The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "Do you know what?" I said to T. "This is so much more civilized than what some other countries do. I just read an article in the Times--maybe you saw it too?--about the Germans--or was it the Belgians?--anyhow the people who are settling South America, and they brought back two of everything they've discovered so far: fish, leopards, birds. They even brought back a pair of Indians. People turned out in droves to see them. But the poor things shivered and shook--they were just children--the whole time, and when winter set in, poof, they died."

  At that moment, I happened to glance up at T., but he was looking into the door of the hut where the figure was spinning. But the figure was not spinning any longer. She was standing in the doorway!

  M'Sukta was little, about four feet ten, slender as a reed, and blacker than anyone I had ever seen. She seemed ageless--a very young child, an adolescent, or an old woman carefully preserved. She was dressed exquisitely in cloth made from hundreds of the strips that decorated the pegs by the door of the hut, which I now saw copied many of the colours, motifs, and symbols that covered the mud walls. Her hair was in dozens of mid-back-length plaits; on the end of each one was a bit of seashell. Her small feet were encased in colourfully beaded slippers of soft leather. She came towards us holding her spindle and carrying a large basket of cotton from which she was making thread.

  She barely acknowledged us. No. She did not acknowledge us. She just seemed to know we were there, and that was her cue to come out, sit before us in her splendid garb, which obviously she had made herself, and begin a demonstration of this aspect of her village's way of life. I looked about for other members of the tribe to emerge, but none did.

  It would not even have required a feather to knock me down.

  "The museum lets her live here," said T., still smiling fixedly at the woman. I had never noticed before how shallow he was, always willing to skim about on the surface of things. The woman gave no indication that she heard or saw or cared about our presence. But there was an increase, barely perceptible, in the smell. It was, I realized, the smell of fear. This tiny, childlike creature was afraid of us! Of me! I felt myself immediately brought into focus. Animals in zoos were afraid of me as simply another human being come to stare at them, but this was different, somehow. If she was afraid of me, then it was definitely my whole existence that was "wrong," and not the screaming colours of her clothing or her house.

  "What do you mean, they let her live here? Where does she come from?" At this question T.'s expression said: A woman so black, where would she come from? "But where does she really live?" I was frantic for an answer now, feeling my whole being, further back than I could remember, involved. My reaction was perhaps unique to me. Was it, I wondered. If so, this made me feel more afraid. I mean, where was this woman's world? That she should end up like this, on view to us. Black people, though not unheard of in the streets of London are nonetheless rare. There are a very few men that one glimpses from time to time and no women. Or maybe, I thought now, they live in a part of London, a kind of underworld, that I have never seen. Even in the brothels there are not ever any really black people, not chocolaty black and exquisite, like this woman. Only Indians and the occasional swarthy Arab, looking ashamed of himself.

  T. was smiling. "She's lived here ten years," he said, through his teeth. And I noticed how straight and clean and polished they were. They glistened like pearls against his red lips. They made me think of T.'s love of food, and of him eating, eating rather than talking if any subject arose at dinner that made him uncomfortable. There were many such subjects. In another few years, I thought, T. will be quite fat. The fat of silence, the fat of silence, the fat of ... I could not stop thinking this, even as I strained to hear what T. was saying.

  "At first she was installed on the main floor, but after a year or so she had a breakdown of sorts. The young boy who was with her died. Maybe it was the cold," he said, looking up at the bright "warm" ceiling. "These old buildings are draughty and damp, really only made for ghosts. Anyway, after the boy's death, which some people ascribed to one or the other of them, she went inside herself to such a degree that everyone assumed she would be next. They watched her round the clock, just as though she were a sick elephant. But when they gave her some privacy--she and the boy had been on view in the main hall downstairs every day except Thursdays, when the museum was closed, and of course at night--she recovered."

  "She has never tried to escape?" I asked T., looking at the meek creature bent over her spindle, her little black fingers, on one of which she had placed a tiny, many-coloured cotton-thread ring, fairly flying. It was a simple wooden spindle she was using, like the ones the older shepherds' wives still use in the country near Morley Crofts. There were looms of different sizes--one of them a tiny handloom on which she made the colourful inch-wide strips--propped against the wall near where she worked.

  T. seemed surprised by my question. "But where would she go?" he said. "As I understand it, the tribe she comes from in Africa is no more. Intertribal warfare, slave raiding, that sort of thing. She's the last of her people." There was a hint of disgust in his voice for "that sort of thing." I welcomed it eagerly. After all, I love T. "Besides," he continued, killing this feeling entirely, "you know women like to stay at home. Here she has everything she needs, her houses, her granary--there's even grain in it--her household duties, just as she'd have back in the jungle. She's remarkably talented, as you can see. She makes her own clothes, and things to sell, too, you'll be happy to know." He looked at me and reached for a strip of woven cloth hanging on one of the pegs. The woman's eyes flickered when he took the strip, but that was her only reaction. He tied it about my hair, making a headband like American Indians wear. He placed a shilling in a dish I had not noticed before. I liked the strip, I kept it on. I bowed stiffly in the woman's direction. But the thing was covered with the smell. I would have to wash it over and over again.

