A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (14 page)

· 15 ·

Like a Calabash

J
ACOB LIFTED THE
edge of his shirt and wiped his face. The meeting had gone well. Pastor called him “our man.” But the interview had also been a trial, especially with the woman. Was it necessary to go into his capture? Bats came into his head.

Ah. That day from boyhood. At first, he had thought it might be some spirit festival he had fallen into—the way he tripped and was pulled into the air, as if a great bird had captured him. The world went upside down, all the trees coming out of the sky instead of up from the ground. His head spun and he screamed. Those ugly men shouting in rude tongues. Only when they lowered the net could he perceive how he had been upside down. He saw other young boys. It must be an initiation. He had heard that it could happen this way. Boys set upon by elders who would take them out of the village for a set of trials. But none of the men was familiar. Unless they were wearing masks. If so, they were not like the masks he knew before. These were too real, like men’s faces pressed into themselves. The spears they carried spit fire. One fire reached for a child when he ran. It pinned him in the air and then he fell into a tiny heap, like old cloth thrown to the rubbish.

He had fallen into a very bad world. For several days he believed he might wake. He ate and moved only to save himself abuse by the spirit men. When he was transferred in one village, he found another boy who had a proper tongue. That was how he learned it was not a dream or a spirit bush.

“This man has taken you,” the boy said. “Now you are his, like a goat. You must do as he commands or he will flog you.”

But how could Jacob follow commands when no one had a proper tongue?

His heart broke like a calabash.

When he was saved by the British and taken to Sierra Leone, he followed every instruction he could understand, fearful of the men without skin. But no one struck him. He was given clothes and placed in a room with boxes for sitting until he began to hear the language. He took it in quickly. In the afternoon he worked with the other boys on a farm. The land was very like his country. There was no guard. In any case, where would he go? Every seventh day, he and the other children, with the white people, entered a larger room with a long golden rod crossed by a shorter rod. Here also, he tried to follow. When he was in the school for two years and comprehended Galatians chapter three, verse twenty-eight, he declared himself a Christian.
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free.
In Jesus Christ he could never be a slave again.

If his family had survived, or any part of his village remained, he would not be looking for an
oyinbo
father. But it was not the case. Instead he had discovered an American missionary who had been witness to the signing of a treaty between Lagos and England that ended the slave trade. He was on the edge of a new world with this man, Rev. Bowman, and the peculiar wife, who spoke as if she did not know how to bring English to an African ear. But something in her reminded him of a deer, a
duiker
, and he thought she might be better than most
oyinbo
women.

Let Jesus make a new house for him in Ogbomoso.

· 16 ·

The Hammock

T
HE DAY THEY
were to leave, clouds hung low and full. The church had insisted on a send-off. They brought gifts. Emma’s was an ivory bracelet she would never wear because it fell off her arm. She thought this item might suggest she should plump up. Henry’s gift was a lavish Yoruba
agbada
. On the spot, he pulled the robe over his American clothes and everyone cheered. Women followed Emma out of the yard, petting her arms. She gave Tela a china teacup to remember her by, and the woman wept more largely than her mother had when she left Georgia. Tela insisted Emma take her blue shoulder cloth.

“I pray mah, I pray,” Tela said, her hands still clasping Emma’s.

Emma’s students stood in a cluster, and she thought her heart would fail her.

“Please mah.” It was Jacob in front of her, demanding attention. “It is time.”

Emma pressed a wide-brimmed hat on her head and prepared to enter the hammock, an African version of the carriage, but motored by men rather than wheels and a horse. An awning was stretched on a rectangular frame, including flaps that could be let down on either side to offer shade, and from the frame hung a canvas seat outfitted with arms and a footrest. A smaller version of Emma’s seat, one facing hers, had been added for Abike, the new handmaid, who was already seated. The porters, she saw, were prepared with ample crowns of cloth to diffuse the weight of the wooden beams on their heads. Still, she worried it would be too heavy for them.

“Enter mah,” Jacob said.

She did as she was told, and Jacob left for the front of the caravan. The Yoruba men’s talk was polite as roses as they adjusted the hammock.

“Bring it forward small-small.”

“Thank you for helping me.”

“You have done well.”

They were up and off. Emma saw Henry ahead, riding his new mount, with the king’s four guards also on horseback. Just then, she heard a clap of thunder and the sky opened. In her last glimpse of her women friends, they were running for cover. Emma tried to get a count. It seemed there were about fifty in their company: twenty-odd porters conveying their loads, Duro and Abike, who now looked rather morose, and Jacob, as well as a number of traders, men and women, who had annexed themselves to the caravan, hoping to avoid taxes charged along the way.

