Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

by Alice Walker

  Yolo chuckled. He knew from the very beginning, he said. What was good for him. What was his.

  They both did. They took to the land as if they’d always lived on it, and of course they had, but modern folks don’t think like that. I was modern. Every time I sold a “property” they wanted to strangle me. And I was always selling to haoles too, which made it worse.

  Alma, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, I’m so sorry.

  So I play a lot of solitaire, she said. And I smoke and drink a lot. If I’m drunk none of it matters very much.

  It matters to your namesake.

  She doesn’t even remember me, said Alma. She knew my mother, not the tiny baby my mother was carrying.

  She doesn’t have to remember you, in particular; she remembers the children of Hawaii, and you are one of them. She wants you to be healthy and happy.

  I’m happy, said Alma, squinting through tears and drawing on a fresh cigarette.

  On the Plane Home

  On the plane home Kate wanted to chew gum. She thought she might have some in her mauve backpack, which she’d stashed under her seat. As she rummaged through it looking for the gum, which she found squashed and linty, and which she carefully unwrapped and chewed anyway, she noticed part of a Post-it pad near the bottom of the pack. Taking it out she saw it was the beginning of the story about a father and a daughter she’d begun what felt like a century ago. When she was running the Colorado. She began to read her scribbled dialogue. There they were, the characters in her story, trying to get the father to eat after the death of the mother, his beloved wife. Roberta, Kate’s character, was finally able to get the old man to eat. This had annoyed and saddened her sisters who had been trying to get him to eat all afternoon.

  Why had she written that? wondered Kate.

  After eating the rice and vegetables she was served for lunch, she sat gazing out the window of the plane, musing on the mysterious nature of writing. All of it that had life was anchored in the dreamworld, she thought, but what had she dreamed about? She suddenly recalled that this story had been inspired by a dream of her mother after her death, who, in the dream, had only one hand and with that one hand was untangling and then mending a net. Her mother’s missing hand had grown back and she’d flung the net into the sea. We do not need a boat for this, she had said.

  Kate remembered her fascination with the fact that her mother had regrown her hand.

  As the plane carried her closer to her final destination, as flight attendants liked to say, Kate began to see all the pieces of the dream and the story clearly, as if a veil were being removed from her eyes. It came to her with certainty that she was not her father’s biological child. That naming herself Roberta, after him, in the story was designed to reveal and to hide this fact. As was his way (to some extent in real life) of doting on her to the slighting of his own biological daughters, who were hurt by his attempt to make sure Kate felt like his child. Perhaps they knew! she suddenly thought; and experienced a wave of embarrassment that was like a hot flash. But then she thought that they probably did not, and that not knowing was even more cruel. For they would have believed he loved her more than them, and this they would never have understood.

  That she was not her father’s biological child was the reason her mother was always dissatisfied with her. Why part of her motherness was missing. It grew back only as She, the Daughter, resolved to look into Life for herself: We do not need a boat [a mother] for this, she had said, and: The secret is, you do not have to be told.

  That explained why Kate looked so different from her sisters, so unlike her father. She didn’t look like her mother, either. Maybe she was adopted? But no, she felt her kinship with her mother; they were alike in many ways. And they had identical heads of heavy, vigorous hair. Her birth was more likely the result of an affair her mother had had, during the early turbulent years of the marriage to her father, years the children had been told about. And she had come back from it, to “Robert,” whom she loved, pregnant and filled with remorse.

  Was it the medicina, the Bobinsana, that gave her this clarity? This certainty? It will make you see things in your life in a different way, Armando had promised. It will teach you to see through your own plots. Kate smiled, thinking of his warning. It is a plant, furthermore, that grows deep, deep, deep beside the river and remains where it is planted always. The river may change course but the plant will never move. When you drink it you too will want to root yourself, to find your riverbank and never uproot yourself again.

  When Armando told them this about the Bobinsana Kate had had an image of everyone in America, the land of speed and movement, drinking it, and suddenly realizing they might as well stay where they are.

  You could not tell me your beloved “Robert” was not my father, Kate wrote across the bottom of the Post-it. He was my father, though. She took the well-chewed gum out of her mouth and wrapped it in the Post-it; when the flight attendant came around again to pick up rubbish she pushed it into her bag. There, a paper curtain was removed! She felt things would flow much more smoothly with her sisters from now on. She would, in fact, share the dream, and its connection to the “story,” with them, and ask them what they thought.

  There were many subtle things she loved about her people, and how they bent themselves backward and turned themselves inside out in their attempts to love biological surprises was one of them. She thought of the half-European children hundreds of thousands of black women had delivered into the world, children forced on them through rape; children deliberately conceived in the bodies of black women so they could be sold. And they had pitied and loved these children; and in an attempt sometimes to prove it, they had seemed to love them more than their darker offspring. And what confusion had resulted from that! Still, the intention of the ancestors to cherish whatever the Creator shocked them with was noble, she felt, and good, and led to a people whose tolerance for the peculiarities of others was legendary. A tolerance they were sometimes denigrated for; but that was the bind and that was the freedom too.

