Echoes From a Distant Land

by Frank Coates

  Sam knew nothing about the American legal system — a fact that GM’s lawyers had obviously counted on when crafting their outrageous offer — and no idea how to find a suitable attorney to handle his case. Then he recalled the young lawyer who Ira had engaged as executor of his estate.

  He wracked his brain and came up with the name Joshua Samuels, but there was nobody listed under that name in the telephone directory entries for lawyers. He made a dozen or so phone calls and found someone who knew him. He was now a senior partner in one of New York’s biggest law firms.

  Samuels had added thirty pounds and lost most of his hair since Sam last saw him, but he greeted him warmly in his office high above Fifth Avenue.

  ‘Mr Wangira,’ he said, coming around his desk to take Sam’s hand. ‘So good to see you again. Please, take a seat.’

  Sam was pleased that he remembered him. After some small talk, Sam outlined his situation and showed Samuels the offer.

  Samuels shook his head. ‘Amazing. If I may say so, Mr Wangira, they obviously saw you coming. But you’ve done the right thing bringing it to us. If you’d gone to a small operator, B&G would have wiped the floor with you.’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice. I came to you because I remembered you from Ira’s will,’ Sam admitted. ‘You’re the only lawyer I know.’

  Samuels laughed. ‘Either way, you’ve made the right decision. Speaking of Ira, I tried to get in touch with you again some time after the settlement, but I think you’d left your hotel, or returned home. Anyway, the purpose was to ask what you wanted me to do with Ira’s personal effects.’

  ‘I thought we sorted all that out.’

  ‘We did, but these things came to light later. I put them in my attic while I looked for you, then forgot all about them. About a year ago, I found them again. Yes, I know, it sounds strange. The fact is, I got divorced and my ex got the house.’ He shrugged. ‘I was about to throw them out, but they’re real nice, and I thought you should decide what you want done with them.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Photos and films. Quite a few of you.’

  Sam carried the box up to his hotel room. He hesitated, considering whether he should open this passage to his past. He left it on the bed and sat in the armchair to stare at it for a further ten minutes before berating himself for his childishness.

  The box contained a number of large envelopes, each enclosing a photographic print, and spools of film. He slid a print carefully from its jacket. It was a black and white study of a Maasai warrior. He opened more, arranging them on the bed and furniture in his hotel room. Soon he was surrounded by fifty or more photographs of various African subjects.

  A sizeable part of the collection was Ira’s studies of wildlife. There was a magnificent front-on head-shot of a black-maned lion, taken as the spark of alertness flashed into its intelligent hazel eyes. From experience, Sam knew that an instant later the lion would be in full charge at his quarry: in this case, the photographer.

  In another towered a great bull elephant. Ira must have had his camera set low and only a few paces from the beast. A halo of dust framed the bull’s raised trunk, flared ears and long sweeping tusks. He could almost feel the reverberation of its enormous pads and hear its trumpeting blast of alarm.

  There were sweeping landscapes of the Mara savannah with long snaking lines of migrating wildebeest and zebra silhouetted against the sky as they climbed a hill; the wide expanses of the Great Rift Valley captured as if in watercolour; acacia trees at sunset; and a misty jungle waterhole with the muzzle of a waterbuck sending widening concentric circles across the silvered water.

  There were many large prints of Sam as a young porter on Bill Hungerford’s safari. In one he was proudly wearing his blue jacket, khaki shorts, boots and gaiters, with a red fez perched at a jaunty angle on his head, and an uncertain smile on his lips. On the back was written Samson Wangira, August 1916.

  In another — a more detailed black and white study of his head and bare torso — Ira had used lighting that captured the bulge of muscle on his arms, shoulders and chest, and emphasised his taut abdominals in ripples of highlight and shade. Sam’s hand went involuntarily to his midriff, where a thin layer of flab now covered the underlay of muscle.

