The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "She says American writers are very strange. One came to visit her and also brought along numerous pictures of herself. In America, I told her, the women writers need pictures to remind everyone they exist.

  "This she termed a typically American, childish, trivial pursuit. 'If your work exists, you exist,' she huffed. 'Ask God.'

  "Last summer at the women's crafts festival in Vermont I bought two beautiful woolen tie-dyed shawls. One is red, with a yellow sun; the other, brown, with an orange-and-purple one. I gave the brown one to her, for 'chilly' London. I can just imagine her there, an ordinary colored woman from the colonies, to the people who notice her in the street. But what a writer! How else would we know all that we know about the psyche of South Africa? About the sexism of Africa? About the Bush people of the Kalahari? About Botswana? It is only because Bessie Head sits there in the desert, in her little hut, writing, that we have knowledge of a way of life that flowed for thousands of years, which would otherwise be missing from human record. This is no small thing!"

  It wasn't. And yet, for just a moment, Suwelo wanted it to be. He wanted American history, the stuff he taught, to forever be the center of everyone's attention. What a few white men wanted, thought, and did. For he liked the way he could sneak in some black men's faces later on down the line. And then trace those backward until they appeared even before Columbus. It was like a backstitch in knitting, he imagined, the kind of history teaching that he did, knitting all the pieces, parts, and colors that had been omitted from the original design. But now to have to consider African women writers and Kalahari Bushmen! It seemed a bit much.

  "Ola drove Ms. Head to the airport himself," Fanny continued. "As she was getting into the car I told her I had a confession to make: Though I had loved all her stories, and especially Maru, I had not really understood her fattest book, A Question of Power.

  "'Oh,' she said, in her Cape Colored accent, 'I'm not surprised atall. It is the map of a soul being destroyed, and the demons that one usually only imagines behind one's eyelids have been given names and faces. They've left the skull of the sufferer and actually lounge about in her rooms. There are some people who immediately connect with the book, but that is because they've been there.' She turned to embrace my mother and say good-bye to her. Then she said: 'Those people who understand it right off don't even need to read it. They're all staring out into space quite peacefully by now.'

  "Overall, I would have to say I felt she didn't quite approve of me. I felt I appeared too solid, too complacent. Too sane. Most writers, I imagine, really worship the glint of madness in other people; torture, to them, must be people who always speak and act in monochrome. She is one of the wariest people I've ever met. She actually looked over her shoulder as we talked. She has light, obviously, tons of it, but it's definitely diffused.

  "When Ola came back from the airport, he told us she'd had a complete nervous breakdown some years ago. That she was simply crushed. She got her health back by taking care of an experimental community garden. In Botswana she has to report to the authorities every day.

  "'What a life,' said my mother.

  "'Yes,' said Ola, 'it makes the little trouble I manage to cause here seem small mangoes indeed. She is paying for who she is with her life. But, don't we all?'"

  "In every book you write there's a chap called Francis," Ola was saying to a local white writer one morning as Fanny came in to breakfast. "Is this accidental or is there some sort of inscrutable meaning the reader is supposed to get?"

  "Come on," said the man, "there's only one Francis, in my first book. Later on there's a Frances with an e, and then in my last book a Frank."

  "But aren't they all the same name, more or less?" he asked.

  "Good morning, Ola," Fanny said. She kissed the top of his head, and he flung an arm around her. He was in the jovial mood, as he sometimes phrased it, of the literarily inclined escaped convict.

  "This is my daughter from America," he said proudly. "Fanny, meet Henry Bates, a founding member of our writers' guild, come to warn me away from harm."

  Henry Bates was small and pasty-faced with light-colored hair and a beer paunch.

  "I've been telling him," he said, "just because he knows or is related to everyone in the government doesn't mean they won't get tired of him."

  "She doesn't know we're related to anyone," Ola said. He turned to Fanny, "We're not really related to those imbeciles in the government, because obviously we're not in progression. You know the Hindu saying that you're only related to those with whom you are in spiritual progression? But a few of your uncles are in positions of authority. And do you know, when they arrested me, after running the bulldozer through my play--a hell of a final curtain, you have to admit!--two of them came to my cell just for 'a little chat.' Politics gives them a headache, so they wanted to talk soccer. Soccer. These are men who've never read a book in their lives. Never stayed awake through a complete play. If they didn't read it or see it by form five, they don't know anything about it.

