Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [41]
Naturally
Naturally, said Lalika, there came a time during our ordeal when we knew our only hope was to pray. I asked Saartjie, Do you believe in God? She said no. We discussed this problem for a little while. We didn’t have much time because the guards let us out of our cells and into the yard for only fifteen minutes. It was the only time during the day that we saw each other. By then I loved the sight of her more than my life. She was a large, bosomy woman with a big butt and a slow smile. Not that either of us smiled much in jail. We’d met in the field picking peaches with other migrant workers, though most of the others were from Mexico.
We have to have somebody to pray to, she said. Jesus, I suggested. He suffered.
Maybe, she said, but with a tone that Jesus didn’t quite get it for her. He had a father, she said, looking away from me.
It wasn’t long after that that one of the other prisoners lent us a Jet magazine. You know how Jet can be counted on to tell you the unglossed good and bad of the black race. And in this issue there was the story of Saartjie Bartmann.
Really? said Kate. Wondering what Jet had had to say.
Just the bare bones, said Lalika. How she’d been taken from South Africa by someone who put her in an exhibition because of her physical “deformities.” Which were the norm in the tribe she was from. How she’d been dubbed the “Hottentot Venus” and forced to show herself to incredulous Europeans all over Europe. How when she died in childbirth she and the child were still dragged, embalmed and in an open coffin, around Europe. How parts of her body were cut off, pickled, and kept in a jar, ending up in a Paris museum.
Amazing, said Kate.
Typical, we thought.
And to have only that to read while you were being abused, said Kate.
Exactly, said Lalika. They were sitting on a log that had washed up when the river overran its path. Though it never rained in October, according to Armando, rain seemed imminent. The sky was filled with dark gray, water-saturated clouds. There was no wind. The heat was stifling.
A week or so after we read about Saartjie Bartmann each of us began to dream of her. It happened first to Gloria; that was her name before. She ran up to me and said: Guess who came to see me last night, right in the middle of . . . She didn’t finish the sentence. I knew what she meant. I wasn’t even asleep, she said. And there she was, the woman from Jet magazine.
I had almost forgotten. What woman from Jet? I asked her.
Saartjie, she said. The woman they cut up. She made a face. Our captors often threatened us with knives.
Oh, I said.
She just appeared, right in the middle of the room. One of them was on me, the other one trying to film it. She was so real I couldn’t believe they didn’t see her. We locked eyes, she said.
You did what! Girl, you’re tripping, I said.
It happened, she said, all excited. You should have been there!
And then what? I said.
Gloria looked toward the sky with a dreamy kind of look and said, She was holding a jar with something in it.
Oh-oh, I said, mocking her.
And she had such a look of love on her face. Oh, it went right through me. She laughed, bitter and short. They thought I was responding to them.
I made a gagging gesture with my finger down my throat.
Really, she said.
We were running out of time. What was in the jar? I asked.
I don’t know, she said. I was so busy looking at her face which was just like the face of a mother. A mother looking at her child. Not just her child, but her favorite, best, child.
And then, she raised the jar level with her heart, said Gloria, and it disappeared into her heart.
Maybe it was because she told me about it, said Lalika, gazing at the sky and then toward the river, which ran casually, unhurried, waiting for the rain, but the same night, Saartjie came to me. By then they were charging each other to use us.
She came to me as two of them were fighting over whose turn it was. She was dressed in clothing strange to me. A yellow grass skirt, a beautiful