In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose

  It is the first major motion picture ever produced by an organization of black women, Delta Sigma Theta. With a history of political activism that includes participation in the feminist and suffragist demonstrations of 1913, the eighty-five thousand members of American-based Delta Sigma Theta, the largest black sorority in the world, decided they would no longer accept the degraded images of black people--and especially black women--being foisted on them from the movie screen. Instead they would raise the money themselves, from among themselves, to make the kind of movie they wanted: one that reflected contemporary values and concerns of black people, and the ungilded magnificence and political activism of black women. Countdown at Kusini, from a script by Ossie Davis (who also directed), Ladi Ladebo, and Al Freeman, Jr., and based on a story by John Storm Roberts, is the result.

  Kusini explores the themes of revolution, guerrilla warfare, and the relation of Afro-Americans to the African struggle against foreign domination. Afro-American musician Red Salter (Greg Morris) is touring in Africa when he gets involved in revolution. Foreign corporations are attempting to destroy the local anticolonialist struggle by assassinating Motapo (Ossie Davis), a revered guerrilla freedom fighter. Salter is enticed by revolutionary Leah Matazima (Ruby Dee) into running guns and transporting Motapo between hiding places.

  The movie is often painful: ideals are betrayed, friends of the revolution are murdered. But it is basically an upbeat, joyous film, with incredible vistas of Africa (filming was done entirely in Nigeria; many of the actors are African), and African ceremonies, music, and customs. One leaves the theater ready to join the next revolutionary battle, not in dejection over how much there is to be done, but in awe of the possibilities for change once an oppressed people decides to rise.

  Nearly all the flaws in Kusini are both obvious and instructive: Ossie Davis, as Motapo (a composite of Patrice Lamumba, Amilcar Cabral, and Martin Luther King), is essentially detached from the character. He plays Motapo as patronizing, too aware of his role as "liberator" of his people. He does not project a depth of feeling, and certainly not enough of it to get through a revolution. Ruby Dee's Leah, Motapo's tough, beautiful corevolutionist, is often distractingly overdressed for her role in a poor, embattled country. Otherwise she is superb, so real as a woman determined to get oppressors off her back that one is moved to reach out and take her hand.

  The film's major flaw is the casting of Greg Morris (who in his plasticity is reminiscent of Richard Nixon) as the Afro-American musician turned gunrunner for the cause. Morris--Barney Collier in the TV series "Mission: Impossible!"--is so awkward and jerky as the macho lover of Leah (who is obviously more woman that he will ever be able to understand, much less dominate) that the audience, both times I saw the film, chuckled at his efforts.

  Another flaw is the obligatory put-down of "the ugly honky woman" (mindlessly pursuing the plastic black hero) in favor of the black woman, Leah, who does not need this sort of cheap build-up.

  Countdown at Kusini is an impressive beginning in moviemaking by the black women of Delta Sigma Theta. I hope they will give us, from now on, at least one such meaningful movie a year.

  1976

  LULLS

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA, JANUARY 15, 1976

  My cousin is driving me through the city. She is slender and brown, an aggressive, vocal driver, at ease with the idiosyncrasies of other drivers, calm at high speed. After a snowy morning in New York, the sunny weather in Atlanta is like spring. "What brings you to Atlanta?" she asks, driving down a hill that affords a sweeping view of the "New Atlanta," from "the world's tallest hotel" (recently completed) to bright murals that cover the walls of several of the city's lower buildings. It is the murals I like; the hotel building--as straight and round as a black finger pointed at the sky--seems imitative in its height, and redundant.

  My cousin's name is Faye.* I have not seen her in ten years. Standing on an Atlanta street corner, resting after a mile-long march from Ebeneezer Baptist Church in support of the right of every American to have a job and also in commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s forty-seventh birthday, I had, while listening to the mellow voice of Atlanta's black mayor, Maynard Jackson, felt a gentle tug on my arm. "Are you my cousin Alice Walker?" she had asked. For an answer I gave her a hug. We stood smiling at each other for the duration of the rally. Then she whisked me away in her car.

