A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (18 page)

Emma had her drawing instrument to the ground now, like a walking stick to steady herself. Her head felt dangerously hot. The Iyalode was too demanding. Let her try to understand Copernicus. Emma took in a breath and let out a puff of air. “Tell Iyalode men travel in boats around the globe, around the world, and use tools to measure the land. The earth is round”—she showed with her hands—“like an orange. People have sailed, in large canoes, all the way around her big country”—she pointed to Africa and saw Uncle Eli’s maimed foot. Quickly she pulled her eyes back, and the stick too. She adjusted her hat. “Around her country and across the ocean to my country and back.” Jacob explained at leisure and Emma boiled in the sun. Finally, she could continue. “They have even sailed all the way around the earth.” About the time sweat started running from her scalp down into her dress, it dawned on her that it took significant abstract thinking for the woman to have realized that the best place to anchor a drawing table for sketching out the earth would be the heavens.

“She says she will think some more,” Jacob said.

“Yes, I heard her,” Emma said, grateful for her own endurance. What a trial the lady was, over there shaking her head, looking out at the horizon.

“One more question mah,” Jacob said, this time with his smile.

“What?” She tried to be impolite.

“She wants to know why have you come so far to this place and left your mother?”

Emma looked at the map she had sketched, but it seemed the earth had slanted funny and the brown dirt was slipping away beneath her. With the Iyalode’s walking about the map, the area of Georgia looked like a burst pumpkin. When Emma raised her eyes, the sun nearly blinded her and she remembered for a moment swinging out under the big oak in her front yard when she was a girl, how she would let her head go back to watch the sun falling upside down through the trees. Then when she got off the swing, the right-way world looked upside down.

She put her arm out and the Iyalode caught her at her elbow. What a relief to be led to a mat under a tree. Emma took her hat off and fanned herself. Her stomach was certainly in turmoil. She looked to see if anyone had noticed her weakness. Abike and the Iyalode’s girls were comparing hair styles. Wole took turns with the children jumping from the piazza into the yard. Jacob pulled out a lobe of kola nut and was intent on his ceremony. The Iyalode’s long legs stretched before her on the mat. She began another speech, using the xylophone sounds, and Emma didn’t try any longer.

“What is she saying, Jacob?”

“She says the world began in her country. Therefore your ancestors traveled to America from this place and now you have returned home. She says you managed to leave your birth mother because your ancestral mother resides here. Otherwise you could not have come. She says you will need your mother soon.”

Emma caught the Iyalode’s meaning right away: The woman meant she was in a family way. She imagined that Jacob too understood, and the idea of that knowledge in his head made her feel out of time. All at once birds sounded. Someone was chopping wood. The loveliness of a huge, perfectly made pot sitting in the shade with a flat stone as a lid confused her. The Iyalode’s eyes turned flat and smoky. Across the yard, Emma saw an ugly lizard. In a hidden compartment of her mind—like the hidden place in the writing box—she had known her condition. “My,” she said, looking toward the sun, “how the time has passed.”

In order not to repeat the stand-up with Jacob, she put her hands flat on the mat, bent forward, and pressed back onto her feet, and then she came up vertebra by vertebra until she was standing, testing with every move the condition of her stomach and her head.

“We part as friends,” she said, extending her hand to the woman. “I hope you will call on me soon.” A breeze came up the hill, cooling Emma’s neck. Jacob said, “Come,” and while he meant Wole, she followed.

That evening, Emma jotted some notes, almost all questions:
Why does it seem I will betray Sarah by having another child? Does God guide our every move or does He allow others to bring the daily miracle? I can’t simply have happened upon the Iyalode. Did Jacob know? Was he guiding me there?

“I might be six weeks along,” she said, lying alongside Henry before snuffing the bedside candle. “I wasn’t sure until today.” He didn’t respond right away. Quick as the devil came that awful thought:
He’s not well; he doesn’t wish it; he wants to move again.
She raised herself to look at him. His lips were slightly parted.

“Are you happy?” he said, pulling himself up to meet her.

“I can’t say.”

“You dwell on Sarah,” he said.

“I don’t want to lose her,” Emma said. She paused, running her hand over the sheet. “I have sometimes thought I was losing you.”

