Living by the Word (10 page)

I was saddened that, in their need to protect their egos from already well-known-to-be-hostile-and-indifferent white racists (who have made plain for centuries that how they treat us has little to do with the “positive” or “negative” image we present), many black men missed an opportunity to study the character of Mister, a character that I deeply love—not, obviously, for his meanness, oppression of women, and general early boorishness, but because he went deeply enough into himself to find the courage to change. To grow.

It is a mistake to assume that Celie’s “meekness” makes her a saint and Mister’s brutality makes him a devil. The point is, neither of these people is healthy. They are, in fact, dreadfully ill, and they manifest their disease according to their culturally derived sex roles and the bad experiences early impressed on their personalities. They proceed to grow, to change, to become whole, i.e., well, by becoming more like each other, but stopping short of taking on each other’s illness. Celie becomes more self-interested and aggressive; Albert becomes more thoughtful and considerate of others.

At the root of the denial of easily observable and heavily documented sexist brutality in the black community—the assertion that black men don’t act like Mister, and if they do, they’re justified by the pressure they’re under as black men in a white society—is our deep, painful refusal to accept the fact that we are not only the descendants of slaves, but we are also the descendants of slave
owners.
And that just as we have had to struggle to rid ourselves of slavish behavior, we must as ruthlessly eradicate any desire to be mistress or “master.” I have not, by any means, read or even seen all the negative reviews of Mister’s character and its implications for blacks in America. However, in the ones I have read, I’ve been struck by the absence of any analysis of who, in fact, Mister is. Nobody, no critic, that is, has asked this character, “Boy, who your peoples?”

In the novel and in the movie (even more so in the movie, because you can
see
what color people are) it is clear that Mister’s father is part white; this is how Mister comes by his run-down plantation house. It belonged to his grandfather, a white man and a slave owner. Mister learns how to treat women and children from his father, Old Mister. Who did Old Mister learn from? Well, from Old Master, his slave-owning father, who treated Old Mister’s mother and Old Mister (growing up) as slaves,
which they were.*
Old Mister is so riddled with self-hatred, particularly of his black “part,” the “slave” part (totally understandable, given his easily imagined suffering during a childhood among blacks and whites who despised each other), that he spends his life repudiating, denigrating, and attempting to dominate anyone blacker than himself, as is, unfortunately, his son. The contempt that Old Mister’s father/owner exhibited for his black slave “woman” (Old Mister’s mother) is reflected in Old Mister’s description of Shug Avery, who, against all odds, Albert loves: “She black as tar, she nappy headed. She got legs like baseball bats.”
This is a slave owner’s description of a black woman.
But Albert’s ability to genuinely love Shug, and find her irresistibly beautiful—black as she is—is a major sign of mother love, the possibility of health; and, since she in her blackness reflects him, an indication that he is at least capable of loving himself. No small feat.

We have been slaves
here
and we have been slaves
there.

Our white great-grandfathers abused and sold us
here
, and our black great-grandfathers abused and sold us
there.
This means—should mean—that we are free now. We don’t owe them anything but our example of how not to be like them in that way. Slavery forced us to discontinue relating to each other as tribes: we were all in it together. Freedom should force us to stop relating as owner and owned.
If it doesn’t, what has it all been for?
What the white racist thinks about us, about anything, is not as important as this question.

But crucial to our development, too, it seems to me, is an acceptance of our actual as opposed to our mythical selves. We are the mestizos of North America. We are black, yes, but we are “white,” too, and we are red. To attempt to function as only one, when you are really two or three, leads, I believe, to psychic illness: “white” people have shown us the madness of that. (Imagine the psychic liberation of white people if they understood that probably no one on the planet is genetically “white.”) Regardless of who will or will not accept us, including perhaps, our “established” self, we must be completely (to the extent it is possible) who we are. And who we are becomes more obvious to us, I think, as we grow older and more open to the voices of suffering from our own souls.

For instance, I know about Old Mister’s father—that he was a slave owner—because he was also my great-great-grandfather. But I didn’t begin to
feel
him,
let
myself feel him, until I was in my late thirties. I discovered his very real presence in an odd way: I began to hear him pleading to be let in. I wrote a poem about this called “Family Of”**:

Sometimes I feel so bad

I ask myself

Who in the world

Have I murdered?

It is a Wasichu’s voice

That asks this question,

Coming from nearly inside of me.

It is asking to be let in, of course.

I am here too! he shouts,

Shaking his fist.

Pay some attention to me!

But if I let him in

What a mess he’ll make!

Even now asking who

He’s murdered!

Next he’ll complain

Because we don’t keep a maid!

He is murderous and lazy

And I fear him,

This small, white man;

Who would be neither courteous

Nor clean

Without my help.

By the hour I linger

On his deficiencies

And his unfortunate disposition,

Keeping him sulking

And kicking

At the door.

There is the mind that creates

Without loving, for instance,

The childish greed;

The boatloads and boatloads of tongues…

Besides, where would he fit

If I did let him in?

No sitting at round tables

For him!

I could be a liberal

And admit one of his children;

Or be a radical and permit two.

But it is
he
asking

To be let in, alas.

Our mothers learned to receive him occasionally,

Passing as Christ. But this did not help us much.

Or perhaps it made all the difference.

But there. He is bewildered

And tuckered out with the waiting.

He’s giving up and going away.

Until the next time.

And murdered quite sufficiently, too, I think,

Until the next time.

