Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Hamisi thought for a long time, then said, “Every once in a while, something scares the cows, and they all run away.”

  So that was the funniest thing that ever happened out in the fields: a stampede.

  We climbed out of the valley into a deciduous woodland at about 4,500 feet. Some local Sandawe hunters took us up to high granite promontories where all kinds of art had been drawn on the rock over the centuries, over the millennium. There were wildebeests, humans, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes pictured in three different sites. One giraffe was brilliantly done—anatomically perfect, from the notch in its lower chest to the hock high up on the back legs. The sites were, Peter thought, anywhere from twenty thousand to forty thousand years old: a major archaeological find, undocumented and perfectly preserved. Peter took a GPS reading. He would come back later, study the art, and perhaps someone would write a scientific paper.

  As Peter sketched the ancient giraffe in his notebook, the Sandawe built a smoky fire under a tree. Bees were moving in and out of a large hole in one of the branches and there was honey for the taking. Gele climbed the tree with a smoking branch, thrust it into the hole, and there was the disconcerting sound of angry buzzing bees, the sound of something awful about to happen in a horror film. Gele worked in complete silence, pulling comb after comb out of the hive.

  “Are you getting stung?” Peter called.

  “Yes, very much,” Gele said.

  Later, we sat under the giraffe and ate honey, while Ali pulled a dozen white stingers out of Gele’s arm.

  “Can’t those bees kill you?” I asked Ali.

  “We try not to let that happen,” he said.

  Later that day, we trudged through a high marsh beside an actual running river, and the path led down to the dry and dusty town of Kwa Mtoro, where we went to the monthly market. Sandawe people sold millet and honey beer, called scud; cows were auctioned off; batteries and caps and T-shirts and single cigarettes were for sale.

  A few days later, we partied with the Barabaig, who had brewed up about sixty gallons of honey beer, made from honey we bought for the tribe from the Sandawe. Barabaig from all over arrived. The women greeted one another fiercely: they stood four steps apart, then came together in a thudding hug. I could hear the cowhide slapping fifty yards away.

  Outside the boma of a respected elder named Kalish, young men stood together in a group while a like number of women in cowhide dresses stood half a football field away. The men sang and banged their sticks on cowhide shields. Occasionally, one would step in front and leap straight up in the air, sometimes a dozen times or more. It was bad form to bend the knees. The leap came only from the feet and calves, so when two or three men jumped together, in unison, it looked as if gravity had no dominion over them.

  The women, for their part, came out jumping in the same manner. The dancing went on for several hours—the young men and women staring at one another, assessing athletic prowess, and deciding, I imagined, who might make for a hot sex partner.

  We weren’t called on to jump, but Kalish invited me into a hut inside the boma, where we drank honey beer out of cow horns and discussed the important matters of the day, as elders and white men who can’t jump are wont to do. Sunlight fell in shafts through the poles in the hut, and Peter said that the ceremony was significantly different from Masai dances. It was, he thought, pretty much an anthropologist’s wet dream. I drank another horn full of the foaming, yeasty beer: it tasted like a sweet, liquid form of dirt.

  “Drink,” Kalish said, and I did, spilling plenty a polite quantity down my shirt. The cow horn came around many times, and while I drank, I reflected on what was surely the high point of my trip: the great donkey conference.

  Early on, we’d encountered three heavily armed Masai crossing the sand river. They said they were going to a meeting with the Barabaig about some stolen donkeys. We could come and watch, they said, as long as we kept our distance and our mouths shut. Which is how we found ourselves sitting under the spreading acacia tree observing African politics in action. Since the Masai were the complaining party, they got to start. A man stood and said, “We know sometimes a Masai’s livestock is stolen by his own son, but we have investigated, and this has not happened. We have also searched the bush, and there are no bones. The donkeys must be in someone else’s hands.”

  A Barabaig man stood to reply: “Either you know who took the donkeys or you don’t. You can’t just make vague accusations.”

  Though the Barabaig and Masai each have their own language, everyone was speaking Swahili, which Peter quietly translated. Speakers were polite; tones were reasonable.

