The Temple of My Familiar

  Fanny bit into a small hard roll that showered her blouse with crust flakes.

  "We must have a world language," said Ola, reaching over to dust her off, and making Fanny feel like a small child, "before we can have world peace. But imagine how people will fight over which language it must be!" He laughed. "Of course it should be something elegant, but relatively simple, and you must not be able to say 'I despise your kind,' or 'I do not respect your god' in it; in short, it should be Olinka. I'm joking," said Ola.

  "No, you're not," said Fanny, smiling.

  "This frustration with the whites," Ola said, thoughtfully, and not responding to her smile, "is a natural reaction to what they have, collectively, done to you, not simply as an individual, but as a people, a culture, a race. The instinct for self-defense and self-preservation is innate, although there was a time, and very recently, too, when white scholars actually did studies that 'proved,' in their eyes, these instincts were innate in all people except us. They'd put us so far down, you see, they thought we'd never get up again, so they advanced theories that showed our innate love of being down." He sipped his coffee, added a dollop of cream to it, and frowned. "I have been responsible for the deaths of whites," said Ola. "It did not 'liberate' me psychologically, as Fanon suggested it might. It did not oppress me further, either. I was simply freeing myself from the jail that they had become for me, and making a space in the world, also, for my children."

  And Fanny thought: Right. Even fifteen years ago I could not have come here. I could not walk or drive on the roads of my father's country in peace. He could not have met me at just any gate at the airport. He could not have protected me from white viciousness on the street.

  "You must harmonize your own heart," said Ola. "Only you will know how you can do that; for each of us it is different. Then harmonize, as much as this is ever possible, your surroundings." He thought for a moment, sighed. "Whatever you do," he said, "stay away from people who pity themselves. People who are always complaining have a horrifying tendency to spread their own lead into everybody's arse."

  Fanny smiled at this.

  "You must try not to want 'things,' too," said Ola, "for 'thingism' is the ultimate block across the path of peace. If everytime you see a tree, you want to make some thing out of it, soon no one on earth will even have air to breathe. Trees that are already dead are fine," he added. "Old logs dug up out of the mud are okay." He chuckled softly, as if at a private joke.

  "Make peace with those you love and that love you or with those you wish to love. These are your companeros, as the Latin Americans say. Above all, resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there."

  "Even in the consciousness of those who have fallen down the drug barrel?" asked Fanny, skeptically.

  "Especially those," said Ola. "The struggle with the eternal questions, the ones not definitively answered by the rebel or revolutionary in his or her late teens or early twenties, when one thinks all problems can be solved--the thoughts that so trouble you, the eternally nagging furies--these things are what probably pushed many of our people over the edge. But they can be retrieved. If they do not die from their addictions--their attempts to banish all intelligence about what is really happening to the world, while inhaling the rotten fragrance of the lotus of their 'escape'--they will have to see that they are killing themselves. Their teeth are gnawing on their own legs."

  SUWELO HAD AT LAST driven up from San Francisco to see Fanny. She was then living by herself in the little yurt they'd once shared during summers.

  "My father told me, shortly before he died," said Fanny, as they warmed themselves by her small fire, in which pinecones occasionally popped, "to harmonize my relations with you." As she thought about Ola she identified with Zindzi Mandela, Nelson Mandela's daughter, whom she had recently heard on the radio, trying to keep alive the words of her father, imprisoned for twenty-five years. "Of course it takes two to harmonize," she said firmly, gazing into the fire. "But I am to struggle with you in the faith that harmonizing is possible. This has nothing to do with the question of whether or not we sleep together."

  Suwelo sighed. What a difficult woman this was!

  "And what does your mother say?" he asked, sardonically. Fanny seemed very small, and young, despite the threads of silver at her temples that had appeared since he last saw her.

  Fanny smiled. "As you know, my mother counsels forgiveness. It is the spring castor-oil tonic of the soul."

  "And why are these the messages we are given?" asked Suwelo, feeling little hope. "Why is this what they say, and not something a wee bit more probable?"

  Fanny shrugged. "Let's face it, Suwelo," she said; "it is because we are the people we are and not some other people. We are not white people, for instance. This is the message not simply from my parents, but it is the message from the beginning. We can trace this message from our earliest contact with the sun."

  "No shit," he said. "The sun?"

  "We have never considered the sun an enemy," Fanny continued gravely, "only, perhaps in the beginning, a goddess. Then later, no doubt under coercion and stretching our imagination to the limit, a god. We have never, until very recently, far less than a thousand years, known the cold. Deep in our hearts, because of our relationship to the sun, we believe we are loved simply for being here. There is no reason for us to hate ourselves. As someone has said: I can dig worshiping the sun, because it worships back. Our relationship to the sun is the bedrock of our security as black human beings. We have our melanin, we have our pads of woolly hair. We're ready for the beach. We can cope." Fanny smiled.

  "But are you not," said Suwelo, "afraid of being burned? After all, even the sun is no longer what it was." What he was really asking was whether or not she had the courage to love him, changeable as he was.

  "The sun hasn't changed," she said, looking into the fire. "It is exactly the same, as far as human beings are concerned, and will remain so for inconceivable lifetimes to come. It is we who have changed in relation to it. The African white man was born without melanin, or with only incredibly small amounts of it. He was born unprotected from the sun. He must have felt cursed by God. He would later project this feeling onto us and try to make us feel cursed because we are black; but black is a color the sun loves. The African white man could not blame the sun for his plight, not without seeming ridiculous, but he could eventually stop people from worshiping it. He could put a new god in its place that more closely resembled himself: cold, d