Makeda

  She continued to look at me for a long moment. Then she spoke, I thought, to demonstrate that she had been listening. “It’s a bit scary, I know,” she said, “when you write, you speak because you need to, but into empty space.” I must be natural. If I try to be clever, she will see through it. Easy. Natural. Stop screwing the top off the pepper shaker. Easy. “It is a world that all artists brave, fearing rejection.” She looks so penetratingly at me when she speaks that mind I see turning behind those intelligent dark eyes. Try and not look away, boy. Hold it. “But the moment a reader is engaged by your interpretation of things, your insecurities will lighten a bit.” I must stop looking at her like this or she’ll think I’m the village idiot. “You’re a sensitive man …” You’re a sensitive man. You’re a sensitive man. “… and that is good …” That is good. “… so you will always have artistic insecurities. Or at least I hope so.”

  We ordered from the menu an ice cream confection called Pineapple Charlotte and talked more about our personal histories.

  “My mother went to college in Paris at the Sorbonne. She began her writing career there and came to New York in 1941 to mount her first American production. She met my father in New York where he was studying medicine at NYU. I was born in New York. We moved to Chicago when I was three. My younger sister, Maryse, was born in Chicago. Now what about you? You grew up in the South, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, somewhat uncomfortably. She looked at me questioningly. “My father is an insurance salesman and my mother does not work.” The words crowded out artlessly. “I guess my grandmother, my father’s mother, is the person I’m closest to.” I stopped there, abruptly it may have seemed. She peered at me as if she hadn’t known what to say then. I flushed, I hoped, imperceptibly.

  “Brothers? Sisters?” she asked.

  “No,” this said with a short edge that was unintended.

  The distance between us lengthened. I felt a small stab of panic. I had not acknowledged as much, but I was lonely. Not alone, but needful of something she had in a short time made painfully apparent.

  Her eyes signaled a small withdrawal. “Is something wrong, Gray?”

  As she asked this, a man approached. He was cleanshaven and handsome with a neat salt-and-pepper Afro and skin the color of milk chocolate.

  “Jeanne, dear, it’s wonderful to see you.” He smiled and held her slender hand in both of his.

  “Hello, Teo. How have you been?”

  “Never better. How are your parents? Your sister?” He spoke in the mellifluous song of upper-class Jamaicans.

  “Everyone’s fine, Teo. I want you to meet my friend Graylon March.”

  He clenched my hand firmly and smiled. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. March. Welcome to the Poinciana. I hope everything has been to your liking.”

  I told him truthfully that everything had been wonderful— the food, the look of the place, the copper-plate family portraits, the music. Unobtrusively, in the background, Bob Marley sang his “Natural Mystic.” I was grateful for Teo’s intervention.

  “Well, I won’t disturb you further. Jeanne, please give your family my regards and come again soon.”

  He left us. We looked at each other. Settled back now into our separate evaluations, sipping the Drambuie that warmed through us, calming the small unbidden apprehensions, finishing smoothly the occasion. Nice. Unclear. But still nice.

  One of the things I liked most about her was that she was not one of those stupidly self-important mysterious types that hid themselves, either in some ludicrous effort to effect—what is it that it looks like?—some sort of tactical defensive bulwark, or to camouflage a deeper, more impressive shallowness. (Might this have been, however, how she could altogether reasonably have seen me?)

  She did not leave things where they had left off. Helpfully, she reached across the unexplored social space between us and offered a small caring smile. “Families, Gray. Remind me someday to tell you stories about the Burgesses and Cesaires.”

  Reprieved.

  “Thank you for a lovely evening. Call me tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  I walked her to her car, a six-year-old Peugeot, surprisingly. We embraced lightly, tentatively. In the damp chill of the March night, I took in for the briefest instant the sweet special scent of her. And then the sensation ended, gone on the flutter of a dancing breeze.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hello.” It was the cultivated voice of a professional lecturer.

  “My name is Graylon March. I’m calling from Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. I am trying to reach Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright.”

  “Speaking.” The voice sharp, curt, with a question in it.

  “I read your book Reincarnation and found it fascinating—”

  “Mr.… Pardon me, what did you say your name was?”

  “March, Graylon March.”

  “Well, Mr. March, I really don’t—”

  “Please, Dr. Harris-Fulbright. I won’t take much of your time, but my grandmother remembers a past life that is every bit as unbelievable as the life of Antonia—I’m sorry, I can’t remember her full name.”

  “Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado.”

  “Yes, well, my grandmother remembers a past life every bit as unbelievable as hers.”

  “Maybe, Mr. March, that is because your grandmother’s story is unbelievable.” This said resignedly, not rudely.

  Still, although I knew that she did not know me and had no reason to believe anything that I was saying, I was becoming annoyed.

  “Dr. Harris-Fulbright, please—” I drew in a long calming breath. “I can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that ten years ago, my grandmother dreamed about the existence of a star, invisible to the naked eye—its orbit, its weight, its constituent materials—that only a month ago was confirmed by scientists to exist, at all.” This wasn’t quite the truth, but I had to win her full respectful attention before broaching the Dogon dream story that would fly in the seedpod face of every Western prejudice about Africa that she had ever been caused to inhale.

