Makeda (8 page)

My grandmother, of course, knew about all of this and literally talked me through high school, seldom speaking during this period of the dreams.

“Look, son. My dreams will wait. We’ve got to get you ready to go to college, a good college, so you can prepare to be the writer you want to be, you hear? You got to work. You got to push everything else out of your mind.”

I tried my best to do what she told me to do. My grades rose, much to my parents’ surprise. On weekends, I continued to work at Kensington Hospital. Though never once asked to do so, I gave a portion of my salary to my mother to help with family expenses on the condition that she would not tell my father. I saw my grandmother every Thursday except when my presence was required elsewhere, like the after-school appointment I had with the yearbook photographer in the fall of my senior year.

On August 17, 1963, I paid my last visit to my grandmother before leaving the following week for college.

“Get on in here, boy. I’m so happy to see you.” She hugged me with heartening strength and led me into the parlor. She took her seat in the rocker and patted the chair that had been placed where I customarily sat.

She wore a long, flowing forest-green gown that was festively filigreed with yellow silk along the neckline, sleeve, and hemline. Her hair was dressed in thick salt-and-pepper braids that draped over her shoulders.

“Sit, sit, boy—tell me everything—school, college, writing.” No one in the world gave me the time and attention that my grandmother gave me.

We talked for the better part of three hours—voices climbing, challenging, overlapping, laughing, a time or two uproariously. Eventually, the pace of our talk would slow with the dying light of the day. We went for long, easy moments without speaking. I looked up at the symbol on the wall hanging which had been there on the wall in the same spot, by then, for years.

Looking at the symbol, I asked her, almost languidly, “Grandma, how many of those dreams have you had?”

“You mean about the Dogon people and the stars?”

“Yes.”

“Only the one I told you about.”

“You told me there had been others.”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“One before the Dogon dream and two since.”

“Do the dreams scare you?”

“No, son.”

“I think they would scare
me.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Well, if they are as real and lifelike as you say they are, I would think I’d get confused.”

With that, she gave a short self-deprecating chuckle.

Then she smiled and said, “I think I see what you mean.”

She turned her face to the setting sun. The umberwarm color of the late-afternoon light gave the profile of her features a wistful cast. She sighed. When she spoke again, her voice seemed to start from far away. From some painful place in a bygone girlhood.

“When I was little, I hated this darkness. I wanted to do away with myself. I cursed God.” She spoke with a sharpness that unsettled me. Then she exhaled audibly. “I was poor and blind and fatherless. In desperation, I made some bad decisions. It didn’t seem like I had much choice at the time.”

I knew that she was talking about her brief, failed marriage.

“I had no idea how to take care of myself. It was like I was all alone in the world. I was bitter. I was very bitter.” Her blank eyes moistened. The sight of this caused me to shiver slightly. “Then I found Christ, and I think the church saved me—gave me a place to be, a world to be safe in before I had your father. But, you know, even then I think I knew or at least I sensed, that I was not just blind, but I was different from other folks in some other ways as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I knew it for sure before the second dream—the Dogon dream.”

“Knew what, Grandma?”

“You asked if the dreams frightened me—because they were so real.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why I told you how unhappy I was when I was young. I hated being blind, but not anymore. The dreams have changed that. They have allowed me to see things I could never have seen if my eyes worked. Regular folks see only the physical things that are right in front of them, Gray. I can’t see the physical things that are right in front of me, but I can see beyond those things. Worlds beyond. I have seen my soul when it was young. For old souls who are blind, the worlds of the living and the dead are not so far apart.”

She paused and then said, with heightened intensity, “I was an African, Gray. In every life, I was an African. For an African, the worlds of the living and the dead are one.”

I was silent.

“Am I scaring you, son?”

“No, Grandma. I’m just trying to think hard about what you’re saying.”

“I believe now that this is why I was born blind. I have been blessed, because of it, to know my soul before it was forced to borrow a faith that was not originally mine.”

I did not know what to say. I felt rudderless, queasy.

The specter and prospect of death had always provoked in me considerable discomfiture. I simply could not comprehend the bat-of-an-eye transition from a state of riotously bubbling organic
life
to the plasticized facsimiles of it that reposed like boards in coffins.

When I was eleven, my mother and father had required Gordon and me to go with them to attend the funeral in North Carolina of a distant cousin on my mother’s side named Bill, who’d died of a sudden illness in New York City when he was nineteen. Bill hadn’t visited his home in rural North Carolina for years before his death and the local folk wanted to see him one last time for as long as they could. So Bill’s coffin remained open during the funeral.

Because I was a member of Bill’s family, I sat in the center of the church, second row, with my face level with Bill’s.

I was eleven and couldn’t understand why we were being made, for the duration of the service, to look at Bill in his coffin. In any case, I didn’t believe that it was really Bill in the coffin. The pastor said that Bill had gone home to be with Jesus. I didn’t know where he’d gone. But I did not believe he had gone home to be with Jesus. I did not believe that the pastor or anyone else in the church who was gawking at Bill in the coffin actually believed that or else they would not, themselves, have been so afraid of dying. They all seemed to prove this by holding death at bay for as long as they possibly could.

