Makeda

by Randall Robinson

  In centuries past, the cliff had provided a living refuge for the Dogon from slave hunters. Now it further served as a Dogon burial ground.

  Approaching Teli, we heard the two-volume percussion music of women rhythmically striking millet against stone mortars with long-handled wooden pestles. Hard and sharp against the mortars’ bottoms. Next, pulled soft and long against the side. Twenty or more mortars struck thus in concert. Syncopated. And then once in a while, the anomalous and wonderful offbeat blow for jazz.

  Somewhere in the soft, sweetly timed swooshing dragnote, I sensed an elemental tug of kinship.

  The male luminaries of the village, the elders and chiefs, were assembled on the togu-na, a gazebo-like structure of ideograms carved into pillars beneath an ornate roof.

  Yéhéné made the introductions.

  The men seemed to have been put on notice that we were coming. They were most gracious, presenting Jeanne with an array of well-crafted artifacts and a bouquet of pretty flowers. As Americans, it had not occurred to Jeanne and me that we should bring gifts.

  The Dogon elders and chiefs at the togu-na spoke to us in Dogon, not in French. Thus, we were to rely upon Yéhéné to translate.

  Jeanne said to Yéhéné in English, “Please express to them our gratitude for their hospitality.”

  When Yéhéné translated this, the tallest of the five men was looking at me, I guessed, with an expectation that I would speak first. He turned toward Jeanne and said, “We are honored to have you as guests of our village.”

  It may have been at this point that I began to know, for the first time, the limitations of language. The elders and chiefs had been effusively welcoming to us. At the time, owing to certain cultural presuppositions that were unfortunately wired into me, I embarrassingly mistook what was to them an obligatory courtesy for deference. The aggressive kindness of theirs that I had ascribed to our selftouted Americanness, I would later learn, they extended without exception to all visitors.

  Yéhéné said, “They have asked you to join them for tea but I have explained to them that the hogon should not be kept waiting.”

  Yéhéné then drew us away amidst handshakes and warmly expressed pleasantries. As we were going, the youngest of the men spoke softly to Yéhéné in Dogon. Yéhéné smiled at the man and shook his head in sympathetic discouragement.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked.

  “He said to tell you that he’s sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?”

  Yéhéné looked uncomfortable. “He wanted me to tell you that he is sorry for what happened to you.”

  I said, “I don’t understand.”

  Yéhéné averted his eyes. “My people possess a very old knowledge. For thousands of years we have known about the workings of the universe and we remember all.”

  Jeanne and I must have looked hopelessly confused, causing Yéhéné to breathe deeply before saying, “He wants to tell you that he is sorry that you were taken away.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  We walked into the cool shade of a giant banyan tree that grew near the base of the escarpment. The tree was old and wide and appeared to require in support of its great weight the six huge trunk roots that muscled over and under the ground to a radius of sixty feet or more.

  I read the recognition in Jeanne’s expression.

  “How long do these trees live?” she asked.

  I smiled and did not answer as we sat with Yéhéné on the knees of the tree’s gnarled buttress roots.

  Moments later a dark, very small, very elderly man walked toward us alone. He was dressed simply in a long white robe and a cap not unlike that which my grandmother said that the Dogon priest who was her father had worn.

  The small man looked directly at us as he walked. His face was long with well-cut features that were fixed in a grave arrangement.

  “This is the hogon,” Yéhéné said, as we rose to greet the high priest.

  Yéhéné had said to us before leaving Timbuktu that the hogon we would be meeting was “special,” that he was not only a spiritual leader but “carries the story of the Dogon people in his head.” I had heard of such figures in Africa, as had Jeanne. I had been told that they were called griots, but Jeanne said that the term griot was a French coinage, and that the indigenous word djeli was more appropriate.

  Four hand-carved chairs were brought from a nearby ochre-colored masonry building and the hogon, whose name was not told to us, invited us to sit. A thick sweet tea was served by a pretty young girl in a long brilliant yellow dress.

