Makeda (30 page)

“How did she die?”

“I cannot tell you that.”

This may have been a rebuke of some sort. I could not determine whether or not this was his intention.

“Late in the year of 1401,” he smiled as he referred to our calendar, “Bright Light went with the women of the village, as she had always done, to wash clothes by the river. She became separated from the women and disappeared. She was never seen again.” The knowing directness of the look. The eyes lambent, alive.

“What happened to Ongnonlou?”

“As a solace for the loss of his divine child, the creator god Amma gave him back his sight.”

I picked up my cloth bag and removed from it the drawing which was protected by the clouded plastic sleeve. Passing the drawing to him, I did not say what it was, or that my grandmother had created it from a dream of a past life.

The
hogon
examined it without surprise and did not ask where it had come from. He spoke softly to Yéhéné, then rose and walked toward the rock face of the escarpment.

Yéhéné directed us to follow. The
hogon
entered a narrow cleft in the sandstone cliff that was screened from above by a huge knife-edged crag.

“Come. Come,” he called in Dogon over his shoulder as we followed him deep into the face of the escarpment. Forty feet in, the cleft widened into a cool stone-walled cavity that was lighted from above with golden supernal sunlight. In the center of the space stood a broad stone column of obvious great age measuring ten feet in height. The column had been impressed by a skilled stone artisan with intricate markings that were unmistakably Dogon.

“Come. Come.”

As we drew closer, we saw that the engravings described the elliptical orbits of three small stars around Sirius. The drawing that my grandmother had made was virtually a perfect replica of the markings on the stone column. The orbit lines chiseled into the column, though old, had remained over the centuries easily discernible. First, there was Sirius, the bright blue star I had seen from my backyard on that cold night ten years before. Then, carved into the column was Sirius A, which had not been seen through a telescope by a Western astronomer before 1862. Then, Sirius B (Po Tolo) that the Dogon say is made of a metal they call
sagala
which, according to them, is heavier than all of the iron on Earth. Lastly, scored into the ancient stone statue was the tiny star Emme Ya that Western astronomers had yet to see, or even identify as existing.

After allowing us time to examine the statue closely, the
hogon
spoke for the first time since entering the room. “The French scientist Dieterlen came here with a team of experts ten years ago to talk to us and look at the heavens carved into the stone. They said at the time that the carving was more than 400 years old. But they were wrong. The carving is much older than that. The Dogon have known about the movements of the stars and the planets for more than 5,000 years. Saturn with its rings. Jupiter and its moons. Sirius and its stars. The heavens all.”

Jeanne said that a young American astronomer named Carl Sagan had explained that Europeans might have visited the Dogon in the 1920s and informed them of astronomical matters. The
hogon
merely smiled and moved his fingers across the effaced engravings on the ancient stone statue.

It was very still in the little rock-faced room. The smallest sound trailed around the smooth walls.

I sensed that the meeting had come to an end.

The
hogon
said, as if to settle the matter, “In time, they will find Emme Ya. What will they then say?”

With little or no thought, I reached into my rucksack and took out the picture I had taken of my grandmother the day before I left for college. Without comment, I handed it to the
hogon
.

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” he murmured softly, almost as if to himself. “Our people recognized long ago that she was a special soul. What a great honor it is to finally see her in the flesh.” His face alight with wonderment, he studied the small snapshot closely and, for long moments, remained quiet.

“Was she once an Akân woman?” When I was ten, I had heard that same question asked by the mysterious man at the 6th Street market.

“I think that, yes, she was.”

I looked at Jeanne. The cool space in the cavity was silent and completely still. It felt as though we had ceased to breathe for fear that movement of any sort would distract the
hogon
.

Then he said almost inaudibly, “Adinkra.”

I had hear the word before, from my grandmother.

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“The symbol there behind her. It is an Adinkra symbol.

It is from the Ashanti of Ghana.
Nyame nwu na mawu.
The symbol represents to the living the immortality of the soul. The message behind the symbol comes to us from Amma or Creator God. It has deep spiritual significance to Africans throughout this region.”

