She had been flying across the mountain slopes on the back of the shining black stallion before us, secure among these "alien" people, yearning body and soul for the shelter and passion of Manuelito's arms, believing that the moon was with her, and so perhaps her own father might be. But she was, unfortunately, the daughter of a fool. I had failed her and without reason destroyed her life.
Manuelito, I said, I wish I were dead.
Ah, you are now ready, Senor, he said.
In the blink of an eye, the black stallion, Vado, reared in our faces, and a triumphant Magdalena jumped from his back.
Fathers
My name is Father, I said to her, when I found myself looking into her eyes. I am the father watching over you, the daughter that I love. She appeared mutely humble, hearing this, for so ebullient a soul. Her gratitude so raw that had I felt it in life, I am sure it would have made me bleed.
When the time came, and I knelt before her, I kissed not only her palms and the arches of her feet, which seemed to buzz with energy, but also her knees. Because, after all, it is to our knees that we must sometimes be driven, before we can recognize, witness, or welcome our own light.
Light
It was like Susannah to die of old age, at home, in bed, in her sleep, and while dreaming!
Of what were you dreaming? I asked her, as we watched the gathering of her friends, some with plates of food in their hands, coming into her house and into her room.
Oh, she said, smiling, I was dreaming of Anand, and the way that we met.
Anand?
Yes, she said. He is the man in the corner, with the wonderful white mustache, weeping. He is also the brother of the man I married. You recall Petros, no?
Believe me, the recollection is vague by now, I said.
She laughed.
I met Anand the day we disinterred the body of Irene's mother and reburied it on a hillside overlooking the sea.
Susannah's had been a life that, to my regret, and because of my own need to cause her suffering, I knew little about, no matter that the Mundo thought the dead knew everything. Curious, I urged her to continue.
Oh, it is a long story, she said, but we have a long time. I will tell it to you. By the time she got to the digging up of the trunk in which Irene's nameless mother was buried, I was almost in tears.
Her mother's trunk was just like the one at the foot of my bed, she said, inviting me, with a gesture, to look. Petros sold that one to me for a dollar and twenty kisses. He was ashamed of it because it was crude. But, in fact, it was crude only because he did not understand its value.
And what was that? I said, peering more critically at the large cedar chest with carved flowers and mountains and rivers all over it. While I looked, a very old woman, even older-looking than my sister, with snowy dreadlocks to her knees, sank down upon the trunk, weeping.
Ah, said Susannah, Pauline. Is there nothing I can do to solace her?
The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory, I said.
No kidding, she said, reflectively.
It is large, I said, imagining Petros dragging the heavy trunk all the way from Greece.
Yes, said Susannah. And for good reason. In the old days the trunk or chest contained everything a young woman took with her when she married and left her parents' house. It contained linen and silver, her clothes, her small spindle, even her cooking pots and pans. By attaching two curved pieces of wood underneath, that fit neatly inside the trunk when not in use, its owner could turn it into a cradle. During her marriage, and after her babies were big, she kept everything she valued inside it. When she died, she was buried in it.
And so, I said, Irene's mother was buried in her portable coffin!
Or in her cradle, said Susannah.
On the low, simple wooden bed, Susannah wore a long green nightgown, beautifully embroidered. Her thin white hair was in a dozen plaits with red ribbon wrapped around them, and rested on her chest. In one hand was a feather, in the other a green jellybean. Several of her friends, who appeared haggard, as if they'd sat with her all night, were slowly beginning to stir. Anand rose from his vigil in the corner and approached the bed.
At first I thought he was Petros, said Susannah, looking tenderly at him. They resemble each other so much. I think I thought so all the while I watched him and the other men digging up Irene's mother's body. But then, when we were having the ceremony of reburial, and he joined the women dancing, I realized it couldn't be. He was dancing and weeping, right along with us!
He weeps a lot, I said.
He's so heavy! she said. It's true. When we got to know each other and became lovers and then just good, comfortable old friends, I used to listen to his stories about his work among the poor and among battered women and children and in the refugee camps--apparently there are always refugee camps in Greece--and I would think how his deep concern for people, his taking on of moral burdens, which meant he could never abandon Greece, made Petros seem like Anand Lite.
She laughed. One too light, the other too heavy, she said.
And Pauline just right?
With time, yes, she said. She needed only to honor her own sovereignty and to relearn tenderness.
She should get up off the trunk, I said, so that they can put you in it.
My trunk is my house, she said. But I do care a great deal for the one Petros sold me. His mother gave it to him, even though he was a boy, because she lost all her daughters while they were babies. He lugged it off to America, but was eager to get rid of it. I had an instinct that it would have a history I would uncover someday.
Susannah did not seem at all surprised that we were having this conversation in the same room in which she lay dead.
No, she said, reading my thoughts, nothing surprises me anymore. Once you've smelled an orange or really seen a tree, what could surprise you?
Poor Irene, I said, thinking of her small friend.
