Temple of My Familiar (20 page)

“My mother did not particularly interest me. Whereas Big Mama (as I called Grandmama Celie) and Mama Shug (as I called Miss Shug) were always good for a kiss, a laugh, a squeeze, a ride to the garden or at least to the front porch, my mother was—dare I say it?—a boring woman, who rarely laughed and always had her nose in a book.

“I used to sit on the floor at her feet, having crawled about the house until I was tired, and look up at her, hoping she would put aside her book for a moment and play with me. Occasionally she would, but there was a perfunctory quality in her caresses that irritated me. Rather than submit to her insincerity, and thereby appear to accept it, I would wriggle from her arms with a cry. Immediately one or both of my pals would arrive, and I would be hugged in all seriousness, kissed intelligently, changed if I needed to be, and fed something whether I needed it or not. I was indecently fat, as fat and round as Mama Shug. When we lay down together, it was like a small ball resting on a larger one. And how we enjoyed the contact of our fat bellies! Neither of us could imagine the other could do any wrong. And we were right.

“This period of my life was a long bliss. Very little happened that I considered threatening to me. I soon learned to pay as little attention to my mother as she paid to me, and my life was a round of fascinating events and spontaneous smiles. Visitors to our house frequently lavished their attention on Benny, it is true, because in their own homes boys were more prized. In our house, however, it paid to be a girl, and all my womanish ways were approved. I decked myself out in what finery came my way in a routine rummaging about in everybody’s drawers. I peeked under dresstails and stared at the mysterious closings of men’s pants. I tried to cook.

I tried to cut wood as I saw Big Mama’s best friend, Miss Sofia, do. I tried to build a house out of stove wood and make blinds for it out of pieces of straw. I imagined myself a car, like Mama Shug’s, and drove it by the hour. I brought money home and also took everybody out.

“‘Come on, let’s go, y’all,’ I said to Benny and our collective toys, as we headed for a night spot miles away.

“Sometimes I imagined doing the things my mother and grandfather did. I ‘read.’ Or I imagined I was Papa Albert, who used to be Big Mama’s husband, and stared off into space.”

F
INALLY ONE DAY
F
ANNY
said, “Listen, Suwelo, I love you too much to divorce you without your consent. You have been wonderful to me. Without you, how would I have grown? But I am going away for a while, with my mother. We are going back to Africa to visit the Olinka. Their country is free now, and my father wants to lay eyes on me.”

From London she wrote to him: “The hotel we are staying at is dreadful. No telephones in the rooms and hostile receptionists. There was a fire on one of the upper floors some time ago and there is still a charred odor in the air. The new owners are Middle Eastern. They sit in the lobby and watch the bellboy, African; the charwoman, West Indian; the people who work in the dining room, Indian, Arab, and Greek; and the hostile receptionists, blonde English girls. One day my mother said, ‘Look, it isn’t even safe; I can step through this window into the street,’ which she did. But we don’t stay there very much. Most of our time is spent at the Africa Center, where my mother is giving lectures on her years in Africa—growing up there as a black American child and young adult.

“Mom is such a little piece of leather, as she says, but
so
well put together! She wasn’t even fazed by the horrid scrutiny of the guards at the airport, who seem to think everyone who is a visitor to England and isn’t white wants to settle here. What conceit! I sit and listen to her stories and I feel embarrassed that for so many years I ignored her. As I have told you, probably a really boring number of times, when I was a child, she had no real authority in our house, which was ruled by the two queens, Big Mama Celie and Mama Shug. Next to these two, and even next to Great-aunt Nettie, who raised her, my mother’s flame seemed feeble. Even Uncle Adam had a certain exuberance that my mother lacked.

“What she has instead is an astonishing clarity about things, expressed in a straightforward, unassuming manner. Listening to her here makes me realize why the students in her classes at the nursing school always perform well academically, and also have some of her soul-rooted quietness. This is a quality she inherited from her adoptive mother, she says.

