The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "There was laughter and cold lemonade and flowers and always lots of children and older people, too, that Big Mama had helped raise. You know there had to be some folks in the community who'd have nothing to do with our house. They called Mama Celie and Mama Shug 'bull-daggers.' But I always thought the very best of the men and women were our friends, for they were usually so busy living some odd new way they'd found, and were so taken up with it, they really didn't give a damn. And then, too, Mama Shug especially had real high standards; and if you stepped on an ant in Mama Celie's presence and didn't beg forgiveness, you were just never invited to her house again. Though this sensitivity to animals was not always Mama Celie's way. It was something she learned, as she learned so many things, from Mama Shug.

  "But there was really no place for me there. Not really. I was welcome and I was loved, but I was also grown. After a few years I began to feel smothered by their competence, their experience in everything, their skills that caused me to feel my own considerable attributes were not required. And they simply took over the task of raising you. By this time, too, Mama Shug had decided to found her own religion, for which she used the house, and sometimes this was very hard, because of the way she structured it. Six times during the year, for two weeks each time, she held 'church.' Ten to twenty 'seekers' would show up, and they had to sleep somewhere. Usually it was on the floor, or, when there was an overflow, in the barn or the shed. Everyone who came brought information about their own path and journey. They exchanged and shared this information. That was the substance of the church. Some of these people worshiped Isis. Some worshiped trees. Some thought the air, because it alone is everywhere, is God. ('Then God is not on the moon,' someone said.) Mama Shug felt there was only one thing anyone could say about G-O-D, and that was--it had no name.

  "I don't know how they were able to talk about it, finally, if it had no name, or if everyone had a different name for it. Oh, yes, I do remember! I was telling them, Mama Celie and Miss Shug, about how the Olinka use humming instead of words sometimes and that that accounts for the musicality of their speech. The hum has meaning, but it expresses something that is fundamentally inexpressible in words. Then the listener gets to interpret the hum, out of his own experience, and to know that there is a commonality of understanding possible but that true comprehension will always be a matter of degree.

  "If, for instance, you say to someone in jail who is feeling low: 'How are you?' He or she can say, 'Ummm, ugh,' and you more or less get it. Which is the way it really is. If the person replied, 'Fine' or 'Terrible,' it would hardly be the same. No work would be required on your part. They have named it.

  "So that is how they resolved it. They would hum the place G-O-D would occupy. Everyone in the house talked about ummm a lot!

  "And so, to make a long story manageably short, I left you there with these ummm-distracted people and went to Atlanta to enroll in the Spelman nursing school. My adoptive mother had gone there, you see, and that made it very attractive to me. She was such a lady! A word I know your generation despises, but back then it had substantial meaning. It meant someone with implacable self-respect. Besides, 'woman' meant, well, someone capable of breeding. It was strictly a biological term and, because it was associated with slavery, was considered derogatory. I had been sent to England to study nursing while we lived in Africa, so I already knew quite a lot. I'd also assisted the young African woman doctor at home, who'd trained in England; an eccentric Englishwoman writer had paid for her education. Still, I needed accreditation to work in the U.S. It wasn't easy. I was older than the other students and had a child, but they were interested in my life in Africa, and I was several times asked to speak at vespers. Come to think of it, no one ever asked me whether I was married, but they automatically called me 'Mrs.' and behaved as if they thought I was. Very respectfully. But then, everyone--I mean the students--was respectful. Too respectful, I often thought. They were so grateful to be there--one of the few places a young colored girl could go for training--they acted as if their teachers and the college administrators were gods. They acted, in fact, precisely like the colonized Africans who were educated at our mission in Olinka. Too much respect for people who are not always respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity, and their abject gratitude rather depressed me. Well, I wasn't there to agitate. I got my accreditation in due course and applied for a job at the black hospital on Hunter Street, Harrison Memorial. I sent for you as soon as the job came through.

  "It was a wonderful place! Not simply because it was there that I met your stepfather. Of course I was too dark for his family, and practically an African, a real African, to boot--but that's getting ahead of my story. By the time Lance--his parents named him Lancelot--had graduated from medical school he'd had enough of prejudice among black people; he just couldn't tolerate it. All the cadavers they'd worked on were from a certain range of shades between dark brown and black, and this had radicalized him about the amount of economic disparity that existed along intraracial lines. He started to think there were no poor, really destitute lightskin black people, and this made him very sad. And the marks of hard knocks on the bodies he and the other students were required to work on! His heart was broken, he said, every day. There was a woman, for instance, who walked seventy miles carrying her sick child to a doctor whose existence was only a rumor to her. She died of heart failure; the baby, of dehydration caused by diarrhea. Both these bodies became the property of Lance's medical school.

  "There they were cut up while some of Lance's colleagues told jokes and others talked of the food they expected to have for dinner.

