Temple of My Familiar (25 page)

But what was in the package? What was their gift? Suwelo took a deep breath as he carefully pulled off the string. The brown paper crackled as he ran his fingers underneath it. He thought at first they’d given him a stack of albums, for the package was just that size, though quite light. But no, there were paintings. He lifted them out and stared at them, first one, then the other, for a long time. They were obviously self-portraits. Perhaps not obviously, though, for on one painting was written “Self-portrait, Lissie Lyles,” and on the other, “Self-portrait, Harold D. Jenkins.” The background of the paintings showed all the familiar things the two friends loved to paint: their trees and corn and morning glories, the pink-and-cream spider flower. It was the center of the paintings that was different from anything Suwelo had ever seen. For instead of faces, as in a portrait, there were merely the outlines of their upper bodies, a man’s shape and a woman’s shape, and these outlines surrounded blue, infinite space, painted with such intensity, depth, and longing that it was as luminous and as inviting as the sky. Wonderingly, Suwelo turned the paintings over, as if that infinite space might have leaked through to the other side. What he saw made him smile and hug the paintings to his heart, as the train shot through a long gray tunnel into an even blacker dark. On the back of Lissie Lyles’s self-portrait were the words, in emerald lettering, “Painted by Hal Jenkins.” On Hal’s self-portrait, in bright red, were the words “Painted by Lissie Lyles.”

S
UWELO, NOW AT HOME
, was intrigued by the fat pink envelope, which he lifted to his nose and sniffed. It smelled like Miss Lissie—old-fashioned white roses under a hot summer sun. Turning it over, he was surprised to see, in Miss Lissie’s ancient script, all sharp points and decisively rounded
o
’s: “They burned us so thoroughly we did not even leave smoke.” He did not know what he expected to find on opening the letter, but the blank pages that lay in his hand, over a dozen of them, struck him as an odd missive, even from Miss Lissie.

It was days before he understood, and then, in the middle of the night, it came to him. This part of Miss Lissie’s story was written in invisible ink. At the moment he realized this he also knew that all he needed to read her letter was a candle. Heaving himself out of bed, he went in search of one. Luckily he found a box of them—an earlier gift from Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal—on top of the fridge. Still in his nightshirt, hunched over the kitchen table, the candle close up behind the first sheet of paper, and the chill of the San Francisco fog seeping into his bones, he began to read ... what at first seemed to be some kind of religious raving.

“The religion I was taught as a child, growing up on the Island,” wrote Miss Lissie, “is a thing that causes people to try to eat up the earth, since we were taught ‘everything is for man,’ while man was never asked to be for anything in particular. Well, for ‘God,’ but who knew what that was?”

“Hmmm,” said Suwelo, yawning, and scratching his chin.

“The first witches to die at the stake were the daughters of the Moors.”
Moors?
he mused skeptically. “It was they (or, rather, we) who thought the Christian religion that flourished in Spain would let the Goddess of Africa ‘pass’ into the modern world as ‘the Black Madonna.’ After all, this was how the gods and goddesses moved from era to era before, though Islam, our official religion for quite a long time by now, would have nothing to do with this notion; instead, whole families in Africa who worshiped the Goddess were routinely killed, sold into slavery, or converted to Islam at the point of the sword.

“Yes,” and here Suwelo imagined a long, hesitant breath, “I was one of those ‘pagan’ heretics they burned at the stake.

“They burned us first—well, we were so visible. Even after centuries of living among the Europeans. You can think of Desdemona and Othello, if you can’t come at it any other way, in trying to catch even a glimpse of our presence in Europe. The Inquisition eventually traveled where they were, too, to watery Venice, a dank and still somehow beautiful place, and there were screams and firelit shadows bouncing off the walls of the Doges’ Palace in St. Mark’s Square for months on end.

“But did you never wonder why, in the little bit of the story the whites could not prevent Shakespeare, at least, from trying to tell (that ‘mysterious’ playwright about whom so very little is known), that there are only Moors (defined as men) and no Moor
esses
? I can tell you, we were there, somewhat paler than when we were in Africa, yes, but imagine Desdemona’s and Othello’s children. We were there, for sure, and brought up to be our fathers’ daughters, our fathers who loved learning more than any other thing, and who embraced a religion that had terrorized them in Africa, and who traveled the world and married strangers and barbarians in order to learn more about their curious, alien ways. Our poor fathers, whose only crime was that they loved their Mother, but who, in seeking to protect Her and themselves, helped to change us all, finally, into another spirit and another race.

