A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (11 page)

· 9 ·

Many Things in Her Heart

One of the mysteries of the spiritual life is how we learn the depth of an experience only as it befalls us. I am confident enough now that I may write to share the news. I will bear a child. Four months hence. But what I refer to above is this. I had little awareness of what you felt when you were the same and now that I wish for your counsel, I find myself far from your side.

—EMMA TO CATHERINE, IJAYE, 1853

E
MMA DISCOVERED LINES
on her skin. The dry season had come, a silent stalker, and little by little green grasses browned, lower branches in palms grayed like tree moss in South Carolina, and dust rose in the streets. Henry had turned to eating African foods, cassava and native sauce and
akara
, the Yoruba bean cakes. It might have been a kindness, Emma considered, letting her enjoy corn pudding and biscuits—if only he didn’t lean so over the bowl in sopping up the soup. He withheld himself. Her feelings were hurt, and out of that hurt she made a tighter circle with her baby. Yet it was still fine to see her husband so diligent and commanding. His speech was far more elegant than his African eating habits, and she enjoyed the attention he drew in the town. She had longed for guidance, and Henry was offering it. But then she remembered how he blamed her for their pinched finances. She read her Bible and tried to pray. The hedgerow around the compound gave small yellow trumpet flowers, and she collected these in a vase. Then she would see some ignoble thing in the town—someone flogging a child in public—and it would set her back. Another turn of her mind and she would consider how adult Negroes were beaten in her own country. Had she thought it would be easy to follow Christ in any land? Many came to church but there were no converts, even after all of Henry’s time here. In the afternoon—her schoolchildren and Tela gone for hours, Duro not back from market, and Henry not expected for hours—Emma doubted she could endure another five minutes. In such a dolorous mood, she had no power to write, nor pull out her sewing, nor even to worry about snakes. Her abdomen was large with the baby.

She was grateful for Rev. Moore. What an uncomplicated man he was next to her husband. After a while, she confided in him.

“My husband is powerfully devoted to preaching, several times a day,” she said.

“You think perhaps overly so,” he said.

“A body needs time for restoration,” she said.

“Are you worried about him?”

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“He was quite ill before. I’m sure he’s told you.”

“Why, of course. Rev. Bowman told me everything before we married. He was completely candid.” Emma remembered how she had wanted to ask Henry more when he proposed. But now she felt defensive on his behalf. “God uses us—imperfect vessels though we are. With Him all things are possible.”

“Of course,” Rev. Moore said.

They sat silent, Emma watching a bird with tail feathers a foot long perched on a swaying stalk outside the window. “Henry’s commitment is so great,” she said, her hands on her belly.

“Rev. Bowman is a driven man.”

“That’s a way to put it,” she said, sighing deeply, letting go of her reserve. “I fear he forgets his basic needs. He’s lost weight. He seems hardly to sleep.”

“Ah,” Moore said, looking into her. “You’re lonely.”

She smiled. “Of course I’m lonely. But soon I’ll have the baby and plenty enough to keep me busy.”

“What’s your guess, a girl or a boy?”

“Oh, a boy certainly, for my husband.”

She meant for herself: a boy to love.

One late afternoon, after a visit with Moore and alone in the house, Emma saw that Henry had Uncle Eli’s carving and was using it as a rule for lining paper. It pleased her, and she almost believed she could hear the old man’s voice:
I taught you how to see. Remember.
An illumination shone in her mind: Uncle Eli had spent his life far from the aid of family, far from home. Surely she could endure.

By November, the grass was so brittle it broke beneath Emma’s feet like the carcasses of bugs. Lizards clustered as high as possible on the outer walls of the house. The heat was fierce. Her belly sat ponderous on her lap and she developed a skin rash. Henry slept on the piazza while Emma stretched herself across the bed, lying on her back. Occasionally she woke to Henry slapping at a mosquito, and she turned over. In the morning she sat up thinking of muslin. She made a simple light dress and was much relieved by its airiness.
I suppose if the disciples had been women, we might have heard more about ordinary life
, she wrote in her journal.
Such as how to keep cool and refreshed in travel and free of illness.
Well, she thought, women would have talked about having babies, or how not to. But that wasn’t something to write.

