Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  Before they got back to their seats, a woman from the choir stood and began to sing “I’ll Fly Away,” softly at first, so softly, she seemed at moments to go into a trance. And then, as from the bottom of a well, her voice came back and grew stronger. She stretched her arms out and held a note like she was waiting for God. She must have seen him, because she shook her arms and began to turn counterclockwise. A second time around and the congregation began to shout. She sang, a cry of desperation, a plea for mercy. A deep hum rose from the choir. The woman shifted into a minor key.

  Some bright morning when this life is over

  I’ll fly away

  Tacker was in Nigeria. It wasn’t the lyrics but the minor key and the particular dance that transported him, the dancer turning with exquisite precision in a small circle of earth, head bowed, until she gained momentum and threw her head back, and her mouth opened with a click and her voice erupted in exuberant sadness. Tacker wasn’t sure then and he wasn’t sure now if he believed in God. He believed in the woman.

  Eight pallbearers processed down the center aisle. The casket was closed, and a sharp cry pierced the air. For a few moments there was only the sigh of benches, the wither of fans. Until someone called Praise God Almighty and an answering flood of Amens resounded.

  The service was over. Tacker searched for Frances’s family. But Gaines and Valentine and Old Daddy were already in the black limo by the time he and his parents got downstairs and out the big front doors. A familiar gray veil filled Tacker’s consciousness and clung to his shoulders. He was the outsider. Outside in Nigeria, outside in Winston, outside of Gaines’s circle.

  If he had not said good-bye to Frances yet, it was too late. She was gone. Her black tie-up shoes were gone, her turquoise pocketbook against her black coat, her capable hands with the feather duster that had once held his hand as he crossed the street. Gone. Also gone was her corn bread, her banana pudding, her fig preserves. Her ginger smell was gone. Her lean arms as she held the white sheets to hang on the line in the backyard. They were gone. Her frankness was gone. He remembered when he had told her he was going to Nigeria, almost three years ago now. She was ironing but she had set the iron down and patted her cheek. She half laughed. “I always wanted to go to Africa.” Tacker had had no answer for her and she had picked the iron back up and kept pressing.

  Osogbo, Nigeria

  1959

  Chapter Twenty

  TACKER MET ANNA Becker during that early-March week in ’59. His team was in Osogbo, where, at the tail end of their stay, Fray would show himself, flipping up the curtain into the room where Tacker had been sleeping. They had finished the foundational wall of the high school. Now they were staying the weekend because Saturday happened to be a festival day for the Osun River. This wasn’t the largest of the yearly festivals but it coincided with the beginning of the rains. So it was a transitional moment, like fall festivals in North Carolina. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of seekers in white, men, women, and children, would come to pay respects and ask Osun for everything from babies to bountiful harvests to money.

  Friday morning, Tacker’s mates went into town to pick up fixings for the evening meal. Tacker chose to stay by the river. The day before, Joshua had made a joke about Tacker’s whiteness. “Your friend’s face does not show in the mirror. I think he is a ghost,” he had said. “Ah,” Samuel had replied, “when you approach the mirror it cracks because it cannot hold your stomach.” The interaction was typical Yoruba ribbing. But Tacker felt chilled, as if he were clinging to the glassy edge of a world he could see into but never fully enter. He felt almost homesick.

  So he was alone when he saw a white woman with short blond hair on the other side of the river, passing among the newly greened trees. She wore a white dress with a broad belt and moved as if she were in her natural place. Then she was gone, like smoke, and Tacker thought he had imagined her. He waited for her to show up again. But she didn’t return. Still, his mood had improved. He forgot how foreign he had felt just an hour earlier.

  He walked back to the chalet and there she was, the girl with the cropped blond hair, as short as a boy’s, only now she was also wearing a broad-brimmed woven hat. The dress was cut up at the sides to give her freedom to walk, and her legs were brown and strong. Her arms were completely bare except for multiple silver bangles. She rested one hand on each hip, her fingers long but her hands as worn as a farmer’s. She wore native sandals, her feet daintier than her hands.

  The woman’s beauty was new to him: her figure slender yet round, a beautiful boy face with piercing brown eyes, high cheekbones, full, broad lips, and a regal nose that lifted just at the end, sending her beauty slightly in the direction of playfulness. But the perfection of these parts was not her beauty. Her beauty was her self-possession, as with the Yoruba.

  “Ek aaro,” she said. It meant good morning.

  Tacker had been in the country eighteen months and not once heard a white person begin with a Yoruba greeting. His own Yoruba was far less musical than hers and he was embarrassed to try it, especially with this girl-woman who looked like Peter Pan.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “So I’ll talk with you in English, then,” she said. “I’m Anna Becker. Where are your friends?”

  Her voice was now distinctly European, as if a radio channel had been changed.

  “Tacker Hart,” he said. “They went into town to shop for dinner.”

  “And you could not pull yourself away from Osun, Mr. Hart?” she said. She smiled as she said “Osun,” as if she were referring to a lover.

