Makeda (3 page)
After I turned fifteen, something conspicuously different was added to the little parlor’s generally cheerless décor. On the long interior wall of the room that ran along the other side of the hall that carried through the house from front to back, hung a huge cream-colored coarseweave cloth on which a symbol of some sort had been printed from a woodcut. I had been with her the day she was given the hanging by a man we met at a market, but I hadn’t gotten a very good look at it then. The natural fiber weave had several rents in it and appeared to be very old. The thick-membered design seemed to be printed on the cloth with what looked like a natural pigment of red ochre that over time had grown dark and veined with razor-thin crisscrossing fissures. The handcrafted design was perfectly symmetrical with quadrants of roundish loops which joined in the center of the symbol to a single straight line that assembled the design’s four elements into a unified statement.
It was stunningly out of place in the little room. At the same time, it was its very incongruousness that seemed to give the exotic hanging its light, lift, and power over what was otherwise a dreary and tenebrous space.
Riveted by the old painting, I asked my grandmother what it meant.
“Sometimes it’s best to simply feel,” she had said cryptically.
The happiest times of my life were spent with her in the little front parlor on Duvall Street with the mysteriously exotic wall hanging.
“Why did your mother name you Makeda?” I once inquired of her.
“I asked my mother that very question and all she would say to me was, ‘You
are
Makeda,’ and that was the end of it.”
“Where did the name Mattie come from?”
“My mother said that folks would not hire someone named Makeda, even to wash their clothes, and that I should call myself Mattie, but that I was never to forget that I was really Makeda.”
It was the only time that she ever spoke of her mother to me.
On Sundays my grandmother wore to Reverend Boynton’s First African Baptist Church the frill-free white dress of the deaconess that she had been wearing virtually all of my life. But the decorous deaconess who toiled during the week in a laundress’s uniform wore flowing colorful tie-dyed muumuus of African inspiration at home. The muumuus had been acquired at my grandmother’s request from a Nigerian woman who served with her on the church deaconess board. This—the wearing of muumuus, that is—was quite unusual in the 1950s for black women of late middle years in a place like Richmond, Virginia. Indeed, it was more than unusual. It was all but unheard of. My grandmother, who seemed not two but three people, unsurprisingly had more than her share of detractors, blithely ignoring convention, as she faithfully did, as often as not.
Though she would never have confessed to it, I suspect that my unremarkably conventional mother did not always approve of my grandmother who in any case would hardly have noticed.
It was from that chair in the little poorly lit parlor that I confided to my grandmother when I was fifteen that I wanted to be a writer. She had not washed other people’s clothes for five years by then. She turned her face toward the window so that she could feel the warm bath of the early-autumn sun and answered as if she had not heard what I said.
“Do you ever talk to your mother or father about Gordon?” I did not answer and we sat together in silence for a time. “How is Gordon? Is he all right?”
“Yes, Grandma. Gordon is fine.” Questions about Gordon were always asked with an urgency that I did not understand.
Moments passed.
“So, you want to be a writer.”
In the early days, we would sit much as we were sitting now and discuss the progress of our lives. Even then she appeared to be looking without seeing, as if she were watching in her thoughts a screen of past experiences. The movement of her occluded irises would tell me when they were off to some far place, when she had divided herself between here and there. Owing, I think, to her ability to perform this trick of simultaneous presences, her irises would move in small lateral darts as if they were being operated by two separate selves.
Upon greeting me and others, she would bow slightly in a most uncommon fashion, as if she were not offering a courtesy but responding to a courtesy a lesser had rendered first to her.
Some twelve years or so ago, around 1958 or 1959, I calculatedly asked her the question I thought would stir in her the fascinating otherworldliness that I found so compelling.
“How old are you, Grandma?” Her eyes were wide, seeing virtually nothing. She seemed not put off by the question but rather to be waiting along with me for the answer.
