The Devil that Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

  Our father worked ever longer hours. He ran two clinics in the centre of town – one for prescriptions, the other for minor surgical procedures: cataracts, circumcisions and the like. He tried hard to persuade people to bring their boys to him, instead of cutting the foreskin the traditional way, by a cleric or medicine man who tugged on it three times before slicing the skin off with an unsheathed blade. Certain days were set aside for circumcisions and sometimes fathers arrived from the countryside with six or seven boys of different ages. The obstetrics clinic was at the house, so my father could be on hand for those women whose babies came at night.

  There was no nurse, so our mother helped. She held the women's hands while they were in labour, especially the Fula women, who had to endure childbirth in silence. They were also supposed to give birth alone and by the time their relatives forced themselves to break their own traditions and bring them to the clinic the women often didn't make it. Other times my mother monitored heart and blood pressure when an anaesthetic had to be administered; often my father just wanted my mother to stay in the room for propriety's sake, so few of the women had ever been to a gynaecologist before.

  When she wasn't helping out in the clinic, or in her part-time job at the Volkswagen franchise in town, my mother sang: ‘"Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance,” said he.’ Her mighty voice was the loudest, purest sound I had ever heard; it ran through my body with a shiver, like a cold drink on a hot day. She sang sitting cross-legged with her guitar balanced on her knee, in a cotton dress she'd made herself, hair hanging loose.

  We sang too, after a fashion, like three baby crows gathered around a songbird: ‘I danced for the scribe and the far-thest-seas, but they would not dance and they would not follow me.’

  She could practically sit on her hair; it was thick, naturally bleached by the Tropics and people in Sierra Leone marvelled at it. One of my aunts thought she must iron it straight and asked to borrow her hot tongs. My father used to have fun taking several strands and tying them into a knot to demonstrate how they unfurled in an instant, sliding like wet ice across glass. The trick was quite a crowd-pleaser among our African relatives, who came forward one at a time and asked to touch it.

  Years later, when she no longer lived with us, her hairstyles became the test of memory between us children. ‘Can you remember Real Mum when her hair was long?’ we asked each other. Around the time she and my father split she cut her hair short. If you remembered her when she pulled it into a doughnut shape on the top of her head, or let it dry in crinkly waves down her back, then you remembered a time when our parents were together.

  For me the image of her face and her hairstyles faded and brightened through the years. But her voice: I never, ever forgot the sound of her voice.

  4

  They met at a Christmas dance in 1959. My father was a third-year medical student at Aberdeen University and my mother was in her final sixth-form year at the Aberdeen Academy and a volunteer at the British Council. She wore her hair in a French plait, a tight-waisted skirt that made the best of her voluptuous figure and winkle pickers on her feet.

  My father was just five foot eight; one of those people everyone imagines to be a great deal taller. In his student photograph he wears a well-cut suit, narrow in the leg and lapel, in the style of the sixties. His dark skin glows against the starched white cuffs and collar. The expression in his eyes is both amused and utterly self-possessed. Scattered like freckles across his cheeks and nose are dozens of small round scars, remnants of a childhood battle with smallpox. Yet the scars, like his height, were obscured by his own self-confidence. He had an eye for attractive women and he crossed the room to her: ‘I'm Mohamed.’ He extended his hand. ‘And you are . . . ?’

  Maureen Margaret Christison was a local girl, raised all of her nineteen years in Aberdeen. Her father was a clerk in a travel agency and a strict Presbyterian; her mother, dark-eyed and anxious, had a job in a milliner's until she began to have babies and slowly developed agoraphobia. Maureen was smart, attractive of a strong, open type that in Scotland they call bonny. The confines of home life were as suffocating to the daughter as they were comforting to her mother. Maureen found herself drawn on many nights to the British Council, to the events held for overseas students which she volunteered to help organise.

