by Alice Walker
He was glad when he heard Miss Lissie’s knock. It was firm and decisive, as always. When he opened the door, he was instantly cheered by the lively, ironical eyes—that seemed to say, Well, what else, if anything, is new?—in the old, beautifully angular face. Her bright hair was covered with a woolen shawl the color of California poppies, Fanny’s favorite flower. This alone made Suwelo smile. She wore a camel-hair coat, and high, lace-up black shoes. Her breath was short, from the effort of bringing a large cardboard box up the steps. Suwelo quickly reached out and took it from her.
She stepped into the foyer and took off her shawl and coat, hanging them on the coatrack and checking herself out in the dim mirror beneath the light. She was wearing a soft yellow dress that had a large embossed black paw print, or perhaps it was a flower, Suwelo thought, looking at it closely, just above her heart. In a few minutes they were seated in the front parlor, drinking tea Suwelo had prepared as he awaited her arrival, and going through the big box.
“When your uncle died,” said Miss Lissie, “I didn’t know for certain who would be taking over the house. I didn’t want these pictures to go to just anybody. They’re special, and I wanted to give them only to someone who’d understand.”
Suwelo was glad Miss Lissie considered him someone who did. All over the walls of the house there were pale empty spaces where the photographs had hung. Suwelo had stopped before them many times, trying to imagine what the pictures might have been like. Miss Lissie now took each of them out, unwrapped it, and placed it face down on the oak bench next to the sofa. After she’d done this, she carefully crumpled the newspaper wrappings and put them in the box. She then took a cloth from her black leather purse and began to polish the glass of each picture. After that, she placed them in rows on the bench, sat back, and invited Suwelo to look.
Before he looked at the pictures, though, he looked carefully into the old face next to him and tried to locate the young girl standing in front of the fancy carved chairs, barefoot, clothes patched, her hair in plaits. He looked for the lovely nose, the soft mouth, the round cheeks. Perhaps she was there. It was hard to tell. Then, noting the rough and beautiful texture of the oak and pine frames, he began to look at the photographs, of which there were thirteen. Miss Lissie explained that she already had a copy of the one photograph she had left in the house, and therefore hadn’t taken it when she had removed the rest.
Suwelo remembered Mr. Hal’s remark: “Lissie is a lot of women,” and expected to see a lot of pictures of the same woman dressed to make herself appear different; and it was true, in each picture the chair—one of those in the photograph left behind—was the same, and the outfit varied greatly. What he saw, though, were thirteen pictures of thirteen entirely different women. One seemed tall, another very short, one light-skinned, with light eyes, another dark with eyes like obsidian. One had hair to her waist, another had hardly enough to cover her skull. One appeared acrobatic, healthy, and glowing. Another seemed crippled and barely ambulatory.
He chose two pictures and held them out in front of him. In one, a short, high-yellow flapper stared boldly into the camera, lips puckered and a rakish look in what appeared to be green eyes, a spit curl of lightish hair an upside-down question mark in the middle of her forehead; in the second, a tall, dark, gangly miss, with the sad grace of a domestic servant and former field hand, looked out of beaten eyes at a camera and cameraman she did not trust. She was wearing a maid’s white uniform, and her scant hair was mercilessly straightened and pulled tight under a peaked white cap. There was no similarity at all between the two women. In fact, there was none among any of the thirteen women. Nor did they look like the elegant grandmotherly woman at Suwelo’s elbow.
“I ran off with the photographer, a colored man from Charleston, who took that,” said Miss Lissie, pointing to the flapper one. “He was married. When I found out, I ran away from him. I was pregnant at the time. This,” she said, pointing to the one in the maid’s uniform, “is how I looked when he found me again. I was one of his models for going on thirty years, off and on. Long after what fire there was between us burned out. We fascinated each other. He had never, in all his work as a photographer, photographed anyone like me, who could never present the same self more than once, and I had never in my life before found anyone who could recognize how many different women I was. Oh, some people, even my mama and papa, commented on how I didn’t seem to have, as they put it, ‘no certain definite form,’ but to them I looked enough like myself from day to day so that it didn’t matter. But Henry Laytrum began to photograph me once or twice a year, and the result is what you see; there were others, but in these the differences are most striking.
