Temple of My Familiar (8 page)

“There was, at the time, a big to-do about giving us cod-liver oil, because somebody noticed that me falling asleep was the least of it. Many of the children had legs that looked like pretzels. We had people on that Island with legs so bowed they made people with straight legs look deformed. That’s what we needed the cod-liver oil for, to prevent something called ‘rickets.’ It was funny, too, because by then, on the Island, bow legs in women were considered sexy, and you actually had people grumbling about how straight-legged women ‘didn’t do a thang for ’em.’ Meaning sexually. My mother actually had the nerve to try to tell me I didn’t have to take the stuff if I didn’t want to. But I remembered sick and deformed children from hundreds of years before, and I was disgusted that this should still happen. But I did demand that the cod-liver oil be given to us in orange juice. Because, once the parents were asked if the children should take it straight or with orange juice, they got into a debate over it and tried to make it a moral issue. Their children weren’t sissies, by God and his grandmother! Their children could take anything dished out to them ‘like a man’! Can you believe that shit? It really made you wonder about the general thoughtfulness of the divine universal plan.

“Well, I wasn’t a man. Never had been one. Unless I had orange juice, I said, I wouldn’t take the cod-liver oil. If I didn’t take the cod-liver oil, nobody else in the school would either. Everybody knew this to be the unvarnished truth. And besides, the cod-liver oil, taken straight, tasted like shit.

“There are few things more confusing to people than the process of regaining or attaining health. It is one of the great mysteries. And when I think of my dear mother as her mind began to clear—for she, too, was gradually induced into reinstating the kitchen garden, getting a few chickens for the eggs, and eschewing the syrupy-sweet coffee she loved—even now, long after her old head is cold, I have to laugh! She started, for the first time since she was a girl, to remember her dreams. And it was—that first morning after so many dead nights and one live one—as if she’d seen a ghost. For weeks her dreams were all she could talk about. The people and events in them, the fabulous lands she saw—she never understood they were
her
lands—the houses she visited that ‘just felt so familiar,’ the food she ate. In fact, she was always eating in her dreams, milk and fruit and greens! And everything she dreamed herself eating she searched for until it was found. She enlarged her garden and her livestock and sold her surplus to the neighbors; she bought her own little boat. Off she went to the mainland with her bag of nickels and dimes. She would mentally prostrate herself before an orange. A banana drove her wild.

“Her speech remained strange, but ceased to be unintelligible as she added more of herself to it. She stopped dragging her feet. Her taste for snuff left her. I began to see her in quite a new light, with less impatience and contempt. It was from this time that we became more than mother and daughter. We became friends.”

“H
AL, NOW
. H
AL
. T
HANK
God for Hal. He was the only person I felt I had known before. He likes to tell stories about us as babies slobbering over each other’s faces and trying to get ourselves together enough to crawl away. This is the Lord’s truth! When I first made contact with Hal, when my little chubby fingers got hold of a handful of his fat face, my juices (those in my mouth, of course) started to flow. Here, at last, was something, someone familiar. Now I know some folks like to tell you that the man they married, or the woman, was once their grandmother. I can’t claim anything like that. I don’t know who Hal was, and all these years I haven’t had any success in either remembering or figuring it out. What I can tell you is that he was familiar, comfortable; and what’s more, emotionally recognizable. And he felt the same way. I don’t have many memories of this life that don’t have Hal somewhere in the middle of them. I had to see him every day. When he had to go off anywhere—for instance, the time he went into the army—I like to have died.

