My Familiar...The Temple

The years she spent in prison she never spoke of to Carlotta, even though that was where Carlotta was born. It was a prison that did not, anyway, look like one. It looked like the confiscated Indian village in the backwoods of the country that it was. The Indians had been “removed” and all their rich if marginal land was now planted in papaya. It was to plant, care for and exploit these trees for an export market that the prisoners were brought to the village.

How her mother escaped with her, Carlotta did not know. Perhaps her father had been one of the guards-untutored men, fascinated, if resentful, that a young, pretty woman like Zede could read and write. Later, when Carlotta’s mother described the tiny, slivery boats that slid down the river like floating schools of dried vanilla-bean pods, she thought perhaps they’d made their escape in one. Perhaps they’d floated through the Panama Canal, mistaken by the U.S. Coast Guard for a piece of seaweed, and then floated to the coast of North America and into San Francisco Bay.

It was San Francisco that Carlotta’s own memories began. She was a dark, serious child with almond-shaped eyes and glistening black hair. In a few years she spoke English without an accent, a language her mother at first had difficulty understanding, even when Carlotta spoke it to her. Years later she would speak it quite well but with so thick an accent, she sounded as if she were still speaking Spanish. Zede could not , therefore, teach in the public schools of California. And she would have been afraid, in her shyness, to try. They lived in a shabby , poorly lighted flat over a Thai grocery in an area of the city populated by the debris of society. Some of the people did not live in indoors, although it rained so much of the time, but slept in doorways or in abandoned cars. Her mother found work in a sweatshop around the corner. There was no man in her mother’s life. There were just the two of them. Her mother’s responsibility was to provide food and clothing, and it Carlotta’s job to do the cooking and cleaning and of course, go to school. School was a misery to her, but like so many bad things that happened, she never told her mother. Zede, stooped. a twitch of anxiety in her face at thirty-face, was a grim little woman, afraid of noise, other people, even of parades. When the gays paraded in costumes on Halloween, she snatched Carlotta from her perch beside the window and drew the shades. But no before Carlotta had seen of the enormous feathered headdress of peacock, pheasant, parrot ad cockatoo feathers, almost too resplendent for the gray, foggy city. The headdress was worn by a small, pale man, carrying a crystal scepter, who appeared to be wearing little else. He was drinking a beer.

From this glimpse of the Halloween parade Carlotta marked the beginning of her mother’s new career. During the day she sewed jeans and country-and-western style shirts and ties in the sweatshop where she worked. At home they ate mainly rice and beans. With the money her mother managed to save, they bought feathers from one of the large import stores. Eventually Carlotta would work at one of these stores, called World Import, first as a sweeper in the storeroom, among the crated goods, so cheap, so colorful and pretty, from countries like her mother’s (she did not think of South America as her continent), next as an arranger of goods in the floor and finally as a cashier. By then she was entering college and could work only during the summers and after school. Much later in her life she heard the store of the man who worked in a factory that made farm equipment and each day passed the guards at the gates pushing a wheelbarrow. Each day the suspicious guards checked to make sure the wheelbarrow was empty. It always was. Twenty years later, when the man was rich, he told them what he had been stealing: WHEELBARROWS. It was the same with Carlotta; only, she stole feathers, which she always seemed to be holing in her hand as if about to dust something. Peacock feathers mainly. Bundles and bundles of them over the year, because her mother had discovered that the rock stars of the sixties were “into” feathers and that, for one spectacular peacock cape, she could feed and clothe herself and Carlotta for a year.

During her last year in college Carlotta delivered one of these capes to a rock star so famous even she had heard of him-a slight, dark-brown man who wore a headband and looked, she thought, something like herself. It was his Indianness that she saw, not his blackness. She saw it in the way he really looked at her, really saw her. With the calm, detached concentration of a shaman. He was stoned, but even so...She hafd delivered many capes, shawls, headdresses, dresses, beaded and feathered headbands, sandals, and jeans to rock stars and their entourages, and in the excitement of trying on what she brought, they never saw her. Never questioned how the magic of the feathered ckothing was done. Never wondered about her mother’s pricked fingers and twitchy face and eyes. She didn’t expect them to. They were demonic to her. She hated the way they looked, so pale and raw and wet; she disliked the drugs, always so carelessly displayed. Feathered pipes and bowls were steady sellers--she was not sure her mother even knew or cared what was done with them. Carlotta learned to wait silently ...like an Indian, until the buyer--her mother’s only words for them--stopped admiring his or her reflection and languidly fumbled for the always-hard-to-locate checkbooks. They often tried to get her to llower her prices. Sometimes she spoke to them in her mother’s incomprehensible Spanish and pretended she could not understand what language they spoke. At times, an especially happy buyer, going to a ball or to a parade, gave her a bonus, or noticed she was pretty.


Excerpt from “The Temple of My Familiar”
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Walker, Alice “The Temple of My Familiar” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989:5-8