Color Purple Collection

by Alice Walker

  “There was no reason for them to think me alive or to grieve over me excessively. For months after I became old enough to inherit my own money, I had made a quietly shocking spectacle of myself by giving it away. They looked on grimly, disapproving. But really, I had so much; and sometimes I was shaken to discover that there were weeks when, simply by letting my investments alone, I earned more, sometimes as much as three times more, than I had managed in the same period to give away. There was a dreadful feeling of creeping ‘moneyism’; days when I felt for all the world like a field or forest being overtaken by kudzu. I felt I would drown in all my money, and the panic of that feeling only began to ease as I made plans to give up forever being who I was.

  “How can I say this so that it doesn’t seem totally awful? I was eager to give up being who I was. I had already chosen a new name, ‘Rowena Rollins,’ which, I was later to realize, I could only use comfortably on paper. In establishing myself in Africa, I called myself ‘Mary Jane Briden,’ getting rid of ‘Ann,’ which I’d never liked, and ‘Haverstock,’ which seemed just a pseudonym for cash, and adding a name that—now that I consider it—had something of the possibility of marriage in it. Prophetically, it would be in Africa that I would become, though only in name, a bride. But I simply did not know how to get about in the world without sufficient cash. This means I did not give away all my money, as my parents thought I would, saying at various times to me that when I grew old and penniless I would regret my ‘foolish’ behavior. I opened several foreign bank accounts under my new name and under a few long numbers and under a couple of other people’s names, all deceased. I kept enough to live on, in other words, and to do whatever in the world I might modestly choose, and I left the Recuerdo sinking decisively into oblivion, like my old life, and went off in The Coming Age, the Recuerdo’s twin, except for a small turquoise snake embroidered on her sails. After years of barely conscious deliberation, this symbol had emerged as my personal emblem of spiritual expression. The snake, which sheds its skin but is ever itself, and, because of its knowledge of the secret places of the earth, free from the threat of extinction, apparently uneradicable; and turquoise, a color of cleansing of body and spirit, of the clarification of memories, and of powerful healing.

  “I remember how I felt as the storm subsided and the fog began to clear. All that year I dressed in black jumpsuits, and as I sat in a deck chair with my steaming cup of camomile tea and my pink lace-up boots propped against the rail, I felt, for the first time that I could remember, not only mentally lucid and well defined against the landscape of my universe, but also actually vivid; in short, free.

  “I did not really know where I was going, and so I returned to the past. But the old past, not the one that I myself knew. I went to London and tramped about in the parks and museums and libraries for quite some months, listening intently, speaking when I could, until I’d developed something of a British accent. I then took the train out to Hampstead and the nursing home for the exceedingly rich and aged where she was. I couldn’t decide, as I waited in the softly colored, restfully lighted lobby, whether I should pass myself off as a journalist or a student; surely I’d need some justification for my interest in Eleanora Burnham’s life. But I had not reckoned on having been known to her in the past. The old past. The past of before I was born or even thought of.

  “‘Elly,’ she croaked at me immediately. ‘You’ve finally come back home! And what did you bring me?’

  “She was the oldest, frailest, most ethereal-looking human being I’d ever seen, my great-aunt Eleanora. Her bright blue sunken eyes dominated her thin, wrinkled face. Her sparse white hair hung in two lusterless pigtails over her red, ethnically decorated nightdress. Daydress, too, I supposed, for she had the look and, as I bent over her, the smell of someone who, though clean, was never out of bed.

  “But why should she call me ‘Elly,’ a diminutive of her own name?

  “‘Elly Peacock!’ she exclaimed happily, smiling broadly and without a tooth in her head. I sat on the edge of a chair beside the bed.

  “The nurse winked at me. ‘She’s in and out of this world a great deal,’ she said, smiling. ‘Sometimes she thinks I’m her mother ... and,’ she said, looking down at her short skirt, ‘dressed indecently.’

  “I looked up at the blonde, plump, matronly woman. I thought she looked a bit like me—a Slav or Russian or eighteenth-century English country version.

