He put a hand to the back of his neck and for a moment Kate thought he would lean in and kiss her. She waited a heartbeat. His eyes scanned her door.
“So I’ll see you around,” he said.
She walked into her house alone and turned the deadbolt and in a little bit she heard the bike start up again. In the library, she switched on the light and sat down in front of her mother’s portrait. The cool lozenge in the lower chamber of her heart seemed to pulse. She was too withdrawn, too aloof, perhaps because she was afraid that any man she loved would end up dead. In a little bit, she got up and moved to the downstairs bedroom that her mother had transformed into a studio, turned on a light, and looked around. She might make it into a darkroom.
* * *
• • •
KATE HAD LEARNED to develop film in the darkroom adjacent to the student paper offices at Agnes Scott a year ago. She’d been taught by an art professor who was also the faculty adviser to the Profile. His name was Mr. Lancaster.
“If you’re going to be a photographer, Miss Monroe,” Lancaster had said, pushing back his glasses, “you should have the experience of developing your own film. I don’t mind showing you if you can stop by on Saturday.”
“Saturday afternoon?” she said. “I have a paper I need to finish Saturday morning.”
“That will do fine. Shall we say three o’clock? Meet me at the side door. I’ll have to let us in. Shoot a roll of film you don’t care much about. It may get ruined.”
On Saturday she was there as promised.
“Go ahead and rewind your film,” Lancaster said once they were upstairs.
She did.
“Very well. Open your camera and hand me the roll.”
The camera clicked open nicely.
“Once we enter the darkroom, you will have to accomplish these first steps blind.” He paused. “Miss Monroe, the building is locked. You may set your camera on the counter. You won’t be needing it.”
Yes, Lancaster had used the key to open the building, but somehow Kate had not thought until now about being locked in with him. “Of course.” They walked toward the back of the classroom, Mr. Lancaster’s head to one side as he talked.
“When we go in the red light will be on. That’s the safe light. But as I said, we must turn it off at the beginning. Just a moment of light and your pictures will be ruined.”
Mr. Lancaster was a serious old man, but suddenly she was afraid he might touch her. The year Kate was home with her mother, she was walking down a neighborhood street and a man passed and she smiled at him and in the same instant felt his hand on her bottom, and she ran. Lancaster pulled a small instrument from his white jacket pocket. It looked like a bottle opener. “The first thing you do is pry off the lid.”
“Yes,” she said. Mr. Lancaster’s hands were large.
“Before we turn off the light, I’ll show you the film reel and the metal container. Once the canister is open, you must pull out the film, holding it just so.” He demonstrated with his thumb and forefinger. “The roll is going to snake out. If you feel something against your leg, do not scream and drop your film.”
“Of course.” She would scream if he touched her.
“You must line up the film to the reel so that it catches on the teeth and then start rolling. I’ll talk you through.” He pulled out a handkerchief and coughed and replaced the handkerchief. “You’ll put the film reel into the black box and place the lid on top. Only then can we turn on the safe light.”
“I believe I can do that.” Just don’t even breathe on me.
“I believe you can too, Miss Monroe. You have steady hands. Now, follow me.”
Lancaster led her to a funny-looking door. He backed into it; it swirled around, making a mechanical sound and emitting a red light, and for a moment Kate thought he had wound himself into the film reel. The door padded shut. “Are you coming, Miss Monroe?”
She pushed forward through the revolving door. It breathed the same mechanical sound and padded shut behind her. She was in the center of a red jewel. A chemical smell filled her lungs and three rectangular basins met her eye, full of liquid like witches’ brew. Her fear of Lancaster was gone.
He showed her the film reel and the metal box and explained the stop bath and the fixer. “Now,” he said. “Are you ready?” He handed her the bottle opener.
“Yes.” The red light went off and the dark rushed into Kate’s eyes. She placed the opener against the canister, feeling for the lip, turned the canister, and kept pressing. At last the canister sighed and the lid popped off.
