Free Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

tits.’ She seemed to exist in a trance, and when I cried she responded with an absent-mindedness that left me breathless. I used to lie on the bed and watch her going back and forth through the house in her slovenly wrappers, her steps dragging, almost shuffling, from front porch to kitchen. She dipped snuff. Every so often she’d drag herself to the side of the porch and spit off into the weeds. I knew I’d never seen, in any of my lifetimes, a more stupid person.
    “Then there was my father. Where my mother was merely clumsy—she had a habit of changing me in such a way that the old soiled diaper always came in contact with my head—my father was hopeless. He was every stereotype of the inept father of a newborn baby rolled into one. He spoke the same odd language as my mother—rather, he mumbled it—and it would take me years to master it, whereas in other lifetimes I was able to master new languages in a matter of minutes, though it was months before I could speak. For years I literally could not speak, and out of that frustration over the language I would also fight.
    “The worse thing was, I’d never known these particular people before! Never. They were complete strangers to me. I didn’t recognize their scent, I didn’t recognize their body movements, their rhythms—of which they made so much—I didn’t, as I said, recognize their speech. God knows, I didn’t recognize the diet! These people lived on corn bread, lima beans, and the occasional head of boiled cabbage. That was during times of plenty. The rest of the time they lived on grease, sorghum syrup, and biscuits.
    “Those first weeks and months, I slept as much as I could. And even as a big child I would fall asleep. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the diet of the children on the Island was improved. I kept falling asleep in Miss Beaumont’s class, and one day the visiting health nurse noticed it. They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time. In those days, in slavery, the people were whipped for tasting the milk or stealing the greens or eating the fruit; consequently, nearly fifty years later they had to be almost forced to eat those things. And they detested fish! Many a time I heard my mother complain that fresh fruit gave her wind, milk broke her out in hives, and only the whitefolks, she reckoned, would eat ‘rabbit food’—which was how she viewed raw greens. My mother and the other women on the Island had to be prodded into going back to planting little kitchen gardens. At one time they’d all had them, as well as pigs and chickens, but somehow or another they lost their animals and their seeds, maybe in one of the big floods that sometimes came as a result of coastal storms. Beautiful storms, I might add. Just deadly. Then for many years they couldn’t afford to buy seeds or animals, and being on an island didn’t help, because every little thing had to be brought over on one or two small flimsy boats, and it was about a ten-hour trip. The plantation overseer would pull up any vegetable growing in their yards that looked like anything planted in the field. And you could lose your house, because nobody owned their houses.
    “But this little woman—she was a white woman, and she had a black woman helping her—she started to agitate on the mainland about the condition of the Island children, and pretty soon whole big boatloads of white people came to look us over. It was the first time I’d seen so many! They were in many different shapes and sizes and very healthy from having eaten our food all their lives. I didn’t know this then, of course: how they had sound teeth because mine were rotted; how they could afford glasses to help them