  She felt such overwhelming gratitude for her own parents that when the wheels of the plane touched the earth, she clapped to thank the pilot of the plane for delivering their child safely home again, then wrapped her arms around herself for sheer joy.

  They Bombed

  They bombed eight different places in the world while we were gone, said Yolo, holding her close when they met at Baggage Claim.

  Okay, said Kate, with a sigh, resting against Yolo as if he were a rock. I’m home now.

  It did not seem possible that people would bomb one another rather than talk. What fear was this, that kept silent until announced by the loudest sound on earth, the sound of worlds being destroyed? Was it the fear that one’s own terror would be glimpsed, one’s own childhood of terror guessed? She tried to imagine any of her friends deciding to drop bombs on other people. It would not have occurred to anyone she knew. What would she and her friends drop instead? Food, blankets, matches, tents, music. And she felt certain that if enough of this were dropped, and all of it was cheap compared to the price of bombs, the people who received the goods would in response sell them, at a reasonable price, all the oil or whatever they required. As it was, a gallon of oil cost less in America than a bottle of purified water. So dropping goods directly to the people from the air, bypassing all the middlemen who gobbled up the aid sent through “official channels,” made excellent sense. And what fun people could have!

  The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one another. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their expansiveness. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain? she thought. She knew the answer; America would be the true leader of the world, not its biggest bully. So much of the world had thought America had a heart of joy, and had followed what they assumed was a lighthearted friendliness that made Americans envied and unique. Now they were
seeing the other side. Well, as an African-Amerindian woman from the South she was intimate from birth with America’s mean-spiritedness. The people who had lynched and charbroiled black people and cut open black women’s bellies for sport had not died out and disappeared; they’d morphed into people who worked for the Pentagon and could do this sort of thing from the air.

  You’re dreaming, Yolo said as Kate talked about dropping bicycles and short skirts and jeans to women in Muslim countries.

  Yes, she replied. As a woman, I have to. And she remembered a quote by the now thoroughly, in some quarters, discredited Winnie Mandela, “So far there’s no law against dreaming.” And of what had Mandela dreamed? Freedom from Nazi-Fascist oppression, labeled “racism” to make the native Africans somehow at fault. Freedom for her husband who had been in prison longer than they’d been married. And there had not been a glimmer of hope that anything would change in her land; and yet, because she dreamed, and because she encouraged everyone she met to dream, she had found her voice and so had they. And one morning her husband walked out of the prison beside her and became the country’s president.

  What happened to Winnie? Kate mused. Now everything one heard was negative; that she embezzled money, passed bad checks. Before that she had been accused of helping to murder someone. In photographs she seemed to be desperately clinging to youth, and to material wealth. Her dyed hair looked limp and lifeless, her eyes evasive behind expensive designer glasses, her fingers and arms and neck swathed in gold jewelry. The whole look of her was of someone lost. It made Kate weep, she had admired her so much. And yet, suppose the dream, the ability to dream, and to pass that ability on was all Winnie had to give them. It had been enough to see them, as a race, through many a dark and hopeless hour. It had brought to them collectively, the day her husband was freed, one bright and shining day. Medicina for a belief in a future. Thank you, Winnie, she said under her breath, and turned her eyes to fully appraise and appreciate her partner as they drove home.

  Yolo was much slimmer too! He seemed more grave. His hair was longer and he wore it in one long plait down his back. A string of tiny flowers had been braided through it, but these had dried. Around his neck was a fat plumeria lei, a match for the one he’d pulled from a plastic bag and placed over her head when they met in the airport. Their car was perfumed, transformed into a magic carriage in which they sat like a king and a queen. Or like best friends. When he bent to kiss her as they stopped at a red light, she thought he tasted different. When she glanced at his hand on the steering wheel she noticed a new tattoo.

  What’s that? she asked, looking closely and lightly touching his hand. The tattoo was a short row of slightly curving blue lines, four of them, almost overlapping, and it was on the last digit of his pointing finger.

  I got it last night, he said.

  Did it hurt? she asked.

  It sure did, he said.

  They drove in silence for a while. Both of them happy to be homeward bound, happy to be safe and together. Looking forward to the night.

  Later, in bed, he said to her: I loved eating supper with you (they had stopped to pick up the yummy Chinese vegetarian take-out they both craved); I loved being in the bath with you (she had emptied half a bottle of L’Occitane Ambre bubble bath into the tub); loved smelling and stroking you.

  She grinned. It is good, isn’t it? she said.

  Amazingly, yes, he said, feeling her head settle on his chest. The world has never been in worse shape: global warming, animal extinctions, people fucked up and crazy, war. And then there are us, harmless little humans who somehow get to nibble at the root of things . . .

  Did you meet any cute women? she abruptly asked. Or cute men?

  It was hard for Kate to believe other people were completely straight, but Yolo was. He loved other men as brothers but why he’d want to sleep with a man when there were women around he could not fathom.

  I actually remet someone, he said. An old lover.

  Kate lifted her head so she could see him better.

  And he began to tell her about Alma.

