Possessing the Secret of Joy (3 page)

Now I watched the backs of her legs and noted how they sometimes quivered with the effort to ascend a steep hill; for there were many hills between our farm and the village. Indeed, the farm was in a completely different climate from that of the village: hot but moist, because there was a river and still a bit of forest, whereas the village was hot and dry, with few trees. I studied the white rinds of my mother’s heels, and felt in my own heart the weight of Dura’s death settling upon her spirit, like the groundnuts that bent her back. As she staggered under her load, I half expected her footprints, into which I was careful to step, to stain my own feet with tears and blood. But my mother never wept, though like the rest of the women, when called upon to salute the power of the chief and his counselors she could let out a cry that assaulted the very heavens with its praising pain.

N
EGRO WOMEN,
said the doctor, are considered the most difficult of all people to be effectively analyzed. Do you know why?

Since I was not a Negro woman I hesitated before hazarding an answer. I felt negated by the realization that even my psychiatrist could not see I was African. That to him all black people were Negroes.

I had been coming to see him now for several months. Some days I talked; some days I did not. There was a primary school across the street from his office. I would listen to the faint sound of the children playing and often forget where I was, forget why I was there.

He’d been taken aback by the fact that I had only one child. He thought this unusual for a colored woman, married or unmarried. Your people like lots of kids, he allowed.

But how could I talk to this stranger of my lost children? And of how they were lost? One was left speechless by all such a person couldn’t know.

Negro women, the doctor says into my silence, can never be analyzed effectively because they can never bring themselves to blame their mothers.

Blame them for what? I asked.

Blame them for anything, said he.

It is quite a new thought. And, surprisingly, sets off a kind of explosion in the soft, dense cotton wool of my mind.

But I do not say anything. Those bark-hard, ashen heels trudge before me on the path. The dress above them barely clothing, a piece of rag. The basket of groundnuts suspended from a strap that fits a groove that has been worn into her forehead. When she lifts the basket down, the groove in her forehead remains. On Sundays she will wear her scarf low in an attempt to conceal it. African women like my mother give harsh meaning to the expression “furrowed brow.”

Still, the basket itself is lovely and well made, with a red and ochre “sisters elbow” design that no one weaves more neatly than she. That is all I care to think about. But not all that I will.

I did not carry you to term, she has told me, because one day when I was coming back from bathing I was frightened by a leopard. She was acting strangely, and charged me.

I try to imagine a leopard on the path between our farm and the village. Now there are wild dogs and jackals, but nothing so beautiful as a leopard.

M’Lissa came to look after me.

And was I an easy birth?

But she will only look over my head, to the side of my ear. Of course, she murmurs. Of course you were.

Later we discovered someone had shot and skinned her mate and her cubs, my mother sighs.

And that was the official story of my birth.

So that my mind too veered away from myself and my mother’s ordeal and went off into the world of the leopard. Soon enough I could see her clearly, licking down her cubs, or having intercourse with her mate. There in the dappled shade of the acacias. Then, the sound of thunder cracking, and all her loved ones down in a flash. And she, to her shame, forced to run away in fear, even as she smelled the blood and saw the bodies sprawled ungracefully. And later, coming back, she would discover all those she loved, just as she’d left them, but stiffly dead and without their skins.

And I could feel the horror in the leopard’s heart, and the rage. And now I see a pregnant human appearing on the path, and I leap for her throat.

The other children used to laugh at me. Look at her! they cried. Come see how Tashi has left our world. You can tell because her eyes have glazed over!

O
LIVIA BEGGED ME
not to go. But she did not understand.

There was a bird that always cried when friends were parting forever, though the missionaries never believed this. It was called Ochoma, the bird of parting. I heard it as Olivia pleaded with me. I was arrogant, and the Mbeles had sent a captured donkey for me to ride.

I listened to Olivia trying to control her breathing as she held on to the rope bridle. She was crying and there was a part of me that longed to trample her.

She was like a lover.

Tell me to do anything, and I will do it, she said.

Tell me to go anywhere, and I will go, she said.

Only, don’t do this to yourself,
please,
Tashi.

The foreigners were so much more melodramatic than Africans ever dared to be. It made one feel contempt for them.

We’ve been friends almost all our lives, she said. Don’t do this to us.

She hiccuped, like a child.

Don’t do it to Adam.

I had in my mind some outlandish, outsized image of myself. I sat astride the donkey in the pose of a chief, a warrior. We who had once owned our village and hectares and hectares of land now owned nothing. We were reduced to the position of beggars—except that there was no one near enough to beg from, in the desert we were in.

They are right, I said to her from my great height astride the donkey, who say you and your family are the white people’s wedge.

She stopped weeping. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and nearly laughed.

Tashi, she said, are you crazy?

I was crazy. For why could I not look at her? I stole glances down alongside her face and let my eyes slide over the top of her head. Her thick hair was braided in two plaits that crossed at the nape of her neck, just as she always wore it. Never would she wear the mealie row fan hairstyle that was traditional with Olinka women.

I had taken off my gingham Mother Hubbard. My breasts were bare. What was left of my dress now rode negligently about my loins. I did not have a rifle or a spear, but I had found a long stick, and with this I jabbed at the ground near her feet.

All I care about now is the struggle for our people, I said. You are a foreigner. Any day you like, you and your family can ship yourselves back home.

Jesus, she said, exasperated.

Also a foreigner, I sneered. I finally looked her in the eye. I hated the way her hair was done.

Who are you and your people never to accept us as we are? Never to imitate any of our ways? It is always we who have to change.

I spat on the ground. It was an expression of contempt only very old Olinkans had known how to use to full effect.

Olivia, who knew the gesture, seemed to wilt, there in the heat.

You want to change us, I said, so that we are like you. And who are
you
like? Do you even know?

