Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [45]
Well, somebody had to, said Raye, with a straight face. And the two of them actually sat there laughing.
I could not take it in. I stared at Amy.
It had been done to the grandmother of our cook, she said. Many operations, when she was a girl. She couldn’t have children of her own; she’d adopted Gladys, my mother’s childhood companion and maid, whose own clitoris had been excised; though she had not, like her mother, been infibulated. Gladys was docile in the extreme, not legally a slave, but superbly slavish in spirit. She just had no spunk. No self. This “gentleness of spirit,” as my mother called it, was always held up as exemplary and the way my mother wanted me to be.
Raye and I watched as tears coursed down cheeks that even then held their grin shape. My first year in America, Adam and Olivia had taken me to the circus and there’d been a weeping clown with a wide white smile painted on his face. That was what Amy’s face was like.
I was to be controlled all my life, she said, by my mother’s invisible hand. And it was invisible, she cried, striking the arm of her chair with a clenched fist. Because I forgot!
You were a child, said Raye firmly. A child who was told your tonsils were being removed. A child who did not know such a thing as your mother did to you was possible. A child ignorant of what was so wrong about touching yourself. Too young to think something that felt so comforting could be wrong.
Amy wiped her eyes with a tissue. Sniffled. Her gray eyes were red, and appeared to perspire rather than tear.
I was sore for a long time, she said. My mother let me stay in bed and brought me lemonade to soothe my throat—for she convinced me it was my throat in which the work had been done and therefore where I felt the pain. And I could not touch my fingers to where the pain actually was, for fear of contradicting her. Or offending her. I never touched myself—in that way— again. And of course when I accidentally touched myself there I discovered there was nothing left to touch.
I became cheerful. I went in for sports because I enjoyed the high achieved by competitive exertion. My body was hard, lean, fit. Nothing missing. I had sex with practically anyone. Screwing madly, feeling nothing; in order not to feel my rage. I smiled even as, years later, I laid Mother in her grave. But I did not begin to remember until Josh died, when my own life was virtually over; because suddenly I had to start feeling my own feelings for myself. I had tried to live through Josh’s body because it was whole. I’d pushed him to be a dancer; I can only imagine his sadness when he could no longer dance for me.
After this distressing conversation, from which I angrily extricated myself by slamming out of Raye’s office, I ceased watching “Riverside.” I now read everything I could find on Louisiana and New Orleans. I learned Louisiana had once belonged to France. Maybe, I thought, reliving the hostility anything French always provoked in me, Amy’s mother had had trouble communicating with her doctor, who was perhaps like me a stranger from another tribe; perhaps her troubles stemmed from a complication encountered in the language. Perhaps Amy’s mother had meant her daughter’s tonsils after all.
PART FOURTEEN
EVELYN-TASHI
EVERY DAY NOW, down below my window in the street, there are demonstrations. I can not see them, but the babble of voices rises up the wall of the prison and pours right through the iron bars.
What I am really hearing, says Olivia, is the cultural fundamentalists and Muslim fanatics attacking women who’ve traveled from all parts of the country to place offerings