  “It reminds me a little of home,” he said. “Well, not really. It’s not anything like the Yadkin River in North Carolina except that it’s brown. I learned to drink coffee sitting in a duck blind with my father.”

  “A duck blind? In America?” she said.

  “A shelter for hunters waiting for ducks. To shoot.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said.

  “Samuel and the other guys will be back soon.” He had said too much of the wrong thing already.

  “I suspect not soon,” Anna said. “They’ll take their time.”

  Tacker felt his arms dangle awkwardly. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Not really. Only give them my greetings.”

  She turned to go and then called over her shoulder.

  “Would you like to come to my house for tea?”

  * * *

  • • •

  ANNA BECKER’S HOUSE was a house proper, not a hut or a chalet, up on a hill with a view of the river, built of mud but nicely plastered, roofed with rich thatch overhanging the veranda to create a broad, deep shade. She led him up the steps and into the front room. A Nigerian woman sat next to a window braiding a girl’s hair. Two other children sat on a low settee, watching and waiting their turn. They were unperturbed by Tacker’s presence.

  “Wetin?” one said.

  “A new friend,” Anna said.

  She made tea and served it in small pottery cups.

  “What brings you here?” she said.

  “I’m with an American organization, stationed in Ibadan, at the university. We’re building a secondary school. You probably already know about it since you know my friends. What about you?”

  “I didn’t know about the American link.” She brushed her hair back. “I came with my husband from Germany,” she said, laughing. “The husband didn’t last. Oh, he’s still here, teaching at UCI. Once I found the river and the sacred forest of Osun, I had to live in Osogbo.”

  A thousand questions came to Tacker: Who supports you? You live here alone? What do you do all day?

  “I’ve become a devotee,” she said.

  “Of what?” he said.

  “Everything. The river, the forest, Yoruba life.”

  The children were switching places. One’s hair finished, a
nother’s begun. The one whose hair was complete came over to Anna to have it inspected. Anna spoke to her in Yoruba, cradling the child’s head in her lap, stroking her neck. Then she must have given her some instruction because the child lifted herself and marched off importantly.

  “Whose children?” Tacker said.

  “Mine. I adopted them,” Anna said. “If you’re finished with your tea, I’ll show you my work.”

  Her work was outside, along the riverbank and in the forest, upstream from the chalet where he was staying with his friends. Enormous sculptures in mud and plaster, arched and winding, portions of wall marked by animal shapes, freestanding stone forms—part human, part abstraction—clustered on green hillocks. Squat sculptures of women with children. Wood reliefs filled with drummers. Tacker didn’t know much about art, but it looked modernist to him. Like Picasso except the dimensions had been opened up and made life-size, so he was in the art, not viewing it in a museum. They passed through an archway, the crown resembling two abstracted heads joined in a posture of love. Anna ran her hand along the smooth pier, the base resembling tree roots so that the arch appeared to rise out of the ground. Some of the sculptures seemed like gigantic replicas of the body’s interior. They passed into a mud-and-plaster tunnel, the walls swirled like a metal coupler, and came out at an eddy in the river. Tacker wondered if he had just walked through the birth canal.

  “Amazing,” he said.

  “You like it?” Anna said.

  “Like may not be the word. It’s sort of unreal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh. American slang for exceptional.”

  “Excellent,” Anna said, clapping her hands. “Most Americans don’t like it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, they’re mostly missionaries. They don’t like our revival of Yoruba traditional religion.”

  “So that’s what your sculpture is about?”

  “The mystical dimension exists everywhere, don’t you think? But I must go see to the evening meal.”

  “Oh. Sure. I didn’t mean to hold you up.”

  “Not at all. Perhaps I will see you on Saturday.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE TIME Tacker got back to the house, the VW van was parked under the mango trees. At the outdoor kitchen, he found his friends unpacking their goods. They hadn’t purchased meat and vegetables as Tacker had imagined they would. Instead they had brought with them a woman and her enormous earthenware pot, in which apparently resided a stew she had begun to cook early that morning so that by now the flavors were, in Samuel’s words, “well developed.” She sat on a stone near an open fire, occasionally checking the contents and grinding pepper on another stone.

  “What’s in there?” Tacker said.

  “Na monkey,” Joshua said. “Proper proper.”

  “Comot!” Tacker said. He’d finally learned to spar with Joshua in pidgin English.

  “Ignore him. Only chicken,” Samuel said.

  “That sounds better. Got a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  They walked to the front of the house, to the van under the mangos. Tacker leaned against the driver’s door. “I just met Anna Becker.”

  “Ah. I was going to surprise you,” Samuel said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “By introducing you to her. She is a very unusual oyinbo, no?” Samuel said.

  “I’ll say.”

  “I think you may like to settle down next to Osun yourself. Ha! I can see I am right.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ON SATURDAY A steady stream of people, all dressed in white, paraded past the chalet on their way to the river, most on foot, a few on bicycles, a man riding a bike with a woman perched on the crossbar. Tacker didn’t catch sight of Anna all day. On Sunday he went looking for her. She was working on a painting in an open building not far from her house, wearing a sleeveless, diagonally striped dress, with the same belt as before. It appeared that the entire canvas would be shades of blue.