  The last in the series was a close-up. It was taken a few weeks after the first set, when Sam had become accustomed to the camera and was starting to take an interest in Ira’s work. He took the print to the bedside lamp and sat on the bed to study it. His youthful eyes were wide and quizzical; he recalled that Ira was attempting to explain what the camera did to capture his image at the time.

  In a mere twinkling of an eye, thirty-five years had slipped by.

  He remembered there was a period in his life when he willed the sands of time to quicken their flow; to move him from child to boy; from boy to warrior. Now he wanted to give it no more encouragement, nor to be reminded of its passing.

  He felt uncomfortable keeping Ira’s body of African work. It was too personal. The photographs were not only of their subjects: by their presentation they portrayed the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, of the photographer. It was like having Ira’s ghost in the room with him. But if he couldn’t keep them, he also didn’t have the heart to throw them all away.

  While walking past his old college, New York University, the previous day, he’d noticed an announcement of an upcoming photographic exhibition. He would donate Ira’s collection and, if the art department didn’t want to include these examples of early African photography by a talented amateur, they could do with them as they wished.

  Sam knew it was a cowardly decision, but it meant he could avoid a painful choice.

  Jelani was in a part of the city he’d not visited previously; he’d been directed there by Randolph, the rotund black man who had collected him at the airport in a black sedan with a high pointed bonnet, sweeping mudguards and a running board trimmed with chrome — just as Jelani had hoped he’d ride in when in America. Randolph was employed by the Longshoremen’s Union and given the task of introducing Jelani to New York.

  ‘You done arrived at the right time, boy,’ he’d said. ‘We’s gonna have a big demonstration next week.’ He pronounced demonstration as if it consisted of three separate words. ‘Yessir. Thousands of our members are gonna be out on the streets, takin’ on New York’s finest.’

  ‘New York’s finest?’ Jelani asked.

  ‘The po-lice.’ He laughed. ‘Who you think? Li’l Red Ridin’ Hood? The boss says you should come along. Good experience.’

  The next day, Randolph began his induction program by telling Jelani: ‘Get yo’ ass down to Harlem, Jelani my man. See a part of New York what no visitin’ white man sees.’

  That was why Jelani was now on West 122nd Street, feeling oddly out of place. All the people were black, but none looked familiar. There was no Luo, or Kikuyu, or Maasai, or any other Kenyan tribe identifiable in the faces surrounding him on the crowded street.

  Barefooted children played in piles of rubbish and old people sat on the bottom steps of three-storey brownstone buildings, some with paint peeling off in large curled flakes, watching him pass with idle curiosity.

  On the steps of the Second Baptist Freedom Church — a flat-fronted two-storey building painted white at least a couple of decades earlier — stood a black vicar in a pointed white hat and a long white robe hemmed in gold lace. He was preaching in a babbling, rhyming voice that Jelani found difficult to understand. At first he wasn’t even sure it was English, then a string of words caught his attention.

  ‘Just brown, O Lord, not the black of Your Holy Word: sinners’ wages, Jesus! Born of sin!’

  Jelani stopped short in a sudden fury: he’d come halfway across the world and yet there was no escaping this difference. The evil of his birth had tainted every experience he’d ever had. He stood and glared at the preacher, who continued to rave with his face raised to the heavens and his eyes closed.

  Jelani gave up, swallow
ed his temper and walked on.

  The message came again — this time not from the preacher’s words, but by some magic that sent the thought spearing into his mind. The taunt took him back to his childhood, when his schoolmates would tease him about his pale skin. The preacher too had referred to the sinister joining of a black man with a white woman. Jelani felt the blood rush to his face, and the bile rise from his stomach.

  He spun around and marched to the steps of the decrepit building and glared up at the old preacher, who at first ignored him then, looking down to find him standing before him, smiled.

  ‘Does the Lord send you here to pray wit’ me, boy?’ he asked kindly.

  The unexpected gentleness of his voice threw Jelani completely off-balance. He couldn’t maintain his anger in the face of such benign serenity. He must have been mistaken: the man’s speech had, after all, been barely decipherable. But he wanted a fight.

  The preacher held his smile.

