Makeda (15 page)
No. Grandma was right. Still, it seemed unfair.
Why shouldn’t people believe her?
All they needed to do was ask the Dogon themselves.
The Dogon must have had some way of proving just when they’d come by this extraordinary knowledge of theirs. More proof, I would have wagered, than William Shakespeare could have massed to prove he had written the anonymously published plays credited to him—plays that were set in countries across a continental Europe of the sixteenth century that had never once been visited by Shakespeare, whose mother, father, and daughter were illiterate. The man reputed to be the greatest Englishlanguage writer of all time had possessed no library, willed no books, and lived virtually all of his life in Stratford, a provincial English town that was blessed with no literary culture to speak of. Where, possibly, could he have learned the craft of language and writing? No one knows.
Yet the entire Western world believed Shakespeare had written plays the extant evidence suggests he could not possibly, or at the very least likely, have written.
“Please don’t tell Jeanne or anyone else about this, Gray,” my grandmother had said to me from Ms. Grier’s telephone just the night before. “The lady will think both of us are crazy. I would too, hearing something like this from someone else. You know how the world works, son.”
I thought of my grandmother, looked at Jeanne, and retreated. I said to her, “Let me tell you in a month or so. I’m afraid talking about it out loud will scare me off course— that externalizing my idea will make it seem absurd, even to me.”
She said, “I know exactly what you mean.” And I thought, foolishly then and there, that I loved her.
I needed to tell her things and thought that I could. Without preamble, as if I had started speaking in the middle of a thought, I said, “I don’t want to be a journalist. I want to write what I feel and think.”
“Well, even journalists do that.” She said this with lightly inflected irony.
“They’re not supposed to.”
“True enough, Gray, but how can they not? Yes? Nothing’s objective after it’s interpreted.”
“I suppose.” I felt good—well, nearly giddy, to tell the truth—looking at her in the small restful light of the restaurant. She peered very directly at me when I spoke, her eyes smiling a
knowing
that bore no relation to what we were saying with words that floated nervous and disembodied in the space between us. I turned away from her eyes in a half-hearted ineffectual effort to gain control over my thoughts. I could no longer hear the muffled tinkle of cutlery, the low weave of conversation from the neighboring tables. I could feel the gathering surf of pulse in my ears. I heard myself then making a speech about writing. It was likely intended for the most part to keep her eyes trained on me.
“… But that’s the hard part for me, you see? Because I live
inside
the feeling, and know it only because it is mine uniquely, I can never know that I am describing the real emotional color of it in words. I can think that I am doing this and fail badly. The writer is blind to himself. He can see the interior of his feelings, but cannot possibly see whether he is describing them to you with the emotional weight he feels and bears. As I cannot see myself from the outside, I cannot see what I write. It leaves me feeling insecure. Richard Wright called writing ‘the sweet agony of uncertainty.’”
She continued to look at me for a long moment. Then she spoke, I thought, to demonstrate that she had been listening. “It’s a bit scary, I know,” she said, “when you write, you speak because you need to, but into empty space.”
I must be natural. If I try to be clever, she will see through it.
Easy. Natural. Stop screwing the top off the pepper shaker. Easy.
“It is a world that all artists brave, fearing rejection.”
She looks
so penetratingly at me when she speaks that mind I see turning behind
those intelligent dark eyes. Try and not look away, boy. Hold it.
“But the moment a reader is engaged by your interpretation of things, your insecurities will lighten a bit.”
I must stop looking at
her like this or she’ll think I’m the village idiot.
“You’re a sensitive man …”
You’re a sensitive man. You’re a sensitive man.
“… and that is good …”
That is good.
“… so you will always have artistic insecurities. Or at least I hope so.”
We ordered from the menu an ice cream confection called Pineapple Charlotte and talked more about our personal histories.