“Now, that’s fine,” Mr. Lancaster said. “Take hold of the top of the film—we’ll call it the tongue—and let the film spool out. Put the canister on the tabletop to your left.”
She obeyed.
“Now find the reel with your other hand and picture in your mind getting the perforations to slide onto the teeth.”
Kate felt her way. So this was what it was like to be blind: a life of touching, of smell, of loving through touching. “I got it,” she said, pressing hard on the reel.
“Start turning.”
Kate had the loaded reel in the box and the top in place when Mr. Lancaster turned on the red light. She was almost sorry. The chemical dark had become a book in which she was reading the world new. Lancaster poured in the developer and they turned the box several times, then poured the developer out. Then came the stop bath and then the fixer. Finally they poured water into the box. When Kate lifted the film out, she felt a rush of mastery, as if she were creating the realest of worlds. They flipped themselves back through the revolving door into the disorienting white light of the office.
“Here, Miss Monroe,” Mr. Lancaster said, showing her a kind of closet where she would hang the film. He looked at his watch. “It will need to dry for a good hour and a half. Do you have errands to run?”
“Not really. I brought a book to read.”
An hour later, she was cutting the long reel of film into strips of five images each and entering each into a plastic sleeve. At the light table, Mr. Lancaster’s breath had gone to peppermint. Using a magnifying loop, Kate discovered a mysterious world of light and dark turned to opposites. She circled every image. Then they were back in the red jewel of the darkroom, putting the first set of images onto an object like a pancake and sliding it into the enlarger, slipping paper into the bottom of the machine, the paper thick enough that she could imagine its treeness. Lancaster set a timer.
“Light in the machine for fifteen seconds,” he said.
Was it like this at the beginning of the universe? Light off. Paper out. Kate slid the thick sheet into the developer pan. The images coalesced like ghosts becoming people, ghosts becoming buildings. One thing became something else. At last she held a photograph. She submerged it into the stop bath, into the fixer, then rinsed in water and rinsed again, squeegeed off the water, and put the photograph on a dry rack.
On that day in Decatur as Kate walked out into the late afternoon, carrying with her the smells of the developer, the stop bath, the fixer, her pictures in an envelope held tight to her heart, the breeze lifting her skirt, she thought of James and the house she had inherited back in Winston, and nothing compared to what she was holding.
Southwestern Nigeria
1957
Chapter Six
TACKER STARTED SKETCHING in an eighth-grade art class. He was fascinated by perspective. The summer after tenth grade, he worked for a surveying company in Winston. Mostly it was a matter of lugging equipment and cutting weeds. The next summer, he worked for an architect, running errands and learning to do renderings. He had an uncanny knack for drawing. When a friend went off to North Carolina State College, School of Design, and came home at Christmas talking about his teachers, Tacker was hooked. “You should see this one prof,” the friend said. “He makes his shoes out of old tires!” The fr
iend switched to forestry and Tacker applied to the School of Design. When he got to those reused barracks on that huge courtyard, he’d found his niche. His pals were as competitive as football players, but they were kooky, some of them, and smart. Working over his table, twelve other fellows in the room, books puddled everywhere, was like summer camp for nerds except that snow swirled outside. Tacker loved it.
In the afternoons he played intramural football. He was too good and people got mad at him, so he switched to basketball, which he wasn’t nearly as good at. He joined a fraternity, and his second year, he started dating Jill. There were summers at the beach and the years cycled one after the other until his fifth year, when he found himself chosen for the Clintok assignment.
A week before Tacker was to take the train to New York to board a freighter headed for West Africa, he got a phone call telling him that his partner in the two-year assignment, Seth Hudson, whom he’d roomed with in D.C., had come down with mono and couldn’t go. “Spend a year here doing an internship. Apply to Clintok again next year. You’ll be a shoo-in. I don’t want you going alone,” his mother said.