“None of us ever becomes all that was in us to be. Not in the majority of our lifetimes, anyway. You take Hal, well, he was an artist. A painter. All he ever did really well was draw, on anything he could. From a baby! He’d get him a little stick and be out there in the sand digging and drawing, happy as a little clam. But his daddy hated that in him, and I’ve seen him take the stick away and stomp out the drawing—and Hal was a baby! Drawing was something his father wanted to do himself, something maybe he had a real talent for, but you can’t draw pictures for a living, is I reckon what he thought, and maybe his own daddy had broken him early, forbidding him to try. Before that it would have been the overseer on the plantation during slavery time. But it was so cruel! Like seeing someone forced to blind himself. And also very illogical. Mr. Jenkins, Hal’s daddy, became a great furniture maker, mostly chairs. He carved the most beautiful designs on them. It was from the sale of these chairs that he and his family were able to live better than the rest of us. It was beautiful, too, seeing those tall, polished, shining chairs, one to the small boat, floating out to sea! Still, he hated the tendency to art in his son. Why? Hal spent a lifetime in the dark about his father’s fears.

“When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal. Hal could not defend himself, for instance; he didn’t consider himself worthy of defense. He never learned to fight. And listen, the most amazing thing, his eyes became weak! But I always took up for him; I knew he had to be reminded that it was all right to see. And in whatever corner of privacy we could find, I forced him to draw. If I hadn’t, he would have been blind as a bat within a year. His father threatened to keep him out of school if he drew. So for years I had a big reputation as an artist. It was all Hal’s work—pinched and furtive, as if his father loomed over his shoulder, but still expressive, raw, and pure. And I’m proud to say I can remember almost every painting that he drew. He drew right up to the time he left for the army. After that, for quite a while, nothing. And sure enough, during that time, Hal was to tell me later, he was a regular stumblebum. But at least the army let him out finally because of his bad sight, though it kept other colored men whose disabilities were almost as pitiful. I was really glad to get him back and painting again, for a gifted artist such as Hal can paint the memory that maybe you yourself have started to doubt. He actually did that more times then I can count.

“I was talking to an African scholar one time, a man from one of these big schools. He was real skinny and black and straight, and he wore that little African-style hat that’s just like an American soldier’s, only in bright colors, and he was all right, I guess, but he had lifeless eyes, and I almost shivered while he was talking to me. It was like he was a well-educated, smooth-talking zombie, and he had sort of jerky movements, too. So anyway, he got to talking about how much of a cliché it was when black people here claimed their ancestors were sold into slavery by an uncle. He kinda chuckled when he said it and leaned back in his chair. I didn’t say anything to him, ’cause he’d already decided that the truth, if told a number of times, can be dismissed as unbelievable, and I have lived enough times to have seen this happen a lot. Some folks actually think the truth can be worn out. But anyway, it was my uncle who sold me. It was the uncle who sold a lot of women and their children, and it’s easy enough to understand why this was so. It was the African organization of family life.

“My father died of a heart attack when I was two years old. He was an old man and I was the last child by his youngest wife; even if he had lived, he would have seemed and have been someone from another century. By law my mother and her children became the responsibility of his brother, who was even older than he was, a practicing Mohametan that bathed and prayed all day. He already had more wives and children and slaves than he knew what to do with. One of his child wives egged him on to sell us, and he did. She wanted to buy some of the white man’s trinkets that after the rainy season fairly flooded our part of the world. Mirrors! You’ve never seen so many appear out of nowhere, or as quickly disappear. Loud-colored cloth, bright tin washbasins, and things for which there was no apparent use—knickknacks; for instance, porcelain dancing ladies and their fancy gentlemen. But this happened well into the dry season, for it was very hot; it must have been something like November or December. My mother had sent me to the okra patch to get the okra that had been left on the stalks for seeds, and I was humming along, hitting at the weeds by the dusty path with a stick. I was about thirteen then. We lived in a poor little hut off by itself and out of sight of my uncle’s compound. There were four huge men squatting at the edge of the okra patch, and they just looked and smelled evil, so I turned to run back home. Well, they caught me and tied me up, and one of ’em tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. They then went on to the hut and grabbed my two sisters, my brother, and my mother.

