Possessing the Secret of Joy

by Alice Walker

  After being brought out of her dark hut and into the sunlight of her new home—with running water and an indoor toilet, both miracles to the lucky M’Lissa—a remarkable change had occurred. M’Lissa had stopped showing any signs of death, stopped aging, and had begun to actually blossom. “Youthen,” as the article said. A local nurse, a geriatrics specialist, ministered to her; a cook and a gardener rounded out her staff. M’Lissa, who had not walked in over a year, began again to walk, leaning on a cane the president himself had given her, and enjoyed tottering about in her garden. She loved to eat, and kept her cook on his toes preparing the special dishes of lamb curry, raisin rice and chocolate mousse she particularly liked. She had a mango tree; indeed, the photograph showed her sitting beneath it; she sat there happily, day after day, when the crop came on, stuffing herself.

  In the photograph M’Lissa smiled broadly, new teeth glistening; even her hair had grown back and was a white halo around her deep brown head.

  There was something sinister, though, about her aspect; but perhaps I was the only one likely to see it. Though her mouth was smiling, as were her sunken cheeks and her long nose, her wrinkled forehead and her scrawny neck, her beady eyes were not. Looking into them, suddenly chilled, I realized they never had.

  How had I entrusted my body to this madwoman?

  TASHI-EVELYN

  A FLAG FLEW above her house, the red, yellow and blue vivid against the pale noonday periwinkle sky. I was not her only visitor; there were cars parked in the postage-stamp parking lot, neatly screened from the house by a rose-colored bougainvillea, and a tour bus was halted by the road. The passengers were not permitted to disembark, but were busy taking photographs of the cottage from the windows of the bus. I left my rental car out of view of the house, and when I walked up the red steps to the porch and looked back, I felt surprise that it had disappeared. Not seeing the vehicle of my arrival seemed right, however, after a moment’s reflection, for I experienced all the more a feeling I’d begun to have in the openness of the countryside: that I had flown direct, as if I were a bird, from my house to hers, and that this had been accomplished with the directness of thought: a magical journey.

  I was met on the porch by a young woman who had not been mentioned in the Newsweek article: slender, with smooth dark skin and shining eyes, as lovely as a freshly cut flower. I explained I’d known M’Lissa all my life; that she had in fact delivered me into the world, having been a great friend of my mother and in fact mother of the entire village. I explained I had come from America, where I now lived, even though Olinka by birth, and that I hoped to spend time with M’Lissa, perhaps after her other guests had gone.

  What is your name? she asked softly.

  Tell her it is Tashi, Catherine’s, no, Nafa’s daughter, who went to America with the son of the missionary.

  She turned. Out of habit I glanced down at her feet. As she moved away, I saw she had the sliding gait of the “proper” Olinka maiden.

  Within minutes all of M’Lissa’s guests poured out of the house, as if scattered by her cane. They scrutinized me as they passed. Perhaps they thought me an important dignitary. As their car motors were turning over, shattering the quiet, the young woman returned.

  You may go in, she said, with a smile.

  What is your name? I asked her.

  Martha, she replied.

  And your other name?

  Mbati, she said, her eyes twinkling.

  Mbati, I said, why do the people come here?

  The question surprised her. Mother Lissa is a national monument, she said. Recognized as a heroine by every faction of the government, including the National Liberation Front. She’s famous, she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking at me as if puzzled I didn’t know.

  I do know that, I said. I read Newsweek.

  Ah, Newsweek, she said.

  But what do they talk about with her?

  About their daughters. About the old ways. About tradition. She paused. It is mostly women who come. You may have noticed this by the people who just left. Women of a certain age. Women with daughters. Frightened women, often. She reassures them.

  Oh? I said.

  Yes. She knows so much and says such bizarre things. Why, do you know, Mama Lissa claims there was a time when women did not have periods! Oh, she says, there may have been a single drop of blood, but only one! She says this was before woman’s capture.

  I couldn’t help laughing, as Mbati was doing.

  She just sits and talks; holds court. It hardly matters what she says. She is probably a hundred; everyone wants to have been in her presence before she dies. So much, as you know, has fallen apart here: independence is killing us as surely as colonialism did. But then, she added, sighing, that is because it isn’t really independence.

  Mbati takes my hand and pulls me slowly forward, still speaking quietly. She is a link with the past for us; especially for us women, she says. She is the only woman honored in this way by the government; she is an ikon.

