Makeda (24 page)
The room was small and Spartan with a single glass aperture situated high on an antiseptic white-white wall through which only a heavy blue sky could be glimpsed. There were two single beds fastened as bunks, one against the window wall and the other against the wall adjacent to it. The room was almost completely devoid of decoration. Well-laundered white sheets wrapped the thin coil-less mattresses tightly like oversized bandages.
The bathroom plumbing was naked and visible. The carpet was wall-to-wall and coarse. The pillows and bedding suggested a military minimalism. The whole of the space registered the cold empty personality of a disinfected cloister.
I fell, fully clothed, splayed across the window-wall bed upon my back and stared vacantly into the tiny room’s ceiling, hoping that sleep would arrive and rejoin me to a world that I knew.
I remained in this position and wide awake for the better part of the hour.
In the early afternoon, I called Mrs. Grier and asked her to bring my grandmother to the telephone. While I could scarcely afford the call, my grandmother had made me pledge to contact her the moment I had safely arrived in Paris.
“Gray? Is that you, son?” I heard relief in my grandmother’s voice. During the night of my long over-water flight, her colorful imagination had surely painted every possible horror that might have befallen me.
“It’s me, Grandma. I’m fine.”
“Where are you now? You haven’t gotten to Mali yet, have you?”
“No. I leave for Mali this evening. I’m staying the day at a little airport hotel near Paris.”
“I can’t get over it. You being all the way over there. You sound like you right here in Richmond.” She laughed, I thought, out of relief that I was safe for the moment.
“What’s it look like over there?”
“I don’t know, Grandma. Different, I suppose. Everything kinda looks and feels harder.”
“What do you mean,
looks and feels harder
?”
“I know it seems a little strange to pick out something like that, but, you know, the benches in the airport, the seats on the bus I rode over here on, even the bed I’m lying on. The stuff is harder, that’s all. Makes our cars and all feel like waterbeds.”
“Waterbeds?” She said this worryingly, as if I had used profanity. I changed the subject.
“I’ve never heard so many languages spoken in my life.”
“It must be really something, son. I’m so proud of you. And goin’ to Africa. My grandson. What a thing! Makes me wish I was young.”
“I know, Grandma. But it’s like you’re here with me. It’s like when I get to Africa, you’ll be there with me. That sounds strange, but …”
“No, not to me it doesn’t. Not strange at all.”
I did not know what more to say, and felt a little like a faltering dancer who’d lost the step without knowing how to regain it unnoticed.
“Are you okay, Gray?”
“Oh, yes, Grandma. I’m fine, I’m fine.” I felt that she did not believe me.
“Your mother called and asked about you. When you’d be arrivin’ and everythin’. I’m sure your father wanted to know too.”
“You really think so, Grandma?”
“I’m sure of it, son.”
There was a second stretch of silence.
“Well, Grandma, I just called to let you know everything is okay.”
She was silent for another moment, as if she were deciding something. When she spoke again, her tone was contemplative. Soft.
“Take care of yourself, Gray. Go on to Mali and bring it back for me, son.”
“I will, Grandma. I will.”
I had been sitting up to talk on the telephone. I lay back on the bed. Something nonspecific was bothering me.
It could have been that I was worried about Grandma. When I had visited her three days before my departure, she was less open with me than usual. When I asked her whether she’d had any new dreams, she tersely said no, closing off further discussion.
The words had been spoken wearily, resignedly.
I worried that she may have been poised to give up on a world that, by her measure of it, had been, for a long time, headed in the wrong direction. I think that she believed strongly that this was particularly the case for our people. She, after all, had been cursed or privileged to witness, firsthand, the long epochal downward trajectory of black folk’s relative social circumstance near and far.
Before sensing her despondence, I had been at the time on the verge of raising with her the situation with Jeanne that haunted me much as an unshakable fever would. But seeing that Grandma at the time was of an uncharacteristically brittle temperament, I hadn’t brought up Jeanne’s name at all. I was sufficiently concerned about all this that I stopped next door to speak with Mrs. Grier about Grandma before leaving Richmond that day.
