Free Living by the Word by Alice Walker Page B

the language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us. And, amazingly, it has sustained us more securely than the arms of angels. Nowhere is this clearer than in our seemingly illiterate, generally nongrammatical songs, songs that even our enemies admit give us the energy century after century to struggle on through. Mrs. Green apparently doesn’t understand yet that when you love people their warts take on a strange beauty of their own. She would be amazed by African and African-American folk painting and sculpture, in which the prettiest, most symmetrical, and correct subject is never the one presented. In short, I think what probably most upsets Mrs. Green—who also thought sex should be only heterosexual, and not pleasurable or God-inspired—is the discovery that there is definitely a world view different from her own.
    Another line in Marley’s song is “Why do you look so sad and so forsaken? Don’t you know when one door is closed, many more is opened?” Every time I hear these words I see the old ones who spoke in ways that today means their exclusion from serious conscious life. I see the Jewish woman talking Yiddish, using her tongue but, especially, her hands. I hear the Italian-American putting an “a” on the ends of his words. I see so many of our old ones, like Mammy and Tonto, locked away from us and from reality, imprisoned in the easy stereotype of caricature so that even the real language they spoke by this time appears comical, odd, and more and more foreign and “degrading” to their descendants.
    But though the system tries to make us kill our brother/sister humans, by distorting their present and obliterating and ridiculing their past, we are, all of us, those doors of which Marley sings. (And think of all the old ones, including the buffalo soldiers and even Natty Dread himself, Marley brought back in!) The system closed the door on people who sounded like Celie long before I was born. All of us who can hear her today open wide the shut doors in ourselves, and in our society.
    And when Celie comes through those doors, buffalo soldiers on one side, Shug and Natty Dread and a clutch of dread-locked Rastas perhaps on the other, and only when Celie comes through those doors; when Celie comes in from the cold of repression, self-hatred, and denial, and only when Celie comes in from the cold—do I come in. And many of you as well. And when all of us and all of the old ones are hugged up inside this enormous warm room of a world we must build very quickly, really, or die of a too shallow mutual self-respect, you will see, with me, through the happy spirits of our grandchildren, such joy as the planet has never seen. And until that day, let us grow to understand a paraphrase of another of our brother Marley’s songs. Let us understand that to keep alive in us the speech and the voices of the ancestors is not only to “lively up” the old spirits through the great gift of memory, but to “lively up” our own selves, as well.
    And I can personally deliver the message that the old spirits are more alive today than anyone thought.
    When I was a little girl, there was a song that was very popular on the gospel station of the radio. It was called: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” It is about how death breaks the circle of loved ones on earth, but how, in heaven, “in the sky, Lord, in the sky,” this will not be the case. In heaven neither father nor mother will die. Nor little sister, brother, lover, or husband or wife, either. Heaven, according to the song, is different from here.
    It is a mournful song, which was written specifically, I think, about the loss of the songwriter’s mother, and it used to make me sad and fearful of losing my own. Over the years I have worried about losing not only my mother and other members of my family, but also poets, singers, philosophers, prophets, political activists. And many of these we have all lost, sometimes to