Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [55]
Number four: God is wise. That is why He created the tsunga.
All: With her sharpened stone and bag of thorns!
Number one: With her needle and thread.
Number two: Because He liked it tight!
Number three: God likes to feel big.
Number four: What man does not?
(Laughter)
Number one: Let us eat this food, and drink to the Queen who is beautiful, and whose body has been given us to be our sustenance forever.
(Laughter, and the noisy eating of food)
The small child that I was is not noticed at all. She could have been a fly, or an ant. I do not particularly notice them, either. They’ve always been there underneath the baobab tree, graybearded, old. Dressed in thick dark robes against the sun. Their wise old heads wrapped and their eyes mirroring the timeless vacancy of the landscape around them.
Gazing at them now from the safety of the prison chapel, from the safety of my impending death, I can see they are shells, empty of life. It is they who are being stuffed with food, while nothing but oppressive verbal diarrhea comes out. The child, taught to respect these elders above all others, could not have recognized this. The old men discussing her and all the females of the village did not care that she heard them. They knew she would not be able to figure out what they were talking about. They were discussing her, determining her life, and at the time she did not, could not, know. And yet, there in her unconscious had remained the termite hill, and herself trapped deep inside it, heavy, wingless and inert, the Queen of the dark tower. From my seat in the chapel, Adam’s hand still in mine, I glance down at the feet of the child as she leaves the old men, belching in contentment, sitting in the dust. Idly, she kicks a stone. There is grace in her aim and no hesitation in her thrust.
PART EIGHTEEN
EVELYN-TASHI
BUT WHAT DID YOU THINK, I ask M’Lissa. When I came into the Mbele camp asking to be “bathed.”
I thought you were a fool, she says without hesitation. The very biggest.
But why? I ask.
Because, first of all, there were no other women in the camp. Didn’t you have eyes in your head? Didn’t anyone ever teach you that the absence of women means something? Or were you so wrapped up in yourself you didn’t notice?
You were there, I say. And you told me the other women were all out on raids of liberation.
Huh! she scoffs. I lied. It was the camp itself that needed liberation. When the women came they were expected to cook and clean—and be screwed—exactly as they had been at home. When they saw how things were, they left. Even I would have left, M’Lissa says, glancing down at her lame leg.
Suddenly she laughs.
They sent for me, you know, just as they sent for you. I was also sent a donkey to ride. They were constructing a traditional Olinkan village from which to fight, and therefore needed a tsunga.
They sent for me?
To give the tsunga something to do. To give the new community a symbol of its purpose.
Which I became, I say, dumbstruck.
Which you became, M’Lissa hisses. Lying on your mat of straw, making other little mats of straw. The same work your great-great-grandmother would have done!
But you encouraged it, I say, puzzled and hurt.
Do fools need encouragement? she asks the ceiling. They encourage themselves.
But Our Leader informed us…. I think rapid thoughts with which to defend myself. But M’Lissa is quicker.
Did Our Leader not keep his penis? Is there evidence that even one testicle was removed? The man had eleven children by three different wives. I think this means the fellow’s private parts were intact.
I am horrified to hear such a disrespectful view of Our Leader. M’Lissa, I say, behind that face you show to those who come asking about tradition, you are bitter.
Even the sweetest mango in my mouth is bitter to me, she says. But women, she sneers, women are too cowardly to look behind a smiling face. A man smiles and tells them they will look beautiful weeping, and they send for the knife.
They have reason