Makeda (22 page)
Mrs. Grier rocked her slowly and said over and again, singsong, “I’m here, Makeda. I’m here. It’s all right, I’m here.” Standing three feet away, Mr. Grier watched, still not knowing what to do or say.
Mr. Grier brought a first-aid kit with which Mrs. Grier treated the cuts that my grandmother, until her mind had fully cleared, thought had been inflicted by the killer dogs in her dream.
In the dream, my husband and I had names, but we have somehow forgotten
or lost them. This worries and alarms us because it means that
we will not know what to call our child that is to come in three months’
time. It is summer and the night is full of sounds and smells in the black
of the moonless forest. We can only see clearly the star that we know can
lead us to Canada and the Quakers and freedom. The night is so black
that we have lost our faces too and have trouble finding each other in
the wet swampy undergrowth. In the distance we hear the dogs closing
on us from the south and the east. We stumble and fall in the muck, and
Canada seems farther from Albemarle County, Virginia, than it ever
did before. The howling dogs, that seem to incite each other’s ferocity,
grow louder and louder. My husband tries his best to remain bravesounding,
but I can hear the fear in the rising pitch of his voice. The turpentine
we rubbed into our feet and onto our legs to throw off the dogs
has washed away in the swamp. It is only a matter of time. My husband
says that he is not going back under any circumstance, and that I am to
go on without him if he can throw the slave hunters off the trail a bit.
But the dogs catch both of us. My husband refuses to surrender and the
men shoot him. When I run to him, two dogs, foaming with madness,
lunge at me and bite my leg, my thigh, and then into my womb where
my baby moves hard about, seeming to sense that something is wrong. I
see the whitish swelling flesh of my insides soaked in blood. Then everything
goes black as if I too have died.
The first thing my grandmother told Mr. and Mrs. Grier was: “Do not tell my son about this.”
But Mrs. Grier said, “Makeda, this is too serious not to tell ’im, with you here at night all alone. Anyhow, he gon’ see the cuts and know something bad happened.”
Against that my grandmother argued, Mrs. Grier later said, desperately, “He won’t see the cuts. My gowns will hide them. Now, Gertrude, I’m askin’ you not to tell him. It’ll cause more trouble than you know.”
Mr. Grier stayed out of it. Mrs. Grier did not know what to do. My grandmother was her friend, but when she had first seen the bloodied old blind woman furled in a bedspread thrashing about on the floor at three in the morning, she quite understandably believed that my grandmother was well along toward losing her mind. In the end, she felt she had no choice but to tell my father, and did so the very next morning after she had slept the rest of the night in bed with my grandmother.
My father spoke with young Dr. Bakewell, an internist down at Richmond Community Hospital, the tiny colored hospital in which I was born on the street behind Virginia Union. Dr. Bakewell, who had done in his short new medical career all of a half-day of psychiatric rounds, told my father that my grandmother’s episode might well have been “triggered by the stress engendered by that California professor who spoke to your mother just hours before she went to bed.”
T
he trip to Mali was to begin in just under a month. It loomed large before me as something of a consummation of sorts, intangible but important, no less so than the physical intimacy Jeanne and I were forestalled still to explore.
We had made plane reservations to fly from D.C.’s Dulles airport to Paris on Air France, and on to Bamako from Paris via Air Mali. We had still to make arrangements for travel from Bamako to Timbuktu, and from there to the land of the Dogon. We were to leave America on June 17 to arrive in Bamako late in the afternoon of the following day.
When I had first broached with Jeanne the idea of a trip to Mali, I was not entirely forthcoming about my reasons for wanting to go.
She had asked, “Have you been to Africa before?”
“No, I’ve never even been outside the United States.”
“Why Mali? I mean—why just Mali?”
I lied, but only by omission. “I want to study the work of ancient African writers at the library in Timbuktu.”
