This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  ‘I will stay,’ he said again.

  Jacob Abraham’s head bobbed up and down with pleasure.

  ‘Fine, fine, fine,’ he said smoothly. ‘We will work it out together. We will make people hear about Futura Academy. You will make suggestions, eh? You are in touch with these things. A new curriculum – yes, yes, that’s it. You are a sincere man, Amegbe. Not too clever, in some ways, perhaps, but a sincere man – that is the thing. You will be Futura’s “kra,” eh? How is that?’

  He laughed uproariously at his joke.

  Nathaniel tried to laugh, too, but the laughter stuck in his throat. He was to be its ‘kra’, then, its soul, seeking perfection? Its guide in a new land, its ferryman across Jordan. All that, when he did not know the way himself?

  ‘What does that leave you to be?’ he asked.

  Jacob Abraham chortled appreciatively.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘just what you are thinking.’

  By the same sacrilegious comparison, Jacob Abraham would be the ‘sunsum’ of the school. Its personality, filled with self greedy for life, but with an enormous vitality, an enormous will.

  Perhaps the analogy was not so absurd after all. Nathaniel felt hope flowing back into him. They might just bring it off, the two of them. They might just manage it. They might, after all, make something of this old grey wreck of a place, this chipped, battered, decayed and twisted shell that dreamed it was a pearl. They would blunder, and deceive themselves. But they might just do it.

  ‘We must have faith!’ Nathaniel cried, in impulsive joy. ‘We will do something, do something. It will be all right – you will see!’

  On his way home, Nathaniel stopped in at his church. It was cool and quiet inside, away from the sun and heat. No one else was there. Nathaniel walked the length of the church to the niche where the ebony Madonna stood.

  She was there, serene with love, the Mother of all men, her painted blue cloak around her black-gleaming shoulders. She looked at him from her calm eyes, and they became for him no longer wood.

  He stood beside her, awkwardly, wanting to kneel but afraid someone might see him there in broad daylight and wonder what trouble he had that made him kneel here, now by himself.

  – Mother, Mother – forgive me. I am staying here. Forgive me, but I cannot go back. Never in my life. Let them understand.

  – I have a new chance and I have a new name and I live in a new land with a new name. And I cannot go back. Let them understand. If I do something or if I do nothing, I must stay. A man must belong somewhere. If it is right or if it is not right, I must stay. The new roots may not grow straight, but they have grown too strong to be cut away. It is the dead who must die. Let them understand.

  – In my Father’s house are many mansions. A certain Drummer dwells in the House of Nyankopon, in that City of Many Mansions. I know it now. It is there that he dwells, honoured, now and always. It may be that I shall never see him again. But let him dwell there in peace. Let him understand. No – he will never understand. Let me accept it and leave him in peace.

  – I cannot have both gods and I cannot have neither. A man must belong somewhere. Mother of men, hear me –

  – My God is the God of my own soul, and my own speech is in my mouth, and my home is here, here, here, my home is here at last.

  – Let me wash my soul.

  – And let the fear go far from me.

  After he left the church, the mood of exaltation wore off and reality returned.

  He had to send the money to Kwaale. He had to. There was no excuse now. And Adua was insisting on a celebration of the birth of the child. She had asked more than twenty people already and she promised to provide chop. That left him with the drink to buy, palm-wine and gin. How was he going to do it?

  Nathaniel began thinking once more about Kumi and Awuletey.

  Could honesty be bought back with a piece of gold and a piece of cloth? It was the way a man felt that mattered. If you resolved to do right, what did it matter what went before?

  How could he return them, anyway? Kumi and Awuletey would not be impressed. They would only think he had gone crazy. They did not expect the gifts back. They had long ago shrugged it off – the luck of the draw. What would he say to them? He would be too embarrassed to say anything to them. They would think he had lost his mind.

  He knew if the boys had got the jobs, he would never have considered returning the gifts. Why should he now? A gift was, after all, a gift. Besides, one of the shirts had been worn.