“The Inquisitors slaughtered our fathers and took their property for the church, as was done also to the Jews. Our African fathers, who, fleeing the religious dictatorship of Islam, while dressed in its cloak, had come into Spain, caught their breath, found themselves and their incredible handsomeness and learning admired, and, for the most part, settled there. Some of them pushed on into France and Germany, Poland, England, Ireland, Russia. One or two settled in Venice and inspired a famous play. Well, you get the picture. If I am not mistaken it is only in Poland that Our Black Lady, the Great Mother of All—Mother Africa, if you will—is still openly worshiped. Perhaps that is why it is said of the Poles that they are none too bright.

“But during the time of which I am speaking,” the letter continued, and the smell of the tallow candle seemed suddenly to hurt Suwelo’s nose, “and which I have tried to drop from memory because it is so horrible, they obliterated us. They said the mother of their white Christ (blonde, blue-eyed, even in black-headed Spain) could never have been a black woman, because both the color black and the female sex were of the devil. We were evil witches to claim otherwise. We
were
witches; our word for healers. We brought their children into the world; we cured their sick; we washed and laid out the bodies of their dead. We were far from evil. We helped Life, and they did not like this at all. Whenever they saw our power it made them feel they had none. They felt themselves the moon to our sun. And yet, as every woman knows, the moon also has great power. We are connected to all three planes—past, present, future—of life; so is man, but he will not let himself see it. He has let himself be taught that his own mother is evil and has joined religions in which her only role, after nurturing and rearing him with her blood, is to shut up.”

Suwelo imagined Miss Lissie’s frown.

“Can you believe it?” the letter continued. “It is as if each man forces every other man to go out into the night without a candle, to go out among the speaking without a tongue, to go out among the seeing without an eye, to go out among the standing without a leg.

“‘If you want to join the company of men,’ they are told, ‘you must do something about your mother.’ Meekly man says, ‘What must I do?’ Teeth already chattering from the cold he will feel without the warmth of his best friend. Hah! ‘We want you to shut her up,’ he is told. ‘Don’t pay any attention to anything she might suggest. In return, we will help you pretend that you created yourself. Just ignore her. Don’t hear her. Let her weep, let her moan, let her starve.’ This is what they have done to their own mothers; it is certainly what they have done to Mother Africa.

“They burned us so thoroughly—the dark women so recently, relatively speaking, from Africa—that, unlike the Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies and artists and rebels they also burned, not to mention the rich women whose property they stole even before their ashes cooled, we did not even leave a trace of smoke. The connection between black woman and white was broken utterly; the blood sisterhood that African women shared with European women was gone as if it had never been. In France, there is nothing. Notre-Dame. Our Lady. Not our
Black
Lady. In England, nothing; unless you find it among the remnants of the Celts, their own way of life smashed to bits. In Ireland, rumors of ‘the little people’ and all those ignorant jokes about ‘black Irish.’

“In Venice, where Othello was a nobleman, there are today endless statues of Moors, dressed in the livery of slaves. In Spain—well, there’s all that ‘Moorish’ architecture, too exuberantly
colored
to be easily explained.

“When they burned me at the stake I cursed them; what else is a dark woman to do? I did not mind that they coveted my house and the land my father left me. I would have given it to them, to save at least the lives of my children, who were grouped around me, and whose screams burned in my ears more piercingly than the fire. But what I refused to give up was my essence; nor could I. For it was simply this: I do not share their vision of reality, but have, and cherish, my own. And when you look at the world today, it fits my curse exactly, but with one exception: Those I cursed do not suffer alone; everything and everyone does. This I would not have had. It was a long time in the learning, that lesson: You cannot curse a part without damning the whole. That is why Mother Africa, cursed by all her children, black, white, and in between, is dying today, and, after her, death will come to every other part of the globe.”