  For the African students Britain was a new and demanding experience. Many kept to themselves, finding safety in numbers. They were all on government scholarships – men and women chosen to lead their countries one day soon across the post-independence horizon towards a new Africa where they would design bridges, run schools, plan towns, drain swamps, build hospitals or, as likely, become desk-bound bureaucrats.

  When he was fourteen my father had won a scholarship to Bo School. The Eton of the protectorate of Sierra Leone was established by the British in order to educate the sons of chiefs to take their place in Britain's empire. He spent seven years there, wearing a white uniform, taught by English masters. In his last year he became head boy and while he was waiting for the results of his scholarship application to read medicine in the UK he taught the junior years. Alongside his formal education the years at Bo gave him an understanding of the men who ruled his country and their values and their history, or at least the version taught in England's public schools.

  Before they boarded a cargo ship bound for Liverpool at Freetown's docks, the only understanding of Britain most new pioneers possessed was through their first British Council induction seminar. The arrivals from the provinces were herded into a darkened hall, where they watched reels of black and white short films entitled An Introduction to British Life and Culture.

  In one short film, Lost in the Countryside, two young Africans in old-fashioned tweed suits amble through a pastoral scene. Their skin is so dark they almost look like they're white actors in blackface, and their hair is brushed straight upwards. Suddenly they realise they can't find their way back and a crescendo of mishaps parallels their mounting panic. When they emerge from a haystack pulling strands from their hair an authoritative voice cuts in: ‘If you become lost in the countryside do not panic. Find a road. Locate a bus stop. Join the queue [and there, in the middle of nowhere was a line of people]. A bus will arrive, board it and return to the town.’ The film ends with the Africans looking mightily relieved sitting on the bus, surrounded by smiling locals.

  They were given a map of the London Underground, a train timetable, and a talk on expected etiquette, including how to behave in a British home. Visits should be undertaken on invitation only. Never walk into a British household and sit in the chair belonging to the man of the house. In Britain visitors are expected to maintain a flow of conversation. It is polite to decline a second helping of food. And on it went.

  So very different from the African household in which I was raised. On the weekends and even the weekdays my aunts and uncles appeared at all hours and sat on the veranda for lengthy periods, just keeping company. They talked for just as long as someone had something to say and then lapsed into companionable silence. Every now and again one of my aunts would break the silence to begin the routine of greetings all over again. When they'd finished, people would snort with serene satisfaction; my aunts would adjust their head-dresses and lappas; and settle even more deeply into themselves. Conversation is a whim, not an art. Of me no one expected anything except a respectful silence and the appearance of listening. If I'd begun to try to amuse them with stories and precocious attempts at conversation, the way children in England did, they would have exchanged sly glances. ‘How dis pickin dae talk so!’

  In time, very often when most people had already been there for half the morning, the cook would begin to prepare food. I'd be given a plate with a man-sized helping and if it was a special occasion we were all expected to go back time and time again to taste each dish: mounds of jollof rice, cooked in tomatoes so that the rice turned pink, sour sour or stewed sorrel, okra stew, chicken fried with fresh Scotch bonnet peppers, deep-
fried plantains. At the end of the day half the visitors left carrying a tin dish wrapped in cloths to take home for the rest of the family.

  From Freetown to Liverpool, then by train to Aberdeen, where the green and ochre of Africa was replaced by shades of blue and grey. In winter the sky over northern Scotland turned to black and the granite of the buildings glittered like silver. And the cold, it was alive! It stung legs, bit cheeks, pinched fingers and toes. It was like going for a swim and being caught in a flurry of jellyfish. The newest arrivals were always obvious: they wore old-styled cotton suits made by their provincial tailors, neither customer nor tailor imagining for a moment that they would not be thick enough to stand the coolest weather. By the end of the first week their smart new suits were packed away in tin trunks for good.

