by Alice Walker
"Now wait a minute," says Mr. Hal, with much of his charm still intact, "you don't want Suwelo to think that's the only thing."
Miss Rose blushes. She definitely does. Suwelo puts down his empty cup and scratches his chin. Hummm, he thinks. Miss Rose excuses herself and goes off to visit a friend farther down the hall. She understands that Suwelo and Mr. Hal want to talk.
"Thanks again for sending me the cassettes Miss Lissie left for me," says Suwelo. "And for the slides of the work she did before she died."
"Oh, it was all so puzzling," says Mr. Hal, "those last things she did. I couldn't make heads nor tails out of any of it. That big tree with all the black people and funny-looking critters, and snakes and everything ... and even a white fellow in it. Then all those lions ..."
Mr. Hal stops to catch his breath.
"Mr. Hal," says Suwelo softly, "in those last paintings, Miss Lissie painted herself."
"Sure she did," Mr. Hal says, almost laughing. "You forget how many changes I've seen Lissie go through. But I didn't see a sign of her in any of those last paintings." He pauses. "There's not even a sprig of verbena or a stalk of corn from our yard... ." He is almost bitter. It is as if he feels, in her very last paintings, that Miss Lissie went off without him. Left him there alone in the little morning-glory-covered house even before she died. Something she'd never done before. Mr. Hal is very mad at her.
"I couldn't recognize anything in them," he says flatly.
At that moment, Suwelo realizes one of the reasons he was born; one of his functions in assisting Creation in this life. He also realizes he will need a higher authority than his own to convince Mr. Hal of anything to do with Miss Lissie. Mr. Hal's heart is hurt, and his mind, consequently, is closed.
Out of his pocket, Suwelo takes the small cassette player that he carries with him now whenever he is likely to encounter elderly people. Miss Lissie's tape is already in it. All he has to do is place the earphones over Mr. Hal's ears and turn the machine on.
At first Mr. Hal is apprehensive and seems bothered by the wires. Suwelo adjusts everything, more than once, until Mr. Hal is comfortable. Mr. Hal also calms down when he hears Miss Lissie's voice.
They sit, the middle-aged man and the very old man, sometimes looking into each other's faces, sometimes not, as the tape spins. Suwelo is intensely conscious of the sunlight now coming through the window above the bed and the way it falls, like a blessing, on the little green plant he brought. He gets up, goes down the hall, and brings back a cup of water, which he pours over the plant. He stands and watches as the water soaks into the soil. "Say 'ahhhh,'" he whispers to the little plant. And he imagines it does so.
After half an hour, and after he's turned over the tape for Mr. Hal, Suwelo hears the schlop, schlop of old and hesitant feet coming down the room between the double rows of beds. A few minutes later, old Mr. Pete, whom he had seen on the front porch, is craning his hairy red neck into Mr. Hal's cubicle. "Whar's Hal?" he asks in a braying, panic-stricken voice. He is looking right at Hal, but because Mr. Hal is absorbed in listening to the tape and, furthermore, has his eyes closed, the old man can't see him. At least this is how it appears to Suwelo, who is amused.
Miss Rose comes up out of nowhere and hustles Mr. Pete away. Suwelo gets up from his chair and tiptoes down the walkway after them. Mr. Pete is one of those old tall, blue-eyed, rawboned white men who look as though they've lived long lives of perfect crime. He is leaning heavily on Miss Rose's shoulder, and she is chattering away at him. "Hal's busy right now," she says.
"What you say?" says old Pete.
"He's got company!" she shouts up at his ear.
"What's he got?" he says. "Not got a cold, is he?"
"No," she yells, "company."
"What's he got?"
Miss Rose says, "Got a Co'Cola that he told me to give to you. Here"--she hands him a Coke from the machine in front of them--"have a cold drink."
Suwelo laughs and laughs. He thinks, Well, what do you know, there's life, even in nursing homes!
When he gets back to Mr. Hal's bed, after walking all over the nursing home and seeing more of its life, he finds Mr. Hal in tears.
"Oh," he moans, when Suwelo sits next to him on the bed. "She loved Rafe so much better than me!"
Suwelo takes one of his old smooth hands in his own. He is tempted to kiss it. What the hell, he thinks. What does it mean to be a man if you can't kiss when you want to? He lifts Mr. Hal's hand to his lips and kisses it, as he would kiss the mashed finger of a child.
