Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 1400061733
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

I could not avoid killing him, Lalika had said. He was so huge. When I hit him with my fist he laughed. When I kicked him in the balls he said he felt excited. He wanted to fully experience himself, he said, and that was only possible with a nigger. Kate, Lalika had said, looking sadly into her eyes, what does that mean?

He thought he needed a perpetual victim, said Kate, in order to feel like a winner. He thought he was incapable of being himself on equal terms with a person of color. He thought he would be lost. What he had is by definition an inferiority complex.

They’d sat on a mat outside Lalika’s hut. Lalika had brought with her to the Amazon a tiny piece of crocheting, creamy white and dainty. As she talked, she worked steadily, her needle smooth and silent. If I survive this journey, she told Kate, I will shave my head. Then, until I’m used to being bald, I will wear this little crocheted cap. It has many tears woven in, Lalika said thoughtfully, but if I live, the sun will dry them.

Kate had smiled, though tears came to her eyes.

It was so like women to create their own rituals, she thought, their own little markers of transition, their own ephemeral celebrations. Catching a tear as it slid down her own cheek Kate leaned forward and pressed it into Lalika’s design.

There will be the tears of two of us, then, she said.

Lalika burst into tears.

Why does the thought that two of us will always be present make you cry? she asked.

Because it reminds me of Saartjie, said Lalika.

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