  “So. Mr. Tacker Hart. It’s an unusual name. You are back.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Back to UCI to complete your design.”

  “I’ll be in Nigeria four more months.”

  “You must return to visit Osun.” Her dark eyes sparkled as she spoke.

  “We probably will.”

  “Let me give you something to take with you,” she said.

  She turned aside, opened a large cabinet, picked things up, and discarded them. At last, clutching brush and bottle, she closed the cabinet, selected a bowl, and dipped it into a water barrel.

  “Come,” she said.

  Tacker followed her out into the brown yard.

  “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a large log clearly employed as outdoor seating.

  Tacker half expected her to say close your eyes and then she was going to put a frog or maybe a snake in his palm. Instead she readied herself to paint.

  “You don’t have a canvas,” he said.

  “I will paint your palms. It’s my gift to you.”

  “No. You’re kidding.”

  She gazed at him with a firm clarity.

  “How about my arm?” he said.

  “Whatever you like,” she said.

  One of the children sauntered down. “Mah,” she said. “My stomach is light.”

  Was she speaking English for his benefit?

  Anna kissed the child’s forehead. “You may have biscuit. Share with your sister. You understand?”

  “Yes, mah.” The girl was already skipping off.

  Anna squatted beside him. “Hold the inkpot,” she said.

  “Wait,” Tacker said. “Will this stuff come off?”

  “It’s henna. In a few days.”

  She had already begun the first stroke down the interior of his arm, the brush on his flesh an exquisite torture. A slight tickle, the sensation rode up his arm, into his chest, up to his brain, cupping his skull like a vise of feathers, then descended his backbone, filled his abdomen, slipped down around his backside, and rose into his groin.

  When she finished, she did not say good-bye in Yoruba or English. She rose and walked away and was lost in the forest. Tacker sat for an hour, looking at his arm and out at the trees, listening to the river. Finally he went back to the chalet.

  “Ah, brother!” Samuel said. “I thought you were lost.”

  “I went to visit Anna,” Tacker said. He showed Samuel his arm and Samuel sucked on his teeth.

  “Ahh,” he said.

  “I thought you liked her. What’s wrong?”

  “Only.” He paused. “Someone may misunderstand.”

  “I hope your thing does not fall off,” Joshua declared from across the room. “Let me see it.” The other men in the room laughed uproariously. When the glee had subsided, Joshua made his pronouncement. “Ah. It’s very bad. A witch. You can see here.”

  He showed Tacker the form.

  “It looks more like a praying mantis,” Tacker said.

  His mates prepared dinner. Tacker looked out the window. He wished he had had his photograph made with Anna. As she bent over him in her work, he could see the cleavage of her breasts but it was her rough hands that cast a spell on him.

  Winston-Salem,

  North Carolina

  1960

  Chapter Twenty-one

  MID-MARCH BROUGHT SLEET. “Must be nice staying home all day,” Tacker mumbled as he fed the cat. There was no way he could get in a run that morning. “At least Pops is okay, right?” He scratched da Vinci’s neck and put on the coffeepot. His father’s tests had come back negative, but things with Kate had chilled to a standstill, making the cold days even colder. Tacker was handing over two boxes of groceries to Gaines every w
eek, some of the donation, such as canned spaghetti and tuna fish, coming out of his paycheck, but perishables, like bread and fruit, would have been thrown away, so they cost nothing. The groceries were for full-time activists Tacker had never met and likely would not. He didn’t feel especially noble about it. Just the opposite. He wished he could be more openly involved. Negro students were still showing up where they weren’t welcome regardless of the weather and in spite of Winston’s mayor, who had appointed a committee of Negroes and whites to study the issue, hoping to avoid the negative press that Greensboro was drawing. Tacker had been to another sit-in, this time at Kress. Nothing much happened. But he was aware of how slowly time moved when he was being served nothing but dirty looks, and he left with a muddy pool of emotion in his gut. Without Kate to lift his heart, he couldn’t tell that he had made much real progress since coming home. He was still in limbo.

  In the icy morning, Tacker set out on foot rather than taking the Indian, wearing the letter jacket, a thick knit cap, gloves, and his old boots. He had loafers at the store to change into. He did enjoy walking in the silence, the only sound the crunch of his boots. This was as close to prayer as Tacker got.

  No sign of traffic until he got to the red light on First, and even then all he saw were a couple of cars on Hawthorne Street. Maybe a lane had been cleared. No one would be in for hours. Coming into the parking lot, he glanced up at the entrance. The glass door was iced up and something—a box?—was pressed against it. A delivery? Tacker looked at the sky. A solid blue-gray. He fumbled with the key and it fell into the sleet. As he retrieved it, nearer the entrance, his vision corrected itself. The glass door was shattered. What he had mistaken for a box was a message. Crudely lettered. Black ink. On a neatly cut rectangle of plywood.