Makeda (31 page)

“I’ve seen a cross like that somewhere before, but I can’t remember where.” She was quiet for a while, then she said, “I remember now. Oh yes, it’s Ethiopian. It’s a Lalibela cross. I couldn’t place it at first because I had never seen one in the United States. A wealthy Ethiopian Christian friend I went to school with in Paris showed me one that she owned that was very similar to this one. Hers was an antique—hundreds of years old and very valuable. My friend’s cross was almost identical to this. I’m almost sure this is from Lalibela.”

We looked at each other.

“How did your grandmother come into possession of this?”

Before I could answer, we heard a footfall on the stairs above. Remembering my early training, I returned the cross precisely to its former position on the table. The old wooden stairs creaked with age. Jeanne gripped my hand and rose to her feet, pulling me up with her.

My grandmother turned through the vestibule and moved into a parlor that appeared just as it had when I was five. She paused in the afternoon sun shaft that must have felt warm on her skin.

“Welcome home, Gray.” Sightless eyes agleam. Arms open. “So at last I get to meet your Miss Burgess. Hello, my dear. Welcome to my home. So glad to have you here.”

Her voice had a rosy enveloping quality to it, causing Jeanne to visibly relax. My grandmother wore a generously draped, resplendently embroidered raw silk white gown with a head-wrap of the same fabric and color. Her uncovered eyes looked synchronously sightless and penetrating. It was as if she were seeing all and nothing.

I went to her and hugged her in silence for a long while. I led her to her red-velvet rocking chair, though she didn’t need me to guide her. I then brought Jeanne by the hand around the little coffee table and over to where my grandmother was sitting.

“I-I’ve so looked forward to meeting you, Mrs. March.” Jeanne grasped her hand and leaned down to embrace her.

“And I you, my dear. You’ll never know how good you’ve been for Gray. I hear it in his voice.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Gray, would you go to the kitchen and ask Gertrude to bring us—what would you like, dear, coffee, tea, juice?”

“Tea, thank you.”

“Tea for Jeanne, and what about you, Gray?”

“Tea will be fine for me, Grandma. What can I bring you?”

“Tea as well.”

After I left the room, my grandmother spoke to Jeanne: “I don’t say this because he’s my grandson, but he’s a fine young man. He’s had some tough things to handle. And he loves you very much. But I’m sure you already know that.”

“Yes, ma’am. And I love
him
very much.”

“I know, dear. I know. I can feel it. Now I can relax. Take good care of him. He’s like a son to me.”

“I will, Mrs. March.”

The sun poked its beam through a V-shaped opening in the tall cumulus cloud. Its piercing ray seemed to arrest my grandmother’s heed. She turned toward it and raised her face to its warming light.

She lowered her eyelids then, and appeared to relocate to and from somewhere in the far past, and then back again into the little room. She spoke very quietly—as if her words were offered not for us, but as a poultice, a salving rumination, a solace of sorts, to offset the man-made modern social condition; a modest celebration, perhaps, the reasons for which only she could know sufficient cause to understand or appreciate.

It was warm in the room. Across its deep shade, the sun seemed to choose her as its point of interest. She kept her face turned to it as she enunciated her words with meticulous care. Whispering meditatively as if to herself, “Here we are.”

Was she speaking of a time or a place? I couldn’t know.

Jeanne and I said nothing.

We waited.

Then drawing us in, she said, “I think that I remember most everything now. The grandest of times were of an ancient age in which our people worshipped this very sun. I think it must be those few things that are ageless—the sun, the soul, the universe—that join me from then to now, and to you.

“For our people, these present times are, without doubt, the worst of times—the self-destructiveness, the willing self-abasement—but know that this will pass and we will be restored of our health. I will die and live on among you to see this—and so shall you.

“Now, Gray,” my grandmother continued, sounding more like herself again, “tell me what you have learned from the
hogon
about my father and the Dogon heavens.

