Possessing the Secret of Joy

by Alice Walker

  The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.

  When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting cock, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude.

  The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks.

  And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant cock waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.

  There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted—by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the cock as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me—I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.

  The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the cock.

  When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man’s foot or a woman’s foot?

  The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the classic pose of the deeply insane.

  A man’s foot? A woman’s foot?

  How could one know?

  But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called “crazy road,” a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that the foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman’s, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M’Lissa’s tattered wraps.

  As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant grass, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura’s age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.

  Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M’Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn’t realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken—a hen, not a cock—was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M’Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M’Lissa’s upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.

  ADAM

  DEAREST LISETTE,

  How much I would like to see you, to hold you, to hear your wise words. All night long I have not slept, and I am writing outside in the loggia by the light of a candle, just as the sun is rising over the lake. It is so beautiful here, and so peaceful! Sometimes Evelyn and I are able to enjoy it, along with the agreeable conversation of your charming uncle. At least the two of them get along. As you know, I had feared they would not; Evelyn does not take easily to doctors of any sort, and has, over the years, tended to leave her therapists prostrate in her wake.

  As you suggested, the fact that I am here with her, and that this is an isolated, quiet and beautiful spot, seems to calm her. She seems also to like the fact that your uncle is old. She is sometimes merry just at the sight of him, and thinks of him, I believe, as a kind of Santa Claus. As such, he is another representative of the exotic Western and European culture she so adores.

  But why, I can hear you wondering, am I up at this hour, and have been up all night? I will tell you. A few nights ago, while your uncle was showing some of his old films of his trip to East Africa—the ones that mesmerized you as a youngster and were the impetus behind your trip to Africa, where we met…! Anyway, he was showing these films to us after a day of picnicking and sailing as far south as Schmerikon and as far north as Kusnacht. We’d feasted, when we arrived back at the house, on a fine dinner of roast pork and potatoes that your uncle had managed to leave cooking for us in the old fireless cooker left to him by his grandmother—perhaps, this fireless cooker, the most intriguing example of his magic, as far as Evelyn is concerned! To be brief, near the end of one of these films, she fainted, her body rigid as death, her teeth clenched in a fierce grimace and, most strange of all, her eyes open. So of course we thought for a moment she’d died. When she came to later she tried to laugh the whole thing off and said she wasn’t used to so much activity—sailing and walking and eating—in the unfamiliar altitude.

  Though we have a room in a hotel in Schmerikon, we sometimes spend the night with your uncle, especially when he and Evelyn are working particularly well together, and so we stayed the night in the guest bedroom the night this happened. Evelyn slept badly. In the morning she rose early and began, even before breakfast, to paint.

  She began to paint a chicken. Over and over. On larger and larger paper. She grew frenzied as the size of the paper she held in her hand seemed to shrink in comparison to the monstrous bird she had in her mind. Then there was the question of how to blend the paints she had—which your uncle had kindly given her—to make something she called a black chromium green. She was frantic to manufacture this color, and this color alone, for the tail feathers of the beast. Her mood was impatient, foul, as she tore the smaller drawings into bits and tore her hair as well, all the while oblivious to the presence of your uncle, who sat on a canvas chair out by the lake, reading, or pretending to; or of my distracted attempts to repair a broken pot that I’d noticed tossed in a corner near the hearth. It looked pre-Columbian, and I handled the shards, and the glue, carefully.

  Abruptly, she left us, taking her paints and brushes along. There was a loud snap as she closed the shutter of the upstairs bedroom. And then there was quiet. Only the lapping of the water, the chirping of birds, the rustle of wind in the trees. I fixed the pot, as well as I could do considering a third of it was missing. The Old Man’s book now rested on his knees; he was sound asleep.

  When night came, I avoided going up to bed. All seemed quiet up there, and I did not want to cause any disturbance; I hoped Evelyn had yielded to exhaustion and drifted into one of her deep, coma-like sleeps that could last for days. But when I finally found myself on the stairs, I noticed a light underneath our door. Opening the door, I was confronted with Evelyn, still busily painting, after twelve hours or more! And now painting a humongous feathered creature—for it was too menacing and evil to be given the simple appellation of chicken or cock—directly onto your uncle’s formerly pristine white walls.

