A Million Years with You (13 page)

Steve's pay was low, so we had almost no money. We would listen to the radio for a food sale, figure out how much we'd spend on gas to drive there, count the pennies we had in the jar in the kitchen, and then go or not go to the sale, depending on the cost. I remember one disastrous decision that took us many miles out of town to buy meat advertised at ten cents a pound. The meat was a ground-up gray substance that I could hardly look at and didn't want to touch, let alone eat. And the trip had used half a gallon of gas.

I tried to get a job, but the best pay I was offered was $25 a week. For years I had earned that much by babysitting, and despite our current poverty, I came from a well-off family who would spend that much on a pair of gloves. I wouldn't look out the window for $25, let alone work for a week in the hardware store that made the offer. So I got a job as assistant to the principal of a school for disabled African American children, who were not, of course, admitted to the school for disabled white children. I loved my employer, Edna Fuller, and offered myself as a volunteer—if I was going to work for nothing, I wouldn't do it for that hardware store—but the congregation of her church insisted on pay- ing me.

It wasn't long before I got a feeling for Caucasian Fayetteville. It soon seemed that race loomed even larger there than in apartheid South West Africa, strange as that may seem. But I think it can be explained by population numbers. In South West Africa, as grim as the white people were, there weren't many of them, and unless they were actually present they did not have to be dealt with. Black people outnumbered them by at least twenty to one, probably more, because nobody counted the people in outlying areas such as the Ju/wasi. Except in the specifically white communities, everybody was a black person. One could spend months or even years without encountering a white person. Also, the African people retained their cultures. Their customs and their social systems were their own, as were their religious practices. The names of some of their leaders, such as Tchaka, Mosilikatsi (it means Path of Blood), and Dingaan the Vulture, were widely known in many different countries to many thousands of people. To be sure, these men were known for the carnage they caused, but also for their military genius. They are usually described as evil, as are some other successful military leaders, such as Genghis Khan, but those who described them were usually from populations that had been threatened by them. People in Europe wrote about Genghis Khan, and white people wrote about the Zulu warriors.

On the lands assigned to the African people, their own laws were in effect. To assign a piece of land to people who had already been there for hundreds of years and force them to stay on it was certainly the heart and soul of apartheid, and was instantly canceled as soon as apartheid South West Africa became independent Namibia, but at least while on these lands the people didn't have to deal with whites every day. In short, much of life could go on even under apartheid, with the whites mostly looming as a negative force, hostile and dangerous but often remote. I came to compare the South West African whites to New Hampshire hurricanes. We have hurricanes, but not all the time, and unpleasant as they are, when we've cleaned up after one of them we can forget them for a while.

Not so the racial situation in Fayetteville. Not counting the army— which by then was integrated, or was supposed to be—the whites outnumbered the blacks by five to one and also controlled the world as they knew it. They wrote all the laws, controlled all the elections, and put
WHITES ONLY
signs on just about everything. It seemed to me that a day could not pass without a black person having a bad experience with a white person or at least with white culture. For all the time I'd spent in South West Africa, for all the cultural differences I'd seen, by far the greatest culture shock I ever felt was in my own country, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Fayetteville, North Carolina—a journey I would not want to repeat.

One day when I was crossing a street, a white man deliberately tried to run over me. Of course he did; I worked for a black person. I had unwittingly broken the racial rules. Had my attacker succeeded, the judge would undoubtedly have seen the event as my fault and would have exonerated my attacker.

Why would I have such an antisouthern notion? Because of what happened while I was there. One day the white authorities castrated a little boy who was a student at our school. Some white girls had made a pet of this boy, and because his disability was cognitive, he would run to them when they called. He was their little dog, it seemed. That was fine as long as this boy was young, the white community believed, but he would grow up, and the sexual fears of the white community were boundless. For a cognitively disabled black man to be accustomed to the company of white girls was asking for rape. The medical authorities castrated the child as a preventive measure.

