by Alice Walker
His mother has been conjured by the odd, unAmerican movement of Pierre’s shoulders, as much as by his words. Why, I wonder, do we assume people who think deeply about us ever die?
As I open the book, my eye falls on a passage Pierre had not read: “The man then had intercourse with the woman, who later bore the first two children of a series of eight, who were to become the ancestors of the Dogon people. In the moment of birth the pain of parturition was concentrated in the woman’s clitoris, which was excised by an invisible hand, detached itself and left her, and was changed into the form of a scorpion. The pouch and the sting symbolized the organ: the venom was the water and the blood of the pain.”
I read the passage over again, my eye always stopped by the words “an invisible hand.” Even so long ago God deserted woman, I thought, staying by her just long enough to illustrate to man the cutting to be done. And what if pain wasn’t what she felt at the moment of parturition? After all, pain was what I felt, having given birth, and I did not have a clitoris for it to be concentrated in.
I read further: “The dual soul is a danger; a man should be male, and a woman female. Circumcision and excision are…the remedy.”
But who could bear to think of this for long? I closed the book, wandered unsteadily across the room, flopped heavily onto the couch, and lost myself in a rerun of “HeeHaw” on TV.
ADAM
IT SADDENS ME that Pierre has never married, and that he seems content to pursue his career as an anthropologist and to spend much of the time he has for himself with Benny. This petit (for a man) curly-haired, teak-colored person is my son! I am as astonished as he approaches middle age as I was when he was two. Though his voice is deep, deeper than mine, a person of color’s voice, it still seems at times, because of his accent, the voice of a stranger. I see his mother in him. Lisette, who took so long to die, bravely determined to hold on to her dignity, her self, to the end; her thick, fierce French neck wasting away as she struggled. Only to beg, finally, for morphine and more and more morphine. Seeing her in Pierre makes the memory of my last visits with her bearable, and reactivates happier thoughts of our earlier days.
Pierre laughs at my concern, gracefully refraining from observing aloud that my own marriage has been hellacious.
I am married to my work, he says.
But your work does not produce children, I counter.
He smiles. Mais oui, he says, my work will produce children! Children who will at least understand why they are afraid. How can a child be a child if she is afraid?
I cannot argue. Since the moment, as a small boy, Pierre heard of Tashi’s dark tower and her terror of it, he has never put her suffering out of his mind. Everything he learns, no matter how trivial or in what context or with whom, he brings to bear on her dilemma. The conversations we have as adults predictably include some bit of information that he has stored away to become a part of Tashi’s puzzle.
The only girl he ever loved, for instance. A Berkeley student with whom he often went horseback riding.
She rode bareback, always, he tells me, as we sit on a boulder in the park in the middle of an afternoon hike. She experienced orgasm while riding the horse.
Are you sure? I ask.
Yes, he says. She swooned. And when I asked her, she admitted it.
I am speechless at the thought that any woman’s pleasure might be found so easily, I stammer; so, in a sense, carelessly.
The word you are looking for, says Pierre, is wantonly. Loosely. A woman who is sexually “unrestrained,” according to the dictionary, is by definition “lascivious, wanton and loose.” But why is that? A man who is sexually unrestrained is simply a man.
Well, I say, was she loose?
Pierre shifts his weight on the boulder and frowns up at the sky. Now, he says, in the scholarly tone that still strikes me as amusing in one so childlike in size, we can begin to understand something about the insistence, among people in mutilating cultures, that a woman’s vagina be tight. By force if necessary. If you think of being wanton, being loose, as being able to achieve orgasm easily.
How did this happen? I ask. To your friend, I mean.
She’d been brought up by pagan parents, earth worshippers, on a little island somewhere in Hawaii. She could experience orgasm doing almost anything. She said that at home there were favorite trees she loved that she rubbed against. She could orgasm against warm, smooth boulders, like this one we’re sitting on; she could come against the earth itself if it rose a bit to meet her. However, says Pierre, she’d never been with a man. Her parents had taught her early on that it wasn’t absolutely necessary, unless she wanted to have children.