  No traveller arrived in Britain from Africa without being suitably awed by his first sight of a terraced row. The houses were built in a single row that ran the entire length of the street like a set of dentures. A rich man in Africa builds his house to stand out from every house around it. In Britain people owned their homes, but all the houses looked the same. A story was told of an undergraduate on his first day in Aberdeen who was taken to his friend's student digs in a terraced row. He thought his friend must have made good and exclaimed on the length of the house. When the others laughed and pointed out that the building was in fact many houses, he was crestfallen. Now the house began to looked cramped. But once you were inside you saw there were more rooms than you could ever guess at from the narrow frontage.

  My father discovered the sin of sweet things for the first time in his life, munching his way through packets of Opal Fruits. Muslim or not, his newly awakened sweet tooth extended to an enthusiasm for sweet alcoholic drinks: sherry or brandy mixed with ginger ale. In Aberdeen he had his first toothache, followed by his first visit to the dentist and his first filling.

  The short, round African vowels that fell off the front of his tongue moved further back in his throat and lengthened into local Aberdonian rhythms; he began to draw out his ‘e's, to emphasise his ‘r’s and then to roll them; and finally he adopted the local idiom, talked about patients turning ill and taking scarlet fever, asked them where they stayed. For the rest of his life he spoke with a curious hybrid accent that puzzled some and brought a smile to the lips of others.

  In his first year as a student my father spent much of his time on his own, walking up to his chemistry and biology lectures in the Old University buildings in the north of the city. The next year there was a batch of new arrivals from Sierra Leone: Bernard Frazer, a confident Creole, was wealthy enough to fly to Britain when he started at university (generations of his family had been educated in the UK); Dan Sama, a Mende also from Sierra Leone, was dark and serious and had a long-term love affair with a Scottish student. There was Charlie Renner, who sped around Aberdeen in a green Mini; and the Guineans Henry Blankson and David Anamudu. David's square face and glasses earned him the nickname ‘Mr TV’ and he skated fearlessly over the wet, black cobblestones on a Vespa scooter. They were all studying medicine.

  That first winter the wind gusted in from the North Sea, swirled around the harbour like a furious sea god and rushed straight up Union Street in the centre of town. Just when my father thought the weather couldn't possibly get any worse, it snowed until the black city turned white, like a negative of a photograph. The next day the sun shone strongly for the first time in weeks and the sky was like a stretched sheet of sapphire silk, the colour of the Atlantic.

  The unpredictable northern European weather systems left the West African students battered and freezing; they felt like pioneers battling up the north face of the city; Michelin men dressed in so many layers of sweaters. At home they spent the best part of their grant money on shillings for the gas and at night they slept with their overcoats over the counterpane.

  In Sierra Leone the rains begin on 1 May every year. From then on it rains at eleven o'clock every night, gradually moving forward in the day until the rain falls almost continuously. As the season advances, so the rain recedes at exactly the same pace. Next the sun shines for seven months until the clouds come back again. On 2 May, if for some reason it did not rain the night before, people in the marketplace might remark, ‘The rains are late this year, not so?’ This, in Sierra Leone, is what passes for a conversation about the weather.

  Few of the African students could afford to go home for the holidays. They spent Christmas in each other's company, but New Year was a very different matter. My father and his friends suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of dozens of invitations from their neighbours; they accepted them all and went from house to house downing malt whiskies, enjoying their sudden popularity. The young doctors were already accustomed to locals who crept up to them in the street, reaching out furtively to touch their black skin – for luck, they explained apologetically if they were caught out. Any of the Africans who thought they'd have a quiet night at home spent the early hours of New Year's morning answering the doorbell to revellers hoping to win a little luck in the coming year by catching sight of a black face on Hogmanay.

  Mohamed and Maureen were together for two years before her father passed them on the other side of Union Street one afternoon. When she arrived home she found him maroon with rage. He told his daughter that he would not tolerate her seeing or being seen with a black man.