 

The day that Steve was discharged from the army, we got in our rattling VW bug and drove straight to New York, where Steve had been admitted to a graduate program at Columbia. The GI Bill would pay his tuition. My only regret—a big one—was parting with Mrs. Fuller and the children at the school. We lived in New York for several years, during which Steve went to his classes and I, to put food on the table, got a job as secretary-receptionist for a life insurance company. Jobs like that are not inspiring—one of my duties was to put green coloring on the leaves of the only houseplant. The sun could have done that at no cost to the insurance company, but the plant was kept in an interior office on somebody's desk.

At one point I gave birth to our daughter. A few months later I became pregnant with our son. And all along, in what little spare time was left to me, I was trying to finish that first book of mine,
The Harmless People
. It was published the day our son was born.

What took me so long to finish a book? Many years later I gave the reason in a speech at the fiftieth reunion of my Harvard class, when graduates from the various professions were asked to talk about their work. I was invited to join my former classmates Edward M. Hoagland and John Updike to make a presentation about writing. Since John and Ted were the writers whom I most admired—I'd read everything they'd written and had taken classes with both of them, and to this day can quote passages from the brilliant class work they submitted
⁵
—I couldn't say enough about them in my talk. But then, toward the end of my speech, I also mentioned that although all of us were writing our first books while still in the classroom, their books were published soon after graduation but mine wasn't published for five years. And why was that? Because of our circumstances. John and Ted had wives and I had a husband.

The two literary giants looked a little guilty, bless them. But many women in the audience related strongly to that thought, and spoke to me about their own experiences afterward.

 

I'm sure that the leaders of the women's movement were already astir, challenging what the social system was doing to women, and thank God for them. But I knew nothing about all that. I just struggled along with what I'd been handed. The man's work came first—an edict I had never questioned, not even in the Kalahari, where I'd helped my brother with his filming projects when I could have been out looking for lions—and the wife supported him, often by getting a job, as I did, but always by keeping house and doing all the incidental work, such as making sure the car got inspected, taking the dog to the vet, balancing the checkbook, shopping for everybody's Christmas present. And all that time we were expected to have our hair done and wear makeup, high heels, and dresses. Much against my will, I had to do this for my job with the insurance company. I was no longer Liz Marshall, wild and free, but the indentured Mrs. Stephen Thomas. None of this was Steve's fault, or my parents' fault, or even my fault. It was the culture of the time and not a good culture for women.

I might never have finished that first book if not for my mother, at which point I learned that if men won't help you, women will. My mom came to New York and took care of our infant daughter while I wrote without stopping. My book had been partly written, of course, as I started it while in the Kalahari and scratched away at it afterward when I had moments to myself, but thanks to my mom, I wrote the rest in a few weeks. I thank her very deeply for that, and also for the name I signed it by, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, which came about because of a cultural complication pertaining to women that my mom foresaw at my birth.

The issue now seems pointless, but back then a woman's maiden name was dropped after marriage unless she had no middle name, so that Jane Iphigenia Jones became Jane Iphigenia Smith unless she was just Jane Jones to start with. If so, when she got married, she'd be Jane Jones Smith. My mom knew this, and purposely did not give me a middle name.

I didn't stay with Elizabeth Marshall, although I could have and maybe should have, as my prizewinning short story was published under that name. But I wanted a name that joined me with my husband and children. I might also have been Elizabeth Thomas, but another writer was already using Elizabeth Thomas. So I went with the eight syllables, and from then on, it seemed too late to change. The name is much too long. It takes forever to say it and on beyond forever to scribble those twenty-three letters at a book signing. I've come to envy Amy Tan. I should have used Di!ai or Kothonjoro.

 

But even with an impossible name, I finished
The Harmless People
. Then what? The book got good reviews and was nominated for the National Book Award, and William Shawn, then the editor of
The New Yorker
, took note of it. He asked my agent why she hadn't shown my book to him. He would have published it in its entirety, he said. She told him she had submitted it, but whoever read it had turned it down. He wondered if I would write something else for
The New Yorker
.

