By the Light of My Father's Smile

  “A CELEBRATION …

  Walker’s narrative chronicles the lives, loves and deaths of the Robinson family.… Its characters attempt to mend broken hearts, stifled dreams, war-torn bodies and weary spirits.… The novel presents the greatest quest as that to the realm of grace and forgiveness in the midst of spiritual turmoil, self-delusion and intimate betrayal.”

  —Miami Herald

  “With explicit sexual flair and fluid, descriptive prose, Walker explores the function and dysfunction of sexuality, as it relates to the growth of the human spirit. She glides unabashedly into her storytelling and her personal purpose without hesitation or a moment’s regret.… Her descriptive prowess and fast-paced plotting make each chapter a joy to read. Her unyielding passion and purpose make this a hard book to put down.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Lyrical and profound … Examines how a family’s sexuality—and denial of same—turns its daughters into the women they are, and want to be.”

  —Glamour

  “Ultimately, this is a novel of the late 20th century, a tale of healing and forgiveness, a contemplation and meditation on the meaning of death, and a celebration of the spiritual nature of sex.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “In By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Alice Walker offers us a gift of different flowers that beautifully bloom in memory, in music and in meaning. And she speaks to us in every voice. Every culture. In the now and always … Journey with Alice. Park judgment in long-term. Travel the distance in this memory-music-meaning book.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “[A] luminous ending … Ultimately soothes us with the hope that forgiveness is ever possible and life goes on.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “STUNNING …

  A passionate, richly detailed celebration of sexuality … By far Walker’s most erotic novel.”

  —Ms.

  “[Walker] maintains her standing as a wonderful storyteller. She continues to offer challenging works that make her readers question their perceptions and beliefs.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A daring novel … straddling both the spiritual and sensual realms in a lusty hosanna of healing and redemption.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “As the story moves back and forth in time, the characters have regrets, rejoice in the love they once shared, recognize their true selves beneath the pain and hate, explore nature’s goodness and pleasures, and move on to a beautiful understanding of how things should have been. Walker startles us several times in the journey, makes us laugh, and brings us to tears with poetry she weaves through her beautiful story.”

  —Sunday Record (Hackensack, NJ)

  “Alice Walker … breaks boundaries in her new book, By the Light of My Father’s Smile.… The writing is compelling and lyrical.”

  —Raleigh News & Record

  “Walker has drawn some fascinating characters, and her descriptions of Mexico and Greece are enthralling.… You won’t soon forget the glorious Mundo, who live in harmony with nature, balance the wants of the body with the needs of the soul and believe in dying with a song on their lips. They are the spark that truly animates By the Light of My Father’s Smile.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Admirers of Alice Walker’s fiction will be enthralled by her latest novel.… As much an incantation as it is a story.”

  —New York Daily News

  By the Light of My Father’s Smile

  A Story of Requited Love, Crossing Over,

  and the Sexual Healing of the Soul

  By the Light of My Father’s Smile is a work of fiction. All names, characters, incidents, and places, are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Alice Walker

  Ballantine Reader’s Guide copyright © 1999 by Alice Walker and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Ms. magazine for permission to reprint the interview with Alice Walker entitled “Alice Walker on Finding Your Bliss” by Evelyn Walker.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks and Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–90801

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81695-5

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Angels

  Angels

  MacDoc

  Twigs

  Twins

  Ritual

  Grace

  Inches

  Twenty Kisses

  The Reason You Fell in Love

  Eyes

  Paradise

  Of Course

  Relatives

  Wealth

  Doing Well

  Piercings

  Green

  Apology

  What Is Left

  To Be a Sister

  Why the Mad Dog Is Considered Wise

  Luck

  Meat

  She Rode Horses

  The First Thing That Happens When You Die

  Ashes

  Mad Dog Behavior

  Memories Are So Heavy

  Bad Women Aren’t the Only Women

  Sticking Out to Here

  Lily Paul

  Myrrh

  A Kiss Between the Dead Is a Breeze

  The Story You Were Telling Us

  Sucked into the Black Cloth

  The River

  Anyone Can See That the Sky Is Naked

  Crossing

  For Every Little Sickness …

  Getting the Picture

  Church

  Living with the Wind

  Fathers

  The Cathedral of the Future

  Bears

  Being Saved

  Crossing Over

  Fathers

  Light

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Reader’s Guide

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  To you, victorious

  who taught me

  fuzz of peach

  wet of pear

  light of owl

  shine of

  bear.

  This scandalous

  prayer of

  a

  book

  both remembrance

  &

  offering.

  &

  in kinship with

  our

  insouciant

  fun-loving

  nonreading

  relatives

  the delightful cousins

  Bonobo.

