by Frank Coates
He knew a little of the history of slavery in East Africa. The Consolata nuns had related stories of the slavers, who had only in recent times been thwarted in their periodic plundering of the local tribes. The unfortunate ones, stolen from their families, would serve as household servants in sumptuous Arabian palaces in distant lands. He suspected that the nuns’ version of history had been influenced by the tender age of their audience, but the history of America’s slaves, whose unfortunate recruits were drawn from the other side of his home continent, was far more inhumane and often brutal. Sam read the history in horror.
His interests spread beyond America to the colonial powers’ scramble for Africa. American historians took a high-minded stance against Britain’s relatively recent incursions into East Africa, as their government was not directly involved. They portrayed Britain as the invader.
Sam had seen many of the benefits of the white administration’s efforts to keep the peace among the tribes and to provide health services and a limited form of education, but the pax Britannica came at a huge price. The growing numbers of white settlers demanded more and more land. And they weren’t content with just any land: they demanded the best and most fertile tracts. Even the Maasai, possibly the most militarily proficient tribe in East Africa, were incapable of resisting the whites’ wholesale plunder. Sam discovered that in 1904 they had reluctantly signed an agreement to move from their traditional land in the Great Rift Valley to the Laikipia plateau. But then the white settlers realised that the plateau was far more fertile than previously thought, so seven years later the British broke their own treaty and again forced the Maasai to move, this time to the desolate southern end of their range.
Sam was offended by the wrongs perpetrated upon the Maasai. He knew that his own Kikuyu people were as culturally and emotionally connected to their land as the Maasai, and wondered how long it would be before the settlers began to covet Kikuyu land.
A sense of great injustice took root in his soul. Over the ensuing years it would slowly grow to affect his views of the British, their place in Africa, and his people’s rights to their land.
When graduation day arrived, and Sam lined up with his fellow undergraduates, the auditorium was filled with family and friends from the front rows to where the overflow stood against the rear wall. All smiles.
Somewhere in the crowd was Ira. Sam could hear his occasional coughing and at one point he picked him out; he was beaming as proudly as any parent.
Sam didn’t find the absence of his family upsetting. His father, with his several wives and many children, had always been a distant figure. His mother was a person he could now only recall through the eyes of a child.
It had been many months since he’d thought about Sister Rosalba, but she came to mind again while he waited in line to shake the hand of the assembled academics and receive his degree. She had written on the first Sunday of every month; the letters arriving like clockwork a month and a half later. They provided Sam with a tenuous lifeline to his family and Igobu, though he hardly ever found the time to respond. When they’d stopped arriving during his third year at college, his former existence had so receded in his mind that it took him six months to note their absence. He realised how irrelevant they had become and didn’t trouble himself to write and check on Rosalba and the village. It was as if Igobu had never been part of his life. He felt like an American now. And it would be in America that he would build a new life and fulfil his ambitions.
CHAPTER 11
Ira sank into the armchair in his Staten Island sitting room and almost disappeared. He had lost more weight, but again refused to discuss his health with Sam other than to say that he’d found a new tonic and his general fitness was improving.
He’d no sooner settled into the seat than he sat forwards, resting his elbows on his bony knees and wringing his hands. Sam knew the gesture well. It meant that Ira was unhappy with him; and he knew why. Sam had decided to give up on his futile search for a job in New York. He’d been looking for months. Each time he won a place on the interview list, he made it no further. He had no illusions about why. He had qualified top in each of his last three years, but when the personnel managers laid eyes on him, the notebooks closed. Most had the courtesy to go through the formalities. Some even congratulated him on his CV. Many wrote polite rejection letters that talked about a very strong field of applicants and said that an extremely well-credentialed candidate had emerged from the recruitment process. But Sam knew otherwise. After a time, he’d become cynical to the point where he knew, if he didn’t get away from New York and all its frustration, he would lose his mind. The west was unknown, but couldn’t be more discouraging.
‘Sam, I know I’m repeating myself, but I’m worried about your decision to go out there …’ Ira waved his hand vaguely — a small pale bird fluttering about the room. ‘To … you know … the west. Why don’t you come over to General Motors? I know some important people in the Cadillac division. They need good fellows with all the growth that’s going on.’
‘Ira, GM needs production managers, not accountants.’
‘Then get a job as an accountant. You passed with flying colours, so there must be plenty of opportunities —’
‘Ira —’
‘I know the head of the finance department in Dayton Electric Laboratories. An old friend of mine from our days working on the self-starter, I could —’
‘Ira —’
Ira stopped yabbering. He sighed and sank back into his armchair with a defeated look.
‘Ira, don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do — what you’ve already done for me — but I have to make my own way now. I know this isn’t your idea of a business, nor mine. But I can’t continue to live off your charity. After a year or so I’ll work something out.’
‘So you’ve said. What I don’t understand is what you’ll do out there. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’ll find.’
Ira began to cough; Sam brought him a glass of water.
‘Ira, when are you going to do something about that cough?’