He pulled her close and smoothed her hair.

“You cannot lose Sarah. She is eternal.” Emma’s heart tipped like water spilling out of a tumbler. They came together in that close way, upon the edge and over.

A week later, Emma woke in the night, the space beside her empty. Henry assured her he never left the compound; it was just that sometimes his leg cramped or he couldn’t sleep and he needed to walk about. While it was still dark but after the rooster’s crow, she dreamed and woke with the sense that she had left something unattended.

When she dressed and came into the courtyard, she saw the sun breaking over the low roof of her dwelling, light shifting through the leaves of her tree, a dragonfly hovering over a water pot, a lizard at its base. The morning was cool and she went back into the bedroom for one of Henry’s old sweaters, worn to thinness but perfect for such an African morning. She welcomed the velvety air and rang her bell for tea.
It’s only normal I should be tired
, she reassured herself,
with the move and constant commotion, and this
. Just to think how much she had learned and accomplished, and suffered, in sixteen African months. She patted her stomach.

Duro brought the teapot on a tray along with her favorite china cup. Though she was sure Jacob knew, they had not yet said anything to the household.

Henry came through the parlor door, carrying his coffee.

“I missed you,” she said. “When did you get up?”

“Not much before dawn,” he said. “You were snoring.” She thought he eyed her playfully.

“I never snore,” she said.

“You do now.”

“What’s your plan for the day?” she said. Henry had preached in town, taking up his post with the blind man, who had a choice location at a crossroads, beneath an expansive tree. By Henry’s report, he often drew more than a hundred listeners at a time. She didn’t doubt him. But her husband spent equal time riding to the farms with Jacob and conversing with villagers. He had reported on a nearby hill he meant to explore,
Oke’ lerin
, meaning “mountain of elephants.”

“I thought to work on my Hausa,” he said, meaning the language of the north. “I found a gentleman who knows the grammar.”

“We haven’t finished the Yoruba book,” she said, startled that he would speak of something so far off when their needs were right in front of his nose. Couldn’t they do one thing at a time? Focus on one language.

“Of course,” he said, evading her comment. “You’re forgetting to wear your hat.” He retrieved it for her. “I’ll check the horse and be back for breakfast.”

Emma was just beginning to feel at ease. For several mornings now, she had taken Wole and Abike to the Africa room, the one she had spotted on her initial exploration, with the thatched roof and wooden benches. She knew children would come if she showed herself, and they had. Twice more she had traveled into town, calling at the Iyalode’s, taking some sewing with her, and demonstrating for a group of women how to make a buttonhole. It would be so good when African women had buttons to keep their clothes shut. A particularly eager woman named Sade got the knack of everything right away. She was quite short, probably not five feet tall, with scarifications on her shoulders.

“Abike,” she called. “Abike!”

The girl came into the courtyard through the passageway Henry had just exited. Her head was uncovered and she had a green feather stuck in her hair.

“What are you doing? Where were you?” She was suddenly impatient. The day was getting on. She should be at work. Besides, there were doubtless all sorts of strangers milling about just on the other side of the compound wall, gazing at the girl.

“I was assisting Jacob mah. He has told me to sweep his yard and make fire.”

Emma took care as she stepped down from the veranda. She pulled the feather from Abike’s hair and the girl ducked. A wave of heat came over Emma and she tore savagely at the sweater she had put on. As she did, it caught on a hook in her dress and snagged. The pulled string was almost a foot long, and the sweater all bunched where the damage was done. “Call Jacob immediately,” she said, feeling she had been caught in dereliction of duty.

The man half ran into the courtyard. She was pleased at his alarm. “What do you mean making a slave of my servant? How do you explain yourself?” she said.

“Please mah.” He caught his breath, cocking his hip and resting a hand on one side. “She offered to sweep after she had finished here,” he said.

“She tells me you demanded that she sweep and build a fire.”

“No mah.” He seemed to be laughing at her.

Jacob had enough of the Englishman in him to keep Emma thoroughly confused. He was a black man who didn’t seem to need her help, who considered whether he would accept their offer of employment. Though clearly it should be so, it bothered her that he had greater claim on Wole than she did. “You are not in charge here. This girl is not yours!” Emma said, feeling her chest tighten. “As soon as my husband returns we’ll sort this out.”

