by Alice Walker
For the crossroad
Your birth
Presents
For your mother
And you.
Oh, little ones
Who will one day
Be
So much taller than us
Let us pledge
On your sweet heads
To make a better show
Of things
Than we have done.
Let us promise
To take courage
From the mysterious
Nature of your
Journey.
Let us acknowledge
In all humility
That regardless of
Your status in life
It is we
Who are blessed.
We do not know the beginning
Or the end
We only see the middle of things
Which is our own life.
Perhaps you are a part of
The force
That is coming to help
Us
Rearrange our world
To make it better
We pray that this is
So.
That you have come back
To help heal the confusion
You left behind
So many lifetimes
Ago.
And that you come
Bringing all
We need
To get the job
Done:
Joy, Hope, Song.
We must abandon the notion that we become grandparents only when our own children give birth. In the same way that all adults are ultimately responsible for all of earth’s children, grandparents come into being when we realize we are responsible for all the grandchildren on the earth. This does not mean we can single-handedly feed, house and clothe the eleven or so million orphans in Africa, for instance, whose parents have died of AIDS, but it does mean we find ways to connect and relate to as many endangered children on the globe as possible. There are many organizations already formed to make this connection possible. I am particularly drawn to those that teach self-reliance and sustainability. One of my favorites is Heifer International. Each year, through this organization, I am able to send cows, sheep, water buffalo, chickens, pigs, ducks and rabbits to families with children around the globe. As someone who grew up on a farm I know exactly what I’m sending.
What I would like this and other organizations to consider is the institution, at the many orphanages in Africa and around the world, of small farms stocked with animals for the children to own and care for. Nothing will ever replace their parents, but having animals to tend will ameliorate the loneliness.
I am also an honorary co-founder of Women for Women International, which supports women and their children who have been victims of war. If you are past fifty, take some time to contemplate becoming a grandparent. To what children in what part of the world are you particularly drawn? How are these children faring? What would you do to help them if you lived nearby? Can you find a way to do at least some of that from far away?
If you are fortunate enough to have grandchildren of your own, that is to say by blood, introduce them to these other children that you perhaps passionately love. Encourage them to join you in attempting to care for them. Only when these other children are safe in the world will your grandchildren be safe. Explain to your grandchildren how this works.
From the time I was a teenager I have done my best to protect Cuban children, African children, and children of the poor, of whatever color. When I am with them my “grandmother gene” comes vibrantly alive within me. It is a longing for the healthy self and world that humanity is capable of providing for everyone, and in that moment, because I feel its possibility so intensely, I can envision a different, more glowingly perfect future for the planet. I wish this experience, which is actually a kind of ecstasy, for you as well.
2.
Childhood
One evening my daughter came to pick me up from the country; I had been expecting her for several hours. Almost as soon as she came through the door I asked if she knew how potatoes look before they are dug out of the ground. She wasn’t sure. Then I will show you in the morning before we head back to the city, I told her.
I had begun to harvest my potato crop the day before. In the spring I planted five varieties: my favorite, yellow Finn, but also Yukon gold, Peruvian purple, Irish white, and red new. Even though the summer had been chilly and there was morning shade from the large oak at the front of the garden, the potatoes came up quickly and developed into healthy plants. José, who helps me in the garden, had shoveled an extra collar of humus around each plant and I was delighted as each of them began to bloom. It had been years since I planted potatoes. I planted them in the garden I’d previously devoted to corn because I have a schedule that often means I am far away from my garden at just the time my corn becomes ripe. Having sped home to my garden three years in a row to a plot of over-matured, tasteless corn, I decided to plant potatoes instead, thinking the worst that could happen, if I were delayed elsewhere, would be a handful of potatoes nibbled by gophers or moles.
I had been dreading going back to the city, where I had more things to do than I cared to think about; I sat in the swing on the deck thinking hard about what would be my last supper in the country. I had bought some green peas from the roadside stand a few miles from my house, there were chard and kale flourishing a few steps from my door, and I had brought up corn from a small hopeful planting in a lower garden. Tasting the corn, however, I discovered it had, as I’d feared, lost its sweetness and turned into starch. Then I remembered my potatoes! I grabbed a shovel, went out to the garden, and began to dig. The experience I had had digging the potatoes, before turning them into half of a delicious meal, was one I wanted my daughter to know.
After boiling them, I ate my newly dug potatoes, several small yellow Finns and two larger Peruvian purples, with only a dressing of butter. Organic butter with a dash of sea salt, that reminded me of the butter my mother and grandmother used to make. As I ate the mouthwatering meal I remembered them sitting patiently beside the brown or creamy white churn, moving the dasher up and down in a steady rhythmic motion, until flecks of butter appeared at the top of the milk. These flecks grew until eventually there was enough butter to make a small mound. We owned a beautiful handcrafted butter press. It was sometimes my job to press its wooden carving of flowers into the hardening butter, making a cheerful and elegant design.