She sat back and focused on the girl in front of her. She had an oval head and her cheekbones were visible when she smiled. Her chin was short but ended smoothly under her full lower lip. And her eyes seemed almost round in a lovely way that made them look diamond shaped. Her eyebrows, arched in the middle, contributed to this effect. She had smallish ears delicately set with tiny gold earrings. And yet she had visible muscles in her upper arms, lapping one upon the other like brown waves. Suddenly the girl began to moan; then she wept.

“Here now,” Emma said. “You’re afraid.”

The girl’s shoulders rose and fell in terrible regularity, and at last she raised an arm as if she would wipe her face with the back of her hand.

“No,” Emma said, “wait!” She shook Tela’s blue cloth to its capacity and began a full sweep of Abike’s face. “Now blow,” she said. “That’s better.” Emma had worked with Abike only twice, one afternoon packing kitchen items and another organizing her personal effects. The girl knew English, but it wasn’t yet clear how amenable she would be to more instruction. She seemed to have a habit of closing her face.
Either she’s stubborn or she’s smart
, Emma thought;
however it may be, she’s now in my care
. In a compartment of her mind, she knew she was glad for the girl’s company.

The rain let up to a drizzle and their throng of travelers looked, to Emma, quite lovely in the mist as they traveled on a tolerable road through areas of farm and open field. Far ahead was Henry on Caesar. At one point, Jacob came back to check the progress. He had some sort of musical instrument strung around his neck and shoulder. It fit snugly against his back and looked from a distance like a tortoise shell. Curiosity rose in Emma like a candle flame.

When it seemed an hour had passed, she began to feel overlooked. They entered a deep wood, the rain intensified again, and Henry was lost from her vision.

It was a great relief from the fretting—against which she had foresworn—when she caught sight of a boy, the only child she’d seen in their company. She tried to keep him in view, but he slipped in and out among the crowd. Each disappearance made her nervous. He was a small, lovely life and she meant to know him. At one point, she caught herself counting,
One two three four remember five six seven eight remember
.

Occasionally when the caravan came to a clearing they would be offered a patch of sky—she would relax and tell herself all was well—but then they must plunge back into the gloom. Oddly enough, Abike began to relax and appeared in charge of herself. She settled into talking with the porters and keeping herself amused. Emma felt truly deserted.
I must think on where we are going
, she considered,
and not descend into self-pity
. She closed her eyes, hoping to fetch some thought that would inspire her. In a moment, she felt a tug on her arm. The hammock stopped. Here was a woman from the caravan holding out a leaf of fried plantain.

“For me?” Emma said. She turned to the porter. “Am I to pay her?”

“No mah. She is giving it to you so you will not weary.”

“Thank you,” Emma said.
“E se.”
The woman tipped her head.

As the caravan plodded along and Emma nibbled the plantain, sharing with Abike, an idea wove itself into her mind. She would begin a women’s class in Ogbomoso, but rather than having it on the mission compound, she would travel into the town and find the women where they were. She would be less constricted, her life active and full; she would know things firsthand. Throughout her pondering, Emma kept her eyes on the boy, and it was clear from the way he sought to emulate Jacob that he was with the guide. Instinctively, she reached for Abike’s hand and found it small and warm.

* * *

O
N THE NIGHT
of the second day, they came to an
aroje
, or caravanserai, at the side of a river. The people seemed familiar with Englishmen because they saluted Emma and Henry, but only a few stopped to study them. With the children, it was different. They were curious, slipping up to touch Emma’s skirts. She accommodated and even coaxed them a little, walking about more than she had need of. She was waiting for just the moment when she would amaze them by throwing out a slew of Yoruba sentences. The oldest boy eventually got so bold he touched her hand. “What is your name?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be at the farm? Won’t your father flog you?”

She got just what she hoped for. The children put their hands to their mouths and then swept down, headfirst from the waist in a pendulum movement. They were instantly garrulous. Why were her feet black when her face was white? “Those are boots,” she said, and showed them. Could they touch her hair? “Yes.” Where were her children? She felt a chill at her heart. What would she say? She put her hands on her hips and sighed so deeply the expended breath raised the hair on her forehead. “My children are in front of me,” she said at last. The youngsters looked at her with great seriousness. “I am going to find them.” One girl told her she must hurry since her children might be hungry. Several offered to help her look. None appeared disbelieving. Emma crossed her arms over her chest, holding in a surfeit of feeling.