  Scribbled in the margin at a much later date--the ink was darker and a different color from the rest of the writing on the page; also, the writing was larger and written with a firmer hand--were these words, in which Mary Jane detected a hint of what, for all she knew, was her great-great aunt's legendary sense of humor: "And that is how I met M'Sukta, the little woman who carried me to Africa!"

  TWICE A WEEK NOW Mary Jane eagerly took the train to Guildford. She began to feel like a fixture in the Eleanora Burnham Room. The diary continued, and she read somewhat breathlessly.

  M'Sukta's industry in the solitude of captivity impressed me strongly. Suddenly I felt terribly unaccomplished. As shallow as Theodore. As superficial. As decadent. I was, after all, in my mid-twenties, almost too old for marriage, even if it were forced upon me. The middle-aged Greek merchants who came to our London house for dinner no longer stared, in feigned enchantment, at me. They rushed away after eating, with prettier and much younger young things on their minds. This was a relief. Though now the spectre of some sort of nunnery was raised. My mother reminded me frequently that in her time this would already have been tried--my tenure in a nunnery, that is.

  I avoided confrontations with my parents as best I could by spending time with my old tutors. I had been educated at home always--by governesses, tutors, hired hands, who eventually became, I had thought, almost friends. I looked now at how they lived in the world. Their small flats, their meatless dinners, their threadbare cloaks. Their sense of duty, purpose, expertise. For they had something, these poor people who were so often viewed by my family as being a step above the family dog and a step beneath the cook. And then again, how valuable could what they had be if its sole destination was the instruction of someone like me?

  I had never noticed their singular evasiveness. "How am I to live?" I queried one of them. "What has your instruction prepared me for?"

  She looked at me in surprise. I read discomfiture in her face. She was pale as a potato. And as quiet.

  "Why, miss," she may as well have said aloud, "we've prepared you to be a lady."

&
nbsp; A lady.

  Apparently Theodore and I alone in all the world thought every lady everywhere ought to be shot.

  I do not know exactly why we felt this, and it was not by any means a constant feeling. But there was something so artificial about ladyness, something so separate from others and from the world. The ladies one saw seemed to be trapped in their long skirts. They tripped ahead on the pavement in their tight shoes, their large feathered hats floating above them. And they looked at themselves in shop windows and admired themselves. It was too much! I realized I had a hatred of women--of ladies, rather--that was almost overpowering. And I felt it especially when I had to take off the overcoat, trousers, and shirt bought by T., in which I felt so at ease, and could actually see my own feet, and put on the garb of ladies, which made me feel like a dog bound by an all-too-visible chain.

  "You know history," my tutor stuttered, "you know geography, you know science, literature, and languages. You are quite the best-educated young woman in London," she went so far as to dare say. "There's precious little you couldn't do if you put your mind to it."

  I did know all those things, yet none of them worked when I visited M'Sukta, which I began to do, regularly, after that first visit with T. The history I knew was not hers, the geography I knew placed an elephant herd where her village had been, the science I knew did not teach me how to make dyes and medicines and the other things M'Sukta could do; the literature I read talked about savages and blackamoors, and that was when it was being polite. The languages I knew failed me entirely when I stood before her. ME TAO ACHE DAKEN SOMO TUK DE. This was etched in the wall of the compound as it approached the granary door. I puzzled over it each time I came. Was it Latin? Was it Greek? T. once said laughingly that, as I strained to decipher it, I looked quite pixilated. Then he showed me the brochure in which it was translated. It was an ancient saying of M'Sukta's people, a people always under siege for one reason or another: THEY CANNOT KILL US, BECAUSE WITHOUT US THEY DIE. Hardly what one would expect from the primitive philosophy of "The Savage in the Stacks," as a local paper referred to M'Sukta, assuming, ignorantly, that a museum is a library. Now I had a new quandary: What kind of people would have this thought as a life guide? The more I pondered it, the more of a riddle it became.

  Now the effects on the diary of years of humidity, moths, existence in the bottoms of trunks and traveling cases in distant countries began, abruptly, to show. There were whole pages impossible to read because of faded ink; some sections were literally eaten away. Mary Jane tried to subdue her frustration by remembering that she hadn't even known there was a diary by Eleandra; she hadn't known Eleandra existed. She made herself thankful for the snippets of the diary she could read.

  "Only my painting tutor [something, something, something--this was faded] showed outright impatience with me. I had always thought him rather sullen, and an indifferent painter. I was lamenting that I had no freedom, as a woman, to paint. I could not go to Italy, for instance, as he had done, and he was poor! "Don't pity yourself, please," he said acidly. "I can go to Italy by working every single day with people like you" (here, he bowed!), "saving all my earnings, living on rusks. I can stay two months, I can paint what I like, in two months. You are a woman, but you are rich. People may laugh but they will not harm you if you paint. You can paint all day. You can paint for months, even years, on end. Anything you like. And ..." (he softened not at all, but appeared to look at me with an even deeper disgust) "you have some talent."

