Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [21]
Ja? I said, in my fake Swiss accent, which always tickled him. Except for The Old Man, I thought the Swiss sounded quite unintelligent when they spoke. But perhaps that is because the rest of the world pokes fun at them for their peculiar accent and curious yodeling. Anyhow, I liked to say ja. It sounded ridiculous in my mouth and made Mzee smile.
He was searching now for his pipe, which stuck out of the breast pocket of his apron.
Are you better for having done it? he asked, finding and lighting his pipe. Do you feel better in yourself?
Immeasurably, I said without hesitation. The tears that had evaporated at Mzee’s and Adam’s appearance now drained heavily from my chin. By the time I finished painting it, I continued in a steady voice, quite as though I were not weeping, I remembered my sister Dura’s…my sister Dura’s…. I could get no further. There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane. I had been going to say, before the boulder barred my throat: my sister’s death; because that was how I had always thought of Dura’s demise. She’d simply died. She’d bled and bled and bled and then there was death. No one was responsible. No one to blame. Instead, I took a deep breath and exhaled it against the boulder blocking my throat: I remembered my sister Dura’s murder, I said, exploding the boulder. I felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew. I began to wail, there in Mzee’s old arms. After a long time, he dried my face, stroked my hair, and comforted me with a motherly squeeze that coincided with each of my hiccups, as my weeping subsided.
They did not know I was hiding in the grass, I said. They had taken her to the place of initiation; a secluded, lonely place that was taboo for the uninitiated. Not unlike the place you showed us in your film.
Ah, said Mzee.
She has been screaming in my ears since it happened, I said, suddenly feeling weary beyond expression.
The Old Man was relighting his pipe, which seemed to have been doused by my tears.
Only I could not hear her, I sighed.
You didn’t dare, said The Old Man.
I did not understand him; yet what he said somehow made sense.
He stroked my forehead thoughtfully, got up quietly and left me to the continuation of a very long sleep.
MZEE
NO ONE HAS CALLED ME Mzee since the natives of Kenya did so spontaneously over a quarter of a century ago. Even then my hair was graying, my back beginning to stoop. I wore glasses. And yet, somehow I felt it was something other than my age that they were noting, when they called me “The Old Man.” Some quality of gravity or self-containment that they recognized. Perhaps I flatter myself, as whites do when blacks offer them a benign label for something characteristically theirs, but which they themselves have failed to acknowledge; deep in our hearts perhaps we expect only vilification; the name “devil,” to say the least. It used to amaze me that, wherever I lectured, anywhere in the world, the one sentence of mine which every person of color appreciated and rose to thank me for was “Europe is the mother of all evil,” and yet they shook my European hand, smiled warmly into my eyes, and some of them actually patted me on the back. The Africans chose names for us that were suggested to them by our behavior. “Impatient” became the name of a colleague who was always hurrying. “Eats a Lot,” the name of the greediest of our crew. “Night Moon,” they called the blackest man in their own group, and, indeed, it was the brightness of his blackness that one saw.
It is a new experience having a patient staying across the hall from me, in my own house. In my own retreat! The secret place I come to heal myself. Only your entreaties could have gotten me into this. Yet now that Adam and Evelyn are here, it is as if they were meant to be here from the