  Nathaniel decided to put the whole thing from his mind. He turned his thoughts to the plans he had for next term. He whistled ‘Akpanga’ softly to himself.

  And soon the uneasiness passed.

  At mid-day, the Club bar was empty except for Kwaku, the old steward, who stood behind the counter, his shrunken shoulders hunched inside the white-drill jacket as he polished doggedly a battered champagne bucket. Johnnie wondered how many people drank champagne these days.

  ‘Use this one much, Kwaku?’

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘No, sah. On’y small-small, dis time. Dis one, he too cost. Long time pas’, Eur’pean use dis one – oh, plenty-plenty.’

  He chuckled softly, perhaps recalling those munificent years, and the ‘dash’ given by the drinkers of champagne to a young stewardboy, quick on his feet, strong, princely in white robe and turban and vivid cummerbund.

  ‘No big man now, sah,’ Kwaku said. ‘All dey gone.’

  He fetched Johnnie’s beer. Then he picked up the yellow flannel and began polishing once more, polishing memories.

  Johnnie paid for his drink and went out to the verandah. The branches of the giant niim tree waved slowly, hypnotically. This place was remote, cool, deceptive. The city, the shouting streets, the gabbling markets, the beggars and traders and clerks, the children like insects crawling and swarming, the clinging red dust, the heat of the sun – all seemed very far removed, but they were only a stone’s throw away.

  Johnnie drank, and the cold brown taste washed the hot morning from his mouth. He thought of the phone call he had received earlier. Cameron Sheppard had just arrived at the airport. He would be busy until noon, but he wanted Johnnie to meet him then.

  Cameron would have to be told about the boys. And there was something else to be done as well. Johnnie wondered if anyone had ever before told Cameron Sheppard to go to hell.

  Here he was now.

  ‘Nice to see you again, Johnnie.’

  Cameron wore a light suit of some wrinkleproof material, the type of suit sold by tropical outfitters in Bond Street. He had probably picked that shade of grey because it matched the sincere grey of his glasses’ frame. Johnnie became conscious of his own clothes – limp sweat-pocked shirt with the sleeves rolled up; khaki trousers clumsily sewn by a local tailor and badly pressed by Whiskey with a charcoal iron.

  ‘Two more, Kwaku,’ he called, half angrily, and the old man appeared on the stoep, bearing in arthritic hands the tray of bottles and glasses.

  ‘I expect you’re wondering why I’ve come out again so soon,’ Cameron said briskly. ‘I’ll go directly to the point, Johnnie. First of all, the pilot scheme we agreed upon. I realized afterwards, of course, that boys from secondary schools simply wouldn’t do. If we had more time to train them, yes. But as it is, we’ve got to go further up. I mean the university here – that’s where the real administrative potential exists. We’ve been trying to do things on the cheap. We can’t think in those terms any more.’

  Openmouthed, Johnnie gazed at the other man.

  ‘From now on,’ Cameron was saying, ‘our thinking must be on a larger scale. That brings up the second and most important point. I’ve put the case before the Board –’

  He paused. He poured out his beer and took a quick sip.

  ‘It’s all arranged,’ Cameron said, and his voice was almost brusque in his mannerly attempt to be casual in triumph. ‘James is going to be retired right away. That’s one reason for my trip –
I have to tell him. Bedford, of course, will be going – perhaps you’ve heard. I shall come out here and manage the Textile Branch myself, at least until after Independence. I managed Textiles in Lagos, you know, for quite some time before I got the partnership. It’ll be a temporary measure – I shan’t stay indefinitely. I’ll tell you quite frankly, Johnnie, once things have been organized here, I’ve been promised a senior partnership when Mr. Bright retires next year. You can see, then, that I’ll need an assistant, a man who can learn quickly, who can help with the Africanization programme, and to whom I can ultimately hand over.’

  He broke off and smiled.

  ‘Will you do it, Johnnie?’ Cameron asked.

