Possessing the Secret of Joy

by Alice Walker

  I shrug. I certainly cannot speak of them.

  But I am instantly back in our bed, sharing the night and its terrors with my wife. She is upright, clutching her pillow. Her eyes are enormous. She is shaking with fear.

  There is a tower, she says. I think it is a tower. It is tall, but I am inside. I don’t really ever know what it looks like from outside. It is cool at first, and as you descend lower and lower to where I’m kept, it becomes dank and cold, as well. It’s dark. There is an endless repetitive sound that is like the faint scratch of a baby’s fingernails on paper. And there are millions of things moving about me in the dark. I can not see them. And they’ve broken my wings! I see them lying crossed in a corner like discarded oars. Oh, and they’re forcing something in one end of me, and from the other they are busy pulling something out. I am long and fat and the color of tobacco spit. Gross! And I can not move!

  I did not know I would finally marry Tashi. For many years she was like another sister to me; always about the parsonage, playing with my sister, Olivia, the two of them frequently going on outings with my mother. I teased her mercilessly, and tried to boss her about. Like Olivia, she always stood her ground. I liked her mealie row fan hairstyle and her impish, darting ways. I liked her self-possession. And her passion for storytelling.

  We became lovers partly because we were so used to each other.

  In Olinka society the strongest taboo was against making love in the fields. So strong was this taboo that no one in living memory had broken it. And yet, we did. And because no one in the society could imagine us capable of such an offense—lovemaking in the fields jeopardized the crops; indeed, it was declared that it there was any fornication whatsoever in the fields the crops definitely would not grow—no one ever saw us, and the fields produced their harvests as before.

  I am thinking of our lovemaking, as the doctor waits for more of a response about Evelyn’s dreaming.

  She dreams they have imprisoned her and broken her wings, I say into the suspense.

  They, who? the doctor asks.

  But this, I say, I do not know.

  She was like a fleshy, succulent fruit; and when I was not with her I dreamed of the time I would next lie on my belly between her legs, my cheeks caressed by the gentle rhythms of her thighs. My tongue bringing us no babies, and to both of us delight. This way of loving, among her people, the greatest taboo of all.

  ADAM

  I COULD NOT BEAR the happiness of my father and aunt, who had decided they would be married during our visit to London. Nor could I stand the solicitude of Olivia, who empathized with me as I thrashed about, missing Tashi, though furious with her. I pounded the streets of London until my feet, in new hard leather shoes, were bruised. Only the weather made the days bearable. It was spring, and the beauty of the city was formidable. There were lilacs everywhere, and the air was filled with the sound of singing birds.

  The Missionary Society had put us up in spacious rooms near St. James’s Park, and Olivia and I spent hours underneath the ancient trees. We enjoyed watching the men and women who came out of their homes promptly at quarter to four, on their way to tea at other people’s homes, and who crossed in front of us, reservedly whispering. My window looked out right into the trees, and there was so much sky I often woke up thinking I was still in Africa.

  After the wedding, I took the boat train to Paris, hoping that the change of scenery would do me good. There was also a young woman I hoped to see, whose name was Lisette.

  Lisette had visited us in Olinka as part of the youth group of her church. We often entertained visitors, from all over the world, and this was rather perfunctory, even predictable and boring, but she and I had struck up a lively conversation about some of her family’s experiences as colonialists in Algeria, where she had lived the earlier part of her life, and had had the opportunity to spend several hours alone in each other’s company. This was possible because I was then tending an elderly parishioner who lived on the outskirts of the village. There was no one else to feed and clothe him during the last weeks of his life, and so my father had assigned this task to me, in the hope, I suppose, that it would increase my feelings of humility. I was bored to distraction, and actively prayed for my patient to loose his feeble hold on life and die, which he eventually did.

  It was to this post, Torabe’s hut, that Lisette followed me. She stood by, chestnut-haired and pale, very pretty in the startling white people’s way that seems something of a clash at times with natural surroundings, as I fed and washed him and dressed his sores—for he had lain on his rags for a long time—and she chattered on about the charms of Paris. She spoke English with an accent that embellished it.