Ira tried to speak and almost choked on the water. ‘And when are you going to get some sense?’ he spluttered angrily, struggling to find his breath. ‘If you get into trouble out there with all those … those red-neck cowboys, you’ll be on your own. You’ve seen how difficult it can be for a black man in New York. Well, being an educated black man out west will be the death of you.’ He struggled to his feet. ‘And worrying about it will be the death of me.’
That Ira was right was Sam’s recurring thought for the next four months. As he made his way west by rail, through whistle-stop towns in Pennsylvania and into the farmlands of the mid-west, Sam could find no one prepared to offer him work of more than a day or so. And everywhere was the barely concealed animosity of people wary of strangers — especially, Sam thought, black strangers. Whereas in New York he’d begun to feel part of the amazing American experiment in which thousands of the people displaced by the Great War had found acceptance and the opportunity to flourish, here in the insular mid-western states there was only rejection.
Sam’s saving grace throughout those four months tramping from town to town was his ability to absorb all the new experiences and learn from them. In Detroit he learned how Henry Ford could make almost a million T-model vehicles each year and so cheaply that many of his workers could actually afford to buy what they made. Like siafu ants forging a track through the jungle, Ford’s production line reduced the single very complex process of building a car to a thousand simple steps using men to build it a small piece at a time.
In St Louis, where the great migration of black Americans had seen thousands move from the south to the industrial cities of the north, he learned to enjoy blues, ragtime and jazz — music he’d never heard before.
Finally, in Texas he learned how a man and his horse could control a herd of cantankerous cattle with unimaginable beauty and grace. Although he’d seen horses at home in Africa
, it wasn’t until he became closely associated with them as a roustabout on a cattle ranch that he really appreciated their beauty. His instinct around any large animal was to treat it with respect; and it took many days before he summoned the courage to approach one of the cowboy’s horses. It was a large black stallion, full of spirit and prone to curling its lips to show its teeth to passers-by. Sam chose it because it was by far the most beautiful animal he’d ever seen.
As he stood before the animal, whose sleek black head rose above Sam’s, he whispered to it in Swahili. He wasn’t sure why he chose Swahili rather than Kikuyu, or even English. Later he thought it might have been because Swahili was a musical language. Maybe he chose it because it was understood by all the many tribes of East Africa and somehow this capacity would extend to horses.
The horse snorted and lowered its head for Sam to scratch it between the ears. He was soon running his hands over the sleek neck and shoulders while the stallion blew soft warm breaths on Sam’s neck and arms.
When the stallion’s owner returned, he was at first annoyed by Sam’s interaction with his animal, then surprised.
‘Hey, man,’ he said. ‘How’d you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Make that mean son-of-a-bitch treat you so nice. He don’t usually take kindly to attention. Whatcha been givin’ him? Sugar?’
Sam shrugged. ‘I gave him nothing. Just been stroking him. And talking. He just seemed so … friendly.’
‘Friendly? That big sucker wouldn’t know the meanin’ of the word. Not even for me, and I’ve had him since a colt.’ The cowboy studied Sam. ‘You been working around here as a wrangler, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So if you’re so good with horseflesh, why aren’t you out there on horseback with the rest of us?’
Sam smiled. ‘I can’t ride.’
‘You can’t ride? And look at you. Got that stallion purrin’ like a kitten.’
Sam shrugged and continued to stroke the horse’s flanks. They began discussing horses. Sam was again keen to seize any opportunity to learn. The discussion ended with the cowboy offering to teach Sam how to ride. ‘Though I wouldn’t get my heart too set on it if’n I were you,’ he warned. ‘Not everybody cottons on to it.’
Sam swung into the saddle of the old mare and walked her towards the high, burlap-covered enclosure. Inside it was the meanest wild prairie stallion anyone had seen in Montana, and a dozen cowboys were sitting on the fence to see the newly arrived horse-breaker meet his match.
Sam was accustomed to the overtly racist sentiments he encountered in his role as horse-breaker. Twelve months earlier, when he’d first discovered his innate ability to read a horse’s mood and to gently condition it to accept a rider, there were jokes about mumbo jumbo and black magic. Those who knew he’d only just learned horse riding were amazed as he used his new method to firstly pacify the horse and then teach it to bend to a rider’s wishes. Since then he’d been on the road, working his magic from one state to another.
Inside the enclosure he let the stallion become accustomed to the mare and rider, but when Sam slipped the lasso over its neck, it snorted and fought.
Sam patiently whispered to the stallion but this made no change in its mood. The watching cowboys grinned at Sam’s Swahili and nudged their companions, making snide remarks.
After a few minutes, Sam did the unthinkable. He dismounted and let his mare out of the enclosure, leaving him alone with the snorting, belligerent stallion at the end of thirty feet of rope. An expectant silence fell over the crowd. The horse trotted around the perimeter and he let it settle before giving a sharp tug on the rope. The stallion’s head jolted towards Sam, who immediately loosened the rope as he whispered reassuringly to it. The stallion was momentarily stunned into immobility, before resuming its pacing.
It took him longer than usual, but Sam continued to apply his technique until the snorting, stamping stallion allowed him close enough to touch. A murmur of disbelief rippled among the spectators.
