THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR

“IN THE OLD COUNTRY in South America, Carlotta’s grandmother, Zede, had been a seamstress, but really more of a sewing magician. She was the creator of clothing, especially capes, made of feathers. These capes were worn by dancers and musicians and priests at traditional village festivals and had been worn for countless generations. When she was a young child, Carlotta’s mother, also called Zede, was sent to collect the peacock feathers used in the designs. Little Zede, had stood waiting as the fat, perspiring woman who owned the peacocks held them in ashen, scratched hands and tore out the beautiful feathers one by one. It was then that Zede began to understand the peacock’s mournful cry. It had puzzled her at first why a creature so beautiful (though admittedly with hideous feet) emitted a sound so like a soul in torment. Next she would visit the man who kept the parrots and cockatoos,and the painful plucking of feathers would be repeated. She then paid a visit to the old woman who specialized in “found feathers” and who was poorer than the others but whose face was more peaceful. This old woman though each feather she found was a gift from God, and her incomparable feathers-set in the spectacular headdresses of the priests-always added just the special flair of grace the ceremony required.

Little Zede went to school every morning wearing a neat blue and white uniform, her two long braids warm against the small of her back. By high school her hair was cut short, just below her ears and she tossed it impatiently as her mother complained of the poor quality of the modern feather. No feather these days, she explained, was permitted to mature. Each was plucked while still relatively green. Therefore the full richness she had once been capable of expressing in her creation was now lost.

Their compound consisted of two small houses, one for sleeping, another for cooking--the cooking one was never entered by Zede’s father or brothers--and there were avocado and mango trees and coconut palms around. From the front yard they could see the river, where the tiny prahus used by the fisherman slipped by, like floating schools of dried vanilla-bean pods, her mother always said.

Life was so peaceful that Zede did not realize they were poor. She found this out when her father, a worker on the banana plantation they could also see from their house, became ill. At the same time, by coincidence, the traditional festivals of the village were forbidden. By whom they were forbidden, or “outlawed” as her father said, Zede was not sure. The priests, especially, were left with nothing to do. The dancers and musicians danced, made music and got drunk in the cantinas, but the priests wandered about the village stooped and lost, suddenly revealed as the weak-limbed old men they were.

Her father, a small, tired, brownskin with graying black hair died while she was an earnest scholarship student at the university, far away in the noisy capital. Her mother now made her living selling her incredibly beautiful feather goods to the cold little gringa blonde who had a boutique on the bottom floor of an enormous new hotel that sprung up near their village, seemingly overnight. Sometimes her mother stayed on the street near the hotel and watched the gringas who bought her feathered earrings, pendants, and shawls--and even priestlike headdress--and wore them as they stamped up and down the narrow dusty street. They never glanced at her; they never, she felt, even saw her. On them her work look magnificent still, but the wearers looked very odd.

There were riots almost the whole year Zede was finishing the university, at which she trained to be a teacher. Occasionally, on her way to class, she had to dodge stones, bricks, bottles, and all manner of raging vehicles. She hardly noticed the people involved. Some were farmers, some, students like herself. Some, police. Like her mother, she had a fabulously one-track-mind. Just as Zede the Elder never deviated from close attention to the details of her craft, no matter that the market had changed and others were turning out leaky pots and shoddy weavings for the ignorant tourist dollar, Zede trudged along to school ignoring anything that might make her late.

She was not even sure of the threat that came, out of nowhere, she thought, to shut down the school. And yet, incredibly, one day it was shut. Not even a sign was posted. The doors were simply locked. She sat on the steps leading to her classrooms for two days. She learned that some of her classmates had been imprisoned; others, shot.

But she had almost completed the requirements to become a teacher, and when she was asked to teach a class in the hills, a class without walls and with students without uniforms, she accepted. She taught the basics--hygiene, reading, writing and numerics-for six months before being arrested for being a Communist. “

Excerpt from “The Temple of My Familiar”
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Walker, Alice “The Temple of My Familiar” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989:1-5