Cion

by Zakes Mda

  She ignored me. I went back to the kitchen and removed the kettle from the stove. Perhaps, I thought, I should take the drawings back to the tree. And forget about them and their creator. But I couldn’t let myself do it then. I kept on postponing. Just one more time. Let me look at them one more time. I will return them to the tree tomorrow. Just one more time. Until today. This was my last attempt at having some form of communication with Orpah. I am not going to try again.

  I believe Ruth: this “girl,” she’s got issues. Mostly with me, from the way she behaves toward me. I do not know what I ever did to her. Does she perhaps resent the attention that her mother is paying me?

  I must say a strong bond has developed between us. Ruth and me. I have become her sounding board. When she is frustrated by her children’s inertia she talks to me about it. She calls me to her table as she creates her quilts and asks me earnestly what I think is wrong with her children, after she did so much for them. Why do I think they are repaying her this way? I don’t usually have answers for such questions. It is clear to me anyway that she does not expect answers. She never complains about Mahlon Quigley even though he spends his days staring motionlessly at his garden or brooding with the other elders on the porch of the Kilvert Community Center. Instead, she would rather complain about politicians, and would ask me why I think they are all such a scandalous breed, except of course the one politician very dear to her heart. I voice my opinion only in those instances when I agree with her point of view. In all other instances, which are by far in the majority, I keep my opinion to myself. And this has earned me the honor of being referred to as a good listener by her. And of being called “Ruth’s African” by the neighborhood.

  I learned of this nickname on my first visit to the Kilvert Community Center. I wandered there on my own one day when Ruth was busy with her quilting, Mahlon was tending his garden by shifting the positions of his little American flags, Orpah was buried in her room doing God-knows-what and Obed was whooping it up in Athens. I passed three brooding elders sitting on old car seats on the porch despite the chill. As I opened the door I heard one of them tell the others: “That’s him all right…Ruth’s African.” They squinted to take a thorough look at me. One gave me a toothless grin and I smiled back at them.

  Inside the hall were many, probably a hundred or more, bales of clothes in black plastic bags. Two middle-aged women—one quite stout and round, the other slim and sinewy—sat on a bale each, sorting out the clothes. A young woman sat at one of the long tables in the room, punching something on the computer.

  I greeted and offered to help.

  “He’s Ruth’s African,” said the young woman.

  “My name is Toloki,” I said. “Toloki from South Africa.”

  “He’s a professional mourner,” said the young woman, flaunting her knowledge of me to the other women, who didn’t seem to grasp the significance of my occupation and to place it in the grand scheme of things.

  “We hear so much about you,” said the slender one. “Welcome to the Center.”

  The plastic bags reached almost to the ceiling and it was obvious that the ladies needed a hand to move them about. The young lady at the computer told me her name, and that she was a volunteer from Athens who occasionally helped with the Center’s books. The two ladies at the bales introduced themselves as Irene Flowers and Barbara Parsons. Irene was the slender one. “She’s almost eighty years, you know?” said Barbara. I could understand why Barbara took such pride in Irene’s age that she would announce it unprovoked to a stranger. Irene looked fifty-five at most. That’s why I thought she was middle-aged. I expressed my surprise at her youthful looks.

  “It’s because of onion,” she said.

  “She eats one raw onion every day,” said Barbara.

  “Been doin’ it since I was a girl,” Irene chipped in.

  I promised them that from then on I was going to eat raw onion every day, although it might be too late to save me as they could see from my battered looks. They laughed at this and flattered me, saying that I still looked handsome for my age. Of course they knew nothing about my age.

  Irene’s onion was quite a coincidence. Those of you who know me from Ways of Dying will remember that a diet of raw onion and Swiss roll used to be a special treat for me.

  “As a matter of fact I had the onion habit too once upon a time,” I told the women. “I am tempted to resume it so as to look young and beautiful like Irene.”

  They laughed once more because they thought I was just joking.

  The onion and Swiss roll habit is one of those things I lost when Noria—the late and lamented love of my life—became my habit.

  Irene was proud to show me around as Barbara focused on sorting the clothes and pricing them. They were donated by an organization in Lancaster, Irene told me. It was going to take days to price them. Then after that they were going to have a flea market where they would sell the clothes to raise funds for the Center. The clothes that were not bought would be left outside for the poor people to take for free.

  “You being from Africa and all you can choose any clothes you want for yourself,” offered Barbara. Me being from Africa and all…that reminded me of Ruth.

  “I’d rather buy to support your Center,” I said. “When you’ve sorted them out and priced them I’ll come to the flea market and buy some.”

  I did not mean to deprive them of the joy of dispensing some charity to an African, and I felt bad at turning down the well-meant act of generosity. However I have always paid my way through life and I was not about to change that by taking alms from my new friends. Besides, I can afford to buy my own clothes. I have good savings accumulated from the plentiful deaths that I mourned back in my country.

