Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [62]
Are you saying we should just let ourselves die out? And the hope of wholeness with us?
Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, Mother! I’ve stayed too long. You should rest. Good night.
Soon I shall go to bed forever, I say, shrugging. But never mind; I should get some rest. I want to be alert tomorrow, not to miss anything. Aché Mbele, I say.
Aché Mbele? she repeats.
Yes, I say. Aché is Yoruba and means “the power to make things happen.” Energy. Mbele means “Forward!” in KiSwahili.
Oh, she says, reversing them, bowing to me: Mbele Aché.
She has cut my hair so that, though white, it is dense and springy, like hers. When we embrace, it is each other’s hair our fingers seek.
TASHI-EVELYN-MRS. JOHNSON
DEAR LISETTE,
Tomorrow morning I will face the firing squad for killing someone who, many years ago, killed me. But this is no more odd, perhaps, than that I am writing this letter to you a decade after your last effort to communicate with me, and well after your own death. It is that you are in the land of death that makes friendship with you so appealing. The people of Bali, your uncle Mzee told us, think heaven is exactly like Bali. They like Bali, and so have no anxiety about dying. But if heaven is like Olinka, or even like America, there is much to be anxious about. I write to you because I will want a friend there in heaven, someone who has seriously thought about me.
I used to think my mother thought about me. But I identified with her suffering so completely it was I who always thought about, indeed was haunted by, her suffering; and because I believed she and I were one, I made the part of her that was me think about me. In truth, my mother was not equipped, there was not enough of her self left to her, to think about me. Or about my sister Dura, who bled to death after a botched circumcision, or about any of her other children. She had just sunk into her role of “She Who Prepares the Lambs for Slaughter.”
Is it cruel to say this? I feel it is cruel; but that it is only the cruelty of truth, speaking it, shouting it, that will save us now. If we do not, Africa may well be depopulated of black people in our grandchildren’s lifetime, and the worldwide suffering of our children will continue to be our curse.
In all my life it has been Adam and his sister, Olivia, who I believed thought most about me. He married me; she is my best friend. But do you know why my soul removed itself from Adam’s reach? It is because I helped him start his progressive ministry—more progressive anyway than his father’s and those of most preachers of color—in San Francisco, and I sat there in our church every Sunday for five years listening to Adam spread the word of Brotherly Love, which has its foundation in God’s love of his son, Jesus Christ. I grew agitated each time he touched on the suffering of Jesus. For a long time my agitation confused me. I am a great lover of Jesus, and always have been. Still, I began to see how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of others from one’s view. And in my sixth year as a member of Adam’s congregation, I knew I wanted my own suffering, the suffering of women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons of the torturers, to be the subject of a sermon. Was woman herself not the tree of life? And was she not crucified? Not in some age no one even remembers, but right now, daily, in many lands on earth?
One sermon, I begged him. One discussion with your followers about what was done to me.
He said the congregation would be embarrassed to discuss something so private and that, in any case, he would be ashamed to do so.
I’d learned to appreciate the sanctuary of the Waverly by then. A place where there was a bench on the lawn, partly in the shade but mainly in the sun, just for me. I liked my Sunday mornings there. Sedated. Calm. The grass was so green