Read Online Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker - Free Book Online Page A

and not at the ground, Yolo almost stumbled over a young man lying on the sand. He seemed so peaceful, napping there in the sun, that Yolo could not believe he was dead.
    The shock on his face must have been apparent.
    He dead, bradda, yeah, said Jerry.

The Curious Thing

    The curious thing about the grandmother medicine was that people would take it, even though it tasted ghastly. Even more curious was that it continued to taste horrible, in fact more and more horrible the longer you took it. By now Kate could feel the muscles of her throat contract just thinking about it. If she actually saw it in the shaman’s bottle, she wanted to vomit. Armando laughed at them each time he called them to circle. They all came looking pitiful, he teased them, like goats going to the butcher. He pretended to be unmoved by the disgusting flavor of the medicine, and drank some each time they journeyed. Tonight Kate sat facing the river, which splashed lazily down below their palapa.
    She was feeling weak from the continuous internal cleansing of the day before. Everyone else also seemed pale and less than steady on their feet. It was extremely hot; even so, because of parasites living in the sand and poisonous snakes and who knows what all, they were required to wear tall rubber boots most of the time. Entering the large ceremonial palapa they removed their boots and left them outside. Everyone stretched their bodies, settling into their respective seats, and wriggled and massaged their toes.
    When it was her turn to take the medicine, she asked, as she always did, for help for the humans of the planet and for the coming generations and for the animals and plants and rocks. She asked that she be guided to knowledge of how to act in the world for the highest good of all. She asked that the medicine accept her and do no harm. She called on the Grandmother Spirit to protect her, while she was being taught. With a tightening of her throat, which she consciously acknowledged and willfully relaxed, she drank the medicine in a gulp. Even so, she gagged. What was its flavor? Worse than any kind of excrement, surely, she thought.
    And people had willingly taken this medicine for thousands of years! Repugnant as it was. How could she not love these people? After everyone, including Armando, had taken the medicine, there was a languid, hazy interlude. A feeling of: It is done. Whatever happens now, there will be no turning back. She particularly appreciated this time; it was like being in a small boat, all together, and knowing you would travel the length of the river together and hopefully reach your destination and with good fortune land in a place that welcomed you.
    The New Yorker was the first to head for the bushes. Rushing out without his boots or his flip-flops, which lay beside the entrance. Soon they could hear him vomiting. That triggered one of the women, who went out, slowly, calmly, carefully bending over to place her flip-flops on her feet. Next, the man from Utah, his tall body slightly stooping going out the low entrance, his head brushing the palm fronds that formed the palapa’s top. And then the rest of them, one by one, left the circle. Some went to their holes and leaned over them. Others wandered out into the forest. She went to the forest. Found a tree that looked like an ancient woman, her head in the heavens, her feet in the earth, and, touching it lightly to ask permission, she threw up whatever poisons might be left in her body.
    Returning, she noticed the light had changed. It was now late afternoon. They would be sitting for at least four hours before the mosquitoes began their nightly hunt. But this did not concern her very much, though she was allergic to insect bites and was already swollen from them. She had no mirror but she felt her eyes were almost swollen shut. She closed them.
    The first time she had gone to visit Grandmother she had been fleeing the frightened animal aspect of herself. It seemed to her that