerized by our unconscious knowledge of what men, with the collaboration of our mothers, do to us. After a long pause, she said, this episode with Aisha, who was returned to her family, who beat her for running away, and actually we never knew what became of her, is at the root of my refusal to marry, even though in France there are no instruments of torture beside the bed. And the Marquis de Sade, I asked? Thankfully only one man, she said, and thankfully not in this century, she laughed.
And thankfully, not beside my bed. Perhaps, I said, but surely his cruelty to women is lodged in the collective consciousness of the French, like the zest of Rabelais, the wit of Molière. Perhaps, she murmured, and seemed to lose herself gazing into the fire. Part 9 I was still far away, the breadth of the continent, so I did not worry.
He remained in Cambridge for three years. It was from her letters that I learned of Lissette's illness. Diagnosed first as stress, brought on by her political activity. She was active in the movement against French nuclear power plants, which she wrote, dotted like dangerous pustules, the once pristine countryside.
Later diagnosed as an ulcer, then as a hernia, then, finally, as stomach cancer. She petitioned Adam to permit Pierre to live with him, and to attend Berkeley after her death. This Adam apparently agreed to do. I refused to let him bring up the subject with me.
It was during a period when I could not eat, and was emaciated as a scarecrow. My clothes hung on me, and I wore nothing that wasn't black. The week before, someone introduced me by Adam said, with a snigger, Oh, Adam and Evelyn, how cute! And I slapped him.
I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home, even inside it, I frequently, and with little cause, no cause, boxed Benny's ears. If I made him squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief. I was watching the street when the taxi came. A boxy, bright yellow child's cartoon of a taxi.
The kind of taxi the world expects all American taxis to be. I glimpsed Pierre's curly head before he got out, as he leaned forward to pay the driver. He was skinny and short as if still a child. I watched the two of them, chatting like old friends, go around the boot to take out his bags.
Still chatting, they did not notice the dark specter floating near them. First to the door, then to the porch, then to the steps, alighting to stoop beside a large pile of stones I had begun to collect the very day I learned at Pierre's birth. Large, oblong stones from the roadside, heavy flat stones from the riverbank, sharp, jagged shale stones from the fields. As Pierre thanked the driver and turned towards the house, he saw me and smiled.
A large, jagged stone, grey as grief, struck him just above the teeth. Blood spurted from his nose. I began to throw the stones as if, like Kali, I had a dozen arms, or as if my arms were a multiple catapult of a windmill. Stones rained upon him and upon the cab, which had started to pull off, but screeched to a stop as the driver realized Pierre was under attack and sinking to one knee.
I did not let up, but floated nearer, cradling an armful of stones. Pierre began to speak in a gibberish of French, which infuriated me. I dropped the stones in order to close my ears with the palms of my hands. During this interlude, the cabbie ran up to Pierre, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him out of sight.
I began to laugh as the taxi disappeared down the street. In their cowardly haste, they'd forgotten Pierre's luggage. The brown suitcases sat, importunate and irrevocable, where he had dropped them. More heavy baggage for me to lift and somehow carry.
I would not. I'd go forward, flapping my arms and shrieking hoarsely like a crow, to kick them into the street. Part 10 Evelyn The bus ride from Ombry Station was long, the roads bumpy, the dust everywhere. Each 25 kilometers or so, we stopped to use roadside facilities.
These were not at all like those in America, but were entirely makeshift, smelly holes in the earth on either side, of which some forward-thinking person had nailed a board. On these boards inevitably splashed with urine, one placed one's feet. A week ago, I would not have expected Melissa to still be alive. But yes, according to a year-old Newsweek, I perused in the waiting room of the Waverly.
She was not only alive, but a national monument. She had been honored by the Olinka government for her role during the Wars of Liberation, when she'd acted as a nurse as devoted to her charges as Florence Nightingale, and for her unfailing adherence to the ancient customs and traditions of the Olinka state. No mention was made of how she fulfilled this obligation. She had been decorated, knighted, the magazine said, swooped up from her obscure hut, where she lay dying on a filthy straw mat, and brought out to a spacious cottage on the outskirts of a nearby town, where she would be within easy commute to a nearby hospital, should the need arise.
