Read Online Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker - Free Book Online
Authors: Alice Walker
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so new to each other that all they did was stare into each other’s eyes—for centuries! They were so glad to be found. But this meant they had no self-consciousness about how they looked, beyond the dangling evidence of maleness, the elongated clitoris. They had no concept of dress.
“Woman was entirely used to herself, while man was still infatuated with his relative newness. Woman was already into adornment. In truth, she was already into high fashion! Yes! You can laugh, and I know this is a funny way now to put it. But! Woman did not know she was even interested in high fashion. She was more, you know, like playing with herself. Making interesting to herself and other women what she already had. So she had tits, sticking out to there! She had a soft brown belly and strong brown legs. So what, that she had hair to her ass that glistened like the wings of a bird. Woman was bored with it. And so she began to play with how she looked. She used feathers, shells, stones, flowers. She used leaves, bark, colored sand. She used mud. The toenails of birds! For days she and her sisters hung over the edge of the reflecting pools in the jungle, trying this and that. The rest of the time they spent gathering food. Occasionally they were host to a man, whom they played with, especially sexually, until they tired of him; they then abandoned him.
“But it was these abandoned men who, over time, found each other and corroborated each other’s experience among the women, dressed so weirdly in their colors and feathers, and they spread the word among other men who lacked their experience. Then one of the men told of a birth among the women. That clinched it. Immediately they imagined a mujer muy grande, larger than the sky, producing, somehow, the earth. A goddess. And so, if the producer of the earth was a large woman, a goddess, then women must be her priests, and must possess great and supernatural powers.
“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man’s mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women. They kept their distance from them, but spied on them when they could. The finery the women wore seemed to prove their supernaturalness. The men, lacking the centuries of clothing and adornment experience of the women, were able to make only the clumsiest imitations. The women laughed at them. Perhaps the most fatal error in the whole realm of human responses to sincere effort! So, at first, to show their worshipful intent, the men, who were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat, gathered those things they knew the women liked or might be encouraged to like—feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws—and brought them, on their knees, to the women, who picked over them like housewives at a sale.
“It was a long time before they began demanding these gifts, just as it was a long time before the men noticed that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves. Strangely, the men did not like the children; it was as if the children made them nervous, even the boy children, whom they were always given or who almost always ran off to join them and whom they, in a manner of speaking, raised. For centuries the male community revolved around the female one, and the women hardly noticed it, except to make demands about the amount and number of things they were given.
“Many grandmothers lived and died during this time. Bowed down to, feared, worshiped, spoiled. And then, one day, there was a rebellion. The men grew sick of the women they worshiped. And by now they had made an important discovery about woman’s ability to produce life. That discovery was—and it had been kept well hidden by woman for a very long time—that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had, as had been suspected (and of course many
“Woman was entirely used to herself, while man was still infatuated with his relative newness. Woman was already into adornment. In truth, she was already into high fashion! Yes! You can laugh, and I know this is a funny way now to put it. But! Woman did not know she was even interested in high fashion. She was more, you know, like playing with herself. Making interesting to herself and other women what she already had. So she had tits, sticking out to there! She had a soft brown belly and strong brown legs. So what, that she had hair to her ass that glistened like the wings of a bird. Woman was bored with it. And so she began to play with how she looked. She used feathers, shells, stones, flowers. She used leaves, bark, colored sand. She used mud. The toenails of birds! For days she and her sisters hung over the edge of the reflecting pools in the jungle, trying this and that. The rest of the time they spent gathering food. Occasionally they were host to a man, whom they played with, especially sexually, until they tired of him; they then abandoned him.
“But it was these abandoned men who, over time, found each other and corroborated each other’s experience among the women, dressed so weirdly in their colors and feathers, and they spread the word among other men who lacked their experience. Then one of the men told of a birth among the women. That clinched it. Immediately they imagined a mujer muy grande, larger than the sky, producing, somehow, the earth. A goddess. And so, if the producer of the earth was a large woman, a goddess, then women must be her priests, and must possess great and supernatural powers.
“What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears. I am speaking here of man’s mind. The men both worshiped and feared the women. They kept their distance from them, but spied on them when they could. The finery the women wore seemed to prove their supernaturalness. The men, lacking the centuries of clothing and adornment experience of the women, were able to make only the clumsiest imitations. The women laughed at them. Perhaps the most fatal error in the whole realm of human responses to sincere effort! So, at first, to show their worshipful intent, the men, who were better hunters than the women, but only because the women had found they could live quite well on foods other than meat, gathered those things they knew the women liked or might be encouraged to like—feathers, bones, bark for dyes, animal teeth and claws—and brought them, on their knees, to the women, who picked over them like housewives at a sale.
“It was a long time before they began demanding these gifts, just as it was a long time before the men noticed that some of the children the women were making bore a striking resemblance to themselves. Strangely, the men did not like the children; it was as if the children made them nervous, even the boy children, whom they were always given or who almost always ran off to join them and whom they, in a manner of speaking, raised. For centuries the male community revolved around the female one, and the women hardly noticed it, except to make demands about the amount and number of things they were given.
“Many grandmothers lived and died during this time. Bowed down to, feared, worshiped, spoiled. And then, one day, there was a rebellion. The men grew sick of the women they worshiped. And by now they had made an important discovery about woman’s ability to produce life. That discovery was—and it had been kept well hidden by woman for a very long time—that the life that woman produced came out of a hole at her bottom! But not the hole man also had, as had been suspected (and of course many
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