“Her audiences here are wonderful. African, Asian, Caribbean, and white students from all over the world. It is not too much to say that they treat her with reverence, almost as if she is a holy document. For she can actually tell them, blow by blow, the whole story of the colonization of Africa, the role of the church, and the psychic and physical toll of their work on the missionaries themselves. She always makes clear that the missionaries
are
people, the same as anyone, and that many of them have real and honorable dreams when they push off for the shores of another world. One thing she said last night really struck me, because it is just one of those small things you never think about. She said that when the missionaries first arrived in Olinka, there was no such thing as litter; the whole village was swept clean twice a day, morning and afternoon, by the women. But then, as the grip of the colonials tightened and the people were squeezed to pay taxes and also to pay for shoddy imported things, only the mission was clean. So that anyone strolling through the village would have assumed the people were naturally slovenly and that only the foreigners cared to be clean.

“My mother still looks like a missionary, with her neatness and unstraightened hair. And, in fact, was there ever a more white-missionary-sounding name than hers:
Olivia,
for heaven’s sake! It makes you think of Vanessa Redgrave teaching the natives in the tropics! But now, here at the Center, I see hundreds of photographs of Africans from that time, and she looks just like them, only a shade lighter. Theirs was a definite style then, very plain, very earnest. No jewelry, or hardly any. Their eyes—serious, dedicated, very wide open and direct—these are the jewels of that period. The students want to know everything: Where did the water come from? The river. Where did the people shop? No shops, until after colonization. Barter, rather. How many white people did she see while growing up? Very few. How many wild animals? Very few. The Olinka thought that white people presented an ‘immature’ appearance, as if they were fetuses, but grown. That was inevitably their comment on first seeing one of them. They then tended to treat the white person or persons solicitously, as if they were frail.

“‘This behavior was not understood, and seriously backfired,’ my mother said. And the students laughed.

“However, it was at the Africa Center that we learned my father has been arrested. You would think that, never having seen the man, I would not be in a dither. I am, though. Having read my father’s books and now, in London, having seen one of his plays—a small student production, poorly acted and badly staged—I can imagine why the authorities have arrested him. My mother says what surprises her is that he wasn’t arrested before. The students were discussing this after the lecture. They mentioned the International Alternative Peace Prize that my father received last year, apparently just at the moment the government was about to lock him up. As it was, they had run a bulldozer through the latest of his plays and razed the theater.

“This last play was called
The Fee
, and is about taxation. It is an antitaxes play, in other words; the kind of play no playwright in America would write and that no producer would produce, though everyone there cries about taxes. I’ve been trying to imagine it, and thinking how nice it would be. Anyway, some of the students at the lecture had already received copies of
The Fee
and are planning to mount a production. Apparently liberation has not lowered the people’s taxes at all, nor has it increased their income. Arggh! Since they can’t see their taxes at work for them—the roads are frequently ruts, the hospitals lack medicine, and the schools lack
pencils
, not to mention how
nearly everyone lacks sufficient food
—the folks are saying hell no, they ain’t gonna pay the friggin’ taxes! My father got the idea for the play from an actual protest—‘riot,’ according to the local government-controlled paper, which the students say is funded by the CIA—staged by women and children, who stormed the house of the president the day they learned how much of their money went to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. for weapons their children are too poorly educated and weak from hunger to operate, assuming they wanted to do such a thing. But the catch is that for those who join the military, there is food, though no education. My father’s position is that the reason millions of Africans are exterminating themselves in wars is that the superpowers have enormous stores of outdated weapons to be got rid of. Only the women seem to notice that everyone’s children are suffering.

“But this is the concern of the African mother the world over, isn’t it? The education of her children, the inevitable school fees pinched somehow out of the money earned from washing, ironing, fieldwork, minework. Any kind of work.

