Living by the Word (13 page)

After meeting Ding Ling, who is radiant with life and writing still, it becomes amusing and finally ludicrous to hear one of our American writers complain in city after city, to group after group, that she was unable to write most of her life “because of her children.”

12

In this picture I have just been told by an editor of a Shanghai literary magazine that my novel
The Color Purple
is being translated into Chinese. I am delighted. Especially when she looks me warmly in the eye and says, with a beautiful accent, mocking my surprise: But Alice, it is a very
Chinese
story. She tells me further that two of my stories have already appeared in translation and that the woman who translated them (and who will translate the novel) wanted to meet me but was afraid I’d want to talk about copyrights.

I don’t. What interests me is how many of the things I’ve written about women certainly do, in China, look Chinese: the impact of poverty, forced sex and childbearing, domination as a race
and
a caste (before the Chinese Revolution); the struggle to affirm solidarity with women, as women, and the struggle to attain political, social, and economic equality with men.

But I am disturbed that a young Chinese writer of my generation, Yu Loujing, who is writing stories and novels similar in theme to mine in China, is banned. Whenever we ask about her there is a derisive response. She is only “writing out of her own bitter experiences,” they say, as if this is a curse. “She is perpetuating bourgeois individualism.” One of our hosts even goes so far as to accuse her of libel.

Still, though we do not meet her, and her books (not yet in English translation) can be bought only on the black market, she is the writer in China, next to Ding Ling, who intrigues me. She has written, for instance, about being raped by her husband on their wedding night, and of her hatred of it; an experience shared by countless women around the world (by now we understand there does not
have
to be blood on the sheets). For this bravery alone I feel the women of China will eventually love her. In fact, already do. For though she is scorned by the literary establishment—and by the Chinese Writers Union in particular—all her books are underground best sellers.

13

In this one, one of our hosts is singing “Old Black Joe” under the impression that this will prove she knows something about American blacks. There is deep sadness in this picture, as we realize that the Chinese, because of China’s years of isolation, have missed years of black people’s struggle in the United States. No Martin, no Malcolm, no Fannie Lou. No us. I want to move closer to Paule Marshall and put my arms around her, and I want her to hug me back. Here we are, two black women (thank the Universe we
are
two!), once again facing a racial ignorance that depresses and appalls. Our singing host was once in America, in the fifties, she says, and was taught this song as part of her English lessons. This is one of the songs U.S.-trained Chinese learned in America and brought back to teach others throughout China.

I explain the reactionary nature of the song. But the energy required to do this nearly puts me to sleep. Nor could I foretell that from this point in the trip everywhere I go I will be asked to sing. To teach the Chinese “a new song.” I sing (one of my secret ambitions, actually); the irony of being asked, as a black person, not lost on me for a second. I start out with the Reverend Dorsey (“We Shall Overcome”) and end up with Brother Len-non (“Hold On”). But it is really James Weldon Johnson’s Negro National Anthem that is required (“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”); and I am embarrassed to say I could not recall all the words. This I consider the major personal failure of the trip.

Lift ev’ry voice and sing

Till earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies

Let it resound

Loud as the rolling seas

Sing a song

Full of faith that the dark past has taught us

Sing a song

Full of the hope that the present has brought us

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun

Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died

Yet with a steady beat

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place, Oh, where our [ancestors] sighed?*

We have come

Over a way that with tears has been watered

We have come

Treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered

Out from the gloomy past till now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

14

In this one, three young men from Africa are talking. They are from Chad, Uganda, and Somalia, and have been studying medicine in China for seven years. In a few weeks they will be going home.

They teach us, but that is all, one of them says. There’s no such thing as going up to the professor outside the class.

And if the Chinese should invite you to their home, says another, they make sure it’s dark and the neighbors don’t see. And the girls are told definitely not to go out with us.

But why is this? I ask, heart sinking over the brothers’ isolation. But marveling that they all study medicine in Chinese.

