The Temple of My Familiar

  "This woman," said Fanny, "she didn't frighten you?"

  "She did frighten me," said Ola. "But I had to realize she was me. We mirrored each other almost exactly, I didn't want to be an assassin either. I didn't want to be ruthless. There seemed no other way, however. The whites had done terrible things to us; many of them would claim later that they'd done nothing of the kind, simply because they knew nothing about it. But beyond what they were doing to us, as adults, they were destroying our children. Who were starving to death--their bodies, their minds, their dreams--right before our eyes. We fought the white man as we fought pestilence."

  "It is more honest to fight as you did, perhaps," said Fanny. "In the United States there is the maddening illusion of freedom without the substance. It's never solid, unequivocal, irrevocable. So much depends on the horrid politicians the white majority elects. Black people have the oddest feeling, I think, of forever running in place."

  Ola nodded. "Of course," he said, "that could simply mean you're remaining who you are. And that's not a bad thing."

  "I don't know if that's it," said Fanny. "To me, we seem to be losing who we are. We don't understand white people; that's the crux of the matter. Not that we really want to anymore; it's too frightening. We can't comprehend them at all. We pretend we do from time to time, but that's just to reassure ourselves. If we ever confront our fear at being surrounded by so many people whose ways are incomprehensible to us, I don't know what will happen. They don't do anything the way we would do it. Making those tall buildings that deaden the earth underneath them, for instance" (here she thought of the Indians who considered the weight of a teepee too heavy, and who had had chants that included the exhortation to "shift your teepee, relatives, so that Mother Earth might have sunlight!") "or digging out and claiming everything that's buried in the ground. People's bones and funerary objects, gold, diamonds, silver, and God only knows what else--uranium, plutonium. Most of what's buried in the earth, people of color would never have found, because they'd never have bothered to look for it." Fanny shrugged. "But we're savages," as Chief Seattle said, "what do we know?"

  "Here's a theory of evolution you'll like," said Ola, who knew that many African-Americans hated to think of the ancient Africans as early industrialists. "The first iron, so far as is known, was smelted in Africa; so there were, at least in theory, a couple or three diggers around here, since the ingredients for iron must be dug out of the ground. The people who did this, however, were not approved of. Like the Hopi in your country, most ancient Africans thought of the earth as a body that needs all its organs and bones and blood in order to function properly. The ore miners were forced out, the theory goes. They went north."

  "Yes," said Fanny, frowning, "and unfortunately in about 1492 they continued west."

  She wrote to Suwelo:

  "I feel like a child, asking my father what I should do. But I confess it is a great relief, having a father to ask.

  "Do you know what my mother's advice is? 'Forgive them, Fanny,' she says. 'Do you think they know what they are doing, when they treat us so badly? Do you think they know what they are doing when they suck all the oil out of the earth on one side of the world and complain about earthquakes on the other? Do you think they know what they are doing when they fill the sky with space junk and rockets whose important "missions" to spy on other planets are meaningless to ninety-nine percent of the people and to absolutely all of the plants and animals on earth? Do you think they know what they are doing when they invent the things they have invented and forced on the world, especially on our worlds, things that make us sick? things that kill us? No, darling. They do not know what they are doing. But you are lucky, you live in an age when even they are finding this out.

  "'When I was growing up,' she says, 'the white man's word--backed by his gun--was law. His vision, the inspiration of the world. We dared not contradict him even when he said the sole reason we were put on earth was to be his slave. He was all-powerful. In fear and dread we watched him from our compounds the world over. Some of us were greedy. We believed, as he seemed to, that he was bringing something better than what we had. This never happened. Always, we were left poorer, with a lowered opinion of ourselves. He blocked the view between us and our ancestors, us and our ways; not all of them good ways, but needing to be changed according to our own light. He needed to keep us terrorized and desperately poor, in order to feel powerful. No one who was secure in himself as a person would put such emphasis on the nonpersonhood and unworthiness of another. He could not make the sounds or the movements or the cloth or the food we did. The heat was unkind to him. It was the heat that his tribe had left Africa thousands of years ago to avoid.