  May Life be thanked

  for them.

  We should rise up and praise when we talk about what friendship is and love is and what lovers are about—this interpenetration of one another’s souls by way of the body. That’s so marvellous! I think angels are envious of humans because we have bodies; they don’t, and love-making makes the angels flap their wings in en
vy.… Human sexuality is a mystical moment in the history of the Universe. All the angels and all the other beings come out to wonder at this.

  —FATHER MATTHEW FOX

  From Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality

  Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox

  The reason people and angels hover around human sexuality is because it is a light source that has been kept in the dark.

  —a.w.

  Mama

  help us

  to help

  you.

  Mundo prayer

  Angels

  When she goes to the city she leaves me lounging in the swing underneath the oak tree. She visualizes me as a shadow, as her car zooms around the curves that take her rapidly down the mountain. She is listening to a music I have not heard in many years. At first I think it is Portuguese fado; then I realize it is flamenco, which is also characterized by passion and profound sadness. She moans along with the woman who is singing—wailing, really—her hands gripping the steering wheel to the plangent cries of the singer and the sobbing of violins. The momentum of her flight sets the old swing to rocking. Her car is old and black. It was another expression of my effort to contact her.

  She was not even aware at the time of my death that she missed me. Poor child. She did not cry at my funeral. She was a stoic spectator. Her heart, she thought, was closed. I watched her looking down at me, the father who gave her life, with the passivity of one who has borne all she intends to bear. She did not even bother to smirk as platitudes about me—most of them absurd—filled the church around her. When an especially large falsehood was uttered—that I would never have hurt a fly, for instance—she merely closed her eyes. At the gravesite she clutched the arm of her Greek husband, with his hard curly hair and black mustache, and, leaning as if to whisper in his hairy ear, discreetly yawned.

  She did not know of my sorrow, dying. Poor child. How could she know?

  That night, eating a pomegranate seed by seed beside the fire, she did not miss me. She felt rather as if something heavy and dark, something she could never explain, had rolled away, off her soul. Shameless, curious, forsaken somehow, I watched her and the Greek husband, late into the night, make love.

  The recent stirrings that intimated my presence began with her desire to know about angels. Where they come from in the imagination, why people in all cultures find it difficult if not impossible to live without them. Is the angel in the imagination a memory of a loved one who has died? Is the angel an earth spirit existing in its own right, touching us with the benign blessing and direction of Nature? Why was she dreaming of angels every night?

  She and the Greek went to Kalimasa. This was before tourists exhausted the public Kalimasan spirit, and there, everywhere, in everyone’s home, flew an angel. Watti-tuus, as they were called. Some of them were simply winged women, with a woman’s hands and eyes and feet. But some were winged mermaids, their bronze scales dusted with gold. Some were white as apples; others as brown as shining earth. She was—my daughter, Susannah—enchanted.

  The Greek, Petros, was charmed by her passion. I watched as he fed himself full meals from the store of her enthusiasm. She was radiant and sensual. I saw that first time in Kalimasa that she was, as a woman, someone I truly did not know.

  Petros bought an angel for her, a watti-tuu, as a surprise. It was a dark-haired, dark-skinned, full-breasted woman, with a belly filled with small people, tiny houses, birds. Its wings were painted shimmering green. She laughed gaily, as she had as a child. She clapped her hands. Joy radiated from her eyes. This was the spirit I had not seen for decades. I recognized it, though. And drew near to it, as if to a fire. I saw her frown, suddenly, as if aware of my shadow, and I hastily and regretfully withdrew.

  The second time she went to Kalimasa, Petros did not go. She had lost him back in the States. This time she traveled with a woman who dressed inappropriately for the culture, and wore her bathing suit all day long, and accepted motorcycle rides from the local village males, who were losing their modesty and learning to take whatever pleasure came their way from the shameless tourist women. This woman, though good in bed, so irritated my daughter that she remained in the guest house they shared, day after sultry day, a blue linen sheet drawn taut over her head.

  But when she did venture out onto the two streets of the tiny village of Wodra, more touristed than she would have dreamed possible the last time she was there, she did so feeling there was something drawing her. Of course she did not know what it was.

  Damp, perspiring, though it was only eight or nine in the morning, she found herself at a jeweler’s.

  The Kalimasans are famous for their graceful aesthetic sense. For their innate appreciation of balance and proportion. This sense of what is just right can be seen in their architecture, in their canals, in their waterfalls. Even in their hairstyles. It is often said by visitors that everything in their landscape, except the mountains that frame most villages like spectacular stage props, is artificially constructed, yet looks totally natural. The fineness of the Kalimasans’ eye is pronounced in the jewelry and clothing they make.