  “‘I think Elly must be this person,’ said the nurse, handing me an old photograph in a spotted silver frame. Two young women, with light upswept locks overflowing pins and clasps, and dressed identically in long dark dresses with lace at throat and sleeves, looked out calmly over the wheels of an old-fashioned bicycle built for two. ‘Eleanora and Eleandra’ was written in a spidery hand underneath. I immediately recognized myself in Eleandra.

  “‘She’s been here so long I think I know the whole family,’ said the nurse. ‘Or’—she smiled—‘maybe I’m the one who’s been here so long. Some days she can take me back as far as the eighteen hundreds, if I let her. Eleandra was her twin.’

  “I looked at my great-aunt, at the neatly made bed in which her wasted frame made barely a ripple in the sheets, at the rows of old photographs on the table by the bed, and at the bottles of pebbles, all sizes, colors, degrees of roughness and smoothness set in among the photographs.

  “‘She collected rocks,’ said the nurse, raising her eyebrows for significance, ‘In Africa.’

  “Eleanora, however, was not to be patronized, even in her condition; she rolled her eyes at the woman. ‘Not only in Africa, you sow,’ she hissed or, rather, frothed. ‘All over the bloody world I traveled collecting them. You see, Elly, like you, I knew what was the real gold and silver. People used to break into places where I stayed, because I was a wealthy woman, but all they ever found were these. Once, a burglar emptied all the bottles and apparently bit every single pebble!’ She chortled, but ended in a slight fit of coughing.

  “‘Well,’ said the nurse, ‘excuse me.’ She went off to the next room, where I heard the querulous voice of her next patient greeting her at the door.

  “‘You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen,’ the old woman wheezed. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why I should tell you that; after all, I learned it from you.’

  “‘But how did you learn it from me?’

  “She looked at me, visibly puzzled.

  “‘I’m not Elly,’ I said gently. ‘I’m not your twin.’

  “Eleanora brightened. ‘Of course you’re not my twin. That little twit.’ She sucked her gums as toothed people suck their teeth. Swak, was the sound. The sound of irritation joined securely to dismissal.

  ‘Nobody would learn anything from Elly Burnham. Elly Burnham never left home, and therefore couldn’t come back. Well, she did leave home, but only to marry and then her home was just like the one she left. Oh, what a crushing bore! But Elly Peacock, our aunt Elly Burnham Peacock ... Do you know, when she deigned to come back to England, which she did only because she needed treatment for the cancer that eventually killed her, the papers simply said, “The Lady Peacock has arrived.” And for the longest time I thought my aunt was a peacock. Once, when I saw her, with my own two eyes, going by in a carriage with her dress all peacockish greens and blacks and purples and blues and her beautiful white face shaded by a tiny white parasol, I still thought perhaps she was. We were never allowed to see her up close, of course. She was a disgrace to England, and even more to the family. She had a liking for Arabs, you see. She loved Arabs, horses, and the desert, in that order. Or maybe she loved the desert, horses, and Arabs. I read all I could find about her, and I couldn’t ever really tell. Then, too, she liked Africans.’

  “When she stopped for breath, or wound down, as was the case—she actually seemed to have stopped breathing—I flung out my phony credentials: ‘I’m a student journalist writing a paper on ...’ I stopped. What should it be on? The rich? The old and rich? The
conditions in nursing homes run for the old rich? I could see that things were pretty well run here. Eleanora’s bed linens were undoubtedly her own, or at least bought by someone who had a knowledge of linens. Her sheets were of that soft, rich material that made sleep delicious, her coverlet of ancient handmade lace. Her pillowcases were edged in lace also. And there was a large bouquet of spring flowers practically bursting from the Baccarat vase next to her bed. But of course she was rich enough to send fresh flowers to herself perpetually.

  “‘Africa!’ she muttered, coming out of the snooze her long speech had induced. ‘I hated Africa. The heat, the bugs, the leeches, the niggers.’

  “She looked at me from under scabby white brows, her thin lips, in which the wrinkles had turned to furrows, poked out in resentment.

