Makeda (27 page)
“Jeanne will get here in the morning.”
“Thank God,” my grandmother said. This time, she sounded far away. The connection crackled and faded and then strengthened again. I had a passing vision that she was speaking to me from the deep well of the antiquity I had come all the way to Mali to explore.
“Grandma, you should see this place.”
“Well. Maybe I can, son.” She chuckled as she said this. “Tell me what it feels like.”
“I don’t know, Grandma. I know what it kinda makes
me
feel like. It’s something I’ve never felt before. It’s like the rest of the world no longer exists. Even though I know in my head it’s out there, this world seems more natural. Close. Easy. Very easy. I don’t know or care about what time it is, or what day or what year it is. It’s as though I’m standing here a thousand years ago with funny-looking clothes on. Everything seems to be
living
—you know what I mean? The earth, the buildings—not just the people, but even the people’s clothes. The people’s talk in the streets, the shops. Everything’s open and moving and mixing. Everything’s touching. Everything’s a part of everything else. I know I’m not making sense, but there are no separations … wait a minute. Wait a minute, Grandma. Two elderly men in robes just walked by and greeted me. I did not know what I was supposed to say, so I just bowed and smiled … What did you say, Grandma?”
“I said, what is the weather like?”
“Warm. Sunny. In the middle of the day, the sun makes the orange-red earth look like it’s on fire. In the evening, the Earth’s color softens.”
The connection crackled and hissed.
“When I was a girl, I worsh … sun.”
“What did you say, Grandma?”
“I said I loved the sun on my skin.”
“You’d be right at home here in your gowns. There are all kinds of people here. Of course, I can’t tell them apart or know what they are saying, but right around Timbuktu, the Tamashek, Songhay, Moor, and Fulani people live.”
“Have you met any Dogon people there yet?”
“No, but the Dogon live near here. Jeanne and I are going to visit an old library here first and then we’ll go to the cliff that was in your dream.”
“Tell me, Gray. Tell me what it looks like. I have this picture from my Dogon childhood in my mind. Tell me what the place looks like—the streets, the buildings. Do they have anything sticking out from them?”
I did not know at first what she meant by this, but then something occurred to me. “You mean the buildings?”
“Yes,” she said expectantly.
Many of the sand-colored masonry buildings had timeworn wooden timbers protruding helter-skelter from them. One such building that had drawn my attention was sculpted in the shape of a pyramid, its four sides shot through with old beams that stuck out from the clay façades at odd angles and lengths. I thought of the timbers as heaven’s handles put there by prescient builders to expedite the assistance of the gods in keeping the old structures standing right-side-up throughout eternity.
I described to her the beams that perforated many of the buildings in this way.
“I know—” And again, as if with swelling astonishment, “Gray, I know what it looks like!”
“You do?”
“Are the buildings the color of the ground? Like red sand?”
“Yes.”
“I know what it looks like. In my dreams I have seen what you are seeing.”
I did not try to test her further on this. For there was nothing that she wished to prove. She was interested mostly in having me describe to her the small details of everything I saw. Colors. Shapes. Structures. Smells. Sounds. The visuals of this timeless and different place.
“How are you being treated?”
“Fine. I feel a little guilty because I can’t speak anything but English and people are struggling to speak to me in the few English words they know. But they’ve been very warm to me. Like they’re trying to take care of me. I probably look lost.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“There’s this tea shop near the little guesthouse where I’m staying. The guesthouse doesn’t have a telephone. The woman who runs it is Fulani. She speaks English pretty well.”
For a while she said nothing.
“Grandma, are you still there?”
“Yes, I am still here, Gray.” She changed the subject. “Do you have the old notes and drawings with you?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“And you remember what my name was in the dream, and what my father’s name was?”
“Yes, Grandma, I brought everything with me.”
