The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  Fanny bit into a small hard roll that showered her blouse with crust flakes.

  "We must have a world language," said Ola, reaching over to dust her off, and making Fanny feel like a small child, "before we can have world peace. But imagine how people will fight over which language it must be!" He laughed. "Of course it should be something elegant, but relatively simple, and you must not be able to say 'I despise your kind,' or 'I do not respect your god' in it; in short, it should be Olinka. I'm joking," said Ola.

  "No, you're not," said Fanny, smiling.

  "This frustration with the whites," Ola said, thoughtfully, and not responding to her smile, "is a natural reaction to what they have, collectively, done to you, not simply as an individual, but as a people, a culture, a race. The instinct for self-defense and self-preservation is innate, although there was a time, and very recently, too, when white scholars actually did studies that 'proved,' in their eyes, these instincts were innate in all people except us. They'd put us so far down, you see, they thought we'd never get up again, so they advanced theories that showed our innate love of being down." He sipped his coffee, added a dollop of cream to it, and frowned. "I have been responsible for the deaths of whites," said Ola. "It did not 'liberate' me psychologically, as Fanon suggested it might. It did not oppress me further, either. I was simply freeing myself from the jail that they had become for me, and making a space in the world, also, for my children."

  And Fanny thought: Right. Even fifteen years ago I could not have come here. I could not walk or drive on the roads of my father's country in peace. He could not have met me at just any gate at the airport. He could not have protected me from white viciousness on the street.

  "You must harmonize your own heart," said Ola. "Only you will know how you can do that; for each of us it is different. Then harmonize, as much as this is ever possible, your surroundings." He thought for a moment, sighed. "Whatever you do," he said, "stay away from people who pity themselves. People who are always complaining have a horrifying tendency to spread their own lead into everybody's arse."

  Fanny smiled at this.

  "You must try not to want 'things,' too," said Ola, "for 'thingism' is the ultimate block across the path of peace. If everytime you see a tree, you want to make some thing out of it, soon no one on earth will even have air to breathe. Trees that are already dead are fine," he added. "Old logs dug up out of the mud are okay." He chuckled softly, as if at a private joke.

  "Make peace with those you love and that love you or with those you wish to love. These are your companeros, as the Latin Americans say. Above all, resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there."

  "Even in the consciousness of those who have fallen down the drug barrel?" asked Fanny, skeptically.

  "Especially those," said Ola. "The struggle with the eternal questions, the ones not definitively answered by the rebel or revolutionary in his or her late teens or early twenties, when one thinks all problems can be solved--the thoughts that so trouble you, the eternally nagging furies--these things are what probably pushed many of our people over the edge. But they can be retrieved. If they do not die from their addictions--their attempts to banish all intelligence about what is really happening to the world, while inhaling the rotten fragrance of the lotus of their 'escape'--they will have to see that they are killing themselves. Their teeth are gnawing on their own legs."

  SUWELO HAD AT LAST driven up from San Francisco to see Fanny. She was then living by herself in the little yurt they'd once shared during summers.

  "My father told me, shortly before he died," said Fanny, as they warmed themselves by her small fire, in which pinecones occasionally popped, "to harmonize my relations with you." As she thought about Ola she identified with Zindzi Mandela, Nelson Mandela's daughter, whom she had recently heard on the radio, trying to keep alive the words of her father, imprisoned for twenty-five years. "Of course it takes two to harmonize," she said firmly, gazing into the fire. "But I am to struggle with you in the faith that harmonizing is possible. This has nothing to do with the question of whether or not we sleep together."

  Suwelo sighed. What a difficult woman this was!

  "And what does your mother say?" he asked, sardonically. Fanny seemed very small, and young, despite the threads of silver at her temples that had appeared since he last saw her.

  Fanny smiled. "As you know, my mother counsels forgiveness. It is the spring castor-oil tonic of the soul."

  "And why are these the messages we are given?" asked Suwelo, feeling little hope. "Why is this what they say, and not something a wee bit more probable?"

  Fanny shrugged. "Let's face it, Suwelo," she said; "it is because we are the people we are and not some other people. We are not white people, for instance. This is the message not simply from my parents, but it is the message from the beginning. We can trace this message from our earliest contact with the sun."

  "No shit," he said. "The sun?"

  "We have never considered the sun an enemy," Fanny continued gravely, "only, perhaps in the beginning, a goddess. Then later, no doubt under coercion and stretching our imagination to the limit, a god. We have never, until very recently, far less than a thousand years, known the cold. Deep in our hearts, because of our relationship to the sun, we believe we are loved simply for being here. There is no reason for us to hate ourselves. As someone has said: I can dig worshiping the sun, because it worships back. Our relationship to the sun is the bedrock of our security as black human beings. We have our melanin, we have our pads of woolly hair. We're ready for the beach. We can cope." Fanny smiled.

  "But are you not," said Suwelo, "afraid of being burned? After all, even the sun is no longer what it was." What he was really asking was whether or not she had the courage to love him, changeable as he was.

