The Snake

"Let me tell you a story about a man and a snake. They put down their notepads and melting-in-their-hands pens, the heat was so intense, and hiked up their jeans, took a seat on a stump in her yard, and listened. She was so old she smelled like greens. And so real a number of them swooned. There was this man walking down the road, you see. And she pointed to the long dirt road down which they had trudged, looking for her house. And it was a very, very cold day. They looked into one another’s profusely perspiring faces and couldn’t begin to imagine it. And what do you think he saw just ahead of him on the road?

Well, she carried on, without waiting for them to guess, there right in his path was a snake. Kinda a cute snake. You know, probably had hair like most people want and long eyelashes. Her audience smiled. It was frozen solid though, it was. But still, some part of it could talk to the man. You know how that is. They chuckled. And it said: Please, Mr. Man. I’m just a poor little ole snake nearly ’bout froze to death out here in this weather! Please take pity on me and warm me by putting me in your bosom.

Now, the man wasn’t usually no fool. But you know how it sometimes be. That one day, well. He thought about it. And he was after all a Christian kind of a man. He stood there thinking how amazing it was that such a cute snake could talk. And then he stood there a good five or ten minutes thinking about what Christ would do. If I was to pick you up, he said, leaning over the snake so that his own shadow became a part of it, and he, being a sensitive soul, started to feel a connection, If I was to pick you up, how do I know you wouldn’t bite me? Oh, no, Mr. Man, if you would be so kind as to warm me up and let me live, why, it would be a horrible thing for me to repay your kindness by biting you! I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.

So after a while, the snake looking at him so pitiful, he picked the little ole thing up, and he put it in his bosom, in the pocket of his overalls. Just behind his package of Brown Mule chewing tobacca and right next to his chest, close to his heart, which was beating warming blood all through his sympathetic body. And they walked on. The man thinking real good things about himself and the little snake beginning to feel like him or her self again. Pretty soon the snake was warmed clear through. The man could feel it slowly uncoiling, slithering behind his hansker pocket just a tiny bit. It make him smile, to tell you the truth. It tickled him to think that something as humble as himself could bring something frozen almost dead practically back to life. He reached up to pat the snake. And the snake bit him.

He bit him on the jaw. And the man knew he was in the middle of Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia or north Florida or somewhere there wasn’t likely to be no speedy help. He fell down in the middle of the road, just a cussin’. Why you do me like that? he asked the snake, who was now sliding nimbly across his pants leg. And the snake looked up at him and said, kind of shrugging his shoulders like those folks in France do: You knowed I was a snake when you picked me up. And the man started to die.

The old woman looked at the young people who had disturbed her peace to ask her to join their crusade. She had learned to live without picking up any snakes. She killed every one she saw, no hesitation and no questions asked. She did have a different ending for the story though, that she felt might do them good; for she could see they were understanding her to say what they were attempting was an exercise in futility.

She cleared her throat, which had as many wrinkles as the ocean has waves. Now listen, though, she said, most people stop that story right there. They act like the man was just a total fool, outsmarted one more time, like ole Adam. But when you think more about the story, about the man and the weather and the snake, you understand it differently.

How’s that? someone from the group asked dejectedly. They had walked all morning in the broiling sun just to be told they were picking up something whose bite would eventually kill them. Well, said the old woman, think about the weather. It was still real cold. That snake, he was gonna freeze again. Once he froze again, he’d be helpless again. No kind of protection for a snake too froze to bite. So? asked the same person.

So, said the old woman, this is an endless kind of a thing. Do we kill it or do we let it live? Do we ever believe its true nature and does that true nature ever change? And does ours? She had given them some grapes that grew out behind her house. And some water from her spring. Bye, she’d waved to them, as contented as a girl.”

~ Alice Walker, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (A Novel)

“When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a Middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a distant white relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as Miss when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin, she responded that of course they would not; no Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, and ran her dairy. Among countless other duties and responsibilities, my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn’t pay it to a nigger; that before she’d pay a nigger that much money she’d milk the dairy cows herself.”
~ Alice Walker, The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way (Non-fiction)

