Free Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker Page B

drove her wild.
    “Her speech remained strange, but ceased to be unintelligible as she added more of herself to it. She stopped dragging her feet. Her taste for snuff left her. I began to see her in quite a new light, with less impatience and contempt. It was from this time that we became more than mother and daughter. We became friends.”

“H AL, NOW . H AL . T HANK God for Hal. He was the only person I felt I had known before. He likes to tell stories about us as babies slobbering over each other’s faces and trying to get ourselves together enough to crawl away. This is the Lord’s truth! When I first made contact with Hal, when my little chubby fingers got hold of a handful of his fat face, my juices (those in my mouth, of course) started to flow. Here, at last, was something, someone familiar. Now I know some folks like to tell you that the man they married, or the woman, was once their grandmother. I can’t claim anything like that. I don’t know who Hal was, and all these years I haven’t had any success in either remembering or figuring it out. What I can tell you is that he was familiar, comfortable; and what’s more, emotionally recognizable. And he felt the same way. I don’t have many memories of this life that don’t have Hal somewhere in the middle of them. I had to see him every day. When he had to go off anywhere—for instance, the time he went into the army—I like to have died.
    “None of us ever becomes all that was in us to be. Not in the majority of our lifetimes, anyway. You take Hal, well, he was an artist. A painter. All he ever did really well was draw, on anything he could. From a baby! He’d get him a little stick and be out there in the sand digging and drawing, happy as a little clam. But his daddy hated that in him, and I’ve seen him take the stick away and stomp out the drawing—and Hal was a baby! Drawing was something his father wanted to do himself, something maybe he had a real talent for, but you can’t draw pictures for a living, is I reckon what he thought, and maybe his own daddy had broken him early, forbidding him to try. Before that it would have been the overseer on the plantation during slavery time. But it was so cruel! Like seeing someone forced to blind himself. And also very illogical. Mr. Jenkins, Hal’s daddy, became a great furniture maker, mostly chairs. He carved the most beautiful designs on them. It was from the sale of these chairs that he and his family were able to live better than the rest of us. It was beautiful, too, seeing those tall, polished, shining chairs, one to the small boat, floating out to sea! Still, he hated the tendency to art in his son. Why? Hal spent a lifetime in the dark about his father’s fears.
    “When he broke that commitment to art, to making beauty, to recording, to bearing witness, to saying yessiree to the life spirit, whose only request sometimes is just that you acknowledge you truly see it, he broke something in Hal. Hal could not defend himself, for instance; he didn’t consider himself worthy of defense. He never learned to fight. And listen, the most amazing thing, his eyes became weak! But I always took up for him; I knew he had to be reminded that it was all right to see. And in whatever corner of privacy we could find, I forced him to draw. If I hadn’t, he would have been blind as a bat within a year. His father threatened to keep him out of school if he drew. So for years I had a big reputation as an artist. It was all Hal’s work—pinched and furtive, as if his father loomed over his shoulder, but still expressive, raw, and pure. And I’m proud to say I can remember almost every painting that he drew. He drew right up to the time he left for the army. After that, for quite a while, nothing. And sure enough, during that time, Hal was to tell me later, he was a regular stumblebum. But at least the army let him out finally because of his bad sight, though it kept other colored men whose disabilities were