Then Henry took sick again. Emma was sure it was from sleeping in the open. She knew the illness now, and it was a bad case: vomiting, chills, heat, and fever. Moore insisted on helping her. “Look at your condition. You must not be alone.” He moved into the guest room. They treated Henry with laudanum and wine mixed with quinine, though Henry fought the quinine. When the fever broke, Emma took broth to his bedside.

“Henry,” she said.

“Why have you painted your face?” he said, gazing at her.

“I have not,” she said, touching her cheek with her free hand.

“Something is wrong,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

“Henry, what do you mean?” She tried to smile.

“The colors,” he said.

She set the bowl aside. “I will send Rev. Moore to help you,” she said.

Midway down the hall, she heard her own thin wail. A sob tore out behind it. And another. She could not stop, even when Moore caught her up. “He’s seeing things,” she managed finally. “Oh my Lord.”

“Here, here,” Moore said. “I’ll take care of him.”

Emma counted up to one hundred and back, over and over.

Poor Duro
, she thought, observing the cook in the doorway as she and Moore shared an evening meal.
He’s worried about us, and for himself.
An intense sympathy stirred within her.

“You may rest for the night,” she said.
O daa ro.

“Yes mah. Good night mah.”

She and Moore retired to the parlor. She took the chair next to her writing box. Soon she was running her finger along the groove, then resting her hand on the scallop.

“Emma,” he said after a bit, “this thing with Henry.”

“Yes?” Her finger again ran along the groove.

“We pray for the best.”

“Yes, we pray for the best.” She opened the box, turning her face from Moore.
In my heart a seal . . .

“However.”

What an unpleasant word.

“It sometimes happens with the malaria,” he continued, “that a person can be momentarily broken by it, someone who has seemed perfectly stable before. The spleen condition seems to come with it but does not appear to be its cause.”

Emma closed the box.

“You may be comforted,” Moore said.

I am not comforted
, Emma thought.

“To know I’ve seen others in this state. Most come back to themselves. Even this evening Henry is much improved. Try to keep him on the quinine.”

“I do. He spits it out,” she said.

Unable to sleep, Emma sat in the rocking chair Moore had lent her. “We live in God,” she whispered over and over, in time with her rocking and the drums far in the distance.

In her journal, Emma sought to make sense of the African illness:
Fever returned. My dear husband suffers much with his spleen even when the illness retreats. Nervousness a contributing factor? And what of me? Will I lose myself? What of the baby?
Her hand shook and she had to stop. When her courage returned, she took some pages and recreated the calendar of their illnesses, beginning with Henry at Bathurst. It seemed evident that her sickness followed the weather, but with Henry, the causes were harder to track. The dry season was not a time to take ill, at least not until December when the harmattan came—that season when sands from the Sahara blew south and evenings could cool of a sudden and bring on a chill. She recollected Henry’s activities. If she pressed her evidence, she thought she would find a code. At Bathurst, he had stayed late on shore and been overly stimulated for several days. This time, he had begun his schedule of preaching before dawn and into the night. At times his pace seemed frantic. In his illness, he resisted the bitter quinine and took laudanum or whiskey instead. Then at times the derangement. She kept this evidence beneath her journal in the writing box.

“You mustn’t worry so much,” Henry said the evening Moore left, declaring his fellow minister sufficiently well. “I always come out. It’s only I’m too ambitious, pressing my will onto God’s.” She was not in full agreement, and he must have sensed it. “I’m only sorry for your sake,” he said.

“If something happened to you, husband, I would die,” she said. She lay down next to him, her back to his chest, her head on his arm. His other arm she pulled over her. “Sing,” she said. He hummed a tune without words, the vibration of his chest a language of this country and themselves in it.

