Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

me and spread them across the foot of my bed. Each year since my birth she’d knitted me a sweater. Each year I watched the piece of knitting grow between her flashing needles; each year I was charmed by the result. This year, as every year, she’d outdone herself. The new sweater wrapped me in gold and chocolate; near the center of my chest, just above my heart, there was a petroglyphic spirit head in a rich, mossy green.
    I was reading a book by Langston Hughes, the laughing spellbinder whose sadness almost hid itself in the insouciance of his prose. I had already devoured several novels by James Baldwin, the guerrilla homosexual genius whom I had met once when he came to speak at our school, and two volumes of essays by Richard Wright, the tortured assimilationist and great lover of France. These men, “uncles” from my father’s side, would be my guides on my American journey. I glanced over at my mother, expecting to find her still reading, or staring thoughtfully into the fire, but finding instead that her warm brown eyes were fixed on me.
    I was just thinking, she said. It has been sixteen years since you were born. I can’t believe it.
    That long? I said, smiling at her.
    Her brown hair was dusted with more gray than I’d noticed before, and her face seemed thinner than usual, and more pale. I sighed with the contentment of the spoiled only child, and pondered my good fortune. I felt the greatest possible security with my mother. As she often said, our hearts had beat as one since before my birth. No matter who else was not in my life, there was always my mother: reading, knitting, preparing for her classes at the lycée. It was true that I was beginning to feel ready to separate from her, but gently, as a fruit drops from the tree. One more year of school, of Paris, and I would be gone.
    If you go to America, she said—as if I might not after all our years of planning—and spend time with your father, there’s something you should know.
    What? I asked.
    Something minor, perhaps. But he won’t remember it. And I do.
    How mysterious, I said.
    Not so mysterious! she said. It’s just that I’ve realized with your father that men refuse to remember things that don’t happen to them.
    Full of the passionate words of Baldwin, Hughes and Wright, which rang in my heart as if already inscribed there, I leaned forward to protest. My mother put out her hand and covered my lips.
    For as long as I could remember, my father came to see me and my mother once in fall and once in spring; for two weeks each visit. He never came on my birthday, because coming at that time seriously distressed his wife. Each time he came he showed me photographs of his other son, Benny, and at least one photograph of his wife, Evelyn, or, as he sometimes called her, Tashi. Benny was nearly three years older than me, with bronze satiny skin and a sweet, tentative smile. Whenever I saw a new photo of him I wondered if he’d like me. If we could ever be friends. Once, my father told me that Benny wasn’t as “quick” as I. This pleased me enormously, though I hadn’t the words to ask him what a lack of “quickness” like mine might mean.
    My mother began to tell me the story of how she met my father, years ago in Africa. I’d heard it before. I nodded complacently as she talked about the hours she spent with my father in Old Torabe’s hut, as the old man waited for death. But I soon realized my mother was adding a more adult twist than usual to the tale.
    You have to understand, she said, there was a reason why Old Torabe lived alone, way outside the village, and why none of the villagers came to care for him. Your father certainly didn’t enjoy caring for him, either; your grandfather Samuel assigned Torabe to him.
    My mother uncrossed her legs, pressed her palms against the arms of her chair in order to stretch her back and glanced from me to the fire, which would soon need another log.
    In his youth Torabe had had many wives. A few