Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [13]
It was difficult to maintain my composure when I heard this. I clenched my teeth with the effort. It was enough that she was alive, I thought. After the grueling journey, which I had feared I’d never complete, it was nearly impossible to imagine that Tashi, riding her donkey and walking, had survived it as well.
When I had been vouched for by Banse, the manner of my guards immediately changed. Their stiff, absurdly militaristic posture—as if learned from Hitler himself—collapsed into the graceful melted-bones stride of the ordinary unhurried African. They smiled, they joked. They offered me tea.
Tea, they explained, came from the Europeans in the camp, one of whom was a son of the owner of a vast tea plantation that had displaced the homes of a thousand nomadic Africans. Bob, this son, had grown up on the plantation until he was ten, then had been sent to England to boarding school. The only blacks he’d ever seen around their place had been servants.
This was all I learned of Bob, the bringer of tea. I found it bizarre that he knew exactly where they were and had access to their hiding place. Indeed, I was to learn he had his own hut among them and lived in it most of the time.
Good tea! My captors laughed, liberally lacing it with sugar, and toasting me with their overflowing mugs.
The Mbele camp was a replica of an African village, though considerably spread out and camouflaged. No hut was in the open, but rather each was nestled close to the base of large trees or towering rocks. The pens of the animals likewise hugged the base of the cliffs. It was all reminiscent of the ancient settlements of the cliffdwelling Dogonese, photographs of which I had seen. Nothing, however, except a wisp of smoke perhaps, would have indicated human habitation, if one were in a plane looking down from above.
Tashi was in a rough bower made of branches. Lying on a mat made from the grass that grew around the camp. And as she lay there, her head and shoulders propped against a boulder that resembled a small animal, she was busy making more of these grass mats. I could not tell if she was happy to see me. Her eyes no longer sparkled with anticipation. They were as flat as eyes that have been painted in, and with dull paint. There were five small cuts on each side of her face, like the marks one makes to keep score while playing tic-tac-toe. Her legs, ashen and wasted, were bound.
Her first words to me were: You should not be here.
My first words to her were: Where else should I be?
This reply appeared to leave her speechless. While she struggled to control her expression, so revealing of her hurt, I crawled on my knees to where she lay, took her in my arms, and sighed.
TASHI
HE HAS COME FOR ME, I thought. He has finally come, God alone knows how. He is ragged and dirty and his hair is that of a savage, or of a crazy person isolated in the bush. He is here. And I can see as he looks at me that he does not know whether to laugh or cry. I feel the same. My eyes see him but they do not register his being. Nothing runs out of my eyes to greet him. It is as if my self is hiding behind an iron door.
I am like a chicken bound for market. The scars on my face are nearly healed, but I must still fan the flies away. The flies that are attracted by the odor coming from my blood, eager to eat at the feast provided by my wounds.
PART THREE
EVELYN
YOURS IS THE PAIN of the careless carpenter who, with his hammer, bashes his own thumb, says The Old Man.
He is no longer actively practicing his profession as doctor of the soul. He is seeing me only because I am an African woman and my case was recommended to him by his niece, my husband’s friend and lover, the Frenchwoman, Lisette. It is hard for me to think about the conversations Adam and Lisette must have had about me over the years, on his twice-yearly visits to Paris and her annual