  “Why is it, I wondered, that the racists in one’s own family always come as such a surprise—and disappointment.

  “‘Oh, Aunt!’ I said, without thinking, nonetheless claiming her as my own. But she had fallen fast asleep.

  “I had a really good look at her then and thought she resembled a very old, a really, really old drooling and snoring baby girl.

  “She had given her papers to a women’s college in Guildford, to which the Burnhams had always been charitable, and on days when I did not go to visit her, I visited them. Not only papers, but baskets and bowls and sculptures and cloths as well. Indeed, there was, in one section of the library, ‘the Eleanora Burnham Room.’ It was a replica of a large bedroom and sitting room in an old colonial plantation house. There was her narrow, maidenly bed, covered with mosquito netting, a rattan easy chair and sofa, upholstered in faded blue paisley, her writing table, small and blue, beneath a fake window. The books were by her, a half dozen or so of them anyway, written while she lived in the tropics, and there were other old books: adventures, romances, studies in geography and history, and the family Bible, in which there was, among other family names, a listing of ‘Eleandra Burnham, born on 29 May 1823.’ My great-aunt Eleanora’s twin, Eleandra, named for this adventuring aunt, was listed several decades later, and had not been like her at all, apparently. The walls of the room were lively with beautifully fierce African masks and long beaded fly whisks. There were also a couple of rat-eaten and sweat-stained ‘bwana’ hats.

  “I was mainly interested in her diary, and to get at it I needed her permission, or, rather, the permission of her guardian. I found out who this was, a solicitor in London, and paid him a visit. Since he knew nothing of the existence of the diary—‘You mean the old woman kept a diary? Whatever for, do you suppose?’—he could not find a reason to keep me from seeing it. I’d dressed carefully in a dowdy tweed suit and pulled my hair back from my face. Glasses that caused me to squint completed my outfit. This camouflage was probably not necessary, and yet I enjoyed it.

  “And then, sitting in the rattan easy chair in ‘her’ room at the library, with the fake African sun streaming through the window and the women’s college of Guildford, as far as I was concerned, on some other continent, instead of just outside the closed door (no one came, no one cared about Eleanora Burnham, no matter how much money and what quantity of ‘artifacts’ she’d bequeathed the college in her will, and of which the college had been informed, so naturally the administration had waited impatiently, over the years, for her to die), sitting in the easy chair, with the one volume at a time I was permitted to take, I made a startling discovery. Far from hating Africa and the bugs, leeches, and niggers, as she’d claimed, Africa had been the great love of my great-aunt’s life.

  There is a little serpent here [she wrote in 1922] that is exactly the colour of coral. It lives only in certain trees and comes out of its hole, far up the tree, near dusk. It lives on tree spiders and bugs, and is known to sing. The natives tell me that it sings. They claim they have heard it sing millions of times, and act as if this is entirely ordinary. Furthermore, they ask why I have not heard it and why it should be so strange. Everything sings, they say.

  But I do not. This, however, I cannot bear to tell them.

  Well, today I at least saw the little creature. They had told me which tree at the edge of my yard I should keep an eye on, and, sure enough, today, just at dusk, down came this little coral fellow, sticking out its tongue, slithering primly down the tree looking for dinner and finding several plump hors d’oeuvre on the way. I watched it disappear into the grass, and I felt that although the colour was as vivid as I had been led by the natives to expect, I still could not believe it would sing. I felt perhaps they were only teasing me.

  Another entry:

  I could not imagine living for a hundred years, yet the natives quite often live that long. They say it is because everything they eat is alive. The grain they eat is so alive that if they planted it instead of eating it, it would come up. They eat fruit, grains, which they make into porridge, and root crops. They eat a lot of boiled greens and okra, both of which grow wild. They eat little or no meat, and when asked to prepare thick slabs of it for me and my English or European guests, they handle it as if it is offensive.

  BUT HOW HAD HER great-aunt become interested enough in Africa to live there?

