The Temple of My Familiar: A Novel by Alice Walker

Author:Alice Walker [Walker, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Literary, African American, Cultural Heritage, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9781453223994
Google: UlsEIsMkLiwC
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-09-19T18:30:00+00:00

BUT HOW HAD HER great-aunt become interested enough in Africa to live there?

Eleanora was now a hundred years old. Mary Jane wondered if this pleased her. If it made her think of the old “natives” she had known. Such a loaded word, “natives.” For people like her great-aunt, it had meant savages. It was not a word Mary Jane could imagine her great-aunt using to refer to herself, though she was a native of England.

Her great-aunt had been born in 1885, on March 23. She was an Aries, which explained her impulsive, headstrong nature. She would be a person who loved flying, for instance, long before anyone had any notion that flying could possibly be safe. She had flown, rapturously, in the first planes that went to Africa; Aries people were akin to birds. She would also follow her instincts regarding other worlds, other peoples. But what had been the pivotal experience of her great-aunt’s life? Mary Jane sat now, several days a week, mostly watching her great-aunt sleep and thinking of that life, that grand life of the English upper class during the years before the Great (as they called it) War. Well, for one thing, they’d liked the word “great.” She had gone on a tour of the “great” English country houses and been to Morley Crofts, in Warwickshire, the old house of her ancestors. She had trooped along over the checkered floors and gazed from the mullioned windows, inset with Celtic designs in stained glass, which looked oddly Egyptian. There was a profusion of coral-and-black serpents and jeweled shepherd’s crooks. Morley Crofts covered many acres and resembled a medieval castle more than it did a house. Vast gardens surrounded it, and as she drifted about with the other tourists—who reminded her of rather pathetic sheep, in their polyester suits and spanking (and pinching) new tennis shoes, exclaiming with joy over each dovecote or gargoyle, each primrose path or giant dahlia—she imagined Eleanora sitting here or there among the garden statuary, reading a book or perhaps simply staring out into space, far out into the future, into Mary Jane’s own time, and, with a small smirk of amusement, watching.

Mary Jane’s own grandfather had left England penniless—cut off from his father’s and grandfather’s wealth, amassed in Ireland on the broken backs of the Irish—but with a sense of adventure and the desire to make his own fortune. He had succeeded splendidly, eventually owning copper mines in Missouri, petroleum fields in West Texas, and entire southern counties in Alabama and Georgia planted in cotton picked by illiterate blacks he probably never so much as glimpsed. His father and grandfather noted his success, so like their own—for the grandfather lived on and on. Sometimes Mary Jane thought she could almost remember him, but it was only the stories she remembered: of his fierce avarice, his contempt for weaker adversaries, his love of wealth for its own sake. The stories his children and grandchildren told about him were as pointed as morality

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