by Alice Walker
They wanted to send him “back East,” as they called it, to college. Never mind that he hated school and all its works. They figured that out there in the “back East” he’d find a woman like himself. And I’m sure there were many back there like him too.
Yolo smiled at the face Alma made.
Parents, he said.
Well, he wasn’t having it. First thing they knew he’d spotted a pure Hawaiian beauty over among the pineapples on Dole’s plantation and the second thing they knew he wanted to marry her. Olé! All hell broke loose. Alma snickered. But it was too late because I was already lying in wait, planning on being born.
What was the overdose of, do you think? asked Yolo, relinquishing his half-full bottle of beer and taking a sip of the fresh, cold one.
Ice, maybe, she said. Crystal methamphetamine. It’s the latest drug to swamp the island. So many of the young people are addicted to it. It fries the brain. Really, almost exactly the way an egg is fried. Marshall, my boy, hated being hooked. She took a fresh pack of Marlboros from a cabinet near the small wooden table in front of them. He started using on a dare, she said, tearing open a pack and lighting a fresh cigarette.
They were quiet, looking out at the ocean.
Where does it come from? Yolo asked. This is an island.
She looked at him coolly. Like nearly everything else, she said, it comes by boat.
Naturally
Naturally, said Lalika, there came a time during our ordeal when we knew our only hope was to pray. I asked Saartjie, Do you believe in God? She said no. We discussed this problem for a little while. We didn’t have much time because the guards let us out of our cells and into the yard for only fifteen minutes. It was the only time during the day that we saw each other. By then I loved the sight of her more than my life. She was a large, bosomy woman with a big butt and a slow smile. Not that either of us smiled much in jail. We’d met in the field picking peaches with other migrant workers, though most of the others were from Mexico.
We have to have somebody to pray to, she said. Jesus, I suggested. He suffered.
Maybe, she said, but with a tone that Jesus didn’t quite get it for her. He had a father, she said, looking away from me.
It wasn’t long after that that one of the other prisoners lent us a Jet magazine. You know how Jet can be counted on to tell you the unglossed good and bad of the black race. And in this issue there was the story of Saartjie Bartmann.
Really? said Kate. Wondering what Jet had had to say.
Just the bare bones, said Lalika. How she’d been taken from South Africa by someone who put her in an exhibition because of her physical “deformities.” Which were the norm in the tribe she was from. How she’d been dubbed the “Hottentot Venus” and forced to show herself to incredulous Europeans all over Europe. How when she died in childbirth she and the child were still dragged, embalmed and in an open coffin, around Europe. How parts of her body were cut off, pickled, and kept in a jar, ending up in a Paris museum.
Amazing, said Kate.
Typical, we thought.
And to have only that to read while you were being abused, said Kate.
Exactly, said Lalika. They were sitting on a log that had washed up when the river overran its path. Though it never rained in October, according to Armando, rain seemed imminent. The sky was filled with dark gray, water-saturated clouds. There was no wind. The heat was stifling.
A week or so after we read about Saartjie Bartmann each of us began to dream of her. It happened first to Gloria; that was her name before. She ran up to me and said: Guess who came to see me last night, right in the middle of . . . She didn’t finish the sentence. I knew what she meant. I wasn’t even asleep, she said. And there she was, the woman from Jet magazine.
I had almost forgotten. What woman from Jet? I asked her.
Saartjie, she said. The woman they cut up. She made a face. Our captors often threatened us with knives.
Oh, I said.
She just appeared, right in the middle of the room. One of them was on me, the other one trying to film it. She was so real I couldn’t believe they didn’t see her. We locked eyes, she said.
You did what! Girl, you’re tripping, I said.
It happened, she said, all excited. You should have been there!
And then what? I said.
Gloria looked toward the sky with a dreamy kind of look and said, She was holding a jar with something in it.
Oh-oh, I said, mocking her.
And she had such a look of love on her face. Oh, it went right through me. She laughed, bitter and short. They thought I was responding to them.
I made a gagging gesture with my finger down my throat.
Really, she said.
We were running out of time. What was in the jar? I asked.
I don’t know, she said. I was so busy looking at her face which was just like the face of a mother. A mother looking at her child. Not just her child, but her favorite, best, child.
And then, she raised the jar level with her heart, said Gloria, and it disappeared into her heart.
Maybe it was because she told me about it, said Lalika, gazing at the sky and then toward the river, which ran casually, unhurried, waiting for the rain, but the same night, Saartjie came to me. By then they were charging each other to use us.
She came to me as two of them were fighting over whose turn it was. She was dressed in clothing strange to me. A yellow grass skirt, a beautiful rose-colored shawl, and a big round red hat. And she was holding this glass jar in her hands, as if holding it out to me. Just for me to see it, nothing more. And she held me with that look. I never had a mother so I don’t know if this is what my mother would have looked like if she’d managed to get inside that jail to try to comfort me. But the look on Saartjie’s face was pure love. It was so extraordinary I forgot all about my body lying there exposed on the cot, and just as Gloria had done, I locked eyes with her. She was a big woman; big tits, big ass, big everything, I guess. I could see why the puny Europeans who first saw her naked body must have felt fear. If she could have so much—you know, tits, ass, pussy—why did they have so little?