“Yes,” she said, as if answering Suwelo’s question, “those are both me. All of these,” she continued, with a sweep of her arm, “all of them are me. Henry Laytrum, with his old box camera and his break-away chair—so he could dismantle it and take it anywhere he went—that was carved by Hal’s father, was able to photograph the women I was in many of my lifetimes before. It was such a wonderful gift he was able to give me, although because he was so dishonest with me about his marriage—never telling me until after we’d run off together—I never told him the secret of what puzzled him so and intrigued him. And I only came to understand myself—at first it frightened me to see myself as so many different people!—after years of memory excavation and exploration, years of understanding I’m not like most other people, years of anger and confusion over this, years of fighting everyone! But finally it dawned on me that my memory and the photographs corroborated each other exactly. I had been those people, and they were still somewhere inside of me. When Henry Laytrum aimed his camera, different ones were drawn out. Over time I grew to love seeing which self would pop out. Henry Laytrum would develop the pictures, race over to see me, spread them out on the porch, and introduce us. ‘Miss Lissie,’ he’d say, bowing to me and the latest picture, ‘say Howdy!’ And I would. It was such a kick. The selves I had thought gone forever, existing only in my memory, were still there! Photographable. Sometimes it nearly thrilled me to death.
“In the wide world there was war. These white people here, trying to rule over everybody in America, and the ones in Europe, trying to rule over everybody else in the world. The Depression came. Seem like you heard of a hanging or some other monstrous thing done to colored every time you turned around. But this is what was happening to me. And because I was a colored woman, nobody would ever know about it. I was sort of glad, for I’m the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.”
Suwelo shook his head. He did not know if he could believe this or not. And he thought about how believing in things like Halley’s comet was not the same thing. Or was it?
“Remember what I told you about losing my foot and leg after being caught in a bear trap?”
“Oh,” said Suwelo, his eyes going instantly to the picture of the small, sad-eyed, very black cripple. It wasn’t that you could see her injury—the missing foot and leg—it was just that you looked into the ashen face, in which the spirit seemed already to have been given up, and you knew.
“Now this,” said Miss Lissie, seeing in Suwelo’s mournful face the heaviness of his commiseration with a self she had moved through, “is how I looked at the time when I stayed with the cousins and hung out in their trees.” She handed Suwelo the happiest-looking of all the pictures, in which she appeared squat, tiny, with a waist like a wasp’s, her hair in wooly ringlets, her eyes bright and laughing, her strong white teeth playfully bared in a wide smile. A pygmy.
SO THAT IS WHY they believed Africans ate people, Suwelo mused, thinking of what Miss Lissie had told him, on the visit previous to the last, about the cousins. Someone, millennia after the time of which she spoke, had come across the gnawed skulls and bones of these ill-fated relatives. But then, obviously in Miss Lissie’s estimation, her cousins were people, even more peoplelike than the folks from her own branch of the family. He sat looking at the picture of Miss
Lissie from thousands of years ago; he imagined her mate taking the photograph and laughing with her as she made faces at him. He imagined their children crawling about under the cathedrallike trees; trees as big as Chartres, she had said. He imagined the huge black hairy cousins swinging about with their young and Miss Lissie’s young, too, clinging to their backs. He thought of the big dark faces and the small paler ones.
He was still thinking of this when he heard Mr. Hal’s truck and, later, his gentle, tentative knock on the door. Suwelo let him in, helped him off with his coat, and because he knew how Mr. Hal enjoyed good coffee, he hastened to make him a cup.