  "Everyone thought a doctor's life was so glamorous! I never understood it. When I went to work at the hospital and had the chance to work with him, I could see it was, very often, a depressing, soul-killing job. There were people who were sick simply because of the way they lived, and ate: a diet of fatback, biscuits, syrup, and hard fried meat. There were colon cancers, ulcers, liver and artery congestion. The ignorance of proper diet was astounding. There were people so addicted to Coca-Cola that this drink was all they consumed all day long, with salted peanuts, bought by the nickel bag. And they boasted of this! That this was 'good.' That this was what they liked; and by golly, this was what they would eat! Don't talk about green leafy vegetables in the same room with them, and only rabbits ate carrots, and cauliflower didn't grow in the South, to their knowledge, so there!

  "I was not looking for a husband. I sometimes thought of Dahvid; that day you were conceived was like a dream memory. I knew that the whole country was engaged in fighting. I imagined Dahvid might be fighting, too, or he might be injured or dead. Besides, you were quite a handful and quite enough companionship, I thought, for me. During the week, you went to the Spelman day nursery school, where everyone loved you; on Saturdays we went shopping for our weekly supplies. On Sundays we went to church. A nice, orderly life.

  Even when Lance started to let me know he cared for me, I hung back. I was always shy, retiring--that quality that seemed so out of place in my mother's house of laughter, horseshoe throwing, magicians sawing people into thirds, guitar players and jugglers! and with which you were so impatient. I was plain, and dark, like my mother--much darker than the other nurses--and I didn't 'play.' There was always in my mind, too, the question of how any man who came around us might behave toward you. And on that score I'd heard many frightful stories from other women, and also from my own mother. It still broke my heart to think of how she was abused by her stepfather, who never even bothered to tell her, until after she was grown, that he wasn't her father. Funny. I could never think of him as my father. The truth is, I never felt I had a biological father, apart from my adoptive father, Samuel, and when I learned I did have one I still couldn't grasp it. So that, to this day, I feel almost as if I am a product of an immaculate conception. Like Jesus, who didn't know who his biological father was either. I have often thought it was this lack of knowledge of his earthly father that led him to his 'heavenl
y' one, for there is in all of us a yearning to know our own source, and no source is likely to seem too farfetched to a lonely, fatherless child. This was considered a blasphemous thought when I ventured to express it; but the question of who impregnated Mary, that young Jewish girl, and under what possibly grim or happy circumstances--because of my mother's sad experience of abuse as a young woman--was always much on my mind. If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, and 'God in heaven' was not, and Mary, because of custom, fear, or depression could not speak up about what had actually happened to her, who was the father?

  "Well, you see how to me all daily stories are in fact ancient, and ancient ones current. And it was due to the long languid days in Africa, days that seemed to go on for weeks, that I credit this sense I have that, really, there is nothing new under the sun and that nothing in the past is more mysterious than the behavior of the present.

  "I connected instead with my mother's real father, my grandfather Simon, who was lynched when she was a baby. He was industrious, an entrepreneur. And very successful; which is why the whites killed him. They killed a lot of striving black men, for a black man's success was much more galling to them than his failure. The failures they could turn back into slaves, entertainment for themselves, and pets. Both my mother and I take after him. Her house and tailoring shop--she made and sold the kind of pants she always wore--became the light that illuminated their town, as far as black people were concerned. And I am like my grandfather, I think, in my firm determination and faith that I can take care of myself. As soon as I had you, I knew there was no work I would not do to keep you in food and shelter and clothing.

  "Lance fell in love with my determination and faith. But I was afraid of his blues. It was a sad, almost listless quality that people of obvious mixed race used to have. Not for nothing was there once a stereotype of the 'tragic mulatto'! I think now that a lot of their energy was consumed by their effort to live honorably as who they were (and who were they?), with both sides--black and white--constantly warring against each other and despising those caught in the middle. I didn't feel I could support the heaviness; nor could I be his front in the black community or his thumbed nose to the white. Aunt Nettie used to say, 'Don't take on anybody's burdens that look heavier than yours.' And Lance's looked heavy indeed.

  "But you know the rest. We courted. We married... . How good it was to once again have a friend and confidant! Someone, besides Tashi, to finally tell about those sad last minutes with Dahvid; those first joyous moments, my little Fanny, with you. It was Lance's idea for you to stand up with us; to decide on how you felt about the marriage and to express it that way. And he was a faithful husband and trustworthy father till the day he died. Do you remember how happy we were that day, being married on the front porch of my mother's house? No more blues for any of us, we swore. And how not only the three of us, but also the family and guests, magicians, horseshoe throwers, jugglers, French-horn players, and what have you--all of us wore red?"

  "YOU WILL NEVER GUESS who is in the bedroom down the hall," Fanny wrote. "Bessie Head!"

  When Suwelo read those words he strained to remember--something. But what he was trying to remember was a consequence of an action, not the action itself. And he wasn't sure he knew the consequence.

  Balancing the letter on his knee, he took off his glasses and closed his eyes for a moment. There rose before him a vision of the stark, empty rooms of the house they had bought. The walls were faded periwinkle trimmed in grayish white. They must paint, he felt, immediately. He preferred white walls. In fact, he could live in a totally white, buff, or eggshell interior. Strong colors oppressed him because they demanded that you notice; some kind of response. White all around you focused the color attention on yourself, or on the furnishings, on the art.

