Taken by the Muse

by Anne Wheeler

  An older woman cautiously brings me water to drink. Could I be any more peculiar to them? I can hardly believe myself, acting so strangely, but I am desperate to keep this gathering congenial.

  They seem delighted with my odd behaviour and wait for my next surprise. I look around and see mothers, some of them still teenagers, with babies swaddled in kangas wrapped against their bodies. Old men and women eat slowly, eyes locked on me, inquisitive.

  It’s a sizeable settlement with huts stretching into the darkness. Most of them are rectangular with low-hung thatched roofs. The paths reveal a tight web of community lacing the homes together. The big fire acts as the hub; all paths lead here. I am offered a cob of maize blackened by the fire, and I eat it with pleasure. They nod, approving of my appetite.

  My car is being disassembled. I will not be going anywhere tonight. I fight my paranoia — I could disappear, and no one would ever know.

  A crowd of men stands watching, as my car and all of my possessions are assessed. I am in no position to stop what is happening; I am at their mercy. For the time being, I don’t want to leave the light of the fire for the pitch-black unknown.

  I decide that my best option is to keep them amused. Clearing my throat, I am moved to sing an old camp song, which seems fitting, here by the fire:

  Land of the silver birch, Home of the beaver,

  Where still the mighty moose wanders at will.

  Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more,

  Boom-buddy-um-boom, boom-buddy-um boom, boom-buddy-um, Booooooom.

  They all nod and I repeat the “Boom-buddy-um-boom” phrase over several times. Magically, the women fall into singing it with me. I motion for them to keep it going as I add another verse on top. It sounds pretty good!

  They are so easy with the music, immediately filling it in and making it bigger and more vibrant. It blossoms beautifully with their layers of sound, and they motion for me to stand up and sing out. A big woman stands up beside me and adds a harmony. Others ad lib. Children join in. Sticks become instruments of percussion.

  “Boom-buddy-um-boom” has never sounded so rapturous and resounding. It’s deliciously organic, so fluid, folding over and over itself with parts intertwining. I am singing against an intricate jumble of multiple parts that instinctively build to a mighty cadence. Wow! This is more thrilling than any choral performance I’ve ever heard.

  Immediately, this gives way to another song that Kanu initiates by singing a phrase, which the others repeat with fearless embellishment. I join in. It is so spontaneous. No sheet music. No confining rules. No boundaries. No judgment. So unexpected. We are making music, rich in range and tone — I am thrilled when my voice melds with all the others.

  Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved to play around with harmonies and descants. People would make a fuss over me, believing I had a rare gift, but here it is anything but rare — it is as natural as breathing. Everyone improvises freely — even the toddlers.

  Caught up in the moment, in the strength and passion of Kanu’s voice, I belt out a response, mimicking their lyrics. The song dies in an explosion of laughter. What did I just say? Something hilarious? Crude perhaps? I can only imagine, but I can’t help but join their fit of the giggles.

  I glance over at my car. It seems that, amongst other things, they’ve decided to change my fan belt. Looking for a substitute, they have pulled a pair of nylons out of my backpack. I haven’t worn them since I packed them back in Canada almost a year ago. I’m glad I didn’t throw them out. I was going to wear them at my wedding. In fact, I had a whole outfit planned. Michael had bought a safari suit and a new pair of boots.

  I see a brash young man playing with my camera and I can’t help but feel anxious. Long and lean, he’s wearing shorts made from cut-off dress pants, and the tattered remains of what was once a white dress shirt. The camera is full of exposed film, so I don’t want him to open it.

  My singalong pals follow my focus. Kanu tells the wannabe photographer, Hasani, to give the camera back to me. At least that is what I assume he is saying. Hasani rudely barks back at him, refusing, and a hush falls over the whole tribe. The two men argue back and forth, both of them digging in their heels. The singing stops and Kanu marches toward the young man, waving his stick. Hasani, who looks as if he is in his early twenties, bristles with defiance.

