Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [58]
TASHI
BUT TASHI, Olivia says, clinging to my neck.
Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do it to your son. Don’t do it to Adam. Don’t do it to me.
Olivia, I say, listen to yourself. Surely you remember having said those words to me before.
She looks blank.
When I was on the donkey, half-naked, I remind her. On my way to the Mbele camp.
Yes, she fairly shouts. And look what happened. You’ve paid for not listening to me all your life.
And I intend to keep on paying, I say.
But why? she asks. Forgive me for saying so, please. But it seems so stupid.
Because when I disobey you, the outsider, even if it is wrong, I am being what is left of myself. And that sliver of myself is all I now have left.
They’ll kill you, she says. And you are innocent!
Well, I say. Yes and no.
I am puzzled, she says, frowning.
You are right, Olivia, that I did not kill M’Lissa. I am grateful, I say, for your confidence in me. M’Lissa did die under her own power, which, even at the end, was considerable; she seemed to get stronger, rather than weaker, with age. Hers was an evil power, barely acquainted, any longer, with good. It is for not killing her—in the name of the suffering she caused—that I am guilty. I do not, by the way, want this known.
What? That you didn’t kill her? But why?
Because women are cowards, and do not need to be reminded that we are.
M’LISSA
THE DEATH OF YOUR SISTER—what was her name?—was your stupid mother Nafa’s fault. It was not absolutely sure the chief would make us return to circumcision. After all, he was always grinning into the faces of the white missionaries and telling them he was a modern man. Not a barbarian, which he could have been, for they called the “bath” barbaric. He was chief, they said, he could stop it. Or was he chief? So of course he stopped it, to prove to them he was chief. His decision had nothing to do with us. One heard his own wives screaming when their time came. Did he care? No. Every man’s wife screamed at the appropriate time.
Her name, I say, was Dura. She was small, thin; there was a crescent-shaped scar just above her lip; when she smiled it seemed to slide into her cheek.
I could lie, says M’Lissa, and tell you I remember her. After all the years I did this work, faces are the last thing I remember. If she’d been hermaphroditic, then perhaps.
No, I say. I believe she was normal.
It is all normal, as far as that goes, says M’Lissa. You didn’t make it, so who are you to judge?
I am nobody, I say. You made sure of that.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself! she says. You are like your mother. If Dura is not bathed, she said, no one will marry her. She never seemed to notice no one had ever married me, and that I lived anyway. This was even before the white missionaries left. Being bathed did not kill me, she said. And my husband has always been patient with me. Well, M’Lissa snorts, your father spread himself among six wives; he could afford patience.
As soon as she heard the new missionaries were black, she felt certain the village would be returned to all its former ways and that uncircumcised girls would be punished. She could not imagine a black person that was not Olinkan, and she thought all Olinkans demanded their daughters be bathed. I told her to wait. But no. She was the kind of woman who jumps even before the man says boo. Your mother helped me hold your sister down.
Stop, I say. Even if she were lying, as I now knew she often did, I could not bear to hear it.
But she says, No, I will not stop. You are mad, but you are not mad enough. Don’t you think your mother might have told you how Dura died? She didn’t, did she? That she was that one in a hundred girls so constructed that the slightest scratch made her bleed like a stuck cow. She had noticed this herself, from trying to stop the bleeding of the scratches your sister got while playing. When I bathed you, this was something of which I thought.
And yet you said nothing, I say, though you might have killed me just as you killed Dura.
You’d come so far,