Jeanne had had a passport for some years. I had applied for mine at the passport office on K Street in Washington in early May. I was told that it would take a minimum of six weeks to process my application unless I were willing to pay an additional fee of seventy-five dollars to accelerate matters. So I wrote out a check for the larger amount. Although I could ill afford it, I paid for the two airfares and put Jeanne’s ticket in the mail to her. While it may not have made perfect sense, I thought that buying and mailing the ticket to her would help me deflect the vigorous effort she would mount to pay her own way. The same day, I stopped at the Embassy of Mali on Massachusetts Avenue and collected from a friendly and solicitous cultural attaché an assortment of coated-paper color brochures and other materials about the culture, topography, history, and political system of Mali.
The next day, a Saturday, I called Jeanne to sort out our plans for the weekend.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I was feeling uncharacteristically good about nothing in particular.
“You choose this time. It’s your turn. If it’s a movie, you choose the movie. If it’s dinner, you choose the food. It doesn’t matter. I only want to be with you.” Although she said this playfully, it caused in me an unmitigated spike of intense pleasure, literally thrilling me in some viscerally neurological way.
“Well then, I suggest, by the authority vested in me, that we eat in this evening and work through our plans for the trip.”
“Okay. That’s fine with me. Why don’t I come to your place for a change?”
I hesitated before responding slightly less cheerfully, “Oh, Jeanne, you don’t want to come here.”
“Oh, but I do, sweet prince,” her voice at once cheerful and serious. Soft metal in a silk sleeve.
“Come on, Jeanne, not here, please.”
“Yes, Gray.
There
.”
“My place is a disaster and I don’t have time today to fix it. How about the next time?”
She was quiet for a moment and then decided not to push the point, although I could hear in her voice that my response had meant something more to her than I intended.
“O-okay, I’ll see you here then at what? Seven?” Jeanne asked without light or lift.
“Seven is fine.”
I spent the morning reading through the materials on Mali that the cultural attaché had given me. He was an engaging man who seemed genuinely pleased that I was planning to visit his country. I was somewhat embarrassed by the thought that I had relatives who decidedly were not. A great aunt on my father’s side had called me and said, “I hear you’re going to Africa,” which to her was not a continent, but a country.
It wasn’t a question, and I considered not responding at all, but thought better of it. “I’m going to Mali, Aunt Clarice.”
“What’s a Mali?”
“Mali is a country, Aunt Clarice. It’s in Africa.”
“Where in Africa?” This was asked skeptically as if she suspected I may have been trying to bamboozle her. For what reason I would do such a thing, I had no idea.
“It’s in West Africa, Aunt Clarice, the part where we came from.” My voice was flat. Unprovocative.
“I didn’t come from no Africa,” she had said, offended.
“Where
did
you come from, Aunt Clarice?” The barb flew wide of its mark and it was just as well.
Since I was fifteen, I had wanted to go to Mali—since that late afternoon my grandmother told me in her little parlor about the Dogon dream. I hadn’t consciously realized before that day how much I needed to hear something good said about Africa, where our people (who were being treated so shabbily here in America) had come from. I’m embarrassed to confess that I did not know much of anything reliable about the land of our origin. The painful truth is that about all I’d been told, virtually from birth, was that we were a backward people from a backward place. Given the intensity and the relentlessness of this line of attack, it was hard as hell not believing that Aunt Clarice may have been right in her estimate of us. Think about it for a moment. Willie Best, the bubble-eyed, slow-moving, dim-witted Negro handyman on
The Stu Erwin Show
, was a household name in the country, while Dr. Dubois, the giant Negro intellectual, could walk through most of our neighborhoods unnoticed, and although Daddy had told us that the Negro film director Oscar Micheaux had done his level best in the 1930s to have us appear like normal everyday people in his motion pictures, nobody I knew, knew anymore who Oscar Micheaux was. It was virtually impossible to deny that practically every image of us selected for broadcast to the whole country made us look dumb and worthless, while the vast majority of the Negroes I knew were just like my parents, but I almost never saw people like my parents on television or on the screen at the Hippodrome on Saturdays. What concerned me most was that we seemed to have begun acting like the hired idiots we’d been given no choice but to watch on the national broadcasts, which brings me back to my grandmother.
