By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker Page B

uninstructed and uninitiated, and therefore very rare.
    We saw this immediately. Even on the first day they came to our village. It is easy to recognize a Changing Woman–to–be, even in the person of a small girl. She will be the one who appears to look at everything, deliberately. She will be the one who appears to have no shame. For what good would shame be to someone who might become at any moment that of which she is ashamed?

Luck
    Even as the bus dragged me, I sang. Though by then I must have been already dead. Among my people this is considered extremely lucky. It means I will continue to sing, to live, on the other side. At least until my tasks are done. That is what the initiation song promises, even though when you learn it you are so young you cannot possibly understand.
    Anyone can see that the earth
is grandchild of
the moon
and the moon is mother
of the night sky.
    When you die
this is the song
that will carry you
beyond the river
it is your small craft
it is your horse.
    And that is why my horse’s name was Vado, which means a place in the river where it is easy to cross.
    I did not want to leave Magdalena, but now, from where I am, I can see that it was a perfect time to go. That I, in pieces, had been saved for her, returned to her. But I was like a limp rag that was temporarily starched by her love. I stood tall for a moment at her side. Long enough to tell her that I, too, understood that we were meant for each other. That what we’d shared was real. For that was also part of her hunger. To know she was not in a forsaken love alone.
    Among the Mundo there is the teaching of nonpossession of others. But I left the tribe so young that it was a lesson only partly learnt. The lesson I did learn was that there is one other soul in each of our lifetimes to which we are primarily drawn. It is a body and a soul attraction. When it is found, what one notices inescapably, is that there is no fear of what anyone thinks. You do not say, Who will like this? What offense will we give? You say only Thank Mama (our conception of God) or Thank Luck. Since to us Mama (everything that is) and Luck are the same.

Meat
    My father worked in a meatpacking plant when I was a child, I said to Susannah. Even then, the late Forties, immigrants from Eastern Europe and undocumented workers from Mexico were beginning to be offered the dirtier, lower-paying jobs that men like my father held; he was extremely upset by this. Workers who barely spoke English, whom he’d trained on some noisy, greasy machine, soon rose above him at the plant. All his anger and selfpity was brought home to our door. A scratched and scarred door that was so hideous and forbidding, reeking as it did of the misery on the other side, that as a teenager I saved money from my baby-sitting to buy a small can of yellow paint and painted it “sun.”
    I have often told Susannah of my childhood because she is endlessly fascinated by stories of survival.
    How did your mother feed all of you? she asks, her eyes wide.
    In our house, I replied, nothing was ever thrown away. Not even bones.
    Not even bones, she echoes, whenever she hears this. What could she possibly do with bones?
    Make stock, I reply.
    Stock? she says, as if it is a word not found in culinary conversation.
    Stock, I reply. There was the stock of the stockyard, I explained, that was not far from the meat-processing and packing plant in which my dad worked. But this stock was a broth that my mother used as a base for making soup.
    Oh, she says. She might be brushing her long, sable-colored hair, or painting her nails. I might have just fucked her silly.
    We were poor, I’d say.
    You were poor, she’d echo, as if the concept of not having plenty was one she could not quite grasp.

    But my father’s stereotypical belligerence, hostility, maudlin and abusive bullying were not all there was to him. There was a whole other side, I said. When he was in his right mind, as my