“No, Mom. They’re counting on me.” As soon as he said it, he regretted his conviction. No one knew where Nigeria was, and when he told them, they looked alarmed, as if he were going to the heart of darkness. All the shots he’d taken wouldn’t protect him from snakes and he’d almost certainly get malaria regardless of the medicine he’d be taking weekly. There was some horrible illness called elephantiasis carried by the tsetse fly.
His mother sat on the edge of her chair in the breakfast room. His father held back. He’d always told Tacker to finish what he started. “I can always come home early if something happens,” Tacker said—prophetically as it turned out.
His father ended up taking the train with him to New York, where they spent the night at the Ritz Tower on Park Avenue. The next morning at the dock, the freighter’s black hull loomed titanic and Tacker might have backed out if his father hadn’t been there shaking his hand, pressing his duffel bag into his arms, telling him to write. The trip was tedious. There were only eighteen passengers and Tacker was seasick for the first few days. Once he gained his sea legs, he played deck golf with a Norwegian, but they could hardly communicate. The sailors chipped incessantly with hammers and chisels at the rust that constantly bloomed under the hull paint. Multitudes of porpoises swam alongside the ship.
In Liverpool, an Englishwoman and her daughter boarded. She was joining her husband, who worked for an aluminum company headquartered in Lagos. The girl did correspondence school in the morning. In the afternoon she and her mother walked on the deck and had tea. They invited Tacker to join them. An African steward appeared with a tray carrying a silver teapot and a bed of butter cookies.
“I had no idea they’d be this well supplied,” Tacker said.
“Oh, these are my things,” the mother said, waving the steward off with her handkerchief.
The girl was good at checkers. Tacker wondered who her playmates would be in Nigeria. At night he walked on deck and brooded over what he had gotten himself into. He was probably going to die. Three and a half weeks after departing New York, the ship docked in Monrovia and from there it picked its way down the west coast of Africa. Finally they reached Takoradi. An official representative of Clintok, Charles Robinson, came on board to help Tacker clear customs.
Africa smelled like an enormous green organism on fire, a pungent soup of salt water, smoke, and enough growth for an eighth continent. They offloaded onto an enormous canoe. Astonishingly, they found themselves within a marketplace of canoes: women selling umbrellas and flip-flops and banana leaves that held some native dish. “Don’t eat a thing,” Robinson said. “And don’t buy anything either. It only encourages them.” Onshore, Tacker focused on Robinson’s back until they reached his Renault. They would drive along the coast to Accra, where Tacker would catch a Nigeria Airways flight to Lagos. As he came out of a disorienting slumber, his eyes met an enormous structure jutting out into the ocean. Peach colored and colossal against blue sky. He sat up in his seat and wiped his eyes.
“Wow,” he said. “What’s that?”
“Elmina Castle,” Robinson said. “Built by the Portuguese. Fourteen eighty-two.”
“Amazing,” Tacker said, straining his neck to see better.
“An important stop on the slave-trade route,” Robinson said casually. “Thirty thousand slaves a year through the door of no return.”
Dazed, Tacker closed his eyes, his teeth set against a rising tide of nausea.
* * *
• • •
A PETITE NIGERIAN man in a starched white shirt grasped Tacker’s hand. “Come, my friend. I am Samuel Ladipo, here to fetch you for the university.” Tacker had just deplaned at the Lagos airport, a structure not much larger than a good-size barn flanked with corridors. Samuel had three upward-slanting scars on his cheeks, deeply drawn. Had to have been with a knife. Or a razor. A nerve-tingling jolt ran through Tacker’s groin. Miraculously, Samuel seemed to know exactly which were Tacker’s suitcases, and before Tacker knew what was happening, two boys not much larger than the luggage were carrying the bags out the door into broad daylight. Everything smelled of deep wells and machine oil.
