Living by the Word (15 page)

His grandmother was the former English bondwoman.

As it happened, Molly Walsh, Benjamin Banneker’s English grandmother, had been accused of stealing a bucket of milk (which she said the cow she was milking kicked over) and had been sentenced to seven years of indentured servitude in a relatively new British colony, Maryland. When her time was served, she set off, barehanded, in a westerly direction into the wilderness, where she claimed a portion of unoccupied land (except by Indians and the Earth’s natural animal and plant inhabitants: the layers of occupation are always thick) that lay surrounding a spring. She bartered with the Indians, and eventually she was able to purchase two slaves, who she hoped would clear the land for her. However, one of them, the son of a king in Africa, was forbidden by his station in life to work for anyone other than himself. This is the one, Bannaky (his African name), Molly Walsh married.

This interesting couple, who from all accounts were prosperous and happy, had four children. When the eldest daughter was old enough to marry, Molly Walsh again went down to the slave ships and bought an African. This man was Benjamin Banneker’s father.

One day, in the parallel America we are constantly constructing alongside the one that is beginning to topple over, from its own distortions and lies, we will routinely have films about our real ancestors, not about the sanitized, error-free, unrecognizable-as-human stereotypes we
endure,
for the most part, today. More and more the America that really exists and the Americans that really were and are will be acknowledged and studied. This is what so many of us, happy to count ourselves
alternative Americans
(to the ones in power or rampant on TV), work toward. For we know none of us can really feel good about our country or ourselves if we don’t know who we are, where we’ve been or why, where we are going—and are afraid to guess.

Or, to quote Doris Lessing, “If we were able to describe [or see] ourselves accurately, we might be able to change.”

One of the reasons our country seems so purposeless (except where making money is concerned) is that Americans, even (and perhaps especially) genetically, have been kept from acknowledging and being who they really are. There are few “white” people in America, for instance, and even fewer “black” ones. This reality is metaphor for countless other areas of delusion. In all our diversity we have been one people—just as the peoples of the world are one people—even when the most vicious laws of separation have forced us to believe we are not.

I, too, sing America.

Seeing Red
is a film that reminds us not to despair of self-discovery of ourselves as a country. In it, some of our most radical political and
spirited
ancestors are recorded in all their dedication and complexity. Looking at and listening to them we see, many of us, that in our own beliefs and actions for a more just America (and world) we are only one of the many waves of movement for change, and that the American Communists of the first half of the twentieth century were an earlier wave for justice of which—whatever its failings and flaws—we can be proud. (Having numerous failings and flaws our own selves.)

Whenever I look at the city of Washington, D.C., now, I know I will see superimposed on the phallic Washington Monument and the bunkered White House, the image of a small black boy with his hand tucked lovingly into his white grandmother’s larger one. A founding couple to cheer the honest American heart. And when I study all the movements for justice that spring up and are battered, maligned, and sometimes destroyed by corrupt leaders and bad-faith followers, I will see the passion, devotion, disillusionment, and, finally, transcendence that mark the people in this film—who seem to have been made more whole by their struggles, rather than less.

These are some of the ancestors we have been encouraged to avoid, not to praise, not to know. This alone tells us much. In the America we are building, they laid many a foundation. In the America that will be, they have an honored place.

1984

*
Your Most Humble Servant
by Shirley Graham (New York: Julian Messner, 1949).

Ubud, Bali

February 12,1987

Another rainy night. I am in bed, where I’ve been for several hours, after a long walk through Ubud to the monkey forest and then for lunch at the Lotus Cafe—entirely inhabited by Europeans and Americans and one stray very dark and pretty Indian girl in a vivid red dress. Then the walk home, stopping in a local shop—where the woman proprietor is sweet and sells wonderful flowing cool and colorful pants. (Rebecca, on seeing them hanging near the street, immediately exclaimed, “Miss Celie’s pants!”) Anyway, the pants I liked, knee length, with the flowing grace of a sarong, she no longer had, but she urged me to try a kind of flowered jumpsuit, very long—before she showed me how to adjust it to my shape—and Western-influenced Balinese. It looked great, so I bought it.