Because the Chinese do not like black people, one says. Some are nice, but some call us black devils. They don’t like anyone really but themselves. They pretend to like whites because that is now the correct line, and they’re all over white Americans because they want American technology.

As we talk, I am reminded of Susan’s face one evening after she’d been talking, for over an hour, with our interpreters. She was happy because they had appeared interested in and asked innumerable questions about American blacks. Only after I pointed out that they could have put the same questions directly
to
American blacks (Paule and me) did her mood change.

That’s right, she said. Damn it.

The next evening a continuation of the questions about blacks was attempted, but Susan was ready, and annoyed. Any questions about blacks, ask Paule and Alice. Both are black, and Alice is even a peasant! she said. And that night her face was even happier than before.

‘5 This is a picture of our hotel room in Hong Kong. Susan is standing in the doorway preparing to leave. She is carrying a beautiful cello she bought for her husband in Shanghai (which she laughingly says is my color
and
shape). But is it my tone? I reply.

I have been ill the last couple of days of the trip, and she has been mother, sister, and nurse. All of which adds up to:

Let’s get a doctor up here quick! It is mostly exhaustion and I am spending my last morning in Hong Kong in bed. Later I will get up and catch a plane to Hawaii, where my companion is waiting to meet me.

Now that we are out of Mainland China there is an eagerness to be gone entirely. I look down on the bay and at the hills of Hong Kong and all I can think about is San Francisco. China already seems a world away. And is. Only a few images remain: the peasant who makes 10,000 yuan (about $15,000) a year and has built a nice two-story house that fills his eyes with pride; the tired face of Shen Rong, the writer whose long short story “Approaching Middle Age” (about the struggle of Chinese women professionals to “do it all”) I watched dramatized on Beijing TV; the faces of people depicted in statues commemorating the Chinese Revolution: strong, determined, irresistible; Ding Ling; and the city of Beijing itself, which of all the marvels I saw is what I like best of the New China.

But the finest part of the trip has been sharing it with Susan. Over the years we have incited each other to travel: Let’s go to Mexico! Let’s go to Grenada! Let’s go to China! And now we have. She stands worriedly at the hotel door, now admiring, now cursing the rather large cello that grows larger by the second, that she’s not sure she should have bought. Do you think they’ll let it on the plane? she frets. Will it need its own seat? And, are you
positive
you’re okay? she asks, striding out the door.

1985

* I have replaced the original “fathers” with “ancestors,” believing that Brother Johnson, a sometime progressive in his day (1871-1938) and an artist, in any event, would understand that our fathers were not by themselves when they sighed.

By five o’clock we were awake, listening to the soothing slapping of the surf, and watching the sky redden over the ocean. By six we were dressed and knocking on my daughter’s door. She and her friend Kevin were going with us (Robert and me) to visit Nine Miles, the birthplace of someone we all loved, Bob Marley. It was Christmas Day, bright, sunny, and very warm and the traditional day of thanksgiving for the birth of someone sacred.

I missed Bob Marley when his body was alive, and I have often wondered how that could possibly be. It happened, though, because when he was singing all over the world, I was living in Mississippi, being political, digging into my own his/herstory, writing books, having a baby—and listening to local music, B. B. King, and the Beatles. I liked dreadlocks, but only because I am an Aquarian; I was unwilling to look beyond the sexism of Rastafarianism. The music stayed outside my consciousness. It didn’t help either that the most political and spiritual of reggae music was suppressed in the United States, so that “Stir It Up,” and not “Natty Dread” or “Lively Up Yourself” or “Exodus,” was what one heard. And then, of course, there
was
disco, a music so blatantly soulless as to be frightening, and impossible to do anything to but exercise.