I recalled the English translation of the same passage that I had read, on the flight across the Atlantic, in Professor Opoku’s book.

The
hogon
knelt and took from his robe a small brown leather pouch. He filled the pouch with soil dug from the area of the engraved stone column’s base.

He then rose and, with a formal gesture, presented me with the soil.

“The Dogon people would be honored if you would give this to her upon your return to America.”

And then the old
hogon
was gone.

Jeanne, Yéhéné, and I sat for a while under the banyan tree before boarding the little donkey cart that would take us part of the way back to Timbuktu. The discussion with the
hogon
had had a disproportionate effect on Yéhéné, I think, because he had no notice of all that the discussion would involve.

We had been silent for a time, digesting things, when Yéhéné, looking at the ground musingly, said, “In your country, there is a great professor of our past. His name is John Henrik Clarke. A Negro American like yourselves. Do you know of him?”

Jeanne said that she did, though she had not read his work. I confessed to have never heard of him.

Yéhéné looked disappointed. “He was here many times.”

I said nothing.

“He was blind also, you know. I met him in New York. He taught at one of the colleges there and would come to the UN to speak with the Africans there.”

Yéhéné peered around musingly.

“He said to me once, ‘I see the world clearly because I am blind. I am less distracted. I have the darkness in which to think and remember and know who I am. When I speak in America about the Dogon and their ancient knowledge of the cosmos, the
academy
works its collective authority to make me out as a lunatic. The first line of academic hostility to the notion of Africans having a past is to distract everyone in the world from searching for it. But I cannot see the distractions. All I do in here is think. Thinking in our people is somehow seen to be dangerous to the academy. When one does so by overrunning the rampart of glossy diversion, the West’s first line of cultural hegemonic defense, the academy’s centurions come out firing upon us like missiles from underground silos. Such is the West’s hostility to the very notion that black people might have done something great as an outcome, not of individuals formed by
them
, but rather as products of great civilizations formed by their own people. The consequence of this, the consequence of the West’s ceaseless cultural antipathy toward us, is that they have defeated us finally by causing us to think so little of ourselves. They have sought to guarantee our defeat by diverting us from even seeking to discover ourselves. But I am not distracted. I am blind.’

“Your Professor Clarke said these things to me. He is a great man and you, my dear Gray, have never heard of him. So sad. So sad.”

We got back to the guesthouse in Timbuktu that evening after the dinner hour had ended and the two-person staff had left for home. The pendulum of our aroused emotions had swung back, with postadrenaline force, in the direction of hunger and fatigue. I accepted with no small gratitude Jeanne’s offer to share the vendor-machine potato chips and sweets that she, before leaving Baltimore, had squirreled away in the pockets of her suitcase.

The evening sky was flecked brilliant with stars. The air was cool and dry. I stowed the leather pouch filled with soil in the bottom of the satchel in which I kept the notes and my grandmother’s drawing of the Sirius star system. I had left the snapshot of my grandmother with the
hogon
as a token of appreciation, while fearing that I may have committed a faux pas of some sort. I bathed and changed into fresh clothes and headed for Jeanne’s room, a thirtyfoot walk along a narrow hall lighted by a single yellow bulb seated in the trunk of an ebony-wood elephant-head sconce.

Jeanne opened the door dressed in a white linen shift that augmented the rich bloom a day of sun had raised from her dark brown skin.

“This way, my Gray,” playing with me now, seating me on the little bed with a thin mattress, serving the vendormachine fare with cheery theatricality. She was anything but a brooder. She had a talent for happiness that I envied. Yet, I suspected, when she needed to be, she was as malleable as cast iron. God I loved her. Loved her silly. Especially tonight. This night. In this place. After today.

