The Temple of My Familiar

  "On we talked into the night, listening to the crickets and appreciating the warm brilliance of the stars. People are called 'stars' not only because they shine--with the glow of self-expression and the satisfaction this brings--but because the qualities they exemplify are, as far as human lives are concerned, eternal. We are attracted to their sparkle, their warmth, their light, but they will be forever distant from us. So distant we can never quite believe our inseparability. Never quite believe that we are also composed of the light that they have. Ola says he is convinced that human beings want, above all else, to love each other freely, regardless of tribe, and that when they're finally able to do it openly--although the true essence of the person they've focused on is camouflaged by society's dictation--there is always the telltale quality of psychic recognition--that is to say, hysteria; the weeping of the womb.

  "The Choctaw lad with the long black hair, full lips, and sultry eyes is the mate the pioneer maidens would have chosen, if they'd had the chance, Ola said. And for the first time I imagined Elvis as really beautiful: bronze, lithe, running lightly through the primeval forests of Mississippi, hair to his waist. Their great-great-granddaughters are still weeping over their loss. And so, to my surprise, was I!

  "If Ola is exiled, he says perhaps he will come to America, and he and I together can write this play. He said this teasingly, noticing my sniffle and that he had obviously moved me very much.

  "I never dreamed I would so enjoy having a father. It is like having another interesting mind, somewhat similar to your own but also strangely different, to rummage through."

  "I WOULDN'T MIND DYING if dying was all," Miss Lissie told Suwelo. "The old folks used to say that all the time down on the Island. Somebody would witness it with a heartfelt um-huh. And I used to think they knew more about life than they thought. For dying, I can tell you, is the least of it. Dying is even pleasant. You just recede from everything, including torture, and burn out quietly, like a candle. What's not pleasant is coming back, and whether they have sense enough to know it or not, everybody, well almost everybody, does. Don't ask me how or why. They just do. I can appreciate the idea that to come here a lot of times is no more a miracle than to come here once. That's the truth of it.

  "You take the way things are going in the world today. You have your poisoned rivers and your poisoned air and your children turning into critters before your eyes. You have your leaders that look like empty canons and the politicians who look drugged. You have a world that scares everybody to death. You can't go nowhere. You can't eat anything. You can't even hardly make love. And that's just today. There are days when the best thought you can have is that one day you'll die and leave it all behind.

  "Suwelo, let me tell you, you can't leave it behind. The life in this place is your life forever. You will always be here; and the ground underneath you. And you won't die until it does. It is dying, and the people are, too--but, Suwelo, my fear is not that we people and the earth we're on will die. Everything eventually dies, maybe. But it looks like it will take a long time and death will be painful and slow. It's the difference between being blindfolded and shot dead in the first volley of bullets and being tortured to death very slowly by men paid by the hour for their work. It is not simply a struggle between life and death. That is too easy, I guess. It's between life everlasting and death everlasting, and everlasting is a very long time.

  "I am tired of it. Not tired of life. But afraid of what living is going to look like and be like next time I come."

  Now Suwelo was on the train going back home to California. He crossed the Rockies and he crossed the desert. He thought of his months in Uncle Rafe's house and almost crossed himself. He thought of Fanny. Of who she was, really, and of what each of her previous selves must have been. Though Fanny had left San Francisco, and wrote that she had no desire to see him, he wished that he could meet her all over again, from the perspective of someone who believed true love never died and that you only suffer if you struggle--and that as surely as struggle led to suffering, suffering led to a knowledge of how not to. There were, after all, lifetimes and lifetimes, and love alone was healing and balm. Love alone, mother's milk.

  He had finally sold the house and would now have money on which to live while he perhaps wrote an "oral" history--one of those unofficial-looking books, full of "he said" and "she said," that he'd always despised--about Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie. Before he left Baltimore, he'd driven to Miss Lissie's address, only to find it was also the address of Mr. Hal. These two elderly friends were quietly painting in the backyard, a narrow strip of pink verbena separating their easels. They did not stop as he sat on the back steps watching them. They painted, with loving strokes, what was directly in front of them: the back of their own small, white-clapboard house, a large ivy-encircled pecan tree towering over its front, a garden along one side with flowers and fruits growing all together. There were giant dahlias and blue morning glories decorating both house and corn. The sun was warm and the day eternity itself, and Suwelo soon lay back on the porch and drifted off to sleep.

