Makeda (25 page)

This may sound (even somewhat to me) mawkishly sentimental. After all, I was alone, high above the Earth, in a foreign night with the moon outside my window and the stunning canvas of Africa beneath me. I will further confess that this may have influenced the language I have used to describe what I was feeling. But if I am certain of anything, it is that only the language can be viewed as sentimental, not the deepening conviction that inspired it. Not the feelings themselves.

The Air Mali Boeing 737 jet touched down on African soil at 6:37 in the morning. I pressed my face to the window the whole time it took the pilot to taxi into the terminal building area. An African ground worker waved up at me in a gesture I chose to interpret as a welcome. He was tall and lean, wearing wooden clogs, a wine-colored felt fez, and a long, white ground-length robe that shifted on the light morning breeze. Behind him, I could see far across the flat red-clay plain into the limitless distance.

The door opened and non–French speaking voices from the outside wafted into the plane’s cabin. (I would later learn that it was Bambara that was being spoken. This was one of the three Mande languages spoken by half of Mali’s population.)

It was the beginning of the rainy season and the air was cool and humid.

The plane’s cabin itself underscored the first odd dichotomy that I would notice. All of the workers moving about outside the plane were Africans, while all who were onboard the plane—with the exception of me—the flight crew, and nine passengers that I assumed were Malians, were probably French nationals.

I took out the travel itinerary that I had handwritten in Baltimore and tucked into my shirt pocket. I had two hours to wait until my connecting flight left for Timbuktu which lay two thousand miles to the northeast along the Niger River in the central section of the country. I had more than enough time to clear immigration and customs before starting on the last leg of my journey.

I’d had difficulty reserving a room at a hotel in Timbuktu. So I’d arranged through the good offices of the Sofitel L’Amitié Bamako to stay at a small inexpensive guesthouse not far from Timbuktu’s ancient libraries.

The flight attendants, both Malian women, put on light green six-button double-breasted blazers and began preparing the passengers to deplane. The attendant toward the front of the aircraft, a tiny woman in her early twenties, gave over the public address system a stream of announcements in French, only the first of which had I understood:
Bienvenue au Mali
.

I peered out toward the terminal which was a rudimentary ferroconcrete building decorated modestly along its top edge by a cornice from which protruded a flagstaff that supported a large version of the national flag. The flag was comprised of three wide vertical bars—green, yellow, and red, the borrowed colors of Ethiopian Pan-Africanism. Just beneath the swing of the flag were two lines painted in large letters on the façade of the building:

BIENVENUE
BAMAKO, MALI

Suddenly it started to rain, and with such torrential intensity that the water banging against the skin of the fuselage sounded like a shower of metal pellets. Within seconds, the rain stopped and the morning sun began quickly baking away all evidence of it having rained in the first place.

A mobile stairway was pushed against the side of the plane, and shortly afterward we were allowed to go down to the ground.

This altered in me an unstable balance of contesting emotions. This business, as it were, of going
down to the
ground
. Nothing else would explain my calm state, inasmuch as I have never liked large new experiences.

As a child, I hated changing from my old elementary school to the junior high school on the same street six blocks away. I had been anxiety-logged about it, even when many of my friends transferred with me to the same new place. I had never liked crowds of strangers or meeting new people. My mother always had the hardest time getting me to try new foods. While I liked Chinese food, I had never once tried to maneuver any from plate to mouth with the two little wooden sticks. At Morgan, I’d never bothered learning to greet a Nigerian student in Yoruba, or a Liberian student in Kru or Krahn.

All my life, I had so invariably relied upon the security of habit that I was all but completely unaware of habit’s own unremarked tenacity. I not only required neatness of space but also the meticulous preservation of small routine. In stores I’d search for brand names while knowing nothing at all about the brand-name products’ serviceability.

