Makeda (11 page)

“It is written in the
Kebra Nagast
that Menelik defeated his father and avenged his mother’s humiliation with the consignment by God of his covenant with man to Ethiopia. Thus, according to the writers of Ethiopia’s holiest book, the
Kebra Nagast
, Ethiopians became God’s chosen people and Ethiopia Israel’s successor.”

During the question-and-answer period that followed Dr. Abana’s remarks, a student named Herbert Brody walked to one of the two standing microphones that had been placed in the hall’s two aisles. The room fell quiet in anticipation. Even in the semidark, we knew it was Herbert from the shape of the large head which rested on his body like a macrocephalic boulder. His nickname was
Brain
and he was a 4.0 student headed the following year to Harvard Divinity School.

“Do you believe that Menelik
really
took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia, Dr. Abana? And where is it now?”

Dr. Abana peered through his thick eyeglasses into the gloom at the well-confident Herbert Brody and paused for what seemed an age. Sensing what was to come, Dr. Quarles’s face wore an expression of restrained amusement.

“The Ark of the Covenant, containing God’s decalogue of law, is believed to have been made by Moses. The Ark is said by the historians to be a gold-plated hardwood box measuring four feet long, two and a half feet wide, and two and a half feet deep.

“The Ethiopians believe that the Ark of the Covenant remains to this day in Ethiopia. There is a fair body of evidence that at least until recent times it was preserved at Axum, the ancient capital. Axum is a place in Ethiopia that you should visit. I should add that Menelik’s return to Ethiopia with the Ark was assisted by a group of Jews who left Israel to come with him. The modern Falashas of Ethiopia are Jews who trace their descent from these ancient people.”

Herbert Brody looked as though he thought Dr. Abana might be trying to make fun of him by suggesting that he visit Axum, which was not the case.

“May I ask your name, young man?”

“Herbert Brody. My name is Herbert Brody.”

“Mr. Brody, do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?”

The question was unexpected and it momentarily startled Brody. “Yes, I do believe in the divinity of Christ, but what does that have—”

“Do you know, Mr. Brody, that Jesus, who had been considered an influential but mortal prophet, was not given divine status until nearly four centuries after his death?”

“With all due respect sir, I don’t see what your question has to do with mine.”

Dr. Quarles sat back in his chair and folded his arms, looking pleased.

Dr. Abana’s demeanor did not change from its initial fix. “Have you ever heard of the Council of Nicaea, Mr. Brody?” This was asked quietly after another of his long pauses.

“No, I have not.”

“The Council was convened by the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire,” pausing, “a pagan who worshipped the sun just as the Queen of Axum and Sheba had 1,400 years before him. She converted to Judaism before her son brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. Emperor Constantine was baptized as a Christian only on his deathbed—unwillingly, it is believed. It was Constantine, a pagan Roman politician, who organized the ecumenical meeting known as the Council of Nicaea to vote on the matter of making Jesus Christ divine. That which you believe, Mr. Brody, was accomplished for you by a pagan Roman emperor who did not believe in Christ’s divinity himself. He did what he did for political and business reasons. The Roman Empire was divided by the growing Christian movement. In one stroke, the clever, cynical Constantine co-opted the Christian movement and consolidated political and economic power for the Roman Empire and, not unimportantly, for the Roman Catholic Church.”

Dr. Abana stopped and looked at Brody who found himself suddenly unnerved and without a riposte.

More kindly, almost sweetly then, Dr. Abana continued, “You asked if I believed that Menelik took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. The historical evidence would suggest that he did. The queen had been both a good mother to him and an important coming figure in the history of two of the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism and, through her line, early Coptic Christianity. Menelik loved his mother and he was very much Ethiopian. He, on the other hand, had little reason to love his father, King Solomon. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that he did return to Ethiopia, and with the Ark of the Covenant. I do not believe, however, Mr. Brody, that he did so by levitating over the Red Sea, but then I do not believe that Christ walked on water either. The mortals who wrote the
Kebra Nagast
and the Bible were indeed fanciful and poetic. It was the literary fashion in those days. But all that they wrote was not meant to be taken literally.”