Tacker tried to watch his bags. The boys zigzagged this way and that, around carts with root vegetables and vehicles parked at every angle and displays of blue cloth and women with babies who had set up thatch booths for selling cigarettes and watches and tomatoes. They were in a pinball machine, and only by some mad happenchance was Tacker ever going to see his bags again. Samuel chuckled, loping along, his brown sandals clacking. Around a low building, and there was a beige Volkswagen van, the luggage already loaded, an older man standing at the driver’s door. He wore a kind of gown over trousers. The boys stood at the back of the van, their hands resting on the bags, legs lightened by dust.
Samuel offered each a small octagonal brass coin. The boys shook their heads and laughed. One motioned to Tacker in a way that seemed to say, Come.
“They are not satisfied with the dash,” Samuel said. “What do you say in your country? The tip? They want American money.”
Samuel’s English was impeccable, but Tacker couldn’t identify the accent. It wasn’t British. He fished in his pocket for the nickels and dimes he still possessed. The boys extended their hands.
“Thank you, sah,” they said ceremoniously. “You are welcome,” they also said.
Then they were off like low-flying birds.
* * *
• • •
SAMUEL DELIVERED TACKER to a hostel on Victoria Island, not far from where the ships docked out past the lagoon, and prepared to leave him for the night. In the morning, they would drive upcountry.
“Aren’t you staying with me?” Tacker said.
“Ah. Independence has not registered yet,” Samuel said.
What? Tacker wondered. Maybe there was a special meaning to register that he didn’t grasp. When dinner was served, he understood. The hostel was full of white Americans and Europeans. Nigerian men in fitted white jackets with brass buttons waited on them with great ceremony. At the end of the meal they were served blocks of ice cream on plates.
In the morning he waited for Samuel downstairs in the fenced yard surrounding the hostel. A light haze floated above the ground and the temperature was pleasant. Tacker was surprised by tall evergreens along the avenue. He caught a whiff of something that smelled like homemade rolls baking. Across the street were two-story buildings with large open windows, and in them he could see men dressed in shirts and ties, moving about, working at typewriters. He wondered if he was observing a bank building or a newspaper. Elderly men strolled along in their long robes as men on bicycles wove in and out among taxis and cars and the occasional Mercedes-Benz. A boy carried a whole flock of chickens in a basket and a man on a bike balanced mattresses on his head as he cycled
. Scores of kids in blue uniforms skipped by, laughing and calling out. Women walked barefoot, carrying stacks of tinned goods or huge vegetables Tacker thought might be yams.
A church occupied the lot just next to the hostel, Episcopalian perhaps. Its soaring windows arched and the nave suggested a capacity of three hundred. The square vestibule, ornamented with a single round window, rose to an imposing tower. Tacker wondered if anyone had ever slept there. Enormous carved doors against cloud-colored masonry walls in a setting of coconut palms and flocking white birds and a wafting ocean breeze gave the building an ethereal composure. It seemed a church in paradise.
Samuel arrived in the van for the trip upcountry to Ibadan. Loading his things into the vehicle, Tacker asked about the church.
“Everything for constructing that church was sent here by boat after your civil war,” Samuel said. “Even the bell.”
“Episcopalian?”
“No, my friend. Baptist. Those people are very enterprising,” he said. “It’s good, no?”
“It’s fantastic,” Tacker said. He was surprised to find such a fine expression of late-nineteenth-century architecture on this side of the Atlantic. After the fear of death he’d felt on the ship, he was reassured by Samuel’s warm welcome. This morning he had wakened and brushed his teeth as always—though with filtered water delivered in a thermos—and eaten breakfast and listened to the news on the radio. Now he sensed a current of opportunity waiting for him in this country, sure and clear as an underground river. Lagos wasn’t Paris. But for that very reason he would do something important here. This was why he’d won the Clintok appointment. He was destined.
Within a mile, they entered a congested market area. Buses and goats and bicycles and boys and women moved about according to their own code, though there was plenty of yelling and honking and pleading and somehow no one was getting hit. Market stalls reached out in every direction as the VW van turtled along.
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