  Her mother died when she was three, he said slowly, and she had breast-fed Alma from birth. When she died of influenza Alma was devastated. I can’t even imagine how bad it must have felt. Suddenly to lose someone who loved you, held you, fed you from her own warm body. Her mother had been friends with an older woman who taught an ancient system of body purification. In fact, she had been one of Aunty Alma’s students, and that was who Alma was named after. Aunty Alma is well-known today as a kahuna, or healer; the foundation of her healing is a cleanse. You fast for many days and among other things you do, you drink a lot of seawater. Alma, my friend, had never given her, or her gift to Hawaiian culture, a second thought. Well, said Yolo, when I got there, by some strange fate, I was asked to sit on a rocky beach beside the body of Alma’s son. He’d died of an overdose of a drug they call ice.

  Kate sat straight up in bed. No, she said, her eyes wide.

  Kate, said Yolo, he was so beautiful. And he described the cutoff jeans, the beads around his neck, the earring. His name was Marshall. I asked Alma why he was named Marshall and she said it was because of the islands, the Marshall Islands, where he was conceived when she and his father had gone down there to try to halt the dropping of bombs the U.S. military was testing. Children there were being born without eyes or spinal columns. They were sometimes just blobs of tissue.

  Kate was by now hugging her knees.

  Yolo paused.

  I’m going to save the rest for other times, he said, smiling into her stricken eyes. There’s actually some good news. He kissed her forehead. Now you tell me something your crowd did.

  And she, after a few moments of thought, began to tell him about the amazing plant, Bobinsana, that grew beside the river, whose roots, dissolved in water, she had drunk morning and night, and how she had begun to have dreams that diagnosed the illnesses of others.

  It was funny to find myself coolly examining the innards of a bunch of people I had barely met; what wasn’t funny was trying to tell them what I’d seen. She laughed. They didn’t want to hear it. Fortunately nothing I saw was very serious. A hernia; a blood clot—well, I guess that could become serious, later on. A fractured clavicle that had healed wrong. I asked Armando the shaman: Should I tell or what? He thought it was up to me to decide, since I had been given the dreams. Anyway, she continued, the ones I told were only mad at me for a little while; then they forgot.

  Forgot? asked Yolo.

  You’d have to have been there, Kate said, and laughed. Try to imagine a bunch of middle-aged people sitting in a circle in the middle of the jungle, green with nausea, vomiting our guts out.

  Do I have to? he said, laughing with her, and drawing her closer to him.

  Neither of them said anything about sex, nor was there any movement that suggested making love. They kissed each other with their eyes open, before settling thankfully into the rich comfort of Kate’s bed.

  Sleeping with Yolo was always wonderful. He was warm and he smelled great. There was even something soothing about his snoring, which in the beginning had kept her wakeful and unamused. Her back curled into his, his arm curved under her breasts, there was a feeling of being snug and out of winter’s way, even in summer.

  They woke up the next morning talking.

  And did I tell you, said Kate, that we got one cup of cereal and one banana per day? And not even a sweet banana.

  I guess I shouldn’t tell you about the lau lau and kalua pig, said Yolo. The pasta and a forgotten world of ice cream, Jell-O, and pies.

  No, said Kate, don’t.

  And I was pretty much off meat too, said Yolo. But you know what? I couldn’t say no to the people’s food. I knew I wouldn’t be eating it long, and it was very tasty. I also knew that to taste it was, in a sense, to taste them. They still cook pork in the ground, you know. They’ve been eating pigs forever.

  Yeah, well, said Kate, I guess somebody’s been eating grains an
d bananas forever. I got really sick of them.

  But think how clean you are, said Yolo. I can taste it.

  Speaking of taste, said Kate, you taste very different yourself and you smell even sweeter, if that’s possible.

  It’s possible, he said, grinning at her.

  Suddenly she realized what was different about Yolo. You quit smoking, she said.

  Yes, he said. I’m happy about it too, he said after a pause, and while gazing intently into her beaming face, but to tell you the truth, sometimes I feel like chewing off my paws.

  That bad, huh, she said.

  I don’t know if I can do it.

  You can, she said. If other people do it, that means it’s at least possible.

  I really love smoking, he said. It’s felt like a friend. I know it isn’t, of course.

  Yes, I know, she said.

  I was so grateful you never minded kissing me.

  I didn’t, she said. You never tasted like an ashtray to me. And your oral hygiene has always been enviable.

  I have a goal now, about quitting, he said.

  You want to stay healthy and cute, she said.

  Yes, he said, that too. But the real reason is that I took a vow, with a few other brothers of the world, to stop.

  Yolo held up his hand and stretched out his finger.

  These lines that you see are waves. There are four of them because most of the old cultures believe there have been four worlds, including this one. They are all connected by water, just as these tiny lines are. It is hard to see the connection, he said, peering at the end of his finger, but it is there.

  How are they connected by water? asked Kate.

  Because it is the same water. Different worlds, you know, destroyed time and again, but the same water.

  Of course! said Kate, excited. Because there’s no new water on the planet, it’s all recycled. That means that when the Hopi sat out the destruction of the third world by living underground, when they came up everything was changed except the water. It had remained pure. They could wash in it, drink it, cook with it. And also, it had sustained them while they were underground. Water was loyal, she added, thoughtfully.