  "'What are you trying to do,' one of them said, 'make us look bad in the eyes of the world?' He was serious.

  "'Obenjomade, listen to me,' I said. 'Look at my mouth, and clean out your ears, I CANNOT MAKE YOU LOOK WORSE. I am only a human being, after all.'

  "'But Abajeralasezeola,' he says, patiently, 'the government is trying as hard as it can.'

  "'Only the president, his wives, his mistresses, his ministers, his relatives, and the army have enough to eat. Only their children can afford to go to school. The government should try harder. You know, pave a road now and then. Build a hospital. And by the way, why is it that after curfew every night the only people one sees are in army uniform? Among other things, you would think we are an all-male country. And you know what the rest of the world would think of that. And why a curfew, come to think of it? One thing, at least, that Africans always owned before was the night. With "freedom" they seem to have lost even that.'

  "'Go ahead, be funny. Everyone always laughs at your plays. But you shouldn't make fun of people who are trying hard to make something of the country now that the white man has left.'

  "'Look at my mouth, Obenjomade, second son of my father's third wife; clean out your ears: THE WHITE MAN IS STILL HERE. Even when he leaves, he is not gone.'

  "'But Abajeralasezeola,' he says, 'why don't you help us instead of sitting back criticizing? Why don't you write plays that show everyone at his best? You could show how the government is trying to feed and clothe and educate people, even though the whites left everything in a shambles. Why not write a play about how they blew up their own university, their own radio station, and their own hospitals and bridges rather than turn them over to us?'

  "'Obenjomade, cup your endearingly large ears: EVERYONE ALL OVER THE WORLD KNOWS EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE WHITE MAN. That's the essential meaning of television. BUT THEY KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT THEMSELVES.'

  "'The white man?' he asked.

  "'No, the people,' I said.

  "'But Abajeralasezeola,' he finally said, laughing, 'you are the only one who thinks the way you do.'

  "'You are wrong, Obenjemade,' I said, 'THE WOMEN THINK AS I DO.'

  "'But Abajeralasezeola,' he said, shrugging, 'WHO CARES WHAT WOMEN THINK?'"

  Henry Bates and Fanny were both laughing at the faces Ola made as he talked. He didn't look his sixty years. He looked boyish, even impish, as he heartily laughed himself.

  In prison he had slept on the floor, he said, and he thought it had cured his neuritis. Actually, that was a line in his next play, he added.

  Henry Bates threw up his hands.

  Ola was suddenly sober. "Oh, Henry Bates," he said, "watch my mouth: WHERE WERE YOU AND YOUR WORRIES WHEN I WAS IMPRISONED AND TORTURED BY THE WHITES? When my people stop acting like the white man, I can write plays that show them at their best!"

  HE COULD NOT TELL the shrink that he was in love with a woman who periodically fell in love with spirits.

  "But wh
y can't you tell him?" Fanny asked him once, as he was trying to explain his sense of inadequacy, of shame, to her. "What good is a shrink who doesn't understand about spirits?"

  In so many ways, in most, she was an ordinary person. Suwelo had gazed at her hopelessly as she asked this. She had her arms raised and was arranging and rearranging her long, braided hair, turning this way and that in her chair. In her feminine self-absorption and present indifference to other world views she made him think of Cleopatra.

  The shrink was a middle-aged Jewish man who never said anything about himself, which made it hard to say anything to him. Week after week Suwelo waited for some sign that there was a bona-fide struggling human being across from him. Someone who had the least chance of comprehending his plight. But--nothing.

  "Spirits?" he asked, moving a paperweight, like the one in Citizen Kane, ever so slightly on the papers that formed a neat pile on his desk.

  "Yes," Suwelo said. "At the moment ..." He paused. It seemed farfetched. It seemed futile. What would Dr. Bernie Kesselbaum know?

  "Yes?"

