Free Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker

being totally dependent on a woman who was as unknown as either tree or vine. Anunu was small and dark and ageless with shrewd bright eyes that asked nothing of you except that you be willing to approach her as yourself. This was a lot, of course, and many people could not do it.
    Grandmother will want to know all about you, she smiled, and She will find out, too. She laughed. You might as well tell me a little bit of what brought you here today so that I will be better able to help you on your journey.
    Kate had not hesitated.
    I believe all is up with us, she said. Us humans.
    And whatever would make you believe that? asked Anunu, with a chuckle.
    Kate laughed as well.
    It’s all so fucked, she said. She was surprised she had used this term. Ordinarily she was more mindful in her speech. She had reasoned it wrong to use fuck as a curse, for instance. If fucking is used as a curse, she believed, soon the act of fucking, which she considered healthy and succulent, would cause its participants to self-destruct. AIDS did not surprise her, at this level of thought, because it had seemed to crawl out of the global human shadow bag into which sex had been consigned.
    I am also unconvinced of the need to do anything further with my life, she said.
    Anunu was silent, looking at her intently.
    It is such a fine life, said Anunu.
    Kate was surprised. Although she was widely published and was to some extent a public figure, she had the idea most of the time that she was unrecognizable and therefore incognito. This grew out of her feeling when she was a child that she had the power to be invisible, which grew out of the fact that frequently she had felt unseen.
    And, said Kate into Anunu’s silence, there is the question of sex. One’s sexuality.
    Ah, said Anunu.
    I don’t seem to find much of a difference between women and men when it comes to loving them. If they’re wonderful, sexy, and cute, I want to snuggle up and be enchanted.
    They both laughed.
    Well, said Anunu. That’s not a problem. The other two might be, but that’s not.
    I don’t think so either, said Kate. I don’t understand why people have such a hard time seeing it’s impossible to be only one thing; and to love only one gender or one race. At least it seems impossible for me. It would be like thinking only beautiful people have green eyes. Limitation is willful and childish, she said. And so much less fun.
    It’s not that interesting, no, said Anunu. But it’s been an excellent way, for thousands of years, to keep a society’s labor force under control.
    Kate nodded. Her brain began to perk up more, to start to click with thought, the way it did when she met someone she could talk “shorthand” with. Talking with Anunu she thought maybe she didn’t need to take the Ayahuasca. Otherwise known as yagé. Grandmother.
    Anunu was speaking softly, looking into Kate’s face with such kindness!
    Oh, she said, what I’ve discovered is that with lovers as with everything, there are cycles, seasons. If you live your life in such a way as to become free rather than to become not free, she continued, you will find Life presents you with regular summers and winters and autumns and springs. There will be times when the masculine will demand your interest and attention, she said. Times when the feminine will rise and exact her due.
    She sat back in her orange-sunset-colored chair and interlaced her long fingers. For instance, she said, when I began to hear Grandmother calling me, I noticed more and more men coming into my life. It is all Grandmother, of course, she said, chuckling, regardless of appearances! As they say in the Church of Religious Science about God. And there were all these men—can you guess why?
    Kate shook her head. Uh-uh, she said, I hope they were cute.
    Some were, said Anunu. Some were definitely not. She laughed. But to a man they were ethnobotanists.
    Ethno-whats? asked Kate.
    Folks who study people’s relationships with their plants. That