Makeda

  “My grandmother is blind,” I said. “She reads her Braille Bible and talks to me about it. She knows about the Queen of Axum and Sheba and King Solomon from the Bible. When I was a little boy, she told me about Menelik and how he brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.”

  “Did your grandmother also read the Kebra Nagast?”

  “No, I doubt that she’s ever heard of that book.”

  “Then how could she know about Menelik carrying the Ark of the Covenant back to Ethiopia?”

  “From reading the Bible.”

  “The story of Menelik’s flight with the Ark of the Covenant is not told in the Bible.”

  “Then I don’t know, sir.”

  That evening I called my grandmother at her neighbor’s house on Duvall Street.

  “Grandma, have you ever heard of a book called the Kebra Nagast?”

  “Say that again.”

  “Kebra Nagast.”

  “No, son. I’m sure I’ve never heard of that. Why do you ask?”

  “You told me once that King Menelik brought the Ark of the Covenant home from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. I thought you read this in the Bible but Dr.Quarles said the story wasn’t in the Bible. How did you know about it, Grandma?”

  “My mother …”

  “Your mother? Your mother told you. How could that be, Grandma?”

  There was silence on the line. Then my grandmother seemed to begin in the middle of some long past experience. “I was watching the Fasika procession with my best friend Meron.” She trilled the r when she pronounced her friend’s name. “It was the Sabbath and we were consecrating one of our new churches. My mother told me the story of King Menelik and the Ark. That’s how I knew.”

  “You learned this in a dream, Grandma?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “When did this happen? How old was I?”

  “I was asleep dreaming in my rocking chair. You were seven. You woke me up when I was talking in the dream to my friend Meron.”

  “Where was this? Ethiopia?”

  “It was called Abysinnia then.”

  “When was this, Grandma?”

  “The year was 1186. I don’t know the date.”

  Later, I took from the tin box the plastic sleeve from which I retrieved my notes and the Dogon map my grandmother had guided me in drawing when I was fifteen. I pored over the materials for the better part of an hour. It was then that I began, at least in my head, planning the writing of my first book.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  March 1970

  Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

  Iwas reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Sounds from the television in the bedroom played through the door into the small apartment’s living room where I’d sat making small headway.

  … Swedish scientists today in Uppsala, Sweden, released the first known computer-enhanced photograph and orbit simulation of a tiny, little-known star which moves in an elliptical fifty-year orbit path around the larger star, Sirius. Doctor …

  Baldwin’s book fell from my hands onto the floor. I ran from the living room into the bedroom. With my eyes fixed upon the small black-and-white screen, I inched laterally toward the foot of the bed and dropped awkwardly into a sitting position. Finding something in the moment mildly frightening, it was difficult for me to focus on the image that filled the screen. The lines in the image appeared to swim and undulate. I felt a gallop in my chest and my temples. My cheeks began to bake and itch beneath the skin. My eyes started to water as if I were about to cry. I took a succession of small breaths in an effort to gain a measure of control over my faculties.

  I blinked hard and stared at the high-resolution photograph on the screen. The image had been caught through a high-powered telescope by a Dr. Jan Bergman, a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Astronomy and a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist. The NBC announcer described the image as the first picture ever taken of the small star, shown moving along an elliptical fifty-year path around the big star Sirius, the blue queen of the north sky.

  The announcer called the little star not Po Tolo, but a name that meant nothing to me. There had been no doubt, however, no doubt at all. The picture on the screen was virtually a perfect copy of the sketch my grandmother had made from her dream about a previous life with her Dogon father. The drawing was in my closet, still stored in the ten-year-old plastic sleeve. I would get it down later and review it, though I would have no real need to do so. My grandmother’s recreation of her father’s diagram had been burned long since into my memory.

  The photograph remained on the screen while the announcer interviewed an American astronomer from Princeton about the little star’s significance. I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

  It was Po Tolo. It was some sort of miracle. Some gift from the spirit world. “My God! My God! My God!” I shouted at the walls of my apartment.

  I squeezed my eyes and lay back on the bed with my arms stretched hard behind me in joyful catharsis. Then, for the first time in nearly ten years, I cried.

  MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  March 26, 1970

  Mrs. Makeda Gee Florida Harris March

  521A Duvall St.

  Richmond, Virginia 23232

  Dear Grandma,

  How are you?

  Much of this letter is about your “travels.” Stop Mrs. Grier now if you don’t want her to read it to you.

  I am sorry that I will not be able to be there on your birthday. I am literally tied to the library here trying to complete the requirements for my master’s degree so that I can participate in the commencement exercises in May.

  Mama tells me that you are well. That is wonderful news.

  I still, however, miss very much hearing the sound of your voice. I miss having our talks. I am planning to drive down in the first week of May to spend a day with you so that we can catch up.