“I just really love people a lot. I really love them. I was saying this to someone recently, trying to explain how I loved my grandparents when I was a child. Honestly, I loved them so much that I often thought I would just burst. I thought I couldn’t contain it. I just loved them. So, some of that has really just stayed with me—although I’m really very sedate. I’m really very mellow and not actively—I rarely jump up and down. But, in my heart I’m jumping up and down. I’m feeling such an amazing love that that is what does it. You know, the hardest part is when you’re in danger yourself. You have to face what could happen and might be likely to happen to you. It’s not just that you’re there standing next to somebody that something bad is likely to happen to. That is a true moment of reckoning with who you really are. Are you really going to be standing there? I think that that moment of commitment is both very light and very heavy. You can actually feel how bad it could be. But, at the same time, you’re there. That goes back to what I was saying earlier about the lightheartedness - because you got off your couch, you got off wherever you were comfortable, and you’ve made the journey. You’re there, where you really know you need to be…

Well… in the Congo, I remember very much riding—I don’t know if you know this, but the Congo is really beautiful. People correct me and say, “Oh, you mean the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Well, fine. But, the land there, the landscape is extraordinary. It’s big lakes and beautiful hills and trees. But anyway, as you know, it’s being completely destroyed. So, when we were there, I was with a photographer who actually started trying to take photographs of these very mean, hungry-looking young soldiers lining the roads. [This] would have put us in quite a lot of danger if we hadn’t been able to kind of sit on her. You know—real fear. Which brings me to this idea of fearlessness. People will say to you, “Oh, you are fearless.” That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It’s a slander, really. I think what it does is it dehumanizes people and it makes them seem like they’re so different from you. People feel fear. So, we were afraid. I was afraid in the Congo…

But, it’s what do you do then? What do you do when you’re afraid and you know you’re afraid? You can have no way of knowing how this will even impact your health later. This is another part that is often not talked about—how, months later, you’re still—I mean, I understand—what is it? Post-traumatic stress syndrome. I understand it completely, because you’re there [and] you’re standing somewhere where many people have just been chopped to bits, like in Rwanda, for instance. This part of Congo is where a lot of the people from Rwanda fled—they fled across that border. You’re trying to be there, be supportive, be present—all of it to show people that they’re not alone, they’re not forgotten, that somebody cares. Somebody loves them. Somebody sees that they are beautiful and great. It’s not their fault—whatever rotten thing is being done to them. But, months later, you can still be having physical repercussions that you didn’t expect. You can have mental things happening that you didn’t expect because you have placed yourself where you “had to be.” But, it’s almost like nobody told your body. [Laughs.] Nobody told your body that, and the body is freaking out…You may not get anywhere, but leave the “expletive” shore. [Laughs.]

So, I got home, not thinking anything really had changed. I got into this little farm truck that I have to haul whatever—manure and firewood and whatever’s heavy. I’m used to driving this little thing. It’s not that big. But, I right away ran into a tree. I just ran into a tree. I was not there. I was not connected still to my body. So, that was like the biggest thing. No—the other thing was [that] a dog that we have that I’ve been around for years—I just tripped over it and just fell hard. Damagingly hard. Again, the places that we can be taken to are so far from where we live day to day that the psyche—or whatever—has a hard time getting back. So, it can take—it depends on who you are, but in my case, six months or a year—to reclaim myself, reintegrate myself, and really feel whole. So, I have to factor that in as a cost.

You have to say, “Well then, is it worth it?” Well, yes, it is worth it. Unfortunately, you can always see that life is so much more challenging for the people you are there to witness.

So, yes. I think the lightheartedness—who knows what goddesses send this beam of lightheartedness, but thank goodness. Otherwise, it’ll be too depressing because you know that anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, “Can I pay this? What will this mean to me—to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?” I think this is the place that people fear—and rightly so. It’s not small. But, the consequence of not doing that could be worse, I think. I was reading somewhere where, in this country, a third of the people—this may be an exaggeration, but a large number. I think it was a third of the people who can afford the stuff—they are on tranquilizers of one sort or another. I would say to just throw the tranquilizers away and go and do something that you think you can’t do. Then suffer whatever that is for however long it takes, and then see who you are. I think that your health and everything else will be improved…

Where I live in Mexico—I live in a tiny village called La Manzanilla. It was hit by the worst hurricane ever to hit the world that we know of, [Hurricane] Patricia. People lost pretty much everything all up and down between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanilla. They were hit just terrifically hard—don’t have roofs, some have no walls either. But, just devastation. What I’ve seen from keeping in touch as well as I can is that what I find so typical in Mexican culture is the helpfulness of the people to each other. I think, at this point, that is the highest good and the highest we can hope for—which is to be of help and use to each other wherever we are. We are in for disasters without end. So, I think the light of our presence, basically—and of our willingness to take up the broom and the dustpan, and try to drag the limbs out of the street and try to raise money to put on a roof, and try to make sure people have water right where you are. I think that that is what is probably the most important thing…

I love meditation. I love it because that’s where you find what your voice is. You cannot really find it easily in this culture. This culture is the noisiest culture ever, ever. I think the damage that it has done to people is in that realm of silencing them. They are overwhelmed by gadgets. They don’t know what to think because they’re so heavily programmed about what it is that they should want and should think. So, in a sense, you have to steal back yourself. You have to steal back your own mind. Meditation helps in that area. Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here.

