A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (8 page)

“I’ll take you,” he said.

“I don’t believe I can,” she said, but she followed him down a path where he whacked down some underbrush with a cutlass and then stood with his back to her to protect her privacy.

Henry rolled a cigarette and they started again. Under the midday sun, Emma sweated until her clothes clung to her cruelly and she itched something fierce. She wore a hat with netting over her face and tucked into her collar—to keep out insects—and now she ripped it off.

At first the food seemed palatable—beans and rice. But after three days, Emma could hardly stomach it. She longed for fried chicken, lima beans, a biscuit, a mere carrot. Rather than enjoy a wholesome meal, she must watch the carriers dig into their dinner with their hands, talking with their mouths full, licking their fingers.

As they progressed, she became a great oddity. Rather than
oyinbo
, one frightened woman called her “
Eemaw!
” Monster! before running for cover, quick as a fox. Emma had thought Africans might find her attractive. It was a great disappointment to learn they found her appearance disagreeable. She retrieved the netted hat and put it back on.

All of the people everywhere were as loud as could be. No one talked but he must throw his arms up and down, side to side, and move his head as if always agreeing with himself. Emma continued to be surprised by the people’s clothing. The men wore yards of cloth for parading about town in their
agbadas
, or gowns, while the women’s outfits were hardly existent.

“I cannot,” she said one night, undressing by candlelight in what was to pass as their night’s chamber—a mud room, eight feet square, stifling hot, the roof so low she must stoop. Her petticoat was brown from trailing in the mud. When she took off her gloves, she found her wrists were dark with dirt. Her malodor was frightful. As she poured water into a bucket, something fell to the ground and scooted out the low door. She screamed, her heart hammering. Surely Henry would hear her. When he did not come, she had no choice but to pray. “Dear God, forgive me. I will fail. It is too much. If something lands in my hair, I will die. You must shield me.” Her misery was severe. She thought of her mother; her own white, plump bed at home—all she had left without a second thought, in order to sit in this hovel scared to death of whatever lizard or bug might crawl up her leg. After the merest bath, she slipped an undergarment over her head to serve as a gown. In her dreary state, she opened her writing box and pulled out Uncle Eli’s carving, so beautifully smooth and clean. She clung to it lying on the pallet, meaning to wait for Henry. A moment and she slept.

In the morning, Henry attended to a man whose foot had developed a sore. Emma had time to pull out the lap desk and her journal. She wrote down everything.
I had thought in marriage to be less alone but closeness makes distance more acute. The people are friendly but I find no point of contact. Keeping clean will take all of my strength. Henry teaches me that the emblem of peace is the palm tree.

At last they reached farm lands in the rolling plains. These seemed broader than any fields Emma had ever seen, and in the wooded glades, the variety of greens emerging with the rain was so dazzling she thought there could not be enough words for such color. She felt her first happiness in the country. Here were acacia trees like gazelles springing into air. When she saw the women bearing yams and other fruits out of the farms, she observed how their posture was akin to colored women back home carrying melons on their heads. She felt a delight of recognition and pulled off the netted hat. “I’m not wearing this,” she said to no one in particular. Emma had discovered that the mosquitoes hardly bothered her anyway though they gave Henry fits. It was only at night when they buzzed around her head that she hated them.

She was grateful for deep woods where the forest canopy seemed half a mile tall and knit tight as a cathedral ceiling, and in the middle of the day the light was blue and the temperatures lower. Unlike oaks and maples, whose upper roots spread along the ground, the great African hardwoods were anchored with natural buttresses as tall as Emma was. Once in the bush an elephant came out and stood in the way.
This is a real elephant
, Emma thought,
not a circus one
, and rather than panic, she admired it. Some of the carriers wanted Henry to shoot.
No
,
Emma thought,
not this glorious being with its great animate ears and swinging trunk
. She was immensely relieved when Henry said no. They hadn’t time for slaughtering, and besides his rifle wouldn’t take it down; the elephant would run after being wounded or charge and it would need lots of spearing. There seemed a general disappointment before the elephant crashed off.

They came to a village on a river where the huts were built on stilts. To this point, all of the towns had been alike, one after the other, full of windowless mud houses, open markets, potteries and clothmaking out of doors, shrine houses for the
orishas
or community gods, lots and lots of drumming, and the air lavender with smoke from cooking fires. The fires produced a smell Emma had already come to enjoy, sweet and peppery. Here at the river village, they must, as always, ask permission to enter. An old chief came out, a string of women and girls behind him. It seemed a lot of daughters for one man. When things were settled, Emma asked about them.

“They are his wives,” Henry said.

“His wives?” Emma said. “They look like schoolgirls and he looks a hundred.”

