from The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
"When you ask me about peace, Suwelo," said Miss Lissie, "if I've ever in all my lifetimes experienced peace, I am nearly perplexed. Could it be possible that after hundreds of lifetimes I have not known peace? That seems to be the fact. In lifetime after lifetime I have known oppression: from parents, siblings, relatives, governments, countries, continents. As well as from my own body and mind. Some part of every life has been spent binding up my wounds from these forces. In the memory, I would have to say, there are only moments ~at most, days~ of peace, except for the times I have been shaman or priest and have lived, for months on end, in a kind of trance. But as you
probably know, these blessed periods are a vacation,
[Image] in a sense, from life, and one screaming infant or
barking dog can force one home again.
[Image] "In the dream world of my memory, however, there
is something. I do not remember this exactly, as I
[Image] remember the other things of which I have told you.
But the memory, like the mind, has the capacity to
[Image] dream, and just as the memory exists at a deeper
[Image] level of consciousness than thinking, so the dream
world of the memory is at a deeper level still. I
[Image] will tell you of the dream on which my memory, as
[Image] well as my mind, rests. When I think of it I realize
there was at least a peaceful foundation.
[Image] "In the dream memory we are very small people,
all of us, not just the children, who are really
small, and the children live with the mothers and the
aunts; our fathers and uncles are nearby, and we
visit and are visited by them, but we live with the
women. We are in a forest that, for all we know,
covers the whole earth. There is no concept of
finiteness, in any sense. The trees then were like
cathedrals, and each one was an apartment building at
night. During the day we played under the trees as
urban children today play on the streets. Our aunts
and mothers foraged for food, sometimes taking us
with them and sometimes leaving us in the care of the
big trees. When you knew every branch, every hollow,
and every crevice of a tree there was nothing safer;
you could quickly hide from whatever might be
pursuing you. Besides, we shared the tree with other
creatures, who, in raucous or stealthy fashionÑthere
was a python, for instanceÑlooked out for us. Well,
our aunts and mothers were often tired after a day
gathering foodÑroots and fruits, mostlyÑand
occasionally cross. Those were the times they could
not stand us children, and so we were sent to our
cousins' trees. Our cousins, like our fathers and
aunts, lived in different trees from ours, and it was
fun to visit them.
"Our cousins were bigÑas big as we were
smallÑand black and hairy, with big teeth, flat black
faces, and piercingly intelligent and gentle eyes.
They seemed strange to us because they lived together
as a family; that is, the fathers and uncles lived
with the mothers and aunts, and all of them played
with and looked after the children. They loved us,
too, and would chatter with joy when we crept up on
them. We crept because they were so serene, their
trees so quiet that loud noises startled and
frightened them. We were, by comparison, regular din
makers. The only analogy I think of in this lifetime
would be the experience, as small children, of being
sent south to your grandparents' for the summer.
Grandpa and Grandma might be old and decrepit, quiet,
mellow, and unused to noise. They know a visit from
the 'grands' might do them in for a while, but they
let you know every day they're thrilled you are
there. Same with our cousins. And I loved the little
baby cousins, with their hairless pale faces, who
were always clinging to somebody's back. It was a
lovely feeling to hold a little cousin under one's
chin, and how the parents delighted at this means of
holding it! We had no hair on our bodies, you see,
for the little fingers to clutch. It was from these
cousins that I learned to love babies and to want to
grow up and give birth.
"There was such safety around their trees. The
fathers and uncles were gigantic and mean-looking
when provoked, with a roar that hurt your ears. The
mothers and aunts could bare their teeth viciously.
They could bite through the fiercest neck. I used to
practice baring my teeth and biting the way they did.
My imitation tickled them very much. But they were
menacing only when someone or something came into
their domain uninvited. WeÑour mothers and aunts,
fathers and uncles, tooÑwere always welcome, and
almost always, if there was anything to fear, we
gathered at our cousins' trees. They had long sharp
nails on their hands and feet, strong arms, and hard
teeth, and they ripped rather large animals apart
with one swipe. They protected us, and seemed to have
great fun doing it. After they destroyed an attacker
they chattered gaily and slapped each other on the
back.
"They liked to feed us children, too. They did
everything as if it were a game. I liked to go on the
hunt with them because, unlike our fathers and
mothers, who ate meat and therefore killed small game
all the time, the cousins ate only plants. They would
hide roots they'd already dug, just for us, who were
clumsy and had hopelessly weak hands, to find.