Do bears live in the woods? I'd do it for free. But write about what? People, not animals, were believed to be a suitable subject, as I had already learned from the school librarian so many years before. And I'd done pretty well with
The Harmless People
.

I was even called an anthropologist, which surprised me because
The Harmless People
is a travel book and was published as such. If I remember rightly, I took only two courses in anthropology, both of them as an undergraduate and one of which I walked out of because the professor was so mean. One day, for instance, he suddenly stopped his lecture in midsentence to declare that knitting was a form of masturbation. Most of us were shocked, because at the time masturbation was not generally acknowledged. But the student who was knitting in the front row and to whom his comment was directed was not at all disturbed. “When I knit, I knit, and when I masturbate, I masturbate,” she told him calmly, pulling more yarn from the skein in her pocket and starting the next row.

I lacked her serenity and sophistication, so another day when the professor said something equally offensive about people without graduate degrees who do fieldwork in anthropology—meaning, I realized, my parents, whom he not only knew but who lived three blocks from where he was standing—I just got up and left. At any rate, I didn't become an anthropologist.

But evidently, all you need to do to be called one is to write about unfamiliar people, and as long as I seemed to be in that arena, and since I had just written about hunter-gatherers, I thought I should write about another kind of culture. Pastoralists, maybe. At least they had cattle.

I had been to a lecture by Neville Dyson-Hudson, a real anthropologist who with his anthropologist wife, Rada, had studied pastoralists in Uganda and Kenya. In anthropological circles, the people they studied were known as Central Nilo-Hamites. Neville's account of them was fascinating. They were warlike, had big herds of cattle, and were contemptuous of anything western. All that seemed good to me. Shawn thought that Central Nilo-Hamites would be just fine, and gave me lots of money. I was also fortunate enough to get a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. With the money I bought equipment and plane tickets, and the next thing I knew, I was living among the Dodoth in northern Uganda.

8

T
OM AND KIRSTI OFFERED
to come with me. By then they were raising perennial plants instead of chickens and the plants didn't need their constant attention, so they could travel. I could not have been happier, as the reason for their offer was to help me take care of my children—Stephanie, age four, and John, age two—when I was out in the field. Steve came too, but only for a few weeks because he was still in graduate school. The photographer Tim Asch also came with us and took hundreds of photographs, many of which appeared in
Warrior Herdsmen
, the book I eventually wrote about the Dodoth. On his own, he also made a splendid film called
Dodoth Morning
. We took tents and other equipment with us, and I bought a Land Rover when we got to Kampala.

At the time, Edward Frederick Mutesa II was kabaka, king of the Baganda people, and while in Kampala we visited the Basi Kabaka's tomb, built for three of King Mutesa's predecessors, including his father. We were awed by the large traditional building made of thatched poles, very dark in its wide interior, where, when our eyes adjusted, we saw a stuffed leopard and long curtains of bark cloth concealing something unknown to us but obviously important. Sitting next to the far wall was a group of elderly women, the widows of King Mutesa's father. Their role was to care for the tomb.

They were kindly women who welcomed us as we went in, then held out their hands to my children. I was focused on the leopard, as leopards had cultural importance throughout the forested parts of Africa. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull had once described to me a leopard society that flourished in West Africa from Sierra Leone through Liberia and into Côte d'Ivoire, but especially in Liberia. Colin almost turned into a leopard himself as he told how members of that society would become leopards, hiding near a water source as leopards do and killing the first person who came along, no matter who that person was. A real leopard would do nothing less. Colin's fingers seemed to turn into claws, and his teeth, which appeared through his slowly widening smile, seemed to sharpen. Although we were at a party in his Manhattan apartment at the time, his reenactment scared me half to death. I don't believe the society extended into Uganda, but the power of a leopard is almost beyond description, and I wasn't surprised that the Baganda kings were associated with them.