The Temple of My Familiar

  "You are beginning to know, Carlotta," he said, with such tenderness that both of them blushed. And then: "How it becomes you."

  In Shug's pamphlet, illustrated back and front by several large, serenely alert elephants, the pamphlet that Carlotta had brought home ages ago from a massage parlor run by a woman whose husband had become her lover, and that she had casually given him and he had as casually read, Arveyda recognized a spiritual kin of his own mother. His mother. Any remembrance of her pained him. So he never thought of her. Reading the Gospel was the first time since his long-ago meeting with Zede that he'd seen anything that made him feel curious about her, or that he missed something of her spirit in the world. Why had his mother loved a photograph? Whose was it? "Your father," she'd always said; but now that he was a father himself he knew how much more there was. Why had she removed it from beside his bed? Why had she become a "whirling dervish"? Why had she never been able to affirm all that he was? Why had she formed a church? And had it been like this, like Shug's pamphlet, not a building or any kind of monument, but simply a few words gleaned, like spiritual rice grains, from her earthly passage?

  THERE WAS A JUAN Fuentes poster of Nelson Mandela in the window of a picture-framing shop near her therapist's office. It was beautiful, vibrant, with many small images of Mandela's head imposed, smiling, over a huge red ribbon. The same kind of ribbon Fanny wore, in solidarity with the South African struggle, on her denim coat. She decided she would buy the poster on her way home.

  Her therapist's name was Robin Ramirez, and Fanny liked her. She was small, quiet, intense--and dark-haired, which was a relief. When a friend recommended her to Fanny, the first thought that came to mind was: Was she or wasn't she? For Fanny did not, in the compulsive fantasy that was driving her insane, slice off the heads of dark-haired people.

  She'd told this to Robin on the first visit.

  "Well, I guess I'm lucky to be a Chicana after all," said Robin, and asked her to say more.

  "There isn't much to it," said Fanny. "Let's just say that in my fantasies blonds don't have more fun."

  "Why blonds?" asked Robin, who more than once had considered bleaching her hair. Didn't people have more respect for what blond-haired people did and said? This certainly seemed to be the case among an awful lot of Chicanos she knew; her other patients, for instance.

  "I think because they represent white people, really white people, to me, and therefore white oppression."

  "You mean domination?"

  "Yes. I mean Nazis, Klansmen, the white people and their children one has to worry about on the street."

  "Did you know any blond children when you were growing up?"

  It was curious, when Fanny considered the question, to realize that the only blonds she remembered seeing as a child were other children. All the white adults that she remembered had brown hair.

  "There was Tanya," she said. "I don't remember much about her. She lived down the road from my grandmother's house, which is where my mother and I lived part of the time I was growing up. Sometimes we played together. She was okay." Fanny shrugged.

  "Did Tanya have brothers? Parents?"

  "I know she had parents. Her father was a farmer and always in the fields or, on Saturdays, in town. Her mother was always home. She baked cookies and brought them outside to us. I could play in the yard with Tanya, but I wasn't allowed to go in the house. There was a grandmother."

  "How did that make you feel? Not being allowed inside Tanya's house."

  "It was a dump," said Fanny, "as I recall. I don't remember thinking much about it. But I remember I wasn't permitted inside, so that means I certainly noticed."

  "I'm sure you did," said Robin. "Could you imagine why you weren't allowed inside?"

  Fanny thought about this. "It was funny, you know. My grandmother's house was much finer than theirs. In its own simple way, it was elegant. Well, three grown, talented, creative women--my mother and my two grandmothers--lived there; it would have to be elegant. Tanya's people were really almost what you'd call 'poor white trash.' But not quite. They aspired to better things." She laughed. "You know, I think white people in the South must have had a secret campaign of uplift among themselves to make sure every white person's house was painted--white, if possible--and every black person's house was not. I think part of the reason they paid black people barely enough to keep body and soul together was because they were afraid that if they ever had the slightest excess of funds they would paint their houses. They already knew how black people love color and how good we look in it. As it was, black people made paint out of bluing and white mud, and with this mixture they painted their fireplaces a brilliant blue. There were only two houses in the county inhabited by colored or black people that had paint. One of them belonged to my grandmother."