  Johnnie gaped at him. Assistant manager, with the prospect of becoming manager within a year. It would be meteoric, compared with the Firm’s past policies. But things happened quickly nowadays. The time of the twenty-year period of virtual apprenticeship was over.

  Johnnie felt vaguely that he ought to observe a decent interval of deliberation. But it would be pointless to pretend there was any real question at all.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Certainly I will.’

  ‘Good,’ Cameron said. ‘I knew you would. Another thing, Johnnie. I’m not particularly worried about your short experience in Africa, but when you take over from me, you’ll need a right-hand man, someone who knows the country inside out. I’ve found just the chap. An African. I knew him at the London School of Economics. I went back a few years ago, you know, and got my degree. He’s an odd sort of fellow, but rather brilliant in his way. Bit of luck, really, my knowing him. That was where I was this morning – seeing him. The way I visualize it, the three of us will work in close co-operation over this Africanization business. You, myself, and Victor.’

  Johnnie blinked.

  ‘Who? Who did you say?’

  ‘Victor Edusei.’

  Johnnie threw back his head and laughed. So this was Victor’s informant in London. No wonder the African had been so amused, so smug, that first time.

  ‘That’s strange,’ Cameron said. ‘Victor did the same thing. He said he wasn’t much interested in textiles, but nevertheless it was the only job in the country that would tempt him. But he wouldn’t say why. He told me you’d met. What did you think of him?’

  ‘I may as well admit it – I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Well, it was mutual, as no doubt you know. But I don’t give a damn whether you like each other or not. All I want to know is – can you work together?’

  Johnnie hesitated.

  ‘I think so,’ he said finally. ‘We’ll watch each other like hawks, but perhaps that won’t be such a bad idea. One thing about him – he doesn’t put on an act. At least you know where you stand with a person like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cameron said. ‘That’s precisely what he had to say about you.’

  Johnnie drove back to the office alone. He parked his car and walked along the street to Allkirk, Moore & Bright’s old building, the building that had stood since the year of the last Ashanti War.

  He walked past Mandiram’s, and suddenly he stopped.

  Cora was in there. She was dressed in yellow, and on her jaundiced face was an expression of hopeless longing. She stood at the brocade counter, and her hands quivered over a bolt of rich blue.

  Johnnie looked quickly away. Then he crossed the street, so she would not see him.

  That afternoon, Johnnie and Miranda left the baby in the care of Whiskey’s young wife while they drove out to Sakumono beach. They walked along the sand, past a grove of palms, a sacred grove. A few old fishing boats rested on the shore near the palms. They were grey and cracked, husks of fishing boats, like shells cast off by sea creatures. Beside them, the women of the village waited with their headpans for the evening boats to ride the wild breakers, bringing the day’s catch to shore.

  Miranda walked close to the fetish huts, little hives of woven straw, concealing their power and their fear from the casual eye.

  Johnnie watched her. She would never know what was inside the huts, what collection of bones or tangled hair or freak sea-spine comprised their godhead. They were tightly tied at the top of the hive, sealed off as their worshippers were sealed, defying curiosity.

  The green ragged leaves of the coconut palms rustled and whispered, ancient untranslatable voices.

  But there was another voice on the wind. In the nearby fishing village, a young man was singing a highlife, a new song.

  SIXTEEN

  Nathaniel lifted his son up and took him onto the stoep. In front of the house the city sprawled, lax-limbed, like a giant fisherman tired after work, like a giant cocoa-picker tired after work. The houses sprawled yellow-brown along the shore, and it was not yet night. The lamps were not lighted yet, and the night drums had only begun. The women at their stalls were still selling hot kenkey balls and peeled oranges. There was a smell of sweet food frying on charcoal burners. The mammy-lorries honked their horns, the city’s voice.

  And beyond the city, the plains. And beyond the plains, the forest. And beyond the forest, the desert.

  ‘Aya!’ he cried. ‘Shall we call him Joshua? That’s a good name, isn’t it?’

  ‘He has his names already,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘But Joshua – that’s a good name.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if you want it.’

