My Daughter Smokes
Alice Walker
My daughter smokes. While she is doing her homework, her feet on the bench in front of her
and her calculator clicking out answers to her math problems, I am looking at the half-empty package of Camels lying carelessly close at hand. Camels: I pick them up, take them into the kitchen, where the light is better, and study them – they have filters, for which I am grateful. My heart feels terrible. I want to weep. In fact, I do weep a little, standing there by the stove holding one of the cigarettes, so white, so precisely rolled, that could cause my daughter's death. She doesn't know this, but it was Camels that my father -- her grandfather -- smoked. But before he smoked “ready-mades” -- when he was very young and very poor with eyes like lanterns -- he smoked Prince Albert tobacco in cigarettes he rolled himself. I remember the bright-red tobacco tin, with a picture of Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, dressed in a black coat and carrying a walking stick.
The tobacco was dark brown, pungent, slightly bitter. I tasted it more than once as a child, and the old tins could be used for a number of things: to keep buttons and shoelaces in, to store seeds, and best of all, to hold worms for the rare times my father took us fishing.
By the late forties and early fifties no one rolled his own anymore (and few women smoked) in my hometown in rural Georgia. The tobacco industry, coupled with Hollywood movies in which both hero and heroine smoked like chimneys, completely won over people like my father, who were hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. He never looked as high-class as Prince Albert, though; he continued to look like a poor, overweight, overworked colored man with too large a family -- black, with a very white cigarette stuck in his mouth.
I began smoking in eleventh grade, also the year I drank numerous bottles of terrible sweet, very cheap wine. My friends and I, all boys for this venture, bought our supplies from a man who ran a segregated bar and liquor store on the outskirts of town. Over the entrance there was a large sign that said COLORED. We were not permitted to drink there, only to buy. I smoked Kools, because my sister did. By then I thought her smoke-darkened lips and teeth looked glamorous. However, my body simply would not tolerate smoke. After six months I had a constant sore throat.
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I gave up smoking, gladly.
My father died from “the poor man's friend,”pneumonia, one hard winter when his usual lung troubles had left him low. I doubt he had much lung left at all, after coughing for so many years. He had so little breath that, during his last years, he was always leaning on something. I remembered once, at a family reunion, when my daughter was two, that my father picked her up for a minute -- long enough for me to photograph them -- but the effort was obvious. Near the very end of his life, and largely because he had no more lungs, he quit smoking. He gained a couple of pounds, but by then he was so thin no one noticed.
When I travel to Third World countries I see many people like my father and daughter. There are lots of advertisements directed at them both: the strong, “take-charge” older man, the glamorous, “worldly” young woman, both puffing away. In these less developed countries, as in American ghettoes and on reservations, money that should be spent for food goes instead to the tobacco companies; over time, people starve themselves of both food and air, effectively weakening and addicting their children, eventually wiping themselves out. I read in the newspaper that cigarette butts are so toxic that if a baby swallows one, it is likely to die.
My daughter would like to quit, she says. We both know the statistics are against her; most people who try to quit smoking do not succeed.
There is a deep hurt that I feel as a mother. Some days it is a feeling of helplessness. I remember how carefully I ate when I was pregnant, how patiently I taught my daughter how to cross a street safely. For what, I sometimes wonder; so that she can gasp through most of her life feeling half her strength, and then die of self-poisoning, as her grandfather did?
There is a slogan from a battered women's shelter that I especially like: “Peace on earth begins at home.” I believe everything does. I think of a slogan for people trying to stop smoking: “Every home a smoke-free zone.” Smoking is a form of self-battering that also batters those who must sit by, occasionally beg or complain, and helplessly watch. I realize now that as a child I sat by, through the years, and literally watched my father kill himself. For the rich white men who own the tobacco companies, surely one such victory in my family is enough.
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