Makeda

  That is all that should matter.

  But that’s not all that matters, somehow, and I am a little disappointed with myself to have to admit such. I am spiritually put together much as my grandmother was. I seem to look for in people, quite involuntarily, that which I never found in my parents, or even Gordon. An elasticity of intellectual tolerance. A taste for the foreign, the unexplored, the unknown. A certain poetic inexactness. The sweet mess of unscripted creativity.

  This is what I have looked for in people. What I have found is that I, perish the insight, have become a little of what I so intensely disliked in my parents, that is intolerant, and sometimes self-righteously, judgmentally so.

  I was as distant from them as they were from me. We were simply different, and there is little more that can be said about it.

  But one recognizes and knows and, then, loves the self that one finds in another. How else could two people proceed, spiritually affirmed, except by mutual recognition? I found myself in Jeanne and, conversely, she in me. Thus could she know me and come to love me.

  The tie of blood alone cannot engender love. Only the staged, ritualized form of it. One must really know another soul to really love that soul. I have known in my life only three, and here I count myself fortunate: Jeanne, Michäelle, and Makeda.

  My father died of congestive heart failure just before Jeanne and I moved here to the Shore. I mourned him in form.

  I am reasonably certain that he would not have thought much of what I have done with my life as the managing editor for a small little-known newspaper. It would not have meant success to him. Hence, he would not have understood the pure joy that Jeanne and I felt just recently when the struggling black farmers here, with The Bugle’s support, prevailed in their suit against the United States Department of Agriculture on the grounds of racial lending discrimination. Nor could he have understood our despair when the government declined to honor the settlement that it had reached, in bad faith as it turns out, with the farmers. Or perhaps, remembering my grandmother’s accounts, my father might have appreciated all of this as a young man. As it was, he seemed to have died twice, the first death a larger tragedy than the second.

  The two of us, my father and I, were never to reconcile.

  My mother died a year after my father. It was as if there were nothing else for her to do, my father being gone and all, which—all—was what he had been to her.

  My grandmother, the great formative figure in my life, died in 1989 at the age of eighty-six. She lived long enough to example her immortal splendid spirit to our daughter, Michäelle, who was thirteen at the time of her greatgrandmother’s passing.

  I am here on the Shore working hard for small wages and miniscule notice, clearly not only because of Jeanne, but because of my grandmother’s lasting influence upon me as well. I am happy and fulfilled as I never imagined I could be.

  Even now, I can recall, as if they had taken place yesterday, all of our Saturday and weekday talks, including one that took place during my last year of high school. My grandmother had been encouraging my embryonic confidence in the idea of trying to become a writer.

  “Live where you are. Success can only be found in your heart. It’s a very private thing, son. What everyone else calls success is usually not that at all, and the people who have what most people call success are often miserable. Don’t be fooled by that. If it doesn’t make you happy, it’s not success.”

  Not long after my father’s death, my grandmother would confide to me in the parlor of the house from which she would not, before her death, be budged, “My biggest failure in this life was with my own son. There were things I could not make him see even though he was a devoted son. It was just how he was after the war. Closed and afraid inside, fightin’ so hard he couldn’t afford to look around. Couldn’t let his guard down. My poor David.”

  By most any standard, I cannot be remarked to have been a productive writer. While over the years I’ve had several ideas for books, I’ve never been sufficiently motivated to act on any one of them owing to the ideas having been forced out and contrived. Any book based on them would have necessarily resulted in an empty uninspired exercise.

  Over the fifteen years since my grandmother’s death, I have, however, worked on and off, sometimes like a stuck stylus, on the book about her dreams of past lives.

  Following the blow-up with my father, precipitated by Gordon’s death and the ill-advised disclosures that I made to Dr. Harris-Fulbright of the University of Southern California, my grandmother requested that I not write anything about her experiences until after she, my mother, and my father were gone. She was adamant about this and there was nothing I could do to change her mind, including telling her that no major publisher would consider publishing such a book without her alive to verify its central thesis. Even under those circumstances, I told her, it would be unlikely that a publisher would agree to such a book. Still not moving from the position she had taken, she made a second request that appeared to fly in the face of the first.

  “You must promise me that you will see to it that the book is published before these people find Emme Ya.”

  She was obsessive about this, and restated it to me with increasing frequency in the months before her death. Her last dischargeable duty on Earth, she held, was to make certain that “these people” not be allowed to take credit for astronomical discoveries that the Dogon people had made hundreds, if not thousands of years before. She would not listen to reason. Reality was of little concern to her. I told her that black Americans had almost no influence inside the American major publishing industry and that the industry would likely be little interested in Dogon proofs, even those that had been verified by white scientists like the French team of eminent anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen.

  “You see to it, Gray, that this gets done.”

  “I’ll do my best, Grandma,” which did not satisfy her. That day, I’d sat where I had sat since I was five—in the side chair that I placed in front of her rocker that was hard, as always, by the sun-bathed front window.

