Makeda (10 page)

He was an attractive man of fifty-four years who had been told repeatedly as a teenager that he was black and ugly by the younger daughter of his British colonial missionary school teacher, a certain Mr. Horsford.

He looked overlong down at his notes. Because he was short, his face fell close to the white paper on which his notes were scrawled in an indecipherable hand. The thick eyeglasses he wore gleamed opaque and white in the bright reflected light of the lectern lamp.

Dr. Quarles had been uneasy before the program. He worried that his friend detested public speaking and was purposely not good at it, holding that ideas spoiled when bellowed and that the public speech was necessarily the tool of one form of demagoguery or another. This was a relatively new view that Dr. Abana had developed in reaction to a mistaken impression that public speaking in America was characteristically sermonic. Making his acknowledgments, Dr. Abana turned and looked at the empty chair on the stage in which the school’s president had been expected to sit.

He began to speak in a quiet voice as if he were alone in the room. Were not the microphone, owing to his lack of height, so close to his mouth, no one would likely have heard him begin with little preamble from what seemed the middle of a foreign and strange tale.

“How do you see me?”

Pausing, he looked about the vast, scantly populated hall into puzzled faces. Students were not accustomed to convocation speakers beginning their remarks with a question.

“What joins us, if anything more than your discomfort over what we should mean to each other and our mutual ignorance of each other’s circumstance?”

A rustle of disquiet could be heard over Dr. Abana’s long pause.

“The differences that are obvious set me apart from you, no? How I appear to you. How I dress. How I speak English.

“You may even see me as a complete stranger, a stranger to be shunned, a stranger with embarrassing custody of your past, a past you remain ambivalent about, a past you have been caused long since to involuntarily discard. You have new names and manners and ways now. I am the leper obstructing your flight from yourselves. Or for those of you who are rather more psychologically advanced, at best you see me as the inconvenient cousin who, during your long centuries of bondage, disappeared from the family portrait. Cropped from memory by a grand interloper.”

He sensed that he sounded cantankerous, unpleasant, and that the few who were listening had shrunken from him.

“Other than our separate experiences of shame and degradation, we have no common memory. Thus, absent memory, there can be no proud, joyous, painless
we
that joins us, you and me. For the only memory that survives reposes in the photographs that others have taken for their own purposes, where the camera of our common experience was never moved far enough back in time to frame us all—one whole family in one common, unbroken belonging.”

He noticed that some students sitting about in pairs had begun to talk to each other. He then swung around to glance at Dr. Quarles who was sitting forward in his seat on the stage. Dr. Quarles smiled inscrutably. Turning back to the audience, Dr. Abana sighed and changed the meter of his speech.

“How many of you have any idea of what I’m talking about?”

Three hands rose. One of the three but halfway.

Dr. Abana had not wanted to strengthen any welldeveloped social complexes he strongly suspected many of the students were afflicted by. This concern caused him to speak next in a more sympathetic tone.

“Make no mistake. We are not alone in our long, costly experience with powerful forces in the world. The truth often has ruthless enemies—enemies so powerful they can all but make the truth disappear, go away—our truth, and the painful truth of other peoples you probably don’t know much about.”

He paused to decide how best to explain himself.

“One of your presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, is believed by most in your country to have been a great president. While this may have been true on American terms, Theodore Roosevelt was not just the person many of you have heard about. For instance, he believed that the most desirable lands in the world should by natural right belong to the white race, the race he very wrongly believed solely responsible for world civilization. He expressed this view in 1897 before becoming president. These are his words:
Nineteenth-century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world’s surface.
In 1906, after becoming president, Roosevelt wrote,
The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands.

“In much the same conquering American spirit,” Dr. Abana continued, “Mexicans lost most—and American Indians all—of the lands they had once owned in North America. Calling Filipinos
Pacific Negroes
, Roosevelt, wielding brute American military force, simply took the Philippine islands from that country’s people. So you see, we are not alone. A great many others in the world, including myself, have suffered in ways that no one has told you about.”

Dr. Abana had only arrived in the United States three weeks before the convocation, and it was his first visit to the country. He had read much about American Negroes and had spoken at length about them to Dr. Quarles during the historian’s several visits to Ghana. But not until that precise moment in his talk did it appear an absolute certainty to him that the American Negro had no insides left to speak of. All that seemed to remain was the will to fight against an immediate or proximate nemesis like the white Southern segregationists. This seemed the only facet of their problem left visible to them. The far past and future,
they
seemed to have lost the ability to see and find sustenance in. The years of slavery and the cultural isolation it imposed had produced in the American Negro an apparent partial loss of
self
.
They
were no longer their own
they
but someone else’s, a
they
born of the afflictions of a terrible and sustained oppression, a group dismembered and rebuilt by its “dismemberers” in the form of the missing self the “dismemberers” had removed and hidden.

“Let me then tell you a story to illustrate my point, a story that, though you may not have heard it, belongs as much to you as it does to me. Remembering the story, telling it, moves the camera far back in time. Far enough back so that it pictures not only the people named in the story, but by inference, all of their direct and indirect cultural and racial descendants who have fanned out all across the world in the centuries since the events took place nearly 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. Like all accounts of religious history, the story is part fact, part legend, part verifiable, part thesis of faith.”

The auditorium was funereal with a kind of embarrassed disturbed quiet. I sensed a thin sweeping dislike for Dr. Abana in the room. I did not share this antipathy, however, and oddly wanted to interpose myself between the unwitting professor and the students who, I suspected, had mistaken intellectual candor for rebuke.