Now there was an abrupt change in tone, and Suwelo noticed, with some alarm, that as he read each line, it completely disappeared; Miss Lissie had written her story not only in invisible ink, but in invisible ink that could not be read twice. He moved the page closer to the flickering candle to make sure of this observation. He lifted other sheets to the flame. They were blank. He sighed, shook his head, and read on.

“Now woman,” the letter continued, “by hook and by crook, and with a strong memory of African Eden in her batteries, kept alive some feeling for the other animals, though she was reduced usually to the caring and feeding of one small house cat. Well, there she was, black, with her broom and her cat, her hair like straw. Ever wonder why witches’ clothes are always black, and their hair every which way?” Suwelo knew Miss Lissie, in writing this, had laughed out loud.

“We never forgot it should be possible to communicate with anything that had big enough eyes! So there we were, the dark women, muttering familiarly to every mouse or cow or goat about the place. Their writers of fairy tales would make much of this tendency. We were shoved into the beds of men old enough to be our grandfathers, in countries where, unlike in Africa, bathing was simply not done; on estates far from human beings of any kind. The animals and our children were our world. Foolishly we thought the animals and our children, at least, would not be taken from us. But the Inquisitors, set in place to control us, declared ‘consorting’ with animals a crime, punishable by being burned at the stake! And our children fell into the hands of their fathers, their ‘masters,’ who traded them for gold, as they traded flour and land and cloth.

“The Inquisitors claimed we were fucked and suckled by bulls and goats and all manner of malformed animal creatures. For good measure, they gave their devil—the black thing that represented the people they most despised and wished to be perceived as separate from—sharp cloven hoofs and pointed horns, a tail. They made it seem not only natural but also righteous to kill, as brutally as possible, without any feeling but lustful self-justification, any animal or dark creature that one saw.

“There was something about the relationship she had with animals and with her children that deeply satisfied woman. It was of this that man was jealous.

“The animals can remember; for, like sight, memory is renewed at every birth. But our language they will never speak; not from lack of intelligence, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them. And that is why, in a nutshell, Suwelo, goddesses and witches exist.”

S
OME MONTHS AFTER
A
RVEYDA
came back from his travels with Zedé and told Carlotta the heartrending story of her mother’s life, she noticed that the red parrot-feather earrings had fallen apart; there were still wispy gold threads that went through her ears, but these had fallen free of the feathers themselves, which were bedraggled shreds that had to be smoothed flat with an iron. Taking the red, tissue-thin blots of color with her one day, she stopped at a shop in San Francisco where anything at all, depending on size and flatness, could be encased in plastic. Within hours a necklace had been made for her, and so, around her neck, enclosed in clear, hard plastic, she began to wear the feathers. In her jewel box at home she continued to keep the stones, until one day she realized they had spent their entire existence, in the thousands of years before they came into her care, in the open air. She took them out and casually placed them in their original formation—which she now saw as a pyramid or triangle, or the women’s sign for peace—beneath the arching overhang of a giant California live-oak tree in the San Francisco arboretum. Beneath this tree she began, quite frequently, to eat her lunch, do yoga stretches, run in place, and meditate and pray.

It was after she began wearing the new necklace that she started, for the first time in years, to dream. In her very first dream she was a young child in a cave with her mother, only this mother was not Zedé but someone much larger and darker, and that mother was busily painting something on the walls in bright colors. Carlotta, too, was encouraged to paint, and so she painted the walls and herself. Her mother was dark bronze, with black wavy hair that bushed to her waist, but now, behind her, looming up against the very topmost reaches of the cave softly came her father, a giant of a man, bearded and fierce. But no, he was smiling. He was darker even than her mother, and his hair was dull. Then the three of them stood together in the mouth of the cave, exactly as a small San Francisco family would stand in their doorway peering out into a rainy day. Only now that they stood in the light, Carlotta saw that if they were in a cave, it was not a natural one; the sides of the entrance, where her fingers rested, were smooth as glass. Looking up, she saw that the cave entry was indeed a door, and that the lintel was made of smooth stone into which a strange beast with the head of a very ugly, big-nosed and long-lipped person was magnificently and scarily carved. But Carlotta felt no fear.