  “The livestock,” a Masai man said, “is in Barabaig hands. There is no point in pretending otherwise. Please, let’s work this out. There are no long roads without twists and turns, without sharp corners. Together, we can straighten out this road.” The discussion continued apace for four or five hours until the Barabaig asked for time to confer among themselves. They went off down a slope, out of sight. Gobre, our Barabaig pal, wandered after them to eavesdrop. He was dressed in Western clothes, and none of the locals knew he spoke Barabaig.

  The men conferred until well after dark. We wandered back to our own camp, where Gobre filled us in on the Barabaig conference. They were going to meet with the Masai again tomorrow. And yes, two of the young men had stolen the damn donkeys. They had already sold them, so they couldn’t just give them back. That left only three alternatives, the way the Barabaig saw it: they could rush in and spear as many Masai as possible; they could pack up and move out in the middle of the night, as they had done before in similar situations; or they could find some way to pay the Masai for their donkeys.

  “You think there could be violence?” I asked.

  Nobody thought so, but then Gobre began telling the infamous story about a small massacre his people had suffered at the hands of the Warangi under similar circumstances about fifteen years ago. The parlay was about—what else?—stolen livestock, with accusations on both sides. Gobre had been at the meeting. There were only about fifty Barabaig, he said, all sitting, waiting for the meeting to begin. In contrast, more than two hundred Warangi showed, and they didn’t sit, but rather positioned themselves in such a way that the Barabaig suddenly found themselves surrounded. Gobre had a gift for comic understatement. Everyone was laughing. It finally dawned on me that this was considered an amusing story. It was even funnier than a stampede.

  “We were sitting there like a pack of goats,” he said, as the other Africans in our party doubled over in laughter. Gobre said the sight of the advancing Warangi made him “uneasy,” and so he excused himself to go “dig for medicine,” an African euphemism for relieving oneself. More laughter. He was walking through a nearby cornfield when the Warangi began firing their arrows into the sitting Barabaig. “I could hear the screams,” Gobre said, “and I ran. Five people died, including my son-in-law.”

  And then the laughter stopped. Abruptly. East Africans, it seemed, can laugh at death and pay it solemn homage in the space of a single breath. Or maybe the body count just brought home the parallels with a certain other livestock parlay due to commence about a mile away at nine o’clock the next morning.

  So it was with a degree of trepidation that we attended the second day of the great donkey dispute. We took a position some distance away from the great acacia tree, so that we could slip away into the bush at the first sign of trouble. The Barabaig, however, did not rush in immediately and spear the Masai. They hadn’t left in the night, so perhaps they were going to pay. We moved closer to monitor the debate.

  About two-thirty that afternoon, an older Barabaig in a purple shouka finally admitted that his son had stolen the donkeys, and the aggrieved Masai said he would be willing to accept the donkeys back, along with two cows in payment for the emotional pain and aggravation he had suffered in searching for his animals. After many eloquent speeches, the thief’s father agreed to the payment of two cows only (worth about $300), since the don
keys themselves were, of course, long gone. The Masai thought that was fair if the father threw in 30,000 shillings (about $36), a figure that was negotiated down to about $12.

  So, after seventeen hours, the great donkey contretemps was settled without bloodshed. A Masai said, “We knew you Barabaig had the donkeys, but we chose not to steal back from you, because we respect you.” The Masai left, but the Barabaig stayed for another several hours. The father had just lost two cows out of a total of ten in his herd. It was suggested that his son pay him back. The son refused, but under intense community pressure changed his mind ten minutes later—a virtual split second in Barabaig political time. Still, he was only going to pay one cow. He hadn’t stolen the donkeys alone, and his rustling buddy should pay the other. The second thief stood and declared that he had no cows and no money to boot. An hour of argument ensued, and the second thief was given four days to come up with a cow.

  Later I discussed the matter with Gobre. “They gave him four days because …?”

  “He has to go somewhere where they don’t know him …”

  “And?”

