The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "I was never a gentle person. Maybe in the lifetimes I don't recall, but in all the ones I do recall I was a fighter, someone who started trouble. Someone who was easily bored by other people and was offended if they tried to present their feeble point of view. For most people, as you know, remember nothing of other lifetimes, and no matter how old they get they never remember any better. They honestly think that when they were born their brain was a clean slate. I've actually heard this said! That babies have no memories; that they are empty of knowledge and experience; that, in fact, there is no one there. This is insane. Of course, the memories that they have appear to babies as dreams indecipherable to themselves because they are no longer in those contexts, and because babies lack the ability to speak any language, not simply the languages they spoke before. Of all the periods in one's life, babyhood is the most pitiful and the most confusing. There you are, without anyone you know, surrounded by giants you may never have imagined existed. They are blowing their objectionable breath on you, oiling your skin with God knows what strange mixture, giving you food to eat that, in an earlier lifetime, might have been taboo. It is hideous! And as you lie there looking about, you summon just enough intelligence to understand this is the next classroom, these people are the next lesson you will be required to learn. Oh, the horror of it! That is the real reason babies sleep so much. Imagine where and to whom so many of them are born. They sleep to avoid the shock of the cruel thing that's been done to them and to avoid the inevitable feeling of utter helplessness.

  "I did not like my parents at all. My mother was rather clumsy and obviously untutored; she seemed to speak not only in a language I'd never spoken, but in a language newly invented. She spoke of 'taters' and 'rotgut,' 'hog killin' and 'sugar tits.' She seemed to exist in a trance, and when I cried she responded with an absent-mindedness that left me breathless. I used to lie on the bed and watch her going back and forth through the house in her slovenly wrappers, her steps dragging, almost shuffling, from front porch to kitchen. She dipped snuff. Every so often she'd drag herself to the side of the porch and spit off into the weeds. I knew I'd never seen, in any of my lifetimes, a more stupid person.

  "Then there was my father. Where my mother was merely clumsy--she had a habit of changing me in such a way that the old soiled diaper always came in contact with my head--my father was hopeless. He was every stereotype of the inept father of a newborn baby rolled into one. He spoke the same odd language as my mother--rather, he mumbled it--and it would take me years to master it, whereas in other lifetimes I was able to master new languages in a matter of minutes, though it was months before I could speak. For years I literally could not speak, and out of that frustration over the language I would also fight.

  "The worse thing was, I'd never known these particular people before! Never. They were complete strangers to me. I didn't recognize their scent, I didn't recognize their body movements, their rhythms--of which they made so much--I didn't, as I said, recognize their speech. God knows, I didn't recognize the diet! These people lived on corn bread, lima beans, and the occasional head of boiled cabbage. That was during times of plenty. The rest of the time they lived on grease, sorghum syrup, and biscuits.

  "Those first weeks and months, I slept as much as I could. And even as a big child I would fall asleep. In fact, that's one of the reasons the diet of the children on the Island was improved. I kept falling asleep in Miss Beaumont's class, and one day the visiting health nurse noticed it. They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time. In those days, in slavery, the people were whipped for tasting the milk or stealing the greens or eating the fruit; consequently, nearly fifty years later they had to be almost forced to eat those things. And they detested fish! Many a time I heard my mother complain that fresh fruit gave her wind, milk broke her out in hives, and only the whitefolks, she reckoned, would eat 'rabbit food'--which was how she viewed raw greens. My mother and the other women on the Island had to be prodded into going back to planting little kitchen gardens. At one time they'd all had them, as well as pigs and chickens, but somehow or another they lost their animals and their seeds, maybe in one of the big floods that sometimes came as a result of coastal storms. Beautiful storms, I might add. Just deadly. Then for many years they couldn't afford to buy seeds or animals, and being on an island didn't help, because every little thing had to be brought over on one or two small flimsy boats, and it was about a ten-hour trip. The plantation overseer would pull up any vegetable growing in their yards that looked like anything planted in the field. And you could lose your house, because nobody owned their houses.

  "But this little woman--she was a white woman, and she had a black woman helping her--she started to agitate on the mainland about the condition of the Island children, and pretty soon whole big boatloads of white people came to look us over. It was the first time I'd seen so many! They were in many different shapes and sizes and very healthy from having eaten our food all their lives. I didn't know this then, of course: how they had sound teeth because mine were rotted; how they could afford glasses to help them see, while my friend Eddie couldn't see beyond his nose and would never learn to read; how they ... well, you get the picture. They all had a distinct quality of being apart from real life. It was like they were on one side of a glass and we were on the other, and we could have no real impact on what happened on their side, the side of the unknown, but they could have a great deal of impact on us. And I felt that was because we were where life was. For even in our frailty, we laughed. So much was so funny to us! They could not laugh freely. Their faces were like fists. When they almost touched you, they grew confused and looked about to see what others in the group did. We gathered in clumps, digging our bare toes into the sand, and looked at them as if they were a zoo. Only one man, short, fat, and disheveled, had come to be alive with or without us. He headed for the beach out in front of the school and took off most of his clothes, never looking at us. He took out a jar of liquid soap and started blowing bubbles. Pretty soon we were all out there with him chasing the bubbles and watching them float out into the bay.

