Makeda (5 page)

When I look at Gordon, I guess I can understand why people would say that we favor one another, but most of the time I can’t see it at all. Perhaps this is because I know in every other way how very different we are. What I am about to say is not to disparage Gordon at all, or at least I earnestly think not, because I love him, but Gordon is not at all, from what I can see, a complicated person. He is very smart, but he labors under no psychological compulsion to dice every unimportant social issue into an incomprehensible hash. Thus, he appears to enjoy a working happiness, or a contentment of sorts at least, that he is not driven to deconstruct into a mess of gloom. He does not despond.
I
despond—and as instinctively as he does not. I do not enjoy being this way (or perhaps I do), but I cannot help it. I think that I mean this when I say it, but I do not wish to be like Gordon who appears to me happy but flat with an emotional surface that is all but impervious to abrasion. The hide of my psyche is rather more corrugated than his and registers even the most inconsequential of experiences that roll across it. For this reason, it is my guess that I know him better than he knows me. There is less of him to know. Or so it would seem.

Seeming,
however, is deceptive. I can only know how Gordon seems. Not how he
is
. For I think that I may
seem
friendly and outgoing. In my heart I am. But the mechanics of engaging people make the entire proposition of doing so, for me, not worth pursuing. Most people who know me think that I am funny and social. I am anything but. I much prefer being alone, or with the very few for whom I feel uncalled to act or perform. When I am introduced to people, I invariably, seconds later, don’t remember their names because I never really listen for their names, so unnatural and false is the moving space between us. I don’t think this is the case with Gordon, or, at least, this doesn’t appear to be the case with Gordon who has no faculty for obsession of any kind. Thus, life for him seems easy, but I cannot know this because teenagers, even brothers, don’t talk about such things. Probably no one else does either.

My grandmother had always been something of an unspoken karmic ally to me. Only she seems to see inside my heart. My guess is that when I told her that afternoon that I wanted to be a writer, she knew that what I really meant was that I wanted, really wanted, to
want
to be a writer. Perhaps she believed that I had told her this merely to curry favor with her. But maybe I had only been hoping that destiny primed would provide me in my confusion some small glimpse of itself. Looking back on it, I think now with conviction that it was my grandmother’s uncanny
knowing
of me that inspired the timing of her revelations that day. Standing in the frigid dark gazing into the heavens that night, I felt for the first time in my life the sweet force of purpose.

A dark middle-aged four-door sedan rolled slowly to a halt, its headlights washing the yard. “Is that you out there, Gray?” The voice was loud and gritty in the cold night air, jarring me from my reverie.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“You all right, boy?”

“I’m fine, Daddy,” I said and sighed involuntarily.

“Well, come on in the house,” my father said, sounding worried.

My father’s father and my grandmother married when they were fifteen, after she became pregnant with my father. Little more than children themselves, the two of them awaited the birth of their child while living in the house of my grandmother’s mother, an ill-tempered divorcée of high temperance and small charity who believed the
crime
the boy had committed against her daughter to be unpardonable in the sight of her very own vengeful God. The boy ran off, eventually, in adulthood, making a new life and family 150 miles away in Baltimore. Though he saw my father from time to time before he died of old age and regret in Baltimore, my father never forgave him for leaving his mother at the age of sixteen, months after he was born. My father was not a forgiving man, even during those early years. He had been an only child with no model of a man to copy and a blind mother who worked from dawn to dusk laundering clothes up on Monument Avenue. He had literally
fabricated
himself, which was to mean that Gordon and I would have no need to do the same. I did not understand this when I was growing up. All I could uncharitably see was a distant inflexible man who clanked about in a false girdle of out-rigging armor, while chiseling out immutable laws-for-living on tablets of certainty. With no margin of error to speak of, he had very much needed, so to speak, to keep his lines straight. Gordon intuitively understood this and my father, while I, less mature at the time, somehow childishly found attractive the poet’s weakness for philosophical dilemma and practical failure. But here I do myself too much credit. The fact is, though I did not know it at the time, I may have been too much like my father at least in one way, and as a consequence, took no pains, as Gordon had, to try and understand him.

We took our customary seats at the Formica-top kitchen table, and after a toneless recital of grace by my mother (grace that my father did not believe in, in any case), ate our lasagna in silence.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

T
he day after my grandmother told me her dream story, I stayed after school to meet with Mr. Garver to find out what I could about the Dogon constellation. He not only taught integrated science, but that particular year, 1960, he served as faculty advisor on the yearbook committee. The yearbook for Armstrong High School was called the
Rabza
. I did not know why it was called that and, to this day, I do not know why. Curiously, no student during my years at Armstrong was ever provoked to investigate the word
Rabza
, which ought to have seemed a conspicuously peculiar name for a yearbook.

Mr. Garver was a big barrel-chested man who wore a big black brush mustache that cast a shadow over his mouth.

“Graylon, why is it that I have the impression you’re someplace else when you’re in my class? I had Gordon when he was a freshman like you and he was an exemplary student.”

Gordon was pictured in the 1960 edition of Mr. Garver’s
Rabza
in no fewer than five places: in cap-and-gown with the graduating class, as captain of both the football and basketball teams, in a group photograph of the school’s National Honor Society, and as president of the class of 1960.

“Your brother set an example that we all expect you to equal.”

I hated Mr. Garver, the only colored man in America, as far as I knew, who played the
hneh
, a bamboo oboe-like instrument he had picked up during his travels in Burma, travels about which he had recounted insufferably to our fourth period class on numberless occasions.

