Possessing the Secret of Joy (18 page)

I had always resisted intimacy with the victims. It was as if my heart, under the burden of my own suffering, and having already witnessed so much human devastation, had gone numb.

However: My name is Hartford, he said, with a grimness to match my own. And yet, because of the unexpected associations evoked by his name (an elk, an American city in Connecticut and an insurance company), I smiled. He seemed charmed, as a child might be, by this response, and appeared to savor it, as a little child might a sweet. Wonderingly he withdrew the clawlike hand that had snagged my sleeve, and placed it against his own cracked, unsmiling lips.

Everything he said and did was in slow motion; it was several minutes before he spoke again.

In the old days, he said, whispering, there was more harmony in the world between man and creature. I have heard this said: in truth, how can I know? In the not so old days we people were hunted down and killed or stolen from our land and families to work for other people far across the sea. Hunted we were, like we hunt the monkey and the chimpanzee.

Here Hartford groaned and closed his eyes. Bubbles of perspiration burst on his skin. It was as if, suddenly, his body became a fountain. I mopped his skin with the tattered towel I carried with me, and when the sweating stopped, placed my hand on his swollen knee, which, protruding beneath the skin of his leg, was like a black coconut.

Father, he said, I am not a medical student. That is a lie I have told to salvage my self-respect.

I patted his knee, somehow startled at the intensity of his remorse; how difficult it was for him to disgorge these few words of shame. Besides, I honestly did not care.

Being a medical student, becoming a doctor, was only a dream I had, he sighed. When the pharmaceutical company offered us local boys “positions” in their factory, I thought my dream was on the way to becoming reality.

We did not know anything about these men. They were strange. They always wore white, so that they looked like the doctors we saw in films and on TV. They did not see you when they looked, that we knew. We felt we did not exist to them any more than they did to us. We could feel how strange we were to them, as well. We had always hunted monkeys and chimpanzees, they reminded us. What they were asking was nothing new. Only now there would be money, and, of course, often there would be meat. Both to eat and to sell.

So it began.

At first I was in the rainforest, hunting with the other boys. We loved our guns. We trapped and dragged back to the factory more monkeys and chimps than I’d even thought there were. I grew to identify, and sometimes mimic, chimp and monkey behavior. Monkey gestures. The mother always placed the baby behind her body, the little one’s arm reaching around to her breast; the father always fought, then screeched a warning to others as he ran away. If we captured his mate and child, he would often follow so closely and with such disregard for his own safety it was easy to shoot him. This we often did, laughing.

He was not needed anyway. We were told this by the pharmaceutical company, but we soon saw it for ourselves. Only the females and the babies were wanted. Very soon, no new monkeys or chimps were needed because the factory was at last complete. The local boys and I had filled it. With the help of only a few males, the females were forced to breed. This they did in cages hardly large enough for the act of mating.

Hartford swallowed. I held a glass of sweetened water to his lips. Suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head and his head dropped to one side. His pulse, when I took his arm, was faint as the heartbeat of an embryo.

At last he opened his eyes.

They were being raised for their kidneys, he said slowly, in a flat tone. Now that there was no longer a need to hunt them, I was assigned the job of decapitating them.

He paused, his eyes stormy, strong, and large enough to swallow me.

The screaming of monkeys, he said, musingly, studying my face as if he’d read a subtle change in me, is really unlike the scream of the peacock, which, as you know, is very human. But somehow, because of the chimps’ and monkeys’ faces, their screaming is even more human. Everything they think, everything they fear, everything they feel, is as clear as if you’d known them all your life. As if they’d slept in the same bed as you!

Do not disturb yourself, I said, gently, and still with a certain detachment. Even this horror could not penetrate to the level of numbness at which I dwelled. After all, I thought, how could he have anticipated the evil of civilization, having been indoctrinated from birth to believe it the only future.

The factory was vast, he said. Vast. For they were manufacturing vaccine to sell to the whole world. I discovered this when I read some of the literature they received written in English. Most of it was written in some other language. Perhaps German or Dutch. On the other hand, there were often Americans about. Australians and New Zealanders. Hearty fellows, always enthusiastic; as if they were on the track of a cure for all mankind.