  Two women had owned the house, teachers like him and Fanny, and they had left it in passable shape. Broom-swept. The upstairs carpet had been shampooed. Downstairs in the center of the living-room floor they'd left a bottle of champagne, and a note that wished them happiness in the house, as they had had. In the upstairs study one of them had left a small stack of books. He'd picked them up, one by one, looked at them. They were all by a writer named Bessie Head. There was a note saying here was someone extraordinary and not to drink the champagne and try to read her at the same time.

  Ms. Head was black; there was a small snapshot of her on the back flap of the smallest book. He thought it vaguely racist that the women, both white, had left books by a black person. After a few days he thought no more about it.

  Months later Fanny put one of the books, Maru, on the table beside him as he was completing the chore of check-writing to cover the monthly bills. He glanced at it warily. She was always trying to get him to read books that, to his way of thinking, had nothing to do with his own life. He was a teacher; he taught American history; he was good at it. He read enough. Besides, he had never read a book by a woman.

  "Who is she anyway?" he asked. "Isn't she African?"

  "Yes," said Fanny. "She's amazing. Read this."

  He picked it up and flipped through the pages. Read an inscrutable line. Set it down again. "Put it on my desk," he said. "I'll try to get to it."

  Eventually the whole little stack was piled on his desk. One day he got tired of them being there and shifted them to the floor.

  "She has changed the way I think of Africa," Fanny said. "She's changed the way I think about a lot of things!"

  "Good writers do that," he murmured, distracted.

  But he did not want to change the way he thought of Africa. Besides, when he wanted insight into Africa, he'd read a man.

  As if she heard what he was thinking, one day she brought him Two Thousand Seasons, by Ayi Kwei Armah. She had just finished reading it and was in tears.

  "I can't believe a man can understand so much!" she cried.

  This book, too, gathered dust on the floor by his desk.

  Much later, he noticed her rereading the same book but with a different cover. She was frowning and underlining passages.

  "Why are you reading that again?" he'd asked.

  "They've printed a second edition," she said, furiously, "and it appears to be jumbled."

  "Are you sure? Why would they do that? You don't think it was deliberate?"

  "Did you ever read the first edition?" she asked.

  "Well, no," he admitted.

  "Then you wouldn't understand."

  She slept in the guest room, her "study," that night.

  But why should he try to read all the books that changed her life. She had the time for those kinds of books. She taught literature! He had to read the books required by his profession. The teaching of American history. This was simple enough to understand. Yet he could watch hours and hours of television, which made hash of the teachings of his profession. After the bottle of champagne the two women left, there were rivers of wine. TV, the couch, wine. If only his woman would stop reading books and changing her life, he'd sometimes think, in a wine-induced, mellow mood, and just come over and snuggle up on the sofa with him. Then Monday night NFL football, at least, would be perfect.

  Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn't read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes.

  "She is about our age," Fanny wrote. "And chubby. No, puffy. She says she hasn't been well in a long time. She is a peculiar brown shade because of the sallowness of her skin. In her eyes you sometimes see the most astonishing glint of green, brown-pond-water green. I wanted to ask her so many questions based on things I have read in her books. But she seemed so vulnerable and the questions loomed so intrusive! I mean, there she sat, under the umbrella on the verandah, in none too new robe and slippers--flip-flops, to be precise--her short hair drying from the shower, sipping her morning tea. 'Was your mother really a white South African woman?' I wanted to ask. 'Was your father really black? Tell me again how they met. I don't remember from your book. Was it really about yourself that yo
u wrote, and about your parents? Was she really thrown into the insane asylum? And what in the world became of him? And was it immediately after your first book was published that they kicked you out of South Africa? Where on earth is your son's father?' You know, Suwelo, I've never before met an actual refugee.

  "When my father introduced us he'd said: 'The great writer Bessie Head.'

  "She'd muttered: 'The great unheard-of writer Bessie Head.'

  "'I've read everything you've published, so far,' I said. And it was such a kick to see her response. At first she just stared at me, as if she wasn't sure what she'd heard. Then she was obviously pleased, like a little kid, but I also thought she felt somewhat foolish.

  "'Yes, you see,' she said later, 'I count on not being known. I can really make people feel uninformed and guilty.' She has a deadpan sense of humor.

  "'Your work is known in the States,' I said. 'I've taught some of your things. I call you the Tolstoi of Africa.'

  "She stiffened. 'Have you read how he treated his wife?'

  "'Well,' I said, 'I sincerely hope you don't have a wife.'

  "She finally laughed outright.

  "She is on her way to London for medical reasons. And, she said, to lend the shock of her impoverished presence to her publishers. Apparently she receives very little for her work, and I can certainly testify that her publishers do nothing to promote it. She showed us pictures of her life in Botswana, where she is one among thousands of South African refugees. There is just her hut, bare except for a small table on which her typewriter rests. There was no picture of her son.