Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

unfinished basket, the bare spikes of its sides making it look like a large spider about to crawl up the back of the chair.
    The chairs were exceptional-looking: tall, of a light glistening wood, with rush seats and elaborately carved backs. He’d never seen anything like them.
    He continued to look at the pictures up and down the stairwell, and in the parlors. The young woman with the chairs was the only woman he didn’t know. He went back several times, and could always identify his aunts and cousins, but not the young woman. And then he noticed light oval and square spots where pictures had once hung on the walls. Someone had taken them down.

“M E AND L ISSIE COURTED from the time she was in long dresses and I was in short pants,” Mr. Hal said to Suwelo a few days later as they sat at the kitchen table over coffee. “It must have started, us feeling something for each other, almost from the time we was babies. You know, or maybe you young ones don’t, but there was a certain kind of living in the country back then that had a lot of advantages. It wasn’t all night riders and scary white people acting ugly. Course, they did that, too; I just come to believe now they can’t help it, and you sort of wish they’d study the tendency. But they won’t, not in this lifetime anyway. Maybe in the next. But they struck you, and if you was a child, after they struck you, and didn’t kill you or run off anybody in your family, or one of your friends’ families, they was gone. Hallelujah! You didn’t really think about them till they caused some more grief. They are the most frightening of all people, and I’ll just be fair: I am afraid of them. They will take what they want, regardless, and that’s what you feel when you meet them. And so I always tried to keep the kind of life where meeting them wasn’t necessary.
    “But the country is a big place, and it’s beautiful, and the islands ’cross the bay from Charleston are real special. And in the evenings after working in the field we sometimes would visit one another—our families would, you know—and we’d sit out on the porch. Well, the grown-ups would. Sit there chewing and smoking, and having them long conversations with them short, short words. Sometimes a hour would go by and they’d have said nearly nothing, but the world and the firmament of heaven and the battlements of hell would have been covered.
    “Well, before we knowed ourselves good, as babies, me and Lissie use to play together. Her daddy and mama’s place faced the beach, but we didn’t think of it as ‘beach’ back then; it was just their yard, and you could sit on that little shackly porch and watch the sun drop into the bay. It was a beautiful sight. Sometimes all of us would be out there watching: children, grown-ups, the hound dogs, the cats, even the goats. Just sitting or standing around in silence watching the sunset ... Although maybe not the cats—anyhow not up close to us—’cause I was, and am, for some reason deathly afraid of cats, and this grieved Lissie, who had a real fondness for them. And although I can’t remember us as babies, I can almost remember it—Lissie remembers it perfectly, she says—and I like to think of us two fat brown babies with our asafoetida bags round our necks looking at the sunset together with the animals and slobbering all over one another’s face.
    “Everybody laughed to see the attraction force between us. Soon as we could walk, off we’d totter together, sticking everything in our path in our mouths and gumming each other’s noses with our baby teeth. But then she became a little girl and I became a little boy, and for a number of years we went sort of separate ways. Until Miss Beaumont started up a little school back of her house for people’s children, and me and Lissie fell right back together again. It wasn’t even love, as such. It was more like what these young people today have when they go off to fight against nuclear war