After some prodding, Mrs. Grier told me that on several occasions Grandma had
disappeared
(this was the word she used) for seconds while talking to her. What Mrs. Grier described was nothing so fantastic or supernatural as teleportation or such. What she said was, “Makeda would be in her body right there in front of me, but then she’d be gone to some other place. Then, in a few seconds, she’d be back again.”
Mrs. Grier did not know about the dreams. She had thought only that Grandma was “gettin’ old and slippin’.”
“Have you noticed anything else different about her?” I asked.
She hesitated before answering. “Well, maybe that strange cross she has that was never around the house before. Leastways, I never saw it before.”
“What cross?”
“It’s a thick metal thing that’s nearly the same whichever way you turn it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, the two pieces of it are the same, you know, about the same length. Like maybe it would fit inside a circle. It even had a circle inside it where the two pieces cross each other. And the cross had little birds on it. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
“Was it very small? Small enough to keep in a jewelry box?” Save for the wall hanging with the symbol on it, nothing visible had changed in the house since I was a little boy.
“No, I’d guess it was somewheres near a foot anyway you looked at it.” She frowned.
“What is it, Mrs. Grier?”
“The cross had these funny things on the three ends.”
“Can you describe it?”
“I don’t know. Alls I can say is what I was thinkin’ when I saw it.” She looked as if she thought there was something dishonorable in talking to me this way about her friend.
“What were you thinking, Mrs. Grier?”
“Well, I was thinkin’ that three ends of the cross was bloomin’ like iron roses.”
It was 1:45 or thereabouts when a young African waiter delivered the ham and cheese sandwich I had ordered from room service. He told me that he was a thirty-six-year-old Badjara man from Senegal. His parents had given to him both a Wolof name and Wolof as his first language when he was very small. They had thought that this would help him along, inasmuch as the Wolof had been the dominant group in Senegal for centuries and still held most of the important positions in government and commerce.
Babukar had come to Paris from Dakar to attend university sixteen years earlier, but had dropped out before completing his degree in agriculture. While he had always intended to earn a diploma and return to his parents’ village in Senegal, things hadn’t worked out that way and he was losing confidence that they ever would.
Babukar told me all of this in response to the questions I began asking just after he’d put the sandwich down on a small table near the door.
He was half a head shorter than me, neat of build and feature, with deep brown skin that was clearer, but otherwise not unlike my own.
Although he had yet to marry, he said to me that he very much wanted to have a family because this was very important to the Badjara, in ways, I’d later learn, I had no cultural framework for fully appreciating at the time. He also said that his elderly parents still hoped he would return home soon and marry not a Wolof but a Badjara woman, and have many children who would then become part of an extended Badjara family network whose members—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, grandsons, granddaughters—would share and share alike virtually everything that was sharable.
Babukar said with a measure of pride that this was “the African way,” and because this was so centrally the case, he had never really adjusted to life in France where nobody seemed to care about anybody and certainly not about an African like him.
I remember thinking that the
African way
made
affordable
gentle personalities like his, and that his model of African man had not been made in America since the holocaust flagship docked at Jamestown in August 1619. By now I had been reared fifteen generations competitively selfish and callous by a million mothers and fathers, black, white, loving, hateful, voluntary, involuntary. Over the long estrangement, I had become different from Babukar in some fundamental way that did not flatter me.
Babukar looks at a glass and sees a window, a window unto a mother, a son, a sister, a cousin, a niece—nothing that he would
own
. I look at a glass and see a mirror, a mirror in which to see
myself
,
my
writing,
my
future,
my
this,
my
that,
my
place in the Great Acquisitor’s running of the bulls.
