“My country,” Samuel said, grinning. “The drive to Ibadan may take three hours. How do you say it? More or less.” He used his hands to indicate more and less.
At last they were out of the city and into marshland. The one-lane road required they pull over onto grassy shoulders to avoid oncoming traffic. Eventually they wound through dense forest, gentle hills rising, clusters of enormous palms where streams ran. Crossing a bridge, they were offered glimpses of women and children bathing and doing their wash. Women’s naked breasts, long and tapering. In training, he’d been told to expect more exposure but he hadn’t quite expected it this morning. Among the women were girls whose breasts sat firmly on their chests like inverted teacups. He felt their influence and was glad to be sitting.
All up and down the road women and girls carried pots and basins and firewood on their heads. When children caught sight of Tacker, they yelled and waved. “What are they saying?”
“Oyinbo,” Samuel said. “White man.”
“Oh, right,” Tacker said. He’d been apprised of the word but it hadn’t been pronounced as the children said it: oh-yeeen-bow, with the second syllable stressed. Nor had he been told that children would run through the streets calling his whiteness out with such enthusiasm. Since leaving the hostel, he hadn’t seen another white person.
Samuel carried on as if all of it was normal, this enormous country, a boy offering to sell them a “grasscutter”—a terrifically large rat, newly dead and swinging on a pole—the dense heat, two gentlemen walking single file, carrying ancient rifles, long-horned cattle that suddenly appeared as they rounded a curve, and then the van stopped and no one rolled up the windows as the herd passed by, though any of those humped beasts could easily send a long horn straight into Tacker’s skull.
* * *
• • •
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE IBADAN, or UCI, was their home base, where Tacker’s team would design the high school, going and coming from the field as need be. The lead architect was a Yoruba man who had attended MIT. Someone at Clintok had recruited him, since UCI had no faculty in design or architecture. One goal of the project was to inaugurate a program in architecture at the college. Tacker was housed with some Israelis in an unoccupied faculty residence on campus. Samuel and the other Nigerian men on his team lived in a dormitory named Tedder Hall. Tacker expected that the arrangement was akin to the Lagos hostel, separation based on skin color. He didn’t ask.
Samuel was team captain, which was why he had come to Lagos to pick Tacker up. The first day the group met, the Nigerian men were dressed in suits and ties. Tacker arrived in trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. The dress code relaxed the following day, but Tacker’s teammates always dressed smartly. Recent graduates of UCI, they would receive a certificate in architecture for their participation. Tacker was getting a stipend, gaining a nice line on his résumé, and maybe shaving a year off the time it would take to get licensed when he got home. The Israelis, it turned out, were in charge of the Western Region’s waterworks. Tacker had never worked with concrete block or considered what sort of roofing was appropriate for equatorial Africa or how to keep termites from destroying a building before the foundation was finished. But he knew the European and American architects whose work had inspired the modernist buildings of UCI and he knew how they had achieved it. It would be in this intersection of knowledge and opportunity that he would make his mark.
The second week, Tacker contracted diarrhea. The toilet in the faculty residence was temporarily out of service and one night he found himself stumbling to a latrine. The stench wasn’t as bad as he had expected, but the occupation of emptying his bowels into a great cavity of excrement along with the wrenching in his belly and the sweating faintness that followed this evacuation caused his African ambition to dim. What delusion, that he or anyone could achieve something of significance in a country without reliable toilets. He heard a rustle outside the latrine and bolted, tripping and finding himself on his hands and knees in the darkest night he had ever known. For the first time since landing in Lagos, he doubted his capacity merely to endure.
A light came bobbing down the path. Samuel with his flashlight, which he called his torch. “My friend,” he said, helping Tacker up. Tacker wondered how Samuel happened to be there just when he needed him, but back in bed he fell into a deep sleep and the next day his memory of the episode ribboned away like a dream.