I used to read this poem occasionally to my students, but stopped. The young white men present always thought “This small, white man” meant them, and that they were being “murdered” and excluded even in the classroom; the black men and women seemed to think the same thing, and that the “murder” was both literal and justified. They may all have had a point, and the poem does work on that level. However, the impetus for the poem came out of my struggle with my great-great-grandfather, the slave owner and rapist (what
else
was he? I’ve often racked my brains!) whom I had no intention of admitting into my self. The more I heard him plead, like a damned soul, to be let into my psyche (and it occurred to me that karmic justice being as exact as it is, I might be the only one of his descendants in whom his voice still exists), the more I denounced him as a white man, a killer, destroyer of the planet, a Wasichu, naturally no part of me. Get lost, you old bastard, is essentially what I said. Being a part of me already, however, he couldn’t.

I dreamed of him. My image of him at the time—and over a period of years, and still—was of a small, white,
naked,
pale-eyed, pale-haired, oldish white man. Weak-looking: weak, nearsighted eyes, weak limbs. Ineffectual. Hard to imagine him raping anyone—but then, she, my great-great-grandmother, was only eleven.

That is what I learned from relatives when I began to ask questions about “this small, white man,” wringing his hands and crying and begging outside my psyche (on his knobby knees) all alone. Already I had found my Indian great-great-grandmother, and she was safely smoking inside my heart.

It took the death of John Lennon to squeeze the old man through. John had been Irish, too (though born in Liverpool). And when he was murdered (and I
loved
him, “white” as he was, for there is no denying the beauty and greatness of his spirit), I felt the price we pay for closing anyone off. To cut anyone out of the psyche is to maim the personality; to suppress any part of the personality is to maim the soul.

And so, I opened the heart of my soul, and there, with the Africans, are the Indian great-great-grandmother and the old white child molester and rapist. Lately I have been urging him to enlarge his personality to include singing or making music on the fiddle. And to stop shouting!

But when I wrote a poem about the peaceful coming together racially, at last, of my psyche, a black male critic wrote the following:

…So as I receive Alice Walker’s 11th book (she has edited an additional one as well) and her fourth volume of poetry, I face my usual decision: Given my disdain for what she and her work represent, in too large a part, should I assess her work? I know I can count on having to cut through her whimpering, half-balanced neurosis and wonder how on earth to avoid an exercise in negativity. And, of course, all of this contemplation begins before I even open her latest book.

After I open it, the worst slaps at me almost before I can take another breath. Her poem-dedication reads:

for two who

slipped away

almost

entirely:

my “part” Cherokee

great-grandmother

Tallulah

(Grandmama Lula)

on my mother’s side

about whom

only one

agreed-upon

thing

is known:

her hair was so long

she could sit on it;

and my white (Anglo-Irish?)

great-great-grandfather

on my father’s side;

nameless

(Walker, perhaps?),

whose only remembered act

is that he raped

a child:

my great-great-grandmother,

who bore his son,

my great-grandfather,

when she was eleven…

So again, here we go with the old Negro refrain of:
me ain’t really a nigger…no, no
…
me really a injin;
and
let me point out the rapist in my bloodline to you.
The Negro is the only species who goes around advertising he or she was raped and has a rapist in his or her bloodline, it is the kind of twisted pathology that black psychology is still trying to unravel.

Yet none of this can be taken lightly because Alice Walker is being pushed by the Liberal mainstream as
the
black writer in season—while they seek to remove Toni Morrison—with her incessant searching for truth and healing in black life—from that pedestal. But the truth is Mrs. Morrison won’t go for the bone of divide-and-conquer that the Liberals especially like to see black people gnawing at. One can see their dribble-laden glee when they can find a black man who through his actions or words attacks a black woman and vice versa. So, of course, they love Ms. Walker, lover of queer bourgeois Liberal affectations and deep-down hater of black.

These comments, by black poet and writer K. T. H. Cheatwood, appeared in a review of my collection of poems
Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful
in the
Richmond
(Virginia)
News Leader,
in the winter of 1984. Unfortunately, in quoting my poem-dedication to my white and Indian ancestors, he left off the most important section:

Rest in peace.

The meaning of your lives

is still

unfolding.

Rest in peace.

In me

the meaning of your lives

is still

unfolding.

Rest in peace, in me.

The meaning of your lives

is still

unfolding.

Rest. In me

the meaning of your lives

is still

unfolding.

Rest. In peace

in me

the meaning

of our lives

is still

unfolding.

Mr. Cheatwood thinks, apparently, that I should be ashamed to mention, to “advertise” my great-great-grandmother’s rape. He assumes an interest, on my part, in being other than black, of being “white.” I, on the hand, feel it is my blackness (not my skin color so much as the culture that nurtured me) that causes me to open myself, acknowledge my soul and its varied components, take risks, affirm everyone I can find (for I, too, have been called everything but a child of God), and that inasmuch as my great-great-grandmother was forced to endure rape
and
the birth of a child she couldn’t have wanted, as well, the least I
can
do is mention it. In truth, this is all the herstory of her that I know. But if I affirm
that
, then I can at least
imagine
what the rest of her life must have been like. And this, I believe, has some importance for us all.

We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed. We are the women and we are the men. We are the children. The ancestors, black and white, who suffered during slavery—and I’ve come to believe they
all
did; you need only check your own soul to imagine how—grieve, I believe, when a black man oppresses women, and when a black woman or man mistreats a child. They’ve paid those dues. Surely they bought our gentleness toward each other with their pain.

So, these are my thoughts, Mpinga. I love that, though born in America, you have chosen an African name. I can remember when such an expression of psychic and cultural duality would have been but vaguely understood. But times change, and people do, too. Now such affirmations are almost routine. The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women
and
men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.