Babukar, standing there in a white shirt and black bow tie, holding in his hand the rumpled bill to be signed by me, said that he’d never met a Negro American before and seemed excited at the prospect, having heard a great deal about us. And so I invited him to sit down on the room’s only chair, a small wooden affair beside the shelf-desk that was affixed loosely to the masonry wall.
We talked for fifteen minutes or longer, long enough that I began to worry for his job. But by then he was well into telling me the story of his family, his village, his country. I did not know why he was talking to me like this. I think he believed that he
knew
me, that I was he. But I was not he and had not been for a long, long time. I tried to read him but could not, talking, as we were trying to, after so long a time, from so great a distance, after so much awful had happened. All that would appear to remain between us was race and how we both had been treated because of it.
It was then that I told him I would be leaving in a matter of hours for Timbuktu. He appeared pleased to hear this.
“Have you ever been to Timbuktu before?”
“No. I’ve never even been to Africa before.”
Tossing tree leaves dappled the fresh sunspot on the wall across from the tiny window. For no particular reason, it occurred to me as I noticed this, that the self-effacing Babukar spoke at least four languages: Badjara, Wolof, French, and English.
“Mali is our neighbor. It is right next door to Senegal. Did you know that?”
I said yes when I wasn’t sure that I
had
known that.
“They speak French in Mali. Do you speak French?”
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”
“Don’t worry. You will do just fine.”
“You know, we could be cousins,” he added.
“Could we?”
“Yes. Yes. The Negro Americans when they were Africans came from all over Senegal, even from my village.”
Looking at him smiling at me, I was unaccountably moved by what he had said. If Babukar noticed this, he did not let on.
“How long will you be in Timbuktu?”
“A week.”
“Well then, you must go to Senegal. You must see Goree Island. It is where the slavers kept the Africans before they were taken across the sea to be slaves and, later, Negro Americans.” It was not unlike, I remembered, how sardines were made.
“I will think about it,” I said.
Babukar continued as if he had not heard me: “And you must visit my village and meet my family. They will take good care of you. Let me call to let them know that you will be coming to our village.”
I didn’t know what to say.
T
he moon shone huge and brilliant above a shimmering Mediterranean Sea.
Perhaps because I am my grandmother’s spirit child, I believe in signs. The moon that night was larger than I’d ever witnessed it, a light as bright and soothing as God would mix to announce the resting countenance of a storied continent that was the embattled lovely mother of the black race.
I felt an involuntary stir as the northwest coastline resolved into view along the edge of waters that wrinkled white atop the obsidian depths. Ahead, the Sahara unveiled its vast curvilinear magnificence, delineated in soaring fawn sands and soft blue-shadowed valleys.
Never in my life had I felt as I did in those moments.
Adrift in the cold induced vacuum of the rich retired slaver’s missing ledger, can there be an event more compelling in a victim’s most private and troubled yearning than the long-awaited homecoming of a former African? Nameless. Homeless. Fifteen times removed. Unwell of spirit.
And there it was.
Africa
.
In a solitary transformational moment, I owned it with breast and sinew as I’d never owned anything before, and with such surprising intensity that I shivered, deep within the night, all alone in a celebration that required to be shared.
I suppose it would not have mattered so much to the actuary’s issue, who angle unimaginatively only for solid work with regular hours and good benefits. But it mattered enormously to me that I was aboard that Air Mali flight, bound for the past,
alone
. Occasions like these were not to be forgone cheaply. For how often in life do they present themselves to those who would appreciate their value?
I
needed
Jeanne. I needed her here with me in Mali. I needed her together with me here to begin making our future, a future built importantly of memories in which we would figure almost symbiotically together; pedestrian memories of pedestrian experiences; small memories of being and doing and sharing and laughing and crying; sweeping memories of the years over which we would persist as distinct and different, yet inevitably become each other; cumulative memories lain down as affirming markers on the cold ground of time, units with which to measure how far we had come together and how well we had done. And this common transformational discovery experience, our presence here in Africa together, would be the benchmark from which to begin the taking of this measure.