Kate chuckled.
Aw, she’s out, one of the guards said. For I had fallen into a kind of faint. And they threw cold water on me.
An odd rain was beginning to fall. Huge drops but several feet apart. Kate had never experienced anything like it. One drop fell on her head, steadily, as if all the drops for that spot were connected, and beyond her feet, like water dripping from a hose, another elongated drop. She and Lalika pondered the pattern of the rain without comment.
Maybe we should move, Lalika finally said.
I know, said Kate. Only, I don’t want to.
I don’t either, said Lalika. Settling her body more comfortably on the log and situating her head under a stream of the large drops. Soon her face and shoulders glistened with the rain. A burst of thunder so loud it almost dislodged them from their seat seemed to roll out of the forest. A restless wind began to eddy about their legs. A lightning that split the sky lit up everything around them.
Shall we sit? asked Kate.
Yeah, said Lalika. And she continued her story.
From that time on, we disappeared from our captors. We did not fight them. We did not curse them. We did not even try to ignore them. All of which we had done before. They did whatever they did to our bodies but we had flown. Into that voluminous grass skirt.
Kate smiled.
Into that big red round hat.
Kate laughed.
Into that rose-colored cape that seemed to be made of thorns.
Oops, said Kate.
Lalika said, Yes. It was the mammy cape. Surely made of thorns. But I don’t mind the connection with Jesus. And besides, when I touched it, and I did touch it, the thorns did not prick me. They were as soft as flower petals. The cape itself as sheltering as a house.
And Gloria and I knew we had found our savior. Someone to pray to. Someone who answered
prayer.
Lalika laughed, really laughed, without regret or bitterness, for the first time.
One day she called me Saartjie. And from that day never called me anything else. And then I started calling her Saartjie. And that is what we called each other, as if we were two expressions of that one loving and constant being, all of us with one name. We began to pray to Her. To Saartjie who, through Jet magazine, had come to us. We designated her a saint.
By now the log they sat on was slippery and glistening with rain. The huge single drops had been joined by a million others and pelted them like hail. Thunder continued to roll, lightning fiercely streaked the sky. Lalika gave herself to the pelting, squeezing her eyes tight and raising her face and chest to receive it. What a storm we’re in, she said at last, turning her face to Kate.
And two of us are in it, said Kate. She could not tell, because of the rain on Lalika’s face, if this comment provoked tears. She did not think so.
I Am Peace
I am peace, said Grandmother. And nothing has to die for me to exist. Not tobacco, not grapes or sugarcane. Not human beings. And not me! she added, laughing. When you circle, paint your faces with yagé to remember this.
James Dean Was the Only
James Dean was the only American man most Hawaiian men could identify with. Maybe because he was smallish. In certain light, tan-ish. He walked like a Hawaiian, not that used to wearing shoes. John Wayne or Fred Astaire definitely wouldn’t have come to mind, except for my grandfather and his cronies. That’s my guess, said Alma. Here we were in the middle of the Pacific, halfway between the United States and Japan. They were fighting over us. Not because they wanted us. They wanted the land. Not for its own sake. For what they called “strategic purposes.” The Americans made it illegal for us to speak our own language. They sabotaged, arrested, and dislodged our queen.
Like most tourists Yolo had a vague memory of a Hawaiian queen but couldn’t recall a thing about her. Certainly not her name.
Lili’uokalani, said Alma. If his ignorance distressed her she did not let on.
She was not just a stateswoman, and a wonderful queen, said Alma—and “queen” in her case meant mother of the Hawaiian people—she was also a great songwriter and poet.
Really? said Yolo. He flashed on his sterile cabana-like room back at the beige hotel. It was decorated in kelly green and white. Air-conditioned, comfortable. It held no hint of queenly purple or of Hawaii’s past. He could have stayed in the same hotel in Vermont.
Alma excused herself and soon came back carrying a large framed poster of Lili’uokalani. Yolo saw a large, benign colored woman’s face that reminded him of his grandmother. Alma explained how the Americans had placed the queen under house arrest and threatened war if she did not resign. She gave up her throne because she knew the Hawaiian people would fight for her if she requested it and she did not want them to be killed. The people surrounded her palace, weeping, the whole night. Many Hawaiians feel the soul of the people was lost then, said Alma, with a sigh. And of course Hawaiians in the millions were dying already from the diseases the Americans had brought.
We were “annexed,” she said, with bitterness. Like a small room to a large house. Yes, she added, we were, we became, the fantasy room. The place Americans went when everybody else on earth was fed up with them. The playpen. I am personally very thankful Lili’u didn’t live to see the results of her noble sacrifice.
As they gazed at the picture, Alma opened another bottle of beer. Leaving the queen in his hands, she bent over the table to light another cigarette.
We Mahus Believe
We Mahus believe we were given by our ancestors a very special charge. That though we are born as males, we are to live out our lives as women. And why is this? The matronly person that everyone called “Aunty” asked.
