Makeda

by Randall Robinson

  Before sensing her despondence, I had been at the time on the verge of raising with her the situation with Jeanne that haunted me much as an unshakable fever would. But seeing that Grandma at the time was of an uncharacteristically brittle temperament, I hadn’t brought up Jeanne’s name at all. I was sufficiently concerned about all this that I stopped next door to speak with Mrs. Grier about Grandma before leaving Richmond that day.

  After some prodding, Mrs. Grier told me that on several occasions Grandma had disappeared (this was the word she used) for seconds while talking to her. What Mrs. Grier described was nothing so fantastic or supernatural as teleportation or such. What she said was, “Makeda would be in her body right there in front of me, but then she’d be gone to some other place. Then, in a few seconds, she’d be back again.”

  Mrs. Grier did not know about the dreams. She had thought only that Grandma was “gettin’ old and slippin’.”

  “Have you noticed anything else different about her?” I asked.

  She hesitated before answering. “Well, maybe that strange cross she has that was never around the house before. Leastways, I never saw it before.”

  “What cross?”

  “It’s a thick metal thing that’s nearly the same whichever way you turn it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, the two pieces of it are the same, you know, about the same length. Like maybe it would fit inside a circle. It even had a circle inside it where the two pieces cross each other. And the cross had little birds on it. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

  “Was it very small? Small enough to keep in a jewelry box?” Save for the wall hanging with the symbol on it, nothing visible had changed in the house since I was a little boy.

  “No, I’d guess it was somewheres near a foot anyway you looked at it.” She frowned.

  “What is it, Mrs. Grier?”

  “The cross had these funny things on the three ends.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “I don’t know. Alls I can say is what I was thinkin’ when I saw it.” She looked as if she thought there was something dishonorable in talking to me this way about her friend.

  “What were you thinking, Mrs. Grier?”

  “Well, I was thinkin’ that three ends of the cross was bloomin’ like iron roses.”

  It was 1:45 or thereabouts when a young African waiter delivered the ham and cheese sandwich I had ordered from room service. He told me that he was a thirty-six-year-old Badjara man from Senegal. His parents had given to him both a Wolof name and Wolof as his first language when he was very small. They had thought that this would help him along, inasmuch as the Wolof had been the dominant group in Senegal for centuries and still held most of the important positions in government and commerce.

  Babukar had come to Paris from Dakar to attend university sixteen years earlier, but had dropped out before completing his degree in agriculture. While he had always intended to earn a diploma and return to his parents’ village in Senegal, things hadn’t worked out that way and he was losing confidence that they ever would.

  Babukar told me all of this in response to the questions I began asking just after he’d put the sandwich down on a small table near the door.

  He was half a head shorter than me, neat of build and feature, with deep brown skin that was clearer, but otherwise not unlike my own.

  Although he had yet to marry, he said to me that he very much wanted to have a family because this was very important to the Badjara, in ways, I’d later learn, I had no cultural framework for fully appreciating at the time. He also said that his elderly parents still hoped he would return home soon and marry not a Wolof but a Badjara woman, and have many children who would then become part of an extended Badjara family network whose members—mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, grandsons, granddaughters—would share and share alike virtually everything that was sharable.

  Babukar said with a measure of pride that this was “the African way,” and because this was so centrally the case, he had never really adjusted to life in France where nobody seemed to care about anybody and certainly not about an African like him.

  I remember thinking that the African way made affordable gentle personalities like his, and that his model of African man had not been made in America since the holocaust flagship docked at Jamestown in August 1619. By now I had been reared fifteen generations competitively selfish and callous by a million mothers and fathers, black, white, loving, hateful, voluntary, involuntary. Over the long estrangement, I had become different from Babukar in some fundamental way that did not flatter me.

  Babukar looks at a glass and sees a window, a window unto a mother, a son, a sister, a cousin, a niece—nothing that he would own. I look at a glass and see a mirror, a mirror in which to see myself, my writing, my future, my this, my that, my place in the Great Acquisitor’s running of the bulls.

  Babukar, standing there in a white shirt and black bow tie, holding in his hand the rumpled bill to be signed by me, said that he’d never met a Negro American before and seemed excited at the prospect, having heard a great deal about us. And so I invited him to sit down on the room’s only chair, a small wooden affair beside the shelf-desk that was affixed loosely to the masonry wall.

  We talked for fifteen minutes or longer, long enough that I began to worry for his job. But by then he was well into telling me the story of his family, his village, his country. I did not know why he was talking to me like this. I think he believed that he knew me, that I was he. But I was not he and had not been for a long, long time. I tried to read him but could not, talking, as we were trying to, after so long a time, from so great a distance, after so much awful had happened. All that would appear to remain between us was race and how we both had been treated because of it.

  It was then that I told him I would be leaving in a matter of hours for Timbuktu. He appeared pleased to hear this.

  “Have you ever been to Timbuktu before?”

  “No. I’ve never even been to Africa before.”

