by Alice Walker
“When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal. Hal could not defend himself, for instance; he didn’t consider himself worthy of defense. He never learned to fight. And listen, the most amazing thing, his eyes became weak! But I always took up for him; I knew he had to be reminded that it was all right to see. And in whatever corner of privacy we could find, I forced him to draw. If I hadn’t, he would have been blind as a bat within a year. His father threatened to keep him out of school if he drew. So for years I had a big reputation as an artist. It was all Hal’s work—pinched and furtive, as if his father loomed over his shoulder, but still expressive, raw, and pure. And I’m proud to say I can remember almost every painting that he drew. He drew right up to the time he left for the army. After that, for quite a while, nothing. And sure enough, during that time, Hal was to tell me later, he was a regular stumblebum. But at least the army let him out finally because of his bad sight, though it kept other colored men whose disabilities were almost as pitiful. I was really glad to get him back and painting again, for a gifted artist such as Hal can paint the memory that maybe you yourself have started to doubt. He actually did that more times then I can count.
“I was talking to an African scholar one time, a man from one of these big schools. He was real skinny and black and straight, and he wore that little African-style hat that’s just like an American soldier’s, only in bright colors, and he was all right, I guess, but he had lifeless eyes, and I almost shivered while he was talking to me. It was like he was a well-educated, smooth-talking zombie, and he had sort of jerky movements, too. So anyway, he got to talking about how much of a cliché it was when black people here claimed their ancestors were sold into slavery by an uncle. He kinda chuckled when he said it and leaned back in his chair. I didn’t say anything to him, ’cause he’d already decided that the truth, if told a number of times, can be dismissed as unbelievable, and I have lived enough times to have seen this happen a lot. Some folks actually think the truth can be worn out. But anyway, it was my uncle who sold me. It was the uncle who sold a lot of women and their children, and it’s easy enough to understand why this was so. It was the African organization of family life.
“My father died of a heart attack when I was two years old. He was an old man and I was the last child by his youngest wife; even if he had lived, he would have seemed and have been someone from another century. By law my mother and her children became the responsibility of his brother, who was even older than he was, a practicing Mohametan that bathed and prayed all day. He already had more wives and children and slaves than he knew what to do with. One of his child wives egged him on to sell us, and he did. She wanted to buy some of the white man’s trinkets that after the rainy season fairly flooded our part of the world. Mirrors! You’ve never seen so many appear out of nowhere, or as quickly disappear. Loud-colored cloth, bright tin washbasins, and things for which there was no apparent use—knickknacks; for instance, porcelain dancing ladies and their fancy gentlemen. But this happened well into the dry season, for it was very hot; it must have been something like November or December. My mother had sent me to the okra patch to get the okra that had been left on the stalks for seeds, and I was humming along, hitting at the weeds by the dusty path with a stick. I was about thirteen then. We lived in a poor little hut off by itself and out of sight of my uncle’s compound. There were four huge men squatting at the edge of the okra patch, and they just looked and smelled evil, so I turned to run back home. Well, they caught me and tied me up, and one of ’em tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. They then went on to the hut and grabbed my two sisters, my brother, and my mother.
“My mother was just begging and pleading and calling for mercy, because she knew about slavers, but these brutes had no ears. They were like the zombie African professor I told you about. Perhaps that is, in fact, who he was in that time. Well, they carried and dragged us up to my uncle’s compound, and he came out. My mother tried to prostrate herself before him, which was the custom in our country, but she was tied up in such a way she fell over on her side. Thick dust was caked over one side of her face, and both her knees were skinned. I know now that she was someone who was never loved, because she was never really seen, except by her children, who did love her. She had four children, but she was only in her late teens. A strong-looking, somewhat plump, kind of reddish-black woman with big sullen eyes. Her specialty was weaving and, though we were poor, the little cotton our uncle let us keep from the crop we raised for him went into the cloths we wore around our waists—beautiful checks and plaids, made bright and colorful from natural dyes. She’d learned dyeing and weaving from her mother, who’d learned it from her mother and so on.
“My uncle had these cloths removed from us, for they were woven in the distinctive style of our tribe—our colors were yellow, red, and white—and gave us plain unbleached cotton ones instead. By this time I had been stood up, bound, in front of my uncle, along with my sisters and brother. We did not attempt to bow to him. We were not crying, like our mother. We hated the man. The truth is probably that we were in shock. I remember the men paid my uncle some silver money with a hole in it, and he took four of the smallest pieces and pressed them into our hands. We’d walked several miles before I was aware that I still held the one he gave me. It was Arab money, with their writing on it and everything.