T
he new sun rouged the rough plaster wall behind the small bed on which I had roused from a fitful sleep. Jeanne would be here in four hours or so. My first thoughts were addled and nervous. Not so much about the research Jeanne and I were to undertake together, as about the implication of her coming all this way for me, on the strength of what amounted to an unspoken vow that I had made to her. I knew now that she was the best thing that would ever happen to me, that I would have to take a risk, and open myself up to her.
I had to allow her to see most of the whole of me. This wouldn’t be easy. I would struggle to face around to her. The tragedy of my brother’s death may not have been the biggest part of the reason.
I do not mean to blame my father, but I believed he might figure in a problem that predated our current estrangement over Gordon’s death.
I don’t know that a child can inherit a tendency toward inwardness, but if not, the child, in all likelihood, can be socialized, I would think, in that direction.
I cannot recall that my father ever had any real friends. His family was his whole world, which included all of the few people he really trusted. Because of this, uncharacteristically, from time to time, when he was unbearably lonely, he would confide his troubles to Gordon and me, troubles that we were too young to hear, as if a child should ever be old enough to hear a parent’s troubles.
Once when I was eleven, he told me, “Your mother is not happy.” I had not wanted to hear this about my mother and asked him why, only as a nervous courtesy. He answered that he really didn’t know why, but that he reckoned the problem was the result of an inherent incompatibility between all men and all women. He did not say this in so many words but I think this is what he meant.
What he actually said was this: “Men and women are different. We talk to each other with our top layers but the real differences are deeper. I don’t know what your mother is thinking really, and she doesn’t know what I’m thinking. We get along together but we’re
alone
together because men and women are so different. I don’t understand why this is so. I just know that it is.”
I don’t know what got into him and made him say such things, but they were devastating to a boy of eleven. I have always wished that he hadn’t said anything, as was usually the case with him—that he hadn’t dumped his awful pessimism so early at my doorstep. It may have been part of the consequence of him not having known his father. In any case, it had its effect on me. Among other things, it caused me to fear, even to accept, that my love for Jeanne would fade inevitably over time into the gray habit that, from all appearances, marked my parents’ marriage, a marriage in which love was noticed, either by one or both of them, only when there was a crisis that threatened to uncouple them.
You see here that I have not mentioned my mother. This, I think, is because I had only observed the worn surface of her, her
goings-on
, the hard-governing rituals of her daily life—her habits. Because she was stronger than my father—where I had been able to witness, at least in him his pathos, his vulnerability—I’d only witnessed in her, her habits—a housedress on hard rounds, a once-fine but now long-unused mind in which chores had starved out abstraction—and her self-evident surrender, surrender to duty—housewifery duty, damnable, insatiable, life-eating, femininity-smothering, intellect-murdering, labor-intensive duty.
This was where I
came
from. This was what I feared I would promise to Jeanne.
I did have, however, at least two reasons to be hopeful about my prospects with her.
The first was my grandmother, Makeda Gee Florida Harris March who, as I saw it, lived above the plane of the known world. My parents had given me a formal education. But my grandmother had taught me to think, to dare, to imagine the possibility of unseen realms, and to paint them across the mind’s eye in phantasmagoric colors. She was an instinctive teacher who taught using a method she, I’m sure, had never heard the formal name for, something my law school friends called the Socratic method where instruction was dialogical with more questions than answers. “What do you think about that, Gray?” which was her usual response to whatever it was that we were talking about. I couldn’t remember either my father or mother asking me what I thought about something.
The second cause for hope was Jeanne herself, who would occupy with me a
world of ideas
, a world unavailable to the very parents who made it available to me as an unearned reward for their drudgery. My parents worked hard. My father peddling his company’s gray policies, my mother slogging to “keep” house. Their work required them to leave themselves behind as they worked. Thus, they could not love each other when they worked, and because they worked so hard and most of the time, and worried the rest, they had little space left in which to love. Or at least this is how they seemed to Gordon and me. Just tired and worried-looking. And this was, as I have said, most of the time.