“My mother went to college in Paris at the Sorbonne. She began her writing career there and came to New York in 1941 to mount her first American production. She met my father in New York where he was studying medicine at NYU. I was born in New York. We moved to Chicago when I was three. My younger sister, Maryse, was born in Chicago. Now what about you? You grew up in the South, right?”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat uncomfortably. She looked at me questioningly. “My father is an insurance salesman and my mother does not work.” The words crowded out artlessly. “I guess my grandmother, my father’s mother, is the person I’m closest to.” I stopped there, abruptly it may have seemed. She peered at me as if she hadn’t known what to say then. I flushed, I hoped, imperceptibly.
“Brothers? Sisters?” she asked.
“No,” this said with a short edge that was unintended.
The distance between us lengthened. I felt a small stab of panic. I had not acknowledged as much, but I was lonely. Not alone, but needful of something she had in a short time made painfully apparent.
Her eyes signaled a small withdrawal. “Is something wrong, Gray?”
As she asked this, a man approached. He was cleanshaven and handsome with a neat salt-and-pepper Afro and skin the color of milk chocolate.
“Jeanne, dear, it’s wonderful to see you.” He smiled and held her slender hand in both of his.
“Hello, Teo. How have you been?”
“Never better. How are your parents? Your sister?” He spoke in the mellifluous song of upper-class Jamaicans.
“Everyone’s fine, Teo. I want you to meet my friend Graylon March.”
He clenched my hand firmly and smiled. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. March. Welcome to the Poinciana. I hope everything has been to your liking.”
I told him truthfully that everything had been wonderful— the food, the look of the place, the copper-plate family portraits, the music. Unobtrusively, in the background, Bob Marley sang his “Natural Mystic.” I was grateful for Teo’s intervention.
“Well, I won’t disturb you further. Jeanne, please give your family my regards and come again soon.”
He left us. We looked at each other. Settled back now into our separate evaluations, sipping the Drambuie that warmed through us, calming the small unbidden apprehensions, finishing smoothly the occasion. Nice. Unclear. But still nice.
One of the things I liked most about her was that she was not one of those stupidly self-important mysterious types that hid themselves, either in some ludicrous effort to effect—what is it that it looks like?—some sort of tactical defensive bulwark, or to camouflage a deeper, more impressive shallowness. (Might this have been, however, how she could altogether reasonably have seen
me
?)
She did not leave things where they had left off. Helpfully, she reached across the unexplored social space between us and offered a small caring smile. “Families, Gray. Remind me someday to tell you stories about the Burgesses and Cesaires.”
Reprieved.
“Thank you for a lovely evening. Call me tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
I walked her to her car, a six-year-old Peugeot, surprisingly. We embraced lightly, tentatively. In the damp chill of the March night, I took in for the briefest instant the sweet special scent of her. And then the sensation ended, gone on the flutter of a dancing breeze.
H
ello.” It was the cultivated voice of a professional lecturer.
“My name is Graylon March. I’m calling from Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. I am trying to reach Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright.”
“Speaking.” The voice sharp, curt, with a question in it.
“I read your book
Reincarnation
and found it fascinating—”
“Mr.… Pardon me, what did you say your name was?”
“March, Graylon March.”
“Well, Mr. March, I really don’t—”
“Please, Dr. Harris-Fulbright. I won’t take much of your time, but my grandmother remembers a past life that is every bit as unbelievable as the life of Antonia—I’m sorry, I can’t remember her full name.”
“Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado.”
“Yes, well, my grandmother remembers a past life every bit as unbelievable as hers.”
“Maybe, Mr. March, that is because your grandmother’s story
is
unbelievable.” This said resignedly, not rudely.
Still, although I knew that she did not know me and had no reason to believe anything that I was saying, I was becoming annoyed.
“Dr. Harris-Fulbright, please—” I drew in a long calming breath. “I can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that ten years ago, my grandmother dreamed about the existence of a star, invisible to the naked eye—its orbit, its weight, its constituent materials—that only a month ago was confirmed by scientists to exist, at all.” This wasn’t quite the truth, but I had to win her full respectful attention before broaching the Dogon dream story that would fly in the seedpod face of every Western prejudice about Africa that she had ever been caused to inhale.