  She looked about to drop. But, hearing me enter, she turned and stared. Unseeing, certainly, for she neither spoke nor acknowledged me further. Merely whirled back to her monstrous painting, and appeared to fling herself at it.

  I was chilled to the bone. Not onl
y by the wild, ill, distraught look of her; I was used to that; but by the damage she was doing, uncaring, to your uncle’s house, and by the painting itself. I did not know its meaning to her, of course, but even without knowing it, I felt the evil she was encountering deep in my own soul.

  So, Lisette, that is why I am up so early after a sleepless night.

  I trust you are well and that you will continue to write to me care of your uncle. Your letters sustain and comfort me, as they have all these years. I count it the great blessing of my life to be able to call you friend.

  Yours,

  Adam

  TASHI

  WHEN AT LAST I completed my painting of “The Beast,” as the three of us would subsequently refer to it, my mind and body were beyond exhaustion. I fell backward onto the bed and slept. It was late evening of another day when I awoke to the sound of the wind in the trees, the waves of the lake lapping the shore, and the muted sound of voices. I felt no inclination to stir. I lay as I had fallen, merely turning apprehensive eyes slowly left, toward the wall, to look fully into the wicked gaze of my creature. It no longer frightened me. Indeed, I felt as if I were seeing the cause of my anxiety itself for the first time, exactly as it was. The cock was undeniably overweening, egotistical, puffed up, and it was his diet of submission that had made him so.

  I gazed at the foot. Lame, subservient, mindless—as if disconnected from the body of the woman above it. M’Lissa. Here the serenity of my mind sharply decreased. I felt my emotions surge painfully toward the hem of her wrapper. Overcome with grief, I shifted my tearfilled gaze at just the moment Adam’s handsome head appeared at the door, followed by Mzee, who carried a tray.

  They brought oxtail soup, rye bread, carrot sticks, a sprig of parsley, a cup of warm cider and a bouquet of flowers. They propped me up in bed with gentleness and a mildly expectant air. As I ate they entertained me by telling of the culinary adventure they’d had preparing the meal. The Old Man had concocted the soup, from his memory of his mother’s recipe; Adam had made the bread. The parsley, carrots and flowers were from the garden behind the house. Mzee apologized for the woodiness of the carrots that had been left in the earth too long; but I enjoyed them best of all. Their fibrousness scrubbed and refreshed my mouth in a coolly resistant, pleasant way.

  I must apologize for all this, I said, indicating my beast.

  It is certainly large, said Adam. He was quiet after saying this, because he knew the two of us would talk later.

  You must not apologize, said Mzee. He looked at it close up, then turned and walked to a chair by the window across the room. From there he looked at it again.

  Remarkable, he said, after nearly an hour contemplating it.

  He came forward, finally, and took the tray. I had eaten everything, and this pleased him. He was wearing one of his cotton aprons, and there were signs of his soup-making from his mother’s recipe all over it. A small bloodstain glowed maroon near his waist. I looked at it calmly. I had been afraid of the sight of blood for such a long time. And then there had been a period when, if I cut myself, whether accidentally or on purpose, I didn’t notice it.

  This is the way I should have been working all along, said Mzee, as if to himself, after Adam had left us. Healing is not a bourgeois profession. Sighing deeply, he sat next to me on the bed and reached for my hand.

  The silvery blackness of my hand against the parchment rosiness of his was pretty. He looked at our hands thoughtfully for a moment.

  I am curious about something, he said.

  Ja? I said, in my fake Swiss accent, which always tickled him. Except for The Old Man, I thought the Swiss sounded quite unintelligent when they spoke. But perhaps that is because the rest of the world pokes fun at them for their peculiar accent and curious yodeling. Anyhow, I liked to say ja. It sounded ridiculous in my mouth and made Mzee smile.

  He was searching now for his pipe, which stuck out of the breast pocket of his apron.

  Are you better for having done it? he asked, finding and lighting his pipe. Do you feel better in yourself?

  Immeasurably, I said without hesitation. The tears that had evaporated at Mzee’s and Adam’s appearance now drained heavily from my chin. By the time I finished painting it, I continued in a steady voice, quite as though I were not weeping, I remembered my sister Dura’s…my sister Dura’s…. I could get no further. There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane. I had been going to say, before the boulder barred my throat: my sister’s death; because that was how I had always thought of Dura’s demise. She’d simply died. She’d bled and bled and bled and then there was death. No one was responsible. No one to blame. Instead, I took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking my throat: I remembered my sister Dura’s murder, I said, exploding the boulder. I felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew. I began to wail, there in Mzee’s old arms. After a long time, he dried my face, stroked my hair, and comforted me with a motherly squeeze that coincided with each of my hiccups, as my weeping subsided.