  Tossing tree leaves dappled the fresh sunspot on the wall across from the tiny window. For no particular reason, it occurred to me as I noticed this, that the self-effacing Babukar spoke at least four languages: Badjara, Wolof, French, and English.

  “Mali is our neighbor. It is right next door to Senegal. Did you know that?”

  I said yes when I wasn’t sure that I had known that.

  “They speak French in Mali. Do you speak French?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “Don’t worry. You will do just fine.”

  “You know, we could be cousins,” he added.

  “Could we?”

  “Yes. Yes. The Negro Americans when they were Africans came from all over Senegal, even from my village.”

  Looking at him smiling at me, I was unaccountably moved by what he had said. If Babukar noticed this, he did not let on.

  “How long will you be in Timbuktu?”

  “A week.”

  “Well then, you must go to Senegal. You must see Goree Island. It is where the slavers kept the Africans before they were taken across the sea to be slaves and, later, Negro Americans.” It was not unlike, I remembered, how sardines were made.

  “I will think about it,” I said.

  Babukar continued as if he had not heard me: “And you must visit my village and meet my family. They will take good care of you. Let me call to let them know that you will be coming to our village.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The moon shone huge and brilliant above a shimmering Mediterranean Sea.

  Perhaps because I am my grandmother’s spirit child, I believe in signs. The moon that night was larger than I’d ever witnessed it, a light as bright and soothing as God would mix to announce the resting countenance of a storied continent that was the embattled lovely mother of the black race.

  I felt an involun
tary stir as the northwest coastline resolved into view along the edge of waters that wrinkled white atop the obsidian depths. Ahead, the Sahara unveiled its vast curvilinear magnificence, delineated in soaring fawn sands and soft blue-shadowed valleys.

  Never in my life had I felt as I did in those moments.

  Adrift in the cold induced vacuum of the rich retired slaver’s missing ledger, can there be an event more compelling in a victim’s most private and troubled yearning than the long-awaited homecoming of a former African? Nameless. Homeless. Fifteen times removed. Unwell of spirit.

  And there it was.

  Africa.

  In a solitary transformational moment, I owned it with breast and sinew as I’d never owned anything before, and with such surprising intensity that I shivered, deep within the night, all alone in a celebration that required to be shared.

  I suppose it would not have mattered so much to the actuary’s issue, who angle unimaginatively only for solid work with regular hours and good benefits. But it mattered enormously to me that I was aboard that Air Mali flight, bound for the past, alone. Occasions like these were not to be forgone cheaply. For how often in life do they present themselves to those who would appreciate their value?

  I needed Jeanne. I needed her here with me in Mali. I needed her together with me here to begin making our future, a future built importantly of memories in which we would figure almost symbiotically together; pedestrian memories of pedestrian experiences; small memories of being and doing and sharing and laughing and crying; sweeping memories of the years over which we would persist as distinct and different, yet inevitably become each other; cumulative memories lain down as affirming markers on the cold ground of time, units with which to measure how far we had come together and how well we had done. And this common transformational discovery experience, our presence here in Africa together, would be the benchmark from which to begin the taking of this measure.

  This may sound (even somewhat to me) mawkishly sentimental. After all, I was alone, high above the Earth, in a foreign night with the moon outside my window and the stunning canvas of Africa beneath me. I will further confess that this may have influenced the language I have used to describe what I was feeling. But if I am certain of anything, it is that only the language can be viewed as sentimental, not the deepening conviction that inspired it. Not the feelings themselves.

  The Air Mali Boeing 737 jet touched down on African soil at 6:37 in the morning. I pressed my face to the window the whole time it took the pilot to taxi into the terminal building area. An African ground worker waved up at me in a gesture I chose to interpret as a welcome. He was tall and lean, wearing wooden clogs, a wine-colored felt fez, and a long, white ground-length robe that shifted on the light morning breeze. Behind him, I could see far across the flat red-clay plain into the limitless distance.

  The door opened and non–French speaking voices from the outside wafted into the plane’s cabin. (I would later learn that it was Bambara that was being spoken. This was one of the three Mande languages spoken by half of Mali’s population.)

  It was the beginning of the rainy season and the air was cool and humid.

  The plane’s cabin itself underscored the first odd dichotomy that I would notice. All of the workers moving about outside the plane were Africans, while all who were onboard the plane—with the exception of me—the flight crew, and nine passengers that I assumed were Malians, were probably French nationals.

  I took out the travel itinerary that I had handwritten in Baltimore and tucked into my shirt pocket. I had two hours to wait until my connecting flight left for Timbuktu which lay two thousand miles to the northeast along the Niger River in the central section of the country. I had more than enough time to clear immigration and customs before starting on the last leg of my journey.

  I’d had difficulty reserving a room at a hotel in Timbuktu. So I’d arranged through the good offices of the Sofitel L’Amitié Bamako to stay at a small inexpensive guesthouse not far from Timbuktu’s ancient libraries.