One weekend in late September, Samuel had to go to Lagos to pick up supplies and Tacker was at loose ends. So when Joshua invited him to his village for a “tremendous event,” Tacker accepted. Joshua’s father owned a modest compound and an impressive yam farm. Unlike Joshua, who was rotund and round-shouldered, his father was thin and regal. His mother had the look of a young woman who had aged twenty years overnight. Her skin was still supple but the color was ashen and her lips tight. Tacker sensed that Joshua’s father had judged the world and found it wanting, including his wife.
Sunday morning early Tacker was wakened by the sound of bicycles. By the time he found Joshua in the compound, a crowd was gathered, men sitting under trees, women and children at the house fronts. At the center of the compound stood a contrite-looking man in an outfit of worn shorts and a shirt transparent from age. He held a soft hat in his hands and kept his head lowered. At his feet was arranged an assortment of carved figures on a pyre of sticks. Tacker caught a whiff of gasoline.
Joshua was suddenly beside him. “You’re just in time.”
“Why didn’t you get me up?” Tacker felt disoriented. “What’s happening?”
“The man you see is my mother’s brother. He is a recent convert. This morning he will burn his family gods. My father has decreed it.”
“Why?”
“So they will have no more power for him.”
Tacker shook his head. “But if he’s a convert, the gods already don’t have power.”
“You don’t understand.”
Just then Joshua’s father stepped out of the shadow of his veranda, wearing a tall red cap and a heavily embroidered robe. The poor man at the center of this tremendous event seemed to shudder. “Are you sure your uncle wants to do this?” Tacker had the awful feeling that the man would light the fire and leap in with his gods.
“He has no choice.”
“I just want to ask him.” Tacker took off toward the center of the compound and reached the poor man at the same time as Joshua’s father. The idols were wondrously, frightfully carved, with bulging stomachs and huge foreheads and blank, all-seeing eyes. The farmer’s eyes were red.
“Yes?” Joshua’s father addressed Tacker.
“Look. Your brother-in-law. Is this what he wants? These carvings could go into a museum. Why burn them?”
“Who are you to meddle here? If you were not my son’s friend, I should ask you to leave my compound.”
“Ask him.” Tacker pointed to the poor man, who took the opportunity to fall to his knees and wail. A high screech filled the air. Tacker turned to see a woman in a blue dress, holding a burning stick, running across the yard. She lit the pyre. Tacker reached for the nearest god. A jolt like an electric shock ran through his arm, and he dropped it. The man fell to his side, still wailing, while the woman, perhaps his wife, retired to her children.
Back at UCI, Tacker was interviewed about the experience, and it was written up in the student paper, the Herald. “The man seemed pained,” Tacker was quoted as saying.
Interviewer: You are new to our country. By what authority do you judge our goings-on?
Mr. Hart: I’m here to collaborate. I was trying to be helpful.
Interviewer: Perhaps you prefer for Africans to remain unenlightened. You can write to your friends about our native ways.
Mr. Hart: That’s not true.
Interviewer: You believe you know better than the town elders.
The story might have caused Tacker significant hard
ship on campus, but a boxing match between Nigeria’s two greatest rivals was scheduled the day after the story ran, and by the next week the tale of his interference in the tremendous event of the burning gods was pretty much forgotten, or so he thought.
By mid-October, Tacker was leaving the faculty house and the Israelis most evenings to join the guys at the faculty club. A few women always showed up. High-life music filled the air, a brassy, swinging sound that compelled dancing. The night Tacker showed up with Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” things turned in his direction. Within seconds, everyone stopped to listen, as if a new gospel was being proclaimed. As soon as the song ended, they demanded that it be played again. The women giggled under their bright headdresses while the men took the floor, pumping their elbows out. “All shook up” became a slogan. “Tacker, my friend. All shook up!”
Only Joshua held out against Elvis Presley. “The devil plays fine, fine music,” he said one morning when he crossed paths with Tacker in an open courtyard. “Otherwise, why would so many people follow him?”