Brody stood at the microphone alone, with no one in line behind him to speak. He very much wanted to get back to his seat.

Dr. Abana began again, but more solicitously this time. “We have all been taught that Christ died on a cross. The Dogon people of Mali, however, believe that their Creator God, Amma, sent Nommo to Earth to sacrifice himself to cleanse the Earth. They believe that Nommo was crucified on a tree.”

I listened with fascination to Dr. Abana’s affirmation of the story my grandmother had told me when I was fifteen.

“Would it surprise you to learn, Mr. Brody, that the New Testament of the Bible, in Acts 5:30 and I Peter 2:24, describes Christ not to have been crucified on a cross, but to have been hanged on a tree, not unlike, in addition to Nommo, the tree-slain savior figures of Krishna, Maryas, Odin, and Dodonian Zeus?

“Things may not always be as told to us. It is particularly important that
we
understand that, you see, Mr. Brody?”

Brody, feeling bested, did not know what to say. He felt somewhat foolish and was glad that the hall was dark.

“Mr. Brody,” Dr. Abana said as the young man turned to walk back to his seat, “I believe in the divinity of Christ. I have reached that view without fear of discovering the full glorious story of civilization. Read all that you can, curious and unafraid. Education requires that we open books, not close them. I doubt that what you find will weaken your faith. It, more likely, will strengthen it.”

The program ended there. Dr. Quarles, a full head taller than his friend, shook Dr. Abana’s hand and said the words, “Splendid, simply splendid.”

I sat awhile in my seat as one often does after watching an especially thought-provoking movie and gave fresh thought to what Dr. Quarles had said to our class about discovering how old we were.

The next morning, Dr. Quarles, appearing unusually cheerful, called our class to order. He was dressed in a carelessly cut single-breasted suit of sober tweed. He held in his hand a pair of thick rimless bifocals with which he gestured toward a student seated in the rear of the room.

“What did you take away from Dr. Abana’s lecture, Mr.

Daughtry?”

Daughtry, distracted, had heard the sound of his name and nothing more. “Sir?”

“Anybody?”

A small, dark-skinned, pretty young woman, seated in the second row on Dr. Quarles’s left, raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Branch.”

“Well, the truth is, Dr. Quarles, that most of what Dr. Abana said was new to me and I don’t really know yet how to think about it. Something that doesn’t feel so good in me doesn’t want to believe it. I don’t know why that is. Could be that, you know, all these years no one has ever said anything close to what he was talking about.” She paused, knitted her brows together, opened her mouth to continue, and then stopped. Claudia Branch was an earnest young woman of better than average aptitude.

“What, as you see it, Miss Branch, is the purpose of education?”

“To prepare us for the world.”

“What does that mean, Miss Branch?”

“To qualify us for good jobs.”

“Is that all, Miss Branch?”

“Well, I guess, maybe, also to broaden us as human beings.” She fought off a shrug as she said this.

Dr. Quarles, not wishing to press Claudia Branch further, wasn’t sure whether she really believed this last thing, or was merely regurgitating a commonplace from school officialdom.

“What do you think, Mr. March?” Dr. Quarles had a habit of asking the question before choosing a respondent. The method allowed his students to hear the question without pressure, although it hadn’t worked quite that way with Daughtry.

“Well, a lot of what he said was familiar to me.”

“The context, Mr. March, please give us the context.”

“Well, I can tell you, Dr. Quarles, that like Claudia, I never heard in a classroom anything vaguely related to what he said yesterday.”

“Please go on, Mr. March.” Dr. Quarles’s patience exceeded my confidence which was embarrassingly small, particularly in this matter.

