THE UNCONSCIOUS WILL BECOME THE CONSCIOUS
"THE UNCONSCIOUS WILL BECOME THE CONSCIOUS"
The sun had gone down behind the forest; it was not shining into the courtyard any longer.?The cobblestones were wet, as though they had been washed.?Tirelessly, the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more of them.?
Cathie wondered whether this woman took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of thirty grandchildren.?Monroe Stahr came across to her side and together they gazed at the sturdy figure down below.
As Cathie peered at her (the powerful mare-like buttocks protruding) it struck her this woman was beautiful.?It had not occurred to her that the body of a seventy-year old Black woman, blown up to monstrous dimensions by child-bearing, hardened, roughened by work ‘til it was coarse in the grain, like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful.
It was so, and after all, Cathie thought --- Why not??The solid, contour-less body bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.?Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower??“She’s beautiful,” Cathie murmured.
“She’s a yard across at the hips,” Monroe laughed, holding Cathie’s supple waist, encircled by his arm.?From the hip to the knee, her flank pressed against his.?
That woman down there, Cathie thought, had strong arms, a warm heart and a once fertile belly.?She had her momentary flowering, a year perhaps of wild-rose beauty, and then she had swollen like fertilized fruit and grown hard and rasping and coarse, and her life had become laundering, scrubbing---first for children, then for Grandchildren; …over thirty unbroken years. But at the end of it all, she was still singing.
The reverence Cathie felt for her was mixed with the pale, cloudless sky, stretching behind the forest of trees, into interminable distance.
It was curious to think the sky was the same for everybody.?And people under it were the same --- thousands, millions just like this woman; held apart by walls of lies and yet they were storing in their hearts and bellies and muscles, the power to change the world. The Revolution belonged to them!?
Sooner or later it would happen.?The unconscious would become the conscious.?The concept of 'Freedom' was immortal.?Cathie could not doubt this when she looked at that valiant Black woman in the courtyard.?
Awakening would come.?But until then, it might take a thousand years!?Conscious people must stay alive against the odds, like birds passing secrets from body to body.
“Do you remember…!” Cathie spoke aloud to Monroe… “that Skylark we saw in the woods of Panther Hollow?”
Monroe answered solemnly, “That bird wasn’t singing to us, it was just singing.”?
Yet birds sang, Cathie thought, as this woman sang.?The sort of Freedom authority discouraged.?People --- in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of endless Russian plains, in the Bazaars of China and Japan --- everywhere stood that unconquerable symbol:?a woman made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death…yet still singing --- out of whose loins a race of conscious beings would one day come.
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