Suwelo had now been in Uncle Rafe’s house for more than two months. He had not forgotten Fanny and California—and there was a “For Sale” sign outside on the tiny lawn—but days went by when he did not think of her. Or if he did think of her, it was to feel sad that she could not share what he was experiencing. Fanny loved old people and was conversant with them in ways he was not. He was much more likely to be embarrassed with them, as if he suspected they sensed the impatience that was frequently his frame of mind. But it wasn’t simply impatience with them that he felt; he was impatient with the situation that young and old these days had inherited (and he forgot a lot of the time that he was getting older himself): that of being without sufficient time either to talk, really talk, to each other or to listen. Say you were at some unusual event, some kind of house party, and you found yourself next to an ancient anthropologist who just casually said: “Well, when I was in Afghanistan in the thirties ... blah, blah, blah.” What did you do? What you wanted to do was grab her by her collar and drag her home and sit her down in a big comfy chair and sit at her feet (or his feet, as the case might be) for a week, while she talked. At the party the most you were likely to get was a sly anecdote about travel by camel and the lack of roads. It was maddening.
Fanny was more likely than he to stay glued to some rare old person for an evening, completely absorbed, though both she and the old person had to strain to hear each other over the noise of the other guests.
Suwelo loved what was happening to him and was grateful for the time his uncle Rafe had provided for him to get to know his house, his friends, a life he could not have learned about any other way than by having it subsidized. He remembered the first time he had waited for Miss Lissie and her friend, Miss Rose, to bring his lunch and he had asked them to please step inside. Miss Rose had declined, hurriedly, saying she had grandchildren at home waiting for her, but Miss Lissie had come in as if she had been expecting the invitation, and had stood in the foyer in a rather queenly way, he thought, as if waiting for him to dispose of some earlier guest. They looked at each other for a long moment. That day it was her dignity he noticed first; the straightness of her posture. Next, her reserve, the way she said “How do you do?” so formally, then nothing else, as he stood beside her, waiting for her to take the first step into the living room, where, he reasoned, she must have sat countless times before. But she did not budge. He thought she looked quite stately, for someone who wasn’t very tall. And then he, too, became conscious of the guests in his living room.
“I’m sorry. Excuse me,” he said hurriedly, and walking quickly into the living room, he snapped off the TV.
“I get used to having it on for company,” he said, by way of apology. And then he thought, she probably watches the soaps herself, so he said, “I’m getting more like my cousins and aunts every day; they all watch the soaps.”
“The whats?” asked Miss Lissie.
“You know, the stories on TV,” said Suwelo, thinking the modern shorthand for TV stories confused her. After all, she was very old. “Which do you watch?”
“I don’t watch TV,” she said, sitting in a chair next to it and at the same time drawing a blue fringed shawl that had lain on top of the set since Suwelo arrived completely over the front of it.
So that’s its purpose, Suwelo thought, for he had looked at the blue shawl, a large, vivid Mexican serape, and felt it made a rather peculiar doily.
Today Mr. Hal sat in the same chair Miss Lissie usually chose, right by the TV, and like Miss Lissie he paid more than cursory attention to the position of the shawl. Suwelo watched TV much less himself now that Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal talked to him, or, as he sometimes thought of it, transmitted to him, in much the same way the TV did. He was in the habit of covering it whenever it was off. Mr. Hal contented himself with tugging at a corner of the shawl and straightening the edge. That small ritual completed, a gesture that seemed unconsciously designed to close off completely an erroneous and trivial point of view, Mr. Hal settled back to take up his narrative where he had left off. For Suwelo’s talks with him and Miss Lissie were not conversations. They were more correctly perceived as deliveries. Suwelo was grateful to receive.