After a further ten minutes in which Sam introduced the horse to the blanket, the reins, and finally the saddle, he mounted it; the cowboys sitting around the fence broke into spontaneous applause.
The men surrounded him when he came out of the enclosure, slapping him on the back and firing questions at him. He spent some time in conversation before the ranch’s owner interrupted and handed him a telegram.
‘It’s from New York,’ he said.
Sam walked a few paces away to open and read it.
He turned back to the owner and the circle of men, his face now a mask of shock and disbelief.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
The telegram had taken six weeks to track Sam across Texas, into Nebraska and finally to Montana. It had come from Esmeralda, Ira’s housekeeper of seventeen years. In recent times, she had been taking care of Ira as well as the Staten Island house, although the old man would have strongly refuted any suggestion of it.
The telegram was brief: Mr K poorly. Come soon.
As the train rocked and rolled across the mid-western prairie, Sam castigated himself for leaving it so long between visits. He’d not seen Ira, now in his seventies, in nearly a year. He’d been ailing for some time, and Sam tried to keep in touch, but his constant travelling made it difficult to maintain contact.
The day lengthened to night and Sam dozed. In his half-asleep state he felt his usual discomfort rise at the thought of returning to the city. It wasn’t a place he wanted to be now that he’d found the west’s wide open spaces, its big sky and red sunsets, all of which he missed while in New York.
The vision of the west changed until it became the memory of his home on the edge of the great African savannah. He’d not previously associated America’s plain states with Kenya; the overlap came as a surprise.
Also surprising was the realisation that his absence from New York now had little to do with his need to earn his living so far away from Ira, and more to do with his changing view of himself. Just as he’d forgotten about his life, his family and friends in Africa, he was saddened to recognise he’d moved on from Ira, his dear friend and generous benefactor.
Esmeralda opened the door and her broad white smile spread across her coal-black face.
‘Oh, Mr Sam!’ she said, tears welling in her eyes. ‘So good to see you again.’ She gave him a brief hug, but as she drew back she dropped her eyes to her hands, which she studied as she told him that the doctor said Ira didn’t have a whole lot of time left.
‘It’s the fibres, you know,’ she said. ‘From the mines.’
‘When did the doctor last come?’ Sam asked as he headed along the hall towards the stairs.
‘Yesterday. He comes ’bout this time ’most every day.’
Sam thanked her then climbed the stairs two at a time. At Ira’s door he halted, his hand on the door knob. After a moment he knocked, but when he heard no reply he opened the door and peered in.
The bedroom was dim: the autumn afternoon’s light glowed around the edges of the drawn curtains.
He went quietly to the window, opened the curtains a little and stared out into the garden. A breeze chased the golden litter of the birch trees around the curving concrete driveway.
Ira’s cough caused him to turn to the bed, where he saw the old man squinting into the light.
‘Is that too bright for you, Ira?’
‘Sam? Is that you?’ He got his arm free of the covers and shielded his eyes.
Sam came around to the other side of the room and dragged a chair to the bedside. Ira was pale and his cheeks had sunken beneath dark-rimmed eyes, but they lit up when he could see his protégé.
‘Sam! How long have you been here? It’s so good to see you,’ he said between strained breaths.
Sam patted Ira’s shoulder. It felt as narrow as a bird’s under the thick cotton pyjama top.
‘Me too,’ Sam said. ‘I came as soon as … as soon as I heard you were ill.’
‘Thank you, Sam. I’ll be fine. Just a little congestion on my chest.’
He coughed again.
‘I was out west in Montana. I always leave a forwarding address, but sometimes letters get delayed, and —’
‘Sam,’ Ira interrupted, ‘it’s OK. I know how difficult it is to keep in touch. You’re here … that’s the main thing.’
‘Esmeralda told me what the doctor says.’
‘He’s as bad as she is. Worries too much.’
‘I should have come earlier,’ Sam said, moving to sit on the side of the bed.
Ira put his cool, thin fingers on Sam’s hand. ‘I’m so glad you could come, Sam,’ he said.
‘I’m not going anywhere for quite a while.’
‘Good,’ he said, and gave Sam’s hand a squeeze. ‘I love you, Sam,’ he said, softly.
Sam brought his other hand over and patted Ira’s. ‘I love you too, Ira,’ he said.
Ira smiled his wan smile again, and nodded. ‘But I mean, I really love you, Sam. Always have.’ He gasped for breath. ‘From the very first day I set eyes on you out there in the forest.’
Sam felt a lump rise in his throat. ‘Ira …’
‘Dear Sam. There’s no need to speak. I just needed to tell you, before … before it’s too late.’ His words trailed off with a laboured breath.
Sam nodded. ‘I’m glad you did.’
Ira’s hand tightened on his.
There was a brief knock on the door and a middle-aged man carrying a black briefcase entered the bedroom.
‘You must be the doctor,’ Sam said.
‘I am,’ the man said, extending his hand. ‘Dr James Hawthorne.’
Sam tried to retrieve his right hand from Ira’s grip, but couldn’t. Ira held it with surprising strength.
‘Ira?’ he said, but there was no answer. Ira’s eyes were closed and his thin face was calm and at peace.