And with you? I ask.
I’m afraid my lovemaking had a dampening, no, a drying effect, he says. No matter how I tried, it was hard not to approach her from a stance of dominance. When making love with me, she became less and less wet. His face is sad for a moment, then he grins. She went off to India. I think she left me for an elephant she learned to ride, or perhaps for a slow, warm trickle of water from a waterfall, of which there were many amorous ones on her Hawaiian island.
I always thought perhaps it was to make sexual love between women impossible that men destroyed their external sexual organs.
I still think that is partly true, says Pierre. But there is also my experience with Queen Anne.
Queen Anne? Your friend was named after Queen Anne Nzingha, the African warrior?
No, he says. After Queen Anne’s lace, the wildflower.
Later on in the hike, stopping at a pipe for water, Pierre still muses. Is it only woman who would make love to everything? he asks. Man too, after all, has external sexual organs. But does man seek oneness with the earth by having sex with it?
You mean Queen Anne wasn’t simply masturbating?
No. She said she never masturbated, except with herself. And even then she was making love. Having sex. Her partner just happened to be something other than another human being.
Was it with Queen Anne that you discovered your duality? I ask.
Yes, he says. Until I met her I was never sexually attracted to women. I imagined all women mainly suffered from sex. Meeting her was a great relief. I realized that even bisexuality, of which I’d always felt myself capable but of which I’d had no real experience, was still, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, like lesbianism, only a very limited sexuality. I mean, here was someone who was pansexual. Remember Pan? he asks, laughing. Well, Queen Anne was Pan’s great-grandmother!
An image of Pan, the Greek god, merrily playing his flute in the forest rises up. His human head rests on a body composed of the parts of many different animals. Clearly his ancestors had related sexually, at least in imagination, to everything. And before him Queen Anne’s ancestors had related sexually to the earth itself. I am really too old to use the expression “wow” gracefully. But “wow” is what I hear myself say. Which makes Pierre laugh again.
But in a moment he has returned to the thread of his thought. In pornography, he says ruefully, this ability of woman’s to take pleasure in diverse ways is projected in a perverted way. I have seen films in which she is forced to copulate with donkeys and dogs and guns and other weapons. Oddly shaped vegetables and fruits. Broom handles and Coke bottles. But this is rape. Man is jealous of woman’s pleasure, Pierre says after a while, because she does not require him to achieve it. When her outer sex is cut off, and she’s left only the smallest, inelastic opening through which to receive pleasure, he can believe it is only his penis that can reach her inner parts and give her what she craves. But it is only his lust for her conquest that makes the effort worthwhile. And then it is literally a battle, with blood flowing on both sides.
Ah, I say, the original battle of the sexes!
Exactly, he replies.
Well, I say, some men turn to animals, and each other. Or they use the woman as if she were a boy.
If you are at all sensitive to another’s pain, he says, grimacing, or even cogniz
ant of your own, not to mention the humiliation of forcing yourself inside someone whose very flesh has been made into a barrier against you, what else can you do?
PART THIRTEEN
EVELYN
FOR YEARS I WATCHED a television program called “Riverside.” It was about a hospital for psychiatric disorders that reminded me of the Waverly. When Amy Maxwell was introduced to me by Raye, and closely resembled the woman who played the tough, compassionate matriarch and physician emeritus of the hospital, I felt immediately relaxed with her. She was elderly, bony and silver-haired, with a mouth full of straight white teeth which appeared to be wired into a permanent grin. She peered at me over silver half-glasses and stuck out her hand.
Raye sat as usual in her maroon wingback chair, a bemused look on her face. I could not fathom why Amy and I were being brought together. As a joke to myself I wondered: Could this woman be Mzee’s belated bag of clay?
I learned something from Amy recently that I thought might interest you, said Raye, leaning forward.