  The hogon was pleasant of mien, but enigmatically quiet, as if the exigencies of the moment were less important to him than the demands of Amma and the burden of remembered history.

  Jeanne and I had talked at length the night before about how best to proceed. Besides the straight-forward questions that had to be asked, we were, for the most part, culturally very much at sea. Remembering that Haiti had remained culturally more African than black America— indeed, more so than any black society in the western hemisphere—Jeanne strongly advised that we not advance too quickly to the business at hand, as Americans were prone to do, but to pay, first, punctilious attention to the requirements of courtesy, requirements we’d already run afoul of by arriving without gifts.

  Jeanne said, “No matter how anxious you feel about charging forward with the questions, hold yourself back or you’ll seem—what is it the English-speaking Caribbeans say?—broogoo to him. Crude.”

  I followed Jeanne’s advice although this was not easy to do.

  We drank tea and spoke of inconsequential matters. The hogon asked what our impressions were thus far of Timbuktu, and Mali in general. He told us that he had heard much about America but did not think it likely that he would ever visit.

  After a space in our talk, he said calmly, “What is it that you wish to ask me?”

  He appeared possessed of a certain prescience and the suddenness of his question for a moment put me off my stride. I gathered resolve. Beginning then with this: “Was there ever a priest here named Ongnonlou?”

  “There have been many priests here by that name.”

  Yéhéné, translating, seemed surprised by the question. It was foreign to any context that we’d discussed with him. If the hogon was surprised, he did not show it.

  I drew a long breath and looked at Jeanne before going on. “In the year 1394, was there a priest here named Ongnonlou?”

  “By your calendar?”

  There are others?

  “The Dogon have four calendars: a solar calendar, a Sirius calendar, a Venus calendar, and a lunar calendar.”

  “I mean 1394 years after the death of Christ.” I feared that I may have offended him.

  He smiled distantly. “Yes.”

  “There was a Dogon priest here by that name in 1394 A.D.?”

  “Yes.” The answer had come without hesitation.

  I did not know quite how to continue. I had the odd feeling that he knew why we had come, that he—how else can one say it?—sympathized with us, and wanted to help.

  “He was the blind priest who became a great hogon.”

  “Did he have a daughter?” I was growing nervous. Jeanne put the tips of her fingers on my forearm and touched me lightly, briefly.

  “He had four daughters and five sons.”

  “Nine children?”

  “Yes.” Again the distant smile. Knowing. Terribly knowing.

  “Who was the youngest child?”

  This time he drew the smile between us. “The youngest child of the great hogon Ongnonlou was a girl. Her name was …”

  He called the girl’s name, but I could not hear it discerningly enough to lend to it the sounds and symbols of an English-language phonetic.

  “Bright Light,” said Yéhéné, completing the translation of what the hogon had said.

  “It was known before she was born that she was to be a divine soul, a soul that had lived before and would live many times again. Thus the na
me Bright Light.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I cannot tell you that.”

  This may have been a rebuke of some sort. I could not determine whether or not this was his intention.

  “Late in the year of 1401,” he smiled as he referred to our calendar, “Bright Light went with the women of the village, as she had always done, to wash clothes by the river. She became separated from the women and disappeared. She was never seen again.” The knowing directness of the look. The eyes lambent, alive.

  “What happened to Ongnonlou?”

  “As a solace for the loss of his divine child, the creator god Amma gave him back his sight.”

  I picked up my cloth bag and removed from it the drawing which was protected by the clouded plastic sleeve. Passing the drawing to him, I did not say what it was, or that my grandmother had created it from a dream of a past life.

  The hogon examined it without surprise and did not ask where it had come from. He spoke softly to Yéhéné, then rose and walked toward the rock face of the escarpment.

  Yéhéné directed us to follow. The hogon entered a narrow cleft in the sandstone cliff that was screened from above by a huge knife-edged crag.

