Walking with Abel (7 page)

She complained about life in the bush. She complained of excruciating pain in her delicate neck, in her thin-muscled arms and legs, her bony back, her emaciated chest, and as she listed her ailments at each day’s close she touched herself gently, pressed her palms to the parts that hurt. Somehow, despite the strict Fulani tenets of forbearance, this was okay. She had no front teeth left and the remaining teeth were rotted and brown. She was narrowboned and gracile and she wore her long gray hair in cornrows woven so that two thin braids ran down in front of either ear and the rest bunched at the back of her head. The tattoo that once had accentuated her whole mouth and blackened her gums had long faded except for an indigo shadow on her full lower lip. She moved like the river. Her beauty took my breath away. Her cooking was divine.

We settled for breakfast in two tight circles on straw mats and on the swept ground, men and women separate but close enough to pass the common bowl of marsh water in which we took turns washing our right hands, just the right—for the left, the unclean hand, must never be used for eating or giving or receiving. Around us the harmattan was drying out the fens and the land around the fens and it carried off loose skullcaps and bits of plastic, slid empty calabashes across the trampled clay, ripped straw out of the huts as if it intended to blow everything away into the Gulf of Guinea. The cows twitched their rumps against its exfoliating gusts and talked softly among themselves. In the thorn trees around us dozens of weavers’ nests bounced like miniature upside-down Fulani huts. A French military plane growled over the trees on its way to bomb the desert. Fanta moaned something about her aching calves. In her nephew’s hut a malarial nine-year-old girl who looked like a Vermeer portrait was burning up with fever. Or was it the three-year-old? Someone was always sick in the camp. For them, their kin’s prayers.

“Bismillah!”
Fanta said, and within the men’s circle Oumarou pushed down his chin the bottom loop of his faded cotton turban with a gnarled thumb and echoed: “
Bismillah!
Dive in!” Oumarou and Fanta lifted the woven lids off the rice simultaneously and we dipped the wet fingers of our right hands into the edges of our bowls all at the same time to ensure that everyone had the same share of food.

There we sat over two tin bowls of rice: so breakable, so nameless on our uncountable journeys, so inadequate to the pain these journeys laid out before us. Yet our stamina was maddening. We were so tenacious. We were hungry for breakfast.

The rice was scalding and dusted with windblown grit and bits of straw and specks of burnt cow manure from the fire. It was perfect. It didn’t taste like survival at all. It tasted like joy.

A
fter breakfast Fanta ducked into the hut and emerged shaking a wood-stoppered gourd with a narrow neck.

“Anna Bâ?” Hand outstretched. It was my time to churn. Hairatou had had a go at the gourd before; Mama would be next. All morning the women churned and churned and churned milk into buttermilk and butter so that when the sun was a palm above the low eastern treeline Fanta could take the dairy to Weraka and Wono.

Cattle belonged to men. Men took cows to pasture twice daily, for several hours each time, at midnight and at noon. A seven-year-old boy was old enough to take out a herd for a day and bring it back. A fifteen-year-old boy was old enough to take the herd on a seasonal migration route alone. When the cows returned to camp it was the men’s job to milk them before they reunited with their calves, although women, too, knew how to milk them in a pinch.

Women owned the milk. They decided how much would stay in the family and how much would be bartered for grain or dried fish or sugar or salt or Lipton or lumps of raw shea butter, which smelled like an intoxicating composite of chocolate and human feces, and which could be used for cooking and skincare and sorcery. When they were paid in money they spent it on jewelry or sugar candy or pots or skeins of calico for clothes. When men wanted new clothes or jewelry they sold a goat or a sheep. For the most part the men and the women lived in a premonetary economy and rarely used money to measure the price of commodities they occasionally had to purchase. It was beyond question that there was no truer wealth than milk and cattle.

Manure belonged to no one; it was first come, first serve. Ousman barely had reached the camp that morning when small Diakayaté children ran out to collect dung for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ breakfast fires. Now two shirtless teenage Bozo girls at the far end of the fen were heaping cow pies into huge thatch baskets.

Fanta looked at the girls. Only two hours into the day and already their shadows had shrunk into hard dark slivers under their feet and the sunlight was the color of quicksilver. It was very hot and getting hotter. Time to get going.

She took the gourd back from Mama and shook it once and knew by the feel of it in her hand that nuggets of butter sploshed inside. She poured the contents of the gourd into a calabash she had whitened on the outside with chalk the night before to make her wares more attractive to her customers. She threw into the buttermilk a curdling stick she had scraped clean with her husband’s long broadsword and a small plastic scoop to measure out the buttermilk in five-cent increments, then set the calabash inside another, old and also white and with a long jagged crack patched up with cornhusks and polypropylene string unraveled from a gunnysack. She slapped against her thigh two flat lids that Hairatou had woven out of grass and colored thread, and two ocher puffs of dust shook loose. She arranged the lids on top of the calabashes. She pulled off the roof of the hut a pagne printed with pink strawberries against a limegreen field. She twirled the pagne lengthwise in her hand until the fabric spun a thick rope, pink-green-pink-green-pink, and then with both hands rolled that up into a doughnut and arranged it on top of her yellow and red headscarf. She draped another length of cloth, this with a psychedelic design of yellow and blue and red bubbles, over her head and shoulders like a shawl and wound one end around her neck.