But the rain threatens to get me down. In the mornings there is a little sun—nothing direct; in the afternoons there are quite heavy showers, which, even if they are warm and we can walk right through them, I find a little overwhelming after the third or fourth day. Also feeling down because I’ve drunk so much beer, since the water is considered unsafe except here at the house. And, Robert says, this is the week before my period!

Anyway,
very
out of sorts, for me. It’s true I overheard the housekeeper (who travels everywhere with an umbrella against rain and sun) tell Rebecca she “don’t like black,” as Rebecca was saying how much she wants to “brown”; and I resent always being perceived as just another “rich” American tourist and importuned to buy at every turn when we are walking and even here at the house. But Ubud is beautiful! I’ve never seen anything like it. The green rice paddies, the soft bluish-gray skies, the people who’ve created the landscape, and themselves, graceful, friendly, amazingly mellow.

So much so it is a shock to realize that as recently as 1965 more than 100,000 of them killed each other after an attempted Communist coup in Jakarta.

Bali makes me think of Uganda. The same gentle countryside and gentle people; the same massacres and blood baths.

Robert wondered aloud why you don’t see middle-aged people, only the young and the old. A lot of them would have been among the 100,000.

I have many bites! The ones on my feet are especially maddening. In my gloomier moments this morning I thought: If it’s going to rain all the time and I have to suffer mosquitoes as well, I might as well be in Mendocino. (Not knowing that Northern California was experiencing the worst flooding in thirty years!) I felt very homesick, which Rebecca found astonishing. She has taken to Bali—the people, the landscape, the food— like the trouper she is. She is one of those old, old transparent souls the Universe radiates through without impediment, and so, wherever we go, within a week everyone seems aware of her presence. She walks in the rain as if it is sun.

Have been reading
Dancing in the Light,
by Shirley MacLaine; much of it is true, as I have experienced life, and a lot is straight Edgar Cayce. But it is sad to see her spirituality limited by her racialism. Indians and Africans have a hard time; especially Africans who, in one of her incarnations, frustrate her because they’re not as advanced as she is! It is amusing to contemplate what the Africans must have thought of her.

But I don’t care about any of this. In the kitchen, Ketut is making dinner, chicken satay. Rebecca and Robert are at a fire dance, to which I declined to go—pleading aching joints, footwear erosion, and mildew of the brain. The rain is coming down in torrents. Lightning is flashing. The house we’ve rented is spectacular: it faces a terraced hillside of rice paddies, two waterfalls, and coconut trees, and is built in Balinese style but is huge by Balinese standards, I think. Two large bedrooms downstairs and an open-air one upstairs, with another great wooden hand-carved antique Balinese bed at one end. The roof is thickly thatched.

Two days ago I celebrated my forty-second birthday here, with the two people I love most in the world; we talked about my visit, before we left home, to a very beautiful Indian woman guru, who spoke of the condition of “judness.” A time of spiritual inertia, of feeling thick, heavy, devoid of light. Yet a good time, too, because, well, judness, too, is a part of life; and it is life itself that is good and holy. Not just the “dancing” times. Nor even the light.

Thinking of this, hoping my loved ones are dry, and smelling dinner, I look up straight into the eye of a giant red hibiscus flower Ketut just placed—with a pat on my head—by the bed. It says: just
be,
Alice. Being is sufficient. Being is All. The cheerful, sunny self you are missing will return, as it always does, but only
being
will bring it back.

My friends John and Eleanor founded the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company a few years ago. They make their living harvesting seaweed—primarily nori, dulse, wakame, and sea-palm frond—on the Mendocino coast at Elk beach, a small sheltered cove where a river meets the ocean, much loved by the locals, who not infrequently do sun and moon worship there. Large fires, lots of children, much to eat, and much gazing into the awesome heavens going
“um”
and (yes, still) “far
out.
”

When I first came to this area in the hills north of San Francisco, a friendly potter, from whom I bought dishes (now my friend Jan Wax), gave a party to which she invited all the people she knew whom she thought I’d like to meet. Among them were Eleanor and John, who, because it was potluck, brought their various concoctions of cooked and raw seaweed.

