Free Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker Page A

see, while my friend Eddie couldn’t see beyond his nose and would never learn to read; how they ... well, you get the picture. They all had a distinct quality of being apart from real life. It was like they were on one side of a glass and we were on the other, and we could have no real impact on what happened on their side, the side of the unknown, but they could have a great deal of impact on us. And I felt that was because we were where life was. For even in our frailty, we laughed. So much was so funny to us! They could not laugh freely. Their faces were like fists. When they almost touched you, they grew confused and looked about to see what others in the group did. We gathered in clumps, digging our bare toes into the sand, and looked at them as if they were a zoo. Only one man, short, fat, and disheveled, had come to be alive with or without us. He headed for the beach out in front of the school and took off most of his clothes, never looking at us. He took out a jar of liquid soap and started blowing bubbles. Pretty soon we were all out there with him chasing the bubbles and watching them float out into the bay.
    “There was, at the time, a big to-do about giving us cod-liver oil, because somebody noticed that me falling asleep was the least of it. Many of the children had legs that looked like pretzels. We had people on that Island with legs so bowed they made people with straight legs look deformed. That’s what we needed the cod-liver oil for, to prevent something called ‘rickets.’ It was funny, too, because by then, on the Island, bow legs in women were considered sexy, and you actually had people grumbling about how straight-legged women ‘didn’t do a thang for ’em.’ Meaning sexually. My mother actually had the nerve to try to tell me I didn’t have to take the stuff if I didn’t want to. But I remembered sick and deformed children from hundreds of years before, and I was disgusted that this should still happen. But I did demand that the cod-liver oil be given to us in orange juice. Because, once the parents were asked if the children should take it straight or with orange juice, they got into a debate over it and tried to make it a moral issue. Their children weren’t sissies, by God and his grandmother! Their children could take anything dished out to them ‘like a man’! Can you believe that shit? It really made you wonder about the general thoughtfulness of the divine universal plan.
    “Well, I wasn’t a man. Never had been one. Unless I had orange juice, I said, I wouldn’t take the cod-liver oil. If I didn’t take the cod-liver oil, nobody else in the school would either. Everybody knew this to be the unvarnished truth. And besides, the cod-liver oil, taken straight, tasted like shit.
    “There are few things more confusing to people than the process of regaining or attaining health. It is one of the great mysteries. And when I think of my dear mother as her mind began to clear—for she, too, was gradually induced into reinstating the kitchen garden, getting a few chickens for the eggs, and eschewing the syrupy-sweet coffee she loved—even now, long after her old head is cold, I have to laugh! She started, for the first time since she was a girl, to remember her dreams. And it was—that first morning after so many dead nights and one live one—as if she’d seen a ghost. For weeks her dreams were all she could talk about. The people and events in them, the fabulous lands she saw—she never understood they were her lands—the houses she visited that ‘just felt so familiar,’ the food she ate. In fact, she was always eating in her dreams, milk and fruit and greens! And everything she dreamed herself eating she searched for until it was found. She enlarged her garden and her livestock and sold her surplus to the neighbors; she bought her own little boat. Off she went to the mainland with her bag of nickels and dimes. She would mentally prostrate herself before an orange. A banana