The Temple of My Familiar Read online

  "The long and short of it is, the friendship was soon ruined. There was nowhere for any of their best feelings about each other to go. They couldn't even sit down at a hot-dog stand somewhere to discuss the problem. They would have been arrested just for that. Heath became more drunken, nigger-hating, and sullen. He talked a lot about how his father had treated him as a boy, ridiculing and beating him for being slow to understand things said to him and slow to learn to read. He spoke of this to explain his ability to understand how 'the nigras felt,' but what it really seemed to explain was why he so often tried to make those he knew feel as bad as he'd once felt himself. Around him, my father retreated into what he called his old-time know-nothing niggerisms. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath. 'Feelin' like a damn fool.' And of course you realize he called him 'Mr. Heath' from the time they were in their teens. But my father's pretense of ignorance did not protect him. One day Heath came into the shop, and before my father knew anything he was being hugged drunkenly and, as he put it, 'cried on from behind.' My father felt pretty safe, though, because he could see my mother and some of the children playing a few yards away from the open door. Heath had been drinking heavily and fighting with his wife. It would soon blow over. It always did. My father would make coffee, lay on an ice pack, and scramble up something for Heath to eat. But this time, maybe because my father felt so safe, he really let himself feel the weeping body draped around him. Let himself feel the misery and feel the shame. Maybe he felt the love. Anyway, without ever dreaming it was possible, and looking down at himself as if someone had stuck a stick up his pants leg while he wasn't looking, he responded to Heath, who had begun to fondle him.

  "It was a moment that changed his life. Without understanding how it could be possible, my father wanted to be wanted by this man holding on to him, and he wanted to want. He says he saw my mother through the door and called to her, but his voice was so weak it didn't carry. Then, a few minutes later, as if she felt something was wrong, and he was in trouble, she started briskly toward the door herself. Heath, caressing my father and feeling his response, watched my mother approach, over my father's shoulder, and said, 'Tell her not to come in.' Which my father did.

  "He was never the same person after that. He was gloomy. He seldom smiled. He continued to see Heath, though, and I can still remember the sullen bitterness of the fights they had. Fights that were full of a few well-chosen cruel and cutting words, and much drinking. Because, with time, my father drank as much as Heath. Whenever my father read about a lynching of a black man by whites and that they'd cut off the man's privates and stuck them in his mouth, he said he understood the real reason why. Whether he ever did so or not, I'm sure this is something he must have wanted to shout at Mr. Heath. That he understood there was something of a sexual nature going on in any lynching.

  "For the rest of his life he hated anything he thought was gay. He detested art, and the carvings by which he made his living he eventually did with disgust. He was the perfect carver for the heavy barbarous furniture that became the rage during that period before the Great War. His carved lions were snarling, his griffins were biting, his ravens were shrieking. Claws and teeth and drops of blood were everywhere. The stuff made me shudder as a child, and my mother failed to find in it anything to encourage her famous giggle, but white people bought it; pretty soon, black people did, too. It appeared even in the houses of poor people right there on the Island. Generally they liked their furniture and everything else to be straightforward and simple; God only knows what they really thought of it.

  "My father hated my painting. It made him think there was something wrong with me. All my life he tried to keep me from doing it. When Heath finally died, of a heart attack, my father, the only black person permitted at the funeral, was still bitter. My mother, generally merry to the last, never acted as though she knew anything about any of this, beyond the fact that Heath was a nice if drunken white man that liked her husband, David, and sometimes ate dinner--which he always praised--at our house.

  "My father wouldn't have cared if the plague killed off all the gays in the world. He hated Heath because Heath had forced him to look at the little bit of Heath there was in himself. Nobody had prepared him for that vision. Nor could he pretend he hadn't seen it. I've often thought of the battle my father must have had with himself when Heath was embracing him in the shop. What happened to him that day remained a burden on his soul. He died many unhappy years later of liver failure. There was a terrible smell, so terrible that painting over the old paint on his walls wasn't enough. After he died, we had to scrape the paint off the walls, and burn it, then paint the bare walls many times to cover it up. This stench, I felt, must be the rotten smell of that part of my father that he murdered and tried to bury away from other people and from himself.