  She said nothing for what seemed a long while. Then I heard her breathe out in a labored push.

  “Okay, Mr. March, you have my ear. Tell me what happened to your grandmother.”

  I told her about my grandmother’s dream of being a Dogon teenager in the year 1394. I told her my grandmother’s father’s name in the dream and what the old priest had told her in the shady cliff-side courtyard that day about the little star Po Tolo, as well as the path and period of its orbit around the large bluish star in the low northern sky.

  “My grandmother told this to me ten years ago. This was before the Western scientific community knew that the little star existed. My grandmother is completely blind, professor, yet she traced on paper the orbit path of Po Tolo which she remembered from the map her father had shown her in the dream. The drawing she made for me ten years ago matches almost exactly the recent photograph made by Western astronomers that was shown on the national news a month ago. Dr. Harris-Fulbright, my grandmother has never been outside the state of Virginia. She is a retired hand laundress who never reached high school. She is blind. I have the map she drew and the notes I took that day when I was fifteen. There must be a way to forensically verify that the map and notes were made ten years ago. Now, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, how possibly could my grandmother have known these things had she not dreamed them? I know this must sound like a lot to take in at one time, but can you offer a plausible alternative explanation?”

  Dr. Harris-Fulbright said nothing. I could hear her breathing. I waited six or seven seconds.

  “Doctor …”

  “Y-yes, well—I’m not sure what to say, Mr. March.

  Before your call, you see, I’d never even heard the word Doogon be—”

  “Dogon.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dogon. The people are called Dogon.”

  “Yes, I see—”

  “That’s just my point, Dr. Harri
s-Fulbright. How likely is it that my grandmother, a retired blind laundress, could have even known of the Dogon people and precisely where they have lived in Mali, West Africa since the fourteenth century?”

  “I think I see your point, Mr. March.”

  I looked around my tiny sitting room and was glad that Dr. Harris-Fulbright could not see it. The walls were an oil-based institutional gray and completely bare, save for the clean-paint rectangles where a previous tenant’s pictures had once hung. The furniture had been thoughtlessly cobbled together from the distress auctions of departing graduate students. The threadbare divan listed leftward, signaling that I would likely be its last owner. Books and papers, aligned in neat rows, covered every flat surface in the apartment’s three rooms. There were no personal effects, save the toiletries in the bathroom.

  “What is it that you want of me, Mr. March?”

  I hesitated. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through. I read your book yesterday in one sitting. I wanted to get your reaction as soon as I could get you on the phone.”

  “Mr. March.”

  “Yes.”

  She started to speak, then stopped and took a measure of time to think. When she started again, she spoke more slowly than she had before, as if she were calculating in her head how she would meter her forward involvement. She had looked to be in her mid-fifties at the time that the picture was taken for the back flap of her book. She was a white woman with piercing cerebral blue eyes and long wiry gray hair in a high state of scholarly misrule. It was the picture of a woman who had little interest in adornment. She spoke much as she had looked in the picture. Without waste or varnish.

  “Mr. March, if you have reported accurately on this star’s recent discovery, and on your grandmother’s description of it in her ten-year-old dream, your story would warrant further investigation. Most of the stories I come across, however, are found to be without merit. Yours, or rather your grandmother’s, is, on its face, quite interesting.”

  Hers was the professional scholar’s maddening habit of emotionless understatement. A near idiom unto itself.

  “Here is how I propose we proceed, Mr. March. Give me a week to do some reading. There are things I would like to check out.”

  “Understood,” I said with relief. I tried not to sound happy.

  “If you give me your number, I will call you next Monday at eight p.m. your time and tell you what I think.”

  I gave her my number and agreed on the time of her call.

  “Before we go, I have a couple of questions.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Please spell D-dogon for me.”

  I spelled it for her.

  “And now, Mali.” I did this. “You said West Africa, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Po Tolo … Now, one last question—” I waited.

  “Is your grandmother black?”

  “What, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, does that have to do with anything?” I asked wearily.

  She spoke even more carefully then. “It happens that in virtually all authentically regressed past lives, the remembered past life is of the same race as that of the living person being regressed.”

  “I see.” Hackles quieting back into place. “The answer is yes, my grandmother is black.”

  “Mr. March, may I ask what your field is?”

  “I will receive a master’s in English in May.”

  “And what do you plan to do then?”

  “I plan to write.”

  “I see.”

  I suddenly felt that I may have been rashly naïve and lacking a safe course forward.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I spent the afternoon and evening at the little desk in the library stacks. On the way in, I had passed the young woman who had brought me the two books on reincarnation.

  “I found another book for you,” she said, and handed me the book while affording me a smile that, given my recent deportment, I didn’t deserve.

