Walking with Abel (30 page)

A Talib is God’s friend.

Respected mother, respected father,

God will reward you.

Drissa talked little and studied his hands a lot. He picked his toenails. He looked away to ask about his parents and siblings and the cattle. Both times I saw him, he wore the same polyester t-shirt with a portrait of Barack Obama, the second time still more faded than the first. He lived by begging, by trading odd jobs for food and hand-me-down clothes. A Bambara matron whose garden of mangoes and figs he watered and weeded daily in exchange for lunch said he was an excellent worker, honest and kind, but
wallahi
, he didn’t talk! His parents told me he never had, that he was very shy. His tutor, Marabout Kola’s son, said Drissa studied hard and was on track to becoming a very good marabout.

The second time I saw Drissa he was on an assignment for a healer who had asked him to pick twelve lotus flowers for a potion. He did not know what the potion was for. He let me come with him. We walked on an elevated asphalt road, then took a path down to a marsh on the northern edge of San. The marsh was endless and hummocked with small soggy islands in waxy white bloom, and on one such island very far from the mainland stood a lone bay horse. The boy rolled up his pants, black with prints of red and yellow dragons, and waded in. Soon he was waist-deep. He pulled at each flower thoughtfully, slowly. It took him a few minutes. Then he waded back out and stood. The long ropy stems, slack and deflated in his hands, dripped water. He held them in front of his chest and slightly apart as if not knowing what they were. Or what he was. There was a lostness about him.

—

An old cowboy in the bush had told me: “A person who asks questions will never be lost in the world.” But in the savannah the world aligned with family and millennial trade, which often were one and the same. The Fulani herded. The Bozo fished. Everyone told stories around the hearth after dinner. For those of us who inadvertently or by design—whose?—found ourselves without such structure, alone, it was so easy to feel disoriented, disconnected, off course. I felt sad for Drissa and his limp, sopping flowers.

I felt sad for me.

“Anna Bâ,” Gano said to me once, out of the blue. “In your head is a map. But it’s a one-way map. It only knows how to get there, it doesn’t know how to come back.” Back where? I was walking around the Sahel, following someone else’s cattle. And my lover—where in the world was he? I didn’t know. I had been cast off, cast adrift. I used to carry his gift of the pocket compass in my shoulder bag. I would smell its sour brass, finger it smooth. But during the Hoping I had to put it away: it was heavy. And the bearings it set were obsolete.

T
he next day I woke before my hosts, blue and unbalanced after a recurring dream sequence of my beloved’s returns and leave-takings. The merry-go-round of yearning and abandonment had become my companion on so many nights, permitting no rest. I was dispirited and bitter and scorned myself for it. I put on my sandals and walked to the river alone.

I walked past the waking camps: here and there, the glow of a cooking fire, the pale shaft of smoke dissolving into grayblue twilight. Past the cliff where sheer manmade nests of brambles tacked to the earth the graves of Oumarou’s father, son, and daughter, and a dozen graves of the parents and children of other nomads. Past a small Bozo outpost: three banco huts on the lip of a naked bluff where the Fulani bought sugar and tea and charcoal and cigarettes and seasonal peanuts. Past a single tall doum palm growing out of a mound of rotting yellow fruit. The sky paled to smoky blue patches where it was clear and the clouds still held the night, and to the distant west lightning reddened the clouds, hinting at rain elsewhere. I pictured Oumarou waking inside his hut, pacing around the plateau, watching the clouds, wishing them close.

Walking was ever a treasure hunt. Its clues were ephemeral: clouds and dreams; its prizes temporary: rain and a healthy herd and a full stomach for a season—or altogether unreachable: release from heartache. If there was a solution it wasn’t in walking. It may have been in walking on and on and on, forevermore from weather to river to graveyard to pasture.

Beyond the doum palm the river bent and I skidded down a cutbank to the narrow strip of cropped grass. The air was the color of titanium. The river glowed with a prescient glow, the reflection of a day not yet dawned. “If there is magic on this planet,” wrote the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “it is contained in water.” One way or another, everyone in the Sahel was looking for magic.

I checked up and down the current. There was no one in sight. I took off my headscarf and clothes and waded in and swam.

The day before, downstream from here, Hairatou, Djamba, and Kajita Pain-in-the-Ass had forded the Bani to go to Ballé because Hairatou needed to buy twenty cents’ worth of peanut oil and wanted company. Gano and I tagged along. The girls took off their thin headscarves and discreetly wound them around their hips under their skirts. Then they took off their skirts and tied them on their heads to keep the fabric dry. Then they ordered Gano to go ahead and cross first.