“I think I was born around the turn of the century. I suppose you will calculate that to make me about sixty years old.” A vague smile followed. “But who knows how old one really is.”
Once she told me that she thought she and her family had “come from the Moores.” When I asked my father about this, he said he knew of the Harrises, but not of any Moores that we had come from. When I told my grandmother what my father had said, she replied in what I thought to be her deaconess voice, “Well, young man, by and by, we all come to know that the soul travels light.” As with much of what she said, I did not know what she meant by that. I was very young and she was very strange. But wonderful still, and I loved her more than I did anyone in the world.
“So you wish to become a writer. Well, I suspect that you will have somethin’ to say. That is the most important thing. Now all you have to do is learn to write.”
I had come to the house on Duvall Street after school that day in 1960. It was chilly in the parlor. Late-autumn shadows lengthened across the darkening room. A single thin shaft of gold light cut diagonally through the symbol on the wall hanging, making it resemble a sun dial.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Almost half past four.”
“You’ll have to run along home soon. I know you got your work to do.”
“I’ve got some time, Grandma. What is it? Is something wrong?”
“No, Gray, nothin’s wrong.” She paused and turned her face away from the low sun and toward me. She seemed to see me, just briefly. It startled me.
“Gray,” she began, and stopped.
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Do you have pen and paper with you?” Her voice was flat, uninflected.
“Yes.” I retrieved a black-and-white-speckled notebook from my book bag and took a pen from my inside coat pocket. “I have a pen and paper now, Grandma.”
“I want you to take down what I tell you and do what you see fit with it later. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“But never let the record of what I’m goin’ to tell you out of your possession. Do you understand?” Her usually soft voice rose and hoarsened slightly.
“Y-yes, Grandma, I understand.”
“You will not understand what I am goin’ to tell you. Just take it down and put it away until you are grown. You will come to understand later. Will you promise to do this for me?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“I know things that have been lost to us.” I did not know what she was referring to. Nonetheless, I began to write. Her eyelids flickered once and then closed slowly.
The blood appeared to drain from her face which took on the starched, untroubled countenance of a pale death mask. I was frightened by the look of her and became as still as she. Not knowing what to do, I remained motionless, fearing that the smallest movement from me would worsen matters. My thoughts raced themselves into a maddening tangle. Panicked, I began to cry silently. I looked at her. For how long I can only guess. I prayed. Even though, unlike my grandmother, I did not believe in the efficacy of prayer, I whispered, “Please, God, don’t let her die.” Her right foot jerked ever so slightly in its sandal. Then she was still again. Involuntarily, as if they belonged to someone else, my lungs emptied themselves of air. In desperation, I glanced around the room for something—anything—that would help me. For a brief moment, I raged at the telephone that she would not have. I feared to leave her, even though I recognized that leaving would be the only way to get help. I thought she might already have died. I considered trying to feel for a pulse, but I had no notion of how to do that. I looked up with terrified eyes at the large symmetrical symbol on the wall hanging to appeal to it for help.
A
charge seemed to arise in what little air there was left in the shadowy parlor.
It was then that her eyelids again flickered—once, twice—before closing again slowly. Her chest rose and fell beneath her elaborately embroidered gown.
When she spoke she seemed a different person.
At first she spoke softly in her own voice and idiom. “I have lived in many places.”
“Grandma, I—”
“Please, Gray, have patience and listen. I was there.”
“Where, Grandma?”
“Gray, you are a smart boy. One day you will have a chance to study and prove what I tell you. That’s why I want you to write it all down now. Just hold your horses for now. You’ll see in time.”
I said nothing to this and she continued. I would not interrupt her again. I would suspend judgment and write down in my notebook as much of what she said as I could. She helped me to do this by speaking slowly, although I am sure that had nothing to do with why she spoke so.
Her English now bore an accent I had never heard before and was marked by an inventiveness that did not mark her normal speech.