  The flight attendants, both Malian women, put on light green six-button double-breasted blazers and began preparing the passengers to deplane. The attendant toward the front of the aircraft, a tiny woman in her early twenties, gave over the public address system a stream of announcements in French, only the first of which had I understood: Bienvenue au Mali.

  I peered out toward the terminal which was a rudimentary ferroconcrete building decorated modestly along its top edge by a cornice from which protruded a flagstaff that supported a large version of the national flag. The flag was comprised of three wide vertical bars—green, yellow, and red, the borrowed colors of Ethiopian Pan-Africanism. Just beneath the swing of the flag were two lines painted in large letters on the façade of the building:

  BIENVENUE

  BAMAKO, MALI

  Suddenly it started to rain, and with such torrential intensity that the water banging against the skin of the fuselage sounded like a shower of metal pellets. Within seconds, the rain stopped and the morning sun began quickly baking away all evidence of it having rained in the first place.

  A mobile stairway was pushed against the side of the plane, and shortly afterward we were allowed to go down to the ground.

  This altered in me an unstable balance of contesting emotions. This business, as it were, of going down to the ground. Nothing else would explain my calm state, inasmuch as I have never liked large new experiences.

  As a child, I hated changing from my old elementary school to the junior high school on the same street six blocks away. I had been anxiety-logged about it, even when many of my friends transferred with me to the same new place. I had never liked crowds of strangers or meeting new people. My mother always had the hardest time getting me to try new foods. While I liked Chinese food, I had never once tried to maneuver any from plate to mouth with the two little wooden sticks. At Morgan, I’d never bothered learning to greet a Nigerian student in Yoruba, or a Liberian student in Kru or Krahn.

  All my life, I had so invariably relied upon the security of habit that I was all but completely unaware of habit’s own unremarked tenacity. I not only required neatness of space but also the meticulous preservation of small routine. In stores I’d search for brand names while knowing nothing at all about the brand-name products’ serviceability.

  I may or may not have known that everyone did such, or something very much like it, for the sake of preserving one’s sanity. The modern age had become overcrowded with the exponential growth of the hungry little decisions that were increasingly laying claim to the peace and time necessary for making the big and important decisions. Habit was, at once, mind-saver and mind-killer—dumb, blind, salving. Opiate of the mindless masses. Indispensable friend to the anal-retentive. The glue that stuck marriages, democracies, dictatorships, and practically everything else together.

  But I had, I thought, a worse case of habit-clutch than most.

  This could have been due to growing up in a family unit headed by an overburdened insurance salesman and an overqualified homemaker. It could have been that we were so preoccupied with the numberless meannesses of the ugly awful South that we could not afford, at least for the moment, to go looking beyond. Rate tables, gray domesticity, and the ever ubiquitous humiliation of segregation summed up to a certain understandable reduction of us, I suppose. A certain unexamined, foreordained provincialism. It was much related to the race-business obsession of black people that coagulated in the spirit and blocked the light—the painful, mind-numbing, progress-retarding iron-weight that had been dragged around like a leg ball from slavery to freedom and beyond to wherever-the-hellelse we would ever, in a lifetime, be going.

  The weight was there with me on the plane in Bamako, coloring assumptions, erecting inhibitions, accentuating the understandable perception of my own real and conspicuous isolation.

  What would Gordon have felt and done here, all alone and as out of place as a goose in a phone booth? Gordon would never have c
ome here, or even so much as thought about doing such.

  But I was there and proud of myself.

  Makeda’s grandson. Makeda’s spirit child. She had told me in so many words before I left home that I was “lookin’ for something” that I would have to find before I would be able to write in my own voice. She told me that I would find something of what I needed to know in Mali and that it would “come from the past.”

  I was thinking about my grandmother’s words to me as I went down the stairs and stepped upon the ground of Africa for the first time. I took a few steps from the plane in the direction of the terminal. I stopped and allowed the deplaned passengers behind me to go around while I turned full about to examine the details of the place carefully, to engrave permanently the picture of it on my memory—the ground, the sky, the massive old tree in the distance, the aromatic special smell of the vastness, the little Malian girl in the orange print dress boarding one of the smaller aircraft on the apron, the Arab man in a blue burnoose carrying a leather satchel through the terminal entrance, the boarding party of nineteen exotically dressed men and women politely making way for a very old woman with friable parchment skin and an arresting hand-wrapped headdress.

  Just that quickly, something changed in me, something mysteriously renovating, but too new, too unfamiliar, however, to name. I felt slightly nervous, precariously euphoric.

  I began walking toward the door of the terminal. A ground worker swinging a set of wheel chocks and wearing blue coveralls walked abreast of me and said, smiling, “American.” That was all. American. Never in America, by a black or a white, had I ever been called an American. Never once. I thought, for reasons that escaped me at the moment, that this was, for all its ironic timing and meaning, hysterically funny. But the ground worker would not have understood this and I did not laugh.

  Having uneventfully negotiated the immigration formalities, I exchanged at the airport currency-exchange kiosk some of my American dollars for Malian francs and took a seat in the lounge. Although I had declined to have breakfast on the plane, I still was not hungry.