  "Did Tanya ... why, by the way, was she named Tanya? It's not a Southern name, is it?" Robin asked this in a tone that said, I know nothing whatsoever about that weird land, but this name sounds peculiar even to me.

  "No," said Fanny, "it's as Russian as Vladimir. But only a few people ever pronounced it correctly. I always did. Most people said 'Tan-ya,' like the color tan. She and her mother hated it when that happened, and complained. I suggested that they replace the a in Tan with an o, but they preferred to make a lifelong habit of correcting people. Whenever I thought of this later, this obstinacy, it seemed typically Southern to me. A trait as common to black as to white.

  "In high school I watched the integration of the University of Georgia on television," Fanny continued. "And I was watching the night the whole campus seemed to go up in flames, and white people raged against the enrollment of two of the palest-skinned black people anywhere. I watched the integration of Central High in Little Rock. I saw the Freedom Riders, black and white, beaten up in Mississippi. I still remember vividly the face of one of them, a young white man, who died. I saw a lot of black people and their white allies humiliated, brutally beaten, or murdered. It seemed that the people with the most integrity were assassinated. I grew up believing that white people, collectively speaking, cannot bear to witness wholeness and health in others, just as they can't bear to have people different from themselves live among them. It seemed to me that nothing, no other people certainly, could live and be healthy in their midst. They seemed to need to have other people look bad--poor, ragged, dirty, illiterate. It was only then that they seemed to think they could look good."

  "And you thought this way as early as childhood?"

  "No," said Fanny. "Childhood for me was pretty mellow. I lived with grandmothers who had a lot of interesting friends. I was the apple of their eye. I don't remember seeing any white people, ever, at our house."

  "So except for Tanya you had no experiences with them?"

  "Not directly. But Mama Shug was often sick from her struggles with them. She'd go into town, have a run-in--it seemed inevitable--with some redneck and come home cursing up a storm." Fanny chuckled. "But at the same time, she was trying, as she liked to phrase it, to keep her feet on the Goddam Path."

  "What path was this?"

  "Oh," said Fanny, "my grandmothers formed their own church; a tradition of long standing among black women. Only, they didn't call it a 'church.' They called it a 'band.'"

  "A band?"

  "Sometimes a prayer band. Sometimes a band of angels, sometimes a band of devils. 'Band' was what renegade black women's churches were called traditionally; it means a group of people who share a common bond and purpose and whose notion of spiritual reality is radically at odds with mainstream or prevailing ones. But Mama Shug had been a great singer who'd been part of a musical band. To want to become part of a spiritual band was natural to her."

  "Wasn't it unusual for both of your grandmothers to be present, in the same house, raising you?"

  "One was my biological grandmother, my mother's mother. The other was her 'Special Friend.'"

  Robin raised an eyebrow.

  Fanny laughed. "I can't tell you how many raised ey
ebrows I've encountered in telling about them."

  "But this was in the South ... in the fifties? Do you mean to say they lived together as ..."

  "Consorts," said Fanny. "They were very happy, though they used to disagree with or stray away from each other a lot. And they had incredible fights, which made me think of storms. They liked to throw things; flashes of 'lightning' in the form of china were always brightening up the house. Temperamentally they were very different--Shug, direct; Celie, somewhat sly. They lived to be very old, then died within a year of each other. My grandmother, Celie, died first. Shug spent the remaining months of her life working on her beatitudes, which my mother helped her translate into a language somewhat more 'Biblical' than Mama Shug's own. Mama Shug's sounded more like: 'Rule number one: Don't ever mess over nobody, honey, and nobody will ever mess over you!'" Fanny laughed. "She felt that spirituality was, above all, too precious to be left to the perverted interpretations of men."

  "Perhaps it's she who put the sword in your hand?"