I may or may not have known that everyone did such, or something very much like it, for the sake of preserving one’s sanity. The modern age had become overcrowded with the exponential growth of the hungry little decisions that were increasingly laying claim to the peace and time necessary for making the big and important decisions. Habit was, at once, mind-saver and mind-killer—dumb, blind, salving. Opiate of the mindless masses. Indispensable friend to the anal-retentive. The glue that stuck marriages, democracies, dictatorships, and practically everything else together.

But I had, I thought, a worse case of
habit-clutch
than most.

This could have been due to growing up in a family unit headed by an overburdened insurance salesman and an overqualified homemaker. It could have been that we were so preoccupied with the numberless meannesses of the ugly awful South that we could not afford, at least for the moment, to go looking beyond. Rate tables, gray domesticity, and the ever ubiquitous humiliation of segregation summed up to a certain understandable
reduction
of us, I suppose. A certain unexamined, foreordained provincialism. It was much related to the race-business obsession of black people that coagulated in the spirit and blocked the light—the painful, mind-numbing, progress-retarding iron-weight that had been dragged around like a leg ball from slavery to freedom and beyond to wherever-the-hellelse we would ever, in a lifetime, be going.

The weight was there with me on the plane in Bamako, coloring assumptions, erecting inhibitions, accentuating the understandable perception of my own real and conspicuous isolation.

What would Gordon have felt and done here, all alone and as out of place as a goose in a phone booth? Gordon would never have come here, or even so much as thought about doing such.

But I was there and proud of myself.

Makeda’s grandson. Makeda’s spirit child. She had told me in so many words before I left home that I was “lookin’ for something” that I would have to find before I would be able to write in my own voice. She told me that I would find something of what I needed to know in Mali and that it would “come from the past.”

I was thinking about my grandmother’s words to me as I went down the stairs and stepped upon the ground of Africa for the first time. I took a few steps from the plane in the direction of the terminal. I stopped and allowed the deplaned passengers behind me to go around while I turned full about to examine the details of the place carefully, to engrave permanently the picture of it on my memory—the ground, the sky, the massive old tree in the distance, the aromatic special smell of the vastness, the little Malian girl in the orange print dress boarding one of the smaller aircraft on the apron, the Arab man in a blue burnoose carrying a leather satchel through the terminal entrance, the boarding party of nineteen exotically dressed men and women politely making way for a very old woman with friable parchment skin and an arresting hand-wrapped headdress.

Just that quickly, something changed in me, something mysteriously renovating, but too new, too unfamiliar, however, to name. I felt slightly nervous, precariously euphoric.

I began walking toward the door of the terminal. A ground worker swinging a set of wheel chocks and wearing blue coveralls walked abreast of me and said, smiling, “American.” That was all.
American
. Never in America, by a black or a white, had I ever been called an American. Never once. I thought, for reasons that escaped me at the moment, that this was, for all its ironic timing and meaning, hysterically funny. But the ground worker would not have understood this and I did not laugh.

Having uneventfully negotiated the immigration formalities, I exchanged at the airport currency-exchange kiosk some of my American dollars for Malian francs and took a seat in the lounge. Although I had declined to have breakfast on the plane, I still was not hungry.

There were few people in the lounge. A middle-aged scholarly-looking man sitting opposite of me caught my eye and nodded pleasantly. A tall, elegant very black woman in a chartreuse gown approached the desk agent to inquire about a flight. A gnarled old man squinched up rheumy milk-colored eyes to read the chalkboard on which flight information had been written in French. Two young men walked through the large room side-by-side, holding hands (or more precisely, fingers) in a practice I had not seen before in men who were not effeminate or homosexual. I was to see such male-to-male affection demonstrated frequently in Mali.

With no flights to arrive or depart before mine would, it remained intimate and quiet in the room, the peace broken only intermittently by the organic creak of the wooden benches and the occasionally audible exchange of people talking outside the building at a pace that seemed rapid only because I could not understand what was being said. I got up and walked over to one of the two public telephones that were semi-enclosed in partitioned spaces against the wall. The instructions appeared on the phone-housing in French. Even had I understood them, I could not have puzzled out which coins to use or where to insert them. I returned to the bench where I had been sitting.