You may not believe this, but the Dogon dream she described to me that afternoon on Duvall Street when I was fifteen was the first positive thing I’d ever heard said about Africa, the place that had mothered, and like it or not, defined me, both from the outside in, as well as from the inside out. And no matter what Negroes said or had been caused to believe about Africa, we were all indissolubly bound up with her—Aunt Clarice, kicking and screaming, included.
I’d feel better, perhaps, saying that I decided to go to Mali for my grandmother, but that wouldn’t be true. I was going to Mali for myself. My grandmother had been a living eyewitness to Africa
before
the age of slavery. She knew who she was. She had lived and experienced who we all once had been. She did not require repair. I did. I was infected with an insidious malady of the head and spirit that no mortal uninoculated Negro could avoid contracting while breathing in social America.
Thus, it was not that I had simply wished to go to Mali to document my grandmother’s revelation. I
needed
to document her revelation in order to save myself.
The word
black
, the most recent peel-off label for our race (they were getting hard to keep track of), was just coming into vogue at that time, and Aunt Clarice threw that in, “… And I’m sick of all this
black
stuff, Gray. And where’s it takin’ us? Pullin’ us down, I tell ya. Jest listen to ’em. Black dis. Black dat. Black, black, black. I tell ya, I’m sick of it …”
Thank goodness my parents were never like Aunt Clarice because this was a big big problem in the black community. Every other Saturday, Daddy sent Gordon and me to get our hair cut at Ace’s Barbershop at the corner of Saint James and Leigh. The owner was called Pop, or at least that’s all I can remember. Well, Pop would expel any patron heard using profanity, whether the patron was a regular or not. That was the rule and Pop applied it without exception. There was no rule, however, against stupid talk. I know this was so because once I heard Giant Turner arguing with Beverly Taylor (Beverly was a man and touchy about his name) about whether there was a pill that could turn black people into white people. Giant Turner said that he knew for sure that there was such a pill and Beverly kept saying that there wasn’t. “Is.” “Ain’t.” “Is.” “Ain’t.” “Is.” “Ain’t.” They just kept going around and around like this. Then Beverly said that he could prove that Giant was wrong. Well, Giant asked, “How?” It was then that Beverly said, “If there was a pill that could do that, there wouldn’t be no black people.” And Giant had no answer for that. Everybody in the barbershop laughed, even though nothing was really funny as I saw it, even though I was just a little boy.
When I was young, this problem of self-hate was a serious matter for black people in America. Aunt Clarice was only unusual in the extreme way that she appeared to truly enjoy hating herself and never ever taking no for an answer. The word
Africa
, whenever she heard it, was just one of the many panic buttons she pressed as hard and as many times as she could to submerge herself as deeply as possible in her very own well-tended acid bath of self-loathing.
From the very beginning, as everyone ought to have known, black folk have always had a hellacious time existing sanely in America. The place has saddled us with a gaggle of debilitating complexes. Just think what a nasty psychological business it is insisting to people who’ve treated you like vermin that you are equal to them. That alone is enough to make all of us as crazy as the dickens. Reverend King even had us saying that we
loved
them. I knew this was only a strategy. But, God, look at the cost to our heads. I think you can see now where people like Aunt Clarice came from. And were it not for Mama and Daddy, Gordon and I would have been just like them. As it was, truth be told, we were more like them than we cared to admit. Couldn’t be helped, given the poisoned air we all had no choice but to inhale. So you see, because of Mama and Daddy, Gordon and I mostly loved ourselves a lot and hated ourselves only a little. Aunt Clarice, on the other hand, I suppose loved herself a little and hated herself a lot, which meant, laid end to end, Negroes were but mirror images of each other.
I
talked
about race pride, but found the genuine belief in such strangely irksome in Jeanne. It was like she was pulling at the edges of a scab covering an old and terrible wound. I must have reckoned unconsciously that I was safe under the scab even though I may have been drowning in pus there. How was that different from Aunt Clarice, except by degree? Perhaps it was because I shared this overlap with Aunt Clarice (an overlap she called mocking attention to with her ostentatiously celebrated self-loathing) that I resented her so profoundly.