  “Come. Come,” he called in Dogon over his shoulder as we followed him deep into the face of the escarpment. Forty feet in, the cleft widened into a cool stone-walled cavity that was lighted from above with golden supernal sunlight. In the center of the space stood a broad stone column of obvious great age measuring ten feet in height. The column had been impressed by a skilled stone artisan with intricate markings that were unmistakably Dogon.

  “Come. Come.”

  As we drew closer, we saw that the engravings described the elliptical orbits of three small stars around Sirius. The drawing that my grandmother had made was virtually a perfect replica of the markings on the stone column. The orbit lines chiseled into the column, though old, had remained over the centuries easily discernible. First, there was Sirius, the bright blue star I had seen from my backyard on that cold night ten years before. Then, carved into the column was Sirius A, which had not been seen through a telescope by a Western astronomer before 1862. Then, Sirius B (Po Tolo) that the Dogon say is made of a metal they call sagala which, according to them, is heavier than all of the iron on Earth. Lastly, scored into the ancient stone statue was the tiny star Emme Ya that Western astronomers had yet to see, or even identify as existing.

  After allowing us time to examine the statue closely, the hogon spoke for the first time since entering the room. “The French scientist Dieterlen came here with a team of experts ten years ago to talk to us and look at the heavens carved into the stone. They said at the time that the carving was more than 400 years old. But they were wrong. The carving is much older than that. The Dogon have known about the movements of the stars and the planets for more than 5,000 years. Saturn with its rings. Jupiter and its moons. Sirius and its stars. The heavens all.”

  Jeanne said that a young American astronomer named Carl Sagan had explained that Europeans might have visited the Dogon in the 1920s and informed them of astronomical matters. The hogon merely smiled and moved his fingers across the effaced engravings on the ancient stone statue.

  It was very still in the little rock-faced room. The smallest sound trailed around the smooth walls.

  I sensed that the meeting had come to an end.

  The hogon said, as if to settle the matter, “In time, they will find Emme Ya. What will they then say?”

  With little or no thought, I reached into my rucksack and took out the picture I had taken of my grandmother the day before I left for college. Without comment, I handed it to the hogon.

  “Oh yes, yes, yes,” he murmured softly, almost as if to himself. “Our people recognized long ago that she was a special soul. What a great honor it is to finally see her in the flesh.” His face alight with wonderment, he studied the small snapshot closely and, for long moments, remained quiet.

  “Was she once an Akân woman?” When I was ten, I had heard that same question asked by the mysterious man at the 6th Street market.

  “I think that, yes, she was.”

  I looked at Jeanne. The cool space in the cavity was silent and completely still. It felt as though we had ceased to breathe for fear that movement of any sort would distract the hogon.

  Then he said almost inaudibly, “Adinkra.”

  I had hear the word before, from my grandmother.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  “The symbol there behind her. It is an Adinkra symbol.

  It is from the Ashanti of Ghana. Nyame nwu na mawu. The symbol represents to the living the immortality of the soul. The message behind the symbol comes to us from Amma or Creator God. It has deep spiritual significance to Africans throughout this region.”

  I recalled the English translation of the same passage that I had read, on the flight across the Atlantic, in Professor Opoku’s book.

  “God does not die and I shall, therefore, not die” is an expression of the belief in the eternity of God and the immortality of the soul, which is the spark of God in man.

  The hogon knelt and took from his robe a small brown leather pouch. He filled the pouch with soil dug from the area of the engraved stone column’s base.

  He then rose and, with a formal gesture, presented me with the soil.

  “The Dogon people would be honored if you would give this to her upon your return to America.”

  And then the old hogon was gone.

  Jeanne, Yéhéné, and I sat for a while under the banyan tree before boarding the little donkey cart that would take us part of the way back to Timbuktu. The discussion with the hogon had had a disproportionate effect on Yéhéné, I think, because he had no notice of all that the discussion would involve.