  "I had been thinking about how unemployment is killing what remains of the quality of black and/or poor life," I said. "Then I heard about the March for Jobs in Atlanta. I couldn't resist. I also wanted to visit places like Atlanta, Mississippi, and Boston to see what black people are thinking and doing in what appears to be a lull in political protest."

  "I almost didn't come today," she said. "Marching is such a drag once you realize that every time you're out here ruining your feet, your President and congressmen are off skiing somewhere. The last thing they're thinking about is poor folks pounding the street begging--not for food, not for a handout--but for work. Still, it's a good occasion to bump into relatives and friends, and better than doing nothing. What did you think of it?"

  Through much of the march I had thought of the FBI and the CIA. I had focused on J. Edgar Hoover and imagined him--an evil geni spread fumelike over the sky--grinning down on all our former marches, planning ways to make even the greatest of them come to nothing. I had thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., so maligned by so many, fearing--during his last "Mountain Top" days--that he could not remain with us through our final marches, through our arrival (wherever we might arrive), because once black people heard the tapes the FBI threatened to play for us about his sexual "escapades" we would no longer want or believe in him. I had thought how wrong such a fear would have been. Black people had heard rumors about King's sexual "appetite" for years, had read stories that had him making love to strange women "Super-fly" style in bathtubs, yet the majority of us had understood perfectly the character assassination being attempted, and had wished him only joy in whatever part of his life he had left to himself, any modicum of pleasure. At least I had felt that way.

  "I felt silly, marching," I said. "The songs stuck in my throat. When someone started singing 'We Shall Overcome' I actually choked. But then I found myself singing anyway, because if black people still want to sing, if they can still dig up the heart, who am I not to sing with them?"

  The only stanza of the former black movement anthem nobody could get past their lips was the "black and white together" one. It was quickly replaced by "Full Employment Now." I was struck by that. That, and the fact that the person singing near our group who had the purest voice, the sweetest voice, was a young man, barely in his twenties, who was obviously a junkie. At the sudden high force of this young man's voice people in my line of marchers halted, as if an angel from the Movement's past had come to join them. As one person we turned to welcome him, the only singer, it seemed, still capable of infusing the old, righteous energy into our songs. He had reeled under the euphoria of his drug, even as he marched.

  What does this mean, I'd wondered, clutching my handbag tightly, annoyed at this reflex action even as I gazed with sorrow at his sensitive, though lost, dark face; aware it might not be long before I knew.

  Faye has been a student of French literature at Brown University since we last saw each other. "It was a disaster," she says. "I thought I'd go crazy. I wanted to study French-speaking Haitian poets, and of course all I ever got was Proust."

  After Brown there was a year in Lyon "studying and loafing." She has been married--briefly and badly--divorced, and is now studying in an Atlanta seminary to become a minister. She already has a church in her hometown, and this coming Sunday she will preach. "God and I are on excellent terms," she says cheerfully, as if it explains the way she drives. She also runs a day-care center, and as she speeds past the brightly decorated buildings she points out the kind of art, the lively colors, she wants for her children's walls.

  I am amazed that a young, under-thirty, woman like Fa
ye would want to be a minister.

  "But, Alice" she explains, "in the black community, the church has more power than any other institution. We no longer have our schools. We never did have 'town hall.' All we ever really had was the black church, and thank God it hasn't been integrated out of existence. It is my church that sponsors the day-care center I run. There was no other black institution that could take the responsibility.

  "My mother can't understand why her daughter wants to be a minister, either. She keeps trying to marry me off again. I believe she thinks if I'm not interested in the men she digs up for me, it must mean I'm gay. Black folks with unmarried daughters are running scared, in this age of women's liberation." She laughs. "I like men; I just don't have time for them right now. But from the way my mother carries on, you'd think she never heard of a woman wanting to be independent."

