The Temple of My Familiar

  "The Africa that we encountered had already been raped of much of its sustenance. Its people had been sold into slavery. Considering both internal and external 'markets,' this 'trade' had been going on for well over a thousand years; and had no doubt begun as the early civilizations of Africa were falling into decline, around the six-hundreds. Millions of its trees had been shipped to England and Spain and other European countries to make benches and altars in those grand European cathedrals one heard so much about; its minerals and metals mined and its land planted in rubber and cocoa and pineapples and all sorts of crops for the benefit of foreign invaders. I almost said, as foreigners do, 'investors.' And Africa itself became--was made--in the world imagination, an uninhabited region, except for its population of wild and exotic animals. On the maps of Africa of five hundred years ago, as someone has pointed out, Europeans placed elephants where there were towns.

  "I left America when I was six years old. I do not remember it. But I do remember the ocean. The sheen on the endless water, the deep steady rocking of the ship, the confusion over whether so much water, by its sheer density, might not--if one stepped upon it--become a kind of glassy land. And I remember tasting the ocean spray on my face and someone mentioning at that same moment that the sea was salt. If it was salt, I wondered, why was it not white and grainy, as salt was at home. But its water tasted salty. And this puzzled me until I overheard Aunt Nettie saying sadly to my mother that, well, perhaps it was the tears and sweat of all the suffering people of the earth. She cried so much on the voyage over, and none of us, not even my mother and father, knew why.

  "For several years after we arrived in Africa I was quite sickly. I had recurring bouts of malaria, as did everyone in our family. And I was plagued by rashes, sores, and other skin irritations, which were aggravated, horribly, by the heat. Aunt Nettie, whom at times we called 'Mama Nettie,' praised me for not being more complaining. As I recall it now, I was too miserable to complain. Sometimes it was so hot I could not speak. In my teen years I was much better.

  "I was, in fact, happy. And why not? All day long I could be found in the company of my best friend, Tashi. We played house, we splashed in the river, we collected wild foods and firewood in the forest. A forest of magnificent fecundity, density, and mystery. There were trees in the forest thousands of years old and bigger by far than the huts in which we lived. There was nothing we did not share, and I loved her better than I would have loved my own sister; as much, or more, than I loved my brother, Adam, who, from an older boy who teased us, chased us, pulled our braids, and tattled on us to our mothers, became Tashi's confidant, then her suitor, then, many years later, her husband.

  "It is in the year preceding their marriage that my own story begins. For it was in that year that Tashi became more my brother's companion than mine. This caused me much bitterness, because it caused me much loneliness; and then, too, their companionship was considered by everyone in our compound as cherished and inevitable. Even to Tashi this was so. And the days of our girlish joys together became a thing of the past. Seeing that this must be so, I steeled myself to bear it, and turned to both my brother and Tashi a face of loving willingness to serve them. But such sweetness and light takes its toll, and many dark thoughts occasionally strayed across my mind. It was my first understanding that it is possible to love people very much and to resent their happiness partly because you do love them.

  "While all attention focused on Adam and Tashi, I was left to my own devices, largely ignored, or, I should say, unobserved. Corrine had long been dead. The Europeans had come and destroyed the village that had been our home. We had been moved to a barren stretch of rock that lay surrounded by a vast rubber plantation owned and run by Englishmen, whose field labor consisted entirely of our friends. This plantation system used people up in fewer than seven years, and used up the soil as well; it also effectively destroyed the native wild rubber trees, which had once grown abundantly, everywhere. Where there had once been leafy forest, there was now widespread erosion. Many of our friends were dying from various fevers, malnutrition, and overwork. Or were running away to join the Mbeles, a mythical--so we thought--group of African guerrillas who lived deep in the forest many, many miles away.

  "There was one young African man who remained, finally, in the ugly, dusty, tin-roofed compound that was our common home. His Christian name was Dahvid, and since this was all he ever used, I never heard his tribal name, until years later. Dahvid stayed in the compound because of me. But I did not know this was his reason. He was a sullen, restless, sometimes impish young man without a thought in his head for anyone, I believed, least of all, girls; and at times he made my life harder than it needed to have been by his irritable, cutting remarks and rude behavior to my family and me, which my father interpreted as Dahvid's way of railing against the catastrophe that had overtaken the Olinka people and reduced them to virtual slavery. Yet why it should have been directed against us, I could not decipher, since it was not our fault that the Europeans had come.