“Sort what out?” Henry said, back from the stable.

“This servant of yours is commanding my handmaid. He’s had her sweeping this morning and making his personal fire.”

“He’s not my servant,” Henry said.

“He’s had Abike in front of his room, sweeping his yard and tending his fire.” She meant to make her point.

“What’s this, Jacob? What do you say?”

“Sorry sah. The girl . . . it was a mistake. My own mistake.” Emma saw the flutter in Jacob’s jaw—as if
he
were offended—and it made her even angrier. Henry was being taken in by his manner. And she had thought Jacob was acting as an instrument of the divine!

“I don’t see much damage,” her husband said. “In future, Jacob, be sure to check with Mrs. Bowman. She’s in charge of the house staff.”

Instead of a sewing lesson and a bright hour in the school, Emma’s morning was ruined. She did not call Abike. There was no sign of Wole. Henry and Jacob went to preach and she was left with nothing. She committed her thoughts into her diary:
Husband’s servant worrisome; morning lost. Expect better tomorrow.
Returning the journal to her writing box, she remembered Uncle Eli, who had looked out for her, whose hands were so familiar she could see them now, and she felt worse for what she had written. She pulled the book back out and recommenced.
What troubles me that I should be so harsh? How can I be a witness if I cannot be kindlier in my own household?

After dinner Henry set to work on his vocabulary. He had jerry-rigged a work space by placing a plane of wood over two boxes in a corner of the piazza, and here he spent two hours before going out to preach in the afternoon. Emma took a nap in the bedroom. She woke feeling drugged and discontent, the way a foreigner does after sleeping in the day in a hot country and with little true refreshment or companionship. She poured water into her wash bowl and dipped her head into it. She combed her hair out and sat in the rocker on the veranda. She waited for her hair to dry and for Henry to emerge, but he never came from the shaded corner. When she went to investigate, she discovered he had finished his work and gone out.

She went in search of Duro. He was waiting at the kitchen. She sensed he had something to say and hoped it was not about her flare-up in the morning.

“What is it?” she said.

“An idiot has come,” he said, raising both hands to his head and rubbing his short hair, then running one hand straight down his face as if wringing out some distress. “When you were resting and the master has gone. One of those snake charmers. He is very bad. I cannot enjoy myself when he is coming.”

“Did he pass through the gate?”

“He called to me from the wall.” He pointed.

“What did he say?”

“He says you have brought something here. ‘The
oyinbo
woman is bringing trouble. She has something she doesn’t know. It wants to go down.’ That is what he is saying.”

Emma experienced an encouraging lift of understanding. How grateful she was for her cook, who spoke to her plainly. “But you see, don’t you? We have brought the light of Jesus, the gospel. He’s against our religion because he’s fearful for his own way of life. He depends on people’s superstitions and doesn’t wish to be discovered for a fraud. You know all of those rain dancers dance in the rainy season when it’s going to rain anyway. I don’t know how they get away with it. I’m sorry he troubled you.” She was happy to be talking it out.

“I was fearful mah. The man is too dangerous. I am fearful for you.”

“Thank you for your care, Duro,” she said. But still the cook seemed concerned. “Is there something else you haven’t told me?”

“He wanted to give me a charm.”

“Yes?”

“Ah, mama.” Duro shook his head, using that close African address. “A native medicine.”

Emma was surprised her cook was so distraught. These things were common but harmless. It would take some while to rid Africa of its pagan ways.

· 22 ·

Alphabet

J
ACOB SAT ON
the piazza in front of his room, sharpening a saw. He had turned to the work after Mrs. Bowman’s outburst. Since their visit with the Iyalode, he had thought the woman was learning. She appeared to respect him. Now this morning she tried to turn him into a boy. She was too proud. He calmed himself through the task, waiting for Tunji, a friend from the caravan and
omo
Ogbomoso, born in Ogbomoso. Tunji was one of the porters who had run with him in search of Wole. That night they had sat up by the fire. Jacob had told how he discovered the child on his return to Yoruba land. Telling that story had required telling of his own slavery, and he was grateful the next day when the man did not reject him. The mark of slavery was viewed as a personal flaw by Jacob’s countrymen, or, worse yet, a contagion.