She wanted to see her mother's face, said Susannah. I thought it was probably not a good idea. Anand thought it was not. But she insisted. That meant opening the trunk.
She sighed.
And? I asked.
They had bound her mother's hands and feet. She was all in black. They had placed a black shroud over her head.
Black is beautiful, I said, sarcastically.
When it is the truth, yes, said Susannah. That was its only beauty in this situation.
And Irene?
She died within the month.
No, I said.
Susannah shrugged. She was old, and frail, she said sadly. Sighing, she continued. She was so small, so alone, so fierce, so loving, and her people did everything they could to hurt her. It is beyond belief.
It is a woman's life, I said.
As we watched, Susannah's friends began to cover her bed, and her body, with the boughs of trees. I looked around the small room where she lay.
I thought you'd have a more splendid house, I said.
My splendid house was crushed by an even more splendid tree, she replied. I learned to live, contentedly, in the lesson I was taught by that loss.
Aren't you curious about why I am here? I asked. Or about our parents, or Manuelito?
As she was pondering this, I thought of all of them.
Of teaching my savvy mother how to cross the river. Of the way I felt when my father blessed me. After the blessing, he simply vanished. I was left alone with Manuelito. We kissed. We were still kissing when I found myself in Susannah's room watching her die. From the look of things, especially from the look of Susannah's white hair and very old body, decades had passed. This meant, had to mean, that Manuelito was also gone.
Remember, Magdalena, Manuelito had told me, that it is true, as the Mundo believe, that eternity is forever. But at the same time, it is only as long as there is need.
Our eternity together had been long and blissful. Now it was over. Like any other love affair. This thought made me laugh.
What's the
joke? asked Susannah.
What's not the joke? I replied.
Looking more closely at the contents of my sister's room, I saw that there were stacks and piles of papers and books. Notebooks of all colors and sizes. Copies of her published books, videos, recordings of her readings. Her friends were slowly and methodically pouring oil over everything.
When it burns, said Susannah, it will smell of frankincense. She seemed delighted, like a child in anticipation of a marshmallow roast.
You can't mean what I think you mean, I said, as we watched every person, even the little children, bring in more dry twigs, branches of fir trees, dead leaves, and straw.
She nodded.
But, Susannah, I said, this is your legacy!
Magdalena, she said, you are here because you are sorry you deliberately led me astray such a very long time ago. That is all the legacy I need.
But you won't be remembered, I said, somewhat desperately for a ghost.
It is the need to be remembered that has caused most of the trouble in the world, she said. Most of the conquering. Destruction of what is natural. War.
Well, your books are in libraries, I said. So your gesture is symbolic.
Yes, she said. Unfortunately.
Only her face and her hands were now visible, underneath everything that had been piled on top of her. Her friends came slowly forward, a final time, to touch her and to say good-bye. Finally only Anand and Pauline remained. With a look at Anand, Pauline left the room. Out of respect, while he knelt beside Susannah, his old bones creaking, I looked away. Soon Pauline returned, and Anand left the room. Again, I looked away. When next I looked, it was to see that Susannah's body was alone in the room, and that Pauline had cut off and left, draped across the mound of dry straw, fir branches, and leaves, the full length of her dreadlocked white hair.
The flames from her burning house were bright and reminded me of a poem:
When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
willingly burning myself
to light up the darkness around me.
To you, victorious
who taught me
fuzz of peach
wet of pear
light of owl
shine of
bear.
This scandalous
prayer of
a
book
both remembrance
&
offering.
&
in kinship with
our
insouciant
fun-loving
nonreading
relatives
the delightful cousins
Bonobo.
May Life be thanked
for them.
Acknowledgments
I thank the spirit of Eros for its presence in my life and for the lessons it has taught me. I thank the community of spiritual helpers who gathered to support me during the writing of this book. Among them I thank Barbara G. Walker for her immensely important scholarship, and especially for her profound and indispensable book The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. I thank Isabel Fonseca for her clear-hearted, insightful, and heroic book Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. I thank Frans De Waal and Frans Lanting for introducing me, in their book Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, to cousins I had imagined, and written about in an earlier novel, but without proof of their actual existence. I thank the men and women who came to consciousness during the Vietnam War--including Ron Kovic and Oliver Stone--and who returned to tell us what happened to them there. I thank the people of Mexico for having, over the centuries, taken in small wave upon small wave of Indians and African-Amerindians fleeing genocide and enslavement in the United States. These were some of our best people; it is profoundly moving to see in Mexico today, in the eyes of their descendants, these freedom-loving ancestors looking back at me. I thank Zelie Kuliaikanu'u Duvauchelle for inviting me to share life-changing adventures and for loving her Hawaiian ancestors so much she has learned to sing their songs. I thank Peter Bratt and Benjamin Bratt for being an inspiration. I thank Wynton Marsalis for loving our soul. I thank the Great Spirit of the Universe for regularly carrying me to the edge, permitting me to contemplate the drop, and for holding me well. Ho!