  "'The white man is our brother: we have always said this. He is also the prodigal son of Africa. Easily recognizing him for who he was when he returned to us, we prepared the fatted calf. But it has never been enough. He is so empty, so ravenous for what we have that he does not have, that the fatted calf has barely served as an appetizer. He has moved on to devour us and our children, our minds and our bones. But this is not the behavior of well people. Allowances must be made for the sick.'

  "But, even as my mother is speaking, I think: And what of me? I am the first to agree that I am sick. The racism of the world has infected me; I was infected as a child, before I even knew what racism was. Now, in my fantasies, I am poised to strike. But if I do strike, if I bring my fantasies to life, will 'allowances' be made for me? More important, can I make them for myself?

  "'We are too forgiving,' I say to Mom. 'I'm beginning to hate the very word.'

  "'No,' she whispers (we are often in bed for these conversations), 'that isn't possible. Forgiveness is the true foundation of health and happiness, just as it is for any lasting progress. Without forgiveness there is no forgetfulness of evil; without forgetfulness there still remains the threat of violence. And violence does not solve anything; it only prolongs itself.'

  "How could she have this view, which seemed not reactionary, but divorced from reality. 'The way things are going in the United States,' I said, 'there will soon be more black men in prison than on the streets. In South Africa the entire black population is incarcerated in ghettos and "homelands" they despise. Look at what was done to the Indians, and still is being done. Look at the aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand. Look at Indonesia under the Dutch. Look at the West Indies. Forgiveness isn't large enough to cover the crime.'

  "'How is a person destroyed?' whispered my mother in her peculiar missionary-African accent. 'Do you know? When my three parents' (this is how she refers to her adoptive mother and father, Corrine and Samuel, and to Nettie) 'first came to Africa they taught the gospel inherited from the Jews, who were the earliest Christians, and who therefore believed in turning the other cheek, rendering unto Caesar, and so on. Over the years they saw cheeks, heads, whole bodies bloodied and destroyed, as Caesar demanded and took everything. He took the land, everything on it and under it; he took the water. He claimed the air "space" over the land. He took the people's children to work in his fields and mines. He destroyed and therefore "took" their culture, their connection to their ancestors and the universe--than which nothing is more serious. He took their future.

  "'My parents saw people dying all the time.' My mother paused. 'Do you remember, by any chance, what Haydee Santamaria said to the prison guard who, having brought her the eye of her brother Abel and the testicles of her lover, next brought her the news that her beloved brother, one of the youngest and most beautiful of the young Cuban revolutionaries, had been killed? She said--this woman who, twenty years later, would kill herself--"He is not dead; for to die for one's country is to live forever."'

  "'That is very beautiful,' I said. If I'd ever read it, I didn't remember it, or perhaps it was so painful I'd forgotten it.

  "You and I, Suwelo, have, after all, come to maturity against the backdrop of the assassination of our leaders. By the time of Abel Santamaria's death, we'd already borne,
somehow, the news that Patrice Lumumba, and so many others, were no more. Or was he killed after Abel? 'Eliminated,' as the CIA 'adventures' on television described it. Like so much waste from the common imperialist body. But while I thought of this--and I really can't bear to think of this--of all the murders, all the loss, all the pain, all the waste, my mother was continuing to whisper.

  "'My parents attended many people as they died,' she said. 'They noticed that some people died utterly. They went, they left, they vacated their space. There was nothing left. This was not true of everyone.'

  "'What are you saying?' I asked.

  "'Some of the people died in a kind of rapture. These were often those to whom the worst things had been done. Some of them died with the same passion with which they'd lived, and, at the very end, appeared to see, coming to welcome them, the beloved community of souls with whom they'd kept the faith, and in whose memory they had continued to labor while on earth.

  "'My dearest daughter,' said my mother, 'some of them, many of them, died as who they were, as the best of who they were. As whole people. There was no talk of the kind we see on TV deathbeds of who will get the silver, who will inherit the car, who is mentioned in or omitted from the will; those things are the concern of people who have no idea why they are on earth. These people, these revolutionaries, like Haydee and her brother Abel, had given their lives, but they had also kept them; for their lives were theirs right to the end, unbroken, uncorrupted. That is what they left to us.

