Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [49]
To Tashi I have posed the following question and, she has failed so far to properly answer it: Tashi, I have said to her, it is clear you love your adopted country so much; I want you to tell me, What does an American look like?
EVELYN-TASHI
WHAT DOES AN AMERICAN look like? the old witch has asked me. I started right in describing Raye. She is of a color not seen in Africa, I say. Except in certain seed pods or lightish brown kinds of wood. She has curly hair that is at the same time a bit nappy. Also never seen in Africa. And she has freckles. Also not seen in Africa. M’Lissa listens carefully and then questions shrewdly. Really? she asks. But is not America the land of the ghostly whites?
I hasten to describe Amy Maxwell. Her wired smile and powdery skin that is tinged with yellow and pink. Her bony shoulders and marble eyes. Her teased white hair. Her sorrow and hurt.
But M’Lissa is not satisfied.
I begin to describe people with yellow skin and slanted eyes. These, she scoffs, must be Eskimos, of whom she has heard. Everyone knows they live far in the frozen north. Am I sure I can describe a real American?
I describe white men from television, with hearty voices and fake warmth in their eyes. I describe Indians from India and Native Americans from Minnesota. Red women with black hair. Yellow people with blue eyes. Brown people with black eyes who speak a language from another country.
M’lissa waits.
It seems there is no answer to her question. Americans, after all, have come from so many places. This thought alone, I think, must boggle the mind of M’Lissa, who’s never been anywhere.
If you say to someone in Africa: What does an Olinkan or a Maasai look like, there is an easy answer. They are brown or very brown. They are notably short (Olinkans) or tall (Maasai). But no, shortness or tallness, brownness or redness, is not what makes an American.
Finally, outdone, but also sensing an ancient trick, I stopped this little game of hers, and brought us closer to the day of her death.
What does an American look like? she teased me complacently after several weeks had passed and I’d offered her hundreds of descriptions of Americans who rarely resembled each other physically and yet resembled each other deeply in their hidden histories of fled-from pain.
What does an American look like? I asked the question softly to myself, and looked M’Lissa in the eye. The answer surprised us both.
An American, I said, sighing, but understanding my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.
PART SIXTEEN
TASHI-EVELYN
THE VERY FIRST DAY after Mbati left, and I was required to wash M’Lissa, I saw why she was lame. Not only had her clitoris, outer and inner labia, and every other scrap of flesh been removed, but a deep gash traveled right through the tendon of her inner thigh. That was why, when walking, she had to drag her left leg. It was supported by the back tendon and the buttock muscles alone. Indeed, the left buttock was far more developed than the right, and even though she hadn’t really walked with vigor in many years, there was a firm resilience in her flesh on that side.
Yes, touch it, my daughter, she exclaimed, as she felt my fingers exploring the keloidal tissue of the old wound, as hard as a leather shoe sole. It is the mark, on my body, of my own mother’s disobedience.
Since this was the day on which I had earlier resolved to kill M’Lissa, I was unsure whether to appear interested in her life. That is, her life before she murdered Dura. But she was remembering, and I had not completed her bath. Trapped, I listened.
M’LISSA
SINCE THE PEOPLE of Olinka became a