Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

done for Tashi when she too was at the proper age. But, because Catherine had gone Christian, she’d turned a deaf ear to her. Now, M’Lissa said, with a grimace of justification, it was the grownup daughter who had come to her, wanting the operation because she recognized it as the only remaining definitive stamp of Olinka tradition. And of course, now, she added, Tashi would not have the shame of being unmarried.
    I wanted to marry her, I said.
    You are a foreigner, she said, dismissing me.
    I still want to marry her, I said, taking Tashi’s hand.
    M’Lissa seemed confused. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a possibility such as this.
    I never saw the other women in the camp. M’Lissa told us they were all on missions of liberation. Tashi said she thought it was the women’s task to forage for food and to conduct raids against the plantations, most of them now left in the hands of loyal African retainers. A primary use of these raids was to recruit new warriors to swell the ranks of the Mbele rebels.
    The operation she’d had done to herself joined her, she felt, to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka. In her imagination, on her long journey to the camp, they had seemed terribly bold, terribly revolutionary and free. She saw them leaping to the attack. It was only when she at last was told by M’Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her own proud walk had become a shuffle.
    It now took a quarter of an hour for her to pee. Her menstrual periods lasted ten days. She was incapacitated by cramps nearly half the month. There were premenstrual cramps: cramps caused by the near impossibility of flow passing through so tiny an aperture as M’Lissa had left, after fastening together the raw sides of Tashi’s vagina with a couple of thorns and inserting a straw so that in healing, the traumatized flesh might not grow together, shutting the opening completely; cramps caused by the residual flow that could not find its way out, was not reabsorbed into her body, and had nowhere to go. There was the odor, too, of soured blood, which no amount of scrubbing, until we got to America, ever washed off.

OLIVIA
    I T WAS HEARTBREAKING to see, on their return, how passive Tashi had become. No longer cheerful, or impish. Her movements, which had always been graceful, and quick with the liveliness of her personality, now became merely graceful. Slow. Studied. This was true even of her smile; which she never seemed to offer you without considering it first. That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared look into her eyes.
    Adam brought her home to us just as we were about to leave for America. He married her, our father presiding, even as she protested that, in America, he would grow ashamed of her because of the scars on her face. The evening before the wedding, Adam had these same Olinka tribal markings carved into his own cheeks. His handsome face was swollen; his smile, because of the pain involved, impossible. No one spoke of the other, the hidden scar, between Tashi’s thin legs. The scar that gave her the classic Olinka woman’s walk, in which the feet appear to slide forward and are rarely raised above the ground. No one mentioned the eternity it took her to use the w.c. No one mentioned the smell.
    In America, we solved the problem of cleaning behind the scar by using a medical syringe that looked like a small turkey baster, and this relieved Tashi of an embarrassment so complete she had taken to spending half the month completely hidden from human contact, virtually buried.

PART FOUR

TASHI
    O N VERY WARM DAYS The Old Man took us sailing on his boat, up and down and all around Lake Zurich. His ruddy face eager before so much sun, his large hands moving deftly in a contest with tide and wind. His age suddenly amounting to no more than his head of wispy