  "'When Abel died he could not have known that years later I would be whispering about his death to my only daughter, and hoping that she will learn from it, and be inspired by it, as her mother has been. I am not a nationalist,' said my mother, 'so it is not dying for one's country that is so moving to me about Haydee Santamaria's statement. No, what is moving to me is that when people die whole, a wonderful power is released in the world; a wonderful fearlessness before death, which in turn inspires in others a more profound joyousness about life. This is what all torturers learn, and it is why, I think, torture exists. Imagine yourself eyeless, without breasts or testicles, at the mercy of those who are so broken they will have no choice when their own time comes but to die utterly, leaving not one iota of inspiration, encouragement, or joy, and you do not talk, or give information, or name other people, or lick their boots, or accept their gold, or whatever it is they are trying to get you to do. And even if you are broken by them, and you lick their boots, you understand how sick they are to need their boots licked. You think of them as they might have been as children, little children, with no one to protect them from the grown-up whose boots they were forced to lick, no one who loved them enough or was powerful enough to make them feel safe. If you tear out the tongue of another, you have a tongue in your hand the rest of your life. You are responsible, therefore, for all that person might have said. It is the torturers who come to understand this, who change. Some do, you know.'

  "'You are saying,' I asked her, 'that all evil, like racism or sexism, is a result of sickness?'

  "'Not only that,' she whispered, 'the child will always, as an adult, do to someone else whatever was done to him when he was a child. It is how we, as human beings, are made. I shudder to think what Hitler's childhood was like,' she said. 'But anyone can see that the Palestinians and their children are reliving it under the Israelis today.'

  "'But wait,' I said. 'This isn't true of everyone. I mean, some people who've had horrendous childhoods don't turn out to be vicious adults.'

  "'How do you know?' she asked.

  "'Well, we can use your mother, Big Mama Celie, as exhibit A. A more gentle, loving person it would be hard to imagine.'

  "There was a long silence before Mom spoke again.

  "'One of the most disturbing things I noticed about black people in the South, when we returned home near the end of the war, was the mistreatment--casual, vicious, unfeeling--of animals. Your grandmother's behavior was no exception. She had a dog--everyone had packs of hounds--whose name was--don't laugh--Creighton. He worshiped her; he was her absolute slave. He had the most wounded, pained, saddened, completely expressive eyes I ever saw. My mother obviously never looked into them. She treated him with a detached, brutal disregard. I never saw her pet him. I never heard her mutter a kind word in his direction. Her treatment of Creighton was the only thing I remember my mother and Miss Shug coming to blows about. Miss Shug loved animals as she loved people. She could not bear it that Celie, whom she had prevented Celie's husband, Albert, from beating, beat, and beat unmercifully, the cringing dog, who, even as she swung at him with one of her husband's old belts, or somebody's old belt, tried, unsuccessfully, to lick her hand. She would kick him out of her way even when he wasn't in it.

  "'I watched this strange behavior a long time before I realized what I was watching. Before I saw it. She was my mother, and Mama Nettie had instructed me about all the pain she had endured in her life. She was wonderful to me and to Adam and Tashi and their son, Benny. She was droll, playful, creative, and fun. And so harmless. People often said of her, "Why, Miss Celie wouldn't hurt a fly!" Well, she murdered zillions of flies, as everyone does in a hot climate. But it was her mistreatment of Creighton that no one seemed to notice. Quite the opposite. In fact, because she treated Creighton so badly, other people did the same. Many nasty jokes were made at Creighton's expense; anything missing was assumed to have been stolen by him, even if it was a hairbrush or a spool of thread! Anything knocked over or spilled was his fault. He was considered stupid, lazy, clumsy, ugly, and inferior. He was a stray dog who'd simply "taken up" there, as they said. Where he came from, no one knew. I don't even know how he got the name Creighton.'

  "'What happened to him?'

  "'Miss Shug,' whispered my mother, with a smile of admiration in her voice. 'She liberated him.'

  "'No,' I said.

  "'She did. She took him away with her to Memphis. She kept her own house there, always, you know.'

  "'And what did she do with him?'

  "'They were gone a whole summer. I don't know what she did. But when they came back, Creighton had been rehabilitated.'

  "'No,' I said.

  "'Yes,' said Mom. 'Creighton was no longer a slave; he was a dog. Not only that, Creighton knew the difference. The next time Mama Celie tried to beat him, he bit her. And Miss Shug laughed. Mama Celie never dared attempt to beat or humiliate Creighton again. It was Miss Shug's laughter, I believe, that prevented it.