  "At the moment it's a man named ... Chief John Horse." There, he'd got that much out. He nearly wept from the effort. "But it doesn't have to men," he said quickly. It didn't even have to be people, but he thought he'd save Fanny's attachment to trees and whales until he could see further.

  Kesselbaum's face was impassive. Suwelo hated the impassivity.

  "Who is Chief John Horse?"

  There was a long silence.

  "Guess who I discovered today!" she'd cried happily.

  "Who?" he'd asked, stirring the cream of asparagus soup as she came flying through the door.

  "Chief John Horse!"

  He was used to these enthusiasms, yet each one managed to hurt. He always felt he wasn't enough for her and envisioned months of loneliness to come, when he would seem barely to exist.

  "Oh!" he'd said, with faked interest, "and where does--who was it? Chief John Horse?--live?" But he could see that, for the time being, whoever Chief John Horse was lived in his wife.

  Ramblingly she had told him of this man who was a chief, a black Indian chief, among the Seminoles of Florida, before it became a state ("Of course, before it was a state," he'd murmured, thinking how hard it was to imagine the existence of land before it was a state), of how the Seminoles refused to enslave the black people who had escaped from slavery and how they were accepted into the Seminole nation. There had been innumerable fights, she said (eyes flashing, as if she'd been present), when the white slavers pursued them. There had been a long march to Mexico. Years of working for the Mexican government, fighting Mexican bandits. Then, after slavery had ended in the United States, Chief John Horse and his people--men, women, children--returned to Texas. This was in the eighteen-seventies, she said, and Suwelo was again surprised, as he often was, that even though he was a historian he had heard nothing of this. There, because the U.S. army had never been able to beat them and saw that it never would, it hired them to help rid Texas of the same kind of bandits that John Horse and his gang had fought in Mexico.

  Suwelo spun this story out for Kesselbaum to the best of his memory.

  He'd said to Fanny disdainfully, "Oh, he was a buffalo soldier." By which he meant a killer of Indians. For the white man.

  She'd looked at him strangely. Then said quietly, "Yes, and no. All his life he was looking for a little bit of land the whites didn't covet, a little bit of peace. He got neither. But that was the dream."

  "And what became of him?" he'd asked.

  She'd shrugged. "Rode off into the sunset, of course. Back to Mexico. At least in Mexico the government appreciated his skills as a soldier and offered him some land. More than this country ever did. Here, he didn't even get a pension!"

  Her eyes had taken on that faraway look that said she was riding back to Mexico with John Horse; that they were busy picking up women and children and bright-faced black men who dreamed of living free along the way.

  He couldn't stand it.

  "And was this a real person?" asked Kesselbaum. "In history, I mean."

  "Oh, yes," said Suwelo. "I feel lucky when they are real people, for then we can talk about them somewhat. It's harder when she's possessed by a spirit but doesn't know who or what it is."

  "And does this happen often?"

  "Once every couple of years or so. But sometimes there'll be just a slight infatuation. We'll be going along happily enough. We'll be like two people holding hands and wading across a shallow river. Then she'll step into a deep current that seems there only for her and be swept away. While she's carried by the current, I'm left alone, holding ... nothing. If she remembers to say good morning most days, it's a wonder. Making love is a disaster. I never know who's there. I'm certainly not, as far as she's concerned, though she claims otherwise."

  For a long time Fanny had not experienced orgasm with him; she learned how it was accomplished from some of her women friends.

  This was at a time when every conscious woman carried a speculum and mirror in her backpack, and, it seemed to Suwelo, at the drop of a hat they were flopping down on their backs in circles together and teaching each other the most astonishing things. Still, when he asked her what she'd experienced during orgasm, she was as likely to claim she'd experienced a sunrise or a mountain or a waterfall as that she'd experienced him. Sometimes she just whispered, "Adventure," or "Resistance," or "Escape!" This was a great puzzle to him.

  "Many people have passionate interests in historical figures," said the shrink.

  This was true. But Fanny Nzingha found the spirit that possessed her first in herself. Then she found the historical personage who exemplified it. It gave her the strange aspect of a trinity--she, the spirit, the historical personage, all sitting across the table from you at once.

  The intensity wore him out.

