Temple of My Familiar (18 page)

“He was never the same person after that. He was gloomy. He seldom smiled. He continued to see Heath, though, and I can still remember the sullen bitterness of the fights they had. Fights that were full of a few well-chosen cruel and cutting words, and much drinking. Because, with time, my father drank as much as Heath. Whenever my father read about a lynching of a black man by whites and that they’d cut off the man’s privates and stuck them in his mouth, he said he understood the real reason why. Whether he ever did so or not, I’m sure this is something he must have wanted to shout at Mr. Heath. That he understood there was something of a sexual nature going on in any lynching.

“For the rest of his life he hated anything he thought was gay. He detested art, and the carvings by which he made his living he eventually did with disgust. He was the perfect carver for the heavy barbarous furniture that became the rage during that period before the Great War. His carved lions were snarling, his griffins were biting, his ravens were shrieking. Claws and teeth and drops of blood were everywhere. The stuff made me shudder as a child, and my mother failed to find in it anything to encourage her famous giggle, but white people bought it; pretty soon, black people did, too. It appeared even in the houses of poor people right there on the Island. Generally they liked their furniture and everything else to be straightforward and simple; God only knows what they really thought of it.

“My father hated my painting. It made him think there was something wrong with me. All my life he tried to keep me from doing it. When Heath finally died, of a heart attack, my father, the only black person permitted at the funeral, was still bitter. My mother, generally merry to the last, never acted as though she knew anything about any of this, beyond the fact that Heath was a nice if drunken white man that liked her husband, David, and sometimes ate dinner—which he always praised—at our house.

“My father wouldn’t have cared if the plague killed off all the gays in the world. He hated Heath because Heath had forced him to look at the little bit of Heath there was in himself. Nobody had prepared him for that vision. Nor could he pretend he hadn’t seen it. I’ve often thought of the battle my father must have had with himself when Heath was embracing him in the shop. What happened to him that day remained a burden on his soul. He died many unhappy years later of liver failure. There was a terrible smell, so terrible that painting over the old paint on his walls wasn’t enough. After he died, we had to scrape the paint off the walls, and burn it, then paint the bare walls many times to cover it up. This stench, I felt, must be the rotten smell of that part of my father that he murdered and tried to bury away from other people and from himself.

“When I told Lissie about my daddy’s prejudice against ‘funny’ men and hatred of that part of himself, and told her about what had happened that first time between him and Heath, the first thing she said was that my father had been treated like a woman; that was one of the reasons he felt so bad; and that the way he had responded only made him feel worse. His whole existence was compromised by what was happening, yet he could not prevent an erotic response. She also said he was wrong to think queers are unnatural. She said queers have been in every century in which she found herself—and she giggled when she said it—and claimed to have seen queer behavior even among the cousins, always the epitome of moral behavior where Lissie was concerned. One of them, she claimed, not only taught her
how
to dress, but
to
dress.”

A
T LAST, ONE DAY
, Suwelo had a story for his friends. They sat down for tea and cookies in the living room, and he began slowly, in a soft, rusty voice.

“She was in the back, in the garden, among the roses. It was a warm April evening, bright and clear as a day in fall, and there was nothing really in the garden to see. The rosebushes had already been pruned and the branches burned. And yet, when I think of that evening I see her among blooming roses, as she’d looked the summer before, brown and healthy, eyes bright and black, skin flushed, short hair curly and crisp as the day. She was wearing a long skirt, gaily printed, and a T-shirt. On her hands were gardening gloves, and she was trying to wrap part of a climbing rose cane back on its trellis.

“‘Oh, Suwelo,’ she said, when she noticed me on the walk near the back door, ‘you’re home.’

“She seemed glad of it. But did not rush to kiss me as she once had. I felt a pang at this, but hadn’t really expected anything else. After all, we had been discussing a divorce for months now. I moved closer to where she strained to place the rose, and she moved backward a bit as I reached to help her. She was small and slight and
dark
, there in the sun, and I loved the smell of her, as always, something flowery and fresh that made me long to be able to hold her as easily and as carelessly as I once had.

“I remember this evening so well because once again she brought up the subject of the divorce.

“‘It isn’t about not loving you,’ she said. ‘I will always love you. Probably.’ She smiled at me. ‘But I don’t want to be married.’