  I am disappointed at this news of my aunt. When I was a child, my aunts (including Faye's mother) were the most independent people I knew. They were nine strong girls who grew up in the second decade of this century on my grandfather's farm. With the help of their three brothers, they had run it. At family reunions they would reminisce about the old days when each of them had been able to fish and hunt and trap, to shoot "straight as a man," and to defend themselves with their own fists. After telling of a typical day's work on the farm, during which she had done everything from rounding up cattle on horseback to helping slaughter pigs, my favorite aunt would add: "And then I'd come in the house, bathe, put on my red dress, put a little red rouge on my lips, put a dusting of talcum down my bosom, do up my hair, and wait for my 'fella' to come calling."

  My aunts had liked to brag about their healthy bodies, their strong muscles, the amount they could cook and eat and work, and their refusal ever to back down from an equal fight out of fear. Unlike many women who were told throughout their adolescence they must marry, I was never told by my mother or any one of her sisters it was something I need even think about. It is because of them that I know women can do anything, and that one's sexuality is not affected by one's work.

  "Well," says Faye, "they haven't done anything independent for thirty years. They wanted to sit down in fine houses like white women in the movies. They wanted husbands around to ''protect' them. (Though 'protecting' them has driven most of their husbands, including my daddy, nuts.) Now they just want grandchildren, like everybody else."

  I say nothing. I am thinking of the aunts I wished to be like: I still see them standing in overgrown fields shooting hawks, killing snakes, not knowing what it meant to be afraid of mice.

  Joe Harris

  Faye has stopped the car in a quiet suburban neighborhood. We walk up the driveway to the door of a modest brick house surrounded by trees. A large German shepherd greets Faye by bounding forward and attempting to lick her face. This is the home of Joe Harris, a very old and close friend, whom I have not seen for two years. I am eager to talk to him about his return from Boston to live in the South, since living in the South is something he once swore never to do. Joe comes to the door and lets us in, restraining the dog, Uhuru, by holding his collar. "Sit, Uhuru!" he says sharply, pulling out kitchen chairs for us. His wife, Mabel, is at the stove, cooking something that does not smell ethnic--when I am with relatives or old friends I become hungry for specific kinds of food: fried chicken, pork chops, chitterlings, greens, cornbread--I am disappointed that none of these seems to be cooking.

  Joe is nearly six feet tall and his muscular body is showing signs of flab. He has nut-brown skin, an aquiline nose, and straightened black hair that curls over his shoulders in the manner of Errol Flynn.

  "I hated Boston," he tells me. "Black people in Boston have so little unity they won't even get together for a riot."

  He asks his wife to hand him a beer. She is black-skinned, curvaceous, and silent.

  "Mabel doesn't agree with me," Joe says, sipping his beer, "but that's okay. I love it here. I love the climate, everything. In Boston I was always sick. Had to stay off work all the time because of colds, my tonsils, the flu. Here it doesn't get that cold. In my job as manager of a night club I don't have to be out in all kinds of weather changing tires the way I had to do in Boston. Changing tires was the only kind of job somebody with my education could get."

  I know Joe as well as I know my own brothers. We grew up near each other, attended the same school. He was one of the smartest students ever to attend the local schools in Eatonton, Georgia, our hometown. According to his IQ test results he was gifted. But he could not be disciplined. He was eventually expelled from school in the eleventh grade for slapping a teacher and threatening to slap our school principal.

  "If I had a college education," he says, "I could really do well here." He thinks back to our high-school days: "I couldn't take school because when I wore my hair long, like an Afro, in 1954 and '55, the teachers bugged me about it. And I couldn't stand Mr. McGlockton [our principal] because he wasn't a man. He let the white folks in town run him. And through him, us. They wouldn't even call him 'Mr.' or 'Dr.'; they called him 'Professor.'"

  I had liked Mr. McGlockton. It was true, I said to Joe now, that he was humiliated by whites in town who hated to see any black person with an education or a position of importance, but he had been a kind, gentle man who always made time to talk to the students. I assumed he was better than the people who humiliated him, not worse.

  This rather generous rationalization (as he sees it) does not impress Joe Harris, who wanted a hero, and got, he thinks, a coward.

