by Alice Walker
After a week of lessons there was a ceremony announcing my mastery of technique. To my surprise at this event, during meditation, I felt myself drop into a completely different internal space. A space filled with the purest quiet, the most radiant peacefulness. I started to giggle and then to laugh. I knew I’d gotten it. And what I’d gotten was that meditation took me back to my favorite place in childhood: gazing out into the landscape, merging with it and disappearing.
This is not what meditation is for everyone, of course. During a public dialogue with a master Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, I mentioned the joy of the “disappearing act.” I said that it was probably what being dead would be like, and that you’d be surprised how much you enjoyed it. She said for her it was just the opposite. She felt, while meditating, totally present, aware of everything around her. Actually this has become more of what meditation is like for me as well, and though the Buddha teaches us not to cling, and especially not to cling to transitory states of consciousness, I do sometimes miss those brief moments of ego-absent bliss.
As I settled into meditation nearly twenty years ago, there in my two-and-a-half-room apartment, having given up the eleven-room house I’d lived in along with the admirable husband, I was surprised to find how many and how varied one’s transitory states can be. There were sittings that were amazingly sexual, for instance, as if my kundalini energy had been waiting for me to sit down.
There were times when I wept copiously as old sorrows from the past put in their final bids for my undivided attention. There were times of pure joy, as I felt the lightness of heart that comes from knowing you’ve found something truly reliable and helpful.
Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books. I could not have written Possessing the Secret of Joy without it; writing The Temple of My Familiar (my “great vision” novel of how the world got to be the way it is) would have been impossible. The Color Purple owes much of its humor and playfulness to the equanimity of my mind as I committed myself to a routine, daily practice.
It has helped me raise my child. Without it the challenge of being a single parent would have overcome me. It has made many losses bearable. Not just that of my former friend, the man I married, but the loss of other loved ones, communities, cultures, species, worlds in this time we live in, in which to honor our broken hearts, by peering quietly and regularly into the expanded opening, is to nurture a beginning to the re-creation of hope. And the magic of meditation remains.
It is a time when ancestors sometimes appear.
At the same silent retreat at which I understood how my early loss had led to a cherished gain, I became deeply engaged in metta, “loving-kindness” meditation. We were being guided to send metta to a loved one, a benefactor, a neutral person and a difficult person. The difficult person is always rather amusing to choose, because the moment you do so, you begin to see how much that person resembles yourself.
But it was the benefactor that proved momentarily difficult. The metta that one sends is: “May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be peaceful. May you have ease of well being.” The trouble was, I had so many benefactors to choose from.
I thought of two of my teachers, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, historians and activists, who, while I was in college, taught me with the caring and patience of older brothers. I thought of Charles Merrill, a man who has made good use of the money his father (of Merrill Lynch) left him, by giving a lot of it away; some of it to me when I was a poor student without even a pair of warm shoes. I thought of Marian Wright Edelman (of the Children’s Defense Fund), whose work helping children benefits our whole society.
For a while all four of these people merged. But then just behind them rose the face of my poetry teacher, the woman I always said, behind her back of course, dressed like Henry VIII. Because she wore huge Russian-inspired hats made of fur, substantial boots and black-and-green clocked tights. Muriel Rukeyser. Poet, rebel, visionary, life force.
It was the clearest I had been able to see her since I’d known her at Sarah Lawrence, and she looked nothing like she had—pale and weakened—in the years, much later, before she died. She looked ruddy and mirthful, and she was laughing. At Sarah Lawrence she had submitted my very first poems to the New Yorker. They were rejected; and just up from rural Georgia, I had no idea what the New Yorker was. But that she’d done it, instantly, on reading them, endeared her to me.
Later she found an agent for me and introduced me to one of the great loves of my life, Langston Hughes. She would be the godmother to my first book of poems, as Hughes would be godfather to my first published short story.
These two are prime examples of “the American race” that, in America, is always behind us and also always coming into being.
With much gratitude and emotion in my heart I began to send metta to Muriel.
May you be happy, I said.
I am happy, she said.
May you be safe, I said.
I am safe, she said.
May you be peaceful, I said.
I am peaceful, she said.
May you have ease of well-being, I said.
I have ease of well-being, she said.
May you be joyful, I added, just to be sure to cover everything.
I am joyful, she said. As if to say:
I’m in heaven, of course I’m joyful.
Heaven. Now there’s a thought. Nothing has ever been able, ultimately, to convince me we live anywhere else. And that heaven, more a verb than a noun, more a condition than a place, is about leading with the heart in whatever broken or ragged state it’s in, stumbling forward in faith until, from time to time, we miraculously find our way. Our way to forgiveness, our way to letting go, our way to understanding, compassion and peace.
It is laughter, I think, that bubbles up at last and says, “Ho, I think we are there.” And that there is always here.
That teachers are so often poorly paid and little appreciated is a crime against humanity. Where would we be, as a world, without those who perceive our ignorance and seek to eliminate it? We can see what has happened in many parts of the world where knowledge is kept secret from the people, especially from women and female children. Interestingly, knowledge kept secret ceases to be knowledge; it becomes dogma and superstition. Knowledge actually requires sharing in order to exist.
