Echoes From a Distant Land (39 page)

The Statue of Liberty appeared smaller, and the New York terminal quite a deal larger, than Sam remembered from his arrival in 1920. The hubbub on the wharf was as he recalled it, but instead of mainly horse-drawn vehicles awaiting passengers and their luggage, there were now only cars and taxis.

One passenger tried to hand his bag to Sam. ‘Here, boy,' he said. ‘Take this and find me a cab.'

Sam ignored him.

‘Hey!' the man said indignantly, as Sam headed off to collect his own suitcase.

It took him some time to find a cab whose driver would accept him and even when he did, he had to load his luggage himself.

Some things don't change, he thought.

Fashions had. The pale grey suit he'd purchased for the journey in one of Nairobi's finer stores was high-waisted, baggy in the legs, and narrow at the ankle, with an oversized jacket. In New York he realised his outfit was starkly at odds with those worn by Manhattan's businessmen. Here, everybody dressed almost identically in dark blue, brown or grey flannel. Ties were narrower and jackets and trousers closer-fitting. Shoulder pads were gone as was the elegant fedora. The hats had narrower brims and higher bands.

Sam went shopping for a new suit; in the stores that would accept a black man's business, it took him time to find a suit that didn't make him look like a pimp or a gangster.

 

A day later, wearing his new navy-blue flannel, he went to the offices of Bradstreet and Gardiner — General Motors' lawyers in the matter of Ira's self-starter motor.

The firm's receptionist appeared surprised to see him, but if the pair of lawyers who greeted him in their plush meeting room were, they didn't show it. Both were wearing single-breasted, charcoal-grey suits.

‘Mr Wangira.' They beamed, shaking his hand vigorously. They mentioned their similar-sounding names, which Sam promptly forgot, and proceeded to ask him trite questions about his health and wellbeing.

‘And how is your accommodation, Mr Wangira?' one asked.

Sam said it was comfortable.

‘Good. Good.'

‘And your journey? How was the flight?'

‘I don't fly. I came by ship.'

One nodded. ‘Oh, very wise.'

‘A sea journey can be so relaxing,' said the other.

They spoke to Sam in slow, measured tones, as if speaking to a child or to someone with limited language skills.

When the preliminaries finally ended, they slid a brief across the table to Sam, who read it as they continued to blather about their firm's long-standing association with General Motors and other important clients.

‘Gentlemen,' Sam said, interrupting. ‘This document has none of the agreements mentioned in your earlier correspondence.'

‘Yes, well … they were just drafts. We've tidied things up a little in this final version.'

‘And in paragraph six you've veritably accused me of stealing Mr Ketterman's intellectual property.'

‘I can promise you, Mr Wangira,' one said solemnly. ‘We don't intend to pursue that matter.'

‘In return for you accepting our settlement terms,' added the other.

Sam glanced down at the document again. ‘A cash settlement of ten dollars,' he noted.

‘We will carry all the associated costs to transfer ownership to our client.'

‘And we'll say nothing more about rightful ownership.'

Sam looked from one lawyer to the other. They wore identical smiles.

‘So, what do you say, Mr Wangira? Do we have a deal?'

Sam stood. ‘What do I say?' he said in his broadest American accent. ‘I say, gentlemen, you can kiss my ass.'

And he walked out of their office.

He'd hoped his stay in New York would be brief. It was now clear it would not be. In Kenya he'd had some experience fighting situations he knew to be unfair. In America it would be more difficult. He didn't imagine many black people had challenged the workings of the white business world. But he would not go home without giving it a shot.

Sam knew nothing about the American legal system — a fact that GM's lawyers had obviously counted on when crafting their outrageous offer — and no idea how to find a suitable attorney to handle his case. Then he recalled the young lawyer who Ira had engaged as executor of his estate.

He wracked his brain and came up with the name Joshua Samuels, but there was nobody listed under that name in the telephone directory entries for lawyers. He made a dozen or so phone calls and found someone who knew him. He was now a senior partner in one of New York's biggest law firms.

