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

is, the plants that grow around them.
    Kate leaned forward in her seat. She felt like a gong had gone off in her head. Bong. This always happened when a single word triggered awareness that she had stumbled onto the right path. People and their plants. Plants and their people. She had an instinctive understanding, perhaps from birth, that people and plants were relatives. As a child she had spent hours talking to, caressing, sitting in, kissing, and otherwise trying to communicate with trees. As a very young child she’d been convinced that trees had mouths and that she could find a mouth on a tree if only she grew tall enough and looked for it very hard.
    Why can’t they talk? she’d once asked her mother, who’d laughed and told everyone about the funny question her little daughter had asked.
    It was clear she had met an inspirer in Anunu and that they could continue talking well into the afternoon. Her friend was sitting outside the door, however, waiting for her own interview.
    Later, back in the room in which they were to work, Anunu gave them a final word of advice: You will find . . . well, who knows what you will find, she corrected herself, smiling. (She did not want to tell them that their first image, after fully receiving the medicine, would in all likelihood be of two gigantic, entwined, perhaps copulating snakes.) But what happens to me is that just when I think nothing is happening and I’m shut outside of my experience with Grandmother, I will notice, sort of out of the corner of my eye, that there is a large brick wall or something like that. At first I will feel incapable of getting over, around, or through it. Then I will remember that I can mentally remove one of the bricks. I will do this. Suddenly I will find myself on the other side.
    They were required to wear diapers! This had seemed unbearably funny to Kate. And amusing to realize she liked the bulky feel of them between her legs. She was a baby again; she realized how much she must have enjoyed being one. She seemed to remember, feeling the diapers on her bottom, that when she was a baby people were always kissing her. Um, she thought. Happy.
    This is to make sure you don’t have an accident on your way to the bathroom, said Anunu. She and her assistant, Enoba, a white woman with dark hair and warm hazel eyes, took each of them by the hand and walked with them from their lounges out the door to the bathroom, just to make sure they would remember where it was.
    Will we be forgetful as all that? asked Kate, worried.
    We’ll be right with you, said Enoba, whether you forget or not. One of us will walk with you, just like now, and will stand outside until you come out again.
    When was the last time someone had stood outside the toilet waiting for her? Kate asked herself. Her mother, maybe, when she was a child. Or perhaps a nurse, when she’d been in the hospital having her children.
    She liked it. Oh, she thought to herself, I am someone who enjoys being pampered! Usually, raising her children, she’d received no such pampering, though always giving it to others. She had forgotten her own need. And, she thought, I am wearing Pampers! She was having fun even before the journey.

Yolo Had Read

    Yolo had read all about Hawaii, the Hawaii of surfing and volcanoes, before coming. He’d once even had a Hawaiian girlfriend. She was a gifted hula dancer and he’d met her at a party. She was with a very average sort of white guy and this white guy, looking ill at ease in so large and diversified a gathering, wanted her to dance.
    I don’t really want to, she said. She was smoking a cigarette and looking rather bored.
    Ah, come on, he said.
    I’m not dressed for it, she said. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black woolen trousers, and a big brown leather bomber jacket. She shrugged out of the jacket and let it slide to the floor. Yolo had picked it up and flung it on a chair.
    Ta da! the white guy said, pulling a bag from behind the