  Irene’s tour of the Center began at the hall with five long tables for quilting, a glass-panel cupboard with quilts and other odds and ends stored in it and a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall. Today the tables were all stacked in one corner to make room for the bales of clothes. Then there were the bathrooms for males and females and a big storage area for food donations that were later distributed to the poor. But Irene’s pride was the kitchen. Here she practiced her famous culinary skills which, she said, I would experience first hand if I stayed for lunch. I was not about to turn a lunch invitation down.

  Irene gave me a brief history of the Center. It was founded by her son James, who died from polio in 1978. She’d kept the Center running for the past forty or so years. She promised James that she would continue to work at the Center after his death. Although she was now a senior citizen—albeit a sprightly one—the community, especially the senior citizens and the indigent of Kilvert, depended on her for the food and clothes distributions, and for the dinners that were held at the Center to celebrate such special days as Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for the commemoration and observance of important occasions such as Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In recent years she had the assistance of the formidable Barbara, who was also a fund-raiser and food bank manager.

  The women told me that the Center had known some glorious days. At one time it was even the southeast Ohio headquarters of the North American Indian Council, serving people of Native American descent in a ten-county area. Unfortunately a few years back it lost its federal funding, and now it had to struggle to raise funds for its survival. But Irene and Barbara would not let it die without a fight.

  I have since become a frequent guest at the Center, and sometimes I assist with minor repairs. Or even with cleaning up and mopping the floors. This does not sit well with Ruth. It had become a source of pride to have an African of her own. Hence her jealousy and injured pride when I befriend others, such as the women of the Kilvert Community Center.

  Much as I am Ruth’s African to the people of Kilvert, I have earned the ignominy of being “my mama’s lackey” to Obed, who feels I owe my loyalty to him and not to anyone else since he was the one who discovered me.

  He has obvious
ly not given up on me though, and still hopes I will one day redeem myself as his role model and “African shaman.” He still discusses with me some of his hare-brained schemes for the betterment of himself and the rest of mankind. Each day there is a new scheme. I know even as he outlines it that he will not pursue it to its conclusion but will replace it with a new scheme the next day. He dreams these schemes up when he is asleep at night. Some evenings he goes out to have a great time in the bars of Athens with Nathan and comes back in the wee hours of the morning. Even when he is hungover the next morning he will invariably have a new scheme.

  Most of these schemes involve some form of dabbling in the occult, which he claims is from his Native American heritage, or on one or two occasions from some African heritage I had never heard of. This does not surprise me one bit because I have observed that people of African descent in America often create African heritages that no one in Africa knows about. There are some who are descendants of kings and queens who existed only in the collective imagination of their oppressed progenitors. I also know that there are many rituals and traditions long dead on the mother continent, that were preserved and transformed and enriched by the slaves to suit their new lives in America. I therefore cannot claim that just because I have no idea of Obed’s African mysticisms they are not drawn from practices that once existed in Africa. And of course Africa is very big and there are many things I do not know about the hundreds of cultures on the continent. Perhaps my search for mourning should have started there—from one country to another. But then the sciolist had other plans for me. I will still do it. One day I will do it.

  There is always a strong profit motive when Obed dabbles in the mystic. Like when he took up hand trembling, which was one scheme that endured for some time.

  I discovered his hand trembling practice by chance when I heard the women at the Center gossiping about it. In the middle of December with all the chill and snow Obed had set up a tent near the pool at the Federal Creek and was telling fortunes. Gullible people were actually paying him money for it.

  I decided to go down to the Federal Creek to see for myself. And indeed there was Obed standing over a fire outside a green tent.

  “So you heard about it, homey?” he asked with a broad smile. “Am a hand trembler. Didn’t tell you about it ’cause I wanted to refine my skills first. You ain’t the only one who’s got powers of them shamans no more, homey.”

  I didn’t know what the heck hand trembling was all about and why it got him so excited. He was going to make a lot of money foretelling people’s futures, he said. At that moment a curious elderly man walked down to the creek, for he had heard in the village that there was a new shaman camped at the Federal. He was surprised to find that it was none other than the wayward son of Mahlon Quigley. Obed tried to convince him this was serious business. It was nothing to joke about. He had received a calling in his dreams from his Native American ancestors and he was now a true hand trembler.

  “Don’t be silly,” said the man. “Your ancestors ain’t no Navajos. They’re Cherokee or Shawnee or Powhatan.”

  “Shawnee,” said Obed. “They ain’t no Powhatan or Cherokee.”

  “Hand trembling is a Navajo thing, man, and ain’t no Navajos here,” said the stubborn man. “It ain’t Shawnee. It ain’t Cherokee neither. It ain’t nobody’s around these parts. And it ain’t nothing to play with.”

  “It don’t matter no how,” said Obed. “Shawnee…Navajo…same difference ’cause they all Indians. It’s an Indian thing, that’s what matters, and I am a freakin’ Indian.”