I have deeply loved all of my teachers, except one, a distant cousin, who frequently left us locked out of the school building on very cold days. When she finally arrived she reluctantly opened the door for her poor, shabbily clad students, many of whom went the entire day on a Coca-Cola and a bag of peanuts, and ordered someone to start up a fire; she would then sit at the head of the class glowering at us, as she nibbled through a box of prunes. But even this behavior taught me something useful: that children learn best when they are warm, well-fed, and suitably dressed, and when they are seen and loved; and that is what we must insist upon across the planet.
It is within our power to do this.
Was there a special teacher in your life who taught you more than history or literature or science, but also how to live and to think and to relate to others with compassion?
If so, consider sending metta to her or him:
May you be happy
May you be well
May you be peaceful
May you know joy
May you also know
Your student
Of so long ago
Gratefully
Remembers
You.
10.
How It Feels to Know Someone Died for You: Living with the Voice of the Beloved
Talk at UC Santa Cruz, Early Nineties
I want to talk to you about grief.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., died I was living with my husband, a white Jewish civil rights lawyer, in one of the most repressive places on the face of the Earth: the state of Mississippi. My sister once said that she was so afraid of the state of Mississippi that she didn�
�t even want me to fly over it. My whole family thought I was crazy to try to live there. To live there, also, with a white man; my marriage to him, according to the laws of the state of Mississippi, illegal. And I don’t believe my sister has flown over the state of Mississippi, or landed in it, to this day. However, my husband and I were there to change it. To make it a place that black people, who so deeply love the South, the seasons and the sun, could truthfully call home.
I was pregnant when the news of King’s assassination reached us. It had been his voice that urged both of us, at separate times, to return to the South; to challenge the apartheid of Mississippi. If not for his voice, pointing out a duty it might have been safer to ignore, we might not have found each other; not to mention a large part of our life’s work. Determined to follow Martin to the end, we traveled to Atlanta for the funeral. We walked behind his mule-drawn coffin for many miles. I lost the child.
How much can two people weep? It is hard to know because we were so not alone among those who were weeping all around us.
We remained in Mississippi for several years after King’s death, yet for me the period following his passing represented a time of disbelief; of incredible loss; of unspeakable sorrow. Only in the South, I still believe, was he mourned as deeply as he deserved. Because as Southern-born people of color, we understood what a gift his life had offered us. His shining fearlessness. Only in the South did so many of us retreat into so profound a sorrow as to appear to have been struck dumb. I could not bear to hear his voice for a very long time.
And yet, there was a miracle too. Again, especially among black Southerners. Even in our deepest sorrow, the daily palpable ache of missing him, which never seemed to soften or to go away, we discovered a tender, radiant certainty that made some wretched, bewildered, stunned and stupefied part of us begin, almost, to smile. We knew, never not to know, that he had died for us. We knew we had been seen, held precious and dear beyond pain or price. Or sacrifice. We knew we had been completely loved. I firmly believe there is no wholeness for a people, no promised land in view, until this happens. A challenging thought. His offering of himself, in love and faith, was a forerunner of the promised land he would, at the end of his life, offer us.
And yet, there were contradictions: In my novel Meridian, which I wrote while living in Mississippi, being part of the Movement for black liberation and also relentlessly observing it, there is a chapter called “Free at Last: A Day in April, 1968.” In it the heroine, Meridian Hill, a poor woman, attends, as I did, Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta.
Long before downtown Atlanta was awake, she was there beside the church, her back against a stone. Like the poor around her, with their meager fires in braziers against the April chill, she had brought fried chicken wrapped in foil and now ate it slowly as she waited for the sun. The nearby families told their children stories about the old days before black people marched, before black people voted, before they could allow their anger or even their exhaustion to show. There were stories, too, of Southern hunts for coons and ’possums among the red Georgia hills, and myths of strong women and men, Indian and black, who knew the secret places of the land and refused to be pried from them. As always they were dressed in their very Sunday best, and were resigned; on their arms the black bands of crêpe paper might have been made of iron.
They were there when the crowd began to swell, early in the morning. Making room, giving up their spots around the entrance to the church, yet still pressing somehow forward, with their tired necks extended, to see, just for a moment, just for a glimpse, the filled coffin.
They were there when the limousines began to arrive, and there when the family, wounded, crept up the steps, and there when the senators running for President flashed by, and there when the horde of clergy in their outdone rage stomped by, and there when the movie stars glided, as if slowly blown, into the church, and there when all these pretended not to see the pitiable crowd of nobodies who hungered to be nearer, who stood outside throughout the funeral service (piped out to them like scratchy Muzak) and shuffled their feet in their too-tight shoes, and cleared their throats repeatedly against their tears and all the same hopelessly cried.
