Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [57]
And were you afraid? asked Missy.
I’d come so far, said Kate. Fear seemed beside the point. I guess I doubted I’d have much of an experience. And then, after a very full experience with Grandmother, she drifted away.
Really, said Lalika.
Yes, said Kate, that is why I stopped taking the medicine with you. By my third session with Grandmother the snakes or dragons or whatever they were were so small I could hold them in my hands. They were white and blue, and playful, like cartoon figures.
You have now experienced what humans thousands of years ago, to their great amazement I’m sure, also experienced. Such a long time ago we cannot truly imagine it. It is what humans have been experiencing for thousands of years since. Grandmother Yagé is a medicine of origins and endings, yes, Armando concluded, softly. That is why Grandfather reptile always appears.
A Person Is Visible
A person is visible only when it is possible to perceive what sustains him, said Armando to Rick. His nourishment, so to speak. Your nourishment—the food you ate, the education you received, the trips you took, the houses you bought, and the clothes, even the shoes, you bought—was kept secret. Your parents did not tell you that your shiny teeth were paid for by those that fell from the gums of drug addicts.
They thought to protect you from the suffering of the world by making sure you did not know about it. Yet it was the suffering of the world that was feeding you.
Their teeth fall out? asked Rick.
Yes, said Armando. The drug addict does not always care to eat. Or to brush. Flossing is out of the question.
You are very thin, he continued. But not invisible altogether. He paused, seeming to wait for Rick’s response.
Rick looked down at his hands and then away from them toward the river.
I’m thin because I binge, he said, on all the food I can possibly stuff into my body, and then I purge.
So, said Armando after a moment, you are an old hand at throwing up.
Yes, said Rick. Even before I knew the family secret. I felt instinctively that we had too much of everything: food, clothes, money. And my parents, especially my father, was always urging me to take more. Eat! Drink! Buy! That was the only time he sounded Italian. Even Roman. Even imperial. He laughed. Yes, he continued, chuckling, he looked just like those Roman emperors in the movies, setting off to conquer, to eat up, the earth. Devouring everything seems to be in our genes.
And then when I knew . . . I didn’t know what to feel. I realized I felt nothing. And my life went on as always. Nothing changed, even though I now knew something so shocking about my family, our history, and myself; people still treated me as if I were special. Our driver still tipped his hat when he opened the door of the car for me.
But then, one day, I noticed he wasn’t really looking at me—to see me—when he did it. I saw it was my overcoat and hat, my well-polished boots and tailored suit, he recognized. Who I was myself he had no clue and didn’t care about it either. I could have been a mannequin. A blow-up doll, he said, and laughed.
Seriously, he said to Armando, since coming to America all of us “ethnics” who could pass for white people did so. We dropped as much as we could of whatever heart, soul, or rhythm made us unique. It’s curious now that everywhere you look there are white men, but in my view most of them are invisible. We don’t look at each other, you know. Not anymore. We’re afraid someone will have the poor taste to ask: What is your power source?
And certainly you don’t want ethnic studies taught in school, said Kate, because that is exactly the question that is asked.
When a foreigner from a poor country visits America, said Armando, he feels he is moving among shadows. Shadows with teeth! He laughed. Not