  I have been accepted into the English literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Mama seemed very pleased by this news but I can never really tell for sure, things being what they are. In any case, it is more important to me that you are proud of what I have been able to accomplish academically. I have worked very hard, but, I am beginning to think, for many of the wrong reasons. I am not happy, and have not been for a long time. The grind, rigor, and regimen of academic life serves only to distract me. The harder I work, the less I think about what happened. This and, I am afraid, only this, explains the high honors I have won. But more on this later.

  First, the good news, and it is, I believe, fascinating. I have kept the notes I took on what you told me in high school about your Dogon dream, your father, the holy man, the big star that the Western scientists call Sirius and the little star that your father said orbited around the big star. Your father in the dream called it Po Tolo and said it was made of a heavy material called sagala that did not exist on Earth. I also kept the sketch you made of the ancient Dogon drawing showing the elliptical path of the little star around the big star. Well, Western scientists did not know until recently that the little star existed. They had seen its companion, a star they called Sirius A, through a telescope in 1862. But a Dogon drawing, made hundreds of years ago before the telescope was invented, has recently come to light. It shows that the little star, Po Tolo (whose orbit around Sirius, the Dogon have celebrated in their ceremonies since, at least, the thirteenth century), moves around the big star in an elliptical orbit. What is more fascinating is this. The ancient Dogon drawing that was recently discovered looks exactly like the drawing you made of the one your father, the priest, showed you in your dream. What’s more, Western scientists now say that Po Tolo, which they call Sirius B, is made of a substance so dense that a teaspoonful of it weighs ten thousand pounds.

  This whole thing has stumped Western scientists, and perhaps me as well. How could the Dogon people have known, maybe for thousands of years, about a star that cannot be seen without the aid of a telescope? How cou
ld they have known about the path of its orbit and the substance it is made of? That it spins on its axis and makes the big star wobble because of the heavy material Po Tolo is made of. That the little star’s orbit around the big star requires fifty years. No one any longer questions that the Dogon knew these things, but how is this possible?

  What is even more fascinating, Grandma, at least to me, is how you could have known all of this. Everything told to you by your father, the old Dogon priest, in the dream you described to me ten years ago when I was fifteen, has recently been established by Western scientists as scientific fact. Every detail.

  I never doubted that you dreamed what you dreamed. I even began to believe much of it after I found out about the Dogon at the high school library, but tonight on the network news, they showed the first photograph of Po Tolo with its orbit path drawn in. I don’t know why I was stunned but I was.

  I don’t understand. But maybe there are things that are not to be understood.

  The rest of what I need to talk to you about I shouldn’t put in a letter and I think you know what I am referring to.

  I’ve met a girl that I care for very much, but I’m a mess, you know, and no good for her or anyone else.

  I’ll be home soon.

  Your loving grandson,

  Gray

  Three days after I posted the letter, my grandmother telephoned me from Mrs. Grier’s house. She sounded guarded.

  “Gray?”

  “Grandma?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got my letter. You let Mrs. Grier read it? All of it?”

  “Yes. Well, when you write me a letter, I know it must be very important.”

  “I’m sorry, Grandma. I knew I shouldn’t have put the dream business in a letter, but what I found out was so unbelievable that I guess I didn’t use the best judgment.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, son. Mrs. Grier couldn’t make any sense of it. If anything, it’s you she thinks might be a little bit fruity, not me.”

  “I still have the drawing and my notes stashed away in that plastic sleeve. The rest of the information I’ve gathered fills up two drawers in my file cabinet.”

  “I trust you’ll know what to do with it. You’re a grown man now and out in the big world, a bigger world than I ever had a chance to learn much of anything about.”

  I thought about what she said and how cosmically far it was from the truth. “Grandma?”

  “Yes, Gray.”

  “Remember when I told you I wanted to be a writer?”

  “I remember very clearly.”

  “I was just saying words then.”

  “Oh, I knew that, but even then you said those words for a reason, Gray. Some people’s puzzles have more pieces than other people’s puzzles. The people with a lot of pieces have to worker harder and longer to put the picture together than ordinary people with a piece or two, but in the long run, when they stick it out, they make the best pictures. You’re one of those people, Gray.”

  “You really think so, Grandma?”

  “I know so, son.”

  “That’s part of what I need to talk to you about when I come down. Something I want to write about.”

  “Something’s wrong, son … ?”

  “Well, I think you know … ?”

  “Your letter worried me.”

  “I worry about myself.” I pulled myself erect in the chair in which I had slouched. “I’m sorry I missed your birthday party. How was it?”

  “Oh, everybody came. Alma baked a cake. Mrs. Grier helped out. She’s got a good heart, you know. I think everyone had a good time.”

  “D-does Daddy still come by every day?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “Does he know we talk?”

  “Yes.”

  I hadn’t the courage to inquire further and we fell silent for a while. Then she said, “I’ve had another dream.”

  “About the Dogon?”

  “No, somethin’ different.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Let it sit until you come.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The month of March seems invariably to promise more than it delivers, teasing spring, frustrating hope’s impatience.

  An unseasonal light snow was in the morning forecast for Baltimore. The low skull-gray sky choked on angry dark clouds that scudded before swirling winds beneath a thick overcast ceiling.