She glanced toward the courtyard, where a number of the girls were eating around a common pot. She couldn’t tell that they were suffering, but it seemed an awful plight to be married off to a voracious old chief. They wore light wraps, their hair cut close.

“Do you think I might speak to them?” she said.

“By all means,” Henry said.

Emma made her way over to them. They watched with interest, but when she came close, several ran off. A brave young wife offered her space on a mat and Emma took a seat, grateful she had already decided against her stiff petticoats. She said “Good evening” in Yoruba and was met with much glee in this salutation. Emma wished she knew a Yoruba song, but she didn’t. So it was
Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing; wasn’t that a dainty dish, to set before a king?
The girls began to clap and required her to sing the rhyme several more times. Then they insisted she take her gloves off. They took turns trying them on and examined her hands. “Well, I’m charmed,” Emma said, and she was. She liked their spunk. Maybe that old chief had not ruined them entirely. The wife who offered Emma a place on her mat slipped a pair of milky beads over Emma’s neck and would not let her return them when Emma stood to leave.

One night between villages, the carriers had to build up a booth of grass for them to sleep under, and Henry preached in Yoruba and English, to include her, Emma supposed.

“Think of your love for your children. This is how God loves you, only ten thousand times more and still some. Leave off your idols. Through Jesus you will arrive at your Father, the one true God. The only gift you need give is yourself,” he said.

Her husband seemed to find such opportunity for witness in the wild interior of Africa more than sufficient payment for all of their sweat. But in a moment, preaching had to be put off, for a violent storm came up, shaking the territory with thunder.

“My things!” Emma called.

The gullies on either side of the road were soon converted to creeks as Emma sat atop a crate holding her writing box. She was frightened near to death, the huge treetops pitching, branches creaking, the deluge turning everything gray.

“I’ve seen worse,” Henry said.

“Well I haven’t,” she said.

· 7 ·

Visitors

B
Y LATE
M
AY,
Emma was settled in Ijaye in the house that Henry had built on a gentle incline of land. By Georgia standards, it was a fine cabin. Here it seemed a castle. Though constructed of mud and plaster, the work was finely done, the walls deep and smooth. There were six rooms in the rectangular home, three across the front for their use, one opening on the side yard for guests, and two across the back for servants, though, at present, they had only one servant, a man, their cook, named Duro. After days of sleeping in dark huts, Emma gloried in the windows, which looked out on a fair-sized yard before one’s eyes came to rest on a town lane. A veranda, called by Henry “the piazza,” ran the entire perimeter of the house and the rooms opened onto it, though Henry’s and Emma’s rooms could also be passed through from one to the other on the interior. The thatched roof jutted far out over the piazza, providing deep shade. In the back were the kitchen and garden area where Henry had established a lemon tree, a batch of mint, a stand of banana trees, and a row of tobacco.
Clever man
, Emma thought. The privy occupied one corner at the very back of the property. At present the stable stood empty, as they had not, after all, purchased a horse. Catercorner to the house in the front stood Henry’s chapel. Their compound was enclosed by a low wall on one side and a hedgerow on the other, the space close to an acre and a half. They were located near a good-sized stream. Half a mile in the other direction was the center of town and the king’s compound. The lane in front of their house was always busy, especially in early morning and at dusk with farmers going out, market women coming in, children doing as they wished, and even cattle, goats, and pigs—some attended and some not.

Emma set about at once to create a home. She did not believe that a mud floor could be clean and asked Henry if they might purchase native matting to act as rugs.

“It will mean more work,” he said, “taking mats out to air and sweeping beneath.”

“I prefer it,” she said.

Henry agreed, and Emma was pleased with her first decorative touch. Later she would add a tapestry or picture to the walls. Henry had shown her that by boiling nails, he could hammer them into the plaster easy as butter. But at present she had no artwork. Some sort of curtain she would have. She asked Henry to put a bamboo rod over the front window. “I’ll simply drape one of my shawls across the upper beam,” she said, “until I have time for sewing.” Henry seemed to find her efforts surprising, and she thought he must long have desired a feminine touch. There was little furniture except a wardrobe Henry had purchased from a British missionary, wooden packing boxes now turned to side tables, a dining table and chairs, some locally made benches, their long trunk fashioned with a wooden pocket for stowing the rifle, one stuffed chair, a bed, and an extra mattress. Emma gave her writing box pride of place on a bench next to the good chair in the sitting room. Here she would make her devotional, compose letters home, and keep her journal. Whole books might spiral out of her.