There was a long silence, during which I was highly conscious of the powdered pinkness of Amy’s face and the mock-orange scent of her perfume. At last she began to speak. She spoke of her son, Josh—a word which in Olinka means turban—and of how he had been for many years a patient of Raye’s. She spoke his name softly, tentatively, as if unsure she had a right to it. He had danced with a major ballet company throughout his twenties, after which he had had a hard time keeping up. Aging, out of work, depressed, he’d killed himself while still in his thirties.
Almost from birth he suffered from depression, said Amy. And almost from birth, she continued, with a self-deprecating look from Raye to me, I hauled him off to the shrink. Like the dutiful little soldier he was, he went unprotesting to have his head and heart examined by a succession of psychiatrists in an effort to adjust to my incessant cheerfulness: a sunniness so persistent it drove his father, a man of normal, up-and-down emotions, away. No matter what happened to me, I rose above it, said Amy, as my own mother had taught me to do, and as she herself had always done. She was a Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode. Poor for much of her life, but then fabulously wealthy finally because she married my father, who owned a lot of downtown New Orleans.
Here she paused and looked out the window. It was February; across the street the acacias were in bloom. The three of us were quiet, enjoying the look of the fine yellow fuzziness against the new and tender green. I was more puzzled than ever. I glanced sidelong at Raye, but she was sitting back in her chair, her eyes warmly encouraging as she gazed at Amy’s face. I realized this was not her first time hearing this.
Amy laced her thin fingers together and cleared her throat. How old was she? I wondered. Seventy-five? Eighty? Older? She seemed remarkably fit, whatever her age. It was only when he wound up here, with Raye, she said, that he began to suspect the depression he’d always carried was mine.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean, said Amy, sighing, that when I was a very little girl I used to touch myself…there. It was a habit that mortified my mother. When I was three years old she bound my hands each night before I was put to bed. At four she put hot pepper sauce on my fingers. At six years of age our family doctor was asked to excise my clitoris.
Is New Orleans America? I asked suspiciously. For this was all I could think to say.
Yes, said Amy, I assure you it is. And yes, I am telling you that even in America a rich white child could not touch herself sexually, if others could see her, and be safe. It is different today, of course. And even back then not every parent reacted as my mother did. But that I was not the only one this happened to I am sure.
I don’t believe you, I said, rising to go. For I saw the healthy green leaves of my America falling seared to the ground. Her sparkling rivers muddy with blood.
Raye rose also and placed a hand on my arm. I was angry with her, and I knew the look in my eyes expressed it. How dare she subject me to such lies!
Wait, she said.
I sat.
Amy smiled, a small, modest smile, in spite of her tense mouth that was shaped into a wider grin. You think you are the only African woman to come to America don’t you? she asked.
Actually, I did think this. Black American women seemed to me so different from Olinka women, I rarely thought of their African great-great-grandmothers.
Many African women have come here, said Amy. Enslaved women. Many of them sold into bondage because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage circumcised and infibulated. It was these sewed-up women who fascinated the American doctors who flocked to the slave auctions to examine them, as the women stood naked and defenseless on the block. They learned to do the “procedure” on other enslaved women; they did this in the name of Science. They found a use for it on white women…Amy laughed, suddenly. They wrote in their medical journals that they’d finally found a cure for the white woman’s hysteria.
Well, somebody had to, said Raye, with a straight face. And the two of them actually sat there laughing.
I could not take it in. I stared at Amy.
It had been done to the grandmother of our cook, she said. Many operations, when she was a girl. She couldn’t have children of her own; she’d adopted Gladys, my mother’s childhood companion and maid, whose own clitoris had been excised; though she had not, like her mother, been infibulated. Gladys was docile in the extreme, not legally a slave, but superbly slavish in spirit. She just had no spunk. No self. This “gentleness of spirit,” as my mother called it, was always held up as exemplary and the way my mother wanted me to be.