  "'It was the laughter, from someone she loved with her whole being, that ripped through the callus on Mama Celie's heart. She began to feel for everything: ant, bat, the hoppy toad flattened on the road.'"

  "WHY IS YOUR NAME Robin?" Fanny asked.

  "Because it does not sound Mexican. My mother's name is Esperanza. When we came here and she worked for the gringos--as she called them; a word that I, as a professional analyst must never use--they claimed they couldn't remember it or pronounce it, and anyway it meant Hope, didn't it? So that's what they called her. Her personal name for me was Alamo, which means poplar. And Alamo is still what I am called at home. But enough about me," said Robin. "Have you ever been hypnotized?"

  "Yes," said Fanny. "Sort of. I was in Ohio one summer looking for work--this was when I was in college--and there wasn't much for people like me. I saw an ad in the paper that said the local medical school was hiring subjects to be used in an experiment that studied the effects of hypnosis."

  "Oh?" said Robin. "And what happened?"

  "I was taken back to my six-year-old self. I was asked to write as I did then. When I returned to consciousness, after having been hypnotized, I saw my name on the piece of paper they'd given me, and it was my six-year-old, second-year-of-public-school scrawl."

  "And did they know what questions to ask you, while they had you under their spell?"

  "Of course not," Fanny said. "They were young white men who'd probably never spoken to a black woman other than the ones who cleaned their houses."

  N
ow, there was the sensation of falling very fast inside herself; as if her interior chest and back were those coral and faded indigo walls of a desert canyon. Inside, she thought dreamily, I'm desert color. How nice. There was no bottom where she landed. Only space. Dark, comfortable space.

  "What do you think of white people?" asked Robin's voice. But for all Fanny knew, it was the voice of God.

  Her own voice seemed not to belong to her. In any case it barely escaped her lips. Was she speaking? "I am afraid of them," was her reply.

  "When you look at them," said the voice, "how do they look to you?"

  "Very fat," she said. "They are always eating, eating. Everywhere you go, they are sitting down eating. In Paris, they are eating. In London, they are eating. In Rome. They eat and eat. It makes me feel afraid,"

  "Why do you feel afraid?"

  "When I see them eating, I feel myself to be very hungry. Skin and bones. And I feel their teeth on my leg. But when I look down, sometimes it is not their teeth on my leg, only a cold chain. I am relieved to see it is not their teeth, only a chain. I think that when they called us 'cannibals' they were projecting."

  "But why are you so afraid? If it is only a chain that is on your leg, and not their teeth; it can be broken. It can be filed away."

  "Sometimes I see myself joining them at the table and I am eating, eating, eating, too. And we are all bloated and fat. We have chins down to our sternums, our eyes are clamped shut with fat. But the self that I was is still there, too. Right by the table, smelling the food. And she's as poor, as emaciated, as ever. She and her babies. Nothing but eyes and skin and bone. And I am afraid, because I love her so very much, and she is the self I have lost. And the eating goes nowhere. It is endless gluttony to no purpose whatsoever. And I am afraid because aren't those my teeth on her leg?"

  "MAKE NO MISTAKE," OLA had said, "the people themselves must help one struggle with the truly eternal questions. That is why a resistance movement is invaluable." He and Fanny had been sitting on the verandah having breakfast: papaya juice, fruit, coffee, buttered bread, with several kinds of jam; Ola, she had thought, seemed to get his best ideas over food. "There you are in the inhospitable and, you hope, hidden caves of the countryside, having grass scones and lizard tea; your skin is welted from mosquito bites, your shoes rotted from the humidity, but you are sometimes very happy because everyone has the exact same questions about it all that you do. Or variations on them. Do you know what guerrilla fighters do more than they do anything else? Skirmishes and battles occupy a very small portion of their time. They talk." Ola stopped talking long enough to have a spoonful of fruit. "Talk," he continued, chewing rapidly and swallowing, "is the key to liberation, one's tongue the very machete of freedom. We are the only species, some say, who have created speech. But that is only because, being far less intelligent than the majority of the other animals, and more prone to disastrous blunders, in our relationships with others, speech is so necessary."