  "When I told Lissie about my daddy's prejudice against 'funny' men and hatred of that part of himself, and told her about what had happened that first time between him and Heath, the first thing she said was that my father had been treated like a woman; that was one of the reasons he felt so bad; and that the way he had responded only made him feel worse. His whole existence was compromised by what was happening, yet he could not prevent an erotic response. She also said he was wrong to think queers are unnatural. She said queers have been in every century in which she found herself--and she giggled when she said it--and claimed to have seen queer behavior even among the cousins, always the epitome of moral behavior where Lissie was concerned. One of them, she claimed, not only taught her how to dress, but to dress."

  AT LAST, ONE DAY, Suwelo had a story for his friends. They sat down for tea and cookies in the living room, and he began slowly, in a soft, rusty voice.

  "She was in the back, in the garden, among the roses. It was a warm April evening, bright and clear as a day in fall, and there was nothing really in the garden to see. The rosebushes had already been pruned and the branches burned. And yet, when I think of that evening I see her among blooming roses, as she'd looked the summer before, brown and healthy, eyes bright and black, skin flushed, short hair curly and crisp as the day. She was wearing a long skirt, gaily printed, and a T-shirt. On her hands were gardening gloves, and she was trying to wrap part of a climbing rose cane back on its trellis.

  "'Oh, Suwelo,' she said, when she noticed me on the walk near the back door, 'you're home.'

  "She seemed glad of it. But did not rush to kiss me as she once had. I felt a pang at this, but hadn't really expected anything else. After all, we had been discussing a divorce for months now. I moved closer to where she strained to place the rose, and she moved backward a bit as I reached to help her. She was small and slight and dark, there in the sun, and I loved the smell of her, as always, something flowery and fresh that made me long to be able to hold her as easily and as carelessly as I once had.

  "I remember this evening so well because once again she brought up the subject of the divorce.

  "'It isn't about not loving you,' she said. 'I will always love you. Probably.' She smiled at me. 'But I don't want to be married.'

  "This was not a new statement. What she said next was. 'You will find another woman right away, or, rather, one will find you. You'll see.'

  "'I don't want another woman,' I said.

  "'It won't matter,' she said. 'You'll be that rarest of all quantities: black, free, gainfully employed. You'll be snapped up in no time.'

  "We were having dinner by then. She was not what anyone would call a great cook, but she was certainly a good one. In an hour she'd broiled pork chops with garlic and rosemary, the way I like them, made a salad, and steamed rice. All the while, I sat at the kitchen table watching her.

  "'The only problem with that,' she said, frowning at her plate and adding more salt, 'is that she'll be jealous.'

  "'What?' I said. 'What are you talking about. She'll be jealous. Who'll be jealous? Of what?'

  "'She,' she said. 'The new wife. She'll be jealous of me. You see, I don't want to end our re
lationship; I want to change it. I don't want to be married. Not to you, not to anybody. But I don't want to lose you either.'

  "'Well,' I said, 'you can't have your cake and eat it too.'

  "'But why not?' she asked, seriously. 'Say you are my cake. I want to enjoy you, to love you, to confide in you, to be your friend. Shit,' she said suddenly. 'It doesn't work. What do you suppose it means, have your cake and eat it too?'

  "'What it means for us is, you cannot have your way this time. If you love me, stay with me.'

  "'I'll stay,' she said. 'Most of the time. But unmarried. And on a separate floor.'

  "I groaned. This is what I got for agreeing to buy a house with more than one floor.

  "'We were happier before we were married,' she said.

  " "Everybody's happier before they're married.'

  'Then why do they marry?' she asked.

