Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [39]
The judges call for order, over and over. The other furies and I subside. At last order is restored.
I am thinking of how I never met Lisette. How she tried to know me. Tried to visit me. Wrote me letters. Tried to interest me in French cooking—sent me cookbooks and recipes. Sent me clippings about wild mushrooms and where to look for them. (None of this is helpful, I used to mutter to myself, gazing into the mirror and sticking out my tongue.) Sent me her son. And how I refused her. How I thought she knew me too well.
And then suddenly, after a long, painful struggle, she died. Leaving Pierre her eyes—for his eyes are not Adam’s—and it was those knowing eyes, with their appraising look, that, from as far away as an undergraduate dormitory at Harvard, saw into me. Even into my dreams.
Chère Madame Johnson, he wrote. I hope you will not tear up this letter before you read it. (At that point I of course tore it in half, then held the pieces together to continue reading.) All my life I have heard about the tower that frightens you in your dreams. This tower question obsessed my mother since the day she heard of it, and she read many books trying to figure out what it could mean. It was an effort I shared, from the time I was a small boy. Always in the back of my mind has hovered this compelling nightmare of yours, told only once to my mother by my father, but told so vividly our house was never quite free of it.
For as we both understood it, this nightmare, this cauchemar of yours, of being held captive in a dark tower, was what kept my father away from me.
Madame, I now know what the tower is, though not, perhaps, what it means.
As you know, I am now in Berkeley, which is not so far, after all, from your house.
Will you not throw stones?
Shall we meet?
Pierre Johnson
ADAM
THEY DO NOT WANT to hear what their children suffer. They’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo. Like visible signs of menstruation. Signs of woman’s mental power. Signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men. When they say the word “taboo” I try to catch their eye. Are they saying something is “sacred” and therefore not to be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery; or are they saying it is so profane it must not be exposed, for fear of corrupting the young? Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?
These are the kinds of questions my father taught me to ask, alas. Adam, he would say, What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think of and posit many things, but the answer was always the same: Why is the child crying? There had been a crying child even in Old Torabe, whose filth and age and illness so disgusted me. Before he died, I saw it. He had not loved the majority of his wives; in fact, he didn’t even hate them; he thought of them as servants in the most disposable sense. He barely remembered their names. But the young woman who ran away, the wife who drowned herself, he had at least thought he loved. Unfortunately for him “love” and frequent, forceful sex were one. And so he lay, finally, wounded and wet with his own tears, lamenting his life but knowing no other. Women are indestructible down there, you know, he’d said to me, lewdly, more than once, his eyes alight with remembered lechery and violence. They are like leather: the more you chew it, the softer it gets.
If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into? Not just Evelyn. But also the young woman from the paper shop; the old woman who sells oranges. The bourgeois women in their