Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

  “You afraid of witches?”

  “No.”

  “Be afraid of your bad lies. What kind of woman you going to undress with such a salty mouth?”

  She looked at me for a very long time.

  “How come I miss it before? My eyes going blind from the sight of shoga boys.”

  “My ears going tired from the words of witches.”

  “They should be tired of you being a fool.”

  I made one step towards her and the children stopped and glared at me. All the smiles gone.

  “Children cannot help how they are born, they had no choice in it. Choosing to be a fool, though . . .”

  The children went back to being children, but I heard her above the noise of play.

  “If I were a witch, I would have come to you as a comely boy since that is the way inside you, false? If I were a witch, I would summon a tokoloshe, fool him that you are a girl and have him rape you while invisible each night. If I were a witch, every one of these children would have been killed, cut up, and sold in the Malangika witches market. I am not a witch, fool. I kill witches.”

  Three nights after the first moon, I woke up to a storm in the hut. But there was no rain and the wind dashed from one part of the room to the other, knocking over jars and water bowls, rattling shelves, whipping through sorghum flour, and disturbing some of the children awake. On the rug, Smoke Girl was shaking out of her own shape. Moaning, her face solid as skin, then fading into smoke, about to vanish. Out of her face popped another face that was all smoke, with terror eyes and a screaming mouth, shaking and grimacing as if forcing herself out of herself.

  “Devils trouble her sleep,” Sangoma said as she ran over to Smoke Girl.

  Two times the Sangoma grabbed her cheeks, only for the skin to turn to smoke. She screamed again, but this time we heard. More children woke up. Sangoma was still trying to grab her cheek, yelling for her to wake up. She started to slap the girl, hoping that she would turn from smoke to skin long enough. Her hand hit her left cheek and the girl woke up and bawled. She ran straight to me and jumped up on my chest, which would have knocked me over were she any heavier than air. I patted her on the back and went right through her, so I patted again, gentle. Sometimes she was solid enough to feel it. Sometimes I could feel her little hands holding my neck.

  The Sangoma nodded at Giraffe Boy, who was also awake, and he stepped over sleeping children to get to the wall, where she had covered something with a white sheet. He grabbed it, she handed me a torch, and we all went outside. The girl was asleep, still gripping my neck. Outside was still deep dark. Giraffe Boy placed the figure on the ground and pulled away the sheet.

  It stood there looking at us like a child. Cut from the hardest wood and wrapped in bronze cloth, with a cowrie in its third eye, feathers sticking out of its back, and tens of tens of nails hammered into its neck, shoulders, and chest.

  “Nkisi?” I asked.

  “Who show you one,” the Sangoma said, not as a question.

  “In the tree of the witchman. He told me what they were.”

  “This is nkisi nkondi. It hunts down and punishes evil. The forces of the otherworld are drawn to it instead of me; otherwise I would go mad and plot with devils, like a witch. There is medicine in the head and the belly.”

  “The girl? She just had troubled sleep,” I said.

  “Yes. And I have a message for the troubler.”

  She nodded at Giraffe Boy, who pulled out a nail that had been hammered in the ground. He took a mallet and hammered it into the nkiski’s chest.

  “Mimi nguvu. Mimi nguvu. Mimi nguvu. Mimi nguvu. Kurudi zawadi kumi.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Giraffe Boy covered the nkisi, but we left it outside. I held the girl to put her down and she was solid to the touch. The Sangoma looked at me.

  “Do you know why nobody attacks this place? Because nobody can see it. It is like poison vapor. The people who study evil know there is a place for mingi. But they do not know where it is. That does not mean they cannot send magics out on the air.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I returned the gift to the giver. Ten times over.”

  From then I would wake up in blue smoke, the girl lying on my chest, sliding down my knee to my toes, sitting on my head. She loved sitting on my head when I was trying to walk.

  “You are blinding me,” I would say.

  But she just giggled and it sounded like breeze between leaves. I was annoyed and then I was not and then I just took it as it was, that at nearly all times there was a blue cloud of smoke on my head, or sitting on my shoulders.

  Once, me and Smoke Girl went with Giraffe Boy out into the forest. We walked for so long that I did not notice we were no longer in the tree. In truth I was following the boy.

  “Where do you go?” I asked.

  “To find the flower,” he said.

  “There are flowers everywhere.”

  “I go to find the flower,” he said, and started skipping.

  “A skip for you is a leap for us. Slow, child.”

  The boy shuffled but I still had to walk swift.

  “How long have you lived with the Sangoma?” I asked.

  “I do not think long. I used to count days but they are so many,” he said.

  “Of course. Most mingi are killed just days after birth, or right after the first tooth shows.”

  “She said you will want to know.”

