by Alice Walker
He dead, bradda, yeah, said Jerry.
The Curious Thing
The curious thing about the grandmother medicine was that people would take it, even though it tasted ghastly. Even more curious was that it continued to taste horrible, in fact more and more horrible the longer you took it. By now Kate could feel the muscles of her throat contract just thinking about it. If she actually saw it in the shaman’s bottle, she wanted to vomit. Armando laughed at them each time he called them to circle. They all came looking pitiful, he teased them, like goats going to the butcher. He pretended to be unmoved by the disgusting flavor of the medicine, and drank some each time they journeyed. Tonight Kate sat facing the river, which splashed lazily down below their palapa.
She was feeling weak from the continuous internal cleansing of the day before. Everyone else also seemed pale and less than steady on their feet. It was extremely hot; even so, because of parasites living in the sand and poisonous snakes and who knows what all, they were required to wear tall rubber boots most of the time. Entering the large ceremonial palapa they removed their boots and left them outside. Everyone stretched their bodies, settling into their respective seats, and wriggled and massaged their toes.
When it was her turn to take the medicine, she asked, as she always did, for help for the humans of the planet and for the coming generations and for the animals and plants and rocks. She asked that she be guided to knowledge of how to act in the world for the highest good of all. She asked that the medicine accept her and do no harm. She called on the Grandmother Spirit to protect her, while she was being taught. With a tightening of her throat, which she consciously acknowledged and willfully relaxed, she drank the medicine in a gulp. Even so, she gagged. What was its flavor? Worse than any kind of excrement, surely, she thought.
And people had willingly taken this medicine for thousands of years! Repugnant as it was. How could she not love these people? After everyone, including Armando, had taken the medicine, there was a languid, hazy interlude. A feeling of: It is done. Whatever happens now, there will be no turning back. She particularly appreciated this time; it was like being in a small boat, all together, and knowing you would travel the length of the river together and hopefully reach your destination and with good fortune land in a place that welcomed you.
The New Yorker was the first to head for the bushes. Rushing out without his boots or his flip-flops, which lay beside the entrance. Soon they could hear him vomiting. That triggered one of the women, who went out, slowly, calmly, carefully bending over to place her flip-flops on her feet. Next, the man from Utah, his tall body slightly stooping going out the low entrance, his head brushing the palm fronds that formed the palapa’s top. And then the rest of them, one by one, left the circle. Some went to their holes and leaned over them. Others wandered out into the forest. She went to the forest. Found a tree that looked like an ancient woman, her head in the heavens, her feet in the earth, and, touching it lightly to ask permission, she threw up whatever poisons might be left in her body.
Returning, she noticed the light had changed. It was now late afternoon. They would be sitting for at least four hours before the mosquitoes began their nightly hunt. But this did not concern her very much, though she was allergic to insect bites and was already swollen from them. She had no mirror but she felt her eyes were almost swollen shut. She closed them.
The first time she had gone to visit Grandmother she had been fleeing the frightened animal aspect of herself. It seemed to her that humans were now in the position of deer or antelope or buffalo or polar bears. There wasn’t any longer a safe place for any of them. And yet she hated being afraid because fear was so paralyzing. She knew that if human beings, on a global level, gave in to the fear of being wiped out, disposable, like all the other creatures, they would never be able to think and feel their way out of their dilemma.
And so she had sat in a car crossing a long silver bridge, holding a new friend’s hand. This was a woman who seemed to be exactly where she was. In a state of near catatonic panic. Let’s go ask the trees! this woman had said, the first time Kate looked her in the eye and said: Hi, what’s happening?
Had He Been Shot?
Had he been shot, strangled, or drowned? There was no way of telling, from looking at the body. Yolo sat close to it, just where the warm moist sand met the hotter dry sand, and where apparently the body had washed up. There was no blood. He saw no puncture wound. No rope burn around the young man’s neck. He wanted to touch him. Cautiously, looking all about, up and down the deserted beach, he leaned over and lifted gently a strand of brownish-black hair that blew across the peaceful face. He had a feeling of fatherhood. Maybe even grandfatherhood. The boy was so young. So incredibly good-looking, wearing only threadbare shorts, a string of blue beads around his neck, and a silver ring in his right ear. Whatever troubles he’d faced in life were forgotten now, as Yolo wished they might have been while he was still alive.
He felt very present, waiting there beside the body. Present and useful. Drawing his legs up he sat in the lotus position and began to meditate. After half an hour he stirred, stretched his legs, and began to wonder if he were being tricked. But no, looking behind him toward “da locals’ ” parking lot, which was unpaved and partly obscured by scraggly trees, he saw Jerry returning with what looked like a troop, all of them walking heavily, their heads down, as if resigned to receiving bad news.
Jerry introduced him with a nod and briefly explained why he was there. Yolo stepped back immediately, outside the circle of the men.
He did not leave, however. Later, he would wonder why he did not. He stood watching their expressions as each of the men looked at the body of the young man. On some faces there were tears. One of the men, an older version of the dead man, went swiftly to his knees and held the body in his arms. He was smoking a cigarette and Yolo thought how odd it was, how rarely seen, this scene: a living brother holding a dead one with cigarette smoke curling in the air behind them.