  Later, in the little attic flat my father shared with Dan Sama, he listened to an account of the scene from my tearful mother and knew exactly what to do. ‘I'll call on your father at home,’ he told her, confident he could put things right.

  Gairn Terrace is a row of plain semi-detached houses built on the edge of Aberdeen close to the river Dee and the road to Perth. There is nothing to distinguish one house from the other, except the colour of the woodwork that brightens pebbledash facades the colour and texture of porridge. The Christisons’ window frames were painted pale yellow and two net-curtained windows faced the street, one above and one below. Curiously, in a world in which appearances mattered, the houses were built with no proper front door, just an entrance reached by a dark side passage.

  When my mother was growing up there was an army training ground opposite and, farther on, a crater where a fighter plane had been downed during the war, in which wild blueberries grew. In 1935 Robert Christison bought one of the new houses for four hundred and twenty pounds and from then on he kept three boxes on the dresser. For the next eighteen years he put two and sixpence into each one every Friday to pay for the mortgage, insurance and bills. In all respects life in number 38 was equally regimented.

  My grandfather's chair was closest to the fire and faced the bay window onto the street. To the left was the wireless, which replaced the old crystal set after the war. It was a magnificent piece, in two-tone polished mahogany, and stood about three and a half feet tall, occupying the entire corner of the room. From his place my grandfather could reach it comfortably. Its prime location was really the only outstanding feature of my grandfather's chair, which was just one part of a three-piece suite, upholstered in rust and sufficiently yet not excessively comfortable. A lace-edged antimacassar covered the headrest. My father, wearing a suit and tie, took the chair opposite.

  My mother and grandmother stayed in the kitchen – Maureen preparing the tea things and Lydia smoking Woodbines – while my father asked Mr Christison's permission to continue seeing his daughter. Mr Christison listened, though not with his lean, sparse body nor with his brisk blue eyes; he sat with his arms crossed and never once looked my father in the eye, but he didn't interrupt either. My father spoke fluidly and directly, describing his many aspirations, including his plans to specialise in obstetrics.

  Mr Christison was not impressed by the black man's credentials. Nor did he like his forthright manner. ‘Arrogant’ is how he would dismiss him later. He stated his position, an entirely simple one: ‘I'm not prejudiced. I'm sure you've done well enough. But I won't have Maureen going about town with any
man of a different colour. It's my view you stick to your own. There are black women for black men, Chinese women for Chinamen and, for all I care, green women for green men.’

  ‘Forgive me, sir, but if Maureen dated a teddy boy, would that be all right . . . as long as he was white?’

  ‘I wouldn't tolerate that either, as a matter of fact. But that's as much as I have to say to you on the matter.’

  Mr Christison stood up, shaking the newspaper from his lap. He was much taller than my father; he once tried out for the Rhodesian police. He said: ‘Thank you for stopping by.’ Their eyes still did not meet and he excused himself from the room.

  While the visitor was still in the house Mr Christison remained outside, standing on the steep slope of his garden digging at his rhubarb. His wife fed the visitor angel cakes and tea and chattered nervously all the while. If her husband was unimpressed, Lydia Christison was secretly delighted by Maureen's African doctor, who in that hour charmed her entirely. For years afterwards she defied her husband, paying visits to her daughter carrying petits fours and children's clothes, and allowing my mother and her little ones back for hot baths in the years we lived without a bathroom.

  Afterwards my father told my mother what had transpired in his conversation with my grandfather. And I can imagine exactly how my grandfather behaved during the exchange, because almost forty years later, shortly before he died, he was the same way with me when I asked him about the day he met my father for the first and only time. There we sat in the very same room, the decor barely changed in all that time. A clown doll made by my grandmother after she had her stroke sat on an occasional table. A set of tiny ornamental sabres I used to play with as a child had gone. Those were the only differences I could see. He sat in his chair and I, cross-legged on the floor, my back leaning on the chair where my father had sat. Between us on the leather pouf was a great pile of photographs and a tape recorder.