  Eleanora was now a hundred years old. Mary Jane wondered if this pleased her. If it made her think of the old “natives” she had known. Such a loaded word, “natives.” For people like her great-aunt, it had meant savages. It was not a word Mary Jane could imagine her great-aunt using to refer to herself, though she was a native of England.

  Her great-aunt had been born in 1885, on March 23. She was an Aries, which explained her impulsive, headstrong nature. She would be a person who loved flying, for instance, long before anyone had any notion that flying could possibly be safe. She had flown, rapturously, in the first planes that went to Africa; Aries people were akin to birds. She would also follow her instincts regarding other worlds, other peoples. But what had been the pivotal experience of her great-aunt’s life? Mary Jane sat now, several days a week, mostly watching her great-aunt sleep and thinking of that life, that grand life of the English upper class during the years before the Great (as they called it) War. Well, for one thing, they’d liked the word “great.” She had gone on a tour of the “great” English country houses and been to Morley Crofts, in Warwickshire, the old house of her ancestors. She had trooped along over the checkered floors and gazed from the mullioned windows, inset with Celtic designs in stained glass, which looked oddly Egyptian. There was a profusion of coral-and-black serpents and jeweled shepherd’s crooks. Morley Crofts covered many acres and resembled a medieval castle more than it did a house. Vast gardens surrounded it, and as she drifted about with the other tourists—who reminded her of rather pathetic sheep, in their polyester suits and spanking (and pinching) new tennis shoes, exclaiming with joy over each dovecote or gargoyle, each primrose path or giant dahlia—she imagined Eleanora sitting here or there among the garden statuary, reading a book or perhaps simply staring out into space, far out into the future, into Mary Jane’s own time, and, with a small smirk of amusement, watching.

  Mary Jane’s own grandfather had left England penniless—cut off from his father’s and grandfather’s wealth, amassed in Ireland on the broken backs of the Irish—but with a sense of adventure and the desire to make his own fortune. He had succeeded splendidly, eventually owning copper mines in Missouri, petroleum fields in West Texas, and entire southern counties in Alabama and Georgia planted in cotton picked by illiterate blacks he probably never so much as glimpsed. His father and grandfather noted his success, so like their own—for the grandfather lived on and on. Sometimes Mary Jane thought she could almost remember him, but it was only the stories she remembered: of his fierce avarice, his contempt for weaker adversaries, his love of wealth for its own sake. The stories his children and grandchildren told about him were as pointed as morality tales and could as easily have been entitled “Lust,” “Avarice,” “Greed,” but unlike morality tales, the message was never against these things. In any event, seeing
this success, his antecedents heartily embraced him as the true heir of their avaricious genes and of course added much of their own vast resources, after their deaths, to his.

  By the time her own father was born, there was a need to pull in one’s fangs a bit. So Mary Jane and her brother and sister were brought up to be the kind of rich people who were as fundamental to the country’s stability as the earth but as inconspicuous as a rug. Oh, the little patent leather slippers and simple cashmere sweaters, the plain camel’s hair coats, smartly hitting the back of the knee, the neat gray dresses, snug at the waist, loose everywhere else, discreet hair ribbons, mostly black and, this being the forties, sometimes plaid. And yet, when Mary Jane and her sister walked down Fifth Avenue near the apartment her family kept there, she felt people stared at them and knew instinctively they were rich. And laughed at their careful squareness, and resented them.

  When she left this life behind—the sleek blond hairdo that flipped up at the ends like Doris Day’s or Dina Merrill’s, the tiny white pearl earrings, the black velvet or plaid grosgrain bow at the back of her neck—and wore paint-encrusted jeans and funky turtleneck sweaters, and her hair had frizzed out (with the help of a ton of chemicals) into a fiery sunburst of resistance, well over a decade before this became de rigeur for rich and radical white kids in the sixties, she understood why it was that no matter how simply she and her sister dressed, how inconspicuous they tried to make themselves, they were always, in fact, giving themselves away. She decided that they must have exuded a smell of quiet sufficiency, of absolute security, so lacking in the worlds they did not inhabit. This was the smell of the upper class.