  “Thank you,” I responded, and headed to the stacks where I planned to work on my thesis before opening the book that the young woman had given me. This would require a measure of discipline. The business of the dream and what I’d already begun to map out in the way of a literary piece based on it was claiming more and more of my time as my thesis deadline rushed toward me.

  It was a thin volume, more a précis of sorts, as it turned out, than a book.

  Two eminent French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, had written it eight years after my grandmother had her Dogon dream. The writers had traveled to Mali several times over a four-year period to study “the cosmological theories of the Dogon.” Among the Dogon authorities they spoke with were a seventy-year-old ammayana (priestess of the Amma religion), a sixty-five-yearold patriarch, and two forty-five to fifty-year-old priests.

  I used a yellow highlighter to underscore sections of the brief report in which Griaule and Dieterlen took care to quote the Dogon authorities directly.

  The star (Po Tolo) which is considered to be the smallest thing in the sky is also the heaviest: “Digitaria (Po Tolo) is the smallest thing there is. It is the heaviest star.” It consists of a metal called sagala which is a little brighter than iron and so heavy “that all earthly beings combined cannot lift it.”

  The four Dogon authorities described to the French anthropologists a third star in what is now known to the West as the Sirius System. They told Griaule and Dieterlen that relative to Po Tolo, the third star, Emme Ya, was:

  Four times as light (in weight) and travels along a greater trajectory in the same direction and in the same time as it (fifty years). Their respective positions are such that the angle of their radii is at right angles.

  Griaule and Dieterlen were shown a drawing by the Dogon of Jupiter and its moons:

  This figure represents the planet—the circle—surrounded by its four satellites in the collateral directions and called Dana Tolo Unum, “Children of Dana Tolo” (Jupiter).

  With respect to the planet Saturn, a Dogon drawing showed Saturn’s halo, or ring, which can only be seen from Earth through a telescope.

  The paper went on to establish that the Dogon had a vast knowledge of the cosmos for thousands of years, and that this knowledge held for the Dogon a great religious significance.

  Every sixty years, the Dogon hold a ceremony called the Sigui (ceremony). Its purpose is the renovation of the world … Since the beginning of this investigation, we were faced with the question of determining the method used to calculate the period separating two Sigui ceremonies. The common notion, which dates to the myth of creation, is that a fault in Yougo rock, situated at the center of the village of Yougo Dogorou, lights up with a red glow in the year preceding the ceremony …

  I was tired and having difficulty concentrating on the section of the four-page writing that focused purely on the arcane religious beliefs of the Dogon for which I was equipped with no cultural frame of reference. The sections, however, that documented the Dogon’s long mastery of the science of the cosmos were clear enough to me; even in the sleep-deprived state from which I had fruitlessly sought relief weeks ago from a doctor at the Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center.

  It was half past nine and growing late. I had promised Jeanne that I would call that day. Packing up my materials while reflecting upon what I had just read, I remembered a question that the author Robert K.G. Temple had raised in his new book from St. Martin’s Press, The Sirius Mystery: “How did the Dogon know such extraordinary things and did it mean that the Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials?” To Temple, even the far-fetched infinitesimal possibility of an extraterrestrial visit to the Dogon was more likely than any notion that the Dogon people, 700 years in residence beneath Mali’s Bandiagara escarpment, had developed a comprehensive knowledge of the existence and working of an interplanetary universe well in advance of the Western white world.

  Then, of course, there was the further question of how my blind grandmother had come to
know these things, again, well before the white scientists had made their “discoveries.”

  I only hoped that Dr. Harris-Fulbright, who understood more than conventional scientists did about the existence of alternative realms of knowledge, would be more successful than Robert K.G. Temple had been in overcoming what I saw to be the convenient impediment of unconscious prejudice.

  The telephone rang for the second time that evening, startling me. I sat up, rested my hand on the receiver, and took a deep breath.

  It was Jeanne.

  “You promised to call.” Said lightly. Sure of herself.

  “I was just about to when my cousin called.” I considered saying more but elected not to.

  “Caught you at a bad time?”

  “No, not at all. I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “What’s your day like tomorrow?”

  “Well, I have to listen to my poets in the morning. The deadline looms near.” I sounded glib and was not proud of myself. She seemed to intuit that I was hiding something.

  “Then let’s spend the afternoon together. It’s supposed to be warm and sunny. How about it?”

  “That’s the best idea I’ve heard since last night, which, by the way, was the best evening I’ve had in a long time.”

  “Tomorrow then. Pick me up?”

  “Of course. Two o’clock?”

  “Yes. À bientôt.” And she was gone.

  It occurred to me later that Jeanne had guessed that I was a poor graduate student whose furthered education was made possible by loans, grants, and a small work-study wage. I don’t know how she came to know this, but I was sure she had learned, before our afternoon together, roughly what my financial circumstances were. This would have been easy enough for her to infer from the look of alarm on my face when I was presented with the check at the Poinciana. I suspected then that she had seen this and not known quite what to do, before finally deciding that it would only have made matters worse to try and help me.