She and Henry were to camp in a hunter’s house. The hunter himself was apparently out in search of leopards. One lone pelt hung from the wall. While Henry built a fire, Emma found a native broom to poke at the thatch, encouraging the spiders to flee. She was glad for this bit of housekeeping, which brought her together with her husband. Across the road, the women from the caravan were making fires and fetching water, the men making themselves comfortable.

“I’ll never understand why the men of this country sit around while the women labor,” she said, coming outside to shake her broom. She caught sight of Jacob. He had behaved responsibly on the road, but now he sat like the other men, swatting at insects and throwing groundnuts into his mouth. In a moment, he reached around and pulled his turtle-banjo into a position to play it. The little boy sat next to him, swinging his arms as a few brief notes vibrated in the air. “Who is that child traveling with us?” Emma said. “He can’t be six years old.”

“Some relation of Jacob’s,” Henry said.

Emma became dimly aware of how she had linked the child with Sarah. “Is it safe for him—being on a caravan?”

“Certainly. You know how strong these children are, once they survive their second year.”

By the time they had eaten, Henry was complaining of aches and pains.

“Let’s go to bed,” Emma said. By lamplight, they pulled off their outer garments. “How did this happen?” she said, catching sight of Henry’s bruised leg.

“The road was trenched in spots. Caesar had some difficulty. Once or twice, he sent me against a stump,” Henry said.

Emma pulled in close to her husband, her head in the crook of his shoulder. As she closed her eyes, she fancied him in his youth, coming home from a scuffle, a fall, his mother finding the bruise, tending it, in a world before she was born.

· 17 ·

The Oba River

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the Oba River ran green and swollen from rain. Emma had never been good at calculating distance, but she decided it must be forty yards across. The so-called rafts they were to use were actually contrived from the large flat ends of two gourds, cut and cemented to forge round devices the size of a bedside rug. They would have to enter the river and cling to them to cross. The man who would serve as her ferrier assured her there were no crocodiles to be found in these parts. Emma hadn’t thought to worry about anything but drowning before he brought up the possibility of being eaten.

“Yes,” she said in her Yoruba. “The crocodile isn’t here.”
That’s settled
, she thought, but the ferryman had more to say. According to his witness, red birds enter the river where they turn into red fish and frighten away the reptiles.

“Only our savior, Jesus Christ, can deliver us from pestilence,
ipalara
,” she said, her eyes fixed on the vines that hung from the opposite trees, making shapes like huge grottos. “We should pray to him for safety rather than trust in red birds.” Had she been right about the distance? She didn’t want to think about depths.

“Yes mah,” the man said, and it occurred to Emma that he might mistake her prayer for a plea to the water
orisha
.

“Jesus is Lord,” she said firmly.

“Jesus. I know Jesus,” he assured her, appearing to find no conflict between the risen Savior and his story of the crocodile.

Henry was down the riverbank, sorting the last batch of loads. Every mattress, box, locker, pot, and piece of paper would cross on the round rafts, even their wardrobe. Emma tried to imagine the contents of her mother’s parlor balanced on a gourd. The image was preposterous. Yet Emma’s whole aim was to put her life in God’s hands, to straighten all that bentness in Georgia, to make straight a pathway. This morning their path lay on the other side of the river. “Very well, then.” Emma lowered her head. “Let us pray.” A wand of hair fell from her bun and she tucked it up as she began. “Merciful Jesus, center us in your grace, guide our passage, protect us from all harm, that we may serve thee, to the glory of God.”

Just as the man was intoning a long
Amen
, Henry came up.

“Are you ready, Mrs. Bowman?” he said in his whimsical, formal way.

“Yes. Certainly. We have prayed, Rev. Bowman.” How grateful she was for her husband, who had chosen her, saved her from a life of boredom and terror in Greensboro, where not even her mother understood her longing. He guided her into the shallows. The ferryman was waiting, very serious now. Settling into the river opposite him, Emma saw that her dress would rise like a lotus blossom. “Help me,” she said, and Henry patted it down. Then she clasped the man’s shoulders so their arms were locked across the raft; he gave a push, they left the shore, and she let out a cry. Just then, she felt a splash and saw Jacob leaping into the current, as if she had commanded him. He was swimming with one arm and with the other holding Henry’s rifle above his head, pointed toward heaven.
What a crusader
, she thought. Just as quick came the thought that the man was awfully strong. Then came Henry, swimming beside her. His face crested the water as he threw both arms ahead and lifted his breast, and she remembered the first time she saw him, coming into church out of the rain, his hair damp. Just then the raft carrying her writing box appeared in jeopardy of capsizing. She lunged toward it and her head went under water. In that eerie half second she apprehended the movement of some large white apparition. Just as the ferryman caught her up, she knew it was her pantalets. Thank goodness the raft had righted itself. They were safe. Sputtering but relieved, Emma looked about to see the whole party crossing. There was Caesar, looking nobler than he had on land as he plowed through the current, and Abike trying to climb her ferrier like a ladder. Just then she perceived the river’s bottom beneath her feet. They were across.