  How is it possible, I think, as Mbati leads me into M’Lissa’s sparkling hallway and pushes me into M’Lissa’s room and toward a snow white bed, that my mother has lived and died; Mzee has lived and died; the Frenchwoman Lisette has lived and died; I myself have lived and died—in and out of the Waverly, in and out of my mind—many times. World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost. But look, here lies M’Lissa, propped up like a queen in her snowy bed, the open window beside it looking out into a fragrant garden, and in the distance, above the garden, there is a blue mountain. She is radiant, and her forehead, nose, lips, teeth, cheeks smile at me. I bend to kiss the top of her head, her white hair a resistant brush against my lips. I take her hand, which has the feel of feathers, and stand a moment looking down at her. Her whole body is smiling her welcome; except for her eyes. They are wary and alert. I had thought when people aged, their eyes went bad. But no, she sees me clearly. Hers is an x-ray gaze. But then, so is mine, now. What is that shadow, there in the depths? Is it apprehension? Is it fear?

  PART ELEVEN

  EVELYN

  MBATI IS TAKING THE STAND. She wears no makeup or jewelry and her hair is short and natural. There is a simplicity about her that dignifies the whole room. When she speaks the warm quietness of her personality soothes the court, even if the hoarse cry of the ceiling fans becomes more grating than ever. She is the daughter I should have had. Perhaps could have had, had I not aborted her out of fear.

  I float up to the stand and hover, a large dragonfly, in front of her. Reaching out, I take her smooth hand in mine. Her eyes widen: with wonder; with delight. Come, I say to her, smiling, I am your mother. If you take my hand before all of these people, all of these judges, all of these policemen and warders and rubbernecks in the audience, you will discover that the two of us can fly. Really? she asks, placing her other hand also in mine. I tug gently and she leaves her seat and floats beside me over the railing of the witness stand, over the attorneys’ tables, over the heads of the packed courtroom… out the door and into the sky. We are lighter than air, lighter than thistle. Mother and daughter heading for the sun.

  No, I suspected nothing, she is saying, when I float back into myself, sitting on the hard chair next to my attorney.

  They were old friends. Mother Lissa knew her. She was happy to see her. In fact, I’d never seen her so excited. They needed to talk. Time alone. Mother Lissa insisted.

  And so you left your post. Left Mother Lissa’s bedside. Even left the house, the attorney says accusingly.

  My daughter drops her head. But quickly looks up again. There is that healthy, impish twinkle in her eyes she sometimes gets.

  She turns her face to the judges. Your Honors, she says, firmly, I left the vicinity.

  They all ignore this spark of life. This simple authenticity. This beauty.

  Objection, says the other attorney. (I can no longer really tell them apart; the only way I recognize which att
orney is mine is by noticing which of them sits next to me, and by the way he smells: his cologne is a scent popular in America.) The defendant’s fiendish behavior is not something which, in advance, the witness could have known.

  Did you suspect anything? prods the attorney.

  The child looks pained. I feel sorry for her. How could they imagine any of this is her fault? It was I who shooed Mbati from her post; I who told M’Lissa: Mama Lissa, give the girl a break. Your other daughter has come from America just to look after you! Since this coming back to care for the elderly was such a strong characteristic of the ancient traditions, how could she refuse?

  Oh, M’Lissa had said, it is too much happiness. Too much! To see the daughter of Nafa, here, right beside my bed. Oh, surely I shall die of it!

  I thought it an odd thing to say.

  How did the defendant appear to you? the prosecuting attorney asks.

  There is a long pause. Motherly, Mbati replies.

  The young man is surprised. What, his look implies, this demon, motherly!

  Yes, Mbati continues in a definite voice. I lost my own mother when I was an infant, and yet never believed she died. When Mrs. Johnson showed up at the door—

  Childhood memories are quite irrelevant to this court, says the attorney, cutting her off. Though surely the humane response would have been to let her finish; even if one felt quite unable to ask the question: How did your mother die? It is a taboo question, in Olinka. One never asked for fear of the answer.

  Mbati subsides into silence, but looks me in the face and holds my gaze. I see she has not condemned me.

  EVELYN

  MY HEART GOES OUT to Adam, physically stout, emotionally frail; perspiration beading on his upper lip. It is hard to believe this grayhaired and graybearded old man is my husband, and has been my dearest friend for over fifty years. And was my lover.

  He looks condemned, simply to be present in the jammed court. He stares up disconsolately at the recently oiled, slowly whirring ceiling fans, or out the open windows, awaiting the thrust and parry of the attorneys’ questions.

  I remember when his body was slender and firm, and how I used to kiss from nipple to nipple across the smooth expanse of his beautiful chest.

  He is saying I am a tortured woman. Someone whose whole life was destroyed by the enactment of a ritual upon my body which I had not been equipped to understand.

  As soon as he utters the word “ritual” there is a furor in the court. Male voices, and female voices, calling for Adam’s silence. Shut up, shut up, you disgraceful American! the voices cry. This is our business you would put into the streets! We cannot publicly discuss this taboo.

  Adam looks weary. About to weep.

  Mother Lissa was a monument! the voices hiss. Your wife has murdered a monument. The Grandmother of the race!