“We were forced to jog for almost fifteen days without stopping, or so it felt, until we came to the big stone fort on the coast. It was then we saw the white men. They were posted all up and down the front of the fort, and we were only one small group of many converging on the fort at that time. Two white men came eventually to inspect us. They looked at our ears, our genitals—you would not believe the thoroughness, or the pitiful protestations of the women—our teeth and our eyes. They made us hop up and down to test the strength in our legs. Our feet were bleeding. My mother had sunk into a kind of walking slumber and did all she was told to do as if in a dream. We children copied her manner though we were vividly alert, so much so that the four of us managed to hide our silver pieces, before we were searched, in the thickets of our hair.
“The white men, who looked and smelled like nothing we had ever imagined, as if their sweat were vinegar, paid the men who’d brought us, and they turned right around and jogged back the way we’d come. I wanted to run after them and kill them, but the white men had called some other blacks, who seemed at home around the fort, and we were taken to the holding pen, which was like a cellar underneath the fort. It was already crowded with depressed and frightened people. When they saw my mother and her children shoved through the door, many of the men looked sad and turned their faces, in shame, to the wall. These were men sold into slavery because of their religious belief, which was not tolerated by the Mohametans. They carried on the ancient tradition of worship of the mother, and to see a mother sold into slavery—which did not turn a hair on a Mohametan’s head if she was not a convert to his religion—was a great torture for them.
“It was during the hundreds of years of the slave trade in Africa that this religion was finally destroyed, although for hundreds of years previous to the slave trade it had been under attack. There were, in the earliest days, raids on the women’s temples, which existed in sacred groves of trees, with the women and children dragged out by the hair and forced to marry into male-dominated tribes. The ones who were not forced to do this were either executed or sold into a tribe whose language was different. The men had decided they would be creator, and they went about dethroning woman systematically. To sell women and children for whom you no longer wished to assume responsibility or to sell those who were mentally infirm or who had in some way offended you, became a new tradition, an accepted way of life. As did the idea, later on, under the Mohametans, that a man could own many women, as he owned many cattle or hu
nting dogs.
“These Motherworshipers would be the hardest of the Africans to break, for they were devoted to the Goddess, and they were regular chameleons (much, very much we have learned, over time, from the lizards!); but they were broken. That is why the ultimate curse against Africa/Mother/Goddess—motherfucker—is still in the language. It would have been unthinkable in the Old Days, and a person saying it would have been immediately asked for his tongue. Our new masters had a genius for turning us viciously—in ways that shamed and degraded even themselves, if only they’d had sense enough to know it—against anything that once we loved.
“They fed us a little millet gruel, which we dipped with our hands from a long wooden trough outside the pen twice a day. We could see the sky for the ten minutes it took us to eat. In the early morning, before daybreak, we were let out to move our bowels. Constipation was always my problem; fear and anxiety kept me locked tight. But cases of dysentery were frequent, and many people while waiting—for what, we didn’t know—sickened and died. Later I was to realize that the men who bought us to sell had already calculated how many of us were liable to die and had therefore captured more of us than they were likely to need.
“After a week in the stockade, my mother fell sick. There was no room for any of us to lie down comfortably, but one of the Motherworshipers forced a little extra space by the wall, toward which my mother could turn her head for air, and when the pains wracked her, she could kneel. She was sick with vomiting and dysentery, those sicknesses it is least possible to hide. Her deeper sickness was over her shame at being filthy and exposed to strangers, in the embarrassed and helpless presence of her children. There never was a more fastidious or modest woman than my mother. She bathed at least once a day, and her cloths were spotless. I remember how sweet the oil always smelled in her hair! She could not accept so much filth on and about her person.
“On the seventh day she willed herself to die. The white men sent in a couple of brutes to drag her out by her heels—one of them held a rag to his nose as they dragged her—and place her body on a cart and carry it away. I envied her. I pitied myself. I did not know how to ask the strangers or even my sisters and brother to kill me.
“So I am very bitter about my old home, and who can claim I do not have a right to be?
“This is no hearsay. I was there.
“You do not believe I was there? I pity you.
“There was a period during the sixties when I passed myself off as a griot. I pretended I’d traveled to Africa and learned the stories of the diaspora straight from the old storytellers and record keepers there. I didn’t have to go anywhere. I remembered quite enough of the story to tell, thank you. There was a little white woman professor who came to one of my lectures about the crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship. She was one of those Afrophiles who was so protective of Africa that she claimed Idi Amin was framed. She got up and said, ‘I wish you’d try not to say “I remember thus and so” about your African experiences. It is claiming more than you could possibly know, and besides that, it is confusing.’ Well, I apologized for doing that. It just slipped out. I did remember everything I was talking about, though, but I knew the professional way to present my experience was as if it had merely been told to me. Some people don’t understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper. The professor went on to say she couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like on the slave ship. The crowdedness, the dirt, the absolute dependency on madmen to steer the ship, the absence of representation and control.
“Does this make you laugh? No?
