the potato woman

from raga or the 10,000 things (6), by freda karpf

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf    @thewildblues 

One of Mrs. Scattergood’s dreams was about the potato woman.  As she went by the edge of the town, the sun suddenly came out.  Across the field she saw an old woman bending in full skirts, layer after woolen layer, bending to pull up a potato.  She wanted to ask this woman if she dreamed anymore.  “What does your belly feel like after the having nineteen babies?” Her words a thought she wished to project across the field.

     The wind whipped up and carried her thought away.  She ran after it so that the wrong people didn’t know her thoughts. She chased her voice for miles, days, seasons.  She felt hopeless.  She sunk to her knees in front of an old oak tree.  Her tears disappeared into the hem of her long skirts.  She was startled into alertness by someone addressing her. She looked up and thought at first she was seeing a devil, for the man in the black robes of the traveling teacher was barely a silhouette against the dark braided coils of the tree bark.  He spoke again.  She was stilled by fear.  She had heard that only the sacred ones found teachers who would speak to them.  If she spoke now, in response to him, the avenging spirits might come and claim her.  A dybbuk might replace her and walk from the night into her mother’s kitchen for a bowl of steaming potato soup.  How could she betray her mother that way?  She wouldn’t speak.

     But the black cape kept talking.  Tempting her with words that coiled around her heart like a serpent.  She had only wanted to chase her words and bring them back into herself.        

     He asked her if she could ask her fear why it blocks her voice.  Will fear starve if she speaks?  Do her words, like the black cloud that covered our earth, and devoured all the grasses, remove fear from the world?  Does it leave it open to a sunless sky to starve on a dry plain?  Can her words be so cruel that it would banish fear forever?  “I speak to the fear that changes shapes in you for want of survival.  ‘Why do you stop her from speaking?  Why do you hunger for her stagnation?’  And do you know,” he asked Sarah, “do you know that it only answers as if it’s impatient with me, as if to say, ‘Go away little fly, you annoy me?’”

     She almost answered him then.  He looked into her eyes as he spoke.  He spoke to fear as if it were standing next to him.  And she looked to his right as he addressed fear but she saw nothing.  And she didn’t hear the response that fear made but he looked at her as if she must be troubled by such an uncaring creature also.  And she was.  But she was trapped.  She couldn’t respond because then the spirits would torment her soul and she’d miss dinner and she was also afraid of fear.  So she just looked back into his eyes, not trying to seem too defiant or too innocent either.

     Fear is the boundary you cannot cross because you are a little girl of the ghetto.

     “It is your sacred duty,” he paused for effect, “to say to fear that it has no business here.  ‘Go away and leave me alone.’  You should tell it that you’ve given it all you can and you’ll never get that back from anything it gave you.  She tried out her voice, ‘Haven’t you had enough?’” and woke from her dream.