She said nothing for what seemed a long while. Then I heard her breathe out in a labored push.
“Okay, Mr. March, you have my ear. Tell me what happened to your grandmother.”
I told her about my grandmother’s dream of being a Dogon teenager in the year 1394. I told her my grandmother’s father’s name in the dream and what the old priest had told her in the shady cliff-side courtyard that day about the little star Po Tolo, as well as the path and period of its orbit around the large bluish star in the low northern sky.
“My grandmother told this to me ten years ago. This was before the Western scientific community knew that the little star existed. My grandmother is completely blind, professor, yet she traced on paper the orbit path of Po Tolo which she remembered from the map her father had shown her in the dream. The drawing she made for me ten years ago matches almost exactly the recent photograph made by Western astronomers that was shown on the national news a month ago. Dr. Harris-Fulbright, my grandmother has never been outside the state of Virginia. She is a retired hand laundress who never reached high school. She is blind. I have the map she drew and the notes I took that day when I was fifteen. There must be a way to forensically verify that the map and notes were made ten years ago. Now, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, how possibly could my grandmother have known these things had she not dreamed them? I know this must sound like a lot to take in at one time, but can you offer a plausible alternative explanation?”
Dr. Harris-Fulbright said nothing. I could hear her breathing. I waited six or seven seconds.
“Doctor …”
“Y-yes, well—I’m not sure what to say, Mr. March.
Before your call, you see, I’d never even heard the word Doogon be—”
“Dogon.”
“Pardon?”
“Dogon. The people are called Dogon.”
“Yes, I see—”
“That’s just my point, Dr. Harris-Fulbright. How likely is it that my grandmother, a retired blind laundress, could have even known of the Dogon people and precisely where they have lived in Mali, West Africa since the fourteenth century?”
“I think I see your point, Mr. March.”
I looked around my tiny sitting room and was glad that Dr. Harris-Fulbright could not see it. The walls were an oil-based institutional gray and completely bare, save for the clean-paint rectangles where a previous tenant’s pictures had once hung. The furniture had been thoughtlessly cobbled together from the distress auctions of departing graduate students. The threadbare divan listed leftward, signaling that I would likely be its last owner. Books and papers, aligned in neat rows, covered every flat surface in the apartment’s three rooms. There were no personal effects, save the toiletries in the bathroom.
“What is it that you want of me, Mr. March?”
I hesitated. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through. I read your book yesterday in one sitting. I wanted to get your reaction as soon as I could get you on the phone.”
“Mr. March.”
“Yes.”
She started to speak, then stopped and took a measure of time to think. When she started again, she spoke more slowly than she had before, as if she were calculating in her head how she would meter her forward involvement. She had looked to be in her mid-fifties at the time that the picture was taken for the back flap of her book. She was a white woman with piercing cerebral blue eyes and long wiry gray hair in a high state of scholarly misrule. It was the picture of a woman who had little interest in adornment. She spoke much as she had looked in the picture. Without waste or varnish.
“Mr. March, if you have reported accurately on this star’s recent discovery, and on your grandmother’s description of it in her ten-year-old dream, your story would warrant further investigation. Most of the stories I come across, however, are found to be without merit. Yours, or rather your grandmother’s, is, on its face, quite interesting.”
Hers was the professional scholar’s maddening habit of emotionless understatement. A near idiom unto itself.
“Here is how I propose we proceed, Mr. March. Give me a week to do some reading. There are things I would like to check out.”
“Understood,” I said with relief. I tried not to sound happy.
“If you give me your number, I will call you next Monday at eight p.m. your time and tell you what I think.”
I gave her my number and agreed on the time of her call.
“Before we go, I have a couple of questions.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Please spell D-dogon for me.”
I spelled it for her.
“And now, Mali.” I did this. “You said
West
Africa, right?”