Possessing the Secret of Joy Read Free Page B

heads. Their near nakedness. I noticed the men: the seedlike tribal markings on their cheeks and the greasy amulets they wore around their necks. I noticed the dust and the heat. The flies. I noticed the long flat breasts of the women who worked barebreasted, babies on their backs, as they swept and tidied up the village as if in expectation of inspection. I was too young to be embarrassed by their partial nudity. And so I stared, mouth open, until Mama Nettie poked me firmly in the back with her parasol.
    And now when Olivia says, But don’t you remember, Adam, Tashi was weeping when we met her! I am at a loss. For that is not the little girl I remember.
    The Tashi I remember was always laughing, and making up stories, or flitting cheerfully about the place on errands for her mother.
    Sometimes I think Olivia and I remember two entirely different people, and now, because Tashi and I have lived together for so many years, I think my recollection of her as a child is sure to be the correct one. But what if it is not?

TASHI
    T HEY WERE ALWAYS SAYING You mustn’t cry!
    These are new people coming to live among us, and to meet them in tears is to bring bad luck to us. They’ll think we beat you! Yes, we understand your sister is dead, but… time now to put on a good face and make the foreigners welcome. If you can’t behave, we will have to ask your mother to take you elsewhere.
    How could I believe these were the same women I’d known all my life? The same women who’d known Dura? And whom Dura had known? She’d gone to buy matches or snuff for them nearly every day. She’d carried their water jugs on her head.
    It was a nightmare. Suddenly it was not acceptable to speak of my sister. Or to cry for her.
    Let us leave here, Mama, I finally said in despair. And my mother, her face stern, took my hand in hers and walked off with me toward our farm.
    We stayed there seven weeks; long after our crops had been tended. Besides, there was a boy who lived on the farms who would have looked after our plots if we had decided to go back to the village. But my mother and I stayed, until even the groundnuts had been pulled up, placed on racks—the round ones that from a distance look like little hats—and dried. Then we stripped the nuts from their shriveled yellow stems and carried loads of them home to the village on our backs.
    How small I felt, especially since Dura was no longer around to measure myself against. Not there to tease me that I had grown perhaps the thickness of a coin but still had not caught up with her…. And there was my mother, trudging along the path in front of me, her load of groundnuts forcing her nearly double.
    I have never seen anyone work as hard as my mother, or pull her share of the work with a more resigned dignity.
    Tashi, she would say, it is only hard work that fills the emptiness.
    But I had not previously understood her.
    Now I watched the backs of her legs and noted how they sometimes quivered with the effort to ascend a steep hill; for there were many hills between our farm and the village. Indeed, the farm was in a completely different climate from that of the village: hot but moist, because there was a river and still a bit of forest, whereas the village was hot and dry, with few trees. I studied the white rinds of my mother’s heels, and felt in my own heart the weight of Dura’s death settling upon her spirit, like the groundnuts that bent her back. As she staggered under her load, I half expected her footprints, into which I was careful to step, to stain my own feet with tears and blood. But my mother never wept, though like the rest of the women, when called upon to salute the power of the chief and his counselors she could let out a cry that assaulted the very heavens with its praising pain.

TASHI
    N EGRO WOMEN, said the doctor, are considered the most difficult of all people to be effectively analyzed. Do you know why?
    Since I was not a Negro woman I hesitated before hazarding