After being brought out of her dark hut and into the sunlight of her new home, with running water and an indoor toilet, both miracles to the lucky Melissa, a remarkable change had occurred. Melissa had stopped showing any signs of death, stopped aging, and had begun to actually blossom. Youth in, as the article said. A local nurse, a geriatric specialist, ministered to her.
A cook and a gardener rounded out her staff. Melissa, who had not walked in over a year, began again to walk, leaning on a cane the president himself had given her, and enjoyed tottering about in her garden. She loved to eat, and kept her cook on his toes, preparing the special dishes of lamb curry, raisin rice, and chocolate mousse she particularly liked. She had a mango tree.
Indeed, the photograph showed her sitting beneath it. She sat there happily, day after day, when the crop came on, stuffing herself. In this photograph, Melissa smiled broadly, new teeth glistening, even her hair had grown back, and was a white halo around her deep brown head. There was something sinister, though, about her aspect, but perhaps I was the only one likely to see it.
Though her mouth was smiling, as were her sunken cheeks and her long nose, her wrinkled forehead and her scrawny neck, her beady eyes were not. Looking into them, suddenly chilled, I realized they never had. How had I entrusted my body to this mad woman? Tashi Evelyn A flag flew above her house, the red, yellow, and blue, vivid against the pale, noonday, periwinkle sky.
I was not her only visitor. There were cars parked in the postage stand parking lot, neatly screened from the house by a rose-colored bougainvillea, and a tour bus was halted by the road. The passengers were not permitted to disembark, but were busy taking photographs of the cottage from the windows of the bus. I left my rental car out of the view of the house, and when I walked up the red steps to the porch and looked back, I felt surprised that it had disappeared.
Not seeing the vehicle of my arrival seemed right, however, after a moment's reflection, for I experienced all the more a feeling I'd begun to have in the openness of the countryside, that I had flown direct, as if I were a bird, from my house to hers, and that this had been accomplished with the directness of thought. A magical journey. I was met on the porch by a young woman who had not been mentioned in the newsweek article, slender, with smooth dark skin and shiny eyes, as lovely as a freshly cut flower. I explained I'd known Melissa all my life, that she had in fact delivered me into the world, having been a great friend of my mother and in fact mother of the entire village.
I explained I'd come from America, where I now lived, even though Olinka by birth, and that I hoped to spend time with Melissa, perhaps after other guests had gone. What is your name? she asked softly. Tell her it's Tashi.
Catherine's, no, Nafa's daughter, who went to America with the son of the missionary. She turned. Out of habit, I glanced down at her feet. As she moved away, I saw she had the sliding gait of the proper Olinka maiden.
Within minutes, all of Melissa's guests poured out of the house, as if scattered by her cane. They scrutinized me as they passed. Perhaps they thought me an important dignitary. As their car motors were turning over, shattering the quiet, the young woman returned.
you may go in she said with a smile what is your name i asked her martha she replied and your other name mabati she said her eyes twinkling mabati i said why do the people come here the question surprised her mother lissa is a national monument she said recognizes a heroine by every faction of the government including the national liberation front she's famous she said shrugging her shoulders and looking at me as a puzzle that i didn't know i do know that i said i read newsweek ah newsweek she said but what do they talk about with her about their daughters about the old ways about tradition she paused it is mostly women who come you may have noticed this by the people who just left women of a certain age women with daughters frightened women often she reassures them oh i said yes she knows so much and says such bizarre things why do you know momma lissa claims there was a time when women did not have periods oh she says there may have been a single drop of blood but only one she says this was before women's capture i couldn't help laughing as mabati was doing she just sits and talks holds court it hardly matters what she says she's probably a hundred everyone wants to have been in her presence before she dies so much as you know has fallen apart here independence is killing us as surely as colonialism did but then she added sighing that is because it isn't really independence mabati takes my hand and pulls me slowly forward still speaking quietly she's a link with the past for us especially for us women she says she's the only woman honored in this way by the government she's an icon how is it possible i think as mabati leads me into melissa's sparkling hallway and pushes me into melissa's room and toward a snow white bed that my mother has lived and died mazzi has lived and died the frenchwoman lassette has lived and died i myself have lived and died in and out of the waverly in and out of my mind many times world wars have been fought and lost for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost but look here lies melissa propped up like a queen in her snowy bed the open window beside it looking out into a