Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [47]
In my dream I see this child, scrawny, dusty, blood trailing her heels, approach the gallows. The noose dangles before her face, rapt and curious. It is placed round her neck by the president of the republic. Still she marvels, fingers it with reverence. But what is it? she cries, as the noose is tightened and she is dropped into oblivion.
TASHI-EVELYN
NOW THAT JUSTICE is to be served and I am to be put to death, I am permitted visitors other than my family. One morning Olivia brings in the potters who are replicating the ancient fertility dolls.
But they are not fertility dolls, apparently. One of the women, as stout as I am now from my sedentary life and the starchy prison food, and as solid as a tree trunk, informs me that the word “doll” is derived from the word “idol.” The figures that have come down to us as mere dolls were once revered as symbols of the Creator, Goddess, the Life Force Itself. She proffers a stack of photographs of paintings she has discovered among caves and rocks in the driest parts of the country. Where, when we were children, we were told witches and hobgoblins lived. The people who actually lived there, I discovered later on as an adult, were impoverished nomads who resisted being settled, and of whose filth and flies the government, which desperately imitated its British predecessors, was ashamed. In ancient times, says the potter, pursing her lips as if sucking on a seed, the people repainted the paintings year after year. She chuckled. They lived in a vast art gallery, one could say. Now—she grimaces—they are so faded as to be barely visible. Still, with effort, as I take one of the photographs from her hands, it is possible to recognize the little figure from M’Lissa’s hut, smiling broadly, eyes closed, and touching her genitals. If the word “MINE” were engraved on her finger, her meaning could not be more clear. She is remarkably alive. Nor is she alone. Another photograph shows a figure with her hand around the penis of the figure next to her. She is also smiling. Another shows a figure with her finger in another woman’s vagina. She too is smiling. So is the other woman. So, indeed, are they all. Other photographs show women figures dancing, interacting with animals, nestled cozily underneath sheltering trees, and giving birth.
We think children were given these “idols” to play with, as a teaching tool, says the other potter, in some age—she laughs—quite beyond the scope of the present imagination. And that when women were subjugated, these images were sent literally underground, painted on the walls of caves and sheltered enclosures of rock. Some of the stone and clay figures are of course in museums and private collections. The most famous one is of a man and a woman copulating, and his penis is huge; the woman appears to be impaled on it. This is an ancient image, and perhaps the reason all black penises were assumed by white people to be huge. She pauses. Many of the figures were destroyed. Especially those that show both a woman’s vagina and her contented face. She shrugs. Now of course every little girl is given a doll to drag around. A little figure of a woman as toy, with the most vacuous face imaginable, and no vagina at all.
We are not supposed to have vaginas under this scheme, says Olivia, with a smartness of speech that sometimes characterizes her, because it is through that portal that man confronted the greatest undeserved mystery known to him. Himself reproduced.
The potters laugh.
I have a favorite, says the stout woman briskly, and takes from the bottom