  "Except," he says sadly, drinking his beer, "those crackers would never have called him 'Mr.' back then, no matter what. That being the case, I should have stuck it out in school, gone off to college somewhere, become a lawyer, and come back home to kick asses. But it's too late now."

  His two sons come in. They are bright-eyed, curious eight-and nine-year-olds. "Where've you two little niggers been?" asks Joe.

  Hearing this, I remember why I have not seen Joe in such a long time. It is because he calls people nigger. Once, in fact, he called my daughter that. We argued, bitterly. I felt I could never forgive him.

  "I've cut down a lot," he says apologetically, "on my use of that word. You know, before you mentioned it to me that time, I didn't realize anybody'd be offended by it."

  "Not simply offended," I say, "hurt. Whenever I hear a black person I love using that word I feel as if I'm being killed."

  Faye has been listening intently. "I still use 'nigger' a lot," she says, "and I just assumed there was nothing negative about it any more. After all, Red Foxx uses it on national television all the time."

  "I've told Joe not to call our kids that," says Joe's wife, Mabel. "I keep telling him that just because they're 'niggers' to white people they shouldn't be 'niggers' to him, too."

  "I'm preparing them," says Joe.

  "You are preparing them to be 'niggers'?" I ask.

  He makes a gesture that means I do not understand.

  Faye continues: "But then something happened that made me know I had been meaning negative things about the person I called 'nigger,' no matter how many positive adjectives I put in front of it. I met a young man, younger than me--I do think there's a lot to be said for the younger generation--who was so wise and so fine, I mean, where his head was, and his tenderness toward me and his respect for all black people, that I just had to tell my best friend about him, so I called her and I said, 'Girl, let me tell you about this fine nig--' and I just couldn't finish. I couldn't call him that. Because no matter how I prettied it up, he just wasn't a nigger."

  "I hate Red Foxx's show anyway," says Mabel, finally sitting down, 'not just for his stupid nigger and Puerto Rican jokes, but for how he treats 'Aunt Esther.'"

  (Aunt Esther is a character on Red Foxx's "Sanford and Son." She is tall, angular, and black, and is called "gorilla" with stunning regularity.)

  "Everybody's laughing at Aunt Esther," says Mabel, "but they know she looks just like them or some of their relatives. We for
get white people have been calling us 'gorillas' for years. They probably think they're right, now that they see us on TV doing it to ourselves."

  I am reminded that on a recent American Airlines flight from San Francisco to New York I watched an NFL football short starring a famous black running back. The opening shot was of several monkeys dressed in scarves and raincoats, waving large pocketbooks, jumping up and down, "cheering" in the stands. After some footage showing the famous star doing his famous running, the closing shot was of his wife and two other black women, dressed almost identically to the monkeys, jumping up and down cheering the famous star, their pocketbooks in the air. The persons who made this film were making a visual derogatory statement; one I could not immediately protest, except to ache to rip the screen out of the plane, at thirty-five thousand feet. When I arrived in New York, at Kennedy Airport, I learned La Guardia Airport had been bombed. And I thought: Where there are insults to the dignity of people, acts of retaliatory violence endanger the lives of all of us. Each of us pays in fear and anxiety--if not in actual loss of life--and it is a high price.

  Joe Harris talks about his garden, his trees, his unlittered quiet street. "I can go for days, even weeks," he says happily, "without seeing a white person. I buy gas for my car from a black man. I shop, and I see only black faces. Black night clubs here are owned by black people, and they're nice, nothing flashy or tacky, like in Boston. Liquor stores are owned by black people. I bought my house from a black realtor. .. All I get from white folks is my electricity and my telephone.

  "In Boston a poor man can work his ass off, and never own anything but dirt and roaches."

  "And the children's education?"

  "Well"--he frowns--"that's about the same here as in Boston. When they integrate the schools in this country what they integrate is teachers. In my children's classes all the children are black, the teachers white. Our oldest boy is just as rebellious as I was. He has a hard time accepting discipline from a white teacher."