In the morning, just before packing the car for the ride to the city, I harvested an abundance of Chardonnay grapes, greenish-silver and refreshingly sweet; a bucket of glistening eggplant; an armful of collards and chard and kale; some dark green and snake-like cucumbers, plus a small sack of figs and half a dozen late-summer peaches. Then I took my daughter out to the neat rows of potatoes, all beginning to turn brown. Using the shovel to scrape aside the dirt, I began to reveal, very slowly and carefully, the golden and purple potatoes that rested just beneath the plants. She was enchanted. It’s just like … it’s just like … she said. It’s just like finding gold, I offered, with glee. Yes! she said, her eyes wide.
Though my daughter is now in her thirties, her enthusiasm reminded me of my own when I was probably no more than three. My parents, exemplary farmers and producers of fine vegetables in garden and field, had enchanted me early in just this same way. As I scraped dirt aside from another potato plant and watched as my daughter began to fill her skirt with our treasure, I was taken back to a time when I was very young, perhaps too young even to speak. The very first memory I have is certainly pre-verbal; I was lifted up by my father or an older brother, very large and dark and shining men, and encouraged to pick red plums from a heavily bearing tree. The next is of going with my parents, in a farm wagon, to a watermelon patch that in memory seems to have been planted underneath pine trees. A farmer myself now, I realize this couldn’t have been true. It is likely that to get to the watermelon patch we had
to go through the pines. In any case, and perhaps this was pre-verbal as well, I remember the absolute wonder of rolling along in a creaky wooden wagon that was pulled by obedient if indifferent mules, arriving at a vast field and being taken down and placed out of the way as my brothers and parents began to find watermelon after watermelon and to bring them back, apparently, as gifts for me! In a short time the wagon was filled with large green watermelons. And there were still dozens more left to grow larger in the field! How had this happened? What miracle was this?
As soon as they finished filling the wagon, my father broke open a gigantic melon right on the spot. The “spot” being a handy boulder as broad as a table that happened to reside there, underneath the shady pines, beside the field. We were all given pieces of its delicious red and thirst-quenching heart. He then carefully, from my piece, removed all the glossy black seeds.
If you eat one of these, he joked, poking at my protruding tummy, a watermelon just like this will grow inside you.
It will? My eyes were probably enormous. I must have looked shocked.
Everyone laughed.
If you put the seed into the ground, it will grow, said an older brother, who could never bear to see me deceived. That’s how all of these watermelons came to be here. We planted them.
It seemed too wonderful for words. Too incredible to be believed. One thing seemed as astonishing as another. That a watermelon could grow inside me, if I ate a seed, and that watermelons grew from seeds put in the ground!
When I think of my childhood at its best it is of this magic that I think. Of having a family that daily worked with nature to produce the extraordinary, and yet they were all so casual about it, and never failed to find my wonderment amusing. Years later I would write poems and essays about the way growing up in the country seemed the best of all possible worlds, regardless of the hardships that made getting by year to year, especially for a family of color in the South half a century ago, a heroic affair.
I have experienced many difficulties and hardships in my life and yet despair is a state in which I rarely remain for long. This is largely because despair cannot share the same space as wonder, and it is wonder that I have had from childhood, and in abundance. From the moment I saw that a plum grew out of a brown-colored, dry-looking branch, and a watermelon came from a green stem attached to a plant that was rooted in the dark earth, “heaven” as described by the pastor of our church (somewhere beyond earth) became irrelevant. I was already in the only heaven that mattered to me, and I knew it.
This sense of the magic of Nature has encouraged all of my environmental understanding and activism. It is the reason I believe all our children, whether two years old or forty, should be encouraged to look, really look, at what they are seeing every day: incredible improbabilities, miracles—plums, watermelons, tulips, turnips—that are, on our planet, that radiant blue orb, exceedingly ordinary, though obviously divine.
In fact, a useful meditation would be to sit with your child or grandchild and eat a peach together. The peach is perhaps my favorite fruit, though I love them all. First have the child hold and smell the peach, remembering that it is in full sun that its scent is strongest. This might be a good time to teach how important it is not to refrigerate fruit, unless it is essential to storing it. That it is best just off the tree, fully ripened, or ripened in an airy fruit bowl until its scent begins to permeate the air. Let your child or grandchild (or your neighbor’s child or grandchild) sniff and feel the fuzz of the peach. When he or she bites into the peach let the juice run down her or his chin. Ask a simple question: Is that good? Another simple question: Where do you suppose this comes from? The child will not know of course, any more than you do.
What is left then is simply to enjoy.
You might ask: Do we want this experience of goodness to last forever and for everyone on earth to have it? It is very likely the child will say yes. This is your opportunity to gently share ideas about how this might be accomplished.
3.
When Life Descends into the Pit
At the end of By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Susannah, a writer and by now a very old woman, has died at home in bed, surrounded by her friends. One by one they come forward to say good-bye to her body, and to cover her with boughs of trees, dry grass and twigs.
