Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [64]
Was it the medicina, the Bobinsana, that gave her this clarity? This certainty? It will make you see things in your life in a different way, Armando had promised. It will teach you to see through your own plots. Kate smiled, thinking of his warning. It is a plant, furthermore, that grows deep, deep, deep beside the river and remains where it is planted always. The river may change course but the plant will never move. When you drink it you too will want to root yourself, to find your riverbank and never uproot yourself again.
When Armando told them this about the Bobinsana Kate had had an image of everyone in America, the land of speed and movement, drinking it, and suddenly realizing they might as well stay where they are.
You could not tell me your beloved “Robert” was not my father, Kate wrote across the bottom of the Post-it. He was my father, though. She took the well-chewed gum out of her mouth and wrapped it in the Post-it; when the flight attendant came around again to pick up rubbish she pushed it into her bag. There, a paper curtain was removed! She felt things would flow much more smoothly with her sisters from now on. She would, in fact, share the dream, and its connection to the “story,” with them, and ask them what they thought.
There were many subtle things she loved about her people, and how they bent themselves backward and turned themselves inside out in their attempts to love biological surprises was one of them. She thought of the half-European children hundreds of thousands of black women had delivered into the world, children forced on them through rape; children deliberately conceived in the bodies of black women so they could be sold. And they had pitied and loved these children; and in an attempt sometimes to prove it, they had seemed to love them more than their darker offspring. And what confusion had resulted from that! Still, the intention of the ancestors to cherish whatever the Creator shocked them with was noble, she felt, and good, and led to a people whose tolerance for the peculiarities of others was legendary. A tolerance they were sometimes denigrated for; but that was the bind and that was the freedom too.
She felt such overwhelming gratitude for her own parents that when the wheels of the plane touched the earth, she clapped to thank the pilot of the plane for delivering their child safely home again, then wrapped her arms around herself for sheer joy.
They Bombed
They bombed eight different places in the world while we were gone, said Yolo, holding her close when they met at Baggage Claim.
Okay, said Kate, with a sigh, resting against Yolo as if he were a rock. I’m home now.
It did not seem possible that people would bomb one another rather than talk. What fear was this, that kept silent until announced by the loudest sound on earth, the sound of worlds being destroyed? Was it the fear that one’s own terror would be glimpsed, one’s own childhood of terror guessed? She tried to imagine any of her friends deciding to drop bombs on other people. It would not have occurred to anyone she knew. What would she and her friends drop instead? Food, blankets, matches, tents, music. And she felt certain that if enough of this were dropped, and all of it was cheap compared to the price of bombs, the people who received the goods would in response sell them, at a reasonable price, all the oil or whatever they required. As it was, a gallon of oil cost less in America than a bottle of purified water. So dropping goods directly to the people from the air, bypassing all the middlemen who gobbled up the aid sent through “official channels,” made excellent sense. And what fun people could have!
The world