For Jeanne and me, it could be, indeed, I hoped it would be, very different than it had been for my parents. Jeanne and I should not be caused to leave ourselves behind when we worked because we would work together in the world of ideas, and the ideas were who we were, and moreover, the ideas were what we were to each other.
Now that I thought about it, I realized that she was not coming halfway around the world for me, but for
us
.
I recited this in my head.
I am not my father. I am not my
mother. Jeanne is Jeanne and Jeanne alone, and like no other. Things
are not how my father would see them. I am not so little as just a man
and Jeanne is not so much as only a woman. We are not characteristic
minions of some other or another faux science or determinism or popular
gender prejudice. We are special, if not to the world, always, I am
sure (it must be at least possible), to ourselves and to each other.
She ducked through the low door of the plane, raised her head, and smiled brilliantly.
My heart raced with excitement.
She wore a ground-length orange dress of crinkly light cotton. The dress had a high, shallow V-shaped neckline and covered her shoulders and arms down to her elbows. Against the orange airy material of the dress, her deep chocolate skin glowed alive under the bright Malian sun.
She placed a sandaled foot carefully upon the metal tread of the stair.
My senses were keener than usual. Rapier-sharp.
I could hear the small
swish-clop
of the sandal-sole as she lifted it from the tread. I could hear the folds of the orange cotton crinkles shifting on the fresh warm breeze. I could see the ageless dance in her glistened eyes. I could sense the caution of her step giving way finally to the command of her heart.
Then she was on the ground, at home, and in my arms.
We spent the first day together walking the narrow unpaved streets of the old city. There was little in the way of motorized traffic to impede us. Save for the small wooden carts drawn by donkeys, the streets belonged almost entirely to people afoot, bantering and exchanging sentiments in a leisurely and attractive manner.
I pointed out to Jeanne a lady walking elegantly with a large wooden tray of bananas balanced upon her head. Jeanne said that this reminded her of scenes from her childhood stays in Port-au-Prince.
She expressed surprise that the women’s faces were not veiled and cited as her somewhat dated authority Leo Africanus, the great Moorish writer from Granada, who chronicled from Timbuktu in 1526 that the “women of the city maintain their custom of veiling their faces.”
Jeanne is naturally more outgoing than I, thus it was easy for her to ask a waiter in French what it was that was being eaten from a bowl at a restaurant whose entire front was open to the street along which we were strolling. The waiter said that porridge-like food was
to
and
na
, and when Jeanne asked what
to
and
na
was made from, the waiter said it was made from millet that had been pummeled and cooked first, and then cooled stiff before being dipped into a gravy made from okra. Then the waiter invited Jeanne to sample the dish, and she accepted without a moment’s hesitation. I must have turned my body in such an attitude as to place myself safely beyond the kind waiter’s courtesy, for Jeanne looked at me with an indulgent, somewhat sympathetic smile.
We moved carelessly back into the street.
“It was good!” Laughing at me. Teasing.
“I’m getting adjusted. It may take a little while.”
“The world is waiting for you, darling. You’ve got to jump in.” She laughed again. I did as well.
The muezzin’s haunting call to prayer floated wide over the city above over heads. Children squealed in play. A hawker talked up from his stall the merits of his metal wares.
For us, it was true enough that the world we had left behind seem to no longer exist, and the world we had entered existed only for those of us who were there at that moment, a moment that had, in its exotic russet tone, apparently remained undisturbed for a thousand years. It was as though the moment, threadbare and tired, but beautiful still, had somehow been waiting for something. Perhaps only for a modest appreciation of its priceless treasures that lay about virtually in the open, unbothered.
Saying nothing, we stopped in what we thought must have been the middle of the city, and looked full around at it as one would a cycloramic painting. We held in our view a sight which no one that we knew had ever seen. The sight returned to us a curious emotion, the common memory of which would serve to sustain our tie to each other for years to come. Indeed, the two of us, standing upon the faded lost jewel of African glory, were jealous of a fortune the outside world had declined to acknowledge or scarcely even remember.