“I’ll try my best to do better.”

Mr. Garver was surprised that I’d stopped by but dutifully said all the things that I had heard all too many times before: that I had been gifted with as much ability as anyone, that I was wasting that ability, and, not least, that I was causing my mother and my father a great deal of needless worry and pain.

Hanging over the blackboard from hooks was a large oilcloth illustration of the solar system. Focusing on it, I asked him the question I needed answered about the big star that the Dogon priest had described in my grandmother’s dream, the star I had found in the sky the night before.

“Which way were you facing when you saw it?”

“North.” I showed him.

“Was it bluish in color and the brightest star in the sky?” I told him yes. “Then the star you saw would be Sirius. It is large and close, only eight and a half light-years from Earth. It is larger even than the sun.”

I asked him, “Is it orbited by another tiny star?”

“No, it is not.” He looked at me quizzically.

From the door, I asked, “Have you ever heard of the Dogon?”

“No. What is that?”

“They are people, sir.”

“Where do these people live?”

“Well, I don’t quite know.”

The school, built in 1951, was a two-story brick example of the American modern public school minimalist idea, replete with low ceilings and endlessly long hallways lined with vented metal student lockers that deafened at school day’s end with the racket of a tool-and-die factory. Near the building’s front door were Principal Herbert Bean’s office, the auditorium, and the library, my next destination, which was run by Miss Martha Botts who by all appearances was a mirthless woman of bone-straight posture.

“Miss Botts, have you ever heard of the Dogon people?”

She sat behind the counter in the library on a high stool, looking sterner than usual. “No. What are they? An ethnic group? Where do they live?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s just see, Mr. March. Come with me.” She led me to a table in the reference section and ordered me to sit. She then disappeared into the stacks and returned in five minutes with four heavy oversized volumes.

“Look through these. Tell me if you don’t find what you’re looking for. Then we’ll look some more. Okay?” She was nicer than I thought she would be.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The first book was
The Butcher Encyclopedia of the World’s
Peoples.
I searched the index and discovered that the word
Dogon
appeared nowhere in the 2,075-page tome. Second in the stack was a book of maps for which I held out little hope. I turned my attention to the third book, which was titled
Culture and People of the Global Community
by C. T. Hoppes and Vivian Kornegay. I drew my finger down the index entries under
D
and found halfway down the page,
Dogon Tribe of Peoples, 52–53 passim.

The sight of the word
Dogon
in print on a page in a book gave me a stir of jittered excitement. I turned quickly to page 52 and there it was, text and pictures. The pictures were of a breathtaking topographical feature and a black family dressed in flowing white robes. The first picture had under it a caption which read:
The Bandiagara escarpment,
a 600-foot sandstone wall that runs for 120 miles south of the Niger
River.

I got up and walked to the end of the long table where an unabridged edition of Webster’s Dictionary rested on a book stand:

My God. The cliff. The river.

I returned to the book by Hoppes and Kornegay and began reading the text section on the Dogon people.

I reached my grandmother’s house before four-thirty. On the bus ride across town, I thought of little else besides the dream. How could she have known such things, things that the well-educated people I knew, knew nothing of? How could she, a retired blind laundress with a grade-school education, possibly have ever heard of any Dogon people at the foot of a cliff beside a river in Africa? Yet I believed her that she had dreamed it. I believed further that she believed what she had dreamed. Climbing the weatherbeaten wooden steps to her small front porch, I told myself that I would make notes on all that I had learned (or not learned) from Mr. Garver and from my library researches immediately upon reaching home. I would secret the notes in the plastic sleeve where I’d put the drawing and dream notes yesterday in the locked metal box on the top shelf of my closet.

Recognizing the special antic tempo of my bell ringing, my grandmother called through the door’s oval glass window, “Gray, is that you, son?”

“Yes, Grandma. It’s me all right.”

“Come on in, son. Take off your coat and come sit down so we can talk awhile.”

Grandmothers are put on Earth for harmless conspiracies, for telling things, things that cannot be told to parents—parents who are ever woebegone beneath the weight of rules, responsibilities, and a well-understood need to lie to their children about their own adolescent misadventures.

There were flowers in a vase on my grandmother’s little mahogany coffee table, yellow carnations standing roundfaced on a spray of jasmine that scented the close air.

“Those are pretty flowers, Grandma.”

She took this as a request for explanation. “You know Agnes Sally, don’t you?”

“You mean the lady from the deaconess board?”

“Yes. Well, she sells vegetables down at the 6th Street market. Got these flowers from a neighbor’s stall. Brought them not long before you got here. Sweet of her, don’t you think?”

“Y-yes, I guess.”

“Oh, son, she knows I can’t see them. But I can smell them. That’s jasmine you’re smellin’. You like it?”

“It’s great.”

She paused and then said abruptly, “Why are you here today, Gray? You don’t usually come two days in a row like your father who, bless his heart, comes just ’bout every day.”

When I did not answer immediately, she said, “You want to talk some more about my dream, don’t you?”

“My science teacher said that the big star is called Sirius.”

Her arms surged with alarm from the wide drape of her exotically embroidered shift. “You didn’t tell anybody what I told you, did you, son?”

“No, Grandma. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“I don’t want people thinkin’ I’m crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Grandma.”

“Who
you
tellin’?” she said and laughed.

“Grandma, had you ever read about or heard about the Dogon people anywhere before?”

“No. Where would I?”

“I don’t know. This is just all so, you know, strange.”

“You found out somethin’, didn’t you? What is it? What did you find out?”

“There
are
people that are called Dogon.”