--ALICE WALKER
Temple Jook House, Mendocino, California
June 1997
By the Light of My Father's Smile
ALICE WALKER
A Reader's Guide
A Conversation with Alice Walker
"Alice Walker: On Finding Your Bliss"
Interview by Evelyn C. White
This conversation is reprinted from a interview originally printed in
Ms. Magazine in September/October 1998.
"You look like you're dressed for summer," says Alice Walker, skeptically, to a shorts-clad visitor who arrives at her majestic, 40-acre retreat in northern California. For Walker, who grew up in the blistering heat of rural Georgia, the mid-60s isn't anywhere close to her idea of warm. Indeed, bundled up in a black and gray striped shirt, crimson V-neck sweater, black pants and boots, Walker looks as if she's ready to curl up in front of a roaring fire. A friend from Hawaii, tanned and bright-eyed, is similarly attired except that her pants are a dazzling green; a green that mirrors the rolling, tree-blan-keted vista that extends for miles outside the window of Walker's luxuriant kitchen--which is where she and I settle after her friend excuses herself.
Sipping cups of ginseng tea, we sit at a gleaming wooden table that is adorned with a vase of peach-colored lilies. The petals of the flowers are fully open, making them appear as if they're flirting with a tall, leafy banana tree in an adjacent corner. "I'm going to put it outside on the deck," says Walker, about the tree. "Maybe it'll coax some heat over here."
Heat? The woman wants heat? Well, she can count on fire. Because fiery emotions are sure to be evoked in readers of Walker's stunning new novel, By the Light of My Father's Smile (Random House). A passionate, richly detailed celebration of sexuality, By the Light ... is by far Walker's most erotic novel. Moreover, the complex, multinarrated story, which is set in Mexico, features a ghost father who, from his spiritual perch, watches the rapturous lovemaking of his daughter.
As such, Walker knows that By the Light ... is likely to provoke a riot of Bible-thumping outrage. But if anything's clear after examining the life of the Pulitzer prizewinning author of The Color Purple, it's that she's no shrinking violet.
In fact, readers and reviewers could have predicted what was to come by taking a close look at Walker's first book, Once, a collection of poetry published in 1968. The title poem features a stanza that reads:
By the Light of My Father's Smile
One day in
Georgia
Working around
the Negro section
My friend got a
letter
in
the mail
--the letter
said
"I hope you're
having a good
time
fucking all
the niggers."
"Sweet." I winced.
"Who
wrote it?"
"mother."
she
said.
Considering her literary beginnings as a black woman writer who came out of the block breaking taboos, is it any surprise that thirty years and twenty-two books later, Walker, one of the most censored writers in the U.S., still gets people upset? People like a reviewer of her 1989 novel, The Temple of My Familiar, who denounced the book, calling it a "pantheistic plea, lesbian propaganda, a hootchie-cootchie dance to castration."
On that note, here's a bit of advice for folks wishing to spare themselves grief: Alice Walker is never going to conform. You'd best get with the hootchie-cootchie.
The youngest of eight children, Walker was reared by struggling tenant farmers who, she says, themselves never uttered an off-color remark, des
pite the indignities they suffered in the Jim Crow South. She entered Spelman College in Atlanta on full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred up north to Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York, graduating in January 1966.
Continuing the civil rights activism that marked her college years, Walker returned to the South, where she was involved in voter registration drives and campaigns for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi. While there, she met and later married a white civil rights lawyer. Upon taking their vows, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi--a union that brought them a steady stream of taunts, harassment, and murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
Undeterred by burning crosses and firebombs, Walker continued to pen groundbreaking literature that chronicled the condition of black women--novels and books of poetry such as The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and Revolutionary Petunias.
Divorced (amicably), and the mother of daughter Rebecca, Walker worked in New York as an editor for Ms. before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. Already a prolific and highly respected writer, she became internationally known in the 1980s with the publication of The Color Purple and its subsequent film release.
The calm, contemplative life Walker has created (typical days will find her tending the artichokes, strawberries, and collard greens in her magnificent garden) has given rise to an ever-expanding cornucopia of novels, stories, essays, and poems. In recent years, she has turned her eye to topics as varied as the Million Man March, Michael Jackson, female genital mutilation, Winnie Mandela, Native American rights, and the injustice of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. Indeed, speaking recently about her admiration for Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Walker proclaimed: "What's not to like about the man? If Fidel could dance, he'd be perfect!"
As evidenced by her new novel, Alice Walker, at age fifty-four, is a sassy, sensuous woman who maintains a passion and hopefulness about life that she seeks to impart to all who cross her path. Witness the neighbor who arrives midway through our conversation. A native of Alabama, the woman is also dressed in long pants and immediately launches into a lament about the "chill" in the air. Hoping to lift her spirits, Walker directs the woman to her kitchen window, from where they both gaze longingly at a huge swimming pond in the meadow below.