Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [25]
I don’t think so either, said Kate. I don’t understand why people have such a hard time seeing it’s impossible to be only one thing; and to love only one gender or one race. At least it seems impossible for me. It would be like thinking only beautiful people have green eyes. Limitation is willful and childish, she said. And so much less fun.
It’s not that interesting, no, said Anunu. But it’s been an excellent way, for thousands of years, to keep a society’s labor force under control.
Kate nodded. Her brain began to perk up more, to start to click with thought, the way it did when she met someone she could talk “shorthand” with. Talking with Anunu she thought maybe she didn’t need to take the Ayahuasca. Otherwise known as yagé. Grandmother.
Anunu was speaking softly, looking into Kate’s face with such kindness!
Oh, she said, what I’ve discovered is that with lovers as with everything, there are cycles, seasons. If you live your life in such a way as to become free rather than to become not free, she continued, you will find Life presents you with regular summers and winters and autumns and springs. There will be times when the masculine will demand your interest and attention, she said. Times when the feminine will rise and exact her due.
She sat back in her orange-sunset-colored chair and interlaced her long fingers. For instance, she said, when I began to hear Grandmother calling me, I noticed more and more men coming into my life. It is all Grandmother, of course, she said, chuckling, regardless of appearances! As they say in the Church of Religious Science about God. And there were all these men—can you guess why?
Kate shook her head. Uh-uh, she said, I hope they were cute.
Some were, said Anunu. Some were definitely not. She laughed. But to a man they were ethnobotanists.
Ethno-whats? asked Kate.
Folks who study people’s relationships with their plants. That is, the plants that grow around them.
Kate leaned forward in her seat. She felt like a gong had gone off in her head. Bong. This always happened when a single word triggered awareness that she had stumbled onto the right path. People and their plants. Plants and their people. She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives. As a child she had spent hours talking to, caressing, sitting in, kissing, and otherwise trying to communicate with trees. As a very young child she’d been convinced that trees had mouths and that she could find a mouth on a tree if only she grew tall enough and looked for it very hard.
Why can’t they talk? she’d once asked her mother, who’d laughed and told everyone about the funny question her little daughter had asked.
It was clear she had met an inspirer in Anunu and that they could continue talking well into the afternoon. Her friend was sitting outside the door, however, waiting for her own interview.
Later, back in the room in which they were to work, Anunu gave them a final word of advice: You will find . . . well, who knows what you will find, she corrected herself, smiling. (She did not want to tell them that their first image, after fully receiving the medicine, would in all likelihood be of two gigantic, entwined, perhaps copulating snakes.) But what happens to me is that just when I think nothing is happening and I’m shut outside of my experience with Grandmother, I will notice, sort of out of the corner of my eye, that there is a large brick wall or something like that. At first I will feel incapable of getting over, around, or through it. Then I will remember that I can mentally remove one of the bricks. I will do this. Suddenly I will find myself on the other side.
They were required to wear diapers! This had seemed unbearably funny to Kate. And amusing to realize she liked the bulky feel of them between her legs. She was a baby again; she realized how much she must have enjoyed being one. She seemed to remember, feeling the diapers on her bottom, that when she was a baby people were always kissing her. Um, she thought. Happy.
This is to make sure