“This was not a new statement. What she said next was. ‘You will find another woman right away, or, rather, one will find you. You’ll see.’

“‘I don’t want another woman,’ I said.

“‘It won’t matter,’ she said. ‘You’ll be that rarest of all quantities: black, free, gainfully employed. You’ll be snapped up in no time.’

“We were having dinner by then. She was not what anyone would call a great cook, but she was certainly a good one. In an hour she’d broiled pork chops with garlic and rosemary, the way I like them, made a salad, and steamed rice. All the while, I sat at the kitchen table watching her.

“‘The only problem with that,’ she said, frowning at her plate and adding more salt, ‘is that she’ll be jealous.’

“‘What?’ I said. ‘What
are
you talking about.
She’ll
be jealous. Who’ll be jealous? Of what?’

“‘
She
,’ she said. ‘The new wife. She’ll be jealous of me. You see, I don’t want to end our relationship; I want to change it. I don’t want to be married. Not to you, not to anybody. But I don’t want to lose you either.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too.’

“‘But why not?’ she asked, seriously. ‘Say you are my cake. I want to enjoy you, to love you, to confide in you, to be your friend. Shit,’ she said suddenly. ‘It doesn’t work. What do you suppose it means, have your cake and eat it too?’

“‘What it means for us is, you cannot have your way this time. If you love me, stay with me.’

“‘I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘Most of the time. But unmarried. And on a separate floor.’

“I groaned. This is what I got for agreeing to buy a house with more than one floor.

“‘We were happier before we were married,’ she said.

“
“Everybody’s
happier before they’re married.’

‘Then why do they marry?’ she asked.

“‘Because everything builds up to marriage. Don’t say we haven’t been happy married,’ I said, almost angry. ‘We’ve been very happy.’

“‘I don’t feel free,’ she said.

“‘When have you ever felt free?’ I asked.

“She considered the question. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt free, never in my life. And I want to.’

“At the office several of my colleagues said how sorry they were that we were breaking up. Ours was the last stable, apparently happy marriage they knew. Something in the way they offered condolences made me realize they considered the breakup Fanny’s fault entirely. To a man they’d been polite to her but never liked her very much. And whenever she came to the office to see me before we went out to lunch together, she was cool, distant, never able to do much with small talk. And there was the way she dressed. The shorter the miniskirts on other men’s wives, the longer her skirts. And she wore flowing scarves made of silk, and once, in conversation with one of the guys, carelessly mentioned her pipe. A pipe more for ornament than anything else, really. Bought to smoke grass in, it’s true; because she could never learn to roll a cigarette; but then she smoked very little. However, certain things you don’t talk about in your husband’s office at a far from radical, not even liberal university, where every nonwhite instructor is already suspected of smoking dope, screwing students in the stairwells, and hiding submachine guns in his hair; and I brought this up with her.

“‘Do I embarrass you?’ she asked.

“‘How could you embarrass me?’ I said, leaning over the table to kiss her and holding her hand.

“‘Freedom must mean never having (or being able) to embarrass anybody,’ she said.

“And I ordered our lunch to save us from another discussion of
that
subject.

“It became harder and harder to talk with her the nearer separation approached. She begged me not to draw away.

“‘It’s marriage I don’t want,’ she insisted, ‘not you.’

“But I couldn’t see it. Oh, I
pretended
I could. But my heart wasn’t in it. I felt abandoned, rejected, set adrift. After all, this was someone I’d known and loved for a good portion of my life. When we were married, I considered it a natural
joining
, a legal verification of what was already fact. We were one, in my opinion. And being legally married seconded that opinion.

“‘Do you think your new wife will let us spend time together?’ she asked, for she was convinced I would remarry.

“I hated expressions like ‘spend time.’ They sounded so hippie.

“‘Once every few months, if more often made her upset?’

“She was sitting at the foot of the bed. I was lying down. She placed her hand on my knee.

“‘I know I’ll feel more sexy with you after the divorce,’ she said.

“‘Promises, promises,’ I said bitterly. And she removed her hand.”

Part Two

Helped are those who learn that the deliberate invocation of suffering is as much a boomerang as the deliberate invocation of joy.