  I could not believe I’d found her so easily. But soon we were cozily sipping coffee in her tiny doll’s house near the train station, a house that had been left her by her grandmother, and she was telling me about her career as a teacher. In her surroundings I felt it was I who clashed.

  But you did not come all this way to hear about French high school students, she said, passing me a dainty slice of cake.

  You seem troubled, no? What is the use?

  It was a minor slip, charming, and made me laugh. It was just how I felt.

  You live alone here, and no one bothers you? I said.

  She shrugged.

  And no one cares that you are not married and that you make your own living?

  Mais non, she said. Women are no longer chattel, she sniffed. Even if it is only very recently that Frenchwomen got the vote. Now, she said, frowning, we get to vote for one man after another.

  I smiled sadly.

  I wanted so much to ask her about her sex life. When, whether, to whom she made love. How the act of lovemaking felt to her. Whether she knew and practiced the ways to make love without making babies.

  I asked instead about her church. Whether she was still active in it. Whether it still sent youth groups to Africa.

  Well, to tell the truth, she said, I have lost the faith. I look and look in this religion of mine and I am nowhere in it. When I was younger I thought the church was there because it helped everybody enlarge their spirit, but really, people around here appear to be more meanspirited than ever.

  She stopped suddenly.

  Don’t get me started. What happened was I could not reconcile the word “obedience” that the bride says in the church wedding with any kind of spiritual or physical expansion for myself. I felt tricked by that word.

  I thought of my father and of Mama Nettie. Had “obey” been a word used in their marriage ceremony? And would Mama Nettie “obey” my father? I knew them well enough to know they’d strive to please each other; they already did so. Neither he nor she would have the last word. But why did the word exist, in a ceremony between equals and loved ones? Well, obviously because the woman, who was required to obey, was not considered equal.

  I thought of Tashi. Each time we made love, she’d wanted me as much as I’d wanted her. She had engineered most of our meetings. Whenever we held each other she was breathless in anticipation. Once, she claimed her heart nearly stopped. Such pleasure as ours was difficult for us to believe. Was it a pleasure of which others knew? we often asked ourselves. The faces of our elders in the village bore no hint of it.

  PART TWO

  TASHI

  CAN YOU BEAR TO KNOW what I have lost? I scream this at the judges, in their stupid white wigs. And at the lawyers—my own and the one hired to prosecute me. They are both young, dapper African men who would not look out of place in London, Paris or New York. I scream it at the curious onlookers for whom my trial is entertainment. But most of all, I scream it at my family: Adam, Olivia, Benny.

  No one responds to my question. The prosecuting attorney suppresses a smile because I have lost control. The judges rap their pencils on their tea trays.

  But on the morning of the twelfth of October last did you not make a point of buying several razors at the shop near the Ombere bus station?

  Once up
on a time there was a man with a very long and tough beard… I began without thinking. Stopping only when it dawned on me that the entire courtroom had burst into laughter. Even Olivia, when I cast a glance at her, was smiling. Oh, Tashi, her look seemed to say, even here, on trial for your life, you are still making things up!

  If you would be so kind as to answer the question, says the dapper young attorney, and not attempt to indulge and distract the court with your fantasy life.

  My fantasy life. Without it I’m afraid to exist. Who am I, Tashi, renamed in America “Evelyn,” Johnson?

  The razor to me was always associated with men, with beards and barber stools. Until I went to America it would never have occurred to me to pick one up, to shave my legs and underarms with it.

  Yes, I say to the attorney, I bought three razors.

  Why three? he asks.

  Because I wanted to be sure.

  Sure of what?

  To do the job properly.

  You mean to kill the old woman?

  Yes.

  That is all, Your Honors, he says.