* * *

THE HEAT WAS
like an iron. Emma’s students’ legs turned ashen with dust. A report came through the town that slave traders had attacked a neighboring town, taking several children. Drums sounded night and day. Henry walked about town and returned to report that the gates were fortified with soldiers. Herders brought their animals inside the city walls, and there was braying and bellowing all around. Henry seemed enlivened by the commotion. Emma napped in the day and woke to the dry rustle of wind through banana leaves.

Days she thought she would die if she did not have a letter from home. Someone out there thinking of her. She must receive that voice of assurance. She must. Or how would she know she existed? She tried to think on Mary, who pondered many things in her heart and who must have feared greatly, not for what she knew but for what she did not know, who must have felt at times she would collapse in on herself. When Henry looked more robust, she began to believe again in his strength and their power to endure. A woman wants fortitude in a man and will hold much evidence at bay to believe in him.

In anticipation of Christmas, Duro cut green branches from young trees near the creek and made a bouquet. Emma created white flowers from scraps of paper and hung them with thread from the ceiling. She meant them as snowflakes. But Christmas preparations were delayed. The baby came early instead. When Emma first saw the child, she looked at the loud pink thing and wondered whose it was.

“Your daughter,” Henry said, who had delivered the infant, with Tela’s help. The woman was beside Emma, patting her arm. “
E ku ise o
mah,” she said. “Good work.”

“Thank you,” Emma said, looking at her friend, whose face now seemed always to have been in her memory.

After two days, Emma and Henry agreed to name the child Sarah: woman of beauty, admired even by God, and given an angel as protection. Such a tiny thing she was! Tela brought a small
shekere
, a beaded gourd, to serve as a rattle while Moore made a gift of a dainty silver cup. The church folks created a celebration in the yard, clapping and singing. The house filled with the sweet smell of roasting corn. Emma knew they would have preferred a boy, but any child at all must have been a great improvement over what they had known formerly, a minister without so much as a wife. Now Emma was an
iya
, a mother. In bed, using the lap desk, she wrote to her family in Georgia, and in the writing she was already anticipating a time when they would go home on leave and she would show off her African daughter.

· 10 ·

The Finest Head

I
N THE COOL
harmattan mornings, Henry wanted his wife. She said she wasn’t ready. “It’s perfectly safe,” he said.

“That’s not how I mean it.”

A few nights later he sought her in bed. He felt her arm stiffen, and then she seemed to relax. Returning to his wife, he felt more ownership of the child and that seemed a good outcome of their intimacy. Then he felt remorse, reflecting on his stinginess when he was angry. What made him so desperate that he would punish Emma by withdrawing from her? He gathered leaves from the lemon tree and made her a sachet. He took Sarah for brief jaunts about the compound as his wife dozed on the piazza. Henry understood now why Africans so cherished their children.
No single man should come here
, he wrote in a letter to the board on New Year’s Day, 1854.
A missionary cannot understand the culture without his own offspring. Children are the underpinning of everything.
He looked to every detail of the little girl’s existence. “She does have the finest head I ever saw,” he said to Emma. “But she needs a new bonnet.”

“I just finished sewing the one she’s wearing,” his wife said.

“But it’s tight. It might limit her brain.” He thought Emma looked at him a little wearily. “I’ll find a native woman to make one,” he said.

Soon, Sarah was wearing a Yoruba blue bonnet with a long brim to shade her eyes. Emma found it amusing, and Henry thought whatever hurt she had felt about their physical relations had been resolved. Their little family was the greatest sweetness he had ever known. Looking into the infant’s eyes, he renewed his vow to care for himself.

He got an idea to tear open a haversack and have it resewn so he could carry the child papoose fashion, only forward-turned against his chest so that Sarah could look out into the world. With an umbrella, he bore her around town. He began to imagine a contraption for carrying her on the horse. In the evenings, he spoke Yoruba to her, holding up objects in the lantern light and naming them:
osan
for orange,
iwe
for book.

They slept with the baby between them. For a while Henry forgot to preach; then he reproached himself. Look at what he had been given. One night he woke nervous and brittle. When the Sabbath came and he preached again, there was release, and he rested better.