Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [27]
Why the colors of our flag? the attorney now asked.
But the young woman’s blank expression was answer enough.
Why the colors of our flag indeed?
Red for the blood of the people spilled in resistance to the white supremacist regime. Yellow for the gold and minerals in which our land is still rich, even though the whites have carted mountains of it away. Blue for the sea that laps our shores, filled with riches and the wonders of the deep; blue also for the sky, symbol of our people’s faith in the forces of the unseen and their optimism for the future.
There had been much debate about the colors of this flag; debate that included everyone. Then the colors were decided by the leaders and the flag sent off to Germany to be designed, mass produced and sold back to us.
I can feel my mind trying to kick off into an alternative flag story to replace the one that happened, in fact, to the people. But surprisingly, nothing happens. My head, like the rest of my body, remains solid in my chair. My refusing-to-leap imagination never makes it even as far as the open windows of the room. I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.
Olivia has crept up behind me as we all stand to be dismissed. She pushes a small paper bag into my hand. When I am in my cell again I open the bag and extract a small doll made of clay. It has been years since I saw another like it, quite by accident one morning in M’Lissa’s hut. She found me playing with it, and boxed my ears, claiming the thing I held—a small figure playing with her genitals—was indecent. I was too young to ask why, therefore, she had it in her hut. A note from Olivia read: This is a replica. There are women potters here who make them. Can you imagine!
Frankly, I couldn’t.
PART SEVEN
EVELYN
THE SHRINK THE OLD MAN sent me to after his death was a middle-aged African-American woman named Raye. He had met her at a conference for psychologists in London when she was just starting out. They’d liked each other and kept in touch ever since. I resented her. Because she wasn’t Mzee. Because she was black. Because she was a woman. Because she was whole. She radiated a calm, cheerful competence that irritated me.
It was to her, however, that I found myself speaking, one day, about Our Leader. Our Leader, like Nelson Mandela and Jomo Kenyatta and others before them, had been forced into exile and eventually captured and jailed by the white regime. Still, miraculously, by word of mouth and the occasional clandestinely made audiocassette, we were able to get his surprisingly frequent “Messages to the People.” Unlike Nelson Mandela or Jomo Kenyatta, Our Leader never made it to freedom himself; he was assassinated on the eve of Independence as he left the high-security prison in which he’d been incarcerated, under heavy guard. It was believed, in fact, that the guards assassinated him, though this was never proved. His murderers, in any case, were never brought to justice, or even identified; and so, even as Olinkans celebrated what we thought was our freedom, there was already an internal backlash of hurt and rage that only swift justice administered to his killers might have assuaged, and the desperate need to show our remembrance and love of Our Leader in everything we did.
But you had already left Africa by then? said Raye, as I explained this to her.
Yes, I said. My body had left. My soul had not. I paused. It seemed impossible that anyone should ever understand. Especially not this smoothly dressed woman who walked with a spring in