Raye and I watched as tears coursed down cheeks that even then held their grin shape. My first year in America, Adam and Olivia had taken me to the circus and there’d been a weeping clown with a wide white smile painted on his face. That was what Amy’s face was like.
I was to be controlled all my life, she said, by my mother’s invisible hand. And it was invisible, she cried, striking the arm of her chair with a clenched fist. Because I forgot!
You were a child, said Raye firmly. A child who was told your tonsils were being removed. A child who did not know such a thing as your mother did to you was possible. A child ignorant of what was so wrong about touching yourself. Too young to think something that felt so comforting could be wrong.
Amy wiped her eyes with a tissue. Sniffled. Her gray eyes were red, and appeared to perspire rather than tear.
I was sore for a long time, she said. My mother let me stay in bed and brought me lemonade to soothe my throat—for she convinced me it was my throat in which the work had been done and therefore where I felt the pain. And I could not touch my fingers to where the pain actually was, for fear of contradicting her. Or offending her. I never touched myself—in that way— again. And of course when I accidentally touched myself there I discovered there was nothing left to touch.
I became cheerful. I went in for sports because I enjoyed the high achieved by competitive exertion. My body was hard, lean, fit. Nothing missing. I had sex with practically anyone. Screwing madly, feeling nothing; in order not to feel my rage. I smiled even as, years later, I laid Mother in her grave. But I did not begin to remember until Josh died, when my own life was virtually over; because suddenly I had to start feeling my own feelings for myself. I had tried to live through Josh’s body because it was whole. I’d pushed him to be a dancer; I can only imagine his sadness when he could no longer dance for me.
After this distressing conversation, from which I angrily extricated myself by slamming out of Raye’s office, I ceased watching “Riverside.” I now read everything I could find on Louisiana and New Orleans. I learned Louisiana had once belonged to France. Maybe, I thought, reliving the hostility anything French always provoked in me, Amy’s mother had had trouble communicating with her doctor, who was perhaps like me a stranger from another tribe; perhaps her troubles stemmed from a complication encountered in the language. Perhaps Amy’s mother had meant he
r daughter’s tonsils after all.
PART FOURTEEN
EVELYN-TASHI
EVERY DAY NOW, down below my window in the street, there are demonstrations. I can not see them, but the babble of voices rises up the wall of the prison and pours right through the iron bars.
What I am really hearing, says Olivia, is the cultural fundamentalists and Muslim fanatics attacking women who’ve traveled from all parts of the country to place offerings beneath the shrubbery that is just below and around the corner from my view. The women bring wildflowers, herbs, seeds, beads, ears of corn, anything they can claim as their own and that they can spare. They are mostly quiet. Sometimes they sing. It is when they sing that the men attack, even though the only song they all know and can sing together is the national anthem. They hit the women with their fists. They kick them. They swing at them with clubs, bruising the women’s skins and breaking bones. The women do not fight back but scatter like hens; huddling in the doorways of shops up and down the street, until the shopkeepers sweep them back into the street with their brooms.
On the day I was sentenced to death the men did not bother the women, who, according to Olivia, simply sat, spent, hidden as much as they could be, at the base of the dusty shrubbery. They did not talk. They did not eat. They did not sing. I had not realized, before she told me of their dejection, how used I had become to their clamor. Even with my family beside me, cushioning the blow of the death sentence, without the noise of the battle from the street I felt alone.
But then, the next day, the singing began again, low and mournful, and the sound of sticks against flesh.
BENNY
I CAN NOT BELIEVE my mother is going to die—and that dying means I will never see her again. When people die, where do they go? This is the question with which I pester Pierre. He says when people die they go back where they came from. Where is that? I ask him. Nothing, he says. They go back into Nothing. He wrote in huge letters in my notepad: NOTHING = NOT BEING = DEATH. But then he shrugged, that curious movement of his shoulders that caused my mother finally to like him, and wrote: BUT EVERYTHING THAT DIES COMES AROUND AGAIN.