It was through my grandmother that I learned, over time, not to fear death so much, but to see it as a portal to a spirit world of old ancestors and new lives.

Toward the end of that last visit I had with her before leaving for college, she told me about the two dreams that had followed the Dogon dream.

One of the lives she had lived, apparently, had been as an Akân woman during the 1600s in what is now called Ghana. The other life had been lived in the eighteenth century as a Benin girl of twelve, living in what is now the modern country of Nigeria.

Grandma said that her people, the Benin people, or Binis, believed that God, whom they called Osanobua, granted each person fourteen journeys through life from birth to death, leaving each person’s status in the ultimate afterlife to be determined by the moral plane taken over the course of the fourteen journeys which were trials of a sort. Binis’ dead were not made inaccessible to the living who were, as was the case with my grandmother, visited by the dead, revealing themselves to the living in dreams. For Africans, my grandmother told me, death does not separate the dead from the living.

Two years before Grandma had the first of these two dreams, the dream about her life as an Akân girl living in the seventeenth century, I accompanied her on a Saturday morning to the 6th Street market to buy vegetables. The market counted seventy or more refrigerated meat display cases and produce stalls that filled the cavernous main floor of the redbrick building that had originally served as an armory.

I remember what happened that morning as if it were yesterday. Grandma wore one of her bright African gowns and carried a carved ebony-wood walking stick. She was well known at the market, and many of the stall operators called out greetings to her. During our tour of the stalls, an elderly black man in a dashiki, speaking elegantly accented English, greeted her from behind a small table. His syntax was formal and out of place in the bustling, working-class crowd of shoppers and vendors. On his table were not vegetables, but bolts of exotically printed fabrics, a set of hand-carved reliquaries, and four or five softcover books.

“Madame,” the man said softly.

Grandma turned in the direction of the man’s voice, as if she had been listening for it.

Without preamble, the man asked, “Are you Akân, madame?”

Grandma did not give the answer that I expected her to give to the strange question. “I don’t know, sir,” she said as she stopped and turned to him.

“I believe that you are Akân, madame.”

The man did not give his name and did not inquire after hers.

“How can you know that, sir?”

“Do you know of the Akân people, madame?”

My grandmother hesitated and for moments remained silent.

The cultured old gentleman then smiled, but only with his eyes. It was as if he had come to the market expecting to see my grandmother. “I have some things for you that you may find helpful.”

He presented her with the reliquary objects and explained their significance. My grandmother slowly rolled them about her fingers, feeling every bend and curve, appreciating the textures and liking the way they felt in her hands.

“These are from the Kota people of Gabon. They are guardian figures to be placed near the remains of ancestors to protect them from evil forces. They also bring to their living families health and prosperity.”

The reliquary guardian figures were small, very old sculptures of human forms that had been fashioned from copper, brass, and wood.

The old man then handed her the rolled wall hanging with the large symbol on it. “This is from the Akân. The Akân are my people and your people.” He picked up a book of yellowed dog-eared pages and handed it to me. “You will read from this to your grandmother.” He patted my shoulder to soften the words that he had spoken as a command.

Without saying another word, the man turned, left the table, and quickly lost himself in the eddy of shoppers.

In the years that ensued before I left Richmond for Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, I read passages to my grandmother from the little book given to her by the mysterious Akân man at the market.

The title of the book was
West African Traditional Religion.
The author’s name was Kofi Asare Opoku, a professor at the University of Ghana in Legon.

One passage in the scholarly book that my grandmother asked me to read to her over and again was this:

The day of my last visit before leaving for college was gone and Grandma had grown tired. She heard me rise from my chair and her voice mixed regret with affection.

“Tomorrow, son, you begin your great adventure. I can’t tell you how proud I am of the man you have already become.”

“I will miss you, Grandma.”

We embraced for a long time. Then she said, patting my back, “Okay, son, okay.”

“Grandma, I don’t have a picture of you to take with me. Come, stand here.”

I posed her against the long wall with the Akân wall hanging showing over her right shoulder. I picked up the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye that my parents had given me for my tenth birthday. She stood still until the small clap of the camera’s shutter released her.

“Let me get one more, Grandma.”

“Here. Take this with you.” She held out the little book that the Akân man at the market had given her years before. Placing it in my hands, she said, “Don’t forget to take with you the Dogon notes.”

“I won’t forget, Grandma. I won’t forget.”

“Guard them, Gray.”

“I will,” I said and hugged her one final time.

PART TWO

C
HAPTER
T
EN

I
t was at college that I was first introduced to a notion that one of my more thoughtful professors called “the intellectual ideal.”

As Negro students, we did not know how the politics of the country’s white society functioned internally, how its edicts were formulated and lowered down for our consumption and compliance. It had never before occurred to me that we might try and puzzle out its functions with an eye toward influencing them. White America was opaque, indecipherable, and entirely separate from our America. We were bottled up and over by its stolid mass camped on our borders. If the circumstances of our poverty seemed to me irrefragable, so did their power. It had seemed best not to think about it, which was what the freshmen class did,
en masse
. We were powerless, a conclusion most of us reached without deliberation.