  "'Because everything builds up to marriage. Don't say we haven't been happy married,' I said, almost angry. 'We've been very happy.'

  "'I don't feel free,' she said.

  "'When have you ever felt free?' I asked.

  "She considered the question. 'You're right,' she said. 'I've never felt free, never in my life. And I want to.'

  "At the office several of my colleagues said how sorry they were that we were breaking up. Ours was the last stable, apparently happy marriage they knew. Something in the way they offered condolences made me realize they considered the breakup Fanny's fault entirely. To a man they'd been polite to her but never liked her very much. And whenever she came to the office to see me before we went out to lunch together, she was cool, distant, never able to do much with small talk. And there was the way she dressed. The shorter the miniskirts on other men's wives, the longer her skirts. And she wore flowing scarves made of silk, and once, in conversation with one of the guys, carelessly mentioned her pipe. A pipe more for ornament than anything else, really. Bought to smoke grass in, it's true; because she could never learn to roll a cigarette; but then she smoked very little. However, certain things you don't talk about in your husband's office at a far from radical, not even liberal university, where every nonwhite instructor is already suspected of smoking dope, screwing students in the stairwells, and hiding submachine guns in his hair; and I brought this up with her.

  "'Do I embarrass you?' she asked.

  "'How could you embarrass me?' I said, leaning over the table to kiss her and holding her hand.

  "'Freedom must mean never having (or being able) to embarrass anybody,' she said.

  "And I ordered our lunch to save us from another discussion of that subject.

  "It became harder and harder to talk with her the nearer separation approached. She begged me not to draw away.

  "'It's marriage I don't want,' she insisted, 'not you.'

  "But I couldn't see it. Oh, I pretended I could. But my heart wasn't in it. I felt abandoned, rejected, set adrift. After all, this was someone I'd known and loved for a good portion of my life. When we were married, I considered it a natural joining, a legal verification of what was already fact. We were one, in my opinion. And being legally married seconded that opinion.

  "'Do you think your new wife will let us spend time together?' she asked, for she was convinced I would remarry.

  "I hated expressions like 'spend time.' They sounded so hippie.

  "'Once every few months, if more often made her upset?'

  "She was sitting at the foot of the bed. I was lying down. She placed her hand on my knee.

  "'I know I'll feel more sexy with you after the divorce,' she said.

  "'Promises, promises,' I said bitterly. And she removed her hand."

  Part Two

  Helped are those who learn that the deliberate invocation of suffering is as much a boomerang as the deliberate invocation of joy.

  --The Gospel According to Shug

  "MY MOTHER, CELIE, was very much influenced by color," said Olivia. She was talking to Lance, the man she was not quite sure she would marry. They were walking along spacious, tree-lined streets after their duties at Atlanta's only Negro hospital, Harrison Memorial, were done. To passersby they presented an unusual couple: she, short and very dark, he, tall and very light, with the sandy, wavy hair that would, under certain circumstances in their rigidly segregated city, have classified him as white.

  Olivia spoke with the simplicity and earnestness that characterized her, and Lance listened with the attentiveness of one who is, by lucky chance, finally hearing the good news of life he might otherwise have missed.

  "The year I met her," continued Olivia, "in my middle thirties, she was fascinated by the color blue. Not the bright blue of skies or the drab blue of serge Sunday suits, but a complex royal blue with metallic glints. A combination of teal and electric blue that she one day, in her endless rummaging about in fabric shops across the country, ecstatically found. This was a blue that, she said, gave off energy, or, to use her own word, power. A person wearing this blue was suddenly more confident, stronger, more present and intense than ever before. She made me a pantsuit that gave me all of these qualities when I wore it, just as she predicted, and I was sorry when my daughter, Fanny Nzingha, while helping me make tamale pie, spilled chili sauce on it, and the stain wouldn't come out, no matter how many times I took it to the cleaners. Years later I bought another blue pantsuit, but it wasn't nearly as perfect as the one my mother had made. Though it was as close to the same shade of blue as I could get, it failed to give off any particular energy. In fact, I always felt slightly enervated when I wore it. It was like wearing the shadow of my old suit.