  "There was, at the time, a big to-do about giving us cod-liver oil, because somebody noticed that me falling asleep was the least of it. Many of the children had legs that looked like pretzels. We had people on that Island with legs so bowed they made people with straight legs look deformed. That's what we needed the cod-liver oil for, to prevent something called 'rickets.' It was funny, too, because by then, on the Island, bow legs in women were considered sexy, and you actually had people grumbling about how straight-legged women 'didn't do a thang for 'em.' Meaning sexually. My mother actually had the nerve to try to tell me I didn't have to take the stuff if I didn't want to. But I remembered sick and deformed children from hundreds of years before, and I was disgusted that this should still happen. But I did demand that the cod-liver oil be given to us in orange juice. Because, once the parents were asked if the children should take it straight or with orange juice, they got into a debate over it and tried to make it a moral issue. Their children weren't sissies, by God and his grandmother! Their children could take anything dished out to them 'like a man'! Can you believe that shit? It really made you wonder about the general thoughtfulness of the divine universal plan.

  "Well, I wasn't a man. Never had been one. Unless I had orange juice, I said, I wouldn't take the cod-liver oil. If I didn't take the cod-liver oil, nobody else in the school would either. Everybody knew this to be the unvarnished truth. And besides, the cod-liver oil, taken straight, tasted like shit.

  "There are few things more confusing to people than the process of regaining or attaining health. It is one of the great mysteries. And when I think of my dear mother as her mind began to clear--for she, too, was g
radually induced into reinstating the kitchen garden, getting a few chickens for the eggs, and eschewing the syrupy-sweet coffee she loved--even now, long after her old head is cold, I have to laugh! She started, for the first time since she was a girl, to remember her dreams. And it was--that first morning after so many dead nights and one live one--as if she'd seen a ghost. For weeks her dreams were all she could talk about. The people and events in them, the fabulous lands she saw--she never understood they were her lands--the houses she visited that 'just felt so familiar,' the food she ate. In fact, she was always eating in her dreams, milk and fruit and greens! And everything she dreamed herself eating she searched for until it was found. She enlarged her garden and her livestock and sold her surplus to the neighbors; she bought her own little boat. Off she went to the mainland with her bag of nickels and dimes. She would mentally prostrate herself before an orange. A banana drove her wild.

  "Her speech remained strange, but ceased to be unintelligible as she added more of herself to it. She stopped dragging her feet. Her taste for snuff left her. I began to see her in quite a new light, with less impatience and contempt. It was from this time that we became more than mother and daughter. We became friends."

  "HAL, NOW. HAL. THANK God for Hal. He was the only person I felt I had known before. He likes to tell stories about us as babies slobbering over each other's faces and trying to get ourselves together enough to crawl away. This is the Lord's truth! When I first made contact with Hal, when my little chubby fingers got hold of a handful of his fat face, my juices (those in my mouth, of course) started to flow. Here, at last, was something, someone familiar. Now I know some folks like to tell you that the man they married, or the woman, was once their grandmother. I can't claim anything like that. I don't know who Hal was, and all these years I haven't had any success in either remembering or figuring it out. What I can tell you is that he was familiar, comfortable; and what's more, emotionally recognizable. And he felt the same way. I don't have many memories of this life that don't have Hal somewhere in the middle of them. I had to see him every day. When he had to go off anywhere--for instance, the time he went into the army--I like to have died.

  "None of us ever becomes all that was in us to be. Not in the majority of our lifetimes, anyway. You take Hal, well, he was an artist. A painter. All he ever did really well was draw, on anything he could. From a baby! He'd get him a little stick and be out there in the sand digging and drawing, happy as a little clam. But his daddy hated that in him, and I've seen him take the stick away and stomp out the drawing--and Hal was a baby! Drawing was something his father wanted to do himself, something maybe he had a real talent for, but you can't draw pictures for a living, is I reckon what he thought, and maybe his own daddy had broken him early, forbidding him to try. Before that it would have been the overseer on the plantation during slavery time. But it was so cruel! Like seeing someone forced to blind himself. And also very illogical. Mr. Jenkins, Hal's daddy, became a great furniture maker, mostly chairs. He carved the most beautiful designs on them. It was from the sale of these chairs that he and his family were able to live better than the rest of us. It was beautiful, too, seeing those tall, polished, shining chairs, one to the small boat, floating out to sea! Still, he hated the tendency to art in his son. Why? Hal spent a lifetime in the dark about his father's fears.