  It is best that I stay out of this, I decide. The situation is finely balanced between young and old, and could tip either way. Kanu, I am guessing, was once a leader, but now is bent with age; his skin is loose and thin. How old he is, I cannot tell, but I can see that the people still respect him. Hasani, on the other hand, is the most outspoken amongst the young and does not bow to Kanu’s command. I can tell that individuals are choosing sides. This is not just about the camera, I am guessing. It’s about what to do with me. And my stuff.

  Hasani pushes past Kanu and walks toward me, a sneer on his face. I will myself to appear fearless. Is he going to hit me or give me back the camera? He stops at arm’s length from me and we stare at each other, eyeball to eyeball. I feel that he is challenging me, but have no idea what I’m supposed to do. So I do nothing; I refuse to blink or lower my eyes. Maybe I am asking for trouble.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, in perfect English.

  Stunned, I stammer the obvious, “You speak English?”

  “No, it’s Latin,” he says scornfully. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m on my way to my brother’s — he lives in Tanga.”

  He doesn’t quite believe me. “What’s your brother doing in Tanga?”

  Being aware of the expatriates and “do-gooders” from all around the world who live a privileged life here, I am careful about how I answer his question. “He’s teaching Tanzanians to be schoolteachers.”

  “Ah. Teaching what? British history? Getting big money, no doubt.”

  “My brother teaches science. His family is with him — his wife and two children. They have been in Tanga for three years. They speak Swahili.” I’m trying desperately to win his trust.

  “Science. Good for him.” He doesn’t reveal how he feels about what I have said. Everyone yammers at him to translate, but he ignores them. Instead, he boldly states, “I think you should give us this camera. You are rich. You can buy another camera. If you want us to fix your car, you will give us the camera.” He plays with the latches and the lens.

  Actually, I think that’s fair but it’s not so simple. “Please don’t open it. It has pictures inside that are important to me.”

  “More important than your car?”

  “No, but the camera was a gift and ... I want to take more pictures ... of my brother and his family.”

  “Doesn’t your brother have a camera?” Hasani grins, knowing he has a point and my arguments are feeble.

  “It is my camera. I’m not rich,” I say weakly. “I have a clock you can have ... a radio or anything else.”

  He grimaces at my limp attempts at compromise. He opens my camera and takes out my film, ruining it all by exposing it to the light. Maybe he doesn’t know much about cameras and film. I try to remember what pictures were on this roll. Most of them were of Michael and me — the dig, working back at the museum, sorting out the bags of artifacts, decorating our apartment, shopping in the markets. The good times. Gone now. Wiped out for good. That’s metaphoric.

  The people are getting agitated now, not understanding what is being said. Kanu tries to take the camera, but Hasani slaps his hand away. That brings more men into the fray; the mood is getting tense.

  Cheerily, I try to speak to everyone through Hasani. “Would you thank them for me please. Everyone. They have been very kind, to feed me. Rescue me.” Some of this I say in Swahili with the hope of being understood. Some of them do, and some of them nod. Hasani eyes me with suspicion. “You are American?”

  “No, Canadian.”

  “I hate Canadians.”

  I am surprised. His friends are n
ow playing with my radio, my cassette player, and are rummaging through my toiletries and underwear. A bathing suit flies through the air, and Hasani catches it by the crotch. It’s very pink. He plays with it like a puppet, and mimics my voice, “Hello, I’m a Canadian. My brother does good things for the poor people!” He repeats it, I’m assuming, in their language. I can feel his power within the group build as they enjoy his mockery. He has a gift for entertaining and the crowd is now his. Kanu, the old man, stays quiet and looks to me to do the same.

  I feel the cold sweat of fear. Hasani dumps my undeveloped film out of the bag. I want to grab it back, to save it. Children can feel the tension brewing and crawl nervously into their parents’ laps, as if suddenly I’m to be feared or detested. I have lost my audience.

