Walking with Abel (24 page)

He said: “I’m like a bird, perching, waiting for real rain, waiting to see where the best place will be. Where it rains better, there I will go.”

No one in Isiaka’s or Sita’s family had a cellphone that worked to make or receive calls. For five months, the Diakayatés would have no contact, no news of one another, until—and at this speculation the men evoked God’s name—they reconvened on the narrow knoll near Doundéré and Dakabalal the following December. All across the Sahel Fulani families were studying the sky and plotting the routes of their rainy-season transhumance. That month all the nomads would disperse from the bourgou, splitting kin from kin, scattering across rivers and deserts until the end of harvest.

—

That evening I cooked a stew of fish and tomato paste for everyone in the camp. Fanta helped me peel two dozen tiny garlic cloves and tossed some in the fire, to keep the campsite safe from the evil eye. Garlic was particularly effective as protection for the very young. When I squatted by the hearth to feed to the fire long knotty sticks of kindling, Bomel came over and smiled at me.

“Are you missing someone, Anna Bâ?”

I started.

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re singing.”

I was? I was. I hadn’t even noticed.

“They say when a woman sings, she is missing someone.” She squinted at me. “You sing to yourself a lot, Anna Bâ.”

We ladled the stew into extra bowls and dispatched the food with small children to the huts of Sita and Sita Dangéré and Isiaka. In return, Oumarou’s relatives sent calabashes of milk. We dined in the dark and afterward we ate wild honey with our forefingers straight out of the pot. A menacing red pall trimmed the land to the north where farmers were burning their fields again and to the southeast stars darted across the sky before a coming lightning storm. Ousman lay on his back with his right foot resting on bent left knee and played songs on his cellphone. The phone was called Tiptop Power for Life and had no SIM card; Ousman used it to listen to music. Now a man in the recording sang: “Because sometimes Fulani cut tree branches to feed their cattle / the Ministry of Forestry and Water Resources persecutes the Fulani.”

“When I was young,” Oumarou said, “there were no phones. When I wanted to listen to music I’d go to the griot and I’d reach into my pocket and suddenly there would be a lot of money there. I would sit down in front of the griot and command: ‘Sing very well. Sing for me from here to the sky!’

“Sometimes my friends and I would pitch in and organize a party and hire a griot for the night. Those griots, if you were to meet them today and ask them about me, they’d say, ‘Oumarou Diakayaté, son of Hashem al Hajj,’ and they’d tell you the story of my whole family. Except I think all these griots are dead now. I don’t know if there are still griots anymore.”

—

One afternoon in the Djenné market square Ali the Griot chain-smoked my cigarettes and complained about his life. “I am Griot Number One!” he said. “But no one wants to pay for my stories. So now I am Goldsmith Number One.” No one wanted to pay for his jewelry either. Afraid of the war in the north, Western seekers of the exotic no longer came to Djenné. The town’s tourist-based economy had collapsed. Several millimeters of dust and grime coated everything in Ali’s workshop and his massive display table heaped with silver rings with geometric Tuareg designs and goldleaf Fulani hoop earrings and ebony bracelets inlaid with silver and bronze was a uniform beige bas-relief, like an anthropological dig, a recently disinterred burial site.

Ali complained and I took notes.

“For what?”

“So I don’t forget things. To tell the story accurately.”

“You will tell the story of how Griot Number One sits in the square all day?”

“
Inshallah
. If that’s okay with you.”

“
Wallahi
, Anna Bâ. You are a griot, like me.”

—

After the music had quieted we could hear thunder and we also could hear invisible herds on the move. In the ash of the hearth a goat had nestled like a giant horned hen, warming its belly.

In the night it drizzled lightly, then the wind kicked up to a heavy storm. I ended up the seventh adult jigsawed into Oumarou and Fanta’s hut, jostling for room on the floor cemented with a blue paste of crushed acacia beans and manure ash and clay beneath Hairatou’s artwork, on halfpacked sacks, on mats not yet rolled up for travel. I rested my head on a bundle of coiled pagnes, sinking into its buttermilk scent. Outside the wind shrieked, and squalls thrashed the hut with wet sand and rocks. Frogs began in unison, then stopped. Anxious goats whimpered. Fanta’s chickens peeped by the wall. A mouse ran across our bodies. Then there were more frogs, and goats again, that ancient Sahelian rondo.

But first, at the very end of their last evening in the bourgou, after Hairatou had finished pounding millet and rattling aluminum bowls, after the adults had prayed the final time and baby Afo had dozed off by my side on a polyester mat, the family sat in the dark and drank the milk that Isiaka and Sita had sent over. They drank from two calabashes, slowly and in complete silence.

THE RAINY SEASON

Traveling. . . .

The illusion of having overcome distance, of having erased time.

To be far away.

—G
EORGES
P
EREC

T
he cart was large and tall and had no sideboards. It had been nailed approximately together from wide boards of unfinished wood. Its two wheels had been filched from a sedan. Its underslung metal axle and single shaft were painted canary yellow. A massive and rusted eye lag screwed the tip of the shaft to a heavy yoke carved out of a tree trunk to harness two oxen, but instead the cart was hitched with three donkeys. One of the donkeys was round with pregnancy.