  The shop, like all the shops on that end of the street near the restaurant and the river, was quite small. Only a few feet deep, after you climbed three steep steps up from the road. There were four rows of trinkets: rings, bracelets, necklaces. Nothing costing more than fifty U.S. dollars. Susannah began to try on bracelets, the ones that are made of brass and look a hundred years old, though they might have been made yesterday. And then her eye fell on the ring she’d been looking for without knowing it. Black onyx, an oval shape. Its sides splashed with gold. Though, since the ring cost only eighteen dollars, perhaps the gold was something else. The ring fit her finger perfectly. Happily she paid the young Hindu shopkeeper, continued on her way through the village of Wodra, and was even inspired to go as far as the Elephant Walk, a mile and a half from the village, before giving in to the desire to return to the guest house.

  “What is the meaning of this ring?” the woman asked at dinner, in the whining, bossy voice my daughter had come to dread.

  “It is beautiful,” said Susannah. She raised her hand to her cheek and rested it there. The light from the candle made the gold splashes beside the onyx glow red.

  “I wanted to give you a ring for that finger,” the woman pouted.

  “But I have nine others,” said my daughter. “All vacant.”

  “You know what I mean,” said the woman. Her name was Pauline. Dressed in a billowy native “costume”—for indeed, the villagers themselves rarely wore their traditional clothing anymore—she seemed plump and steamy. I read her as someone cutthroat in her intention to have, as an adult, the childhood she missed as a child. I did not see how Susannah could bear her.

  My daughter sipped her drink thoughtfully. “You are looking very lovely yourself, tonight,” she said.

  The woman was instantly distracted by this compliment, as my daughter knew she would be. She began to puff herself out, across the table. To look for her image in my daughter’s eyes.

  My daughter’s dark eyes were wide open. Frank. She allowed them to be mirrors for Pauline. Behind them, of course, she was deep in thought.

  Of what is she thinking? Certainly not of me. Perhaps she is thinking of the Greek husband who ran off with a blond airline hostess. Of his discovery that the woman’s hair was as dark as his own, naturally. And of his complaint. Whatever a woman was, was never enough, or right enough, for him. They’d quarreled because she loved wearing high heels, which indeed made him look quite short, and she’d often remarked that his taste in clothes—he admired tweeds and plaids, which she associated with squareness and recent immigration—was bad.

  But maybe not.

  The woman across from Susannah is flirting with the young boy who is the waiter. When he brings a tray on which there are flowers as well as satay, she finds a reason to brush his brown arm with her own. The heady scent she wears rises full-blown into the sultry
heat. All around her tension builds. She is the kind of woman who could provoke rain.

  Later in the night, to show my daughter that she is indeed desirable, she and the young waiter will stand entwined in the shadow of the giant banana tree just off the wide, plant-filled verandah. My daughter will hear the sultry rustle of the woman’s clothes. The pitiful, hopeful breathing of the young boy. Nothing will come of it, she knows. Pauline is too afraid of germs. Except in fantasy, she is also sexually indifferent to males.

  Boys in Kalimasa still, for the most part, look innocent to Susannah. She imagines them as her sons. Their wide, dark eyes, easily perplexed, enchanted her. Their shy speech, in an English carefully learned. It disturbed and hurt her to see, over the years of her many visits, the first signs of envy creep into their dark eyes. Their parents’ eyes had not had it. But rather bemusement at the pale (mostly) foreigners poking their damp heads everywhere, surprised that so much life existed in a part of the planet they knew so little about. They marveled at the architecture, the vegetation. The paintings—paintings were everywhere—the music, and, of course, the dance.

  Do they not dance and paint where they are from? the old women asked each other.

  Do they not have tasty food?

  Have they no remaining vegetation?

  Young and old alike were puzzled. Some were flattered. Most were, for the longest time, wary or indifferent. Few of them remembered the overthrow of their country’s monarchy by Europeans in a distant century. Their beautiful country occupied. Their king beheaded, the queen raped. Their country stomped on, drained, for over three hundred years: a time of seeming amnesia, for survival’s sake. Few dared to think too closely of the horrors the ancestors endured: of the leaden, pus-colored men on top of them who smelled of stale tobacco, sour sauternes, and rancid cheese. The near nakedness of the Kalimasans drove the sexually repressed Europeans to heights of cruelty as they vainly sought to deny their lust. So much beauty in a world indifferent to their ways, a green and gentle and supple world that was actually repelled by the mountainous thickness of the pale male body in its farty woolen underwear, black cloak, and ugly hat. The people had suffered, in silence, seemingly in a collective sleep. The sleep of shame. Then, as if a cycle had ended, collectively they woke up. They fought back. They became independent, at least in name.