  "The sun hasn't changed," she said, looking into the fire. "It is exactly the same, as far as human beings are concerned, and will remain so for inconceivable lifetimes to come. It is we who have changed in relation to it. The African white man was born without melanin, or with only incredibly small amounts of it. He was born unprotected from the sun. He must have felt cursed by God. He would later project this feeling onto us and try to make us feel cursed because we are black; but black is a color the sun loves. The African white man could not blame the sun for his plight, not without seeming ridiculous, but he could eventually stop people from worshiping it. He could put a new god in its place that more closely resembled himself: cold, detached, given to violent rages and fits of jealousy. He needed to create a new god, since the one the rest of his world worshiped was so cruel to him. Burned him. How fortunate that he finally stumbled into the Mediterranean, into Europe. The coolness must have felt exquisite.

  "And no," she said, "I am not afraid of loving you. At last I see you for what you are. I see the child in you that became the man and is now fast becoming the person. Your sins are no graver than my own. I indulged in my fantasies of violence for years before I tried to change; as you indulged in sterile, exploitive relationships with other women. I couldn't see why I should be the one asked not to seek revenge, why the buck of violence must stop with me. Besides, must I myself be the only model I had for the creature I intended to be? There is a card in tarot, the ninth card, and its message is: What you hope for, you also fear. This is how it was with me.

  "I didn't feel particularly betrayed as an individual by your affairs with other women; or with Carlotta in particular. You and I are constructing our own lives; other people are bound to be important in them. I do not believe in marriage... . However, I did feel betrayed, as a woman."

  "Betrayed as a woman? But I told you," said Suwelo, "Carlotta meant very little to me. She ..."

  "I know," said Fanny. "What you said was, she meant nothing whatever to you; and, furthermore, she had no substance. It was when you said that, that I hated you. I
hated you as a man."

  "But why?" cried Suwelo. "I was trying not to hurt you. Trying to make you see that no woman mattered to me more than you." He paused, and continued with some bitterness, "I suppose I forgot I was talking to a womanist."

  "No," said Fanny, "you forgot you were talking to Carlotta's masseuse."

  "What?" he asked.

  "I tried to uncramp her legs, untangle her knee joints, flatten out the knots in her back, unclench her jaw, straighten out the curve in her neck, restore free movement to her toes. Clear up a migraine that lasted for a year. She was small, but as dense and as heavy as lead. I knew the body of the woman you said had no substance. Carlotta's very substance was pain. And that you did not know this, or, if you knew it, did not care, that is what made me despise you.

  "I didn't know what had happened in her life. I sometimes wondered whether you knew anything about her life at all. But each time I worked on her I was amazed to feel the pain, like waves of ice meeting my hands, the pain of a body recently and repeatedly struck. A body cringing."

  Fanny had started to weep, and she swiped at her nose angrily with her sleeve. Suwelo knew how she hated to cry when she was angry.

  "Men must have mercy on women, Suwelo," she said coldly. "They must feel women's bodies as a masseuse feels them; not just caress them superficially and use them as if they're calendar pinups, centerfolds, or paper dolls. What woman could trust a man who came back from another woman's arms with a story such as yours? I simply couldn't."

  "I hated you for leaving me," said Suwelo, handing her his handkerchief. "Why didn't you explain?"

  "I was sick of explaining everything," said Fanny, with great weariness. "In my women's studies class and in the administration office at the college I had to explain about blacks; to you and other men I had to explain about women. None of you seemed capable of using your own eyes and feelings to try to comprehend things and people for yourselves. Anyway, you wouldn't have understood."

  "Right," said Suwelo, "all men are imbeciles. Of course. How do you know I wouldn't have understood? Are women the only half of the species that has a brain?"

  "I'd tried so often before," she said, "when we still lived together. I tried with books," she said. "With records. You wouldn't read, you wouldn't listen. You seemed traumatized by the new. It seemed pointless."

  "Pointless," he cried, and he suddenly felt as if all of himself was awake; and that his mind was not in the fog it was usually in when he argued with Fanny, "after all we've been through? Hell, we survived kidnapping together, we survived the middle passage, we survived the slave trade. For all you know," he tossed at her, "I was once your mother."

  "Once my what?" said Fanny, shocked. "Negro, I beg your pardon."

  "Or at least mother's milk for you. Shit," he said, thinking of Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal and all he'd learned from them that he couldn't wait for Fanny to share, "we survived living in New York. Fight with me," he said. "Scream. You have nice big teeth; bite me." Fanny's lovely mouth was shaping the words, in horror, "Bite me?" "But don't just go off inside yourself and assume I'm too dense to follow. Who do you think I am anyway?" How he loved feeling indignant! And as if he had a right, which up to now it had seemed to him only women had, to fight back. To make his self-expression even more satisfying, he got to his feet with a bounce and paced about the small room. Something hot and passionate was opening in him, and it wasn't in his trousers; it was ... in his chest. "I'm flesh, I'm blood," he said with decision. And for the first time truly felt he was flesh and blood. Human, the same as women. "No, I'm not some perfect old outlaw that lived a hundred years ago that you can love without being required sometimes to contradict yourself. But I'm up for the damn struggle any damn day of the week that you are."