You’re not here just to be a clone. You’re not here to be a copy. We have enough of those. You don’t have to apply. You don’t even have to go there to be absolutely yourself—real, here, now, on this planet. There’s nothing like it. You can only stand so much ecstasy. I can never get over the mystery of this wonder that we’ve bumbled into. I mean, I can’t think anybody was planning it, exactly. Who knows? I don’t know. I just know that somehow we got here. So, there is reason for an ecstatic existence—and also that ecstasy is not sustainable forever. On some level, maybe it is.

But, I’m just saying that if you can connect with that—even if it’s just a moment of ecstatic wonder that you exist at all in this huge, magnificent, sprawling wonder—you’re fortified. It’s like—oh, I don’t know—minerals for the spirit, where you get fortified and you got out and you want to protect, save, keep, honor, join—whatever makes more health for this. [Laughs.] It’s really mind-blowing. So, if you can get over being in despair and stop thinking about the soldiers who are shooting out the eyes of children deliberately—and setting people afire in their beds, and bombing hospitals, and chopping people’s limbs off, and chasing people out of their homes, and not wanting to shelter refugees—all the things. If you can just for a moment step back from that and say, “OK. I am here, so I must have done something right to get here. I’m here. I’m really loving this. I thank you so much. However this happened, I just adore you and thank you.” Out of that feeling, then, you turn to whatever needs doing. It could be next door. It could be in your house.

I don’t require myself or anyone to go beyond what they feel they can do. I just do suggest—for their own eventual happiness—that they go as far as they can. They can usually go much further than they think. Then you come up against—it seems to me—one’s fear of dying. That is very real. So, you have to constantly—on your little mental wheel back there somewhere—think about, “This could cost me my life. What does that mean?” You eventually get to this place where you realize that you’re dying anyway. You’re constantly on your way somewhere else anyway, and that dying—to this reality—obviously, like everything else here, releases you into a whole other cycle of being something else. And I think that’s pretty amazing. To not fear it is a good thing. I mean, you might fear how it happens. But, as far as we know, everybody dies.

Sometimes, I think people like Martin and Malcolm and people who are assassinated—the Kennedys—there’s a way of looking at it that I’m sure most people have looked at it this way. So, if you visit someone who’s dying painfully of cancer—which we are doing right now with a friend—he wants to die so badly. He’s in hospice. Every day he pleads that he wants to die. The pain is so horrible and the medicine doesn’t always take care of it. And I think, “Well, you know, the ones who left in a blaze of whatever probably saved themselves from this kind of end here—where you’re dying of some disease that’s making you wish you were dead.” So, it takes time to sort out these issues with yourself and to live in a certain state of readiness. You just learn to live there. People—whether they know it or not—they’re in the state, but they’re also not aware that they need to be in the state and be ready to be there.

Years ago, when they had the threat of nuclear war—we have it today, we still have the threat—people were taught to duck under their little desks. It’s absurd. You can’t really save yourself by ducking under a wooden desk. The same is true now. You cannot really expect to save yourself. And anyway, what would it mean to save yourself and not everybody? So, it’s just living with that reality—that we don’t decide the time. We don’t have the control. Someone has the control, but we don’t. I mean, generally speaking. Humans—whatever billions we are—we don’t have the control. We are considered expendable, basically. So, you live in a state of—if not preparedness—just readiness. It may happen this way, it may happen that way. But, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to be. I want to be with these people. I know who they are. I see them. They’re wonderful. It makes them happy that I am here. It eases their burden a little bit that I’m here. And if I have to go down somewhere, I’d just as soon go down with these people. I think that that’s what love is. I really think that that has to be what love is…

As I see it, our problem mostly is our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they’re empty and they can’t get enough because they’re—you know, it’s that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly…”
~ interview of Alice Walker by Tami Simon, Dec. 2015

~ Alice Walker is best known perhaps for her novel The Color Purple, which was the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.  This novel was on the New York Times Bestseller List for over a year, and was made into a widely popular film by Steven Spielberg.  Furthermore, her expansive accomplishments as a writer, educator and activist have left an international impact.