  Jelani hesitated a moment, then hurried away, confused and embarrassed.

  A block away, he sat on a kerbside bench and wondered if he was ever going to outgrow the shame of his mixed parentage.

  The answer came to him as clearly as the preacher’s message had. It wasn’t the idea of one black parent and one white that tormented him: it was not knowing who they were that was at the core of his pain.

  He got up from the bench seat and felt that a load had been lifted from his shoulders. He had at last found a way to clear his head of all the childhood fears that still dominated the question of who he was.

  He walked back to the preacher and threw a dollar into his bowl.

  He was no closer to finding the answers he needed, but at least he now had the right question.

  CHAPTER 49

  Fiona rang Emerald to discuss their plans to go dancing at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse on Saturday night.

  ‘Why don’t I pick you up? Mummy has let me have our chauffeur for the occasion,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Great. What time?’

  ‘I’ll say seven-thirty. That way we can practise a few steps at Clarice’s before we go. Oh, and Miriam’s coming too.’

  ‘That’s brilliant. I’ll bring “The Bumble Boogie” and “Twelfth Street Rag” — they’re my new ones I mentioned yesterday.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay the night with us at Clarice’s?’ Fiona asked. ‘It could be fun.’

  ‘I did mention it to Mother: she flatly refused. I think she’s still recovering from the ordeal of letting me go to Henley.’

  ‘Pity. But speaking of Henley … Do you remember that funny-looking chap with the fair hair that we met with Laurence’s friends?’

  ‘Oh … do you mean Raph?’

  Raph and his passionate speeches had surfaced from Emerald’s memory at odd times over the weeks since Henley. She could no longer hear her stepfather’s blistering attacks on Clement-bloody-Attlee and the welfare-bloody-state without Raph coming to mind.

  Fiona’s mention of him made her regret she’d not made an effort to contact him before leaving Henley. She wondered if it was his extremism that interested her, for he was certainly not the type of man she’d normally find attractive. With no way to make contact, she had decided to simply put him from her mind.

  ‘Yes, Raph. Well, I heard from Laurence that he’s gone to New York,’ Fiona said.

  ‘Oh, how nice for him.’

  ‘To stay with his brother,’ Fiona continued, relishing the gossip. ‘Apparently, he’s very well established on Wall Street.’

  ‘Raph?’

  ‘No, his brother, of course. Wasn’t Raph interested in art, or photography, or something like that?’ Fiona asked, probing.

  ‘I’m sure I have no idea,’ Emerald said.

  ‘I think I’d rather study photography than watercolours,’ Emerald said to her mother later.

  ‘Photography?’ Dana asked. ‘Whatever for? It’s a very plebeian hobby, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not at all. I went to a groovy photographic exhibition a couple of months ago.’

  Her mother winced. ‘Must you use those frightful expressions?’

  ‘And I don’t think I’ll bother with the Red Cross any more.’

  Dana sighed. ‘Do you think you’ll ever know what you want, Emerald?’

  Emerald thought about the question for a moment.

  ‘Yes, actually, I already do,’ she said. ‘I’d like to learn to be a photographer so I can become a photojournalist.’

  ‘A photojournalist? What in heaven’s name is a photojournalist?’

  ‘It’s the latest thing. I read about it in Harper’s Bazaar last month. Some of these photojournalists are quite famous, recording history with their cameras.’

  ‘It sounds very American to me, dear.’

  ‘It is. That is, I think it is. At least that’s where the best photojournalists work. Which brings me to another idea I had.’

  Her mother raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I should like to go to New York to study properly.’

  Instead of scoffing as Emerald had expected, her mother looked at her rather oddly then, to her surprise, gave a slight nod of acknowledgement. It wasn’t the outright agreement Emerald might have hoped for, but the nod meant she would consider it and, if satisfied it was a good idea, discuss it with Papa.

  Having only just thought of the idea herself, Emerald was suddenly immensely excited by the prospect.