"She loved you very much," he says. "It's you she'll be coming back to."
"Who am I kidding?" says Mr. Hal. "It's my own fault Lissie couldn't love me more. Rafe let her be everything she was. I couldn't do that."
"But how were you to know all that she was?" says Suwelo, comfortingly. "She never told you, did she?"
"People don't have to tell you every little thing," he says. "Making them tell you every little thing is brutal."
"Well," says Suwelo, pressing his hand, "she did try to tell you at the end."
"Yes," says Mr. Hal. "She did." He begins to cry afresh. "And do you know what I did?" he asks. "I ridiculed what she'd done. I laughed. I looked at the little white fellow in the tree and I said, 'Looks like you forgot to paint that one.' And Lissie just looked at me and said, 'No. That's his color.' But she looked so sad. And would I ask her what was the matter? No."
Mr. Hal blew his nose in a Kleenex from a box on the nightstand.
"And I was even worse about the lions. I told her that just the thought of a cat that big gave me the creeps."
He pauses, wondering.
"But when I said that, she just laughed. You know how Lissie could sometimes laugh. It made you feel like a perfect idiot, but because she seemed so merry you had no idea why.
"And to think ..." Mr. Hal choked. "And here I am, out here at the home, and being out here I've had to learn so much. Why," he says, sitting up taller and straining his neck, as if he's listening for something, "my best friend is an old cracker named Pete. He ought to be shuffling over this way any minute now. We sometimes have our meals together."
Suwelo tells him Pete has been there and gone.
"He was a jerk all his life, you know," says Mr. Hal. "Only the lord and his ledger keeper know how much misery he's caused. But he's here now, and he's scared. And he's deaf, and he's old."
"He's funny, too," says Suwelo.
"The heart just goes out to the man," says Mr. Hal. "Besides, I can't see him."
"Oh," says Suwelo, "he's white, all right. You couldn't mistake it."
"I'm still afraid of cats, though." Mr. Hal sighs. "But I'm willing to work on it."
Suwelo looks at the paintings on the wall. Mr. Hal says he may take any or all of them. There are a dozen more stacked along the floor. Among those on the floor he finds Miss Lissie's last two paintings. The one of what he has come to think of as the tree of life, with everything, including "the little white fellow" in its branches, and the last one in a series of five that she did of lions.
He sits on the edge of Mr. Hal's bed and studies these two paintings. They are lush and clear and dreamlike and beautiful, and remind him of Rousseau.
"I could always see Lissie," Mr. Hal says fussily, with stubborn propriety, reaching over to take one of the paintings Suwelo holds.
Suwelo muses, guiding a painting into Mr. Hal's hand. Was it Freud who said we can't see what we don't want to see? He watches Mr. Hal strain his eyes as if they are muscles, as he tries to see the painting in his hand. It is the tree-of-life one. Groaning from frustration, he soon throws it down in despair.
Suwelo, however, begins to feel hope. And he thrusts the other painting, of the great maned lion, into Mr. Hal's hands. He does not notice he has handed it to him upside down.
"Humm ..." says Mr. Hal, after a few minutes, "what's that reddish spot up in the corner?"
Mr. Hal is shifting the painting back and forth in front of his eyes, trying to get the
reddish spot into the light that comes from the window over his head.
Suwelo sits very still, as one ought to do in the presence of miracles.
But apparently the reddish spot is all that Mr. Hal can see. This painting, too, is flung to the bed with a frown.
Suwelo takes up the painting, which he loves, turns it right side up, and looks straight into Miss Lissie's dare-to-be-everything lion eyes. He knows, and she knows, that Mr. Hal will be able to see all of her someday, and so she and Suwelo must simply wait, and in the meantime--if this is one of the paintings Suwelo takes home with him--she and he can while away the time contemplating the "reddish spot," which marks the return of Mr. Hal's lost vision. For on Lissie's left back paw, nearly obscured by her tawny, luxuriant tail, is a very gay, elegant, and shiny red high-heeled slipper.