Later, following the casket on its mule-drawn cart, they began to sing a song the dead man had loved. “I come to the gar-den a-lone … While the dew is still on the ro-ses …” Such an old favorite! And neutral. The dignitaries who had not already slipped away—and now cursed the four-mile walk behind the great dead man—opened their mouths in genial mime. Ahead of Meridian a man paraded a small white poodle on a leash. The man was black, and a smiler. As he looked about him a tooth encased in patterned gold sparkled in his mouth. On the dog’s back a purple placard with white lettering proclaimed “I have a dream.”
Then she noticed it: As they walked, people began to engage each other in loud, even ringing, conversation. They inquired about each other’s jobs. They asked after each other’s families. They conversed about the weather. And everywhere the call for Coca-Colas, for food, rang out. Popcorn appeared, and along their route hot-dog stands sprouted their broad, multicolored umbrellas. The sun came from behind the clouds, and the mourners removed their coats and loosened girdles and ties. Those who had never known it anyway dropped the favorite song, and there was a feeling of relief in the air, of liberation, that was repulsive.
Meridian turned, in shame, as if to the dead man himself.
“It’s a black characteristic, man,” a skinny black boy tapping on an imaginary drum was saying. “We don’t go on over death the way whiteys do.” He was speaking to a white couple who hung on guiltily to every word.
Behind her a black woman was laughing, laughing, as if all her cares, at last, had flown away.
Martin Luther King, Jr., had asked us to do something really hard. Many people felt he had asked us to do something impossible. He had asked us to embrace nonviolence as a way of life. When he died by the gun, for many, many people, in the Movement and out of it, there was a feeling of release. We can’t do it, many felt; we can’t live as nonviolently as Martin Luther King, Jr., did (and once again the white man—in the person of King’s assassin—has demonstrated why).
It was shocking to feel this. At the same time, it was completely understandable. I went through a period of being afflicted by horrible fantasies: of blowing up terrorists. Members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils, racist fanatics of all kinds who daily tormented and harassed us. And of course blowing myself up with them, since, as a pacifist, and a deep believer in nonviolence, I could never imagine murdering another without also murdering myself. This was a particularly bleak and dreary dark night of the soul. I survived it partly because of King’s example.
Our communities did erupt in violence, many of them; several went up in flames. The youth, especially, could no longer bear to consider nonviolence an option for changing the world. Guns flooded our neighborhoods. Accompanied by the handiest painkiller, illegal drugs. Because it was pain; all of it. The rage, the laughter, the feeling of being relieved of a burden too noble for mere persecuted humans to bear. And underneath everything, the longing for the presence of the Beloved. Deeply missing him. The one who loved us and saw us and stayed with us, knowing he would not survive his blatant love for us; not survive his vibrant, dancing life.
There was a rumor, when I was at Spelman College, which is across the street from Morehouse, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s school, that he was a terrific dancer. Some of the Movement’s tacticians, who also didn’t want us to know a few of our leaders were gay, didn’t want us to talk about this; I think because he was a preacher. This made it all the more amusing later, when the planet discovered that J. Edgar Hoover, the gay head of the FBI, audiotaped him doing more than dancing, and apparently having an exhilarating time. I met him during that period of flying rumors. I was sent by my instructor in speech class to attend one of King’s lectures and to write, literally, about how he spoke. We were warned to write nothing of his politics.
That’s the kind of school Spelman was at the time, even though students were risking arrest and being arrested, eagerly listening to Martin’s every word, every day. After his talk he shook hands with each of us. He had been brilliant. Mesmerizing. But since I couldn’t write about what he said, I wrote about what he wore. A really neat gray suit. And talked about his accent, which I thought was pretty broad, pretty funny. Moving beyond belief, though, was the message of his speech: that by freeing ourselves nonviolently we could also free our oppressor. Though it was an impassioned speech, he didn’t seem particularly attached to it. This detachment was characteristic of him, I was to observe in years to come. An old soul, he already appeared to have the overview of an ancestor. His was a deep love for humanity, and it was wonderfully impersonal. Curiously, this meant that his speeches were unfailingly electrifying. Bringing his audiences to tears and laughter and spontaneous delight in the truth of his words, no matter how bleak.
He was someone who, in a sense, was living, consciously, toward his death.
Which is how we black Southerners felt. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not the only one who thought he wouldn’t survive. Most of us thought he would be taken from us sooner. And yet, when he was no longer with us, knowing we shared this awareness with him, that he had known too, hardly made the loss of him easier to bear.
He feared no man, he said. He had been to the mountaintop, seen the promised land. He might not get there with us, he said. But we, as a people, would someday get to the promised land. What did this mean? Americans, and African Americans too, can be very materialistic. There are those who believe that because we can eat anywhere, sleep anywhere, buy houses and even airplanes almost anywhere, we have arrived at the promised land. Or, to be more accurate, they’ve arrived. Because there is still the huge problem of homeless people, sick and out-of-work people, the continued drugging of our youth in communities across the nation, plus the 1.2 million African American men in prison. Someone else has confessed to the murder for which Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for over twenty years; Jamal is still behind bars. This is more the land promised by Bull Connor and George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, than the promised land seen by Martin Luther King.