  They did not know I was hiding in the grass, I said. They had taken her to the place of initiation; a secluded, lonely place that was taboo for the uninitiated. Not unlike the place you showed us in your film.

  Ah, said Mzee.

  She has been screaming in my ears since it happened, I said, suddenly feeling weary beyond expression.

  The Old Man was relighting his pipe, which seemed to have been doused by my tears.

  Only I could not hear her, I sighed.

  You didn’t dare, said The Old Man.

  I did not understand him; yet what he said somehow made sense.

  He stroked my forehead thoughtfully, got up quietly and left me to the continuation of a very long sleep.

  MZEE

  NO ONE HAS CALLED ME Mzee since the natives of Kenya did so spontaneously over a quarter of a century ago. Even then my hair was graying, my back beginning to stoop. I wore glasses. And yet, somehow I felt it was something other than my age that they were noting, when they called me “The Old Man.” Some quality of gravity or self-containment that they recognized. Perhaps I flatter myself, as whites do when blacks offer them a benign label for something characteristically theirs, but which they themselves have failed to acknowledge; deep in our hearts perhaps we expect only vilification; the name “devil,” to say the least. It used to amaze me that, wherever I lectured, anywhere in the world, the one sentence of mine which every person of color appreciated and rose to thank me for was “Europe is the mother of all evil,” and yet they shook my European hand, smiled warmly into my eyes, and some of them actually patted me on the back. The Africans chose names for us that were suggested to them by our behavior. “Impatient” became the name of a colleague who was always hurrying. “Eats a Lot,” the name of the greediest of our crew. “Night Moon,” they called the blackest man in their own group, and, indeed, it was the brightness of his blackness that one saw.

  It is a new experience having a patient staying across the hall from me, in my own house. In my own retreat! The secret place I come to heal myself. Only your entreaties could have gotten me into this. Yet now that Adam and Evelyn are here, it is as if they were meant to be here from the beginning. Sometimes, when I am sitting outside by the lake and happen to glance into the gloom of the house, at just the moment Evelyn is looking out, I am struck by the rightness of seeing her black face at my window. Watching Adam attempt to fix the spring in the grandfather clock, as he sits in a flood of sunlight on my doorstep, awakens in me a yearning that is practically a memory.

  They, in their indescribable suffering, are bringing me home to something in myself. I am finding myself in them. A self I have often felt was only halfway at home on the European continent. In my European skin. An ancient self that thirsts f
or knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. Needs this knowledge, and the feelings that come with it, to be whole. A self that is horrified at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A truly universal self. That is the essence of healing that in my European, “professional” life I frequently lost.

  In any event, I must ask Evelyn why she does not seem to fear my turret/tower, and what she would say to the gift of a very large bag of clay!

  Yours in wonder,

  Your uncle Carl

  PART FIVE

  OLIVIA

  THE PRISON TO WHICH TASHI was taken was built during the colonial period, some thirty years before independence. It was old even before it was made, as African-American Southerners of a certain age say about Death. It was built on the “native” side of town at a time when the town was quite small. A few short streets of wooden houses built in the Victorian plantation style—with deep, shady verandahs—around a small central square where, one imagines, white ladies in silk dresses and carrying matching parasols endlessly paraded. What else was there for them to do, having conceived and then reproduced the master of the house? There is, in fact, running diagonally across from the park in the direction of the more imposing houses, a passageway that is still called White Ladies Lane, though few white people of any sort, other than tourists, stroll on it now. The houses are used as offices by government officials and civil servants. In the early days, just after Independence, black people moved into them but moved out again, as soon as they were able to construct larger and more private compounds further out from the town, which was already becoming a hodgepodge of a typical African city. White Ladies Lane, for instance, soon led not to an immaculately kept (by African peons) park used only for strolling or sunning one’s pale offspring, but to the market, with its colorful, ramshackle stalls, smoky braziers from which appetizing aromas arose, vendors hawking their wares in a cacophony of persuasive voices, and the squeal of resistant small animals being sold for matter-of-fact slaughter.