“I want you to tell me everything that happened. First, what it looked like, and then what it felt like—the air, the rain, the wind—and the people, the earth, the night sky, the houses, and then the smells, the sounds—everything.”

Despite these requests, I had the clearest conviction that my grandmother already knew everything that we were about to tell her.

“I need to know what they told you.”

Later, I would come to believe that she had asked these questions more for our benefit than for hers.

I began as detailed an account as I could recall of all that had happened, starting with my encounter with the Senegalese room service waiter at the Orly airport hotel, and going virtually hour-by-hour through to the meeting Jeanne and I had with the
hogon
.

While I was talking she retrieved the bronze cross from the spot where I had replaced it on the table and began to move the palm of her hand slowly back and forth across its detailed surface.

I described to her the centuries-old banyan tree, which, I told her, was very like the one in her dream. She emitted just above a whisper, “Aah, aah,” her sightless eyes moving from the sun and into the room, locking onto the location of my voice.

“Your name was Bright Light,” I said to my grandmother. Eyes shining, she smiled a faraway smile.

She asked again about her father and I told her how he had become a great
hogon
and had lost his sight, only to regain it after the surgery at Sankore.

“Did the
hogon
know what happened to me?”

I told her how she had disappeared and she, of course, understood what this meant.

“Grandma, the
hogon
took us through an opening in the cliff to a chamber where an old engraved stone column stood with the Sirius stars carved into its face. What had been carved into the stone pillar was identical to the drawing you made.”

“Aah. Aah.” Pleased. Vindicated.

“Give me your hands, Grandma.”

She put the cross down and extended her hands in front of her, palms up. I sprinkled on them a few grains of the soil that the
hogon
had asked me to give to her.

“Grandma, the
hogon
wanted you to have this.”

She rolled the soil between the palms of her hands. Although I would further explain where the soil had come from, it would be unnecessary.

She raised her smooth unwrinkled face again to the afternoon sun in the window. Tears slipped slowly from her eyes and rolled in two slender lines across her cheeks.

All during this time, Jeanne sat beside me, silent, transfixed. My grandmother put her at ease by holding her hand while I told of our journey.

Though my grandmother had no history of making rash appraisals of people, she seemed to feel an immediate affinity for Jeanne and swept her unconditionally and uncharacteristically into her usually cautious confidence.

Jeanne’s presence changed the chemistry of how Grandma and I customarily related to each other. She lent to the proceeding the cheerful ballast that a woman brings, a woman Grandma had pretty much already welcomed as
the
woman for her grandson.

With effervescent enthusiasm, Grandma asked question after question, requiring after each a detailed answer. She wanted to be told the story of our trip from beginning to end, with no particular omitted, small or large.

She pressed me for a description of Babukar, the Badjara room service waiter at the airport hotel in Senegal, who spoke Wolof and bore a Wolof name.

She asked, “What did he look like? Was he tall, with that beautiful dark skin the Senegal people have?”

I answered, “Yes, in fact he was shorter than I but tall and had the skin you like.” I told her the story of Babukar’s family with the detail of an intimate relation.

“The father worked as a carpenter six days a week, including Thursdays, although the family knew some faraway people—Akân people—Babukar said, who wouldn’t till the soil on Thursdays because that was a day of rest for the Earth, and the Earth was a spirit, a deity that was second, as such, only to God.”

With that, Grandma shook her head and hummed an exotic phrase of music that I had never heard before.

“Now tell me about the professor, Bokhari. What was he like?”

I described to her everything that I could remember, including the strange sense I’d had that Bokhari had materialized in the airport waiting room out of thin air, as manna born of some rare and protective astral alignment, and was placed there in the waiting room to serve as a shepherd to help me find my way
home.
At the time, the feeling hadn’t seemed strange at all, but on the contrary, quite right and fitting.

Grandma then turned her face to Jeanne and said, “I want you to tell me about the
hogon
and everything he said to you. Gray is a man, and men leave out the little things that women know are important.”