  Emerald again checked her dress, spinning in front of the mirror to see the printed taffeta bounce on the layers of tulle. A floaty lilac chiffon stole draped across her shoulders, picking out the lily of the valley pattern on her dress, and a strand of her mother’s Mikimoto pearls demurely set off her décolletage. She was ready for the dance.

  It was already seven-thirty — the agreed time. She couldn’t wait to tell Fiona and the girls about her plans to go to New York to study photography. It was only a matter of time, and the sooner the better. She had no idea how she’d locate Raph, but she would find a way. Fiona’s brother was obviously in touch.

  She still hadn’t made up her mind about her earrings and decided to ask her mother’s opinion. She made her way down the stairs while struggling to get the clip onto her earlobe. When she looked up, Dana was down in the hall, staring up at her.

  ‘Mother, what is it?’

  ‘Nothing, darling. Just marvelling at how you’ve grown. And changed. When did you say Fiona will arrive?’

  ‘Actually, she’s supposed to be here already.’

  The doorbell sounded.

  ‘Oh, that must be her,’ Emerald said. ‘I’ll get it.’

  She swung the door open to find Fiona standing in the entryway in obvious distress. She wasn’t even dressed for the Palais de Danse.

  ‘Fiona! What is it? Is something wrong?’

  ‘The night’s been cancelled.’

  ‘What?’ Emerald said. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Emerald?’ Her mother’s voice trilled from behind her in the hall. ‘Emerald, what are you thinking? Leaving the poor girl on the doorstep.’ She joined Emerald at the door. ‘Fiona, do come in. Oh … are you unwell, dear?’

  Fiona sniffed into her lacy handkerchief and stepped past them into the hall.

  ‘No, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Really.’

  Dana led them into the drawing room, where Fiona sat daintily on the edge of a large Georgian chair, her handkerchief crushed in her fist.

  Emerald’s instinct told her that Fiona’s news should be saved till they were alone, but in the face of her obvious distress, and feeling powerless to intervene, she allowed her mother to take charge.

  There was a long moment in which no one spoke.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Dana offered by way of encouragement.

  Fiona sniffed into her handkerchief; Emerald would later recall that she wore what romantic novelists might call a brave smile.

  ‘I’m … I’m going to have a baby,’ she said.

  Dana lay sleeples
s that night, mulling over the issues surrounding Fiona’s pregnancy. She had wrapped the poor girl in her arms when she heard her news, knowing more than anyone how she would be feeling. Dana did and said all she could to reassure her and to advise that the future was not so bad as she might be imagining. She did her best to prepare the girl for the reproachful, even heartless advice her family might give her. She might be accused of bringing shame on them. In her presence they would discuss her as if she wasn’t there. They might discuss various solutions. Some would insist the boy face his responsibilities and marry her. Others would say it was best to keep the matter quiet. Fiona could take a long holiday and have the baby offered up for adoption. Perhaps she would be told to have an abortion. Having long regretted her choice to seek an abortion when she was in a similar situation, Dana gently implied that it would be natural for Fiona to feel secret relief if this decision were made for her. Of course, she needn’t do any such thing, if she was prepared for the sacrifices — and rewards — that continuing her pregnancy would entail.

  She and Emerald had bundled Fiona back into her car with offers of moral support when the time came to tell her parents the truth. The girl had looked far less tragic by then, but Dana felt dreadfully sorry for her nevertheless.

  What kept Dana awake now though was that Emerald’s friends were not nearly as sheltered as she had been led to believe. Fiona was her daughter’s closest companion. If she wasn’t safe, then neither was Emerald.

  She knew that Oswald loved Emerald very much, but he was a very conservative person and demanded decorum from members of his family. If Emerald disgraced him, she would never achieve the heights that Dana hoped she would. The Middlebridge empire would pass to others.

  She made her decision. She was not prepared to bet her daughter’s future on the chance that she might behave differently from Fiona. Her only option was to take Emerald away from her friends. With Emerald’s new interest in photography, it was likely that Oswald would agree to her going to New York to pursue it. And there would be no need for him to know Dana’s reasons.