  When the two old friends had sat beside him, as he was rousing himself from sleep, he felt as if he knew all about them and yet knew nothing. He knew that they had sent Anatole to Fisk University and that he became a professor of German at Tuskegee. He knew that Lulu, talented and audacious, a singer and dancer par excellence, had gone off, in high spirits, with a musical-comedy team to Paris. Paris, unfortunately, had fallen to Hitler while she was there. Lulu and many of the other black and colored performers working in Paris at the time were never heard from again. He knew that his uncle Rafe had loved Miss Lissie and loved also his best friend, and hers, her soul mate and sometime husband, Mr. Hal. He knew they had lived together more or less harmoniously for many years and had remained friends until Uncle Rafe's death. He knew that Miss Lissie was indeed an extraordinary person, whose rarity would be known and appreciated only by those people least likely to be believed, even if they spoke of it to others--and apparently Uncle Rafe and Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie herself had kept mainly mum. But they were all three of them rare people, Suwelo thought, for they had connected directly with life and not with its reflection; the mysteries they found themselves involved in, simply by being alive and knowing each other, carried them much deeper into reality than "society" often permits people to get. They had found themselves born into a fabulous, mysterious universe, filled with fabulous, mysterious others; they had never been distracted from the wonder of this gift. They had made the most of it.

  "I'm leaving," said Suwelo, stretching and getting to his feet.

  "And we know we go with you," said Miss Lissie, handing him, with a smile, a small flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. She stuffed a fat pink envelope into his breast pocket. A mouse came out of the house and stopped, blinked at the sun, and hurried back inside. A bird dropped, stunned, to the porch; it had flown into a windowpane, in which it no doubt saw a reflection of the sky.

  When Suwelo walked back to the street, passing by Mr. Hal's ancient truck, parked neatly next to Miss Lissie's smart gray Datsun, he carried with him the image of the two old people waving him on, holding hands and smiling, it seemed, at the very word "goodbye."

  And they had painted him, a part of their life, lying on their back porch, surrounded by all the things they loved. Asleep.

  But what was in the package? What was their gift? Suwelo took a deep breath as he carefully pulled off the string. The brown paper crackled as he ran his fingers underneath it. He thought at first they'd given him a stack of albums, for the package was just that size, though quite light. But no, there were paintings. He lifted them out and stared at them, first one, then the other, for a long time. They were obviously self-portraits. Perhaps not obviously, though, for on one painting was written "Self-portrait, Lissie Lyles," and on the other, "Self-portrait, Harold D. Jenkins." The background of the paintings showed all the familiar things the two friends loved to paint: their trees and corn and mo
rning glories, the pink-and-cream spider flower. It was the center of the paintings that was different from anything Suwelo had ever seen. For instead of faces, as in a portrait, there were merely the outlines of their upper bodies, a man's shape and a woman's shape, and these outlines surrounded blue, infinite space, painted with such intensity, depth, and longing that it was as luminous and as inviting as the sky. Wonderingly, Suwelo turned the paintings over, as if that infinite space might have leaked through to the other side. What he saw made him smile and hug the paintings to his heart, as the train shot through a long gray tunnel into an even blacker dark. On the back of Lissie Lyles's self-portrait were the words, in emerald lettering, "Painted by Hal Jenkins." On Hal's self-portrait, in bright red, were the words "Painted by Lissie Lyles."