The neighbors’ goats tended to cluster on the piazza, liking the nice shade. She shooed them off, but they always came back. Shooing off the large brown lizards that congregated on the outer walls was nigh impossible. They only moved a few inches higher into the cool shade. Henry was right about her “rugs.” Because the yard was dirt, dust inevitably sifted into the house, and she must shake them out almost daily. In lighter moods, she enjoyed the industry, but in darker ones, she imagined nothing could stay clean in Africa.

They were in the heart of Yoruba land, a walled town of thousands overseen by a warrior king named Kunrumi who had once planned his own son’s execution on suspicion of his being a traitor. This gentleman kept a large fighting force of men. It seemed discordant to Emma’s pastoral view that it should be so, and she was often spooked by the drums at night. Then she clung to Henry. At least the town had seen
oyinbos
, her husband, of course, and Rev. Moore. Still, people stood on the lane and watched and pointed and commented as she moved in the yard. Any little thing she did could create uproarious laughter. In the evening as the townspeople went home, they called to Emma in gentler voices, wishing her “good evening.” During that brief twilight, the palm tree forest on a distant hill was clothed in mist, and the sweet smell of fires filled the air.

Soon enough some of Moore’s schoolchildren gathered with Emma in the mornings, including two older boys well versed in English. They differed from many youngsters in that they wore some clothing at least, all but the youngest, who had only beads around their necks or waists. Emma had never seen bolder children, and that they were black made it all the more amazing to her. They smiled broadly and waved to say hello, not good-bye, their hands fully extended. They felt free to touch her any way they pleased, to pick at the fabric of her dress and discuss it with one another, and to ask for anything they wanted. She found deep pleasure in their company. To the question, “Who made the bird?” they answered, “God made the bird.” To the question, “Who is Jesus?” they had all kinds of answers, including “your husband,” “my uncle,” “the
alufa
”—or Yoruba priest—and “my friend.”

In the afternoons, women from Henry’s congregation brought pineapples to the house before the evening service. The fruit was exquisite, running with juice when cut, and so pungent, Emma thought it must be God’s apple. The women bowed almost to the ground in their greeting, and Emma found herself doing a little curtsy and with everyone she went through all the litany: How is your husband, how are your children, how is your house,
titi lailai
, forever and ever. When they sang in the yard, the women crooked their elbows, made little fists, and swayed their arms side to side. They tended to bend at their hips so their backside stuck out a bit, and they observed the movement of their feet with great dedication. It was all so liquid and natural and lovely except it lasted indefinitely. There was no such thing as stanzas. Everything, Emma could see, took longer in this world. She looked forward to a time—surely soon—when people would stop their constant coming and going and gawking.

One morning Emma and Henry called at the king’s palace and were received by the elder wife. She insisted on showing them a number of carvings made from elephants’ tusks ornamenting a large room, some mounted on wooden boxes, others stretched out like canoes against the wall. Emma counted two dozen pairs. The wife went to prepare a native refreshment while her guests were left to gaze on the ivory. The room was hot and Emma moved to the door, heavily carved in what appeared to be scenes of village life and hunting. The whole composition was edged in birds.

“What do those mean?” she said.

Henry came to take a look.

“As I understand it, they represent
iya
, mothers whose protection the king must have if he is to rule,” he said.

“They’re quite innocent-looking to have such power,” she said. “They’re shaped like a thrasher. Well, with a shorter tail.”

“They’re happy right now,” Henry said, smiling. “They can turn into powerful night birds, witches, who go on the prowl, punishing anyone who steps out of line. I hope you don’t turn into one.”

“Why are women always the witches?” she said, not sharing his humor.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” he said. “The Yoruba associate women’s childbearing with great mystery, something like metamorphosis. Then they make it into magic. If women can produce children, why not turn into birds? Even the men are dedicated to a fertility goddess. Simple ignorance.”

Emma was not accustomed to casual speech about the private capacities of a woman’s body, and her cheeks burned. By the time they met Kunrumi, she was feeling deflated. Next to the tusks, the warrior seemed small, wearing a rather insignificant robe. But his eyes were bright and she could see he had brains.

When they arrived home, Emma remembered Duro had the evening off. “I need to rest,” she said, and soon she was asleep on the bed. She slept into evening and woke to find Henry had made dinner like a picnic, mats spread before the tin lantern in the parlor. It was much more pleasant than real camping, Emma thought. After clearing the dishes, Henry reclined, lantern light spilling around him. Soon he was snoring. Emma gathered her writing box. She was alert from her rest and it seemed a good time to make a record in her diary.
I wonder
what it is like to grow up in this country, to become a woman here. It seems so far from me. The king’s wife, for example. Did she wish for her life? Does she enjoy it?
Emma glanced at Henry, one arm thrown over his head, the other resting on his abdomen, rising and falling with his breath. It was so perplexing, these many wives with one husband. Emma wanted to write about
that
, but she closed the journal.