  She held lightly in her hands the Ethiopian Lalibela cross as one would an irreplaceable talisman. Though ill by then, she sat unusually high in the chair with her chin elevated as if she were an all-knowing shaman, looking back across the landscape of human experience.

  “Gray.” She spoke softly as if she had little time left.

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “I think you understand that you are the only person in the world, besides Jeanne, who knows who I am.”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “Your father would never have understood me. I never talked about any of this to your mother or Gordon. Only to you. You must tell the story. Some will laugh at you. You need to accept this. But many will listen. Our people. They’re the ones that must be made to know what happened.”

  She paused to husband her strength.

  “You are blessed, Gray. Not all of us have a larger destiny, but you do. Now, you must heed its command.”

  During the months that led up to my grandmother’s death, she endured considerable pain—accompanied by a progressive erosion of strength, but with no corresponding deterioration of her mental faculties.

  I made it my business to get from the Shore to Richmond to spend a day with her at least once every week.

  We had long talks during these visits, talks about life and its elusive meaning. As often as she could manage, we held our talks in the little parlor at the front of the house. On those occasions when the stairs presented her with too insuperable an obstacle, we held our talks at her bedside.

  Knowing full well what lay ahead, she appeared all but indifferent to the prospect of death. On those occasions when she did speak of it, she spoke of it dispassionately— as little more than a portal through which she would cross again from earthly life to the other side, the realm of the spirit world.

  She talked to me more expansively than she had in the past about her many “journeys.
” She had, it seems, become a Jew when she converted to Judaism as a young woman living in Ethiopia nearly 3,000 years ago. Since then, she had lived several Christian lives, with an indeterminate number of them lived in Ethiopia. Two others—two American lives—had been lived as a slave on a Virginia plantation.

  Another, her current life, had been lived as a blind laundress in the little house on Duvall Street in Richmond, Virginia.

  She had also lived at least one life as a Muslim—a Moor—in southern Spain. So it was that, at one time or another, she had embraced all of the three large monotheistic Abrahamic faiths.

  As my grandmother drew nearer to the earthly death that Christians seem to privately believe to be the end of everything, it became increasingly clear to me, from things she said, what overarching store she continued to place in the tenets of the West African traditional religions she had practiced during one or another of the several West African lives she had lived.

  During our countless talks in the little front parlor, she’d once asked me long ago, “Gray, tell me, what do the pictures you’ve seen of Jesus look like? You know, the ones hanging on church walls?” When I hesitated, she’d added, “You know, son, the fence Reverend Boynton and almost everybody else keep staring at.”

  Since she, as often as not, spoke in figurative terms, I hadn’t immediately taken her point. I described to her the ubiquitous print of a painting I’d looked at most of my life, a print that hung on the wall of practically every church I’d ever been in.

  “That’s nothing like the image of Jesus I have in my head,” she’d said. Then she’d found with her fingers the Book of Daniel. “Listen to this, son, The hair of his head like pure wool. Pure wool. Doesn’t sound like the hair you saw in your picture, does it? The Bible has his hair more like mine, don’t you think?”

  Thus, because of what she had come to believe about who Jesus, in life, really had been, and the regard in which the Bible’s Jesus had held the Ethiopians, she had little difficulty harmonizing her Christian faith with her several African faiths. She had come to see them all as virtually one and the same.

  “The Akân people say, If you want to speak to God, speak to the wind. God is everywhere and not just in a church or some fancy building. Jesus believed the same thing. The first Christians never had a building.”

  My grandmother had the Apostle Paul as her biblical authority for this. She had read to me from the Book of Acts what Paul told the Athenians: God who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.

  “So, son, you won’t need to talk to my headstone in order to talk to me. I won’t be there. I’ll be in the air and the Earth. I’ll be in the leaves of the trees. I’ll be in the stars that light the African heavens. I’ll be watchin’ over you and your family. My spirit will always be close enough to touch and protect you all. So, do not grieve for me. My body will die, but my soul will live on. For my soul cannot die. Always remember that my soul is the spark of God in me.”

  Nine days later, she died at home in her sleep. I had been alone with her during the hours that wound quietly down. I sat by her bed in the dark and watched her smooth mahogany face. The lids of her eyes were closed. Her hair was dressed out in silvery whorls that sprayed like a rainbow across the bright white pillow that cradled her motionless head. Her visage under the moonlight bore the gentle mark of mystical insight.

  Her soul poised to break from the failing flesh, I heard from her lips an expiry of small, faintly audible wordlike sounds.

  “Azudlozi lingayi ekhaya.”

  I moved close to her ear and whispered, “Grandma, I …”

  She slowly opened her sightless eyes and spoke to me for the last time. “The spirit never forgets the way home.”

  I gently pressed my cheek to hers. At the touch of her warm skin, I experienced a sensation of karmic envelopment— her final gift to a grateful and loving grandson—the parting embrace of her immortal soul.