  "Perhaps," said Fanny. "And how did you know it is a sword? It really is a sword, with a great golden handle and shining blade. But it is in my look, not in my hand. I look at a blond head and, zip, it's in the gutter."

  "And then what?" asked Robin. "Does doing this make you feel better."

  "No," said Fanny. "I am always feeling better before. Besides, it's the next step that's barfingly gruesome."

  "Which is?"

  "That I'm down in the gutter grabbing the head and reaching for the body, which is still walking along, by the way, and furiously fastening the head back on. I won't be a racist," said Fanny grimly. "I won't be a murderer. I won't do to them what they've done to black people. I'll die first."

  She would die first. (And she felt at times that this was happening.) The sword in her look would blind her first of all. Nothing could prevent the roll into the gutter of her own head. This much she knew. It was after she knew better and her fantasies changed not at all that she began to panic.

  There were times when she came to Suwelo and crept into his bed and said, "Please hold me." Times when he thought they would make love. But no. She would lie in his arms shuddering and weeping.

  "What's the matter?" he would coax.

  It would be a long time before she could answer. Then she'd say: "I'm afraid I'll murder someone."

  In the beginning he chided her. "Just because of those assholes at the college? Come on! They're not worth murdering."

  "Not just those," she whispered, her tears dripping onto his neck.

  "Well, who?" he'd ask. "Not me, I hope."

  "Not you," she said.

  One night she said: "If it is true that we commit adultery by thinking it, then is it also the same with committing murder? What about the way it is so easy, when you watch a plane take off, to imagine it blown to bits? Does this count? Are we collectively responsible for disasters because we image them and therefore shape them into consciousness? Do all human beings nowadays automatically have murder in their eyes?"

  "But why do you think of these things?" he said, holding her close, his erotic interest having died.

  "Doesn't everyone? Now that they see how elusive the freedom is we've struggled so hard for in the world."

  "No," he said. "I don't. Well, I do, sometimes. But I know they're just fantasies. They're meaningless."

  "I don't believe fantasies are meaningless. They are as meaningful and powerful as dreams."

  "You're so gentle," he said.

  "I fear it's only a facade." She sighed. "Underneath, there's this raving maniac. Sometimes I see myself in the faces of the weeping, screaming, completely mad women shown every day on TV. A bomb has fallen through their roof; their children are bleeding to death; there is no ambulance for them. I hate white people," she said. "I visualize them sliding off the planet, and the planet saying, 'Ah, I can breathe again!'"

  "But you can't cause that. Actually they come closer to doing that to themselves, closer to causing all of us to slide off the planet than you ever will. They, not you, should be feeling the crisis you imagine."

  "Then why am I imagining it?"

  "Obviously because we share the planet."

  "They don't want to share the planet; they don't even want to share villages, towns, rivers, beaches, and bus stops," she said.

  "No, they don't," said Suwelo. "But they'll have to. It's either share or destroy."

  "I think they're too clever to destroy themselves intentionally," said Fanny. "But not clever enough to avoid doing it by accident."

  "And we go with them," said Suwelo.

  "And we go with them," echoed Fanny. "I can't stand it! After all we've been through"--and here she remembered Nzingha's comment on Jeff, the young white Southerner: "What? Poor? And after all that!"--"to die horribly because of their pharaonic arrogance. I feel so abandoned," said Fanny. "As if my very self is leaving me."

  "The whole world is freaked out," said Suwelo, "not just you, not just us. Prior to this time in history, at least we thought we'd have a future, that our children would see freedom, even if we never did. Now they've made sure that none of our children will ever live the free and healthy lives so many generations of oppressed people have dreamed of for them. And fought so hard for. I very often think of violence, but any violence I could do at this point would seem, and be, so small."

  "You're large," she said. "You're a man. If you feel violent toward someone, you can do something about it. You can be more direct. And you give yourself permission to feel it. Women are given no such permission."

  "I approve of self-defense," said Suwelo.

