Free By the Light of My Father's Smile by Alice Walker Page A

earth more than anyone, they are always so willing to see more of it.
    Not always willing, said Susannah, chewing. They suffer such terrible persecution for their staunch antibourgeois ways! What they most seem to love is music.
    Ah, yes. Music. It is this also that makes me love them. And their worship of the Dark Mother, who is none other than the human symbol for the dark earth.
    Or a distant memory of the Pygmy Earth Mother, said Susannah. Do you have Gypsy music, by any chance? she asked.
    Irene made a face as if to say: Does a monkey like pistachios?
    From underneath the bed Irene dragged an ancient Victrola and a stack of what appeared to be fifty-year-old records. Soon the small room was throbbing with the weeping of Gypsy violins and the deep, soulful laments of Gypsy women and men.
    Sighing, Irene said, Why is it that we can love so much that which only makes us cry?
    Susannah thought for only a moment, and then, with certainty, she said: Because it is that which calls us home to the heart.
    Yes, said Irene, wiping the corner of her eye. I know you must go home very soon now, but I want you to know something.
    What is that? asked Susannah.
    You are a tourist I like.

Doing Well
    When Petros and my daughter left Skidiza, he thought he had loved her back to himself. As they were leaving his parents’ house, he gazed upon his childhood bed with fondness. He stood before his parents, his hand tucked underneath Susannah’s elbow, and looked them calmly in the eye. He had gone to America with nothing, and had had the good fortune to marry Susannah, a woman of substance, and to find work he enjoyed, and to create a good life. All of the political, cultural, historical forces that had shaped his wife’s life remained mysterious to his parents; they simply liked her for her courteous behavior, her deference to their age; they liked her appreciation of their landscape and their food. For her part, Susannah hadn’t said anything about the Civil War or civil rights, just as, he realized, his mother had said nothing about the lack of women’s rights, historically, in Greece, or about the stoning and stabbing of women she must remember quite vividly from her girlhood. The right of the males in the family to kill the females if they in any way “dishonored” them. They met on the surface of things, but also, in a way, heart to heart. He, Petros, was the place at which they joined.
    His parents had been amazed by how well he looked. How handsome and fit. That he spoke English so effortlessly. Susannah was doing something very right, they felt.
    And yet, Susannah had stood immobile, as he grasped her elbow. There had been no answering nudge, no shiver from her body to his body suggesting a giggle of solidarity, as his parents praised his good fortune, or even a hint of sadness that they were leaving. He felt that his home, his village, his country, was a sad place for her. That she was profoundly disappointed, and had become estranged from him because of that. He blamed the dwarf. No wonder they made her stay in back of the church, he thought, ungenerously.

Piercings
    I am very fat, it’s true. And within a year I will be dead because my heart will simply buckle under the strain of pumping blood through so much weight. I teach at a large Eastern university, where I’m sure my students sometimes think of me as Aunt Jemima disguised as Punk Dyke as I come rolling into the lecture hall with my thrice-pierced nose, green hair, and jelly-plump arms filled with their papers, ablaze with my copious multicolored notes. It is because I teach at this particular university that I am considered a success, no matter what color my hair, how many piercings I have, or how fat I get. I was considered especially successful by my father, who, after my mother’s death, used to startle me sometimes when I returned from class, by sitting on my stoop like a stray cat.
    What do you want? I bluntly asked him, the