He worked the file against the beveled edge, turning it between the teeth until he captured a shiny edge. Wole lay on his stomach nearby, his legs, from the knees up, swaying apart and back together. He was copying letters onto a chalkboard from a set of alphabet cards.

On a routine job carrying loads for British agents between Ijaye and Ibadan, Jacob came upon his small relation. The caravan had stopped in a village close to his former home. Someone had spoken his father’s sister’s name. He inquired, thinking it still possible someone from the family may have survived. When he described his auntie’s long neck and the way her voice carried higher and higher into the trees as she talked, an old woman declared that such a woman had escaped into the town, wearing only a scarf, and round-bellied. She had died in the next dry season but left a son, who was cared for by a grandmother of the town. There was no mistake; the boy was of his lineage.

Jacob lived in the village with Wole for a season before taking him to Ijaye. He told the boy stories of the family. The child seemed to hear everything as a drama. “Do I look like Baba?” he would say in his Yoruba, meaning Jacob’s father, or, “Who has had my head?”
Whose character is like my own?
The stories brought the past back to Jacob so intensely he sometimes felt he would disappear. The boy, however, seemed content, as if he lived at one remove from the world of ordinary people and Jacob understood why it was a commonplace to believe the son is the father returned.

One day in the market he heard of the opportunity with Rev. Bowman. But then the child disappeared on the road. It was enough to finish him. Once he had the boy back, he didn’t care if the reverend sacked him, but the missionary was too happy with Wole’s safety to suck anger.

He looked down to see that Wole had managed
H
but was stuck on
J
. “Why don’t you rest?” Jacob said, half joking. Wole shook his head again and lowered it. “Let me show you,” Jacob said, squatting. “It is the beginning of my own English name. Begin at the top, like so, come down, and pitch left, like the base of a tree. Then put a flat roof on top. Eh?” The tip of Wole’s tongue stuck out in concentration. Jacob looked at the back of the boy’s head. He cupped it with his palm and shook but not hard enough to rattle the child’s brains.

Back at his seat, Jacob turned the saw over and worked the other side. When he was through, he rubbed it with an oil cloth. He caught sight of his reflection in the blade, and he thought of Mrs. Bowman. It was a shame she was so disquieting because Rev. Bowman was a good
oyinbo
. He knew how to work and did not require someone else to haul every small box. Already they had hunted, explored, and preached together. Pastor liked to know everything. What can this plant do? How can you fix this food? How is this wood used? He sat on the ground in the village. It was true he had lost his temper on the journey. All men lose their tempers. The responsibilities of being a man were great, whatever the country. No. It was the wife. He saw now she was a trap that could spring. It was not good for his master. And what of her thin frame? Would she be able to carry the child? It would be bad for the pastor to lose his offspring.

Was it the wife that troubled him, the master? Or something else? Jacob was unable to ascertain the matter as of yet. The man had some struggle in his head. Sometimes, even, he would turn directly from speech to silence. He came out in the midst of the night and walked about in the compound. He might stop, turn around, and walk the other way, as if he had dropped something. He squatted and felt the ground, and Jacob wondered if it was a form of American prayer. When he knew the man better, he would inquire.

In the day, the reverend was very-very exacting. With everything, he would not wish to be off by a quarter inch. Even so, he treated him well, almost like a white brother.

The sun stood higher in the sky and lit the blade of the saw. Jacob remembered the silver bracelets his mother wore when he was young. He had fastened in his brain an image of her as she looked when he was very small, lying with his head in her lap: her round throat, nostrils open, eyelashes, the fringe of headdress above him.

Wole’s legs swayed. Jacob was glad his small relation had his protection. Nothing was worse in slavery than to have his body inspected. A stone of anger sat in the front of his brain, remembering a white man’s palm on his chest, against his thigh. He watched Mrs. Bowman closely with Wole, but with him, she was kind as a mother. Jacob tried to forgive her for her foolishness. Once he observed her hair fall around her neck, and her gesture of putting it up made him wonder who she might be if she had been born in Africa. He swung his arms overhead and stretched. The child turned onto his side.