  Fanny was looking at him as if he'd lost his mind. "Why are you so angry?" she asked.

  "I'm not angry," said Suwelo. "I'm mad. I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.

  "Talking," he said, reminding Fanny very much of Ola, "is the very afro-disiac of love."

  She laughed and put her hand on his arm. Usually when Suwelo became angry he stuttered and muttered and made not a grain of sense. If an argument started when they were in the car and he was driving, they were likely to run off the road.

  "And am I to assume by this ... um ... declaration," said Fanny, "that what we have here is an Afro who would like to come home to roost?"

  "Yes," he said, joining her laughter. "Here's my hand in strugglehood. Let's shake on it."

  "I WAS AT AN exhibit of Frida Kahlo's paintings at the Mexican Museum," said Fanny. "Like so many others, I'm in love with Frida. The museum that day was thronged with women, and they each had a lot to say about every one of the paintings, but they were even more voluble in front of the photographs of Frida and Diego that were hung with the paintings. After viewing the exhibit for the first time, I sat on a bench in the middle of the floor, simply allowing the exquisiteness of Frida's paintings to wash over me.

  "'Oh,' 'Ugh,' 'Blech' came the sounds from the group clustered around the picture of Frida and Diego taken on their wedding day. 'He is so huge!' said one. 'And so gross.' 'And she so tiny,' said another. 'I hate to think ...' began still another. 'Don't!' said her partner. 'So much pain!' moaned a short, dark-haired woman, who reminded me, actually, of you, Robin."

  "I'm flattered you think of me after you leave here," said Robin.

  "Oh," said Fanny, "I think of you a lot."

  "I saw the exhibit," said Robin. "I, too, am a Kahlo fanatic. I stood muttering and musing in front of that photograph myself. Did you know what her father called the couple? 'The elephant and the dove.'"

  "How could her parents let her marry him?" said Fanny. "They knew the condition of her fractured pelvis. But no one, I suppose, not even her parents, could withstand Frida's determination to have whatever she wanted, and she wanted Diego. And just why did she want Diego? I think it is because she herself wanted to paint."

  "Want to paint? Marry a painter," said Robin. "Yes, I think there's something in that. And his grossness wasn't all she saw in him, even when he wasn't painting. She was charmed by his childlike expressiveness. He was direct in his expressions, whether in a confrontation with the Mexican Communist Party, with the Rockefellers, or with his innumerable lovers. Of course, like many husbands, he wasn't capable of being direct with his wife. Women have a hard time understanding this. It hurts them deeply. Frida never recovered from having been hurt. At the same time, she thought her disability may have been the reason Diego felt a sexual necessity to stray."

  "Well, anyway," said Fanny, "there I sat in the museum, letting Frida's genius wash over me. It was as if the sun were streaming in on me through so many stained-glass windows--what little I could see of it as the throngs of women, and a few men, slowly revolved around the walls. I heard a voice speaking, from in front of one of the paintings. The one in which Frida has her own face but the body of a deer, and her deer's body is shot full of arrows. I drifted over, drawn again by the painting, the horror in Frida's eyes, but also drawn by the voice. It was coming from a white woman with a Southern accent. It was a soft, good-humored voice. Incessant. She was with her mother, who'd obviously come from someplace other than San Francisco. She was dressed in one of those pastel pink polyester pantsuits and wore white sandals with stockings and carried an enormous white plastic handbag. She had graying hair, wore glasses, and was squinting at segments of the painting as if she had difficulty taking in the whole.

  "'Now I don't know what to tell you about this one,' said the daughter.

  "'Why, you don't have to tell me anything, Brenda,' the mother said. 'Look at those tears on her face. I've felt like that.'

  "So I went right home," said Fanny, "and I called my mother and asked her to find out from Tanya's mother where Tanya lived. She called me back next day. She lived in Oakland."

  "Really?" said Robin.

  "Yes. When I called he
r up I said, 'Is this Tonya Rucker, from Hartwell?' And she said, 'Well, this is Tanya.' A total reverse.

  "I was very nervous, going to her house. The woman she lives with, a Japanese-American who introduced herself as Marie, let me in. I sat on the sofa, in front of which was a table full of framed photographs. Mostly of two brownskin babies, a boy and a girl, followed from infancy through their teen years, with a smiling college-graduation picture of the two of them, grown.

  "To make a long story short, Tanya looked exactly like her mother. The little child who'd been my playmate was gone. Her eyes were even different. They had become dark gray, not blue, as I remembered. Her hair was brown, and streaked with gray. She was plump and motherly, offering me tea or 'something to knosh on' every few minutes.

  "I picked up a photograph and peered at it.

  "'Their father was black,' she said, as if she'd said it many times. 'They're both in grad school now. I don't know where Joe is. I think he's probably still in Atlanta.'

  "I wasn't too interested in the whereabouts of Joe.