  A young man masterfully slams away on one of my drums, making it resonate far beyond what I could do. It sounds big and beautiful, even melodic. I bought it in West Uganda in a small town the very day Idi Amin pulled off his military coup. The people in that town were celebrating, and I being naïve at the time, I danced and played with them. Over the following week, I witnessed chaos in the streets of Kampala while taking refuge at the Girl Guide Centre. Happily, I was able to get out of the country, but not before being searched and harassed a number of times. That experience has made me cautious; I know things could go badly here.

  Some of the younger women quietly leave with their babies; perhaps they have been dismissed. I feel the adrenalin rushing through my body. What can I do to keep this situation from getting ugly?

  “You have a beautiful village,” I say to Hasani in a loud voice. A baby cries from one of the nearby huts and I stand up, trying to be casual. “My mother was born in a handmade house made of grass and earth. Not so different from your houses here.”

  I walk over and touch the closest mud hut. “My grandfather built a house like this one in the wilderness, in Canada, where there were no trees for miles, no people — just wilderness. He knew it would get very cold in the winter, so he made the walls thick.”

  They are all curious, wanting to know what I am talking about. Hasani reluctantly translates as I continue. “Where I come from, the snow can be this deep.” I illustrate, using all the body language I can. “I come from the far North, close to the North Pole, where we have snow on the ground for eight months of the year. Sometimes we have to dig ourselves out through the roofs of our houses because we cannot open the door.”

  There is a collective “Ah!” of wonder. I am winning them back.

  “The next house my grandfather built was from trees he cut down and dragged to his land with his horses. He stacked them like this.” I use maize cobs to demonstrate the construction of a log house. Then he put mud and grass in between the cracks.” My audience moves in a little closer to see what I’m doing.

  “Didn’t he have servants?” Kanu asks.

  “No, no servants. He was with his three brothers. They did everything themselves, and in the first winter, it was so cold that their cows froze solid, like ice statues, right where they were standing. Eyes still open.” I mime the frozen cow statue with eyes bugged open. I might be exaggerating a little, but they like it. “The laundry that they hung out to dry, turned hard, like wood. The water, you see, turned to ice, just like that.” I snap my fingers. “Everything freezes in the winter — we skate on the rivers and lakes. We can even drive on them with trucks and make holes in the middle of the lakes so that we can fish. Sometime the ice is this thick (I stretch my arms out) and we can see the fish swimming beneath us, through the ice!”

  Even Hasani seems mildly interested in this, but the guys over at my car have found something. They call out to Hasani, telling him what they have discovered and he looks at me, puzzled. “You have a bullet hole in your hood.”

  “I do!?!” Shocked, I try to think back to when it might have happened. “Well, I was in Kampala in January and there were a lot of guns going off. And my car was parked outside for days ... the tires all went flat. Soldiers —”

  He cuts me off. “Are there any guns in the car?”

  “No! Of course not!”

  Hasani gives them some quick explanation and then urges me back into the story as the mechanics go back to work pulling out the fuse box.

  He asks, “Why was your grandfather living in the wilderness?”

  I explain how my grandfather, a city boy with eleven brothers, left his home in Colchester, England, at the age of seventeen to travel across the ocean to the New World. His parents couldn’t provide for him, so he had to find his own life, a better life. He had to learn how to farm and hunt in order to survive. My mother grew up eating deer and moose and wild birds.

  Hasani translates to the others. They can relate to this hunter lifestyle and nod with respect. Curious, they ask more questions, and come closer to me.

  “While travelling west across the great plains of North America, my grandfather met my grandmother and they fell in love. They were married for over fifty years and had six children.”

  Hasani sits down near me. “And where were the black people?” he asks dubiously.

  “Well, I never saw a black person until I was about nearly finished school. I went to a baseball game, and there was a team from a town up north that was mostly black. I remember that they won the tournament. But there were none in my school. We had students whose parents were from Japan, China, India, Greece, Italy — from all over the world, but not Africa.”