“You don’t know, or maybe you do,” said Mr. Hal, a look of deep satisfaction with the coffee and with his thoughts on his face, “how wonderful a feeling it give you when you know somebody love you and that’s just the way it is. You can be good, you can be a devil, and still that somebody love you. You can be weak, you can be strong. You can know a heap or nearly nothing. That kind of love, when you think about it, just seems like some kind of puzzle, and you can spend a lifetime trying to figure it out. If you puffed up with vanity, you can’t help but think what they love is something you created yourself. Or maybe it’s your money or your car. But there’s something... . It’s like how you love a certain place. You just do, that’s all. And if you’re lucky, while you’re on this earth, you get to visit it. And the place ‘knows’ about your love, you feel. That was the love and still is the love between Lissie and me.”
Mr. Hal settled himself more comfortably in his chair, took a large slurping sip of his coffee, just as Uncle Rafe and every old Southern gentleman Suwelo had ever met had done, and continued.
“So the white folks wanted all us boys, your uncle Rafe, too, for the army, to fight in the Great War, or so they said. The truth was, they wanted us to be servants for the white men who fought. I wasn’t painting worth nothing then—did I tell you I used mostly house paint?—Lissie wasn’t pushing me, for some reason, and I couldn’t hardly see the road in front of me. But I was black and able-bodied, and the white folks wanted me for fodder in their war. The furthest I had been from the Island was about a mile from shore. They wanted us to fight some people none of us had heard of, and they were white folks, too. Well, not to fight ’em, just to serve our own white masters, you might say, while they fought ’em.
“So anyway, it meant leaving the Island, leaving my family, and leaving Lissie. I didn’t see how I could stand it. Lissie couldn’t either, but Lissie couldn’t fight the white man’s army, though I don’t doubt she would’ve tried. She hated white people anyway and said she didn’t have one good memory from a thousand years of dealing with them. But you know from all the stuff Lissie’s told me, she didn’t have many real good memories of anybody. She was just in a rage most of the time about me going away. And out of that rage, she got the notion we should be married. I was scared to say no. Besides, it was what everybody was doing, getting married, and it’s safe to say to you today that we didn’t have a clue, really and truly, about what marriage was. Plus I loved Lissie—when hadn’t I loved Lissie?—and she loved me so much, too much, till sometimes I was almost smothered.
“They used to speak of that time on the Island as the time of the big rash. They meant the rash of folks getting married. Like most of them, we got married on the front porch at Lissie’s people’s house, looking out over the bay. It was a pretty spring day, and I just itched to paint it. I never will forget we had a woman preacher to marry us, because we had two preachers on the Island, both of them called by the spirit, and we were too out of the way things were done in the rest of the world to know the spirit didn’t call women. Then there was Lissie staring everybody down and saying she remembered that women were called first and this calling was something men then took away from th
em. Well, nobody was going to fight Lissie over something nobody thought was important. We had two spirit-called people, a woman and a man. It seemed right. Like you have two different kinds of parents, a woman and a man, you know. It wasn’t until I was in the army and saw how all the preachers, priests, and chaplains everywhere we went—and we got as far as France—were men that I thought about what Lissie had said, and how disgusted she looked when she said it. Of course at different times Lissie herself was a witch doctor and a sorceress and a preacher of various kinds, so she knew what she was talking about. She was so angry. The maddest human being I’ve ever seen in all my years of living. Because she saw people losing ground in the battle against ignorance and she could see how it would turn out, whatever the battle was, because she had seen it all before.
“So really, I don’t know why she thought marriage was the answer for us. But I went along with her and hoped for the best. Here was a woman I loved, who loved me and let me paint—she thought nothing of spending a morning thinning enough house paint for me to use up in an hour, and she was a regular scavenger for cardboard and likely pieces of wood, since I painted on any and everything—and she encouraged it—sometimes even, what you might say, forced me to do it, and I couldn’t give her up. For her part, I think she wanted to make the bond between us clearer to other people—we didn’t need it to be clearer to ourselves—and you know how it is: trying to make a private bond a public one is like trying to turn water to wine when you prefer water to wine, and anyway you ain’t Christ.