I tried hard to stay glued to the lasagne—which for a Southern-born person is exotic enough, but—

Try this, said Eleanor, offering a forkful of something that looked like chips of fried garbage bag.

Have a bit of that, said John, proffering something that didn’t look any better.

Soon I was in the same fix I had found myself in when another new friend, at a similar gathering, pressed a fat wad of pig’s-liver pâté into my hand while telling me in detail how she slaughtered the pig herself.
Where are the bushes around this house?
I’d wondered in panic, hastily muttering something about needing to go out and look at the stars, and attempting to chew.

The seaweed was
awful,
I thought. I didn’t care how many minerals it had; besides, how positively gross that you could taste every one.

Excellent protein, said Eleanor.

No fat, said John.

All the trace elements your body’s starved for, said my friend Jan, and a great cleanser of toxins (including nuclear) from the system. She gamely stuck a minuscule slice of something that looked unspeakable in her mouth.

I chewed on. It was kind of a cross between well-salted plastic or rubber and fish.

Have some of the soup, said Eleanor.

Try this dulse broth, said John.

They both had that soft-edged, gracefully aging hippie look that, unfortunately, evokes trust.

I didn’t like the soup.

To hell, I thought, with the broth.

Over the months, at different potluck dinners, I sampled and nibbled the products of the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company—“Grown Wild by the Pacific Ocean!” said their bags. Mainly I learned to hide when the deep-fried sea vegetable platter passed by.

But then, after about a year, two things happened.

One day Eleanor gave me a copy of their new sea vegetable cookbook* and at the same time cooked a new creation of hers called Navarro (after our small village, pop. 67) Oysters—because the seaweed, nori, in this instance, is rolled in beaten egg, whole-wheat flour, onion, and soy sauce, and looks and tastes something like oysters when it’s cooked. Only, to my amazement, it tasted much better.

She cooked a bunch of “oysters” and served them over rice; we ate them with chopsticks. I ate more than anyone—in fact, every cell in my body seemed to wake up at the taste of this new treat, and after finishing the meal I experienced the most intense food satisfaction and well being that I’d ever had in my life.

During the coming ice age, which is probably already starting, people will need to get most of their vegetables from the sea, said John.

For the first time, this did not seem half bad.

They showed me the drying racks for the seaweed on a sunny hill behind their house, then gave me a large plastic garbage bag full of nori from the giant stash they kept in their bedroom prior to marketing. It was clear I was capable of becoming a nori freak.

For a summer my friend Robert and I ate Navarro Oysters several times a week. So did our guests.
“Ummm,”
some said appreciatively. “Yuck! Where are the greens and corn bread?” muttered a few. But all were definitely up for this new experience.

And then one day John and Eleanor invited us to go harvesting with them. We left for the beach before sunup. When we arrived, the tide was out. We clambered over the rocks, marveling at the beauty of the seaweed; its shimmery iridescence as the sun revealed its purples, greens, browns, yellows, and blues. We picked and we picked, always careful to leave enough to grow. Bags of seaweed. Then we explored the rocks beyond the beach, where I promptly slipped and fell, over my head, into the water. Then we lay in the sun to dry, thankful for the ocean’s generosity, its cleanliness, and its peace.

Now the U.S. government is planning to lease Mendocino offshore drilling rights to the oil companies, although oil drilling will tar the beach, pollute the air, and contaminate and possibly kill marine creatures and seaweed. John and Eleanor’s livelihood is threatened. Many of the people who live here and love the ocean are heartsick and outraged. Petitions against drilling are flying thick and fast, John and Eleanor generating some of them—with a little help from their friends, who remember their teachings:

If you eat more sea vegetables, you can eat less meat.

If you eat less meat, farmers can grow more grains and beans.