  “What were these black people doing in Canada — what kind of work?”

  “They came to farm — just like my grandfather. They came up from the United States.”

  “As free men?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did you ever have slaves in Canada?”

  “I don’t think so. But I know that slaves used to escape to Canada ... long ago.”

  I wish I could think of more to tell him. My knowledge of Canadian history is minimal — I know more about Britain and the United States!

  “And these baseball players played against the white boys?” Kanu interjects.

  “Yes, they did.”

  “What about the Indians? You had Indians. Where were they?” Hasani presses me again.

  “Well, where my folks grew up, there weren’t many Indians. At least I didn’t hear much about them. That’s a good question! Where were they? When I was growing up, in the city, we had some at my school, but just a few. Maybe there were more, but I couldn’t tell. Nobody ever actually said to me, ‘I am an Indian.’”

  I could have asked, I realize. Like everyone else during the 1950s, I was in my own little world, taking everything for granted. Mom was a full-time homemaker, Dad, a good provider. Life was easy for me until my father died suddenly, and my world fell apart.

  I decide to change the subject. “Growing up, I had a horse — what we call a mustang, an Appaloosa, white with brown spots. I kept her at my aunt’s farm north of the city, where I lived. There was a school for Indian kids just a few miles away from the farm and I used to ride over there sometimes. The children came from places where there were no schools. They lived in a huge brick building together — out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Without their parents?”

  “Yes. It was not a happy place. There was a graveyard with plain white crosses planted in a row. There were no names on those crosses, just numbers.”

  “Was it Catholic?” Hasani asks — as if he already knows.

  “I think so.”

  “There were places like that in Africa. Boarding schools.” He can relate.

  What an odd place that school was, when I think of it. I change the subject.

  “In the summer, I did some barrel racing. You know what that is?”

  “Racing barrels?”

  I laugh. He has a sense of humour. “No, racing around them. On a horse.” I draw a diagram in the sand, and describe how the ponies turn so sharply, at such an angle that they sometimes fall over.

  “So, Indians and
Whites live separately in Canada?” he persists.

  “Mostly, but Indians are free to come and go as they please, I think. Like I said, we had some in our school, but most Indians lived on reserves — big pieces of land. I’ve never been on one. But, no, they didn’t work like servants, like here ... it was different. Not fair, but different.”

  “Did they farm?”

  “I don’t think Indians ever farmed. The ones who lived near my city were Cree — that was their tribe. They were hunters. Trappers. They lived off the land.”

  That’s all I know. Even that, I’m not sure of, but he keeps asking questions. “Yes, they can be doctors or teachers if they study, though I don’t know of any.”

  “Did you grow up with servants?” he pushes to know.

  “No. We cleaned our own houses. We planted our own crops. And ate from our own gardens. My father and brothers go hunting in early autumn. We fish in the lakes.”

  “That sounds pretty good, I guess.” He softens a little. When he smiles, he’s handsome. We hold our look and stay with the quiet for a moment, until it’s uncomfortable.

  Then I ask him, “What about you? What’s your story?”

  “I went to school in Dar es Salaam. I lived with my auntie, my mother’s sister. I had a teacher from Canada there, who said I was smart. He said I could be anything I wanted to be. But it was hard. My auntie lived outside the city, so I had to walk five miles to school and back, every day.”

  “That was tough, my goodness!”

  “I thought I was lucky. My teacher said he would take me to Canada one day. I believed him. I did favours for him.” He doesn’t translate to the others, but they all sit quietly out of respect. “I found out,” he continues, “that he was promising several students the same thing, and they were doing favours for him like me. Too many favours.”

  “What kind of favours?”

  He looks at me as though I am dim-witted and I realize what kind of “favours.” “Oh. He was a real bastard. I see.” I say this with a pleasant expression, so the others won’t guess. He smiles ever so slightly at me. He’s not going to translate this conversation. It’s between him and me now.