I only knew that she was still aware of my presence when she said, “I have dreams that are different from ordinary dreams, dreams that are as real as the life we are living now, Gray, dreams in which I travel to far-off times and places. The dreams are of people I seem to know. People of all stripes. Dreams of past mothers and past fathers. Members of foreign villages and towns and courts. Law-givers, tin-makers, filigree artisans, muezzins, scribes, goat herders. And loves. My children’s, theirs and their children’s.
“These are dreams like none other. Dreams of vivid colors, shapes, and dimensions, dreams of all manner of tangible appointment in which I turn as I would in this world to discover a glorious manifest of nature’s art wrapped around me, the breathing Earth alive beneath my feet, the sky a soaring blue dome pearled by floating cumulus sculptures. Sounds and scents whither to bathe amidst palm fronds clicking in the wind, mimicking the voice of light rain. The feel on my fingers of the textured, long, oval hanging fruit of the giant baobab tree. The taste of tea from the leaf the Berbers call
adil-ououchchn
.
“It is so different from an ordinary dream which is flat, half-rendered, and knows itself to be just a dream. No. What I have seen, where I have been, is different. So you see, I call these experiences that are mysterious even to me
dreams,
but nothing so real could be dreams, nothing so indistinguishable from common reality, nothing of such unmistakable meaning in the conscious sense.”
I was dumbfounded. This was my grandmother
with
me,
recognizing
me, but speaking from another realm, and in a grammar I could not recognize as belonging to her.
“In the last dream, over 550 years ago, the year was 1394 to be exact, I was a Dogon girl of fourteen living in my family’s large compound in a small village at the foot of a high stone cliff beside a river. My mother’s name was Innekouzou. My father’s name was Ongnonlou.” The names which were completely foreign to me had rolled off her tongue with a practiced fluency. “I had five sisters and three brothers. But neither they nor my mother were in the dream. Only my father and I and a mammoth old banyan tree that stood on gnarled stilt roots in the middle of our courtyard. My father and I sat on the flat two-foot-high knees of the roots and faced each other in the cool shade of the tree’s dense canopy. My father was a holy man and I was the youngest of his nine children. In the dream, it was my day for religious council which was always given weekly by my father to all of his children in the late afternoons in the lee of the family’s ancestors’ tree, the very same large and ageless banyan tree.
“By then, he was an old man, though I did not know in the dream what his actual age was. His skin was dark and smooth. A small man of handsome countenance, his compelling features counted a mouth that hinted of inner peace and eyes that held in them some great unplumbable wisdom. The only hair he displayed was worn under his chin in a thick white brush that matched in color his long unadorned flowing cotton robe and the soft sock cap that folded against itself in the direction of his left ear. He spoke softly but with great purposefulness.
“
How are you faring, my daughter?
“
I am faring well, Father,
I said to him.
“
Your teachers tell me that you are quite an able student. Of this,
I am very proud
.
“
Thank you, Father. You do me great honor
.
“
May the immortal Amma keep you seated
.”
Without comprehension I wrote this down much as I would the sound of a foreign language. I asked her to explain. Her eyelids remained drawn. The interval between my question and her answer was longer than it would have been under normal circumstances.
She said, “Amma is the Creator God, the most important god of the Dogon people. To be seated is to be stable and safe and at peace with the immortal god Amma.
“My father was a village priest who served under the high priest, the
hogon
, who lived high up on the cliff face, separated from the village. My father was bound to secrecy by our customs from sharing much of what he knew. Nonetheless, he began my religious education early. At the very foundation of Dogon religious knowledge is a far-reaching understanding of the role in our lives of the stellar world.”
“Stellar?”
“The stars, son, the stars.”
It was growing dark in the little parlor. The sun had fallen behind the dingy line of row houses to the west. I chose not to turn on the floor lamp standing beside my grandmother’s chair. I remained still. Waiting for her. A police siren sounded and died away in the distance. Joined to me only by a slender filament of trust, she appeared pressed by some great duty to unburden herself of her strange vision.
