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By Root 474 0

rose-colored shawl, and a big round red hat. And she was holding this glass jar in her hands, as if holding it out to me. Just for me to see it, nothing more. And she held me with that look. I never had a mother so I don’t know if this is what my mother would have looked like if she’d managed to get inside that jail to try to comfort me. But the look on Saartjie’s face was pure love. It was so extraordinary I forgot all about my body lying there exposed on the cot, and just as Gloria had done, I locked eyes with her. She was a big woman; big tits, big ass, big everything, I guess. I could see why the puny Europeans who first saw her naked body must have felt fear. If she could have so much—you know, tits, ass, pussy—why did they have so little?

Kate chuckled.

Aw, she’s out, one of the guards said. For I had fallen into a kind of faint. And they threw cold water on me.

An odd rain was beginning to fall. Huge drops but several feet apart. Kate had never experienced anything like it. One drop fell on her head, steadily, as if all the drops for that spot were connected, and beyond her feet, like water dripping from a hose, another elongated drop. She and Lalika pondered the pattern of the rain without comment.

Maybe we should move, Lalika finally said.

I know, said Kate. Only, I don’t want to.

I don’t either, said Lalika. Settling her body more comfortably on the log and situating her head under a stream of the large drops. Soon her face and shoulders glistened with the rain. A burst of thunder so loud it almost dislodged them from their seat seemed to roll out of the forest. A restless wind began to eddy about their legs. A lightning that split the sky lit up everything around them.

Shall we sit? asked Kate.

Yeah, said Lalika. And she continued her story.

From that time on, we disappeared from our captors. We did not fight them. We did not curse them. We did not even try to ignore them. All of which we had done before. They did whatever they did to our bodies but we had flown. Into that voluminous grass skirt.

Kate smiled.

Into that big red round hat.

Kate laughed.

Into that rose-colored cape that seemed to be made of thorns.

Oops, said Kate.

Lalika said, Yes. It was the mammy cape. Surely made of thorns. But I don’t mind the connection with Jesus. And besides, when I touched it, and I did touch it, the thorns did not prick me. They were as soft as flower petals. The cape itself as sheltering as a house.

And Gloria and I knew we had found our savior. Someone to pray to. Someone who answered prayer.

Lalika laughed, really laughed, without regret or bitterness, for the first time.

One day she called me Saartjie. And from that day never called me anything else. And then I started calling her Saartjie. And that is what we called each other, as if we were two expressions of that one loving and constant being, all of us with one name. We began to pray to Her. To Saartjie who, through Jet magazine, had come to us. We designated her a saint.

By now the log they sat on was slippery and glistening with rain. The huge single drops had been joined by a million others and pelted them like hail. Thunder continued to roll, lightning fiercely streaked the sky. Lalika gave herself to the pelting, squeezing her eyes tight and raising her face and chest to receive it. What a storm we’re in, she said at last, turning her face to Kate.

And two of us are in it, said Kate. She could not tell, because of the rain on Lalika’s face, if this comment provoked tears. She did not think so.

I Am Peace

I am peace, said Grandmother. And nothing has to die for me to exist. Not tobacco, not grapes or sugarcane. Not human beings. And not me! she added, laughing. When you circle, paint your faces with yagé to remember this.

James Dean Was the Only

James Dean was the only American man most Hawaiian men could identify with. Maybe because he was smallish. In certain light, tan-ish. He walked like a Hawaiian, not that used to wearing shoes. John Wayne or Fred Astaire definitely wouldn’t have come to mind, except for my grandfather