“But anyway, there I was, in that lifetime, watching everybody’s hair being cut off. A few days before we left the coast they made us kneel in the sand outside the fort and proceeded to cut great clumps of our hair out, and then to shave our heads. As you know, Africans have an abundance of hair, and there were some with locks they’d had since childhood that fell nearly to their knees. These were brutally cut off, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and then came the shaving of the heads and, for the men, of whiskers with a dry, and no doubt dull, razor. The black men who did this, at the bidding of their white masters, went through the severed locks carefully. Hidden in this hair were all manner of precious small items, tokens of home: gold beads, silver pins, bits of gris-gris. In my brother’s and sisters’ hair and in my own the silver coins were discovered. These items were pocketed by the brutes who held us, and they grunted in satisfaction upon discovering each one. You sometimes see these same faces on the streets of our larger cities; these are the young men selling the dope, or terrorizing the young ones while they take the little money that was pinned in the smaller children’s pockets for them to buy lunch. They haven’t left us, those faces; they are never hard to find.
“It was while the haircutting was going on that I was surprised to see a fairly large compound, consisting of many small huts, a short distance from the fort. During the three hours it took to cut our hair, douse us with a foul-smelling liquid, and flush out our mouths with vinegar—a protection against scurvy—I had time to notice it was inhabited by variously colored women of all ages, many yellow or light brown and some almost white; the area in front of the huts was filled with similarly variegated children. This was an amazing sight to me, who’d never seen people of such different shades, and I was too young to recognize the establishment for what it was, and obviously had been for generations, the fort’s brothel. I was to learn this later from one of the fair-skinned young women, who was sold onto our boat along with her young son. Her white master, recognizing himself as fat, swinish, and disagreeable to the nose and touch, had finally convinced himself of the much avoided truth that no one as lovely as this woman could possibly love him, even if she was his slave. In his cups one night he’d gambled her and his son away in a game of cards, which he assumed he was teaching his African flunkies to play.
“After the chopping down of our hair—we had worn it, some of us, in a style that made one think of trees—we were branded with pieces of hot iron shaped into configurations dreamed up by those who had, in America, purchased us sight unseen. I was branded with a C, for Croesus, which in this instance was not the name of a person but the name of an estate, a rather poor one, too, as it turned out. By these brands we were recognized, and if one of us died, her brand was checked and she was marked off the record book into which we were all entered.
“When they pressed the metal to the skin of a buttock or upper arm there was much pain. The swelling and burning continued for days afterward. Though the slavers dotted our wounds with a bit of vinegar and palm oil, nothing soothed like the milk from a nursing mother’s breast, a remedy with which all Africans were familiar, and though most Africans no longer believed in the worship of the mother, this last vestige of her power was believed in firmly. Luckily there were nursing mothers among us, although without their babies. Babies were not permitted on the slave ship, nor mothers too far advanced in pregnancy. Some of the babies were simply smashed against the ground by the captors of their mothers, some were left on the trail to die, some were sold or, less usually, adopted by a tribe that did not believe in or participate in the slave trade—that is, they refused to sell or buy anyone—and to whom small children, so recently inseparable from the source of all life, were especially sacred. I was also to learn of these people on the slave ship, for one of them, on his way from marketing his commodity of salt, had been captured by a white slaver and his black henchmen, who refused to hear his protestations that saltmakers were exempted from being captured, under a separate law. To which I imagine the slaver’s reply was: Under slavery, no nigger exists under a separate law.
“The breasts of the nursing mothers were a haven for the very young among us, who were permitted to drink the milk. Otherwise some of the more frightened and traumatized of the children would have died. And for
the rest of us there was grace in the incredible kindness of these young mothers as they moved among us as best they could, with a drop here and a drop there on our festering wounds. When I was a child, I told Hal this story because he was the only one who wouldn’t laugh at me for thinking I remembered it; the next thing I knew, he’d found crayons and painted it. He painted the face of one of the women as if he’d seen it himself. It was a sight one does not often see, but I will always remember the way it made me feel; the small, and not so small, boys and girls plastered against the sides and stomachs of our grieving young women, who nursed them standing up, crowded together in the fetid barracoon, in the white man’s hell that he was permitted and sometimes even encouraged to build in our own land. And though I was big, there was a time in my despair when, in sorrow over the death of my mother and fear of the unknown journey ahead of me, I also nursed. In truth, for a period before we left the continent and for a time on board the ship I regressed to babyhood, even to the thumb-sucking stage. The first time I was raped by members of the crew on board the ship, I was in chains and sucking on my thumb. The second time I was violated, they chained me so that my arms and legs were spread out and my thumb was beyond my reach. There was nothing to solace me. But in the hold of the ship, somewhere in the awful darkness, I knew the mothers who had suckled me also lay, and sometimes I imagined their moans of despair were songs of comfort for me and for their own lost children.