fragrant garden and in the distance above the garden there is a blue mountain she is radiant and her forehead nose lips teeth cheeks smile at me i bend to kiss the top of her head her white hair a resistant brush against my lips i take her hand which has the feel of feathers and stand a moment looking down at her her whole body is smiling her welcome except for her eyes they are wary and alert i thought when people aged their eyes went bad but no she sees me clearly hers is an x-ray gaze but then so is mine now what is that shadow there in the depths is it apprehension is it fear part 11 evelyn mabati is taking the stand she wears no makeup or jewelry and her hair is short and natural there is a simplicity about her that dignifies the whole room when she speaks the warm quietness of her personality soothes the court even if the horse cry of the ceiling fans become more grating than ever she is the daughter i should have had perhaps could have had had i not aborted her out of fear i float up to the stand and hover a large dragonfly in front of her reaching out i take her smooth hand in mine her eyes widen with wonder with delight come i say to her smiling i am your mother if you take my hand before all of these people all of these judges all of these policemen and warders and rubbernecks in the audience you will discover that the two of us can fly really she asks placing her other hand also in mine i tug gently and she leaves her seat and floats beside me over the railing of the witness stand over the attorney's tables over the heads of the packed courtroom out the door and into the sky we are lighter than air lighter than thistle mother and daughter heading for the sun no i suspected nothing she is saying when i float back into myself sitting on the hard chair next to my attorney they were old friends mother lissa knew her she was happy to see her in fact i'd never seen her so excited they needed to talk time alone mother lissa insisted and so you left your post left mother lissa's bedside even left the house the attorney says accusingly my daughter drops her head but quickly looks up again there is that healthy impish twinkle in her eyes she sometimes gets she turns her face to the judges your honors she says firmly i left the vicinity they will ignore this spark of life this simple authenticity this beauty objection says the other attorney i can no longer really tell them apart the only way i recognize which attorney is mine is by noticing which of them sits next to me and by the way he smells his cologne is a scent popular in america the defendant's fiendish behavior is not something which in advance the witness could have known did you suspect anything props the attorney the child looks pained i feel sorry for her how could they imagine any of this is her fault it was i who shoot mabati from her post i who told melissa mom lissa give the girl a break your other daughter has come from america just to look after you since this coming back to care for the elderly was such a strong characteristic of the ancient traditions how could she refuse oh melissa said it is too much happiness too much to see the daughter of nafa here right beside my bed oh surely i shall die of it i thought it an odd thing to say how did the defendant appear to you the prosecuting attorney asks there is a long pause motherly mabati replies the young man is surprised what his look implies this demon motherly yes mabati continues in a definite voice i lost my own mother when i was an infant and yet never believed she died when mrs johnson showed up at the door childhood memories are quite irrelevant to this court says the attorney cutting her off though surely the humane response would have been to let her finish even if one felt quite unable to ask the question how did your mother die it is a taboo question in alinka one never asked for fear of the answer mabati subsides into silence but looks me in the face and holds my gaze i see that she has not condemned me evelyn my heart goes out to adam physically stout emotionally frail perspiration beating on his upper lip it is hard to believe this gray-haired and gray-bearded old man is my husband and has been my dearest friend for over 50 years and was my lover he looks condemned simply to be present in the jammed court he stares up disconsolately at the recently oiled slowly whirring ceiling fans or out the open windows awaiting the thrust and parry of the attorney's questions i remember when his body was slender and firm and how i used to kiss from nipple to nipple across the smooth expanse of his beautiful chest he is saying i'm a tortured woman someone whose whole life was destroyed by the enactment of a ritual upon my body which i had not been equipped to understand as soon as he utters the word ritual there is a furor in the court male voices and female voices calling for adam's silence shut up shut up you disgraceful american voices cry this is our business you would put into the streets we cannot publicly discuss this taboo adam looks weary about to weep mother lissa was a monument the voices hiss your wife has murdered a monument the grandmother of the race i feel the furies the shrieking voices wrap their coils around my neck but rather than allowing myself to choke i become a part of the shrieking and rise from around my own neck exactly as if i were wind i blow and blow about the court building towards explosion the judges call for order over and over the other furies and i subside at last order is restored