“My grandmother is blind,” I said. “She reads her Braille Bible and talks to me about it. She knows about the Queen of Axum and Sheba and King Solomon from the Bible. When I was a little boy, she told me about Menelik and how he brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.”

“Did your grandmother also read the
Kebra Nagast
?”

“No, I doubt that she’s ever heard of that book.”

“Then how could she know about Menelik carrying the Ark of the Covenant back to Ethiopia?”

“From reading the Bible.”

“The story of Menelik’s flight with the Ark of the Covenant is not told in the Bible.”

“Then I don’t know, sir.”

That evening I called my grandmother at her neighbor’s house on Duvall Street.

“Grandma, have you ever heard of a book called the
Kebra Nagast
?”

“Say that again.”

“
Kebra Nagast
.”

“No, son. I’m sure I’ve never heard of that. Why do you ask?”

“You told me once that King Menelik brought the Ark of the Covenant home from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. I thought you read this in the Bible but Dr.Quarles said the story wasn’t in the Bible. How did you know about it, Grandma?”

“My mother …”

“Your mother? Your mother told you. How could that be, Grandma?”

There was silence on the line. Then my grandmother seemed to begin in the middle of some long past experience. “I was watching the Fasika procession with my best friend Meron.” She trilled the
r
when she pronounced her friend’s name. “It was the Sabbath and we were consecrating one of our new churches. My mother told me the story of King Menelik and the Ark. That’s how I knew.”

“You learned this in a dream, Grandma?”

“Yes, son.”

“When did this happen? How old was I?”

“I was asleep dreaming in my rocking chair. You were seven. You woke me up when I was talking in the dream to my friend Meron.”

“Where was this? Ethiopia?”

“It was called Abysinnia then.”

“When was this, Grandma?”

“The year was 1186. I don’t know the date.”

Later, I took from the tin box the plastic sleeve from which I retrieved my notes and the Dogon map my grandmother had guided me in drawing when I was fifteen. I pored over the materials for the better part of an hour. It was then that I began, at least in my head, planning the writing of my first book.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

I
was reading James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. Sounds from the television in the bedroom played through the door into the small apartment’s living room where I’d sat making small headway.

Baldwin’s book fell from my hands onto the floor. I ran from the living room into the bedroom. With my eyes fixed upon the small black-and-white screen, I inched laterally toward the foot of the bed and dropped awkwardly into a sitting position. Finding something in the moment mildly frightening, it was difficult for me to focus on the image that filled the screen. The lines in the image appeared to swim and undulate. I felt a gallop in my chest and my temples. My cheeks began to bake and itch beneath the skin. My eyes started to water as if I were about to cry. I took a succession of small breaths in an effort to gain a measure of control over my faculties.

I blinked hard and stared at the high-resolution photograph on the screen. The image had been caught through a high-powered telescope by a Dr. Jan Bergman, a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Astronomy and a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist. The NBC announcer described the image as the first picture ever taken of the small star, shown moving along an elliptical fifty-year path around the big star Sirius, the blue queen of the north sky.

The announcer called the little star not Po Tolo, but a name that meant nothing to me. There had been no doubt, however, no doubt at all. The picture on the screen was virtually a perfect copy of the sketch my grandmother had made from her dream about a previous life with her Dogon father. The drawing was in my closet, still stored in the ten-year-old plastic sleeve. I would get it down later and review it, though I would have no real need to do so. My grandmother’s recreation of her father’s diagram had been burned long since into my memory.

The photograph remained on the screen while the announcer interviewed an American astronomer from Princeton about the little star’s significance. I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

It was Po Tolo. It was some sort of miracle. Some gift from the spirit world. “My God! My God! My God!” I shouted at the walls of my apartment.

I squeezed my eyes and lay back on the bed with my arms stretched hard behind me in joyful catharsis. Then, for the first time in nearly ten years, I cried.

M
ORGAN
S
TATE
U
NIVERSITY

B
ALTIMORE
, M
ARYLAND