I suspected that she had made this invitation to Jeanne to have her feel that she was now one of us. That she was a trustee of our secret, Grandma’s dreamt memories of her incredible astral journey across the ages.

Jeanne started to tell her about the
hogon
and how he’d led us through an opening in the great 600-foot Bandiagara escarpment.

“I felt as if I knew him,” Jeanne said. “Even his title was familiar to me.”

“What do you mean?” Grandma asked.

“When our guide said that he was taking us to meet the
hogon
, I knew then what a
hogon
was. That a
hogon
was a high priest.”

Jeanne hesitated. Grandma said, “Go on. Go on, dear.”

Jeanne began again: “My family is from Haiti. The religion of most Haitians is African in origin. It is called Voudoun. A high priest in Voudoun is called a
hougan
.”

Then Jeanne told Grandma everything that had happened with the
hogon
in the cool space inside the great cliff.

“Before we left, the
hogon
gave the soil of your birthplace to Gray to be given to you. Gray then gave the
hogon
a picture of you which he examined without speaking for a long time, as if he were looking upon the face of a great spirit.”

All told, we stayed with my grandmother for more than three hours, talking, eventually, about the more mundane details of our lives and how they intersected and diverged.

As we were leaving to drive back to Baltimore, I remembered to ask Grandma about the metal cross with the elaborate crossbars of near equal length.

“A nice man with an accent gave it to me in church at the spring Lott Carey meeting.” Lott Carey was a major national black Baptist association to which my grandmother had belonged for many years. “He said he thought it would mean somethin’ to me. I have become attached to it.”

“Do you know where it comes from, Grandma?”

“A deacon carried a cross like this high above his head in my Lalibela dream. It looks like the roofs of our stone churches. I was there. In Abyssinia. More than once. As different people. I was Jewish there once, I think, but I hadn’t in that life been born into Judaism.

“Then once, in one of the flashes, I was sittin’ in a church shaped like this.” She ran her fingers over the cross. “I think it was the church consecrated in my Lalibela dream, the dream you woke me from when you were a little boy. We called it the Beta Medhane church and it was shaped just like this cross. That’s all that comes to me.”

I spoke by telephone with Dr. Quarles the following Monday to ask if he had ever heard of an underground church carved from rock in the form of a square cross, with a name beginning with the words
Beta
or
House
. He asked if he could call me back the following day. He wanted to speak with a colleague at Howard about what he thought could be the answer to my question.

I had consulted with Dr. Quarles before leaving for Mali. It was only the second time I had talked with him since completing my undergraduate work. Still, he had been very generous with his time when I had asked for his general counsel on traveling in Africa. He had also extracted from me a promise that I would come by and visit with him upon my return.

He reminded me of this when he called back the following afternoon.

“When can you get over to campus, Gray? I want to hear all about your trip. I’ve never been to Mali. I hear it’s fascinating.”

“I can do it anytime next week, professor. You tell me what’s convenient for you.”

“How is Thursday at one o’clock? We can have lunch.”

“I’ll be there.”

He was an easy, unpretentious man who from all appearances was all but oblivious of his academic celebrity.

“Oh, by the way, I spoke to my friend. The church, or churches, are in Ethiopia at a place called Lalibela after King Lalibela who, in the twelfth century, had eleven of them hand-carved out of rock. The churches are said to be intricate in design with elaborate detail work. The churches are said to tower in height with tunnels and passageways chiseled through solid mountain rock connecting at least four, if not all of them. The name of one of the churches is Beta Medhane Alem, which means The House of the Savior of the World. My friend is certain that what you asked about is in Ethiopia because nothing like it exists anywhere else in the world.”

“Did you mention the cross-shaped design?”

“Yes. He described an ornate work of ancient religious craftsmanship called the Lalibela Cross. The rock-hewn churches that incorporate this cross are Christian, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows the evolution of Christianity. According to my colleague, Ethiopians have been Christians since 34 A.D., more than three centuries before whites converted to the faith. The oldest Christian church in the world was begun in Ethiopia. Does this help you?”