“I don’t know this one,” he said, pointing to the
Q
card. “How do you say it?”

“You don’t know
Q
because we don’t have it,” Jacob answered. “It is a strange fruit. I will tell you how to eat it. First take
K
and put it in your mouth, then
U
; then chew them together:
K-U.
”

“
K-U
,” Wole tried.

“Say it faster,” Jacob said.

Wole spoke something that sounded like a lame bird: “
K-yu, k-yu.
”

“Go on and write it; it will root in your brain,” Jacob said.

The affray with Mrs. Bowman had brought too much into his head. As soon as he sat again, his mind traveled to the day he returned to his country, searching for his village. He had been told it was gone, but he would not believe. He fitted himself with a machete and a knife, as if going into battle. He sought for hours in thick brush and woods, at last finding the familiar granite boulder. When the village was not where he thought to see it, he decided it must be on the other side. He had just remembered incorrectly. Still, he felt hollow. Then the village was also not on the other side. He located the iroko tree where vendors once sold food to travelers. He found the river where his mother had washed him as a boy and the lagoon where he and his friends dove from overhanging trees. A foreign town had sprung up around it. Going back to the place of his lost village, no evidence at all but memory, he at last stumbled across an old wall in the grass. He sat down and wept and turned onto his side, onto the earth, and wept, and reached out and pulled up clumps of grass and dug into the earth and tore his fingernails and dug into the earth again and clamped his fists around the dirt and smeared it onto his face and into his mouth and wept. The earth had broken.

Someone knocked his shoulder.

“What are you dreaming of, the girl, eh?” It was his friend Tunji.

“Why are you pushing me?” Jacob snapped. The memory was in his mouth, the taste of dirt.

“No trouble now. You were sleeping with your eyes open. Again. You are becoming like the white missionary.”

“Crazy man. Sit down before I beat you.”

Jacob relaxed, seeing his friend with his yellow dog. Tunji carried
fufu
dipped in pepper soup and wrapped in a banana leaf.

“I’ve come to deliver you from the white woman’s food.”

Jacob rested his elbows on his knees and leaned into the
fufu
. Some of the hot soup ran down his hands, but he caught the drops with his tongue. The dog waited in case he missed.

How did his friend know his thinking on Abike? It was difficult in any case. Missionaries may fire servants if they suspect attraction between them. “Which girl?” he said.

“Which girl?” Tunji was still standing, and he bent over and laughed as he repeated Jacob’s question. “You na crazy man,” he said. “Abike,
na so
?” He placed his hands on his chest and indicated mounds.

Jacob looked at Wole, but the boy was too involved in his letters to be watching Tunji.

Jacob tried to keep a straight face. “The food is fine.
A dupe.
” Suddenly he wondered if Tunji had hopes for Abike. The man must have read his mind.

“My eye reaches for another girl. She’s farther along,” he said. One of Tunji’s teeth was set at an angle and the effect was to make him so-so handsome to the ladies. He walked in a casual strut. All of the women on the caravan, even the old ones, wanted to wait on him.

“My friend,” Jacob said, changing the subject. “Have you decided whether to come to worship with us?”

“What day is it?” Tunji said.

“Imagine every market week plus two days,” Jacob said.

“How can I remember that?”

“I will call for you one day. Come to the service, then just count off to seven and come again.”

Wole stood. “I am finished,” he said, as if he had built a kingdom.

“Finished what, small man?” Tunji said.

“The alphabet.”

“Ah. You’re becoming an
oyinbo
. Even now, your color is fading. Any time pass now and you will become a ghost. Jacob, have you seen your brother? I don’t see him. Where is he?” Tunji waved his arms, pretending the boy was invisible.

Jacob saw the boy lock his knees until his legs were almost bowed backward. “See me this time! I am not
oyinbo
!” he demanded, holding out his arms to prove it to himself.

“Give the boy some credit,” Jacob said to his friend. And to Wole: “Latch on to my back.” He leaned over and the boy latched on. When they passed under the compound trees, Wole reached into the low branches and grabbed, bringing down a golden spray of leaves.

Jacob caught sight of Mrs. Bowman watching them from the house. She appeared lost. Suddenly he wished to go to her, to ask what she might need. The feeling made his head burn.