  That night in my cell I suddenly remembered the large razor I saw at the old man’s house in Bollingen, when Adam took me there. It was truly huge, as if it had belonged to a giant. I thought: How could a man’s face be so large; it would be almost like shaving one’s face with an axe. It was lying outside in the loggia, near the fireplace, and the old man used it, along with a large machete, to shave off slivers of wood for kindling. It was black and ancient, with Chinese dragons engraved in greenish bronze on its sides. The blade was exceedingly sharp. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. The old man, noticing my fascination, placed it tenderly in my hands, closing my fingers over it protectively. It is beautiful, isn’t it? he asked, but I thought he observed my clutching of the thing with a quizzical look in his eye.

  I held the razor and looked out over Lake Zurich. Marveling that after our long trip, Adam and I had indeed arrived there.

  We had flown first to London, where Olivia was speaking before the Theosophy Society, and then to Paris, and then on to Zurich, a remarkably clean and somnolent city. In fact, from the airplane window the whole of Switzerland seemed to be quietly sleeping. Everything neat and trim, safe. There was an air of thrift, of husbandry, even before one touched the ground. I could see that the forests were carefully tended: where trees were taken out, seedlings were put in. It seemed a country in miniature, where every slight wrong might be corrected, without much trouble.

  I remarked to Adam how odd this was: that the people’s characteristics, easily discerned, were imprinted on the landscape.

  But that is true everywhere, he said. Everywhere some people go they wreck the land, he said. But this is the land of people who’ve stayed home. Mountains, he said, gesturing at the magnificent Alps, make a wonderful fence.

  We were circling the airport. It was in the middle of a field. There were cows and, as we descended closer to the ground, white clover and yellow wildflowers.

  There was a train to Bollingen, and we took it. It ran noiselessly on its track, its conductor a redfaced, jovial fellow with graying flaxen hair. We looked out the window at the chalet-style houses, the acres of grapes, the family plots of corn. Gardens everywhere.

  I had never imagined a warm Switzerland. In my imagination it was always snowing. People were on skis. The ground was white. There was hot chocolate. To feel the intense heat of the sun, to see people in summer pastels, to glimpse an ice cream vendor in one of the stations, amused me. I felt that my child self, who’d so loved to imagine snowy northern landscapes, especially while I was growing up in equatorial Africa, was experiencing a treat.

  Adam seemed somewhat nervous as the train neared the station. Departures and arrivals always upset him. I remembered when we first arrived in America. His excitement to be, finally, “safe” and back home. And his shock at being constantly harassed because he was black.

  No, no, he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I’m black but because they are white.

  It seemed a curious distinction at the time. I was in love with America. I did not find Americans particularly rude. But then I had not been steeped in the history that Adam’s father had insisted he and Olivia study, in preparation for their return home. I felt I was able to see everything in a much more expansive way. For I saw everything fresh, and with wonder that I was in America at all. If a white person was rude I simply turned and stared. I never acknowledged the system that sanctioned rude behavior, but always responded directly to the person. How uncivilly you have been brought up! was the message of my stare.

  We were so intent on reaching the end of our long journey that we missed the station and rode on, oblivious, to the one beyond it, Schmerikon, a pleasant hamlet close to the shore of the lake. Hot and flustered, we clambered down from the train and made our way to a small cafe just by the station. Adam ordered a sandwich—for we’d had no food all day—and I ordered cheese on a roll, a green salad, and lemonade.

  There we sat, in the shade of a linden tree, two rotund black people in advanced middle age, our hair graying, our faces glistening with sweat. We might have been models for a painting by Horace Pippin.

  ADAM

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED was the flatness of her gaze. It frightened me.

  As soon as we returned from England, my aunt and father securely married, I tore off across the country in search of Tashi. It was a long journey that took several months, because I was frequently on foot and had little idea where I was going. During the final month I found myself following a trail whose markers consisted of crossed sticks and odd configurations of rocks piled near watering holes. Then, when I finally dragged my ragged and weary body into the Mbele camp, I was seized by the warriors who stood watch over the encampment, and taken to an isolated compound for interrogation.

