Makeda

by Randall Robinson

  There were few people in the lounge. A middle-aged scholarly-looking man sitting opposite of me caught my eye and nodded pleasantly. A tall, elegant very black woman in a chartreuse gown approached the desk agent to inquire about a flight. A gnarled old man squinched up rheumy milk-colored eyes to read the chalkboard on which flight information had been written in French. Two young men walked through the large room side-by-side, holding hands (or more precisely, fingers) in a practice I had not seen before in men who were not effeminate or homosexual. I was to see such male-to-male affection demonstrated frequently in Mali.

  With no flights to arrive or depart before mine would, it remained intimate and quiet in the room, the peace broken only intermittently by the organic creak of the wooden benches and the occasionally audible exchange of people talking outside the building at a pace that seemed rapid only because I could not understand what was being said. I got up and walked over to one of the two public telephones that were semi-enclosed in partitioned spaces against the wall. The instructions appeared on the phone-housing in French. Even had I understood them, I could not have puzzled out which coins to use or where to insert them. I returned to the bench where I had been sitting.

  “You are from America, aren’t you?” said the scholarlylooking man sitting across from me.

  “Yes.” I was glad to hear words I could understand.

  “I once lived in New York. I taught African history at Hunter College. I lived in New York for six years.” He spoke with a heavy accent, but quite clearly, still.

  “Are you from Mali?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is my first time here.”

  “Then welcome to our country.” He said this while slightly bowing his head in a courtly gesture.

  “Thank you.” I felt less alone and more sure of myself.

  “If you need help with the phone, I’d be happy to assist you.”

  The suspicious American in me involuntarily inquired of itself why the man wanted to be helpful. Was it because this was simply the way his people behaved toward any stranger in need? Was it because I was an American? Was it because I was black? Was it because I was a black American? Was it in spite of one or all of the last three?

  When Jeanne had been planning to come with me to Mali, she arranged for us the counsel of an anthropologist who was a colleague of hers at Johns Hopkins, a black Rhodes Scholar named Bern Spraggins. During a long meeting in her office, Dr. Spraggins said, among other things, “I’d suggest that you not wear on your sleeve to Africa the black American preoccupation with race. Africans outside of South Africa, Namibia, and Rhodesia don’t understand why Negroes go on about it so much. They’ve been exploited by their Europeans rather more indirectly than we have by our Europeans. They’re at a different stage of their time-release abuse than we are. They believe they’ve gotten back a country out of the deal and so they’re in a bit of denial, but they’ll get there in time. Just don’t do what we do, and that is, talk about race all the time.”

  I wasn’t sure that I agreed with her about the black American preoccupation with race. This she dismissed with little more than a small sniff, “Well, we don’t consciously think about the air that we breathe but we breathe, nonetheless, with an intense subconscious consistency twentyfour hours a day.”

  This got us onto another subject that bore more directly on the solicitousness of the Malian Hunter College professor at the airport.

  “I have this notion that I’ve yet to fully think through,” Dr. Spraggins continued. “It’s more shorthand thought than science. But when a black person travels abroad, he or she frequently discovers identities previously unexplored: the basic first-person identity, the basic interior you; the third-person identity, the effect on you of what you perceive others see you as being. When you meet Europeans abroad, what do you think they’re seeing? An American? A black American? A placeless Negro? More importantly, when you meet a Malian in Mali, the homeland, will it bother you that you will not know what the Malian is thinking or seeing? Then, of course, there is the further complication of your cultural Americanness, which you may wish to deny, but will, in any case, bring you, a Negro, rejected by America, uncomfortably face to face with yourself for the first time in your life. You will learn, ironically enough, when you reach Africa, just how much you have been turned into both, a faux American and a Negro, by the very people who’ve rejected you. You, in the eyes of those you will encounter abroad, white and black, European and African, are and are not an American, all at the same time. The one thing that all who encounter us in the world would agree upon is that we are history’s orphans— the American Negro, with that odd name coined for us by whites and intended to sound like a medical condition, a skin disorder, a name used to describe a refabricated people the world tacitly agrees now really belong nowhere.”

  I had instantly disliked Dr. Spraggins. Jeanne did not share this feeling, however, I think because she had always identified herself not so much with whites or America as with Haiti, a country, a culture unto itself that very much belonged to her. The Negro stranded in America would never know what such ownership felt like.

  “Dr. Spraggins, how many black people, do you believe, think about such things?” I had asked, thinly irritated.

  “Mr. March, the overwhelming majority of people, notwithstanding race, think very little about anything of abstract consequence. Day in and day out, they go vacantly about the banal business of their lives like mainstream lemmings. But they’re not the point here, are they, Mr. March? People like you are the point. Black people like you who go all the way to Africa looking for themselves.” She had looked unaccountably annoyed as she said this.

  I put Dr. Spraggins out of my thoughts and looked at the Hunter College professor who had gotten up from his bench and started across the short patch of tiled floor that separated us.

  “Bokhari! Bokhari!”

  The professor turned in the direction of a man in a khaki epaulet shirt calling after him from behind the Air Mali counter.