  "At other times, when he was not being abusive and calling us 'the white man's wedge,' Dahvid was capable of great charm. And I confess at those times I was drawn to him, as to Adam. I could see that the requirements for males in the world were often such that only a machine could fulfill them, or someone of no feeling and much supernatural strength. Dahvid alone could not chase out the Europeans, for instance. Could not even prevent them looking at him and at all of us as if we were born to be their own divinely ordained beasts of burden. Many of them went so far as to view the Africans themselves as having no right to be in Africa, since it was the plan of the white people to take over the continent; the Africans represented merely the burdensome responsibility of genocide.

  "In the year that Adam brought Tashi back from the Mbeles, to whom she had run in her confusion over the destruction of her people and Adam's insistence that she come with him to America, I became receptive to the persistent inquiries of one of the young English engineers, who wanted to learn the Olinka language. I asked permission from my new mother, Mama Nettie, and my father before I began, in the evenings when the work was done, to try to teach him. He was a tall, sunburned, ugly man, whose earnestness and attentiveness made him attractive. And for hours we sat with our backs against the rough boards of our barrack, and I taught him the Olinka language, which I spoke as fluently as I spoke English, and which I could also write, because my father and Mama Nettie had created an Olinka alphabet. The creation of this alphabet had been Corrine's idea. She was Cherokee on her mother's side, and her mother's mother had been involved in the creation of the Cherokee alphabet and had also been an editor of the first Cherokee newspaper ever printed in the Cherokee language. The fact that they had a newspaper was one of the reasons the Cherokee were considered one of the five 'civilized' tribes of Indians in America. This did not, however, prevent the white man from burning them out of their homes and resettling what remained of the tribe in Oklahoma when he discovered he wanted their land.

  "One day, because it was still very hot and because it simply happened and no one seemed to care what we did--all thoughts were on Adam's pursuit of Tashi--we strolled some distance from the compound and stood talking to each other in Olinka in the shade of a huge rock. And the man, whose name was Ralston Flood, leaned down his reddish, perspiring hairy face and kissed me. Out of politeness, surprise, boredom, loneliness, I returned it. That is to say, I placed both my hands on his arms while the kiss lasted. Then, when it had ended--I waited until his back was turned and he was chattering on in Olinka ahead of me--I scrubbed away the kiss with the corner of my blouse.

  "This scrubbing of my mouth Dahvid did not see. Apparently he'd turned away during the kiss itself. For he was also seeking coolness that evening in the shadow of the rock.

  "For days afterward he did not speak to me. The Englishman, having proved something he felt needed proving, did not attempt to kiss me again. Shortly afterward, having learned the language sufficiently to give orders to Ol
inka workers in the field, he ceased to arrive for his daily instruction. Nor did I miss him after the first few days, though I was alone a lot of the time. Not alone if you counted all the sick and shattered people my parents and I constantly attended, but alone because there was--with Tashi and her mother and Adam gone--no one with whom to really giggle or converse.

  "I knew the Olinka had ruled it a crime to have any dealings with the Europeans, and that they were against my teaching the Englishman their language. 'Let him order us to fetch and carry in his own wretched tongue,' they said, for they enjoyed mimicking the foreigners and ridiculing them behind their backs. To the Olinka, the English language, as spoken by their captors, had a sickly, regurgitative sound and was as lacking in nuance and music as a stone. Still, when my father had asked their permission for me to teach the Englishman, they had not withheld it. This was because I was not one of them. Since I was a woman, the permission was given grudgingly and with an attitude that they washed their hands of me and of whatever might result.

  "Dahvid did not go to the remaining elders with my 'crime.' The crime of having received the kiss of the Englishman. He did not have to. He took it on himself to chastise me. And, in retrospect, his chastisement took a predictable turn. Because I had not refused the Englishman, I should not refuse him. And so, one evening I kissed him. In the same shaded spot in which I'd kissed the Englishman. But, as it turned out, a kiss was not enough.