  "When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal. Hal could not defend himself, for instance; he didn't consider himself worthy of defense. He never learned to fight. And listen, the most amazing thing, his eyes became weak! But I always took up for him; I knew he had to be reminded that it was all right to see. And in whatever corner of privacy we could find, I forced him to draw. If I hadn't, he would have been blind as a bat within a year. His father threatened to keep him out of school if he drew. So for years I had a big reputation as an artist. It was all Hal's work--pinched and furtive, as if his father loomed over his shoulder, but still expressive, raw, and pure. And I'm proud to say I can remember almost every painting that he drew. He drew right up to the time he left for the army. After that, for quite a while, nothing. And sure enough, during that time, Hal was to tell me later, he was a regular stumblebum. But at least the army let him out finally because of his bad sight, though it kept other colored men whose disabilities were almost as pitiful. I was really glad to get him back and painting again, for a gifted artist such as Hal can paint the memory that maybe you yourself have started to doubt. He actually did that more times then I can count.

  "I was talking to an African scholar one time, a man from one of these big schools. He was real skinny and black and straight, and he wore that little African-style hat that's just like an American soldier's, only in bright colors, and he was all right, I guess, but he had lifeless eyes, and I almost shivered while he was talking to me. It was like he was a well-educated, smooth-talking zombie, and he had sort of jerky movements, too. So anyway, he got to talking about how much of a cliche it was when black people here claimed their ancestors were sold into slavery by an uncle. He kinda chuckled when he said it and leaned back in his chair. I didn't say anything to him, 'cause he'd already decided that the truth, if told a number of times, can be dismissed as unbelievable, and I have lived enough times to have seen this happen a lot. Some folks actually think the truth can be worn out. But anyway, it was my uncle who sold me. It was the uncle who sold a lot of women and their children, and it's easy enough to understand why this was so. It was the African organization of family life.

  "My father died of a heart attack when I was two years old. He was an old man and I was the last child by his youngest wife; even if he had lived, he would have seemed and have been someone from another century. By law my mother and her children became the responsibility of his brother, who was even older than he was, a practicing Mohametan that bathed and prayed all day. He already had more wives and children and slaves than he knew what to do with. One of his child wives egged him on to sell us, and he did. She wanted to buy some of the white man's trinkets that after the rainy season fairly flooded our part of the world. Mirrors! You've never seen so many appear out of nowhere, or as quickly disappear. Loud-colored cloth, bright tin washbasins, and things for which there was no apparent use--knickknacks; for instance, porcelain dancing ladies and their fancy gentlemen. But this happened well into the dry season, for it was very hot; it must have been something like November or December. My mother had sent me to the okra patch to get the okra that had been left on the stalks for seeds, and I was humming along, hitting at the weeds by the dusty path with a stick. I was about thirteen then. We lived in a poor little hut off by itself and out of sight of my uncle's compound. There were four huge men squatting at the edge of the okra patch, and they just looked and smelled evil, so I turned to run back home. Well, they caught me and tied me up, and one of 'em tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. They then went on to the hut and grabbed my two sisters, my brother, and my mother.

  "My mother was just begging and pleading and calling for mercy, because she knew about slavers, but these brutes had no ears. They were like the zombie African professor I told you about. Perhaps that is, in fact, who he was in that time. Well, they carried and dragged us up to my uncle's compound, and he came out. My mother tried to prostrate herself before him, which was the custom in our country, but she was tied up in such a way she fell over on her side. Thick dust was caked over one side of her face, and both her knees were skinned. I know now that she was someone who was never loved, because she was never really seen, except by her children, who did love her. She had four children, but she was only in her late teens. A strong-looking, somewhat plump, kind of reddish-black woman with big sullen eyes. Her specialty was weaving and, though we were poor, the little cotton our uncle let us keep from the crop we raised for him went into the cloths we wore around our waists
--beautiful checks and plaids, made bright and colorful from natural dyes. She'd learned dyeing and weaving from her mother, who'd learned it from her mother and so on.

  "My uncle had these cloths removed from us, for they were woven in the distinctive style of our tribe--our colors were yellow, red, and white--and gave us plain unbleached cotton ones instead. By this time I had been stood up, bound, in front of my uncle, along with my sisters and brother. We did not attempt to bow to him. We were not crying, like our mother. We hated the man. The truth is probably that we were in shock. I remember the men paid my uncle some silver money with a hole in it, and he took four of the smallest pieces and pressed them into our hands. We'd walked several miles before I was aware that I still held the one he gave me. It was Arab money, with their writing on it and everything.

  "We were forced to jog for almost fifteen days without stopping, or so it felt, until we came to the big stone fort on the coast. It was then we saw the white men. They were posted all up and down the front of the fort, and we were only one small group of many converging on the fort at that time. Two white men came eventually to inspect us. They looked at our ears, our genitals--you would not believe the thoroughness, or the pitiful protestations of the women--our teeth and our eyes. They made us hop up and down to test the strength in our legs. Our feet were bleeding. My mother had sunk into a kind of walking slumber and did all she was told to do as if in a dream. We children copied her manner though we were vividly alert, so much so that the four of us managed to hide our silver pieces, before we were searched, in the thickets of our hair.