“You think Elvis Presley is the devil?” Tacker said.
“One of his emissaries,” Joshua said.
Tacker expected that his visit to Joshua’s compound had caused him some difficulty with his father, so he didn’t argue. He felt sorry for Joshua.
On an aerogram, a thin blue piece of foldable and gummed paper, he wrote to his parents in Winston—
I’ll send a package soon with film to develop. You’ll see a picture of me washing out my shirts in a bucket. A determined old man comes by to press them, using a flatiron he heats on charcoal in a clay pot. There are others of me playing soccer (it’s called football here) with some kids and one of me with my friend Samuel at a local Esso station.
The heat takes getting used to. Americans and Europeans take naps. But I’m trying to gain my African legs so I drink black coffee after lunch, Nescafé instant. Except for open corridors in the classroom blocks and all the palms and the bougainvillea hedges, the campus is a lot like one back home. The Nigerian guys on the project include me in everything.
Tacker had never encountered anyone like Samuel. His modesty almost hid his keen mind, his skin was darker than that of Negroes back home, and his crossed ankles looked delicate. But he could brush his teeth with a chewing stick and juggle a ball with his feet for five minutes at a time and outlast Tacker on the playing field any day of the week. He went to church for three hours every Sunday morning and read his Bible daily, though he didn’t seem rabid about it.
One evening as he was cleaning his leather sandals, Samuel asked Tacker about his faith.
“I’ve been Methodist all my life,” Tacker said. “I guess I was born into it.”
“Faith is the silken thread that brings power to the cloth,” Samuel said, spitting onto a rag and applying it to his sandal. “If the thread is removed, the fabric falls apart.” Trancelike, the man seemed almost to address his sandals rather than Tacker. “My forefathers believed that divinities rest in trees, at the crossroads, all about.” Without taking his eyes from his work, Samuel waved his arm in an arc. “That is why it is not hard for us to believe that Jesus walks with us everywhere. Why should I be surprised? I am not surprised.”
Another day over lunch, Samuel described the round houses of his mother’s village to Tacker. “Further north, north of Ilorin,” he said. “My father married a Nupe woman from a wealthy family. The houses are round.” He formed an O in the air. “Like a mother’s womb.” Often Samuel wore the traditional men’s gown. The cloth fanned out in the breeze so that the simple act of walking was a spectacle. The first time he came up behind Tacker and claimed his hand, Tacker swallowed wrong and started hiccuping.
“I have startled you,” Samuel said. He laughed but didn’t let go, and they kept walking to the cafeteria.
Later that day Tacker pulled out his wallet and looked at his North Carolina driver’s license, surprised by how distant he felt from the reflection of himself in his own world. What had his ambition been before he came to Nigeria? Something else seemed to call him now, something more than architecture, some mystery he still hadn’t glimpsed. The silken thread with that other world seemed very thin.
* * *
• • •
FOUR MONTHS AFTER his arrival, Tacker and his team had perfected initial sketches for the high school. They drove upcountry to Osogbo to visit the property seventy miles north, where the first high school would be built. It was early November, the day clear and warm. The van gained a hillier terrain and entered wooded savannah. After a sudden cloudburst, the sun was out again. Palm shacks with food vendors appeared along the highway. The driver pulled over and everyone spilled out to buy some tidbit—skewers of grilled meat and boiled yams with palm oil for dipping. Tacker couldn’t imagine how the women and children got here so far from town. For a moment he had a vision of his father’s grocery invaded by Nigerian women traders coming in to barter with their bananas and individual cigarettes and groundnuts packaged neatly in funneled cups made from newspaper. He purchased his first eko, a corn-based starch wrapped in banana leaves. It tasted a little like cold grits and he managed to eat most of it though the sauce was some sort of hot he’d never dreamed of.