“You are from America, aren’t you?” said the scholarlylooking man sitting across from me.

“Yes.” I was glad to hear words I could understand.

“I once lived in New York. I taught African history at Hunter College. I lived in New York for six years.” He spoke with a heavy accent, but quite clearly, still.

“Are you from Mali?”

“Yes.”

“This is my first time here.”

“Then welcome to our country.” He said this while slightly bowing his head in a courtly gesture.

“Thank you.” I felt less alone and more sure of myself.

“If you need help with the phone, I’d be happy to assist you.”

The suspicious American in me involuntarily inquired of itself why the man wanted to be helpful. Was it because this was simply the way his people behaved toward any stranger in need? Was it because I was an American? Was it because I was black? Was it because I was a black American? Was it in spite of one or all of the last three?

When Jeanne had been planning to come with me to Mali, she arranged for us the counsel of an anthropologist who was a colleague of hers at Johns Hopkins, a black Rhodes Scholar named Bern Spraggins. During a long meeting in her office, Dr. Spraggins said, among other things, “I’d suggest that you not wear on your sleeve to Africa the black American preoccupation with race. Africans outside of South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia don’t understand why Negroes go on about it so much. They’ve been exploited by their Europeans rather more indirectly than we have by our Europeans. They’re at a different stage of their time-release abuse than we are. They believe they’ve gotten back a country out of the deal and so they’re in a bit of denial, but they’ll get there in time. Just don’t do what we do, and that is, talk about race all the time.”

I wasn’t sure that I agreed with her about the black American preoccupation with race. This she dismissed with little more than a small sniff, “Well, we don’t consciously think about the air that we breathe but we breathe, nonetheless, with an intense subconscious consistency twentyfour hours a day.”

This got us onto another subject that bore more directly on the solicitousness of the Malian Hunter College professor at the airport.

“I have this notion that I’ve yet to fully think through,” Dr. Spraggins continued. “It’s more shorthand thought than science. But when a black person travels abroad, he or she frequently discovers identities previously unexplored: the basic first-person identity, the basic interior
you
; the third-person identity, the effect on you of what you perceive others see you as being. When you meet Europeans abroad, what do you think they’re seeing? An American? A black American? A placeless Negro? More importantly, when you meet a Malian in Mali, the homeland, will it bother you that you will not know what the Malian is thinking or seeing? Then, of course, there is the further complication of your
cultural
Americanness, which you may wish to deny, but will, in any case, bring you, a Negro, rejected by America, uncomfortably face to face with yourself for the first time in your life. You will learn, ironically enough, when you reach Africa, just how much you have been turned into both, a faux American and a Negro, by the very people who’ve rejected you. You, in the eyes of those you will encounter abroad, white and black, European and African,
are
and
are not
an American, all at the same time. The one thing that all who encounter us in the world would agree upon is that we are history’s orphans— the American Negro, with that odd name coined for us by whites and intended to sound like a medical condition, a skin disorder, a name used to describe a refabricated people the world tacitly agrees now really belong nowhere.”

I had instantly disliked Dr. Spraggins. Jeanne did not share this feeling, however, I think because she had always identified herself not so much with whites or America as with Haiti, a country, a culture unto itself that very much
belonged
to her. The Negro stranded in America would never know what such ownership felt like.

“Dr. Spraggins, how many black people, do you believe, think about such things?” I had asked, thinly irritated.

“Mr. March, the overwhelming majority of people, notwithstanding race, think very little about anything of abstract consequence. Day in and day out, they go vacantly about the banal business of their lives like mainstream lemmings. But they’re not the point here, are they, Mr. March? People like you are the point. Black people like you who go all the way to Africa looking for themselves.” She had looked unaccountably annoyed as she said this.