  SUWELO, NOW AT HOME, was intrigued by the fat pink envelope, which he lifted to his nose and sniffed. It smelled like Miss Lissie--old-fashioned white roses under a hot summer sun. Turning it over, he was surprised to see, in Miss Lissie's ancient script, all sharp points and decisively rounded o's: "They burned us so thoroughly we did not even leave smoke." He did not know what he expected to find on opening the letter, but the blank pages that lay in his hand, over a dozen of them, struck him as an odd missive, even from Miss Lissie.

  It was days before he understood, and then, in the middle of the night, it came to him. This part of Miss Lissie's story was written in invisible ink. At the moment he realized this he also knew that all he needed to read her letter was a candle. Heaving himself out of bed, he went in search of one. Luckily he found a box of them--an earlier gift from Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal--on top of the fridge. Still in his nightshirt, hunched over the kitchen table, the candle close up behind the first sheet of paper, and the chill of the San Francisco fog seeping into his bones, he began to read ... what at first seemed to be some kind of religious raving.

  "The religion I was taught as a child, growing up on the Island," wrote Miss Lissie, "is a thing that causes people to try to eat up the earth, since we were taught 'everything is for man,' while man was never asked to be for anything in particular. Well, for 'God,' but who knew what that was?"

  "Hmmm," said Suwelo, yawning, and scratching his chin.

  "The first witches to die at the stake were the daughters of the Moors." Moors? he mused skeptically. "It was they (or, rather, we) who thought the Christian religion that flourished in Spain would let the Goddess of Africa 'pass' into the modern world as 'the Black Madonna.' After all, this was how the gods and goddesses moved from era to era before, though Islam, our official religion for quite a long time by now, would have nothing to do with this notion; instead, whole families in Africa who worshiped the Goddess were routinely killed, sold into slavery, or converted to Islam at the point of the sword.

  "Yes," and here Suwelo imagined a long, hesitant breath, "I was one of those 'pagan' heretics they burned at the stake.

  "They burned us first--well, we were so visible. Even after centuries of living among the Europeans. You can think of Desdemona and Othello, if you can't come at it any other way, in trying to catch even a glimpse of our presence in Europe. The Inquisition eventually traveled where they were, too, to watery Venice, a dank and still somehow beautiful place, and there were screams and firelit shadows bouncing off the walls of the Doges' Palace in St. Mark's Square for months on end.

  "But did you never wonder why, in the little bit of the story the whites could not prevent Shakespeare, at least, from trying to tell (that 'mysterious' playwright about whom so very little is known), that there are only Moors (defined as men) and no Mooresses? I can tell you, we were there, somewhat paler than when we were in Africa, yes, but imagine Desdemona's and Othello's children. We were there, for sure, and brought up to be our fathers' daughters, our fathers who loved learning more than any other thing, and who embraced a religion that had terrorized them in Africa, and who traveled the world and married strangers and barbarians in order to learn more about their curious, alien ways. Our poor fathers, whose only crime was that they loved their Mother, but who, in seeking to protect Her and themselves, helped to change us all, finally, into another spirit and another race.

  "The Inquisitors slaughtered our fathers and took their property for the church, as was done also to the Jews. Our African fathers, who, fleeing the religious dictatorship of Islam, while dressed in its cloak, had come into Spain, caught their breath, found themselves and their incredible handsomeness and learning admired, and, for the most part, settled there. Some of them pushed on into France and Germany, Poland, England, Ireland, Russia. One or two settled in Venice and inspired a famous play. Well, you get the picture. If I am not mistaken it is only in Poland that Our Black Lady, the Great Mother of All--Mother Africa, if you will--is still openly worshiped. Perhaps that is why it is said of the Poles that they are none too bright.

  "But during the time of which I am speaking," the letter continued, and the smell of the tallow candle seemed suddenly to hurt Suwelo's nose, "and which I have tried to drop from memory because it is so horrible, they obliterated us. They said the mother of their white Christ (blonde, blue-eyed, even in black-headed Spain) could never have been a black woman, because both the color black and the female sex were of the devil. We were evil witches to claim otherwise. We were witches; our word for healers. We brought their children into the world; we cured their sick; we washed and laid out the bodies of their dead. We were far from evil. We helped Life, and they did not like this at all. Whenever they saw our power it made them feel they had none. They felt themselves the moon to our sun. And yet, as every woman knows, the moon also has great power. We are connected to all three planes--past, present, future--of life; so is man, but he will not let himself see it. He has let himself be taught that his own mother is evil and has joined religions in which her only role, after nurturing and rearing him with her blood, is to shut up."