 

Samuels had added thirty pounds and lost most of his hair since Sam last saw him, but he greeted him warmly in his office high above Fifth Avenue.

‘Mr Wangira,' he said, coming around his desk to take Sam's hand. ‘So good to see you again. Please, take a seat.'

Sam was pleased that he remembered him. After some small talk, Sam outlined his situation and showed Samuels the offer.

Samuels shook his head. ‘Amazing. If I may say so, Mr Wangira, they obviously saw you coming. But you've done the right thing bringing it to us. If you'd gone to a small operator, B&G would have wiped the floor with you.'

‘I didn't have much choice. I came to you because I remembered you from Ira's will,' Sam admitted. ‘You're the only lawyer I know.'

Samuels laughed. ‘Either way, you've made the right decision. Speaking of Ira, I tried to get in touch with you again some time after the settlement, but I think you'd left your hotel, or returned home. Anyway, the purpose was to ask what you wanted me to do with Ira's personal effects.'

‘I thought we sorted all that out.'

‘We did, but these things came to light later. I put them in my attic while I looked for you, then forgot all about them. About a year ago, I found them again. Yes, I know, it sounds strange. The fact is, I got divorced and my ex got the house.' He shrugged. ‘I was about to throw them out, but they're real nice, and I thought you should decide what you want done with them.'

‘What are they?'

‘Photos and films. Quite a few of you.'

 

Sam carried the box up to his hotel room. He hesitated, considering whether he should open this passage to his past. He left it on the bed and sat in the armchair to stare at it for a further ten minutes before berating himself for his childishness.

The box contained a number of large envelopes, each enclosing a photographic print, and spools of film. He slid a print carefully from its jacket. It was a black and white study of a Maasai warrior. He opened more, arranging them on the bed and furniture in his hotel room. Soon he was surrounded by fifty or more photographs of various African subjects.

A sizeable part of the collection was Ira's studies of wildlife. There was a magnificent front-on head-shot of a black-maned lion, taken as the spark of alertness flashed into its intelligent hazel eyes. From experience, Sam knew that an instant later the lion would be in full charge at his quarry: in this case, the photographer.

In another towered a great bull elephant. Ira must have had his camera set low and only a few paces from the beast. A halo of dust framed the bull's raised trunk, flared ears and long sweeping tusks.
He could almost feel the reverberation of its enormous pads and hear its trumpeting blast of alarm.

There were sweeping landscapes of the Mara savannah with long snaking lines of migrating wildebeest and zebra silhouetted against the sky as they climbed a hill; the wide expanses of the Great Rift Valley captured as if in watercolour; acacia trees at sunset; and a misty jungle waterhole with the muzzle of a waterbuck sending widening concentric circles across the silvered water.

There were many large prints of Sam as a young porter on Bill Hungerford's safari. In one he was proudly wearing his blue jacket, khaki shorts, boots and gaiters, with a red fez perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and an uncertain smile on his lips. On the back was written
Samson Wangira, August 1916
.

In another — a more detailed black and white study of his head and bare torso — Ira had used lighting that captured the bulge of muscle on his arms, shoulders and chest, and emphasised his taut abdominals in ripples of highlight and shade. Sam's hand went involuntarily to his midriff, where a thin layer of flab now covered the underlay of muscle.

The last in the series was a close-up. It was taken a few weeks after the first set, when Sam had become accustomed to the camera and was starting to take an interest in Ira's work. He took the print to the bedside lamp and sat on the bed to study it. His youthful eyes were wide and quizzical; he recalled that Ira was attempting to explain what the camera did to capture his image at the time.

In a mere twinkling of an eye, thirty-five years had slipped by.

He remembered there was a period in his life when he willed the sands of time to quicken their flow; to move him from child to boy; from boy to warrior. Now he wanted to give it no more encouragement, nor to be reminded of its passing.