  Nathaniel held the baby up again, high in his arms.

  ‘See – ’ he said, ‘yours, Joshua.’

  – Someone saw it. Someone crossed that River and won that battle. Someone took that city and made it his.

  ‘You’ll know what to do with it, boy, won’t you?’ he said softly, pleadingly. ‘You’ll know how to make it work. You’ll know how to make it all go well.’

  The baby began to cry. Aya shouted that it was feeding time and did he want the baby to catch a chill out there anyway?

  Nathaniel adjusted his glasses and walked indoors, the child held clumsily in his arms. He felt a little self-conscious, even in front of his wife, and wondered why he let himself be carried away.

  Aya took the baby and put him to her breast. Nathaniel got out the new curriculum and picked up his pen. But he could not concentrate on the work.

  He glanced at his son, and the name kept beating through his mind like all the drums of Ghana.

  – Joshua, Joshua, Joshua. I beg you. Cross Jordan, Joshua.

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  BY GEORGE WOODCOCK

  Margaret Laurence completed the first full draft of This Side Jordan, a highly topical novel about Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast, in 1957 – the year the colony gained independence as Ghana – and it was published in 1960. Thus we look at it now through two dense and different screens of events: Laurence’s own later achievement in the cycle of Canadian novels that began with the publication of The Stone Angel in 1964; and the changes that have taken place in Africa since 1957 and have forced us to reconsider what Laurence herself described as “the predominantly optimistic outlook of many Africans and many western liberals in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” an outlook she saw reflected in her books on Africa.

  This Side Jordan was the first work – and in many ways a tentative one – of a major literary career, and also a book that, if we see it as merely topical, deals with events long superseded. But, unlike many such apprentice books reflecting a lost past, it is a novel that continues to be read in its own right and not merely because of Laurence’s later and better-known books. And there are excellent reasons for its tenacious survival when so many novels inspired by the breakup of the British Empire are already forgotten. This Side Jordan remains important for two reasons: for its peculiar insights into the changes going on in the outlook of Africans during the 1950s and in their relation to the Europeans; and for its relationship to Laurence’s other writings.

  This Side Jordan was Laurence’s first published book, though some of the short stories about Africa that were collected in The Tomorro
w-Tamer (1963) had already appeared. With the latter collection, and The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963), arguably the best travel book ever written by a Canadian, it forms a closely knit group projecting the seven years of experience, in Somaliland and in Ghana – experience of strange places and of her own often unexpected reactions to them – that really started Laurence off as a writer. She had indeed been writing since her teens, but in Africa took place the happy conjunction of time to spare and an environment that from the beginning engaged her imagination. As she herself observed, “I was fortunate in going to Africa when I did – in my early twenties – because for some years I was so fascinated by the African scene that I was prevented from writing an autobiographical first novel.”

  Laurence used her African experiences and first impressions so intensively and with such empathetic imagination that, by the time in the early 1960s when she turned to her mythical Canadian community of Manawaka, she no longer had the sense of a need to write about the continent that had once so commandingly preoccupied her, and none of the major characters in her Canadian novels is shown as having been anywhere near Africa. Yet, though the experience of Africa itself seems to have become encapsulated in Laurence’s memory, the links between This Side Jordan and the later novels are in a formal way very clear.

  This Side Jordan not merely took the place of a thinly disguised fictional autobiography as its writer’s opening book. It also showed itself as something more than a mere apprentice’s exercise by the audacity with which it handled the vital conjunction in the mid-twentieth century of the African tribal consciousness and the European rational and individualized consciousness.

  In appearance at least, This Side Jordan is a realistic third-person novel, a “well-made” book rather neatly arranged around an African couple, Nathaniel and Aya Amegbe, and an English couple, Johnnie and Miranda Kestoe. The place is the Gold Coast capital of Accra, and the time is the eve of independence; with a touch of rather obvious symbolism, Aya and Miranda have children in time to anticipate the birth of the new state.