  Suwelo imagined Miss Lissie's frown.

  "Can you believe it?" the letter continued. "It is as if each man forces every other man to go out into the night without a candle, to go out among the speaking without a tongue, to go out among the seeing without an eye, to go out among the standing without a leg.

  "'If you want to join the company of men,' they are told, 'you must do something about your mother.' Meekly man says, 'What must I do?' Teeth already chattering from the cold he will feel without the warmth of his best friend. Hah! 'We want you to shut her up,' he is told. 'Don't pay any attention to anything she might suggest. In return, we will help you pretend that you created yourself. Just ignore her. Don't hear her. Let her weep, let her moan, let her starve.' This is what they have done to their own mothers; it is certainly what they have done to Mother Africa.

  "They burned us so thoroughly--the dark women so recently, relatively speaking, from Africa--that, unlike the Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies and artists and rebels they also burned, not to mention the rich women whose property they stole even before their ashes cooled, we did not even leave a trace of smoke. The connection between black woman and white was broken utterly; the blood sisterhood that African women shared with European women was gone as if it had never been. In France, there is nothing. Notre-Dame. Our Lady. Not our Black Lady. In England, nothing; unless you find it among the remnants of the Celts, their own way of life smashed to bits. In Ireland, rumors of 'the little people' and all those ignorant jokes about 'black Irish.'

  "In Venice, where Othello was a nobleman, there are today endless statues of Moors, dressed in the livery of slaves. In Spain--well, there's all that 'Moorish' architecture, too exuberantly colored to be easily explained.

  "When they burned me at the stake I cursed them; what else is a dark woman to do? I did not mind that they coveted my house and the land my father left me. I would have given it to them, to save at least the lives of my children, who were grouped around me, and whose screams burned in my ears more piercingly than the fire. But what I refused to give up was my essence; nor could I. For it was simply this: I do not share the
ir vision of reality, but have, and cherish, my own. And when you look at the world today, it fits my curse exactly, but with one exception: Those I cursed do not suffer alone; everything and everyone does. This I would not have had. It was a long time in the learning, that lesson: You cannot curse a part without damning the whole. That is why Mother Africa, cursed by all her children, black, white, and in between, is dying today, and, after her, death will come to every other part of the globe."

  Now there was an abrupt change in tone, and Suwelo noticed, with some alarm, that as he read each line, it completely disappeared; Miss Lissie had written her story not only in invisible ink, but in invisible ink that could not be read twice. He moved the page closer to the flickering candle to make sure of this observation. He lifted other sheets to the flame. They were blank. He sighed, shook his head, and read on.

  "Now woman," the letter continued, "by hook and by crook, and with a strong memory of African Eden in her batteries, kept alive some feeling for the other animals, though she was reduced usually to the caring and feeding of one small house cat. Well, there she was, black, with her broom and her cat, her hair like straw. Ever wonder why witches' clothes are always black, and their hair every which way?" Suwelo knew Miss Lissie, in writing this, had laughed out loud.

  "We never forgot it should be possible to communicate with anything that had big enough eyes! So there we were, the dark women, muttering familiarly to every mouse or cow or goat about the place. Their writers of fairy tales would make much of this tendency. We were shoved into the beds of men old enough to be our grandfathers, in countries where, unlike in Africa, bathing was simply not done; on estates far from human beings of any kind. The animals and our children were our world. Foolishly we thought the animals and our children, at least, would not be taken from us. But the Inquisitors, set in place to control us, declared 'consorting' with animals a crime, punishable by being burned at the stake! And our children fell into the hands of their fathers, their 'masters,' who traded them for gold, as they traded flour and land and cloth.