  "I do not know if she always loved color. Her childhood was an unhappy one, and most of her young adulthood was spent raising another woman's children, while her own children--my brother, Adam, and I--were brought up by our aunt Nettie, who was a missionary in Africa. We were also brought up by our adoptive mother, Corrine, until we were teenagers. She died of fever and was buried outside the village where we lived. My father, Samuel, was a missionary also, but by the time we returned to America he had long since lost his faith; not in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, the prophet and human being, but in Christianity as a religion of conquest and domination inflicted on other peoples. He and Aunt Nettie, whom he married after our adoptive mother's death, spent many long evenings with my brother and me discussing ways we might best help our people discover their own power to communicate directly with 'God.' We had all begun to see, in Africa--where people worshiped many things, including the roofleaf plant, which they used to cover their houses--that 'God' was not a monolith, and not the property of Moses, as we'd been led to think, and not separate from us, or absent from whatever world one inhabited. Once this channel was cleared, so to speak, much that our people had been taught about religion, much that diminished them and kept them in oppression, would naturally fall away. It was so hard for the Africans, in this new religion we brought, to ever feel 'God' loved them, for instance; whereas in the traditional religions they practiced they took this more or less for granted.

  "'As a minister, I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation,' my father found the courage to admit. 'Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this.'

  "The religion that one discovered on one's own was a story of the earth, the cosmos, creation itself; and whatever 'Good' one wanted could be found not down the long road of eternity, but right in one's own town, one's home, one's country. This world. After all, since this world is a planet spinning about in the sky, we are all of us in heaven already! The God discovered on one's own speaks nothing of turning the other cheek. Of rendering unto Caesar. But only of the beauty and greatness of the earth, the universe, the cosmos. Of creation. Of the possibilities for joy. You might say the white man, in his dual role of spiritual guide and religious prostitute, spoiled even the most literary form of God experience for us. By making the Bible say whatever was necessary to keep his plantations going, and using it as a tool
to degrade women and enslave blacks. But the old African religions also, in which mutilation of women's bodies sometimes figured so prominently, left almost everything to be desired. Even in these, man, in his insecurity and feeling of unlovableness, made himself the sole conduit to God, if not at times the actual God himself. My father often commented on the way the villagers feared their holy men and prostrated themselves before them--as Catholics fear and bow before the pope--so much so that the actual assumed receiver of their petitions and prayers, God Itself, was quite often forgotten. Still, there was a small point in the colored man's favor.

  "'What is one absolute truth about the man of color on this earth?' my father would ask. 'He admits spirit,' he would answer himself. And by this he meant spirit in everything, not just in God or the Holy Ghost, who at one time was the Female in the Deity, or Jesus Christ.

  "Throughout these discussions I watched my mother magically create garments in that particular shade of blue, which she eventually dubbed 'Power Blue.'

  "I was fascinated by her. By the way she parted her still-black hair severely in the middle and braided it in two braids that met at the back of her head and were turned under. By the way she invariably wore pants, even to church. But pants so subtle only other women noticed they were pants. By the way she spoke little, apparently out of a childhood and young-adult habit of silence, and how, when she did speak, there was a perkiness, a plainness, that was sometimes humorous but always compelling. She was a literal speaker. What she expressed she both felt and was.

  "We lived in a roomy old house in middle Georgia that she had inherited from her parents. Her father had been lynched by whites; and her mother, as a consequence of this terrorist murder, had lost her mind. My brother and I were the product of the rape of our mother by her stepfather, a man much admired by black and white in the community where he lived. It was he who gave us to our father, Samuel, who, with our adoptive mother, Corrine, and Aunt Nettie, sailed off with us to Africa when we were children.