  "But what good thing have I done?" I asked. I painted because I loved it, not because I had any dream of being good. He reminded me of a little thing I had done that, in truth, puzzled me even as I did it. It was a still life--all my paintings were--called "Tombstone and Fruit." A grave, a stone, fruit covering the mound like flowers. I had no idea where the image came from. I told him this.

  "It came from you. From you, trying to tell yourself something." I had studied with this man, middle-aged and not unattractive, I now saw, for three years. I had never really noticed him. His jaundiced skin, his white, white hands and muscular wrists. The look in his eyes. He had worked for my family, for me, while his own dreams of growth and development as an artist faded. Two months in Italy! I knew they were, in reality, his life. This, then, was the power people like us had. The power to enslave others and to frustrate their dreams. And I had never even taken my painting seriously, whilst his life--living on rusks, he said--bled slowly away.

  Another tattered page:

  "Those words are all that kept me going," said M'Sukta years later, when we could, haltingly, converse. "They were truly my ancestors' gift to me. Not even song meant as much to me--and I used to sing all the time just to hear my own language--or knowing how to weave the tribal cloth, the magic of which is that as long as it is woven, the tribe exists; as long as you know how to weave it, so do you. These words never bored me ('made my head heavy as rice grains in a gourd') all the years I lived in the museum ('granary for humans'). Those words called me back when sickness and sadness ('heaviness of centre chest') threatened to carry me away ('eat down my soul'). It is a miracle ('the end of rainbow') that they should have been there at all, etched in the mud wall beside the granary door; for our people did not read or write; instead they placed their trust ('open chest, sun shining') and their history ('kisses and kicks to the ancestors') in the memory ('head granary') of human beings ('those alone on the earth who think of what is just'--just, 'two hands holding equal amounts of grain'). They believed that all that has ever happened is stored as memories within the human mind, or in the head granary of those who alone on earth think of what is just. The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget; your thing granaries ('museums'), and not yourselves, are full. I can tell you truthfully ('eyes steady, heart calm') that meeting your people was a terrible shock ('small children running away'). Your people are most afraid of what you have been; you have no faith that you were as good as or better than what you are now. This is not our way ('path'). Not only were we as good in the beginning as we are now, but we are the same ('two grains of sand, identical')."

  When she said this, I thought of that night long ago in London, when I sat watching the ballet with T., the scandalous one from which Mother and Father withdrew. I had thought I had merely been titillated by the "savage" dissonance of the music, the thunderous, herdlike cacophony of the dance, which was certainly not the ballet, not the formal, precise, unnatural movements that one was used to. I thought I was responding to the bizarre clothing. Skimpiness on the one hand, outrageous costumes and colours on the other. So barbaric, so savage. But perhaps T. and I were both responding to our first glimpse of ourselves before we, and all Britain, all Europe, became pressed into the forms created for us by civilization. Perhaps the maiden dancing herself to death in her "marriage" to the sun struck some deep chord in us. Perhaps she was expressing a feeling for nature that English people subsequently only expressed politely, with restraint, in their gardens and in their insistence on large parks.

  Where had the passion of praise gone, then, among my own people? It certainly was not in the church, neither the Catholic nor the Church of England. The Roman conquerors seemed to have rid us of it, and yet, I thought, in the passionate dance of the young virginal maiden one could glimpse part of the truth of who we English people were. There was our passion and our savagery before it became tamed. But it had not really become tame, only repressed--and the worship of nature turned into its opposite, and the end result was wilderness ravaged and despoiled, and people in chains, and a little black woman shut up in a museum beneath a fake sky.

  It was Sir Henley Rowanbotham who had had the words M'Sukta lived by carved into the mud wall beside the granary. He was a commander in the British army sent to administer to the needs of the Royal Colonial Exploitation Company, Ltd. The men under his charge assured safe passage throughout Africa to those explorers and entrepreneurs from England who boasted, if the
y lived long enough--for there were such things as fevers, quicksand, and mambas--of making quick fortunes in Africa, buying and selling among the natives, claiming huge tracts of land and all the minerals and diamonds and whatnot they might contain. The slave trade had not yet ended, though it was on its last legs, at least as far as the West was concerned, and there was still money to be made. Rowanbotham had been deeply influenced by the adventures of Sir Richard Burton, another army man, whom he accepted as his personal guide re: things native. Like Burton, he was once thought to be deeply in love with a native woman--African, not Persian--and like Burton, he, in other ways, immersed himself in native life and native affairs. He was, again like Burton, adept at learning languages and was genuinely fascinated by them, and whiled away the long damp tropical evenings of the rainy season ensconced at a window table in the Royal Colonial Club, working up a native alphabet.