—
The Gospel According to Shug

“M
Y MOTHER,
C
ELIE
, was very much influenced by color,” said Olivia. She was talking to Lance, the man she was not quite sure she would marry. They were walking along spacious, tree-lined streets after their duties at Atlanta’s only Negro hospital, Harrison Memorial, were done. To passersby they presented an unusual couple: she, short and very dark, he, tall and very light, with the sandy, wavy hair that would, under certain circumstances in their rigidly segregated city, have classified him as white.

Olivia spoke with the simplicity and earnestness that characterized her, and Lance listened with the attentiveness of one who is, by lucky chance, finally hearing the good news of life he might otherwise have missed.

“The year I met her,” continued Olivia, “in my middle thirties, she was fascinated by the color blue. Not the bright blue of skies or the drab blue of serge Sunday suits, but a complex royal blue with metallic glints. A combination of teal and electric blue that she one day, in her endless rummaging about in fabric shops across the country, ecstatically found. This was a blue that, she said, gave off energy, or, to use her own word, power. A person wearing this blue was suddenly more confident, stronger, more present and intense than ever before. She made me a pantsuit that gave me all of these qualities when I wore it, just as she predicted, and I was sorry when my daughter, Fanny Nzingha, while helping me make tamale pie, spilled chili sauce on it, and the stain wouldn’t come out, no matter how many times I took it to the cleaners. Years later I bought another blue pantsuit, but it wasn’t nearly as perfect as the one my mother had made. Though it was as close to the same shade of blue as I could get, it failed to give off any particular energy. In fact, I always felt slightly enervated when I wore it. It was like wearing the shadow of my old suit.

“I do not know if she always loved color. Her childhood was an unhappy one, and most of her young adulthood was spent raising another woman’s children, while her own children—my brother, Adam, and I—were brought up by our aunt Nettie, who was a missionary in Africa. We were also brought up by our adoptive mother, Corrine, until we were teenagers. She died of fever and was buried outside the village where we lived. My father, Samuel, was a missionary also, but by the time we returned to America he had long since lost his faith; not in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, the prophet and human being, but in Christianity as a religion of conquest and domination inflicted on other peoples. He and Aunt Nettie, whom he married after our adoptive mother’s death, spent many long evenings with my brother and me discussing ways we might best help our people discover their own power to communicate directly with ‘God.’ We had all begun to see, in Africa—where people worshiped many things, including the roofleaf plant, which they used to cover their houses—that ‘God’ was not a monolith, and not the property of Moses, as we’d been led to think, and not separate from us, or absent from whatever world one inhabited. Once this channel was cleared, so to speak, much that our people had been taught about religion, much that diminished them and kept them in oppression, would naturally fall away. It was so hard for the Africans, in this new religion we brought, to ever feel ‘God’ loved them, for instance; whereas in the traditional religions they practiced they took this more or less for granted.

“‘As a minister, I am quite unnecessary to anyone else’s salvation,’ my father found the courage to admit. ‘Surely it is one of the universe’s little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this.’

“The religion that one discovered on one’s own was a story of the earth, the cosmos, creation itself; and whatever ‘Good’ one wanted could be found not down the long road of eternity, but right in one’s own town, one’s home, one’s country.
This world.
After all, since this world is a planet spinning about in the sky, we are all of us
in heaven
already! The God discovered on one’s own speaks nothing of turning the other cheek. Of rendering unto Caesar. But only of the beauty and greatness of the earth, the universe, the cosmos. Of creation. Of the possibilities for joy. You might say the white man, in his dual role of spiritual guide and religious prostitute, spoiled even the most literary form of God experience for us. By making the Bible say whatever was necessary to keep his plantations going, and using it as a tool to degrade women and enslave blacks. But the old African religions also, in which mutilation of women’s bodies sometimes figured so prominently, left almost everything to be desired. Even in these, man, in his insecurity and feeling of unlovableness, made himself the sole conduit to God, if not at times the actual God
him
self. My father often commented on the way the villagers feared their holy men and prostrated themselves before them—as Catholics fear and bow before the pope—so much so that the actual assumed receiver of their petitions and prayers, God Itself, was quite often forgotten. Still, there was a small point in the colored man’s favor.