  I did not look forward to the day, much of which I would spend in the library polishing the thesis draft I had entitled “A Critical Appraisal of the Harlem Renaissance Poets.” At three o’clock I was scheduled to meet with my thesis advisor, Dr. Harold Waters, who was chairman of the English department and a black conservative of the bow tie genus whom I had taken unkindly to calling in my angered head a chestycrat, my name for the self-important vainglorious sorts. Dr. Waters, I suppose, was not a bad sort really. It was just that I had corrupting my personal assessments a sharp and indigestible shard of glass in my craw that I could neither expel nor frontally acknowledge. The disability did not affect the social manners that were well-taught to me early on. Nor was I outwardly unpleasant to acquaintances that inconsequentially slid past as I moved, day in and day out, from where I was coming to where I was going. People were seen by me, firstly and safely, as solid obstacles not to be collided with. Quite literally so, and however sadly, little more.

  No girl had ever seized my attention like Jeanne Burgess. Notwithstanding my low emotional state, I have to confess that the mere nearness of her exhilarated me beyond reason. To leave it said only that she was beautiful would be, I think, unforgivably banal. Indeed she was beautiful, but I only use, first, this term to explain my attraction to her because it was the easiest and simplest, though most inadequate, thing to say about her. The problem here is that I find the whole business of diagnosing romantic appeal to be witheringly abstract and undoable. The truth is that the entire matter of physical appeal is so inherently subjective that to describe what I really found irresistibly compelling about Jeanne would sound silly when said aloud. The small Haitian accent, for instance, and the colorful way it inflected her near visual use of language. The soft susurrus melody of her name when rightly pronounced—Sh-jen— educed the tender sensation of art wedded by mystery. The long, sweet flowing line of her neck and spine. The deep, low glow of her dark brown skin. And something more that may have been appreciated only by me. Something subtle and indescribable that she did with her head when she smiled. This little otherwise insignificantly shy something, whatever it was, would cause me to vibrate slightly.

  Before I even knew. Such, I suppose, is the power and insanity of romantic attraction. Whenever I could look at her, I quite helplessly could not not look at her. And indeed, I may have been the only man to have seen her who’d been so completely smitten by her—or at least superficially so.

  I realize (merely intellectually, of course) that these powerful surface charms of hers—the language, the liquid line of her form, the flawless skin, that head thing—were but elements of her own particular opposite-sex ignition system, much like the small delicate pieces of kindling that burn easy, fast, and hot to light the real blaze that burns for the long haul.

  But as I was saying, she was, all the while, pretty, much as my mother had once been. However, I did not know enough further about her or my mother, for that matter, to compare the two of them very much beyond that. This sounds, I know, a terrible thing to confess. Nonetheless, my guess is that it is not, in the least, unusual. Parents of my mother’s generation hid themselves from their children behind walls of parental propriety that had been taught to them just as, I suppose, it has been taught to me.

  As such, I didn’t know who my parents really were, and likely less still about the geography of their relationship, which appeared on the surface more decorous and habitual than anything that could possibly be identified as passionate. For instance, I never saw them playing, which, I suspect, means something.

&
nbsp; I did want to know Jeanne, perhaps even to love her, but I was reflexively cautious. I would, in any case, have to know her first, and one cannot decide at the outset whether such is even possible. At best, knowing travels a long twisting road with ruts and bumps whose end cannot be seen from the dull safe start. But had I not endured enough? Why go to all the trouble to expose nerves believed cauterized?

  Yet the urges that I felt were likely lymphatic by nature and did not fall, so much as one might have thought, within the discretions of a rational mind to control or direct.

  She was such an exquisite vision, both of flesh and of spirit, which I must have known myself, by then, lost to investigate, shoals be damned. Already she had taken over a large space in my consciousness. Though hardly perceptible, I thought I may have started, even, walking differently.

  My upbringing had been passably pleasant, or at least sufficiently so for me to have seen all of those associated with it as standard people, their attitudes, values, beliefs, social practices, and even their fatuities as majority normal.

  Gordon and I never slept over at friends’ houses or ate at their tables. The March family was a self-contained and socially insular idea. Should I have thought about it at all, I’d have thought that we were like everybody else, or, upon reflection, that everybody else was like we were. My mother and father never went anywhere together, except to church or to errand-run.

  There were no dances, restaurants (most of which were, in any case, for whites only), movies, vacations, or family excursions of any kind that I can remember. My mother and father just worked, she in our tidy house and he at his machine-gray metal desk borne under by tables and policies, tables for death and policies for life: term life, whole life, his life, Mama’s life, Grandma’s life, and anybody else’s life that his company, Bradford Life Insurance, was willing to place a bet on.

  Their tedious daily routines passed unexamined, even by them. Never once had I heard them speak in a language of abstraction, in that upper breathing space, material and metaphysical, afforded by higher education itself and the creature comforts that it buys. (This was so, even though my mother had finished college). They talked about the state of our health. Never about the tone of our lives and the race-nasty boxed-over society that had foreordained it.