Color Purple Collection by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker [Walker, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7643-3
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-08-07T00:42:00+00:00

SUWELO, NOW AT HOME, was intrigued by the fat pink envelope, which he lifted to his nose and sniffed. It smelled like Miss Lissie—old-fashioned white roses under a hot summer sun. Turning it over, he was surprised to see, in Miss Lissie’s ancient script, all sharp points and decisively rounded o’s: “They burned us so thoroughly we did not even leave smoke.” He did not know what he expected to find on opening the letter, but the blank pages that lay in his hand, over a dozen of them, struck him as an odd missive, even from Miss Lissie.

It was days before he understood, and then, in the middle of the night, it came to him. This part of Miss Lissie’s story was written in invisible ink. At the moment he realized this he also knew that all he needed to read her letter was a candle. Heaving himself out of bed, he went in search of one. Luckily he found a box of them—an earlier gift from Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal—on top of the fridge. Still in his nightshirt, hunched over the kitchen table, the candle close up behind the first sheet of paper, and the chill of the San Francisco fog seeping into his bones, he began to read ... what at first seemed to be some kind of religious raving.

“The religion I was taught as a child, growing up on the Island,” wrote Miss Lissie, “is a thing that causes people to try to eat up the earth, since we were taught ‘everything is for man,’ while man was never asked to be for anything in particular. Well, for ‘God,’ but who knew what that was?”

“Hmmm,” said Suwelo, yawning, and scratching his chin.

“The first witches to die at the stake were the daughters of the Moors.” Moors? he mused skeptically. “It was they (or, rather, we) who thought the Christian religion that flourished in Spain would let the Goddess of Africa ‘pass’ into the modern world as ‘the Black Madonna.’ After all, this was how the gods and goddesses moved from era to era before, though Islam, our official religion for quite a long time by now, would have nothing to do with this notion; instead, whole families in Africa who worshiped the Goddess were routinely killed, sold into slavery, or converted to Islam at the point of the sword.

“Yes,” and here Suwelo imagined a long, hesitant breath, “I was one of those ‘pagan’ heretics they burned at the stake.

“They burned us first—well, we were so visible. Even after centuries of living among the Europeans. You can think of Desdemona and Othello, if you can’t come at it any other way, in trying to catch even a glimpse of our presence in Europe. The Inquisition eventually traveled where they were, too, to watery Venice, a dank and still somehow beautiful place, and there were screams and firelit shadows bouncing off the walls of the Doges’ Palace in St. Mark’s Square for months on end.

“But did you

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