  Such a possibility—that I might be captured by some of Africa’s liberators—had not occurred to me, innocent that I was. I had thought, also, that the Mbeles, if they existed at all, would all speak Olinka, or at least KiSwahili, a smattering of which I knew. But no, these freedom fighters were obviously from different parts of Africa. There was even, I was to learn later, a European woman, a European man and several American blacks of both sexes in the camp. Since my interrogators spoke neither Olinka nor English, it was a long time, perhaps a week, before I was able to make them understand I meant no harm but was merely looking for someone. Even after a week of sign language and the drawing of figures on the ground I could see they were not convinced. For one thing, they were suspicious of my shoes. A pair of stout English sandals I’d brought from London. And of course my wrist-watch, with its gold Spandex band, was the kind of luxury item only a white person, in their opinion and experience, could afford to wear. I offered to give them both watch and shoes in exchange for my freedom. But it soon became clear that if they decided I was indeed harmless, that is to say, not a spy, they planned to recruit me. Once I realized this, I rested a bit easier. For I discovered that, face-to-face with these cold black men, I was stricken with the most craven fear. They were all “business.” They neither joked among themselves nor smiled. I had never seen blacks like my captors before.

  There was a flicker in the eye of one of them one day when I rambled on to them in Olinka. I think it was the word for water that caused it. In Olinka the word for water is barash, and I was constantly having to ask them for more. It was hot where we were, in a canyon surrounded by massive rock cliffs that soaked up the broiling sun all day long. I felt I would die of thirst. I knew they resented bringing the heavy jar of water to my hut. Partly because it was heavy, and had to be brought a good distance from the river, but also because the carrying of water was not a man’s job. It was a woman’s job. However, since I was a prisoner, and interrogating a prisoner in strictest secrecy was a man’s job, the bringing of the water had also, of necessity, become a man’s job.

  It was not long after I saw the flicker in the guard’s eye that a young
man from Olinka was brought to talk to me. He said his name was Banse, and when we’d talked a bit I remembered him slightly. It was really his parents I remembered, for they were staunch Christians and supporters of my father and the church. When last I’d seen Banse he was a small boy. He was still quite young, fifteen or so, with a high square forehead and wary, veiled eyes. He said there were many Olinkans in the camp. Women as well as men. He said of course Tashi was among them, but he believed her to be indisposed.

  It was difficult to maintain my composure when I heard this. I clenched my teeth with the effort. It was enough that she was alive, I thought. After the grueling journey, which I had feared I’d never complete, it was nearly impossible to imagine that Tashi, riding her donkey and walking, had survived it as well.

  When I had been vouched for by Banse, the manner of my guards immediately changed. Their stiff, absurdly militaristic posture—as if learned from Hitler himself—collapsed into the graceful melted-bones stride of the ordinary unhurried African. They smiled, they joked. They offered me tea.

  Tea, they explained, came from the Europeans in the camp, one of whom was a son of the owner of a vast tea plantation that had displaced the homes of a thousand nomadic Africans. Bob, this son, had grown up on the plantation until he was ten, then had been sent to England to boarding school. The only blacks he’d ever seen around their place had been servants.

  This was all I learned of Bob, the bringer of tea. I found it bizarre that he knew exactly where they were and had access to their hiding place. Indeed, I was to learn he had his own hut among them and lived in it most of the time.

  Good tea! My captors laughed, liberally lacing it with sugar, and toasting me with their overflowing mugs.

  The Mbele camp was a replica of an African village, though considerably spread out and camouflaged. No hut was in the open, but rather each was nestled close to the base of large trees or towering rocks. The pens of the animals likewise hugged the base of the cliffs. It was all reminiscent of the ancient settlements of the cliffdwelling Dogonese, photographs of which I had seen. Nothing, however, except a wisp of smoke perhaps, would have indicated human habitation, if one were in a plane looking down from above.