  We had been silent for a time, digesting things, when Yéhéné, looking at the ground musingly, said, “In your country, there is a great professor of our past. His name is John Henrik Clarke. A Negro American like yourselves. Do you know of him?”

  Jeanne said that she did, though she had not read his work. I confessed to have never heard of him.

  Yéhéné looked disappointed. “He was here many times.”

  I said nothing.

  “He was blind also, you know. I met him in New York. He taught at one of the colleges there and would come to the UN to speak with the Africans there.”

  Yéhéné peered around musingly.

  “He said to me once, ‘I see the world clearly because I am blind. I am less distracted. I have the darkness in which to think and remember and know who I am. When I speak in America about the Dogon and their ancient knowledge of the cosmos, the academy works its collective authority to make me out as a lunatic. The first line of academic hostility to the notion of Africans having a past is to distract everyone in the world from searching for it. But I cannot see the distractions. All I do in here is think. Thinking in our people is somehow seen to be dangerous to the academy. When one does so by overrunning the rampart of glossy diversion, the West’s first line of cultural hegemonic defense, the academy’s centurions come out firing upon us like missiles from underground silos. Such is the West’s hostility to the very notion that black people might have done something great as an outcome, not of individuals formed by them, but rather as products of great civilizations formed by their own people. The consequence of this, the consequence of the West’s ceaseless cultural antipathy toward us, is that they have defeated us finally by causing us to think so little of ourselves. They have sought to guarantee our defeat by diverting us from even seeking to discover ourselves. But I am not distracted. I am blind.’

  “Your Professor Clarke said these things to me. He is a great man and you, my dear Gray, have never heard of him. So sad. So sad.”

  We got back to the guesthouse in Timbuktu that evening after the dinner hour had ended and the two-person staff had left for home. The pendulum of our aroused emotions had swung back, with postadrenaline force
, in the direction of hunger and fatigue. I accepted with no small gratitude Jeanne’s offer to share the vendor-machine potato chips and sweets that she, before leaving Baltimore, had squirreled away in the pockets of her suitcase.

  The evening sky was flecked brilliant with stars. The air was cool and dry. I stowed the leather pouch filled with soil in the bottom of the satchel in which I kept the notes and my grandmother’s drawing of the Sirius star system. I had left the snapshot of my grandmother with the hogon as a token of appreciation, while fearing that I may have committed a faux pas of some sort. I bathed and changed into fresh clothes and headed for Jeanne’s room, a thirtyfoot walk along a narrow hall lighted by a single yellow bulb seated in the trunk of an ebony-wood elephant-head sconce.

  Jeanne opened the door dressed in a white linen shift that augmented the rich bloom a day of sun had raised from her dark brown skin.

  “This way, my Gray,” playing with me now, seating me on the little bed with a thin mattress, serving the vendormachine fare with cheery theatricality. She was anything but a brooder. She had a talent for happiness that I envied. Yet, I suspected, when she needed to be, she was as malleable as cast iron. God I loved her. Loved her silly. Especially tonight. This night. In this place. After today.

  She was performing for me now. Walking about. Guileless. Funny. Very funny. Celebrating what had happened today without yet seeing the full stunning significance of it. Neither of us could possibly yet. Laughing. Laughing at me in that way that one only laughs when one is in love. And I laughed with her laughing at me. For I was celebrating not just the day, but us, and that she knew me—could and did know me, and was only the second person on Earth to do so. We had nothing to hide from each other anymore. Hence, we were not embarrassed by the giddiness that we shared toward the backside of now.

  “You should have seen yourself, Gray.” Giddiness subsiding. Laughter quieting. Recognition dawning. Belief lagging still. Eyes loving.

  “You should have seen yourself, Jeanne.”

  “You walked into the mountain and found a lamp unto weary feet. Oh my God, who must your grandmother really be?”