Temple of My Familiar (12 page)

“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 ownership—which grew out of the way the forest now began to be viewed as something cut into pieces that belonged to this tribe or that—came 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 together—and 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 night—during which I had responded to him passionately, or, as he later claimed, shamelessly—he 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.”

W
HAT DO HUMAN BEINGS
contribute, Suwelo was thinking morosely, as he waited one afternoon for Miss Lissie to appear. Her story about the animal cousins had moved him, and each day he found himself more conscious of his own nonhuman “relatives” in the world.

The bees contributed honey, but not really—it was taken from them. What, he now wondered, did the bees eat themselves; surely they didn’t make honey for human beings. It was the flowers that contributed honey to both bees and people, the flowers that were always giving something: beauty, cheerfulness, pollen, and seeds. They did not care who saw them, whom they gave to. And on his feet, Suwelo also realized, with disgust, he was wearing moccasins made of leather. What a euphemism, “leather.” A real nonword. Nowhere in it was concealed the truth of what leather was. Something’s skin. And his tortoiseshell glasses. He took them off and peered nearsightedly at them, holding them at arm’s length. But they were imitation tortoiseshell. Plastic, probably. But this made him even gloomier, for he knew the only reason for imitation anything was that the source of the real thing had dried up. There were probably no more tortoises to kill. And what, anyway, of plastic? It was plentiful, cheap. But even it came from somewhere. Of what was plastic made? What died? He knew it was a product of petroleum, of oil, and so he assumed plastic was made out of the very lifeblood of the planet. When all the oil was drained, he imagined the planet quaking and shrinking in on itself, like a squeezed orange that has been sucked to death.

He was glad when he heard Miss Lissie’s knock. It was firm and decisive, as always. When he opened the door, he was instantly cheered by the lively, ironical eyes—that seemed to say, Well, what else, if anything, is new?—in the old, beautifully angular face. Her bright hair was covered with a woolen shawl the color of California poppies, Fanny’s favorite flower. This alone made Suwelo smile. She wore a camel-hair coat, and high, lace-up black shoes. Her breath was short, from the effort of bringing a large cardboard box up the steps. Suwelo quickly reached out and took it from her.

She stepped into the foyer and took off her shawl and coat, hanging them on the coatrack and checking herself out in the dim mirror beneath the light. She was wearing a soft yellow dress that had a large embossed black paw print, or perhaps it was a flower, Suwelo thought, looking at it closely, just above her heart. In a few minutes they were seated in the front parlor, drinking tea Suwelo had prepared as he awaited her arrival, and going through the big box.

“When your uncle died,” said Miss Lissie, “I didn’t know for certain who would be taking over the house. I didn’t want these pictures to go to just anybody. They’re special, and I wanted to give them only to someone who’d understand.”

Suwelo was glad Miss Lissie considered him someone who did. All over the walls of the house there were pale empty spaces where the photographs had hung. Suwelo had stopped before them many times, trying to imagine what the pictures might have been like. Miss Lissie now took each of them out, unwrapped it, and placed it face down on the oak bench next to the sofa. After she’d done this, she carefully crumpled the newspaper wrappings and put them in the box. She then took a cloth from her black leather purse and began to polish the glass of each picture. After that, she placed them in rows on the bench, sat back, and invited Suwelo to look.

Before he looked at the pictures, though, he looked carefully into the old face next to him and tried to locate the young girl standing in front of the fancy carved chairs, barefoot, clothes patched, her hair in plaits. He looked for the lovely nose, the soft mouth, the round cheeks. Perhaps she was there. It was hard to tell. Then, noting the rough and beautiful texture of the oak and pine frames, he began to look at the photographs, of which there were thirteen. Miss Lissie explained that she already had a copy of the one photograph she had left in the house, and therefore hadn’t taken it when she had removed the rest.

Suwelo remembered Mr. Hal’s remark: “Lissie is a lot of women,” and expected to see a lot of pictures of the same woman dressed to make herself appear different; and it was true, in each picture the chair—one of those in the photograph left behind—was the same, and the outfit varied greatly. What he saw, though, were thirteen pictures of thirteen entirely different women. One seemed tall, another very short, one light-skinned, with light eyes, another dark with eyes like obsidian. One had hair to her waist, another had hardly enough to cover her skull. One appeared acrobatic, healthy, and glowing. Another seemed crippled and barely ambulatory.

He chose two pictures and held them out in front of him. In one, a short, high-yellow flapper stared boldly into the camera, lips puckered and a rakish look in what appeared to be green eyes, a spit curl of lightish hair an upside-down question mark in the middle of her forehead; in the second, a tall, dark, gangly miss, with the sad grace of a domestic servant and former field hand, looked out of beaten eyes at a camera and cameraman she did not trust. She was wearing a maid’s white uniform, and her scant hair was mercilessly straightened and pulled tight under a peaked white cap. There was no similarity at all between the two women. In fact, there was none among any of the thirteen women. Nor did they look like the elegant grandmotherly woman at Suwelo’s elbow.

“I ran off with the photographer, a colored man from Charleston, who took that,” said Miss Lissie, pointing to the flapper one. “He was married. When I found out, I ran away from him. I was pregnant at the time. This,” she said, pointing to the one in the maid’s uniform, “is how I looked when he found me again. I was one of his models for going on thirty years, off and on. Long after what fire there was between us burned out. We fascinated each other. He had never, in all his work as a photographer, photographed anyone like me, who could never present the same self more than once, and I had never in my life before found anyone who could recognize how many different women I was. Oh, some people, even my mama and papa, commented on how I didn’t seem to have, as they put it, ‘no certain definite form,’ but to them I looked enough like myself from day to day so that it didn’t matter. But Henry Laytrum began to photograph me once or twice a year, and the result is what you see; there were others, but in these the differences are most striking.

