Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [49]
Me? he’d asked, looking around as if Jerry had to be referring to someone else.
Yeah, said Jerry, you. You sat with Marshall at the end. You showed up like a bradda.
But what else could I have done? Yolo thought. After all, I’m black. To be black is to know your brotherness.
He smiled at Jerry. This has been one hell of a vacation, he said.
I can imagine, said Jerry. Will you come?
Sure, Yolo had said. Will you come get me?
Where you stay? asked Jerry.
Yolo named his beige hotel.
I can sure come get you out of dere, man, said Jerry, laughing.
And, as good as his word, he’d showed up with his van and moved Yolo out of the hotel and into a spare room at Alma’s.
We can’t have you staying dere, said Jerry. What it look like, a guest of our people, coming to circle from a dead hotel? He seemed offended by the idea.
Do you mind? he’d asked Alma. But she’d looked at him like he was crazy and flung open the door to a small, airy room painted white with lots of Hawaiian art, including the large framed poster of the queen, on the walls. She was as usual drinking a beer and the smoke from her cigarette lingered in his hair.
The man with blond hair took the gourd. He must get stared at a lot, thought Yolo. Most folks would assume he straightened and dyed his hair, like James Brown used to do when he was “James Brown and the Famous Flames.” Brown’s group had dyed their hair an outrageous reddish orange and against their very dark skin, almost as black as the aborigine’s, the color of their hair had expressed excitement itself.
We have tried everything, the young man was saying. Lecturing. Cajoling. Loving. Hating. But we have not been able to prevent the young from seeing the truth. That they have lost the future. Some might dispute this statement, and that is their prerogative. I’m saying this is what it looks like to the youths who sniff petrol. There they are, poor, discarded by the society that has slaughtered their people and taken their land; they might be fourteen thousand miles from the nearest disco. A bottle of petrol is the closest they will get to a plane ticket. The closest they will get to leaving their barren environment.
He paused. Studied the gourd.
I too used to feel that way. It is a miracle I am still alive. He stopped talking and sat reflecting for several minutes; everyone in the circle remained respectful and still. He continued: My older sister, who had gone away to find work in the city, came back for me. We lived in one room at the back of her employer’s house. She said only one thing: I don’t want you to watch the master of the house, my employer. I want you to watch me, your sister.
And that is all she said to me for months. We lived in silence. She worked, hard and long. She fed us, kept us clothed and clean. She drew her strength from a small circle of Nunga women similarly situated in the city, far from their folks. At first I missed my visions of freedom, the weightless pleasure of abandoning myself. I also wanted to talk, to dribble at the mouth with words as I had done on petrol. But she was like a stone.
I watched her face, broad and flat and black, as aboriginal faces are described so often in literature, and I saw how tired she was. This frightened me. For it made me think how useless her struggle was. How impossible and absurd. To try to have a life in a place your life was considered worthless. To my shame, I used to laugh at her. But it was my fear that was laughing. And she did not even look at me. She would not respond. Each day she got up off her mat on the floor, made tea for us. Left me two slices of bread. And went out to serve bread with jam, coffee with cream, bacon with eggs, to the owners of the big house that we saw no matter where we looked, standing or lying in our own small room, and that in fact blocked the sun.
When her employers and their children saw me they related to me as to an oddity. My blond hair might have gotten me points, but I remembered what my sister had said. I was not to watch