Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [19]
He laughed. No, you don’t, he said.
I don’t even know why I’m going the other way, she said, with a mock grimace, as the flight attendant took her ticket.
You have to, he said.
Who knew! she said, shrugging, disappearing toward the plane.
Apparently enlightenment of any sort required a lot of regurgitation. Kate remembered telling a friend about her experience with magic mushrooms. How much they’d helped her when she’d been overwhelmed with grief. It had been a time in the seventies when she finally got it that the earth was being destroyed; that human beings were living in a time when Time was running out. She’d taken the medicine with no idea it would help her. It had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, an odd visitor had brought it. Really she’d taken it because she didn’t care anymore. Any reality seemed better than the one she was in. That of knowing humans had fouled their nest so badly it would no longer nurture them. And the first thing that happened was she’d gotten rotten sick. Nausea. Worse than being pregnant. And she’d thrown up.
She’d urged her friend to try the medicine. But the friend dismissed it. I can’t bear being nauseous, she’d said.
But there’s the other side of being nauseous, Kate said. You get to the other side. And that is where you want to get. It’s not just about being sick to your gills.
No, thanks, said the friend. I couldn’t do it.
Kate thought of this as she sat, shivering, hunched over a hole that had been dug in front of her in the ground.
They’d been asked to drink half a gallon of a frothy liquid that tasted like soapsuds. This was to provoke the vomiting and the diarrhea that would clean them out. You could never put a sacred medicine into a polluted body. The heavy meat eaters, if there were any, were especially warned. Fortunately, for this trip, unlike all the others in her life, she’d read everything she could find on what this experience with plant medicines might be. She’d even gone to a local shaman at home, surprised that one lived within driving distance of her. What was happening in the world, she had wondered, that it was possible to call up a shaman who spoke your language and whose voice mail said yes, call again, there might be a space for you? She had gone, taken the horrible-tasting medicine, and for the next seven hours, after the gut-wrenching nausea and diarrhea, had sat wearing a black mask over her eyes, and watched the pictures her plant friends drew for her. It was exactly like being in school, but with fascinating text material. The teacher however was unique. She was Grandmother. The oldest Being who ever lived. Her essence that of Primordial Female Human Being As Tree. Surprisingly, she was not angry. Or even, apparently, perturbed. It was as if she were explaining how a pet project she’d personally sponsored had somehow gone wrong. But this was only the tiniest part of it.
The waves of nausea were like real waves, bending her double by their force. Into the hole went everything that wasn’t internally attached. And though the waves were powerful, her dislike of them was not. This was different; even vomiting so violently that her body was bathed in sweat, Kate noticed this. She saw that even though throwing up is itself revolting, she had, after many sessions with Grandmother, learned to do it well; almost elegantly. She smiled, even as another wave rocked her off her rough-hewn log seat and to her shaken knees. She did not care anymore about the discomfort of this phase. She knew a phase was all it was. That beyond this three hours of drinking soapsuds and vomiting and going to the bushes, Grandmother waited, just as she had waited for indigenous people sick with disease and fear for thousands of years.
I am an American, Kate thought. Indigenous to the Americas. Nowhere else could I, this so-called Black person—African, European, Indio—exist. Only here. In Africa there would have been no Europeans, no Native Americans. In Europe, no Africans and no