  When I was a young man—even for a time after my grandmother first told me of her Dogon dream story—I believed that every life was finite and subject to nature’s one merciless implacable equalizer: time. That all living things were termed to one birth, one passage, one death. That life was little more than a brief, occluded, misunderstood affair, spent forward on currents of mystery and hopeless illogic. I had fastened all focus upon what I believed to be the permanent wall of the impermanent flesh.

  I no longer believe this. My grandmother lives—and I know this.

  Six weeks ago, almost fifteen years after her death, I completed the manuscript and retained an agent in New York to shop it around for me. It was sent to seven publishers. Within a month, four of them had rejected the book with a single-sentence form letter. A fifth wrote courteously that, Though interesting, it is not the kind of work that our house publishes. The sixth publisher answered, While your grandmother’s reincarnation dreams are believable generally, the idea that a tribe in Africa might know something about astronomy is not.

  The last publisher to be heard from, a small house in lower Manhattan, accepted the manuscript and agreed to publish it within the coming year.

  Everyone in our family knew well how long I had labored to fulfill this final obligation to my grandmother. The book, as we had for years come to call it, had developed something of an ethereal presence in our home—a soft comforting awareness of some remembered ratifying greatness that gave us health and hope and foresight enough to understand the relative seasonality of our people’s contemporary adversity.

  Of what consequence is a brief mortal moment against the affirming weight of the ages?

  When I called Michäelle to tell her the good news from the publisher, she became so excited that I worried for the health of my soon-to-arrive first grandchild. Michäelle told me then that the baby’s middle name would be Giselle after Jeanne’s mother, and that the baby’s Christian first name would be Makeda.

  CODA

  In the ancient texts and holy books, the great black woman is referred to in many places and by several names.

  In Matthew 12:42, Christ says of her, The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and shall condemn; for she came from the uttermost parts of the Earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon …

  The ancient Greeks called her the Black Minerva.

  In the Koran, the Muslim writers made reference to her as Bilqis.

  In I Kings 10:1-10 and II Chronicles 9:1-12 of the Bible, she is described as the Queen of Sheba.

  In the Ethiopians’ most sacred book, the Kebra Nagast, she is known to her own people as:

  Makeda

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Dogon people’s millennia-old knowledge of the Sirius star system was first described to English-language readers in 1976 by Robert K.G. Temple in his book The Sirius Mystery, which was published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press.

  Wrote Temple, “The Dogon also know the actual orbital period of this invisible star (Sirius B), which is fifty years … The Dogon also say that Sirius B rotates on its axis, demonstrating that they know a star can do such a thing.”

  Robert Temple is an American-born writer who lives in England. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

  In the thirty-five years since Temple’s book was published, no credible challenge has been lodged to the Dogon people’s age-old comprehensive understanding of the cosmos.

  It wasn’t until 1995 that Sirius C, the star that for countless centuries the Dogon people have called “Emme Ya, the sun of women,” was detected by French astronomers Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent.

  Three significant real-life figures presented as fictional characters in Makeda’s story have had over the years an important influence on my writing and sociopolitical thinking:

  I met Kofi Asare Opoku at a conference on Paul Robeson held nine years ago at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania where he wa
s, at the time, serving as a visiting professor. Professor Opoku, one of the world’s preeminent authorities on African traditional religions, holds degrees from Yale University Divinity School and the University of Ghana. Besides West African Traditional Religion (1978), Professor Opoku has authored several other important books on African religions and culture, including Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa (1975) and Hearing and Keeping: Akan Proverbs (1997).

  In 1970, Walter J. Leonard, a black assistant dean at Harvard Law School, persuaded the Ford Foundation to fund a small number of postgraduate research fellowships for African-Americans aspiring to work and study in Africa. I was fortunate enough to be one of the brand-new research program’s fellows. Invited in the summer of 1970 to Ford’s New York offices to brief us before our departures for several African countries (mine for Tanzania) was John Henrik Clarke, the compelling Pan-Africanist black American writer, historian, and Hunter College professor. The meeting that summer at Ford marked the beginning of a relationship between me and Professor Clarke that would last until his death in 1998 at the age of eighty-three.

  In 1964, at the age of twenty-three, I read The Negro in the Making of America by Benjamin Quarles from cover to cover in two sittings. The book made an indelible impression on me, as did his Blacks on John Brown and the eight other black history books authored by the chairman of Morgan State University’s history department. Professor Quarles died in 1996 at the age of ninety-two.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am especially appreciative that Makeda has been chosen as the first book to bear Akashic Books’ new Open Lens imprint. For this I owe a special thanks to Marva Allen, Marie Brown, Janet Hill Talbert, and Regina Brooks, as well as to the publisher, Johnny Temple, of Akashic Books. All of you have been unstintingly helpful in bringing this project to fruition. My thanks also to Jacqueline Bryan of St. Kitts who typed my handwritten manuscript.