“Yes,” she said, as if answering Suwelo’s question, “those are both me. All of these,” she continued, with a sweep of her arm, “all of them are me. Henry Laytrum, with his old box camera and his break-away chair—so he could dismantle it and take it anywhere he went—that was carved by Hal’s father, was able to photograph the women I was in many of my lifetimes before. It was such a wonderful gift he was able to give me, although because he was so dishonest with me about his marriage—never telling me until after we’d run off together—I never told him the secret of what puzzled him so and intrigued him. And I only came to understand myself—at first it frightened me to see myself as so many different people!—after years of memory excavation and exploration, years of understanding I’m not like most other people, years of anger and confusion over this, years of fighting everyone! But finally it dawned on me that my memory and the photographs corroborated each other exactly. I had been those people, and they were still somewhere inside of me. When Henry Laytrum aimed his camera, different ones were drawn out. Over time I grew to love seeing which self would pop out. Henry Laytrum would develop the pictures, race over to see me, spread them out on the porch, and introduce us. ‘Miss Lissie,’ he’d say, bowing to me and the latest picture, ‘say Howdy!’ And I would. It was such a kick. The selves I had thought gone forever, existing only in my memory, were still there! Photographable. Sometimes it nearly thrilled me to death.

“In the wide world there was war. These white people here, trying to rule over everybody in America, and the ones in Europe, trying to rule over everybody else in the world. The Depression came. Seem like you heard of a hanging or some other monstrous thing done to colored every time you turned around. But this is what was happening to me. And because I was a colored woman, nobody would ever know about it. I was sort of glad, for I’m the kind of woman that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.”

Suwelo shook his head. He did not know if he could believe this or not. And he thought about how believing in things like Halley’s comet was not the same thing. Or was it?

“Remember what I told you about losing my foot and leg after being caught in a bear trap?”

“Oh,” said Suwelo, his eyes going instantly to the picture of the small, sad-eyed, very black cripple. It wasn’t that you could see her injury—the missing foot and leg—it was just that you looked into the ashen face, in which the spirit seemed already to have been given up, and you knew.

“Now this,” said Miss Lissie, seeing in Suwelo’s mournful face the heaviness of his commiseration with a self she had moved through, “is how I looked at the time when I stayed with the cousins and hung out in their trees.” She handed Suwelo the happiest-looking of all the pictures, in which she appeared squat, tiny, with a waist like a wasp’s, her hair in wooly ringlets, her eyes bright and laughing, her strong white teeth playfully bared in a wide smile. A pygmy.

S
O THAT IS WHY
they believed Africans ate people, Suwelo mused, thinking of what Miss Lissie had told him, on the visit previous to the last, about the cousins. Someone, millennia after the time of which she spoke, had come across the gnawed skulls and bones of these ill-fated relatives. But then, obviously in Miss Lissie’s estimation, her cousins
were
people, even more peoplelike than the folks from her own branch of the family. He sat looking at the picture of Miss Lissie from thousands of years ago; he imagined her mate taking the photograph and laughing with her as she made faces at him. He imagined their children crawling about under the cathedrallike trees; trees as big as Chartres, she had said. He imagined the huge black hairy cousins swinging about with their young and Miss Lissie’s young, too, clinging to their backs. He thought of the big dark faces and the small paler ones.

He was still thinking of this when he heard Mr. Hal’s truck and, later, his gentle, tentative knock on the door. Suwelo let him in, helped him off with his coat, and because he knew how Mr. Hal enjoyed good coffee, he hastened to make him a cup.

Suwelo had now been in Uncle Rafe’s house for more than two months. He had not forgotten Fanny and California—and there was a “For Sale” sign outside on the tiny lawn—but days went by when he did not think of her. Or if he did think of her, it was to feel sad that she could not share what he was experiencing. Fanny loved old people and was conversant with them in ways he was not. He was much more likely to be embarrassed with them, as if he suspected they sensed the impatience that was frequently his frame of mind. But it wasn’t simply impatience with
them
that he felt; he was impatient with the situation that young and old these days had inherited (and he forgot a lot of the time that he was getting older himself): that of being without sufficient time either to talk, really talk, to each other or to listen. Say you were at some unusual event, some kind of house party, and you found yourself next to an ancient anthropologist who just casually said: “Well, when I was in Afghanistan in the thirties ... blah, blah, blah.” What did you do? What you wanted to do was grab her by her collar and drag her home and sit her down in a big comfy chair and sit at her feet (or his feet, as the case might be) for a week, while she talked. At the party the most you were likely to get was a sly anecdote about travel by camel and the lack of roads. It was maddening.

Fanny was more likely than he to stay glued to some rare old person for an evening, completely absorbed, though both she and the old person had to strain to hear each other over the noise of the other guests.

Suwelo loved what was happening to him and was grateful for the time his uncle Rafe had provided for him to get to know his house, his friends, a life he could not have learned about any other way than by having it subsidized. He remembered the first time he had waited for Miss Lissie and her friend, Miss Rose, to bring his lunch and he had asked them to please step inside. Miss Rose had declined, hurriedly, saying she had grandchildren at home waiting for her, but Miss Lissie had come in as if she had been expecting the invitation, and had stood in the foyer in a rather queenly way, he thought, as if waiting for him to dispose of some earlier guest. They looked at each other for a long moment. That day it was her dignity he noticed first; the straightness of her posture. Next, her reserve, the way she said “How do you do?” so formally, then nothing else, as he stood beside her, waiting for her to take the first step into the living room, where, he reasoned, she must have sat countless times before. But she did not budge. He thought she looked quite stately, for someone who wasn’t very tall. And then he, too, became conscious of the guests in his living room.