"There was laughter and cold lemonade and flowers and always lots of children and older people, too, that Big Mama had helped raise. You know there had to be some folks in the community who'd have nothing to do with our house. They called Mama Celie and Mama Shug 'bull-daggers.' But I always thought the very best of the men and women were our friends, for they were usually so busy living some odd new way they'd found, and were so taken up with it, they really didn't give a damn. And then, too, Mama Shug especially had real high standards; and if you stepped on an ant in Mama Celie's presence and didn't beg forgiveness, you were just never invited to her house again. Though this sensitivity to animals was not always Mama Celie's way. It was something she learned, as she learned so many things, from Mama Shug.
"But there was really no place for me there. Not really. I was welcome and I was loved, but I was also grown. After a few years I began to feel smothered by their competence, their experience in everything, their skills that caused me to feel my own considerable attributes were not required. And they simply took over the task of raising you. By this time, too, Mama Shug had decided to found her own religion, for which she used the house, and sometimes this was very hard, because of the way she structured it. Six times during the year, for two weeks each time, she held 'church.' Ten to twenty 'seekers' would show up, and they had to sleep somewhere. Usually it was on the floor, or, when there was an overflow, in the barn or the shed. Everyone who came brought information about their own path and journey. They exchanged and shared this information. That was the substance of the church. Some of these people worshiped Isis. Some worshiped trees. Some thought the air, because it alone is everywhere, is God. ('Then God is not on the moon,' someone said.) Mama Shug felt there was only one thing anyone could say about G-O-D, and that was--it had no name.
"I don't know how they were able to talk about it, finally, if it had no name, or if everyone had a different name for it. Oh, yes, I do remember! I was telling them, Mama Celie and Miss Shug, about how the Olinka use humming instead of words sometimes and that that accounts for the musicality of their speech. The hum has meaning, but it expresses something that is fundamentally inexpressible in words. Then the listener gets to interpret the hum, out of his own experience, and to know that there is a commonality of understanding possible but that true comprehension will always be a matter of degree.
"If, for instance, you say to someone in jail who is feeling low: 'How are you?' He or she can say, 'Ummm, ugh,' and you more or less get it. Which is the way it really is. If the person replied, 'Fine' or 'Terrible,' it would hardly be the same. No work would be required on your part. They have named it.
"So that is how they resolved it. They would hum the place G-O-D would occupy. Everyone in the house talked about ummm a lot!
"And so, to make a long story manageably short, I left you there with these ummm-distracted people and went to Atlanta to enroll in the Spelman nursing school. My adoptive mother had gone there, you see, and that made it very attractive to me. She was such a lady! A word I know your generation despises, but back then it had substantial meaning. It meant someone with implacable self-respect. Besides, 'woman' meant, well, someone capable of breeding. It was strictly a biological term and, because it was associated with slavery, was considered derogatory. I had been sent to England to study nursing while we lived in Africa, so I already knew quite a lot. I'd also assisted the young African woman doctor at home, who'd trained in England; an eccentric Englishwoman writer had paid for her education. Still, I needed accreditation to work in the U.S. It wasn't easy. I was older than the other students and had a child, but they were interested in my life in Africa, and I was several times asked to speak at vespers. Come to think of it, no one ever asked me whether I was married, but they automatically called me 'Mrs.' and behaved as if they thought I was. Very respectfully. But then, everyone--I mean the students--was respectful. Too respectful, I often thought. They were so grateful to be there--one of the few places a young colored girl could go for training--they acted as if their teachers and the college administrators were gods. They acted, in fact, precisely like the colonized Africans who were educated at our mission in Olinka. Too much respect for people who are not always respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity, and their abject gratitude rather depressed me. Well, I wasn't there to agitate. I got my accreditation in due course and applied for a job at the black hospital on Hunter Street, Harrison Memorial. I sent for you as soon as the job came through.
"It was a wonderful place! Not simply because it was there that I met your stepfather. Of course I was too dark for his family, and practically an African, a real African, to boot--but that's getting ahead of my story. By the time Lance--his parents named him Lancelot--had graduated from medical school he'd had enough of prejudice among black people; he just couldn't tolerate it. All the cadavers they'd worked on were from a certain range of shades between dark brown and black, and this had radicalized him about the amount of economic disparity that existed along intraracial lines. He started to think there were no poor, really destitute lightskin black people, and this made him very sad. And the marks of hard knocks on the bodies he and the other students were required to work on! His heart was broken, he said, every day. There was a woman, for instance, who walked seventy miles carrying her sick child to a doctor whose existence was only a rumor to her. She died of heart failure; the baby, of dehydration caused by diarrhea. Both these bodies became the property of Lance's medical school.
"There they were cut up while some of Lance's colleagues told jokes and others talked of the food they expected to have for dinner.
"Everyone thought a doctor's life was so glamorous! I never understood it. When I went to work at the hospital and had the chance to work with him, I could see it was, very often, a depressing, soul-killing job. There were people who were sick simply because of the way they lived, and ate: a diet of fatback, biscuits, syrup, and hard fried meat. There were colon cancers, ulcers, liver and artery congestion. The ignorance of proper diet was astounding. There were people so addicted to Coca-Cola that this drink was all they consumed all day long, with salted peanuts, bought by the nickel bag. And they boasted of this! That this was 'good.' That this was what they liked; and by golly, this was what they would eat! Don't talk about green leafy vegetables in the same room with them, and only rabbits ate carrots, and cauliflower didn't grow in the South, to their knowledge, so there!
"I was not looking for a husband. I sometimes thought of Dahvid; that day you were conceived was like a dream memory. I knew that the whole country was engaged in fighting. I imagined Dahvid might be fighting, too, or he might be injured or dead. Besides, you were quite a handful and quite enough companionship, I thought, for me. During the week, you went to the Spelman day nursery school, where everyone loved you; on Saturdays we went shopping for our weekly supplies. On Sundays we went to church. A nice, orderly life.
Even when Lance started to let me know he cared for me, I hung back. I was always shy, retiring--that quality that seemed so out of place in my mother's house of laughter, horseshoe throwing, magicians sawing people into thirds, guitar players and jugglers! and with which you were so impatient. I was plain, and dark, like my mother--much darker than the other nurses--and I didn't 'play.' There was always in my mind, too, the question of how any man who came around us might behave toward you. And on that score I'd heard many frightful stories from other women, and also from my own mother. It still broke my heart to think of how she was abused by her stepfather, who never even bothered to tell her, until after she was grown, that he wasn't her father. Funny. I could never think of him as my father. The truth is, I never felt I had a biological father, apart from my adoptive father, Samuel, and when I learned I did have one I still couldn't grasp it. So that, to this day, I feel almost as if I am a product of an immaculate conception. Like Jesus, who didn't know who his biological father was either. I have often thought it was this lack of knowledge of his earthly father that led him to his 'heavenl
y' one, for there is in all of us a yearning to know our own source, and no source is likely to seem too farfetched to a lonely, fatherless child. This was considered a blasphemous thought when I ventured to express it; but the question of who impregnated Mary, that young Jewish girl, and under what possibly grim or happy circumstances--because of my mother's sad experience of abuse as a young woman--was always much on my mind. If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, and 'God in heaven' was not, and Mary, because of custom, fear, or depression could not speak up about what had actually happened to her, who was the father?
"Well, you see how to me all daily stories are in fact ancient, and ancient ones current. And it was due to the long languid days in Africa, days that seemed to go on for weeks, that I credit this sense I have that, really, there is nothing new under the sun and that nothing in the past is more mysterious than the behavior of the present.