i am thinking of how i never met lisette how she tried to know me tried to visit me wrote me letters tried to interest me in french cooking sent me cookbooks and recipes sent me clippings about wild mushrooms and where to look for them none of this is helpful i used to mutter to myself gazing into the mirror and sticking out my tongue sent me her son and how i refused her how i thought she knew me too well and then suddenly after a long painful struggle she died leaving pierre her eyes for his eyes are not adam's and it was those knowing eyes with their appraising look that from as far away as an undergraduate dormitory at harvard saw into me even into my dreams shall be madame johnson he wrote i hope you will not tear up this letter before you read it at that point i of course stored in half then held the pieces together to continue reading all my life i have heard about the tower that frightens you in your dreams this tower question obsessed my mother since the day she heard of it and she read many books trying to figure out what it could mean it was an effort i shared from the time i was a small boy always in the back of my mind has hovered this compelling nightmare of yours told only once to my mother by my father but told so vividly our house was never quite free of it for as we both understood it this nightmare this caution of yours of being held captive in a dark tower was what kept my father away from me i now know what the tower is though not perhaps what it means as you know i am now in berkeley which is not so far after all from your house will you not throw stones shall we meet pierre johnson adam they do not want to hear what their children suffer they've made the telling of the suffering itself taboo like visible signs of menstruation signs of woman's mental power signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men when they say the word taboo i try to catch their eye are they saying something is sacred and therefore not to be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery or are they saying it is so profane it must not be exposed for fear of corrupting the young or are they saying simply that they cannot and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part that has gone on as far as they know forever these are the kinds of questions my father taught me to ask alas adam he would say what is the fundamental question one must ask of the world i would think of and posit many things but the answer was always the same why is the child crying there had been a crying child even in old to robbie whose filth and age and illness so disgusted me before he died i saw it he had not loved the majority of his wives in fact he didn't even hate them he thought of them as servants in the most disposable sense he barely remembered their names but the young woman who ran away the wife who drowned herself he had at least thought he loved unfortunately for him love and frequent forceful sex were one and so he lay finally wounded and wet with his own tears lamenting his life but knowing no other women are indestructible down there you know he said to me lewdly more than once his eyes alight with remembered lechery and violence they are like leather the more you chew it the softer it gets if every man in this courtroom had his penis removed what then would they understand better that the condition is similar to that of all the women in this room that even as we sit here that women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into not just evelyn but also the young women from the paper shop the old woman who sells oranges the bourgeois women in their elegant robes fanning themselves and powdering their noses against the humidity the poor women packed tight against the back doors the beautiful daughterly woman mabati how wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them i see each one of them as a little child my father was always so concerned about screaming her terror eternally into her own ear we are aware says the prosecutor that mrs johnson though a lincoln has lived in america for many many years and that american life is for the black person itself a torture i stare at him blankly is it not true mr johnson that in the united states with its stressful whites your wife is often committed to an insane asylum my wife is hurt i say wounded broken not mad evelyn laughs flinging her head back in deliberate challenge the laugh is short sharp the bark of a dog beyond hurt unquestionably mad oddly free evelyn tashi they would all take america away from me if they could but i won't let them if i have to i'll stop them in their tracks just as i stopped amy how do you stop someone in their tracks by not believing them adam woman after woman comes to me to complain that her husband man lover is or was unfaithful to her says tashi's new dr ray when we have a consultation the result nine times out of ten is frigidity in the woman psychological circumcision she asks pensively i tell her i do not know had never occurred to me to think of tashi's suffering as being on a continue on the pain i had thought what was done to her as something singular absolute all right that is the first 11 parts of this book we are up to page 173 out of 288 pages so there's about 110 pages left to go i feel like we're gonna finish this here on this program but not tonight maybe tomorrow come back for the final final question part and i hope you enjoyed listening talk to you soon bye yes i know what you think of me you never shut up