  He then offered to demonstrate to the skeptic how skillful he was as a hand trembler. He asked the man to blindfold him, which he did with his blue bandanna. He then asked us to hide something and he would tell us exactly where it was. He went inside the tent while I hid my belt in a shrub some distance away from the tent. I actually made sure that the hiding place was behind large boulders out of the tent’s view. I took a circuitous direction to return to the tent. Obed came out of the tent with a beaded container, from which he sprinkled some yellowish powdery stuff he claimed was corn pollen on his left hand. As soon as he did this his hand began to tremble. He clapped his hands and both of them vibrated and it seemed as if they were forcing him to go in a certain direction, which was of course a beeline to the shrubs behind the boulders. Still trembling, the hands led him to the belt.

  The man burst out laughing. He accused me of being in on the whole scheme. My assurances that I was not were all in vain. It was obvious, the man said, that poor Obed was getting all these funny ideas from me. He had heard that I claimed to be some kind of shaman. You know that I never made any such claim.

  But in a way the man was right. Obed did view me as a role model and for quite some time he had taken to following me like a puppy everywhere I went. When my body cried for mourning and I went to the graveyard to mourn the dead he would be there, following at a safe distance, observing every move and listening intently to every moan. After that he would have many questions about the profession of mourning. But his focus was always on the financial aspects of it. I told him how I went to funerals and sat on the mound of fresh soil and punctuated the proceedings with my harrowing moans and wails, how the bereaved placed money in my hat for sharing their sorrow and dignifying the ceremony with my presence, making it exceptional, since professional mourning was never part of any of the people’s cultures. I told him how in many instances, especially at the funerals of the higher classes, the bereaved paid me a lot of money to stay away from their funerals, for they had come to view me as an embarrassment. Obed was fascinated by all this, and he told me that one day he would go back to his own past to retrieve from it elements of mysticism. At the time I did not take him seriously, especially because after a few days he seemed to forget about it all and to continue with his wanton life in Athens.

  I don’t know how Obed found the belt. No one had even told him that I was going to hide a belt. His powers were genuine, he told me. He discovered them in his dreams. His biggest strength as a hand trembler, he added, was in the interpretation of dreams. People could report their dreams to him and he could forestall their consequences.

  That day I left Obed at the Federal and went to while away time with the women at the Center.

  Obed continued with his hand trembling for a few weeks, and people reported that he was producing results, especially in the interpretation of dreams. They claimed he had forestalled many disasters, including a tornado as big as the one that destroyed every building except the concrete block store in Kilvert in 1937.

  But many citizens of Kilvert were skeptical and therefore he could not sustain his business for long. There can only be so many paying believers in a hamlet like Kilvert. Perhaps if he had given word-of-mouth a chance to spread he would have got customers from the neighboring villages as well, but Ruth got on his nerves by preaching daily sermons from Deuteronomy 18:10–11: Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritualist or who consults the dead.

  “What about Toloki?” asked Obed. “You don’t say nothing about him. He’s a professional mourner.”

  “Todoloo!” said Ruth, tapping her forehead. “Toloki ain’t no son of mine.”

  “And I don’t consult the dead,” I added. “I mourn them.”

  Obed tried valiantly to defend his practice. “Them Indians gonna take us out of poverty, Mama,” he argued. The people of Kilvert must exploit their heritage. What good was it to be people of the future, as Ruth usually boasted, if they continued to live in poverty today? What was the point of depending on food pantries while they were surrounded by all the wealth of their heritage? People who did not have a single drop of Native American blood in them were getting rich from aspects of the Native American heritage. Selling artifacts. Adopting his people’s totems as mascots. Looting his people’s culture. Why sh
ouldn’t he, a true descendant of the great tribes, benefit from what was truly his?

  But Ruth was not going to be swayed by any sophistry. She knew what the Bible said, and that was all that mattered.

  “Go out there and find a real job like Nathan,” she said.

  One day Obed packed his tent, and did not return to the creek for hand trembling again.

  Orpah’s drawings. I come across them again in a trash can in the living room. I have been helping Ruth since early morning with her spring cleaning. There are no Asian bugs this time, so the work only takes us up to midday. When we are done she makes us both cups of steaming Swiss Miss and we sit at her quilting table. We talk about the vicious winter weather, and I know sooner or later she will somehow find a way of linking it with the conspiracies of politicians or the laziness of her children. She is grateful that I am always there to help when her own kids always find an excuse to shirk their obligations.

  The radio from Orpah’s room is blaring country music. And then the one o’clock news. Something about Lynndie England’s court martial next month for her abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It must be a West Virginia station because the commentator seems to take it personally that Specialist England is from that state. He, however, consoles his listeners by reminding them that as far as female soldiers go the state has produced a great heroine and role model in the form of Private Jessica Lynch who was held prisoner by Iraqis and was the first prisoner of war to be rescued by American forces since the Second World War. The state therefore knows the glory and the ignominy of women in the military.