  “Steal one.”

  My Brother, the Pot Dealer

  It was somewhere near three in the morning when Chilero’s screams began echoing off the canyon walls. “Oyyyyy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy!”

  Make that first “Oyyyyy” enormously loud; be sure it’s filled with pain and terror and fear.

  “Oyyyyy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy,” Chilero howled again. “Where are you?” he screamed in Spanish. From my position on the ground, I could see his shadow slipping against the starry night sky. Chilero was gliding over the ice, lurching, but never actually falling. He was a graceful man, drunk or sober.

  He’d been sleeping in the front seat of my truck, and now, at three in the morning, he was skating over the ice sheet in his slick-soled cowboy boots, looking for his friends. He couldn’t see us lying at the base of the canyon wall. We were all trying to sleep, bundled up together in a cocoon of blankets and sleeping bags. The ice below was slowly melting under the heat of our bodies.

  “Hace demasiado frío,” he screamed in Spanish. It’s too cold. “Focking cold.”

  And then it occurred to him that, in this dark night, he was surrounded by the souls and shadows of the Indian people who had populated this river canyon nearly one thousand years ago. He felt their spirits, and he sensed animosity, or so it seemed.

  “Indios,” he screamed in fear and defiance, “listen to me, indios, I am not afraid of you.” Chilero had Indian blood. He was proud of it. He just didn’t trust people who’d been dead for a thousand years.

  We were all awake now, groggy and shivering, all of us watching Chilero rebuild the fire and wishing he’d shut up. There were seven of us on this archaeological outing to the mountains of northern Mexico. The campsite was no doubt beautiful in the summer, but it was the dead of winter, at six thousand feet, and the waterfall that poured over the canyon wall was frozen solid.

  We were out camping on this crystalline winter evening so I could learn about my brother’s business dealings in Mexico. Presently, these included the semi-ingenious Mormon defense to planned marriage.

  Chilero, who was something of a vaquero, crouched by the fire and systematically cursed us all—the focking gringos, the stupid Mexicans, the black guy, everyone. “Me hablen,” he screamed. Talk to me.

  He thought we’d abandoned him to the night and the souls of the dead.

  “Where are you!”

  I decided to put Chilero out of his misery and fixed our position for him by finally speaking.

  “Podríamos matarlo,” I muttered to my brother. We could kill him.

  This act of kindness was rewarded with a similar gesture on Chilero’s part. We’d all been asleep for some hours after assiduously drinking most of the night, and Chilero brought me just what I needed: a gallon jug of water in one of those flimsy clear un-labeled plastic jars. I took a big, thirsty gulp. It never occurred to me that in Mexico, tequila is sold in such unmarked jars. This was an unpleasant surprise, and a real tough way to wake up.

  My brother glanced over at me and pulled the sleeping bag over his head. Sure, I was sick, but in a few hours, he was going to have to deal with the whole planned-marriage thing again.

  My brother, Rick, is a trader in pots, ceramics, which he buys in Mexico and sells to upscale galleries in the United States. (Yes, yes: he’s heard every conceivable variation of the pot-dealer joke.) Rick buys all his fine-arts pots from one dusty village of about three thousand people. The place is called Mata Ortiz, officially, Juan Mata Ortiz. If my Spanish serves me well, I believe the place would be called Juan “Killer” Ortiz in English.

  My brother and I drove down to Mata Ortiz from Tucson, discussing the derivation of the name with a man named Alain Isabelle, another Arizona trader along for the ride.

  Juan Ortiz earned the nickname “Mata,” or “killer,” during the Apache wars of one hundred years ago. He was second in command when Chief Victorio was defeated in 1880, apparently participated in a massacre of unarmed Apaches a year later, and was captured by Chief Juh the next year. The Apaches tortured and eventually killed the man known as “Killer.”

  So, the town’s name either celebrates Ortiz the killer, or Ortiz the killed.

  “We should stop at that little place for sotol,” Rick said.