Acknowledgments
For their cheerful support and independent attitudes during the writing of this novel, I thank my daughter, Rebecca Walker, and our friend Robert Allen. For editing this book with gracefulness and skill, I thank John Ferrone. For being a first reader--along with Rebecca and Robert--I thank Gloria Steinem. For their sensitive criticism of the manuscript, I thank Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal. For the inspiring example of her personal chutzpah and her unflappable calm in pursuit of our common interests, I thank my agent, Wendy Weil. I thank Ester Hernandez for correcting my Spanish.
I thank the Universe for my participation in Existence. It is a pleasure to have always been present.
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States' preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker's parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice's brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker's dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America's premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.
Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.
Alice's parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, in the 1930s. Willie Lee was brave and hardworking, and Minnie Lou was strong, thoughtful, and kind--and just as hardworking as her husband. Alice remembers her mother as a strong-willed woman who never allowed herself or her children to be cowed by anyone. Alice cherished both of her parents "for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are."
Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston during her days in New York City. Hurston, who fell into obscurity after her death, had a profound influence on Walker. Indeed, Walker's 1975 essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," played a crucial role in resurrecting Hurston's reputation as a major figure in American literature. Walker paid further tribute to her "literary aunt" when she purchased a headstone for Hurston's grave, which had gone unmarked for over a decade. The inscription on the tombstone reads, "A Genius of the South."
Alice (front) in Kenya in 1965. She traveled there to help build the school pictured in the background as part of the Experiment in International Living Program. It was here that Walker first witnessed the practice of female genital mutilation, a practice that she has since worked to eradicate.
Walker with her former husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a Brooklyn native. The couple met in Mississippi and bonded over their mutual involvement in the struggle for civil rights--he as a budding litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she as one of the organization's workers responsible for taking depositions from disenfranchised black voters. Despite disapproval from their respective families, Alice and Melvyn wed in New York City in 1967. They then returned to Mississippi, where they were often subjected to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually the pressures of living in the violent, segregated state, coupled with their divergent career paths, caused the pair to drift apart. They divorced amicably in 1976.
Alice and Melvyn with their daughter, Rebecca, who would also grow up to become a writer, in 1970. Alice had just published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which garnered significant praise and prompted these perceptive words from critic Kay Bourne: "Most poignant is the relating of the lives of black women, who were ready and strong and trusted, only to so often be abused by the conditions of their oppressed lives and the misdirected anger of their men." Alice characterized it as "an incredibly difficult novel to write," since it forced her to confront the violence African Americans inflicted on each other in the face of white oppression.
Alice and her partner of thirteen years, Robert L. Allen, a noted scholar of American history, pose for a portrait. The picture was taken at a celebration the couple hosted after the publication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston's writings that Alice edited.
Walker being taken into custody at a 1980s demonstration against weapons shipments sent
from Concord, California, to Central and South America. Her shirt reads: "Remember Port Chicago." This is a reference to an explosion that killed hundreds of sailors stationed in Concord during World War II--most of them black--while they were loading munitions onto a cargo vessel. Walker has remained a dedicated political activist since the 1960s, when she returned to the South after graduating from Sarah Lawrence to help register black voters. Recently, she was arrested with fellow California-based author Maxine Hong Kingston in Washington, DC, during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "My activism--cultural, political, spiritual--is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings," Walker explains.
Walker with celebrated historian Howard Zinn, who taught one of her classes at Spelman College, in the 1960s. Walker developed a lifelong friendship with Zinn and considered him one of her mentors. The two shared a passion for political activism and a desire to shed light on the conditions of the oppressed. "I was Howard's student for only a semester," she says, "but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance--steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor--is a teaching I cherish."
A photograph of Walker taken in 2007 at a ceremony for her dog, Marley, and her cat, Surprise. "Marley appeared," she says, but "Surprise slept through it!"
Walker at her country home in Northern California, where she has lived since the early 1980s. "What attracted me to this part of the world--Northern California--is really the resemblance to Georgia that it has," she once told an interviewer. "This has been a very good place for me," she went on, "a very good place for dreaming."
Walker writing on the front porch of her California home. She has lived in many different places throughout the world--including Africa, Hawaii, and Mexico--and finding a place to write has always been a matter of utmost importance for her. She once said that "books and houses" are what she "longed for most as a child." Years after her tenant farming childhood, Walker is happy to have a place she can truly call home.