In a while, she threw a light shawl across Henry’s shoulders and found her way to bed, but she lay awake and felt herself still moving. The images and smells of the past weeks, walking and canoeing, the constant noise and talk, the unpacking and greeting, the white birds turning to ravens, ran through her in waves. In her mind she walked through all the rooms of her Georgia home and counted everything she remembered. Once she woke in the night to think on Uncle Eli’s old arrangements hung from his ceiling. They must have been his private magic, like the king’s birds, but she could not hold it against him. If anything, she was happy with herself, as if she had been tasked with solving a great puzzle and had found one piece that fit.

It was dawning on Emma that she found Yoruba men more approachable than the women. The men knew some English and dressed reasonably and had things to talk about. Daily she overheard them with Henry discussing theology, the town’s history, the trade routes. A great deal of labor devolved upon the women, who took care of babies as they sold their goods and had already been out that morning to the farm, harvesting before they came into town carrying enormous loads on their heads, loads that seemed more likely for a horse. Then they were grinding corn in their great pestles. They cooked even in the market, making up things to sell. And yet they must return home to cook for their husbands. Surely, Emma thought, she must turn her heart in sympathy toward them as she had the girl-wife who gave her the milky beads. Emma made a note in the red journal.
I must reach the women and not only the children, for in every way, the mothers make the children.
She pulled out a hair comb and used it to scratch her scalp. It was a good commitment, but she knew her heart wasn’t yet in it.

A month after their arrival, there was no letup in the press of people. Morning to night, folks showed up to watch most anything they did. At mealtime, children’s faces filled the windows. One afternoon Emma looked out to see a group of all sorts, young and old, men and women, pointing to her unmentionables on the line. She bolted out the door, down the step, and right into their midst.

“Why are you here?” she said. “This is my own yard. You must leave. Go. Go.” She tried to shoo them, but they barely parted. A young man made a comment and the whole group laughed. She recognized no one. A woman ran her hand up and down Emma’s corset. She might as well have raised her private garments on a flagpole. She swatted at the woman’s hand and hit it lightly. Everything stopped. The woman looked first at her hand, and then she looked at Emma and then at her companions as if she had just been spat upon. The fun was over.

“Ah, ah,” an older man said and shook his head.

It was all wrong. They had intruded upon her and now they acted as if she were the criminal.

“Mama,” Emma said in the African way, hoping to make amends with the woman. But the lady was leaving, her face set.

Henry came into the house that evening, his face grim. “The news in town,” he said, “is the
oyinbo
woman strikes like a cat. Would you like to tell me what happened, Mrs. Bowman?”

Emma stiffened at the formal address. She relayed the story, the intrusion upon her things, her dismay, the slight reprimand. “Just the slightest touch,” she said, “like a feather.” Henry continued to look at her, his eyes going a little funny. “I’ve had just about enough of being a circus attraction,” she continued, dismayed at his look. “Must they forever be gaping at me? Would you stop them if they came into the house and ran through the wardrobe?”

“Has anyone come into the house and run through the wardrobe?”

“No,” she said.

“Has anyone hit you?”

“No,” she said.

“You know what will be next?” he said. “They’ll make you into a witch. It’s a very fine line you walk. We’re already thought by many to be unnatural.”

“Henry,” she said, pleading, a great longing in her for him to understand. She began to cry but he seemed only sterner, as if she were waging unfair battle.

“This is a black world. You are the visitor. Do you understand? You are in their yard.”

“Yes. We are guests. Well, I don’t go gawking at my guests day and night as they do.” She wiped her tears. “Moreover, dear husband, you don’t have such things as I have to hang on the line, to dry properly, as you say.” Her voice rose. She flung her hands out. “As you say over and over: ‘Emma, be certain your clothes are fully dry. You’ll be ill if they aren’t.’ You!” She stopped for a moment. “You insisted I hang my private things in the backyard. In case you did not learn it in your cavalry or your first mission or wherever else you’ve been, a woman must have some privacy.”

His shoulders sank a little and she thought she had gotten through. Indeed, she felt triumphant with her speech.

“Wife,” he said, “you must learn to distinguish between genuine harm and your perception of it. You have not been wronged. Your pride is wounded. The only healing for it is humility. Go to the woman you struck and apologize.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

She felt for a moment that indeed this man was larger than her father, and something trembled in her for what it might mean. Alone later, she lifted the prism from the shelf where she had set it and touched its cool planes to her cheek. In the morning, she and Duro sought the woman’s house to apologize. The burden of waiting was worse than the trial. But the lady had gone to her farm and would not be back for days, so Emma had humiliation and the trial still before her.