“My mother was just begging and pleading and calling for mercy, because she knew about slavers, but these brutes had no ears. They were like the zombie African professor I told you about. Perhaps that is, in fact, who he was in that time. Well, they carried and dragged us up to my uncle’s compound, and he came out. My mother tried to prostrate herself before him, which was the custom in our country, but she was tied up in such a way she fell over on her side. Thick dust was caked over one side of her face, and both her knees were skinned. I know now that she was someone who was never loved, because she was never really seen, except by her children, who did love her. She had four children, but she was only in her late teens. A strong-looking, somewhat plump, kind of reddish-black woman with big sullen eyes. Her specialty was weaving and, though we were poor, the little cotton our uncle let us keep from the crop we raised for him went into the cloths we wore around our waists—beautiful checks and plaids, made bright and colorful from natural dyes. She’d learned dyeing and weaving from her mother, who’d learned it from her mother and so on.

“My uncle had these cloths removed from us, for they were woven in the distinctive style of our tribe—our colors were yellow, red, and white—and gave us plain unbleached cotton ones instead. By this time I had been stood up, bound, in front of my uncle, along with my sisters and brother. We did not attempt to bow to him. We were not crying, like our mother. We hated the man. The truth is probably that we were in shock. I remember the men paid my uncle some silver money with a hole in it, and he took four of the smallest pieces and pressed them into our hands. We’d walked several miles before I was aware that I still held the one he gave me. It was Arab money, with their writing on it and everything.

“We were forced to jog for almost fifteen days without stopping, or so it felt, until we came to the big stone fort on the coast. It was then we saw the white men. They were posted all up and down the front of the fort, and we were only one small group of many converging on the fort at that time. Two white men came eventually to inspect us. They looked at our ears, our genitals—you would not believe the thoroughness, or the pitiful protestations of the women—our teeth and our eyes. They made us hop up and down to test the strength in our legs. Our feet were bleeding. My mother had sunk into a kind of walking slumber and did all she was told to do as if in a dream. We children copied her manner though we were vividly alert, so much so that the four of us managed to hide our silver pieces, before we were searched, in the thickets of our hair.

“The white men, who looked and smelled like nothing we had ever imagined, as if their sweat were vinegar, paid the men who’d brought us, and they turned right around and jogged back the way we’d come. I wanted to run after them and kill them, but the white men had called some other blacks, who seemed at home around the fort, and we were taken to the holding pen, which was like a cellar underneath the fort. It was already crowded with depressed and frightened people. When they saw my mother and her children shoved through the door, many of the men looked sad and turned their faces, in shame, to the wall. These were men sold into slavery because of their religious belief, which was not tolerated by the Mohametans. They carried on the ancient tradition of worship of the mother, and to see a mother sold into slavery—which did not turn a hair on a Mohametan’s head if she was not a convert to his religion—was a great torture for them.

“It was during the hundreds of years of the slave trade in Africa that this religion was finally destroyed, although for hundreds of years previous to the slave trade it had been under attack. There were, in the earliest days, raids on the women’s temples, which existed in sacred groves of trees, with the women and children dragged out by the hair and forced to marry into male-dominated tribes. The ones who were not forced to do this were either executed or sold into a tribe whose language was different. The men had decided they would be creator, and they went about dethroning woman systematically. To sell women and children for whom you no longer wished to assume responsibility or to sell those who were mentally infirm or who had in some way offended you, became a new tradition, an accepted way of life. As did the idea, later on, under the Mohametans, that a man could own many women, as he owned many cattle or hunting dogs.

“These Motherworshipers would be the hardest of the Africans to break, for they were devoted to the Goddess, and they were regular chameleons (much, very much we have learned, over time, from the lizards!); but they were broken. That is why the ultimate curse against Africa/Mother/Goddess—motherfucker—is still in the language. It would have been unthinkable in the Old Days, and a person saying it would have been immediately asked for his tongue. Our new masters had a genius for turning us viciously—in ways that shamed and degraded even themselves, if only they’d had sense enough to know it—against anything that once we loved.