Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [48]
Thinking of it this way, as a marriage, and seeing the happy smiles on the fading visages of the fortunate three, I laugh. I can’t help it. It is as if this sight strikes something awake that had been asleep, or dead, in my own body; though my body, alas, is now too damaged to respond to it in an uncorrupted way. I begin to sneeze.
But what is it? I hear myself finally, sneezing and laughing, say. And for me, the possibility of delight is once more dimly glimpsed in the world.
OLIVIA
TASHI SAYS she wants to wear a red dress to face the firing squad. I remind her that her sentence is being appealed. There is also hope that the United States will honor her North American citizenship. I want to wear red anyway, she says, regardless of what happens. I am sick to death of black and white. Neither of those is first. Red, the color of woman’s blood, comes before them both.
And so, we sew.
PART FIFTEEN
TASHI-EVELYN
YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING, said M’Lissa, as I brushed her hair. You keep asking, as only a fool does, about the people and events of your own time. I could tell you that red fingernail polish is all that remains of woman’s recognition of her own blood power and you would not understand me. Or that red on a woman’s mouth signals something other than a taste for meat. Here M’Lissa grunted suggestively.
In the old days before the people of Olinka were born as a people it is said that the blood of woman was sacred. And when women and men became priests blood was smeared on their faces until they looked as they had at birth. And that symbolized rebirth: the birth of the spirit. Myself, I was baptized by your husband’s father, the missionary, and I bowed my head and held my tongue, for I knew their church’s water was a substitute for woman’s blood. And that they, who considered me ignorant, did not know this.
What, other than her lying life, did I want from M’Lissa? I worried this question incessantly, as only the insane can. Each night I fingered the razors I kept concealed in the stuffing of my pillow, fantasizing her bloody demise. I swore I would mutilate her wrinkled body so much her own God wouldn’t recognize her. I smiled to think of her nose lying bloody on the bed. But each morning, like the storyteller Scheherazade, M’Lissa told me another version of reality of which I had not heard.
One day, as I was washing carefully between her clawlike toes, she informed me blandly that it was only the murder of the tsunga, the circumciser, by one of those whom she has circumcised that proves her (the circumciser’s) value to her tribe. Her own death, she declared, had been ordained. It would elevate her to the position of saint.
This confession, or lie, stayed my hand for many a day.
M’LISSA
I KNOW WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE can’t even imagine or guess. That when one has seen too much of life, one understands it is a good thing to die.
The very first day she came I could see my death in Tashi’s eyes, as clearly as if I were looking into a mirror. Those eyes that are the eyes of a madwoman. Can she really think I have not seen madness and murderers before?
In the village when I was a girl the mad were kept out in the bush. They lived alone in smelly, ramshackle huts, their filthy clothes in tatters. Their matted hair covering their backs like moss. I learned not to fear them, for I discovered, as all the villagers knew, that mad people, though murderous at heart, could, nonetheless, be easily distracted. If one lunged, you offered him or her—for there were always mad women and men; who never, incidentally, chose to live together—a yam. Or a song. Or a story that only a mad person could grasp the sense of. Stories we laughed