They were sitting in a circle under a round roof made of thatch and reeds. Below them a slight decline led toward the narrow highway, pale as a snake, and beyond that there was dark jade green ocean. A lusty full moon, the color of mangoes, lit up the waves and shone into the depths. Aunty’s yard was filled with bright yellow school buses. The painter in Yolo immediately conjured a canvas and filled it completely. At the same time, he hung on every word.
We are lucky that we are of the Polynesian world, Aunty continued. For it is well-known that in other parts of the world, Mahus like ourselves no longer know who they are, who they were, or what they are supposed to be doing here on the planet at this time. Aunty paused.
Yolo had the impression this speech was given each time the men sat in circle. He looked around. Alma had told him about the Mahus, but he’d found it difficult to believe they could exist.
Exist, she’d scoffed. Who do you think teaches us the hula? And indeed it was this very same Aunty, Aunty Pearlua, who taught hula to all the young women who wanted to learn hula the right way, the way it was traditionally meant to be, and not the hula of Hollywood movies or the kind Alma had once forced herself to perform at parties.
There was a time, long time ago, Aunty Pearlua was saying, when women ruled. Well, this is not such a stretch for us because until recent times Hawaiians had a queen. Queen Lili’uokalani. But this was a time thousands of years ago when Mother rule was the dominant way of life, not only here where the original, original Hawaiians lived, but everywhere else too. The first Hawaiians were small dark people, and they were wiped out and intermingled with the tall Tahitians who, from some accounts, were pretty mean. Aunty paused and reached for her fan, which was lying on the mat beside her. We are some of both of them and more besides, so I guess we can’t really complain.
This was a time so long ago as to be mythical. Our origins as Mahus, that is. But we are alive today and carrying on, so we know we are not a myth. The story goes that we were in a position to see the overthrow and enslavement of woman, and the consequent ruination of her children, which was so horrible to us that we decided that until woman was restored to her rightful place we would live her life. That is to say, we would live openly as women. That is to say, we would live openly the feminine part of our nature, which, as we know, is sometimes the dominant nature with which we are born, whether as “men” or as “women.” Aunty cleared her throat and Yolo noticed the dark purple shade of her nail polish and the slight stubble visible on her chin. We also, she continued, in her rich mellow voice, made a vow to be the protector of children. That is why most Mahus that you see are teaching, feeding, or in some way, she said, with a sweep of her arm taking in the parked school buses, taking care of children. They are precious to us and we, long time ago, made a sacred vow to look out for them.
Wow, thought Yolo. All this going on in the world and some folks are just kicking back watching television.
Oh, Alma would say later when he told her about it, that’s Aunty’s version of the myth. She probably made it up.
But what a hip myth to make up, he thought, but did not say in light of her skepticism.
It Was the Bones
It was the bones. always. That is what they said. Generation after generation of their people said this to generation after generation of mine.
His name was Hugh. Kate had never met a Hugh before. How did one name a baby, defenseless, small, and new, Hugh? She thought this too might have something to do with “the generations.” It did.
In the early days of moving west, clearing and claiming it, said Hugh, you could settle as much land as you could control simply by taking it from the Indians—with the help of the U.S. Cavalry—and keeping them off it. Every rancher I’ve talked to, if I could get him to talk about it at all, has a similar story to tell. He paused, looked at the river. Sighed.
We have rivers in the springtime, he said. In the summer they dry up or go underground.
So they’re not really dry? said Kate. She liked the idea of underground rivers. She was beginning to think that human beings had underground selves, always running, limpid, clear, even when everything in the personality appeared use
d up, dusty, and dry.
They seem to be, said Hugh. Actually some of the first settlers died of dehydration because they thought there was no water. The Indians would just bend over, put an ear to the ground—and unbeknown to the settlers they’d be standing in a dry riverbed—poke a reed in the ground, and drink. Imagine how astonishing that must have seemed to someone from London.
It must have been maddening, continued Hugh. They knew every river, every stream, every rock, every tree. And they could eat off the land too. Slugs and bugs and plants—even cactus. It must have been really challenging starving them out.
The winter would do it, said Kate.
Right, said Hugh. Without shelter, sick, grief-stricken because so many of their people had died—then boom, subzero weather. Even so, it took a while for all of them to die. They were some of the healthiest people on earth. And to the great surprise of everyone, in each succeeding generation, all the way from great-grandfather Hugh Brentforth, some of them didn’t. With time it almost became a joke. There we’d be on our considerable spread, all fenced in and secure, always around Thanksgiving too. All of us hale and hearty and addicted to fine brandy and snowmobiles, and then right in the middle of congratulating ourselves on what a good time we’re having and how clever we and our ancestors are . . . Hugh laughed. The area around his eyes was delicate and very pale, as if he wore dark glasses a lot. His eyes, a green that changed to hazel in the shifting light, were wide and blinking, as if he’d recently been surprised.
They were sitting outside his hut at a place where the river dropped half a dozen feet, creating a shallow waterfall. The sound was gurgling and slow. He said it lulled him to sleep at night.