Back in the van, Tacker dozed but snapped awake when they took a sudden turn onto a bad road. The van lurched up a hill and down the other side before the driver pulled in under a stand of mango trees and applied the brakes in a spasm of authority, and then the quiet man who had said not a word the entire trip announced that they would pray. He took off his cap and held it as he thanked God for safe travel, for God’s eye on the road and his hand on the steering wheel, and for sending Jesu Kristi to save them.
“Amen,” the driver and Samuel and all the other men said in unison.
“Amen,” Tacker said, half a second later.
“Come,” Samuel said.
Out they went.
“Is this the land for the school?” Tacker said. They lunged through grass as high as their chests, someone in front beating it back with a cutlass. Chow-ow, chow-ow.
“Not yet,” Samuel said. “We are giving you an initiation.”
Tacker thought of a knife and his face surely showed it.
“Don’t worry. We don’t require blood,” Samuel said, the planes of his cheeks lit by sun. Then an amazed laugh as if life was too brilliant to bear.
They began a decline and Tacker had to be careful not to slip. Most of the time his high-top sneakers were adequate, but the Nigerian men were finding better purchase with their sandals. Tacker couldn’t see anything for the undergrowth and overhead canopy.
“Watch,” Samuel said.
Tacker was about to step on a huge black snake. He leapt forward, colliding with Samuel, who managed to keep them upright. Tacker turned to look back and saw a tree root.
“I thought it was a snake,” he said.
“Not so deadly,” Samuel said, slapping him on the back.
Abraham, the team member with an adding machine for a brain, turned around. “Tacker, I think you are all shook up.” Everyone laughed.
At last they looked out to see a brown river below. Here and there gray stones jutted up like humped backs of great turtles, the current rippling around them. Shortly they reached an open clearing and a swinging bridge high above the river.
“We’re crossing over,” Samuel said.
Tacker felt a wave of energy pass through him. He recalled the days aboard ship, crossing the Atlantic, the fear, followed by Sam’s warm welcome, then the odd normalcy of a world so unlike his own. Yet he was constantly being surprised as if he were living in a story that was being written every day. There wasn’t an ending yet. If he could just keep his balance. The wood-and-rope contraption swung just enough to make his head swim. Look straight ahead. On the other side, they continued, single file. Feeling victorious, Tacker wondered if he might stay in
Nigeria longer than two years, maybe three. Why not longer?
A switchback in the path took them downward again, and Tacker scrabbled for roots and saplings. There was the river. White-faced, white-chested monkeys chattered in the trees along the opposite bank. Tacker slid down the final hill.
“Welcome to River Osun,” Samuel said. He slipped off his sandals, his feet imprinting the brown earth.
They had come to a lagoon where the river broadened. Some of the men squatted onshore, filling cupped hands and releasing river water over their heads. It flowed in glistening streams down their dark curly hair and over their faces like mercury. Only Joshua sat out, appearing to brood. Tacker wondered if he was self-conscious because of his rotundness.
“Please join us,” Samuel said to Tacker.
“What if I just put my feet in?” Tacker said, heeling off his sneakers. He’d already risked eating that eko.
“It’s not like that,” Samuel said. “Osun is a sacred river. It will bring you good health. It will also bless your mother in America.”
“It will make you potent,” Abraham said, grinning, pointing to his groin.
Tacker had promised his mother he wouldn’t swim in an African river. He’d also been warned by the State Department and the Clintok Corporation to steer clear of all rivers and lagoons except for salt water. He couldn’t remember the name of the disease. It started with an s. Well, here he was. Maybe it was best just to pour a few drops over his head. Refusing would be like turning down a gift from a local king. Maybe this was where faith came in, though Tacker felt only foreboding. He would die, only the death wouldn’t be quick. Some gruesome parasite would eat him inside out.
Samuel joined the others and Tacker followed because waiting was worse. He squatted and dipped his hand into the water. One douse and he wiped his eyes.
“It’s not enough,” one of the men said. “Come again.”
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