Working in silence two of the men wrapped the body in a tattered bedspread and hoisted it onto their shoulders. Yolo followed them to the parking lot and over to a battered pea-green van. After carefully laying the body inside, the men shut the door.
He stayed a long time in the parking lot, looking at the bare earth, the footprints, the occasional gum wrapper and beer can. Then he looked out to sea. Seeing the ocean reminded him of his vacation. He started back toward the hotel, back toward his lounge chair, his novel. But he doubted he could really return to any of it.
When Kate Had Visited
When Kate had visited a local shaman, an African-Amerindian woman who had studied with Armando years before, she had been charmed, before completely going under, by Armando’s voice as he sang icaros, healing songs that had come down to him through countless generations, which Anunu had on tape. Ya es el tiempo para abrir tu corazón. Now is the time to open your heart. This was the line that she always understood, no matter how distracted or apprehensive she was at the beginning of the journey. It never failed to make her feel the rightness of her decision to be where she was. Sitting in the dark, drinking a horrible-tasting mixture of an unseen, unknown tree and vine from another continent, and being totally dependent on a woman who was as unknown as either tree or vine. Anunu was small and dark and ageless with shrewd bright eyes that asked nothing of you except that you be willing to approach her as yourself. This was a lot, of course, and many people could not do it.
Grandmother will want to know all about you, she smiled, and She will find out, too. She laughed. You might as well tell me a little bit of what brought you here today so that I will be better able to help you on your journey.
Kate had not hesitated.
I believe all is up with us, she said. Us humans.
And whatever would make you believe that? asked Anunu, with a chuckle.
Kate laughed as well.
It’s all so fucked, she said. She was surprised she had used this term. Ordinarily she was m
ore mindful in her speech. She had reasoned it wrong to use fuck as a curse, for instance. If fucking is used as a curse, she believed, soon the act of fucking, which she considered healthy and succulent, would cause its participants to self-destruct. AIDS did not surprise her, at this level of thought, because it had seemed to crawl out of the global human shadow bag into which sex had been consigned.
I am also unconvinced of the need to do anything further with my life, she said.
Anunu was silent, looking at her intently.
It is such a fine life, said Anunu.
Kate was surprised. Although she was widely published and was to some extent a public figure, she had the idea most of the time that she was unrecognizable and therefore incognito. This grew out of her feeling when she was a child that she had the power to be invisible, which grew out of the fact that frequently she had felt unseen.
And, said Kate into Anunu’s silence, there is the question of sex. One’s sexuality.
Ah, said Anunu.
I don’t seem to find much of a difference between women and men when it comes to loving them. If they’re wonderful, sexy, and cute, I want to snuggle up and be enchanted.
They both laughed.
Well, said Anunu. That’s not a problem. The other two might be, but that’s not.
I don’t think so either, said Kate. I don’t understand why people have such a hard time seeing it’s impossible to be only one thing; and to love only one gender or one race. At least it seems impossible for me. It would be like thinking only beautiful people have green eyes. Limitation is willful and childish, she said. And so much less fun.
It’s not that interesting, no, said Anunu. But it’s been an excellent way, for thousands of years, to keep a society’s labor force under control.
Kate nodded. Her brain began to perk up more, to start to click with thought, the way it did when she met someone she could talk “shorthand” with. Talking with Anunu she thought maybe she didn’t need to take the Ayahuasca. Otherwise known as yagé. Grandmother.
Anunu was speaking softly, looking into Kate’s face with such kindness!
Oh, she said, what I’ve discovered is that with lovers as with everything, there are cycles, seasons. If you live your life in such a way as to become free rather than to become not free, she continued, you will find Life presents you with regular summers and winters and autumns and springs. There will be times when the masculine will demand your interest and attention, she said. Times when the feminine will rise and exact her due.
She sat back in her orange-sunset-colored chair and interlaced her long fingers. For instance, she said, when I began to hear Grandmother calling me, I noticed more and more men coming into my life. It is all Grandmother, of course, she said, chuckling, regardless of appearances! As they say in the Church of Religious Science about God. And there were all these men—can you guess why?
Kate shook her head. Uh-uh, she said, I hope they were cute.
Some were, said Anunu. Some were definitely not. She laughed. But to a man they were ethnobotanists.
Ethno-whats? asked Kate.
Folks who study people’s relationships with their plants. That is, the plants that grow around them.
Kate leaned forward in her seat. She felt like a gong had gone off in her head. Bong. This always happened when a single word triggered awareness that she had stumbled onto the right path. People and their plants. Plants and their people. She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives. As a child she had spent hours talking to, caressing, sitting in, kissing, and otherwise trying to communicate with trees. As a very young child she’d been convinced that trees had mouths and that she could find a mouth on a tree if only she grew tall enough and looked for it very hard.
Why can’t they talk? she’d once asked her mother, who’d laughed and told everyone about the funny question her little daughter had asked.