“And don’t look back!” they hollered after him. They sat down on the grass and watched him take off his shirt and canvas pants and they giggled and whispered indecencies to one another and fell back on the grass laughing. When he was halfway across they took off their shirts and plunged in. Hairatou had wrapped her sequined red and green and silver scarf around her narrow hips. The sequins shone in the water like fish scales, the skin on her small hard breasts shone, her wet hair. Upon Djamba’s belly shone an exploded chrysanthemum of razor scars where a traditional healer had cut her to treat a persistent and powerful stomachache she’d had as a small child. The girls waded and paddled and joked their way across. Kajita moaned with delight. They reminded me of my sister and her girlfriends—when they were younger, when I still spent time with them. They were the same age as my son. They reached the other bank just in time for a cowherd to drive a thin and thirsty herd into the river. Hairatou plopped down in the water in her sparkling loincloth and cracked up with embarrassment and the plain joy of being wet.

Now, in the dawn river by myself, I remembered swimming with the girls and laughed. Then I laughed again, happy that I was laughing. Happiness, like magic, was both elusive and very simple.

When I returned to camp the Diakayatés were awake and Gano had set aside for me a cup of lukewarm Lipton.

“Where did you go? We woke up and you weren’t here. We were all worried.”

“I’m sorry. I only went for a swim.”

“Then why are your clothes dry?”

“I took them off.”

“Didn’t people see you?”

“It was dark.”

“What about the Bozo on the river?”

“They were far and it was dark.”

“
Wallahi
, Anna Bâ. African eyes, they see far away.”

That afternoon in pursuit of eggs, Gano and I crossed the Bani in a borrowed pirogue to visit Kotimi Genepo. A pair of Egyptian geese grazed by the water. A bearded man sat crosslegged on the ground and stitched a rip in his fishing net. A toddler with a distended stomach and a grotesque navel hernia fed mango peels to a billy goat. Skinny white kittens chased one another under palm trees.

For two dollars Kotimi loaded guinea eggs into the pockets of the khakis Gano had bought in Djenné from a pile of secondhand American donations and filled a ten-liter plastic bucket with mangoes. She handed the bucket to me.

“You’ll bring the bucket back some other time,” she said. And then: “So, there must be a river in the country from which you came?”

“Yes, many. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, we were watching you swim this morning. You swim pretty well. We figured you’d done it before.”

—

Gano had worried also because of waterfolk. Waterfolk lived in the river. They dragged people underwater by their hair and gouged out their navels and eyes. Human eyes and bellybuttons were delicacies; waterfolk served them at their riverine weddings. They preferred their victims to be lightskinned. On slave ships they had hitched rides to the Caribbean; there, they stole men’s shadows. They plucked people’s limbs from their bodies. Some of them had one human foot and one cloven hoof. Some of them had feet that faced backward.

In the bourgou they kept their appearances secret. Often people would see an arm, the slippery curve of a hip, a glistening foot disappearing in the river with a splash. The other day Boucary’s wife Abba saw the outline of a leg when she was washing the dishes in the river; now she would not let her children follow her to the water. The Diakayatés knew of no one who had sighted a water person head to toe and survived.

To protect yourself from waterfolk you took cattle to the river with you. You let the cows enter first, then you quickly dove in, washed, drank, and got out while the cows were still in the river. It was a good way to fool waterfolk, and crocodiles, too. I had been unwise to go swimming without any cows.

At least, Fanta said, I’d had enough sense to go in the dark. A person who washed in the daytime was always sick, poor, and mentally disturbed.

L
ate that night Sita strode into the camp to warn Oumarou to keep a close eye on his cows. A cattle thief was prowling the plateau, he said. He had heard a commotion by the river, in the Sankari camp.

“Oh, that’s just Njobo Sankari,” said Oumarou. “Nothing for us to worry about. He is after his own father’s cattle.”

Njobo had been stealing cows from his father’s herd year after year, for several years in a row. He would sell the cows and buy jewelry, a cellphone, a motorcycle. Oumarou said that if he had been the boy’s father he would have locked him up in a hut and given him only water and uncooked millet. “That’ll teach him.”

“How do you lock up anyone in a hut?” I asked. “A hut is made of grass and reeds, and there is no lock on the door.”

“You tell your son: ‘Stay here and do not leave.’ A son must do what his father tells him.”

“But why doesn’t he obey his father’s orders not to steal cattle in the first place?”

Oumarou thought about it.

“Maybe he is not a good son.”

His own sons listened, dispassionate, respectful. Commonly a Fulani man will have stolen an animal from his father’s herd by the time he reached adulthood. The stunt was meant to be a one-time thing, a rite of passage, a determinant of gender identity—a tame rendition of the cattle raids of yore in which pastoralist adolescents raided the cows of other tribes and took entire herds of animals as swag. In the mechanized Global North, some teenage boys stole cars this way. Because the boys usually took animals that belonged to their fathers or uncles the ritual raiding was not considered theft, and was not punished.

By custom unmarried Fulani boys passed the night not with their elders but with boys of their own age. Together they would take their fathers’ cattle on nightherd. Together they would doze off cocooned in thin cotton blankets among the sleeping cows. Together they would water them. Together, too, once in a while they would conspire to steal an animal and eat it. Most commonly, they stole goats.