Free Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker Page A

our heartbeats continued together as they had while he was in my womb. Seeing his sleek tan body and wet curly hair, I missed Adam. But, sighing with completion, I soon sank into the pleasure of the miracle I felt I and the universe alone had made.
    He felt shut out, he said, when he was finally free to come to us. Because he was not there.
    But why? I asked. You knew when he was to be born.
    So did Evelyn, he said.

PART SIX

TASHI-EVELYN
    I T IS HOT INSIDE THE COURTROOM. The ceiling fans, as they turn, sound like hoarse throats trying to clear themselves. The louvered windows are open fully to admit any semblance of breeze. I am dressed in cool white cotton from head to foot; Olivia shops for me in the tourist boutiques. Still, I feel perspiration beading at the center of my back, then slipping down in quicksilver rivulets to rest in an already sodden waistband.
    It has been a morning spent listening to the words of those who saw me on my journey. The man who sold me the razors, a squat, rheumy-eyed fellow who admits he overcharged me because I was a foreigner. Although I spoke Olinka he could tell I was American by my dress, he said. Next, a woman who sold me an orange, as I was getting into the bus at Ombere station. She was old and toothless. Her rags obviously smelled, for both attorneys kept their distance as she sweated and drooled a bit there in the witness stand. It was a young woman, however, whose words appeared to nail me. She was thin and dark, with curious light pink, almost white lipsticked lips and painted nails. She explained, in English, with a word or two of Olinka sprinkled through it, that she was proprietress of the paper shop, hard by the square where one caught the bus. She remembered me because I had come into the shop looking for and then asking her to find for me sheets of thick white paper on which to print signs.
    However, I’d changed my mind about wanting the white paper, she said, as soon as she brought some out to me.
    No, she said I had said. White is not the culprit this time. Bring me out paper of the colors of our flag.
    There was a sort of collective gasp in the courtroom when she said this. I felt even more eyes boring holes in the back of my neck. The judges surreptitiously scratched the natural kinky hair at the edges of their straight brush wigs.
    And is this the paper, miss, that the defendant bought?
    The prosecuting attorney stands before the young woman in the dock, the vivid red, yellow and blue paper held out in front of him.
    There was a time the colors alone made me weep with pride. Now I look at them as dispassionately as if they were Crayolas in a child’s coloring box.
    Surprisingly, there are a few older people near the back of the courtroom who, on seeing the colors—for which they, as young bush revolutionaries, fought—stand, their hands over their hearts. (Of course I can not see them; I only hear, faintly, their movement. The creaking of joints, the shifting of feet. I don’t even wonder about it at the time. Later Adam and Olivia will tell me. I think instead of the flag of my new home, America. I see, with my mind’s eye, that red and blue and white flag. The meaning of whose colors is unknown to me. A flag a woman sewed.)
    Reluctantly, I refocus on the young woman giving testimony. I think of the meaning of the word “testimony.” Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other’s testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake. I imagine the woman’s soft black hand cupping the young attorney’s balls, her shell-pink nails deep in the tangles of his pubic hair. What are we doing in this sweltering courtroom, she is saying, brushing the ebony tips of her breasts against his smooth, hairless chest, it’s actually a beautiful day outside. The attorney’s face has that curious look of concentration sexually aroused men have; he…But I must pay attention, I think, rotating my head slowly on my neck; if I am not