So cocooned in color, Fanta nestled the calabashes on top of her head and set off on the southbound path toward Weraka. She bid no farewells: this was a ritual she performed every other day and it did not merit ceremony. Nor did she ease gradually into her walk. She started right out of the camp at a quick steady stride that never changed until she reached the village. It was the tempo of her last walk, and of her walks before that, and of her mother’s, and of all the milkmaids’ past recall who had affixed their footsteps to the trail before. She simply picked it up. She would have picked up a dropped calabash that way, or a grindstone she had loaned to a neighbor.

—

At first Fanta walked with her right hand raised to hold the straw lids so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. After a hundred paces the arm and the wrist drained of blood and began to ache. She stopped and shook off her right plastic flipflop and with her toes scooped up from the ground a flat stone. She flexed the right leg at the knee and stood on her left unbending leg and without leaning, without looking, reached behind her with her right arm and picked the stone out of her foot. Neck perfectly straight, the calabashes steady on her head. She had done this a thousand times before. Her bubble-printed shawl flapped against her cheek. She placed the rock on the topmost lid and let both arms fall like a marionette’s arms by her sides and walked again. Around her ankles night moisture rose cold from the drying fields. Pied crows hopped in low labyrinths of manure.

—

When you passed a Fulani woman on a dirt road something strummed within, some liminal memory, an inchoate recognition.

And then you knew. It was the smell of sour milk. The proto-scent.

I
n Weraka Fanta banged on doors. She banged on doors of reeds tied together with string, on doors of corrugated metal, on doors of corroded tin painted yellow and black, of thick wood. She banged on a door of three metal sheets held together with an uneven black wooden crossbeam that looked salvaged from a busted pirogue. No one behind these doors wanted her buttermilk.

She hallooed no villagers she passed but she did pause to clasp hands with other milkmaids who had come to trade from Somena or from other camps near Doundéré. They greeted one another by asking whether their journeys to Weraka that morning had gone well and whether they and their cattle were in good health. They traded family gossip and accounts of richer pastures and births and deaths, and stories they had heard thirdhand about the war and all the airplanes and the Fulani marabout Amadou Koufa, who once had gathered congregants in numbers that not even Djenné’s Grande Mosquée could accommodate and who now was in the Sahara, calling upon his nomadic disciples to join the new jihad. This was how the nomads got their news. This was bush radio.

For an hour Fanta circled through the village. From door to door sidestepping sewage puddles that sloughed from trenches dug under compound walls and hemorrhaged one into another in odd phosphorescent curlicues. She sold nothing. Then she walked south past a large open courtyard where men sat weaving long thin strips of unbleached homespun cotton on several large foot-treadle looms and she walked below a single twined doum palm that clacked its loud fronds like bones very high above and she walked past all the handslapped mud walls of Weraka and across a fallow millet field in which a halfeaten carcass of a goat that even black kites no longer wanted stank in the sun and into Wono, where a Bozo woman with a stern broad face called, “Hey, Fulani!” and motioned for her to step through a gate soldered from flattened tin oilcans.

Fanta entered a large courtyard. It had been swept recently and in the far corner under a mango tree a preteen girl in a
LOVE PINK
t-shirt torn at the shoulder was gutting a basinful of small carp. Closer to the gate three women in calico boubous and matching headwraps were pounding millet and rice in three tall wooden mortars, clapping their hands at each bounce of their long pestles, beating out a rickety village waltz. When they saw Fanta they stopped pounding and rested their thick forearms on the tops of their pestles. They spoke in Fulfulde.

“What do you want, Fulani?”

“A woman told me to step in here, said there might be business.”

“What do you have?”

Fanta approached the women and set the calabashes on the ground in front of them and lifted off the lids. Eight or nine yellow dollops of butter floated in sour milk bubbles. Magnificent sun crumbs. One of the women pointed at a low stool hewn out of a palm trunk.

“Good. Grab a seat.”

Soon the shoeless children of Wono crowded around Fanta with bowls of unhulled rice and plastic cups of dry millet. All the grain was dusty and pebbled. From her stool Fanta poured the rice grains into the larger calabash and poured the millet separately onto a ripped black plastic bag she had borrowed from the women of the house and spread on the ground by her side, and she blew into the emptied cups and bowls to clean them of grain dust and deliberately measured buttermilk into them. Three scoops of buttermilk for a half kilo of rice, for a kilo of millet. She asked each child in turn if they wanted butter. Butter was extra. A woman came with an empty purple lunchpail stamped with yellow and white and pink hearts and the inscription
I
AFRICA
and paid for her butter in coins that Fanta accepted without counting and tied into the corner of her headscarf.