A fit of coughing now shook Hartford’s emaciated frame. A spray of blood and mucus covered the rag I held to his mouth.

I had smiled jauntily, myself, the first year I worked for them, he said, as he lay back, resting, after the coughing fit. We were paid good money, and of course we ate or sold those animals who became—usually out of concern for their stolen families—meat. But soon I could not smile. I stood kneedeep in monkey heads, chimpanzee torsos…

Small boys with small knives were trained to make the slit…and haul the kidneys out. It was on these kidneys the men in white coats grew their precious “cultures.”

The vaccine left the factory at the other end from where the monkeys and chimps were raised and slaughtered. It left in small clear bottles with blinding white labels and shiny metal caps.

As Hartford’s voice became barely audible, a whispery rasp, an unbidden glimpse of what he was describing invaded my mind. I closed my eyes tightly to banish the sight. It was too late. I felt as if a whole other world of grief and disaster had just been dropped on my soul. I groaned in agony, almost exactly as he had done. The sound of my own sorrow was shocking to me. But, surprisingly, my sorrow made Hartford look, finally,
released.

Father, thank you for hearing my confession,
he said, savoring my pained expression with the same wonder with which he’d enjoyed my smile. As if he’d waited until certain he had transmitted the full horror of his existence to someone who could still feel, Hartford began to breathe the shallow, rustling wheeze everyone on the AIDS floor knew so well.

There were things to do. In the morning I would lose my wife and friend forever. Where were my sons? I wondered. Or my sister, Olivia, for that matter; whom, I suddenly realized, I had always depended on to be the feeling side of me; it was she who had first noticed the weeping that would stain my wife’s life. Perhaps they were with Tashi. I could not move to look for them. I sat where I was until, an hour after the death rattle began, Hartford—whose African name was perhaps lost forever—medical student and killer of monkeys and chimps, was dead.

Though not a priest, I am a man of God, even now. I could not bear a life lived without belief. But this I know: There is for human beings no greater hell to fear than the one on earth.

I
CONFESSED
because I grew weary of the trial. Sick of sitting next to my attorney. He was always so dapper; so impeccably dressed. Smelling of Aramis. Loving the sound of his own mouth. The opposing attorney annoyed me as well.

I am old enough to be your grandmother, I thought, watching him prance and preen; and you stand there arguing for my death. In truth, it made me pity him, and see him as a fool.

I said to my attorney, in a moment when he was not twirling with a beringed finger one of his greasy curls, Let me take the stand. Though he was against my doing so, I took it anyway. As soon as I was seated, even before the Bible was brought, I said loud and clear so there could be no mistake: I did it.

How
did you do it, Mrs. Johnson? asked the judge nearest me.

That, I said, is none of your damn business.

But do you think my confession stopped the trial?

No, it did not. For days afterward they were still talking about finding my razors in the ashes of M’Lissa’s house, and speculating on the gory ways I chose to mutilate and dispose of her. Their imaginations, I found, were even sicker than my own.

I
T IS FROM
M
BATI
that I learn the African does not call his or her house a “hut.”

“Hut,” she says, is Dutch for “cottage,” and Africans are not Dutch.

I am this child’s mother. Otherwise she would not have appeared so vividly, a radiant flower of infinite freshness, in my life.

In the evenings she reads aloud passages from books for us to puzzle over or enjoy. Tonight she reads from the book of a white colonialist author who has lived all her life off the labor of Africans but failed to perceive them as human beings. “Black people are natural,” she writes, “they possess the secret of joy, which is why they can survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them.”

Mbati stares at me blankly. I return her look.

But what is it? I ask. This secret of joy of which she writes. You are Black, so am I. It is of us then that she speaks. But we do not know. Or, I say, admiring her beauty, perhaps you do know.

Mbati laughs. Well, she says, we are
women.
We must find out! Especially since she also claims to understand the code of “birth, copulation and death” by which we live!

Oh, I say. These settler cannibals. Why don’t they just steal our land, mine our gold, chop down our forests, pollute our rivers, enslave us to work on their farms, fuck us, devour our flesh and leave us alone? Why must they also write about how much joy we possess?