By the time the two rimaibe boys from Senossa drove the cart into the camp most of the Diakayatés’ possessions lay on a single reed mat. The calabashes, stacked one into another. The wooden ladles. The woven straw lids. Two mangoes, one halfeaten, in a calabash. A plastic bowl holding a small bag of peanuts. A green plastic bucket with smaller baggies of spices and medicinal herbs. A tall sack with mat makings. Three large blue plastic bags with something. The kettle for ablutions. Ousman’s own black polyurethane knapsack with a broken zipper, inside of which were the family brand; two muzzles—one studded with thorns, the other with iron square nails—to discourage yearlings from suckling their mother cows; a plastic bag with sugar and tea; a blue enameled teapot; a mostly empty vial of Amitraz 12.5 percent emulsion, an acaricide and insecticide for livestock; a sewing needle; a spool of black thread; his SIMless cellphone. Next to it all lay the mats and blankets and reeds of Oumarou and Fanta’s marital bed, rolled one into the other, a single thick bundle of future rest.

Oumarou and Ousman untied the bits of rope and cloth that for nearly seven months had held together the old man’s hut. They pulled down the thatch, two heavy mats they would take with them to use again. Loose grass flew and dust billowed and Hairatou’s fingerpainting fell to the ground and vanished forever.

The boys from Senossa loaded the mats and rolled-up thatch first, then the heavy bags of rice and millet, then the blankets and the clothes. Cookware and utensils wrapped in pagnes. The mortar. Loose cooking sticks. Then they ran down Fanta’s chickens one by one and tied their legs with strips of cloth and Fanta stuffed them into a netted fishtrap she had found somewhere on her wanderings. The boys hung the fishtrap from the back of the cart, and they tied the tall wooden pestle to the axle with strips of torn pagnes. Sita Dangéré and Oumarou’s son Allaye had left at dawn, driving goats in two separate herds toward Ballé, and cousins were helping Boucary load Sita’s belongings into Sita’s own two small donkey carts. A sheet of clouds had come in and the wind was picking up again, and it blew away tethers and loose matting and it blew from the south the antediluvian whoops and yelps of unseen cowboys ushering their cattle on transhumance.

A hearty meal of millet porridge and fish sauce, for the road. The cart drivers ate with the men. After one more spot of tea Fanta swept the campsite for the last time, out of some sense of rectitude. She tossed to the wind spent teabags, broken flipflops, slivers of cracked plastic. They would tumble into a fen, create a second, industrialized bottom. Frogs would spawn in them. The heavier jetsam—broken veterinary syringes, cracked calabashes, vials of dewormers, smashed flashlight batteries, ripped plastic shoes—snaked in a broomed stria where the calf rope had been. At the beginning of each rainy season the entire bourgou was charted with such tidelines, the markings of nomadic comings and goings. Rain erased them. When I visited the campsite three weeks later the only thing I saw was a patch of tramped dirt.

After she finished sweeping Fanta stood in front of her husband and informed him that she was not coming with him that day to Ballé.

Her elderly brother was very sick. She had learned about his illness from a migrating friend the night before and she had made up her mind to pay him a visit. There was no telling if he still would be alive when the Diakayatés returned to the bourgou after the rainy season, she explained. Or if she still would be. Her brother lived north of the bourgou, on the Niger River, two days away on foot. She already had bound some spare pagnes and a little
chobbal
into a knot, to take along. Bomel would tie Mayrama to her back and walk with her mother for a couple of hours, then schlep half a day to the west, to the village where she lived with her husband, who was also her cousin, the son of Oumarou’s youngest living brother, Allaye.

Oumarou sat for a while and considered his wife’s announcement in silence. Then he said:

“When will you join us?”

“God only knows.”

“Amen, amen, amen . . . It’s far.”

“That’s true.”

“You’ll be tired.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t go.”

“I’m going.”

“All right.”

To show disapproval would have been to demonstrate defeat. “If I need her I’ll tell her to come back sooner,” the old man said. How? Neither he nor Fanta had cellphones. “Oh no, don’t let Oumarou get a cellphone,” warned Boucary, the teasing grandnephew. “If he has a cellphone he’ll call all the women in the bougou and marry them all!”

—

The sun was a full palm above the horizon by the time the three carts slowly pitched across the dried-out fen crazed into large polygonal flakes. The passengers rocked toward the southbound road. In the front Oumarou, young Kajita and Amadou, Hairatou with a sick skewbald week-old goat in her lap. Ousman, Bobo, and their two sons following. Boucary with his wife, Abba, their three small daughters, his mother, Salimata, and his newlywed sister-in-law, Kajita Pain-in-the-Ass, barely fit into the last cart. Their relatives who were staying behind walked alongside the procession, calling out last-minute instructions, tightening slack ropes, holding hands of their departing kin—holding left hands, to ensure another meeting, after the harvest.

To hell with the etiquette of stoicism. Hairatou was openly bawling. All the Diakayatés, disciples of unattachment, Buddhists of the bush, were in tears. Even Yaya. He had walked the farthest after the carts and waved goodbye the longest. After he turned away at last he wiped his face with both hands. Then he lifted the little beaded mirror he wore on one of the lanyards around his neck and checked his eyes.