Her sister, Magdalena, who has died decades earlier, but who has been compelled, as an angel or ghost, to be with her sister at her death in order to correct a terrible wrong she did her as a child, watches in horror as Susannah and all her books, records and tapes are methodically set on fire. Magdalena cannot believe her sister intends to erase her life.
Susannah, however, also an angel or ghost, has learned an important pagan lesson about how destructive is the need to be remembered, and is gleeful to watch her own body burn.
As she watches, Magdalena says: The flames from her burning house were bright, and reminded me of a poem:
When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning myself
To light up the darkness
Around me.
By the Light of My Father’s Smile acknowledges that there are many pits into which life has fallen at this point. Almost too many to name or even to think about. There is the pit of loneliness, so widespread in this postmodern world; the pit of violence, in which our children are slowly drowning; the pit of fear, as we realize how trapped we are in our cities, our towns and our streets, and even in the countryside, where men seem now to be almost always armed, and women know in our bones that we are never safe.
By the Light of My Father’s Smile looks into the pit into which sexuality has fallen. It is calling fathers in particular to come and witness the catastrophe into which this most basic expression of self-love and love-of-other has fallen. It maintains that female children are dying from the abandonment they suffer from their fathers the moment they become recognizable as sexual beings; sometimes this recognition comes at or even before birth. It says our unacknowledged longing for our father’s blessing of what we desire quite frequently drives us mad.
I cannot speak of this novel and its affirmation of sexuality without returning at least briefly to the novel I wrote preceding it, Possessing the Secret of Joy. It was in that novel that I experienced the full awareness of the fall of our human sexual integrity, especially as women. I must speak of the grief and pain I felt as I researched and then wrote that novel about the genital mutilation—systematically, methodically, unfeelingly—of millions of small girls and adult women, personified in the character Tashi, a tribal African woman who elects to be mutilated because she has been brainwashed by her culture to believe this act alone validates her existence as a female.
If this could happen to a hundred million women and girls alive today, across the globe, without protest, without comment, without any but the most isolated outrage, what did it mean to be a woman anywhere in the world, at this particular time on earth?
And so this novel, By the Light of My Father’s Smile, began there, in outrage, in grief, and in the understanding that our human sexual life—because of genital cutting (and sewing), because of rape, because of AIDS and the chilling fear of disease, because of gender abuse of all kinds, because of the thorough domination of women and girls over much of the earth—has fallen into the pit. And, to be completely adult, there may be nothing any of us can do about it.
Being a novelist, however, I opted to try.
When my child was small, I sent her to an alternative school called New Traditions that was near our house in San Francisco. In this school there was an emphasis on sharing, on noncompetitive behavior, on gender equality. It had seemed to me for a long time that the old traditions of domination and control are leading us to our death. And in fact it was a joy to see the children at this school blossom into adults who appear to have little interest in “getting ahead” or relating to something so stressful as a “fast track.”
The Mundo, a tribe
of mixed-race black and Indian people I have created in this novel, are likewise unimpressed by a world concerned primarily with exploitation and monetary gain. They treasure instead their relatedness to the Earth, and their own rituals, ceremonies and ways. That there are people in the world who mutilate their children genitally is horrible, unbelievable, to them. They are people who kiss where others cut; behavior that has marked them for extinction.
And so they teach the father in this book, a man who has become an unwilling prisoner of a puritanical Christianity, and who believes his daughter’s sexuality is evil, that sexuality is instead a mystery, a blessing and a wise teacher of the Self. In the end, they lead him back to his children, his daughters, whose sexual wounds, whose soul wounds, he is deeply responsible for.
Ultimately By the Light of My Father’s Smile affirms the thought that though life as we know it has indeed fallen into the pit, each of us has knowledge of how to live life differently that no one taught us, and that we can find this knowledge inside ourselves and put it to use. That there is Mundo consciousness—the desire to honor instead of degrade, to kiss instead of cut—in every one of us.
This is a time when teachings of all traditions are available to us. If we are lucky, we will have close friends of other cultures who will tell us, in phone call, letter, or e-mail, of a wise understanding of life passed on by earlier generations. The Beloved Woman of the Cherokee people, former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, with whom I became friends many years ago, sent the following message from the Onondaga: “Take care how you place your moccasins upon the Earth, step with care, for the faces of the future generations are looking up from the Earth waiting their turn for life.”
Sit with this message. Whose hopeful faces are you standing on?
There is another saying from a Native American people that moves me: “Relative, shift your teepee, Mother Earth needs sunlight.” When I first heard this, I cried with joy. Nowhere else had I heard expressed my sense of Earth’s suffering at having so much of itself covered with heavy buildings. Teepees of course are not heavy, they’re quite light. That a compassionate ancestor still thought this too much weight for the Mother to bear, without being shifted occasionally, stirred my heart with love.