  “I ni bara,” the man behind the counter said.

  “Ebede,” the Hunter College professor called back, waving at the man. “I am Bokhari,” the professor then said to me. He was taller than I thought, an inch and a half or so taller than I was at six-foot-one. With his left hand, he redraped the sleeve of his ornately embroidered white robe to free the motion of his extended right hand. We shook hands. I noticed that he didn’t hold his right wrist with his left hand as I had seen the two Africans doing at the Orly airport hotel. I wondered with mild disappointment whether he was shaking my hand this way because I was to him, firstly, an American.

  I told him my name and that I would be teaching English literature on the college level in the fall. He had heard of Cheney State and seemed to know it was a predominantly black institution in Pennsylvania.

  He had about him an attractive manner, a quiet completeness that seemed to afford him an ease of sorts. Unlike the veneer of charm, the pleasantness he exuded seemed to run convincingly through him.

  Our bodies were turned in a manner that gave us a view through the open double wooden doors on the front side of the building. He spoke frugally of his experience in America as “memorable.” He then showed surprise when I told him I had never been to New York.

  Across the road from the terminal, a man stood beside a reddish earthen wall in the shimmering distance tending a dromedary. He wore great folds of a periwinkle-blue fabric that fell full to the ground. His face, polished coppery by the sun, was wrapped around and up with a long shesh of black cloth that tied back into a streamer resting against the small of his back. The tableau resembled a painting. Still. Timeless. Unself-conscious.

  “… One has to know where to place one’s feet,” the professor was saying reflectively. “I didn’t belong in New York.”

  I felt as if I were being guided; helped with answers to questions I had not consciously phrased. The pauses between us lengthened. Within them, I felt suspended above an op
en and endless natural space that acknowledged with its silence no requirement to answer for itself. The space, the tableau, the life was just what it simply was—here, as it had always likely been, time immemorial. I thought it hypnotically restful, and guessed that an unobstructed view of the horizon in all probability contributed to that most coveted of gifts: spiritual quietude.

  As I have said, I am not a religious type, or at least in no doctrinal sense am I anyone’s idea of a traditional believer. I do believe, however, that most of what has transpired in the cosmos from the beginning of time lies outside the reach of human understanding. I further believe that events are fated, and do not emerge as products of accident or happenstance. Ever. One has to believe something, and I have chosen to believe this. In fate. And in the eventual justice of fate. Or, is it more likely that I have not chosen anything? That things are what they are, and indeed have already happened in a future yet to disclose its decisions to me. With the scales of cosmic justice balancing back finally in favor of the long underfavored. Would that not explain the many ancient lives of my otherwise ordinary grandmother who has chosen me, of all people, to see for her, to foretell on her behalf the possibility of new glories inspired from the forgotten glories of the ancient past, her past, hence all of ours? And would this not explain the most unlikely meeting here in the Bamako airport waiting room with this man, Bokhari, the former Hunter College professor, who evinces both a path-lighting discernment and an encouraging kindness to me, a lost fresh victim of culture shock? A long way from home. But hadn’t I always been, wherever I was and would ever be, and wasn’t that the crux of the problem?

  “I came home because it occurred to me that I belonged here with the large family that I missed. My wife was very unhappy in New York. Our two children were born there. My wife did not want them to grow up without knowing who they were and what they belonged to.”

  The easy candor with which he spoke might have seemed peculiar were we not talking in a milieu that encouraged such.

  “In any case, I believe that you have come to Mali for a special reason. The least I can do is show you how to operate the telephone.”

  He looked at me as an avuncular figure might, and smiled. He did not ask me about my connecting flight. And for reasons I do not understand, I did not tell him, although I had an odd sense that he knew everything about what had brought me to Mali.

  The coin box operated much as the American pay phones did. He showed me which coins to use and how to summon an international operator.

  I thanked him.

  He said simply, “I think much depends on you, young man. Do not be afraid to tell the world what you discover.”

  Before I could respond to this, he turned and walked back to where he had been sitting. He then took out a red pocket-sized hardback volume and began to read with concentration.

  I sat down again and thought about what I would say. It was one a.m. in Baltimore. She would likely be asleep.

  Jeanne would not be easy to persuade. I was sure that I had hurt her very badly, and not only by what I had done, but by how I had done it. Walking out like that. Cutting her off. Severing her with such unexplained, discourteous abruptness. While I was reasonably confident, at least at the time, that she still wished to be with me, I was equally and reasonably certain that she did not need to be with me. It was this very self-sufficiency of hers that I had found attractive in her from the beginning.

  There is also this. Whatever it was that she had been well along toward thinking of me, she thought differently of me now, perhaps irrecoverably so.

  The phone rang five times. Crestfallen, I began to take the receiver down from my ear when I heard her voice, small and hoarse with sleep.

  “Hello … hello … who is it? Hello?”

  “Jeanne.” A long moment opened. Dawning.

  “Gray? Is that you, Gray?” More incredulous than angry.

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anyone. I never—I never.”