Henry wrestled the rifle from Jacob.

“You might have lost it in the river.”

“No sah. I swim very well, as you have seen,” Jacob said.

“Still, you had no authority. There might have been an accident.”

“No accident at all.” The small lad came up to stand beside Jacob. Emma observed his large brown eyes and the string of blue beads around his waist, a nod to some native deity.

“You don’t take the point. You aren’t to go off without my lead,” Henry said.

Jacob gazed into the distance.

“Yes sah,” he said. Emma could not extrapolate the guide’s feeling out of his tone, but he seemed to know what it meant to come up against a white man who would not listen to reason.

“We may already have ruined Africa,” Henry muttered to no one especially. “What has taken hold here except guns and rum?”

She watched Jacob’s shoulders droop as he went to oversee the remaining loads, the little boy half skipping behind him, holding on to Jacob’s shorts. She wished she could explain to their escort about Henry, the great responsibility he felt.

“You ought to change out of those wet clothes,” Henry said.

She motioned to Abike and the girl came along, a roll of grass matting on her head, though she took her time.

God help me. God help my husband. Give him grace
, Emma prayed in her heart.

At last they were ready to recommence. Emma caught sight of the little boy. He had been given her writing box to carry, and one of her baskets, and rather than walking with Jacob, he seemed relegated to walking with some of the women behind the hammock. Emma tried to speak against the arrangement, but the porters were engaged in lifting the hammock, calling back and forth, and no one heard her.

A swarm of sand flies came up. Oh, they were terrible. Smaller than a flea. Thousands of them. One of the plagues must have been sand flies. They could cover your neck with a thousand tiny bites and they itched like the devil. They seemed to prefer her to Abike. She waved and battled against them furiously. When they at last let up, Emma dozed. She woke to the sensation of cooler air. They were passing through a clear bright brook, not even a foot deep.

“Abike, how did you like the river?” she said, glancing at the girl, feeling playful.

“No mah,” Abike said, deadly serious. “If you cross that river again, please mah, I go wait for you.”

“You will wait for me on the other side?” Emma said, enjoying the conversation.

“Yes mah.”

“And how long will you wait?”

“Until you return.”

“That might be a long time.”

“God is great,” Abike concluded, and then as a final thought, she added, “In the river, your pant it goes flum flum,” moving her brown muscular arms to show the swaying of Emma’s undergarments in the water.

Well
, Emma considered silently.
She was looking at me just as I am watching her.

“Do you know the little boy’s name?” she said.

“Wole,” the girl said.

They left the forest and now the country seemed to stretch out before them like a world that had been born to a past world, the hills so gentle and clear before Emma’s eyes that she longed for every one of them as a place she would live. The flower-green of the higher elevation and the dark luster-green of palms near the creeks made a great crumpled tapestry like a huge rug of God that had been thrown down for him to step upon. She knew there was some verse of scripture that should be coming to mind.
Oh well, never mind, I’ll remember later
, she thought.
All happiness in Africa is of this sort
, she considered,
sudden and unplanned as a storm
. She would write that later in her journal. That and the river crossing.

Just then the porters halted. Food sellers were clustered beneath a stand of scrub trees.

“We won’t take long for our meal,” Henry said. Emma left the hammock and started toward the vendors. A display of pineapples standing in rows on brightly woven mats made her think of a fall festival. She was hoping the women would not run off or the children scatter at seeing her when she heard Jacob calling for Wole. When she heard the boy’s name called a second time, the image of the child’s thin ankles and her writing box passed through Emma’s mind, getting confused with the bargain she was trying to strike.

“I won’t give more than three letters for this fruit,” she announced to the seller before she heard the third call. Emma turned to look at their entourage. She only needed to see the boy and the box. There was Henry. “What is it? Has the boy gotten lost?” she said.

“He appears to be missing,” he said.

A haunting cool came into the region just below Emma’s heart. She tried to remember which woman had been walking with Wole, but she had no clear image, except that he was carrying her writing box. Uncle Eli’s letter opener! Henry’s eyes had their mismatched look, almost as wild and unsteady as the day of the horsewhip when he looked, for a moment, mad. Jacob ran down the path they had just come, already disappearing into the trees.