  "Isn't sliding them off the planet self-defense?" she asked. "I've marched so much by now and been arrested so many times, I'm really quite weary."

  Suwelo laughed. "A benign and gentle wind, out of nowhere, blows. All the ungodly lose their connection to gravity and float away into the ether. Besides, you know as well as I do that not all white people are responsible for, among other things, the high cost, on the nuclear black market, of plutonium, or the way that it is slowly finding its way into the drinking water... . What about your friends? What about Karen and Jackson and John ..."

  "Yes, I know. Georgia O'Keeffe and Van Gogh and all of the O'Keeffes and Van Goghs to come. Pete Seeger and Dr. Charlie Clements certainly tip the scale. It's racism and greed that have to go. Not white people. But can they be separated from their racism?" Fanny sighed. "Can I? And how much time do we have?"

  "But yours, Fanny, unlike theirs, is all in your head. They are not affected by your fantasies, nightmares, or dreams. Racist oppression and nuclear terrorism are two things your magic won't be enough to stop. I'm sorry, but fantasizing opening the doors of Pollsmoor prison will not bring Mandela out."

  "But maybe I can stop racist oppression before it starts in myself?" And she had, next morning, made her first appointment to see Robin.

  Those had been hard times for both of them. In her fear of the murderer within, Fanny withdrew, to the extent that it was possible, from human contact. She abandoned the classroom; too provocative. Heads rolled there every day. Stupid, innocent, childish heads, whose parents had taught them nothing of how not to make other people detest them in the world. She moved next to administration. Bureaucracy and racism were a deadly combination. Her silver blade was always in the air. She thought she'd never be able to scrub all the blood off her knees. Her blood pressure, like that of so many black people, reached alarming highs. Her mother, apprised of her condition by Suwelo, had suddenly called Fanny one day and encouraged her to accompany her on a quiet, restful, celebratory trip to Africa. She would meet her father, whom she had never seen, who had helped win freedom for his country through war.

  "IT'S AN INTERESTING QUESTION," Ola had mused, a few months after Fanny and her mother had come to visit, as they'd sat idly one day over their afternoon tea.

  "What's an interesting question?" asked Fanny, who, while sipping her tea and thinking of Suwelo, had forgotten what
she and her father were talking about. She'd looked at him closely after he spoke, in some alarm. He'd spent the morning "haggling" over one of his plays with an illiterate government censor; the exercise had left him drawn and gray, and as if he wouldn't be able to tolerate such foolishness long.

  "Whether the better fighter against the white man is someone who has actually experienced him firsthand," said Ola. "I once knew a great fighter who'd never seen a white person in her life but who nonetheless felt their oppression in every aspect of her existence, and so, traveling on foot, she covered a thousand miles to join the fight against them. She was excellent. Quite curious about them as people, I think, for she was always asking questions, about their whiteness and their children and their ways. But she was also steady as a rock in attacking them. And ruthless."

  "What do you mean, ruthless?"

  Ola frowned. "It was as if she were mopping up a very foul and troublesome spill."

  "And what was she like otherwise?"

  "Oh, very quiet. Gentle. A wonderful person, really. Even to animals; of all the stories about revolutionaries that were told around the campfires in the mountains, gorges, and caves of our exile, the one she liked best was that one about Sandino and the monkeys. Do you know it?"

  Fanny shook her head.

  "Well," said Ola, "the men in his guerrilla band were capturing the little monkeys that lived in the forest where they were hiding, and eating them. Sandino made impassioned speeches in the monkeys' defense; he pointed out, among other things, that it was the monkeys' screeches that always saved the men from the surprise of enemy attack. 'They are our little brothers,' said Sandino, 'our loyal companeros. How can you even think of eating them?'" Ola paused, thinking of the woman. "Small children adored her. I adored her. Her vision of the future, after the overthrow of the white regime, was very broad; it would include everyone, and everything. That is why she liked Sandino; even though he was as famished as the rest of his men, he held to the vision of the future he wanted to have, a future that would include even the monkeys."