  As he did with all her spirit lovers, he snuck behind her back and did detective work on John Horse. He was helped in this by William Loren Katz's book Black Indians, in which John Horse's story is told in some detail. Somewhat sheepishly, he gave the volume to Fanny for her birthday. Chief John Horse, he'd read, safely dead a hundred years. Hah! Obviously these old spirits like Horse's never died. Had had an Indian partner called "Wild Cat." Had married a pure Seminole woman. Then a Mexican one. Probably Indian as well.

  "What do you love about these people," he'd asked her once.

  "I dunno," she said. "They open doors inside me. It's as if they're keys. To rooms inside myself. I find a door inside and it's as if I hear a humming from behind it, and then I get inside somehow, with the key the old ones give me, and are, and as I stumble about in the darkness of the room, I begin to feel the stirring in myself, the humming of the room, and my heart starts to expand with the absolute feeling of bravery, or love, or audacity, or commitment. It becomes a light, and the light enters me, by osmosis, and a part of me that was not clear before is clarified. I radiate this expanded light. Happiness."

  And that, Suwelo knew, was called "being in love."

  "OLA TOLD US LAST night," Fanny wrote in her next letter, "that a play he is thinking of writing somewhere down the line--'though admittedly,' he joked, 'my line may be quite short!'--is about Elvis Presley.

  "'The Elvis Presley?' my mother queried. 'Our Elvis Presley?'

  "'Mr. Rocket Sockets himself?' I chimed in.

  "'Precisely,' said Ola, smiling.

  "'You see,' Ola said, enjoying our bemusement, 'in our country we, too, have many different tribes, just as you have in America. You know, you have Black and Indian and Anglo and Jewish tribes; Asian, Chicano, and Middle Eastern tribes. And so on. Here we have the Olinka, the Ababa, the Hama, and the white tribe, of which there are several sub or mini tribes.

  "'Now all of these tribes try to maintain their own tribal identities, and that is natural to man, who perpetuates his genetic identity by controlling the woman he uses for production of his children, but it is not necessarily natural to nature, who will produce for anyo
ne. So over time a lot of racial boundaries are crossed and new people created. What is fascinating is to see the love or hatred that is expressed for these new people, who don't, after all, have a firm tribal category in which to be imprisoned.'

  "'But what has this to do with Elvis Presley?' asked my mother.

  "'My play will use him only as a metaphor. He will be a kind of vehicle for what I attempt to point out.'

  "'Which is?'

  "'That in him white Americans found a reason to express their longing and appreciation for the repressed Native American and black parts of themselves. Those non-European qualities they have within them and all around them, constantly, but which they've been trained from birth to deny.'

  "We talked on into the night about this; Ola eventually playing some of his treasured Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash records.

  "'I don't listen to them as you do,' he said. 'I listen to them to hear where commercial and mainstream cultural success takes people, a part of whose lineage is hidden even from themselves, in a world--or in this case, a country--that insists on racial, cultural, and historical amnesia, if you wake up one century and find yourself "white."'

  "According to Ola, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash are both Indians. A foreigner sees this immediately, he says; Americans do not. He says this explains Elvis's clothing style. His love of buckskin and fringe, of silver. And of course culturally, he says, he was as black as all the other white people in Mississippi.

  "'But didn't he have blue eyes?' asked my mother.

  "'Probably the only white things he owned,' said Ola. 'Blue eyes are like money; they pay your way in.'

  "So assume my father is right; what could it have meant to be as 'successful' as Elvis? Suppose that behind those blue eyes and full lips, and under that thick black Indian hair, there was another: the old, ancient Indian. Suppose he, too, or she, watched. If he was Indian, he would probably have been Choctaw, for that's the tribe that existed, and maybe still does exist, in his part of Mississippi. Suppose his ancestors hid out among the white people, as so many of the Cherokee people hid out among the blacks and whites. Trying to evade the soldiers who rounded up the Indians for the long march to Oklahoma--the Trail of Tears. Suppose that little bump-and-grind the crowds loved so was originally a movement of the circle dance. That's what it would resemble, if you watched it in slow motion. Suppose that little hiccupy singing style of his was once a war whoop. Or an Indian love call.