  “Gray?” She sounded frightened. “Where are you?

  Where are you calling from? Are you all right?”

  “Gordon died because of me, Jeanne. My brother died because of me.” I rested my forehead against the masonry wall of the open-faced phone stall.

  “Gray, my darling, please tell me where you are. Please—”

  “I’m in the airport in Bamako and little makes clear sense to me anymore.”

  Jeanne had never had reason to imprison herself in a protective shell. Her sunny spirit had always been allowed to breathe full by emotional strengths that made unnecessary for her the development of an ideology of the inevitability of universal human misbehavior. Thus, her opinion of me would not be shaped by predispositions she’d never found the need to develop about men in general.

  I loved Jeanne, although I thought it somehow unethical to say this to her at that moment. Instead I said, “I can’t explain this. I’ve only been in Mali a little while, but already there are signs that I am here because I am somehow supposed to be here, as if my coming for my grandmother were somehow foreordained.”

  I stopped and waited for her to say something. When she did not, I thought that I had lost the connection.

  “Jeanne?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I know this sounds crazy.”

  “I don’t think it sounds crazy, Gray.”

  “I didn’t realize how important this would be before I came here. It’s hard to explain. You’d have to be here. What I mean is that there are some things that those who would have a life together—I mean a special life together—must do together. This is one of those things. I don’t know how I know this but I do. I’m asking you to trust me in this. To believe me in this. Do you still have your ticket?”

  “Yes, I have it.”

  “Will you come?”

  She took awhile to answer. “Yes, Gray. Yes, I will come.”

  I told her that I would call again from Timbuktu to take down her flight schedule. Then I told her that I loved her and that I would be waiting for her at the airport in Timbuktu.

  An hour later, I was bound for Timbuktu on a small Air Mali twin-engine Antonov 24B.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I had a second day to spend in Timbuktu awaiting Jeanne’s arrival. The day before, I had walked around looking conspicuous in a faded yellow T-shirt and cotton twill khaki trousers.

  The people of the town were virtually all Muslims, I was told.

  Owing to that, I am guessing, the women did not look at me. At least not directly. The men and children, however, watched and smiled at me as if I were as large a curiosity to them as they were to me.

  Someone who had no firsthand knowledge told me in Baltimore that all the women of Timbuktu hid their faces behind burqas. But this clearly was not the case. In fact, I saw more men covering their faces than women. The men turban-wrapped their colorful sheshes around their heads, and then either pulled them long below the waist across their bodies, or brought them across the lower half of their faces around and again. The women, as far as I could see, more often than not, wrapped their heads and not their faces. In all cases, however, the colors and patterns of their garments were stunning. The long robes shifted, sweeping and proud, frequently with white and periwinkle represented.

  I should not have listened to anything that I was told before leaving America. For the little bit that I had been told quickly proved thin, if not flat wrong altogether upon my arrival. The Morgan library had had nothing of usefulness on Timbuktu, and nothing at all on the Dogon beyond the reference materials I’d read years before in my high school library.

  The white reference desk librarian at the Baltimore city library had thought I was joking when I asked him for materials on Timbuktu.

  “I always heard people say, you know, From here to Timbuktu, but it’s not a real place, is it?”

  I had said yes, it was a real place, and handed him the withdrawal slip I had comple
ted from the lone card catalog entry the library had on Timbuktu. The librarian’s search produced nothing of consequence, save his incredulous “I’ll be damned” imprecation upon seeing the name Timbuktu printed on a card from his own card file.

  Having seen no pictures, and having read virtually nothing about the city, may have been a good thing, inasmuch as the resultant void of expectation rendered my first glimpse of the place indelible.

  It was literally like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  I was first struck by how old and earthen the city was.

  In America, the cityscape is young, mathematically perpendicular, relatively colorless, and massively nonbiodegradable, as if the sheer tonnage of it, the cold concrete fruit of its builders’ will, had been violently, rudely piledriven into the naïve green earth, and imposed upon nature without nature’s consent. In America, one could not look at the arrow-straight sheathing of the buildings and know the natural materials from which it had been derived. The Western cityscape, indeed, was nature’s relentless enemy, an enemy that, whenever it took a mind to, caused nature to all but disappear.

  In Timbuktu, the ancient irregular red-clay buildings were nature. Nature, reformulated into grand mosques and university buildings and homes and the like. The structures were not so much on the Earth as of the Earth. I found this harmony surprisingly settling, although I doubt this would be the assessed effect on most Americans, who are bred to appreciate slick, unforgiving exactness.

  In any case, the much-fabled city was barely a shadow of its grand old self. Not long after it was established 900 years earlier by Tuareg nomads, it became the center of trade and scholarship for much of Africa and the Muslim world as well. When Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Timbuktu, poised near the great northern turn in the Niger River, was, during the 1300s, one of the world’s most advanced cities. Mansa Musa, king of the Mali empire, erected his royal residence, the Madugu, here. Gold and salt trade routes crossed here with caravans of heavily laden dromedaries that traveled from West Africa to Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, and beyond.