  I feel the furies, the shrieking voices, wrap their coils around my neck. But rather than allowing myself to choke, I become a part of the shrieking and rise from around my own neck exactly as if I were wind. I blow and blow about the court, building toward explosion.

  The judges call for order, over and over. The other furies and I subside. At last order is restored.

  I am thinking of how I never met Lisette. How she tried to know me. Tried to visit me. Wrote me letters. Tried to interest me in French cooking—sent me cookbooks and recipes. Sent me clippings about wild mushrooms and where to look for them. (None of this is helpful, I used to mutter to myself, gazing into the mirror and sticking out my tongue.) Sent me her son. And how I refused her. How I thought she knew me too well.

  And then suddenly, after a long, painful struggle, she died. Leaving Pierre her eyes—for his eyes are not Adam’s—and it was those knowing eyes, with their appraising look, that, from as far away as an undergraduate dormitory at Harvard, saw into me. Even into my dreams.

  Chère Madame Johnson, he wrote. I hope you will not tear up this letter before you read it. (At that point I of course tore it in half, then held the pieces together to continue reading.) All my life I have heard about the tower that frightens you in your dreams. This tower question obsessed my mother since the day she heard of it, and she read many books trying to figure out what it could mean. It was an effort I shared, from the time I was a small boy. Always in the back of my mind has hovered this compelling nightmare of yours, told only once to my mother by my father, but told so vividly our house was never quite free of it.

  For as we both understood it, this nightmare, this cauchemar of yours, of being held captive in a dark tower, was what kept my father away from me.

  Madame, I now know what the tower is, though not, perhaps, what it means.

  As you know, I am now in Berkeley, which is not so far, after all, from your house.

  Will you not throw stones?

  Shall we meet?

  Pierre Johnson

  ADAM

  THEY DO NOT WANT to hear what their children suffer. They’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo. Like visible signs of menstruation. Signs of woman’s mental power. Signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men. When they say the word “taboo” I try to catch their eye. Are they saying something is “sacred” and therefore not to be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery; or are they saying it is so profane it must not be exposed, for fear of corrupting the young? Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?

  These are the kinds of questions my father taught me to ask, alas. Adam, he would say, What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think of and posit many things, but the answer was always the same: Why is the child crying? There had been a crying child even in Old Torabe, whose filth and age and illness so disgusted me. Before he died, I saw it. He had not loved the majority of his wives; in fact, he didn’t even hate them; he thought of them as servants in the most disposable sense. He barely remembered their names. But the young woman who ran away, the wife who drowned herself, he had at least thought he loved. Unfortunately for him “love” and frequent, forceful sex were one. And so he lay, finally, wounded and wet with his own tears, lamenting his life but knowing no other. Women are indestructible down there, you know, he’d said to me, lewdly, more than once, his eyes alight with remembered lechery and violence. They are like leather: the more you chew it, the softer it gets.

  If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into? Not just Evelyn. But also the young woman from the paper shop; the old woman who sells oranges. The bourgeois women in their elegant robes, fanning themselves and powdering their noses against the humidity. The poor women packed tight against the back doors. The beautiful, daughterly woman, Mbati.

  How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

  We are aware, says the prosecutor, that Mrs. Johnson, though Olinkan, has lived in America for many, many years, and that American life is, for the black person, itself a torture.

  I stare at him blankly.

  Is it not true, Mr. Johnson, that in the United States, with its stressful whites, your wife is often committed to an insane asylum?

  My wife is hurt, I say. Wounded. Broken. Not mad.

  Evelyn laughs. Flinging her head back in deliberate challenge. The laugh is short. Sharp. The bark of a dog. Beyond hurt. Unquestionably mad. Oddly free.

  EVELYN-TASHI

  THEY WOULD ALL TAKE America away from me if they could. But I won’t let them. If I have to, I’ll stop them in their tracks. Just as I stopped Amy. How do you stop someone in their tracks? By not believi
ng them.

  ADAM

  WOMAN AFTER WOMAN comes to me to complain that her husband, man, lover, is or was unfaithful to her, says Tashi’s new doctor, Raye, when we have a consultation. The result, nine times out of ten, is frigidity in the woman. Psychological circumcision? she asks, pensively.

  I tell her I do not know. It had never occurred to me to think of Tashi’s suffering as being on a continuum of pain. I had thought of what was done to her as something singular, absolute.

  PART TWELVE

  TASHI-EVELYN

  “THE GOD AMMA, it appeared, took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him, as he had done with the stars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is the top, and from there stretched out to the south, which is the bottom, of the world, although the whole movement was horizontal. The earth lies flat, but the north is at the top. It extends east and west with separate members like a foetus in the womb. It is a body, that is to say, a thing with members branching out from a central mass. This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe…

  “At God’s approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. He cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things forever…