“The students don’t call my father by his tongue-twisting name, Abajeralasezeola, which is only slight improvement over ‘Dahvid,’ to my mind, and which I can never get right either. They call him ‘Ola.’ Ola has this to say. Ola writes thus and so. Ola is right or wrong on such and such a question. In other words, he is theirs. They are resigned about his arrest. One of two things will happen, they say: He will be imprisoned for a long time, possibly tortured, or shot outright. ‘No one in the country has the brains to try to “rehabilitate” him,’ one young man said; or he will have to flee the country. ‘Yes,’ said a young woman exile from Kenya, who had sung for my mother a beautiful welcome song, ‘he will come and join the rest of us; the African continent abroad.’

“‘So many exiles,’ my mother said on the way back to our wretched hotel. ‘There are as many now as before liberation. How can this be?’ She was tired and feeling very sad. Her eyes were full of tears. I put my arms around her shoulders and marveled at the way my head towers over hers. How is it that mothers shrink and shrink? And her
little
hands!

“At the airport outside the capital, my father came to meet us. He and my mother were cordial. They shook hands solemnly but looked warmly, if somewhat cautiously, into each other’s eyes. I thought: Yes, my mother doesn’t get into a car with just anybody! I was surprised that he looked so ordinary. A small dark man with prominent eyes and rather unkempt graying close-to-his-head hair. He looked exhausted, in fact, and as if he’d just tumbled out of bed. Or out of jail.

“Since he and I were strangers, there was a certain amount of awkwardness, but I felt, with his sensitivity, he would be conscious of my thoughts. Consequently I tried to censor those about his knobby knees and the way his oversize khaki shorts flapped in the wind as we walked.

“He gave me, though, just as we were about to get into his car, a swift, determined, and very shy little hug—Suwelo, I’m also taller than
he
is—and stuck a ring on my thumb. It was his ring; I’d noticed it on his finger. I understood the gesture, too. It was something I myself might have done. Overcome with confusion and emotion, he’d simply wanted to give me something tangible, immediately, to try to make up for the lost years. It was interesting, the emotion I suddenly felt; for, as you know, I’ve never been conscious of missing a father, and certainly not him in particular.

“He laughed when he saw my mother’s wide-eyed appraisal of the car. It was not the jalopy of a jailbird. It had a flag. It had a crest.

“‘Of course I have a nice car,’ he said. ‘I am, after all, minister of culture.’

“My mother knew this.

“‘Oh, Dahvid,’ she said. ‘We are so very proud of you. At least it isn’t a Mercedes,’ she added, smiling.

“‘Only because the Germans were not our masters!’ said Ola. And there was only humor, I thought, not a trace of bitterness, in his voice.

“As if he read my thoughts he said, ‘It does no good to be angry. I will just drive my nice little car until they take it away from me.’

“‘We heard you were in jail,’ my mother said.

“‘And so I was!’ he shouted over the noise of the killer taxis zooming by. I looked out the window at the parched African countryside. My mother says the climate has changed drastically over the years. It rains only sporadically now, and in large areas of the country there is severe drought. All up and down the road there were women walking. Some were carrying babies on their backs and basins on their heads. ‘They let me out this morning. I told them I had important visitors from America.’ He paused. ‘A good friend and ... my daughter.’ They are not completely hardened criminals yet, these thugs in office. I know all of them very well. They are not ready to get rid of me yet. Who will greet the literate visitor? In fact, I don’t think they’ve hit on just what to do. They want the world to think well of them, you see.’

“He laughed, almost merrily, at the absurdity of this.

“I laughed with him. What can I tell you, Suwelo? It was like hearing my own self laugh. I knew exactly the region of the soul from which his laughter came. They were breaking my father’s heart, and he saw himself small, beetlelike in his industrious work at undermining them, and there was still a little part of him that did not feel outmatched. ‘As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope,’ someone once said to me; and I thought of that while looking at the back of my father’s graying head. ‘For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance.’ And today truth is still beautiful, as Keats knew, but so frightening.

“The neighborhoods we drove through were poor, dry, dusty, and the houses were behind adobe walls. These walls were painted in the most vivid abstract designs. The women, my father explained, did this. It was a tradition that, as he put it, failed to let them go.