The Woman Warrior_ Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts - Maxine Hong Kingston [42]
The village crazy lady put on her headdress with the small mirrors, some of them waving quickly on red stalks. In her crazy lady clothes of reds and greens, she greeted the animals and the moving branches as she carried her porcelain cup to the river. Although her bindings had come loose, her tiny feet made her body sway pleasantly, her shoes like little bridges. She knelt singing at the river and filled her cup. Carrying the brimming water in two careful hands, she undulated toward a clearing where the light of the afternoon seemed to be concentrated. The villagers turned to look at her. She dipped her fingertips into the water and flung droplets into grass and air. Then she set the cup down and pulled out the long white undersleeves of her old-fashioned dress. She began to move in fanning circles, now flying the sleeves in the air, now trailing them on the grass, dancing in the middle of the light. The little mirrors in her headdress shot rainbows into the green, glinted off the water cup, caught water drops. My mother felt as if she were peering into Li T’ieh-kuai’s magic gourd to check the fate of an impish mortal.
One villager whispered away the spell, “She’s signaling the planes.” The whisper carried. “She’s signaling the planes,” the people repeated. “Stop her. Stop her.”
“No, she’s only crazy,” said my mother. “She’s a harmless crazy lady.”
“She’s a spy. A spy for the Japanese.”
Villagers picked up rocks and moved down the hill.
“Just take away the mirrors,” my mother called. “Just take her headdress.”
But the tentative first stones were already falling around the crazy lady. She dodged them; she tried to catch them, laughing, at last, people to play with.
The rocks hit harder as the villagers came within stoning range. “Here. Here. I’ll get her mirrors,” said my mother, who had come running down the mountain into the clearing. “Give me your headdress,” she ordered, but the woman only shook her head coquettishly.
“See? She’s a spy. Get out of the way, Doctor. You saw the way she flashed the signals. She comes to the river every day before the planes come.”
“She’s only getting drinking water,” said my mother. “Crazy people drink water too.”
Someone took the crazy lady’s cup and threw it at her. It broke at her feet. “Are you a spy? Are you?” they asked her.
A cunning look narrowed her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “I have great powers. I can make the sky rain fire. Me. I did that. Leave me alone or I will do it again.” She edged toward the river as if she were about to run, but she wouldn’t have been able to get away on her tiny feet.
A large stone rammed her head, and she fell in a flutter of sleeves, the ornaments jumping about her broken head. The villagers closed in. Somebody held a fragment of glass under her nostrils. When it clouded, they pounded her temples with the rocks in their fists until she was dead. Some villagers remained at the body beating her head and face, smashing the little mirrors into silver splinters.
My mother, who had turned her back and walked up the mountain (she never treated those about to die), looked down at the mass of flesh and rocks, the sleeves, the blood flecks. The planes came again that very afternoon. The villagers buried the crazy lady along with the rest of the dead.
My mother left China in the winter of 1939, almost six months after the stoning, and arrived in New York Harbor in January, 1940. She carried the same suitcase she had taken to Canton, this time filled with seeds and bulbs. On Ellis Island the officials asked her, “What year did your husband cut off his pigtail?” and it terrified her when she could not remember. But later she told us perhaps this lapse was for the best: what if they were trying to