“Before coming to the United States, I read that there was a great church in Harlem, New York, called Abyssinian Baptist Church, once pastored by the Negro congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The name of the church comes from a place in ancient Africa called Abyssinia. Abyssinia is today known as Ethiopia. At the time of the story I am going to tell you, Ethiopia was a land called Axum and Sabaea, or Axum and Sheba. The Queen of Axum and Sabaea from the year 1005 B.C. is referred to in the Old Testament of the Bible in Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, Matthew, and Luke. The queen lived in the capital of Axum, which was in the south of her vast lands. Ethiopia was a much bigger country then than it is today. Then as now, however, Axum was, and remains, in Ethiopia. The lands of Sheba, once northern Ethiopia, are now a country called Yemen. The Queen of Axum and Sheba ruled over her sprawling empire more than 1,500 years before the Arabs arrived in the region. The people of Axum and Sheba are said to have been tall, attractive people with woolly hair.
Ye are black of
face
, wrote the ancient priest Azariah of the queen and her subjects in Ethiopia’s most sacred book, the
Kebra Nagast
(
The Glory of Kings
).”

Dr. Abana stopped to study the students’ faces for an index of interest and detected a spark, caused, he guessed, by his mention of a name and word familiar to them,
Powell
and
Abyssinian
(known only to us in reference to the church, just as
Rabza
, a desert in North Africa, had been known only to me as the name of my high school yearbook).

Dr. Abana then began to speak extemporaneously. In the back of his mind, he knew that this was ill-advised. It was a mistake he had made before when falling prey to feelings of angry futility.

“How many of you have heard of the Queen of Axum and Sheba?”

This time, no hands were raised, not even mine.

“Now, how many of you have heard of the Queen of Sheba?”

As far as I could tell, every hand in the auditorium went up.

“Well, her formal title was Queen of Axum and Sheba. She lived all of her life in Axum, the part of her kingdom that roughly corresponds to modern Ethiopia. During her life, she only saw Sheba once while passing through its lands en route north with her royal caravan to visit King Solomon in Israel.

“Do you find nothing suspicious here, dear young people?”

If anyone did, no one seemed to know specifically what it was.

“After 3,000 years, ‘history’—not the history of the
Kebra
Nagast
, not the Ethiopians’ version of history, their own history, but history written by outsiders—has altered the queen’s title. Why? Why was this? Why has history misidentified her as the Queen of Sheba? And why did it not choose, if it felt compelled for some unscholarly reason to shorten her title, to misidentify her as the Queen of Axum, which lay fully on the African continent where she was born, where she reigned, where she spent the entirety of her life? Perhaps it was the arrival of the Arabs in the region, 1,500 years after the queen’s death, that gave foreign historians the idea that this beautiful dark queen with woolly hair from the heart of Ethiopia—this impressive monarch that Jesus Christ 1,000 years later would call, while citing her virtues,
the Queen of the South
—could be passed off as something other than the black woman that she was. This is but one of the many outrageous distortions written cunningly by others that fog our view of ourselves—this one, this lie, so large, so pervasive, so invidious, that an Italian actress named Gina Lollobrigida got to play the queen in the American movie about her relationship with King Solomon. And few in this country—and I daresay none of you here—found anything strange about a white woman playing a black queen of ancient Ethiopia.”

Dr. Abana sighed, shook his head slightly, and collected himself. The room was silent. He then studied his notes and bore doggedly on with his prepared lecture.

“Axum and Sheba was a wealthy and highly developed country with advanced systems of irrigation and hydraulic energy production. Its people built massive wells and dams reaching heights of sixty feet to produce an abundance of food. The country was also rich in gold and spices which it traded along hundreds of miles of road and sea as far away as Israel. Saffron, cumin, aloes, and galbanum were to be had by broad numbers of the country’s people.

Myrrh both healed and perfumed. Frankincense eased a body’s pain and appeased the gods.

“The queen was said by the ancient scribes to have been a beautiful woman. She was born to great wealth in 1020 B.C. and took the throne at the age of fifteen upon her father’s death. She ruled Axum and Sheba, the ancient texts tell us, for forty years with wisdom and skill. The historian Josephus wrote that
she was inquisitive into philosophy,
and one that on other accounts also was to be admired
. The queen herself wrote in her memoirs,
Perhaps many people will say that
I am inquisitive, but that is simply because they do not understand me.
I am always anxious to learn and serious minded.
”

Dr. Abana, by then, had won a small listenership, even though we had little to no idea where his story was leading us. Already I felt from his telling of it both familiarity and surprise. For years, I had heard unexplained references to “the Queen of Sheba,” a common first cousin to phrases and words like the “Wreck of the Hesperus” and the “Midas touch.” But I had known nothing further, neither that “Sheba” was a misnamed country of the ancient world, nor that the country was the modern Ethiopia of East Africa.

I sat alone midway back in the graduated seating of the vast hall that had been built two years before as a multipurpose facility for large lectures, major theatrical productions, and the commencement exercises that drew thousands in the spring. The high ceiling and walls were clad with an acoustical material of a cut and quality common to state-funded middle–twentieth century architectural expediencies.

“Early in the queen’s reign, while beset with doubt owing to her inexperience in the art of statecraft, she decided to travel to observe and learn from the legendary King Solomon of Israel. One night, after plying the young queen at dinner with a variety of royal wines, King Solomon was to slake his lust upon the defenseless body of his comely guest.

“That night, God revealed to King Solomon in a dream that the line of religious succession and responsibility would be transferred to a new order that was to be realized upon the birth of the king’s son now growing in the queen’s womb.

“Born in Axum, the capital, after the queen’s return from Jerusalem, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem at the age of thirteen, whereupon later wishing to return to Ethiopia, he refused his father’s offer to make him the crown prince of Israel. Upon leaving Jerusalem, Menelik is said to have taken with him the Ark of the Covenant which he stole from King Solomon, his father, with the approval of God, who levitated Menelik and his cargo across the Red Sea before the king’s men could give chase.