It was clear she had met an inspirer in Anunu and that they could continue talking well into the afternoon. Her friend was sitting outside the door, however, waiting for her own interview.
Later, back in the room in which they were to work, Anunu gave them a final word of advice: You will find . . . well, who knows what you will find, she corrected herself, smiling. (She did not want to tell them that their first image, after fully receiving the medicine, would in all likelihood be of two gigantic, entwined, perhaps copulating snakes.) But what happens to me is that just when I think nothing is happening and I’m shut outside of my experience with Grandmother, I will notice, sort of out of the corner of my eye, that there is a large brick wall or something like that. At first I will feel incapable of getting over, around, or through it. Then I will remember that I can mentally remove one of the bricks. I will do this. Suddenly I will find myself on the other side.
They were required to wear diapers! This had seemed unbearably funny to Kate. And amusing to realize she liked the bulky feel of them between her legs. She was a baby again; she realized how much she must have enjoyed being one. She seemed to remember, feeling the diapers on her bottom, that when she was a baby people were always kissing her. Um, she thought. Happy.
This is to make sure you don’t have an accident on your way to the bathroom, said Anunu. She and her assistant, Enoba, a white woman with dark hair and warm hazel eyes, took each of them by the hand and walked with them from their lounges out the door to the bathroom, just to make sure they would remember where it was.
Will we be forgetful as all that? asked Kate, worried.
We’ll be right with you, said Enoba, whether you forget or not. One of us will walk with you, just like now, and will stand outside until you come out again.
When was the last time someone had stood outside the toilet waiting for her? Kate asked herself. Her mother, maybe, when she was a child. Or perhaps a nurse, when she’d been in the hospital having her children.
She liked it. Oh, she thought to herself, I am someone who enjoys being pampered! Usually, raising her children, she’d received no such pampering, though always giving it to others. She had forgotten her own need. And, she thought, I am wearing Pampers! She was having fun even before the journey.
Yolo Had Read
Yolo had read all about Hawaii, the Hawaii of surfing and volcanoes, before coming. He’d once even had a Hawaiian girlfriend. She was a gifted hula dancer and he’d met her at a party. She was with a very average sort of white guy and this white guy, looking ill at ease in so large and diversified a gathering, wanted her to dance.
I don’t really want to, she said. She was smoking a cigarette and looking rather bored.
Ah, come on, he said.
I’m not dressed for it, she said. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black woolen trousers, and a big brown leather bomber jacket. She shrugged out of the jacket and let it slide to the floor. Yolo had picked it up and flung it on a chair.
Ta da! the white guy said, pulling a bag from behind the sofa.
The woman looked at him and made a face.
They were all artists of one sort or another. Writers, painters, poets, musicians. All tipsy by now and easily entertained.
Yolo was hoping the sister would just say no to the idea of performing. After all, it was a party thrown by the people whose home it was. She was a guest. Why couldn’t she sit and chat and while away the time any way she felt like it?
The guy was persistent.
You’re so great, he was whining. You ought to give these people a treat.
Yolo wondered if he should speak up. Then he found himself doing so.
They were standing close to the clam-dip tray, which was on a tall wooden table by the window. She wore her hair loose and billowing as Hawaiian women started to do again after the sixties. They’d been much influenced by Kathleen Cleaver of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis of the Black Liberation Movement, both women with exceedingly big hair. She seemed willowy and light beneath it.
You don’t have to dance, he s
aid, looking down at her. Ignoring the white guy, whose hand was on her arm. A hand that looked too white, really, to be there. But Yolo squelched that thought.
But by now the party had roused itself and become a single consciousness, as tipsy parties sometimes will, and that consciousness had heard the word Hawaii and that consciousness knew only one thing for sure about that place: There were beautiful brown women there, dancing.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce my date, Leilani. The white guy was clearly trying to introduce himself.
Yaay! yelled a very drunk man who had seated himself close to the vodka end of the tiny, well-stocked bar across the room.
Hardly seeming to move, the young woman tied a scarf around her head to resemble a haku lei and wriggled herself out of her sweater and trousers and into a pareo and bikini top. Her boyfriend had put on some Hawaiian music that sounded like warm syrup and she began to dance.
It looked like every hula Yolo had ever seen on TV. It also seemed really long. Her hands waved this way and then the other. Her hips swiveled. He thought that at one time, under the proper moon and palm trees, this dance had embodied both enchantment and desire. Now it seemed rote. Yolo wondered how she could keep the same smile plastered on her face the whole time.
There was no way to tell, from her smiling, complaisant mien, that she was angry.
He would never have guessed. Except that later, leaving the party, he heard an argument, a heated argument, going on as a couple approached their car down the street. He drew abreast of them just in time to see Leilani hit the white guy over the head with the bag that had held her dancing clothes, and to see him draw back and punch her. Yolo of course grabbed the guy, who immediately began to cry and to say how sorry he was.
Oh God, Leilani sneered, wiping a trickle of blood from her nose, a crier.
She was wearing highly polished black leather boots that glistened against the snow.