She was performing for me now. Walking about. Guileless. Funny. Very funny. Celebrating what had happened today without yet seeing the full stunning significance of it. Neither of us could possibly yet. Laughing. Laughing at me in that way that one only laughs when one is in love. And I laughed with her laughing at me. For I was celebrating not just the day, but us, and that she
knew
me—could and did know me, and was only the second person on Earth to do so. We had nothing to hide from each other anymore. Hence, we were not embarrassed by the giddiness that we shared toward the backside of now.

“You should have seen yourself, Gray.” Giddiness subsiding. Laughter quieting. Recognition dawning. Belief lagging still. Eyes loving.

“You should have seen
yourself
, Jeanne.”

“You walked into the mountain and found a lamp unto weary feet. Oh my God, who must your grandmother really be?”

“I don’t know.” Nearly whispering this.

Jeanne sat beside me on the bed. We were silent for an indeterminate period.

Jeanne asked, “Has she had other experiences like this?”

“Yes.” I told her about my grandmother’s life in Spain as a Moor, and then about her ill-fated flight with her husband from a Virginia slave plantation. “She has also had recent flashes of a sequel to a dream she had when I was a young boy. The flashes come not in dreams, but when she is awake. The dream itself is of a life she lived in the twelfth century in Lalibela, Abyssinia. In the dream, she is witnessing with her friend a procession of church members about to consecrate one of Lalibela’s eleven interconnected stone mountainside churches. In the flashes, she is sitting alone underground in one of the churches which is carved in the shape of a cross from solid rock. Grandma said the cross, which is also carved into the stone roof of the church, is different from the cross we are used to seeing. The cross on the roof that follows the shape of the underground church has crossing members of equal length.”

We were quiet again. Our bare arms touching lightly.

Loved skin feels quite like no other. With its special properties and energies. Synergies that alter the heart rate. Blood pressure. Colors of the cosmos.

This business of man and woman and magic is not to be looked upon rationally anyhow, is it? Opposed counterparts of a troubled species. Counterparts that would seem so irremediably incompatible. Misfitting templates. One tissue, hard against the other, soft and aromatic. Outlooks hopelessly dissonant. Misinterpretations insanely inevitable. Yet whence comes the magic but from such fundamental and irreconcilable difference. The sweet frisson. Smooth flat surfaces do not bond fast to one another, nor do the saw-cut souls of man and woman join harmoniously when the alignment is ill-fated from the start. But when fortune smiles the perfect union, when kindness and magic can be mutual, all but a little of life’s hard game is won.

I turned off the little lamp at the head of the bed. Jeanne and I embraced gently, saying nothing. We removed our clothes. Unhurriedly. We laid on the bed holding, caressing each other for a considerable period. Then we made love for the first time.

Tenderly.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO

M
rs. Grier seemed to have mislaid much of her composure.

“Lawd, ah’m so glad you home safe, boy. How was that Africa?”

“It was fine, Mrs. Grier. It was wonderful.”

Bustling about the little parlor making ready, she glanced at me doubtfully.

“Ah’m jest glad, thas all. Ah’m jest glad you home safe and soun’.”

It was nearly afternoon and my grandmother had been taking a nap when we arrived. Despite my discouragement, Mrs. Grier woke her and told her that I was sitting in the parlor with “the girlfrien’.”

Dusting feverishly, Mrs. Grier sprouted tiny fresh beads of perspiration above her lip. “Thank you for taking such good care of ’im.”

Jeanne smiled distractedly. She was nervous. Not frantic, as was the case with Mrs. Grier, no doubt, but nervous, still. I had never before seen her nervous.

We sat side-by-side bolt upright on a stiff little Victorian settee. I lifted from the coffee table an unusual antique bronze cross and examined it.

“You every bit as beautiful as Gray said you was.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You sure I can’t get ya’ll somethin’ whilst you waitin’ for Makeda?”

“No thanks, Mrs. Grier. We’re fine. Tell Grandma not to hurry. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Jeanne looked at the Adinkra symbol displayed in the middle of the wall hanging and then at the cross I had been studying.