Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [40]
How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.
We are aware, says the prosecutor, that Mrs. Johnson, though Olinkan, has lived in America for many, many years, and that American life is, for the black person, itself a torture.
I stare at him blankly.
Is it not true, Mr. Johnson, that in the United States, with its stressful whites, your wife is often committed to an insane asylum?
My wife is hurt, I say. Wounded. Broken. Not mad.
Evelyn laughs. Flinging her head back in deliberate challenge. The laugh is short. Sharp. The bark of a dog. Beyond hurt. Unquestionably mad. Oddly free.
EVELYN-TASHI
THEY WOULD ALL TAKE America away from me if they could. But I won’t let them. If I have to, I’ll stop them in their tracks. Just as I stopped Amy. How do you stop someone in their tracks? By not believing them.
ADAM
WOMAN AFTER WOMAN comes to me to complain that her husband, man, lover, is or was unfaithful to her, says Tashi’s new doctor, Raye, when we have a consultation. The result, nine times out of ten, is frigidity in the woman. Psychological circumcision? she asks, pensively.
I tell her I do not know. It had never occurred to me to think of Tashi’s suffering as being on a continuum of pain. I had thought of what was done to her as something singular, absolute.
PART TWELVE
TASHI-EVELYN
“THE GOD AMMA, it appeared, took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him, as he had done with the stars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is the top, and from there stretched out to the south, which is the bottom, of the world, although the whole movement was horizontal. The earth lies flat, but the north is at the top. It extends east and west with separate members like a foetus in the womb. It is a body, that is to say, a thing with members branching out from a central mass. This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe…
“At God’s approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. He cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things forever…
As Pierre reads I study his face seeking signs of Adam, signs of Lisette. He seems a completely blended person and as such new. In him “black” has disappeared; so has “white.” His eyes are a dark, lightfilled brown; his forehead is high and tan; his nose broad, a little flat. He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as of two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain. His brother sits across from him as he reads, sunk in admiration. They have stolen many hours to be together, roaming the Berkeley campus and the city’s streets, happy to have found each in the other his own best friend.
Now he stops reading, suddenly, and looks at me. This is from a book by a French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, he says, turning it so I can see its orange cover and read its title, Conversations with Ogotemmêli. I am under the influence of a new, mild and quite pleasant drug. It is as if I’ve smoked marijuana. I have not grasped the meaning of the passage, which Pierre has read to me so earnestly; nor do I completely