  "And so it was that when I returned to America with Adam and his bride, Tashi, and my father, Samuel, and my aunt, Mama Nettie, I was, as my natural mother, Celie, immediately perceived--but said nothing--'robust' with Dahvid's child. As Tashi was 'robust' with Adam's.

  "But what was I to do with a child? The general advice from my family was that I keep it; Tashi loyally offered to help me raise it along with her own. My daughter was born on the ninth of September, the birthday of Leo Tolstoi, the greatest writer, it seems to me, who has ever lived, and one of the biggest devils--in any event, a favorite of mine. One of the hottest days of the year, it was. My own mother, by now a midwife in addition to being the best seamstress around, delivered me.

  "Just as my baby's head emerged, my mother shouted, 'Little Fanny!' This was even before she could tell it was a girl. She couldn't help herself. 'Fanny,' a name that apparently represented freedom to her, was a name she'd always wanted for herself. She'd hated 'Celie.' Even so, just as she was sucking in her breath to continue the naming I shouted out a very tired and weak 'Nzingha!'"

  "MY EARLIEST MEMORY IS of a red bird with a suction cup on its feet and of two old ladies kissing," Fanny would later--after discovering she had one--tell her sister. "The red bird was made of cloth and feathers and rubber; the two old ladies who gave it to me were delightful-smelling flesh and blood. The little bird could be stuck on any nongreasy surface: a windowpane, the head of my crib, and when I pulled on it with all my might, it gave a satisfying plop and came off in my hand. At first I did not see the resemblance between the thing in my hand, with its brilliant yellow eyes and chartreuse tail, and the creatures flying about outside the door. The two old ladies tried hard to teach me, however, and while one scooped me up in her arms, admiring my nearly squeezed-to-death bird, the other kept saying shush and pointing to a creature who sat singing merrily on a nearby bush. A creature who did not resemble my red bird in any way. For instance, my bird did not sing. It lived in my fist. Its head fit in my mouth.

  "Somehow, though, I must have understood the connection, because sooner or later I said 'bird!' and that was the first word I spoke. It was also my grandmother's nickname.

  "The bird, any bird, it turned out, was precious to my grandmama Celie, just as turtles and elephants were precious to her friend Miss Shug. As I crawled about the house, exploring it with my first cousin Moraga Bentu, or Benny, for short, I was constantly riding on, leaning against, drooling over some stone or metal or cloth facsimile of these treasured creatures. Compared with the rest of the house, my mother's two rooms were bare and uninteresting. There were objects on her walls--cloth and masks and here and there a string of shells or large beads--but nothing I was permitted to touch, even if I had been tall enough to reach it.

  "My mother did not particularly interest me. Whereas Big Mama (as I called Grandmama Celie) and Mama Shug (as I called Miss Shug) were always good for a kiss, a laugh, a squeeze, a ride to the garden or at least to the front porch, my mother was--dare I say it?--a boring woman, who rarely laughed and always had her nose in a book.

  "I used to sit on the floor at her feet, having crawled about the house until I was tired, and look up at her, hoping she would put aside her book for a moment and play with me. Occasionally she would, but there was a perfunctory quality in her caresses that irritated me. Rather than submit to her insincerity, and thereby appear to accept it, I would wriggle from her arms with a cry. Immediately one or both of my pals would arrive, and I would be hugged in all seriousness, kissed intelligently, changed if I needed to be, and fed something whether I needed it or not. I was indecently fat, as fat and round as Mama Shug. When we lay down together, it was like a small ball resting on a larger one. And how we enjoyed the contact of our fat bellies! Neither of us could imagine the other could do any wrong. And we were right.

  "This period of my life was a long bliss. Very little happened that I considered threatening to me. I soon learned to pay as little attention to my mother as she paid to me, and my life was a round of fascinating events and spontaneous smiles. Visitors to our house frequently lavished their attention on Benny, it is true, because in their own homes boys were more prized. In our house, however, it paid to be a girl, and all my womanish ways were approved. I decked myself out in what finery came my way in a routine rummaging about in everybody's drawers. I peeked under dresstails and stared at the mysterious closings of men's pants. I tried to cook.