He felt uncomfortable keeping Ira's body of African work. It was too personal. The photographs were not only of their subjects: by their presentation they portrayed the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, of the photographer. It was like having Ira's ghost in the room with him. But if he couldn't keep them, he also didn't have the heart to throw them all away.

While walking past his old college, New York University, the previous day, he'd noticed an announcement of an upcoming photographic exhibition. He would donate Ira's collection and, if the art department didn't want to include these examples of early African photography by a talented amateur, they could do with them as they wished.

Sam knew it was a cowardly decision, but it meant he could avoid a painful choice.

 

Jelani was in a part of the city he'd not visited previously; he'd been directed there by Randolph, the rotund black man who had collected him at the airport in a black sedan with a high pointed bonnet, sweeping mudguards and a running board trimmed with chrome — just as Jelani had hoped he'd ride in when in America. Randolph was employed by the Longshoremen's Union and given the task of introducing Jelani to New York.

‘You done arrived at the right time, boy,' he'd said. ‘We's gonna have a big demonstration next week.' He pronounced
demonstration
as if it consisted of three separate words. ‘Yessir. Thousands of our members are gonna be out on the streets, takin' on New York's finest.'

‘New York's finest?' Jelani asked.

‘The po-lice.' He laughed. ‘Who you think? Li'l Red Ridin' Hood? The boss says you should come along. Good experience.'

The next day, Randolph began his induction program by telling Jelani: ‘Get yo' ass down to Harlem, Jelani my man. See a part of New York what no visitin' white man sees.'

That was why Jelani was now on West 122nd Street, feeling oddly out of place. All the people were black, but none looked familiar. There was no Luo, or Kikuyu, or Maasai, or any other Kenyan tribe identifiable in the faces surrounding him on the crowded street.

Barefooted children played in piles of rubbish and old people sat on the bottom steps of three-storey brownstone buildings, some with paint peeling off in large curled flakes, watching him pass with idle curiosity.

On the steps of the Second Baptist Freedom Church — a flat-fronted two-storey building painted white at least a couple of decades earlier — stood a black vicar in a pointed white hat and a long white robe hemmed in gold lace. He was preaching in a babbling, rhyming voice that Jelani found difficult to understand. At first he wasn't even sure it was English, then a string of words caught his attention.

‘Just brown, O Lord, not the black of Your Holy Word: sinners' wages, Jesus! Born of sin!'

Jelani stopped short in a sudden fury: he'd come halfway across the world and yet there was no escaping this
difference
. The evil of his birth had tainted every experience he'd ever had. He stood and glared at the preacher, who continued to rave with his face raised to the heavens and his eyes closed.

Jelani gave up, swallowed his temper and walked on.

The message came again — this time not from the preacher's words, but by some magic that sent the thought spearing into his mind. The taunt took him back to his childhood, when his schoolmates would tease him about his pale skin. The preacher too had referred to the sinister joining of a black man with a white woman. Jelani felt the blood rush to his face, and the bile rise from his stomach.

He spun around and marched to the steps of the decrepit building and glared up at the old preacher, who at first ignored him then, looking down to find him standing before him, smiled.

‘Does the Lord send you here to pray wit' me, boy?' he asked kindly.

The unexpected gentleness of his voice threw Jelani completely off-balance. He couldn't maintain his anger in the face of such benign serenity. He must have been mistaken: the man's speech had, after all, been barely decipherable. But he wanted a
fight
.

The preacher held his smile.

Jelani hesitated a moment, then hurried away, confused and embarrassed.

A block away, he sat on a kerbside bench and wondered if he was ever going to outgrow the shame of his mixed parentage.

The answer came to him as clearly as the preacher's message had. It wasn't the idea of one black parent and one white that tormented him: it was not knowing who they were that was at the core of his pain.

He got up from the bench seat and felt that a load had been lifted from his shoulders. He had at last found a way to clear his head of all the childhood fears that still dominated the question of who he was.

He walked back to the preacher and threw a dollar into his bowl.

He was no closer to finding the answers he needed, but at least he now had the right question.