Mbati has never asked whether I murdered M’Lissa. She doesn’t seem to care.

I am miserably flawed, I say to her as she is leaving, after she has promised not to let me die before she has discovered and presented to my eyes the
definitive
secret of joy.

Yes, Mother, she says simply, embracing me. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

That reminds me, I say. I have a gift for you.

Oh? she says.

I have kept the little sacred figure of Nyanda—I have named her, choosing a word that floated up while I held her in my hands—carefully wrapped in my most beautiful scarf. The one of deep blue with gold stars scattered over it, like the body of Nut, goddess of Africa, and the night sky. I take it from my pocket, where I have been keeping it since I learned I would be executed, and place it in Mbati’s hands.

This is for my granddaughter, I say.

Your little doll! she says, touched. You know, she says, unwrapping it, it looks like you.

No, I say, I could never have that look of confidence. Of pride. Of peace. Neither of us can have it, because self-possession will always be impossible for us to claim. But perhaps your daughter…

I never intended to have a child, she says. The world is entirely too treacherous. This tiny figure, she says, kissing its beaming face, against all of this. She waves her arm against the ugliness of the prison, the noise, the stench of the AIDS ward rising from below; the knowledge that I’m to be shot to death in a matter of hours.

Are you saying we should just let ourselves die out? And the hope of wholeness with us?

Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, Mother! I’ve stayed too long. You should rest. Good night.

Soon I shall go to bed forever, I say, shrugging. But never mind; I should get some rest. I want to be alert tomorrow, not to miss anything.
Aché Mbele,
I say.

Aché Mbele?
she repeats.

Yes, I say.
Aché
is Yoruba and means “the power to make things happen.”
Energy. Mbele
means “Forward!” in KiSwahili.

Oh, she says, reversing them, bowing to me:
Mbele Aché.

She has cut my hair so that, though white, it is dense and springy, like hers. When we embrace, it is each other’s hair our fingers seek.

D
EAR LISETTE,

Tomorrow morning I will face the firing squad for killing someone who, many years ago, killed me. But this is no more odd, perhaps, than that I am writing this letter to you a decade after your last effort to communicate with me, and well after your own death. It is that you are in the land of death that makes friendship with you so appealing. The people of Bali, your uncle Mzee told us, think heaven is exactly like Bali. They like Bali, and so have no anxiety about dying. But if heaven is like Olinka, or even like America, there is much to be anxious about. I write to you because I will want a friend there in heaven, someone who has seriously thought about me.

I used to think my mother thought about me. But I identified with her suffering so completely it was I who always thought about, indeed was haunted by, her suffering; and because I believed she and I were one, I made the part of her that was me think about me. In truth, my mother was not equipped, there was not enough of her self left to her, to think about me. Or about my sister Dura, who bled to death after a botched circumcision, or about any of her other children. She had just sunk into her role of “She Who Prepares the Lambs for Slaughter.”

Is it cruel to say this? I feel it is cruel; but that it is only the cruelty of truth, speaking it, shouting it, that will save us now. If we do not, Africa may well be depopulated of black people in our grandchildren’s lifetime, and the worldwide suffering of our children will continue to be our curse.

In all my life it has been Adam and his sister, Olivia, who I believed thought most about me. He married me; she is my best friend. But do you know why my soul removed itself from Adam’s reach? It is because I helped him start his progressive ministry—more progressive anyway than his father’s and those of most preachers of color—in San Francisco, and I sat there in our church every Sunday for five years listening to Adam spread the word of Brotherly Love, which has its foundation in God’s love of his son, Jesus Christ. I grew agitated each time he touched on the suffering of Jesus. For a long time my agitation confused me. I am a great lover of Jesus, and always have been. Still, I began to see how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of others from one’s view. And in my sixth year as a member of Adam’s congregation, I knew I wanted my own suffering, the suffering of women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons of the torturers, to be the subject of a sermon. Was woman herself not the tree of life? And was she not crucified? Not in some age no one even remembers, but right now, daily, in many lands on earth?