  I tried to cut wood as I saw Big Mama's best friend, Miss Sofia, do. I tried to build a house out of stove wood and make blinds for it out of pieces of straw. I imagined myself a car, like Mama Shug's, and drove it by the hour. I brought money home and also took everybody out.

  "'Come on, let's go, y'all,' I said to Benny and our collective toys, as we headed for a night spot miles away.

  "Sometimes I imagined doing the things my mother and grandfather did. I 'read.' Or I imagined I was Papa Albert, who used to be Big Mama's husband, and stared off into space."

  FINALLY ONE DAY FANNY said, "Listen, Suwelo, I love you too much to divorce you without your consent. You have been wonderful to me. Without you, how would I have grown? But I am going away for a while, with my mother. We are going back to Africa to visit the Olinka. Their country is free now, and my father wants to lay eyes on me."

  From London she wrote to him: "The hotel we are staying at is dreadful. No telephones in the rooms and hostile receptionists. There was a fire on one of the upper floors some time ago and there is still a charred odor in the air. The new owners are Middle Eastern. They sit in the lobby and watch the bellboy, African; the charwoman, West Indian; the people who work in the dining room, Indian, Arab, and Greek; and the hostile receptionists, blonde English girls. One day my mother said, 'Look, it isn't even safe; I can step through this window into the street,' which she did. But we don't stay there very much. Most of our time is spent at the Africa Center, where my mother is giving lectures on her years in Africa--growing up there as a black American child and young adult.

  "Mom is such a little piece of leather, as she says, but so well put together! She wasn't even fazed by the horrid scrutiny of the guards at the airport, who seem to think everyone who is a visitor to England and isn't white wants to settle here. What conceit! I sit and listen to her stories and I feel embarrassed that for so many years I ignored her. As I have told you, probably a really boring number of times, when I was a child, she had no real authority in our house, which was ruled by the two queens, Big Mama Celie and Mama Shug. Next to these two, and even next to Great-aunt Nettie, who raised her, my
mother's flame seemed feeble. Even Uncle Adam had a certain exuberance that my mother lacked.

  "What she has instead is an astonishing clarity about things, expressed in a straightforward, unassuming manner. Listening to her here makes me realize why the students in her classes at the nursing school always perform well academically, and also have some of her soul-rooted quietness. This is a quality she inherited from her adoptive mother, she says.

  "Her audiences here are wonderful. African, Asian, Caribbean, and white students from all over the world. It is not too much to say that they treat her with reverence, almost as if she is a holy document. For she can actually tell them, blow by blow, the whole story of the colonization of Africa, the role of the church, and the psychic and physical toll of their work on the missionaries themselves. She always makes clear that the missionaries are people, the same as anyone, and that many of them have real and honorable dreams when they push off for the shores of another world. One thing she said last night really struck me, because it is just one of those small things you never think about. She said that when the missionaries first arrived in Olinka, there was no such thing as litter; the whole village was swept clean twice a day, morning and afternoon, by the women. But then, as the grip of the colonials tightened and the people were squeezed to pay taxes and also to pay for shoddy imported things, only the mission was clean. So that anyone strolling through the village would have assumed the people were naturally slovenly and that only the foreigners cared to be clean.

  "My mother still looks like a missionary, with her neatness and unstraightened hair. And, in fact, was there ever a more white-missionary-sounding name than hers: Olivia, for heaven's sake! It makes you think of Vanessa Redgrave teaching the natives in the tropics! But now, here at the Center, I see hundreds of photographs of Africans from that time, and she looks just like them, only a shade lighter. Theirs was a definite style then, very plain, very earnest. No jewelry, or hardly any. Their eyes--serious, dedicated, very wide open and direct--these are the jewels of that period. The students want to know everything: Where did the water come from? The river. Where did the people shop? No shops, until after colonization. Barter, rather. How many white people did she see while growing up? Very few. How many wild animals? Very few. The Olinka thought that white people presented an 'immature' appearance, as if they were fetuses, but grown. That was inevitably their comment on first seeing one of them. They then tended to treat the white person or persons solicitously, as if they were frail.