I spat in the dust again, though I only made the sound of spitting; my mouth and throat were dry.

You are black, but you are not like us. We look at you and your people with pity, I said. You barely have your own black skin, and it is fading.

I said this because her skin was mahogany while mine was ebony. In happier times I had thought only of how beautiful our arms looked when we, admiring our grass bracelets, held them up together.

But she was suddenly stepping back from the donkey. Her hands at her sides.

I laughed.

You don’t even know what you’ve lost! And the nerve of you, to bring us a God someone else chose for you! He is the same as those two stupid braids you wear, and that long hot dress with its stupid high collar!

Finally, she spoke.

Go, she said, and raised her chin sadly. I did not understand you hated me.

She said it with the quietness of defeat.

I dug my heels into the flanks of the donkey and we trotted out of the encampment. I saw the children, potbellied, and with dying eyes, which made them look very wise. I saw the old people laid out in the shade of the rocks, barely moving on their piles of rags. I saw the women making stew out of bones. We had been stripped of everything but our black skins. Here and there a defiant cheek bore the mark of our withered tribe. These marks gave me courage. I wanted such a mark for myself.

My people had once been whole, pregnant with life.

I turned my back on the sister of my heart, and rushed away from her stricken face. I recognized myself as the leopard in her path.

A
ND WHAT ABOUT
your dreams? the doctor one day asks me.

I tell him I do not dream.

I do not dare tell him about the dream I have every night that terrifies me.

Y
OUR WIFE REFUSES
to talk about her dreams, the doctor says, mysteriously. Above the couch, on which I imagine Evelyn lying, there is a blue, overarching figure of Nut. The body of woman as night sky. I sit uneasily in my chair, as if I am being interrogated as a spy, my damp palms resting on top of talons that end the chair’s arms.

I shrug. I certainly cannot speak of them.

But I am instantly back in our bed, sharing the night and its terrors with my wife. She is upright, clutching her pillow. Her eyes are enormous. She is shaking with fear.

There is a tower, she says. I think it is a tower. It is tall, but I am inside. I don’t really ever know what it looks like from outside. It is cool at first, and as you descend lower and lower to where I’m kept, it becomes dank and cold, as well. It’s dark. There is an endless repetitive sound that is like the faint scratch of a baby’s fingernails on paper. And there are millions of things moving about me in the dark. I can not see them. And they’ve broken my wings! I see them lying crossed in a corner like discarded oars. Oh, and they’re forcing something in one end of me, and from the other they are busy pulling something out. I am long and fat and the color of tobacco spit. Gross! And I can not move!

I did not know I would finally marry Tashi. For many years she was like another sister to me; always about the parsonage, playing with my sister, Olivia, the two of them frequently going on outings with my mother. I teased her mercilessly, and tried to boss her about. Like Olivia, she always stood her ground. I liked her mealie row fan hairstyle and her impish, darting ways. I liked her self-possession. And her passion for storytelling.

We became lovers partly because we were so used to each other.

In Olinka society the strongest taboo was against making love in the fields. So strong was this taboo that no one in living memory had broken it. And yet, we did. And because no one in the society could imagine us capable of such an offense—lovemaking in the fields jeopardized the crops; indeed, it was declared that it there was any fornication whatsoever in the fields the crops definitely would not grow—no one ever saw us, and the fields produced their harvests as before.

I am thinking of our lovemaking, as the doctor waits for more of a response about Evelyn’s dreaming.

She dreams they have imprisoned her and broken her wings, I say into the suspense.

They, who? the doctor asks.

But this, I say, I do not know.

She was like a fleshy, succulent fruit; and when I was not with her I dreamed of the time I would next lie on my belly between her legs, my cheeks caressed by the gentle rhythms of her thighs. My tongue bringing us no babies, and to both of us delight. This way of loving, among her people, the greatest taboo of all.

I
COULD NOT BEAR
the happiness of my father and aunt, who had decided they would be married during our visit to London. Nor could I stand the solicitude of Olivia, who empathized with me as I thrashed about, missing Tashi, though furious with her. I pounded the streets of London until my feet, in new hard leather shoes, were bruised. Only the weather made the days bearable. It was spring, and the beauty of the city was formidable. There were lilacs everywhere, and the air was filled with the sound of singing birds.

The Missionary Society had put us up in spacious rooms near St. James’s Park, and Olivia and I spent hours underneath the ancient trees. We enjoyed watching the men and women who came out of their homes promptly at quarter to four, on their way to tea at other people’s homes, and who crossed in front of us, reservedly whispering. My window looked out right into the trees, and there was so much sky I often woke up thinking I was still in Africa.

After the wedding, I took the boat train to Paris, hoping that the change of scenery would do me good. There was also a young woman I hoped to see, whose name was Lisette.

Lisette had visited us in Olinka as part of the youth group of her church. We often entertained visitors, from all over the world, and this was rather perfunctory, even predictable and boring, but she and I had struck up a lively conversation about some of her family’s experiences as colonialists in Algeria, where she had lived the earlier part of her life, and had had the opportunity to spend several hours alone in each other’s company. This was possible because I was then tending an elderly parishioner who lived on the outskirts of the village. There was no one else to feed and clothe him during the last weeks of his life, and so my father had assigned this task to me, in the hope, I suppose, that it would increase my feelings of humility. I was bored to distraction, and actively prayed for my patient to loose his feeble hold on life and die, which he eventually did.

It was to this post, Torabe’s hut, that Lisette followed me. She stood by, chestnut-haired and pale, very pretty in the startling white people’s way that seems something of a clash at times with natural surroundings, as I fed and washed him and dressed his sores—for he had lain on his rags for a long time—and she chattered on about the charms of Paris. She spoke English with an accent that embellished it.