I first really
heard
Bob Marley when I was in the throes of writing a draft of the screenplay for
The Color Purple.
Each Monday I drove up to my studio in the country, a taxing three-hour drive, worked steadily until Friday, drove back to the city, and tried to be two parents to my daughter on weekends. We kept in touch by phone during the week, and I had the impression that she was late for school every day and living on chocolates. (No
way
! She always smiled innocently.)

My friends Jan and Chris, a white couple nearby, seeing my stress, offered their help, which I accepted in the form of dinner at their house every night after a day’s work on the script. One night after yet another sumptuous meal, we pushed back the table and, in our frustration at the pain that rides on the seat next to joy in life (cancer, pollution, invasions, the bomb), began dancing to reggae records: UB-40, Black Uhuru…Bob Marley. I was transfixed. It was hard to believe the beauty of the soul I heard in “No Woman No Cry,” “Coming In from the Cold,” “Could You Be Loved?,” “Three Little Birds,” and “Redemption Song.” Here was a man who loved his roots, even after he’d been nearly assassinated in his own country, and knew they extended to the ends of the earth. Here was a soul who loved Jamaica and loved Jamaicans and loved
being
a Jamaican (nobody got more pleasure out of the history, myths, traditions, and language of Jamaica than Bob Marley) but who knew it was not meant to limit itself, or even could, to an island of any sort. Here was the radical peasant-class, working-class consciousness that fearlessly denounced the Wasichus (the greedy and destructive) and did it with such grace you could dance to it. Here was a man of extraordinary sensitivity, political acumen, spiritual power, and sexual wildness; a free spirit if ever there was one. Here, I felt, was my brother. It was as if there had been a great and gorgeous light on all over the world, and somehow I’d missed it. Every night for the next two months I listened to Bob Marley. I danced with his spirit—so much more alive still than many people walking around. I felt my own dreadlocks begin to grow.

Over time, the draft of the script I was writing was finished. My evenings with my friends came to an end. My love of Marley spread easily over my family, and it was as neophyte rastas, having decided that “rasta” for us meant a commitment to a religion of attentiveness and joy, that we appeared when we visited Jamaica in 1984.

What we saw is a ravaged land, a place where people, often rastas, eat out of garbage cans and where, one afternoon in a beach cafe during a rainstorm, I overheard a thirteen-year-old boy offer, along with some Jamaican pot, his eleven-year-old sister (whose grownup’s earrings looked larger, almost, than her face) to a large, hirsute American white man (who blushingly declined).

The car we rented, from a harried, hostile dealer who didn’t even seem to want to tell us where to buy gas, had already had two flats. On the way to Nine Miles it had three more. Eventually, however, after an agonizing seven hours from Negril, where we were staying, blessing the car at every bump in the road, to encourage it to live through the trip, we arrived.

Nine Miles, because it is nine miles from the nearest village of any size, is one of the stillest and most isolated spots on the face of the earth. It is only several houses, spread out around the top of a hill. There are small, poor farms, with bananas appearing to be the predominant crop.

Several men and many children come down the hill to meet our car. They know we’ve come to visit Bob. They walk with us up the hill where Bob Marley’s body is entombed in a small mausoleum with stained-glass windows; the nicest building in Nine Miles. Next to it is a small one-room house where Bob and his wife, Rita, lived briefly during their marriage. I think of how much energy Bob Marley had to generate to project himself into the world beyond this materially impoverished place; and of how exhausted, in so many of his later photographs, he looked. On the other hand, it is easy to understand—listening to the deep stillness that makes a jet soaring overhead sound like the buzzing of a fly—why he wanted to be brought back to his home village, back to Nine Miles, to rest. We see the tomb from a distance of about fifty feet, because we cannot pass through, or climb over, an immense chain-link fence that has recently been erected to keep the too eager (and apparently destructive and kleptomaniacal) tourists at bay. One thing that I like very much: built into the hill facing Bob’s tomb is a permanent stage. On his birthday, February 6, someone tells us, people from all over the world come to Nine Miles to sing to him.