"My mother, whose name was Guta Ru, was often
angry with me; consequently, I spent a lot of time
with the cousins. The days were long and full, with
food gathering and grooming taking up a good part of
each day. But what adventures there were during the
hunt for food; what fascinating other relatives,
besides the cousins, one saw, and grooming was the
most satisfyingly sensual experience I've ever had,
in the dream memory or not. Because I lacked body
hairÑwhich I regretted no end!ÑI had a very short
groom period, compared to theirs, which could last
most of the day. The big cool teeth clicking over my
steamy little body felt wonderful. The rough-tongued
licking for lice, too. At least I had hair on my
head, a ton of it. They could work on that for an
hour or two, and I was beneath their teeth and
tongues, perfectly content.
"They were always trying to dress me. Leaves,
skins from dead animals, moss, tree bark. It was
funny. But it was from their experiments that I
learned to dress and to want to be dressed; I learned
to fasten a couple of pieces of leopard or panther
skin fore and aft, and this pleased them, though I
could tell they thought of my costume as a sort of
prosthetic device. They seemed nearly unable to
comprehend separateness; they lived and breathed as a
family, then as a clan, then as a forest, and so on.
If I hurt myself and cried, they cried with me, as if
my pain was magically transposed to their bodies.
"When I reached an age to mate, I did so with
one of my playmates, a boy I had known and loved all
my life. After we mated and I became pregnant, he was
expected, by custom, to move back with the men. This
he refused to do. And I refused with him. We wanted
very much to be together all the time with our
babies, as we had seen happen in our cousins' trees.
Well, you know adults. They haven't changed in a
million years; they weren't going to have this. The
women complained that he would only be in the way and
possibly throw off our common monthly menstrual
cycle; the men insisted they needed him for
ceremonies and hunts. They punished us by isolating
us from each other. We stood it as long as we could.
But when the baby was born, we ran away to stay with
the cousins, who in most things took a decidedly more
progressive attitude than our parents. We were happy
with them. They thought it natural that we would want
to live together. They made a special bed out of moss
for us to sleep on.
"I realize that in our smallness we were like
perpetual children to them and that our babies were
like the tiniest dolls. We were so small that one of
their babies was too heavy for us to carry by the
time it was a week old. Meanwhile, the cousins could
easily carry me and my mate in one arm or with us
clinging to a hairy back.
"There was no violence in themÑthat is to say,
they did not initiate it, everÑonly thoughtfulness. I
used to look at them and wonder how we, so little, so
naked, so easily contentious, had splintered off.
"In the dream memory there are suddenly days and
nights of terror, and the faces of fathers and uncles
who looked like us but were much bigger. They carried
sticks with sharp points on them, and they hurled
these at our cousins, striking them in the chest. To
our horror, they took our cousins' skins and
sometimes cooked and ate our cousins bodies. Us, so
little, they brushed off as if we were flies, and we
dashed to the tops of the trees screaming and crying.
"Over time and after many attacks, our cousins
and we ourselvesÑthe little people, as we now
recognized ourselvesÑwere driven into the most remote
reaches of the forest. We learned to make the sharp
pointed stick and to poison its tip as well. We
learned to make blowguns and slingshots. The trust
that had been between us now disappeared. We were
perceived as helpless and cute no longer, and, for
our part, there were those among us who gloried in at
last having the means to make our giant cousins fear.
"But my mate and I never forgot what we learned
from the cousins. We brought up our children to be as
much like them as possible; and we stayed together
until death, just as the cousins did. It was this way
of living that gradually took hold in all the groups
of people living in the forest, at least for a very
long time, until the idea of ownershipÑwhich grew out
of the way the forest now began to be viewed as
something cut into pieces that belonged to this tribe
or thatÑcame into human arrangements. Then it was
that men, because they were stronger, at least during
those periods when women were weak from childbearing,
began to think of owning women and children. This
very thing had happened before, and our own parents
had forgotten it, but their system of separating men
and women was a consequence of an earlier period when
women and men had tried to live togetherÑand it is
interesting to see today that mothers and fathers are
returning to the old way of only visiting each other
and not wanting to live together. This is the pattern
of freedom until man no longer wishes to dominate
women and children or always have to prove his
control. When man saw he could own one woman and her
children, he became greedy and wanted as many as he
could get. There is a popular African singer today
who has twenty-seven. Idi Amin had so many that the
ones he is rumored to have killed aren't even missed.
"My life with the cousins is the only dream
memory of peace that I have. In one of the worst
lifetimes, many lifetimes later, I was, by some
accident, permitted to marry another man I myself
actually picked and loved, and there was peace for a
time, a beautiful 'rightness' about the world, but
because I was apparently born without a hymen and
therefore there were no bloodstains to show the
villagers after our wedding nightÑduring which I had
responded to him passionately, or, as he later
claimed, shamelesslyÑhe denounced me to the village
and my parents turned me out. After that I was the
lowest sort of prostitute for the men of the village,
including the husband I'd loved, until I died of
infection and exposure at the age of eighteen.