  This is a tequilalike drink which is kept in a five-gallon glass jar so you can see the dead rattlesnake floating near the bottom.

  “They put the snake in the jar alive,” my brother said.

  “But it’s clearly dead,” Alain pointed out.

  “Of course it’s dead,” my brother said. “It’s a rattlesnake. It can’t breathe underwater.”

  “So you’re telling me Mexicans like to see snakes drown.”

  “I’m not telling you any such thing. They say the snake pumps out venom when it dies and that the venom is good for your health.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Alain.

  “What, you think Macario lies about sotol?”

  “You probably just didn’t understand him, is all.”

  And so on. I said: “No more bickering.”

  There was a silence of several seconds. “The Mexicans say we argue a lot,” my brother said.

  “Yeah,” Alain said. “They say we’re like an old married couple and that we ought to get married because we fight so much.”

  “Don’t tell him about that,” my brother said.

  “What about the woman they want you to marry?”

  “Don’t tell him about that either.”

  “They want Rick to marry one of the village women,” Alain said, to my brother’s intense annoyance.

  “Any particular one?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to get married,” Rick said. He’s successfully avoided this entanglement for over forty years.

  “We’ll see,” Alain said. “It’s hard to say no to Macario and Nena.”

  And then we were bouncing down a cruel joke of a dirt road, running past apple and peach orchards, moving up into the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. The road dove into the Palanganas River—three feet deep at the most—then rose into a high, windswept plain. There were cows and cowboys on the land. The snowcapped Sierras rose several thousand feet above, and there, below us, on the banks of the river, was a dusty town of one-story adobe-brick buildings.

  It was Mata Ortiz, a village that is to ceramicists what Paris in the 1920s was to writers.

  The story is legend: in 1976, Spencer MacCallum, an anthropologist, found three extraordinary handmade pots in a Deming, New Mexico, junk shop called Bob’s Swap Shop. The owner said that “some poor people” had traded the pots for clothes. MacCallum bought all three pots for $18 apiece. “To me,” MacCallum wrote in Kiva, the Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History, “they showed such integrity of form and design” that “I was determined to find the unknown potter.”

  The trail took him to Mata Ortiz, a dusty railroa
d town on the high plains of Chihuahua, several hundred miles due south of Deming. People there worked on the railroad, or picked fruit for about $5 a day. MacCallum’s questions led him to Juan Quezada, a man who had dropped out of school in the third grade and who is today regarded as a genius in certain academic circles.

  As a teenager, Juan cut firewood for sale to the village. The mountain slopes where he worked were littered with lustrous shards of ancient polychrome pottery. The Indian culture is called Paquime, or Casas Grandes, and it flourished near Mata Ortiz around the year A.D. 1000. Juan, an artist by temperament, felt driven by some internal obsession to re-create these pots. The raw materials—clay, minerals for paints—were locally available, and—a major consideration for an impoverished artist—they would be free for the taking.

  Juan had never seen anyone make a pot, never read any books on the subject, but he re-created the ancient techniques through a process of trial and error that took fifteen years to perfect. MacCallum subsidized Juan for a while, encouraging him to follow his creative muse and produce his best work.

  Juan eventually quit his railroad job and taught his family the techniques he’d discovered. Today, a Juan Quezada pot sells for thousands of dollars. He teaches pottery classes both in Mexico and the United States. His work is on display in museums around the world.

  In the early 1980s, other families in the village, noting the Quezadas’ success, began making pots. Most learned the techniques from Juan.

  The first book written about the Mata Ortiz phenomenon was The Story of Casas Grandes Pottery (1991, Western Imports, Box 12591, Tucson, AZ 85732). The author is Rick Cahill, my brother, and he does a thorough job explaining the mechanics of the technique: how the clay is sifted; how the pots are formed by hand, without use of a potter’s wheel; how these intricate works of art are painted with a human hair, generally plucked from a child’s head; how the pots are fired one at a time, under a fire of dried cow chips. The book is on sale at various galleries that sell Mata Ortiz pots, as well as tourist shops throughout the Southwest.