Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [16]
M’Lissa grumbled about the lack of everything. In the old days, she said, Tashi would have wanted for nothing. There would have been a score of maidens initiated with her, and their mothers, aunts and older sisters would have taken charge of the cooking (important because there were special foods one ate at such a time that kept the stools soft, thus eliminating some of the pain of evacuation), the cleaning of the house, the washing, oiling and perfuming of Tashi’s body.
I had never spoken to M’Lissa other than to say hello. I knew from Tashi that M’Lissa had brought her into the world. I knew that, among the Olinka, she was a prized midwife and healer, though to those Christianized ones who also turned to Western medicine, she was shunned. I was surprised to see her in the Mbele camp. More because she was old, and limped, than for any other, more ideological, reason. How had she, dragging her lame foot, dressed in rags, come so far from home?
It was only in the late afternoons that she could talk, arriving breathless after a day of tending others in the camp, as she shifted Tashi and washed and oiled her wound, which she invariably referred to not as a wound but as a healing. She told me she had at first been in a refugee camp over the border from Olinka; a horrible place, she said, filled with dying Olinkans who fled the fighting between the Mbele rebels and the white government’s troops, most of whom were members of the black minority tribes that hated the dominant Olinkans. They had been cruel beyond anything she’d ever seen, specializing in hacking off the limbs of their captives. In the camp she had been in demand, though she’d had nothing beyond her two hands to work with. There had been no herbs, no oils, no antiseptics, not even water at times. She had delivered babies in the dark, set bones, and used stones to smooth the protruding gristle of amputated limbs. There was nothing to assist her beyond her patients’ grim endurance. It was in the refugee camp, she said, that her hair turned completely white, and where, eventually, she lost it. Now, she said, running a gnarled hand back and forth over it in self-derision, I am as bald as an egg.
The other women in the camp, according to M’Lissa, had all been initiated at the proper age. Either shortly after birth, or at the age of five or six, but certainly by the onset of puberty, ten or eleven. She had argued with Catherine, Tashi’s mother, to have the operation done for Tashi when she too was at the proper age. But, because Catherine had gone Christian, she’d turned a deaf ear to her. Now, M’Lissa said, with a grimace of justification, it was the grownup daughter who had come to her, wanting the operation because she recognized it as the only remaining definitive stamp of Olinka tradition. And of course, now, she added, Tashi would not have the shame of being unmarried.
I wanted to marry her, I said.
You are a foreigner, she said, dismissing me.
I still want to marry her, I said, taking Tashi’s hand.
M’Lissa seemed confused. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a possibility such as this.
I never saw the other women in the camp. M’Lissa told us they were all on missions of liberation. Tashi said she thought it was the women’s task to forage for food and to conduct raids against the plantations, most of them now left in the hands of loyal African retainers. A primary use of these raids was to recruit new warriors to swell the ranks of the Mbele rebels.
The operation she’d had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka. In her imagination, on her long journey to the camp, they had seemed terribly bold, terribly revolutionary and free. She saw them leaping to the attack. It was only when she at last was told by M’Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her own proud walk had become a shuffle.
It now took a quarter of an hour for her to pee. Her menstrual periods lasted ten days.