  “Who, Sangoma?”

  “She said he will want to know how I am mingi but so old.”

  “And what is your answer?”

  He sat down in the grass. I stooped and Smoke Girl scampered off my head like a rat.

  “There is it. There is my flower.”

  He picked up a small yellow thing about the size of his eye.

  “Sangoma saved me from a witch.”

  “A witch? Why would a witch not kill you as a baby?”

  “Sangoma says that many would buy my legs for wicked craft. And a boy leg is bigger than a baby leg.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did your father sell you?” he said.

  “Sell? What? No. He did not sell me. He is dead.”

  I looked at him. I felt a need to smile at him, but I also felt false doing so.

  “All fathers should die as soon as we are born,” I said.

  He looked at me strange, with eyes like children who heard words parents should not have said.

  “Let us name a stone after him, curse it, and bury it,” I said. Giraffe Boy smiled.

  Say this about a child. In you they will always find a use. Say this as well. They cannot imagine a world where you do not love them, for what else should one do but love them? Ball Boy found out I had a nose. Kept rolling into me, almost knocking me over, and shouting, Find me! then rolling away.

  “Keep eye sh—” he shouted, rolling over his mouth before saying shut.

  I did not use my nose. He left a trail of dust along the dry mud path, and squashed grass in the bush. He also hid behind a tree too narrow for his wide ball of a body. When I jumped behind and said, I see you, he looked at my open eye and burst into crying, and bawling and screaming. And wailing, truly he did wail. I thought the Sangoma would come running with a spell and the Leopard would come running ready to rip me apart. I touched his face, I rubbed his forehead.

  “No no no . . . I will . . . you hide again . . . I will give you . . . a fruit, no a bird . . . stop crying . . . stop crying . . . or I . . .”

  He heard it in my voice, something like a threat, and cried even louder. So loud that he scared me more than demons. I thought to slap the cry out of his mouth but that would make me my grandfather.

  “Please,” I said. “Please. I will give you all my porridge.”

  He stopped crying in the quic
k.

  “All?”

  “I will not even taste a dipped finger.”

  “All?” he asked again.

  “Go hide again. I swear this time I shall only use my nose.”

  He started laughing as quickly as he cried before. He rubbed his forehead against my belly, then he rolled off quick like a lizard on hot clay. I closed my eyes and smelled him out, but walked right past him five times, shouting, Where is this boy? with him giggling as I shouted, I can smell you.

  In seven days we would have been living with the Sangoma for two moons. I asked Kava, Will none from Ku come looking for us? He looked at me as if his look was an answer.

  * * *

  —

  Hear now, priest. Three stories about the Leopard.

  One. A night fat with heat. Sometimes I woke up when the smell of men from a place I’ve been got stronger, and I knew they approached, on horse, on foot, or in a pack of jackals. Sometimes I woke up to a scent getting weaker, and I knew they were leaving, fleeing, walking away, or finding somewhere to hide. Kava’s scent getting weaker and the Leopard’s as well. No moon in the night but some of the weeds lit up a trail in the dark. I ran down the trees and my foot hit a branch. Hit my ass, hit my head, rolling, tumbling down like a boulder cut loose. Twenty paces in the bush, there they were under a young iroko tree. The Leopard, belly flat on the grass. He was not a man; his skin was black as hair and his tail whipped the air. He was not Leopard; his hands grabbed a branch, and thick buttocks slapped against Kava, who was fucking him with fury.

  How much I hated Kava, and whether it was the hole of the woman at the tip of my manhood that made me hate, even if between my legs was a tree branch, and that my hate had nothing to do with the woman since at the tip of me was not a woman for that was old wisdom, which was folly, even the witchman said so.

  That I wanted to hurt the Leopard and be the Leopard. How I smelled the animal and how that smell got stronger, and how much people change smell when they hate, and fuck, and sweat, and run from fear and how I smell it, even when they try to mask it.

  What witchery do you work today, inquisitor? What shall you know?

  Shoga? Of course I knew. Does such a man not always know? This is the third time I have said the name and yet you do not know it? As for us shoga men, we found inside ourselves another woman that cannot be cut out. No, not a woman, something that the gods forgot they made, or forgot to tell men, maybe for the best. Will you hear me, inquisitor, that whenever he touches it, rubs it hard or soft, or jerks it when inside me, that I will stay here, and spurt seed on the wall over there. Hit the ceiling. Hit the top of the tree, spray across the river to the other side and hit a Gangatom in the eye.

  So you do laugh, inquisitor.

  This is not the first you have heard of shoga men. Call them with poetry as we do in the North; men with the first desire. Like the Uzundu warriors who are fierce for they have eyes for only each other. Or call them vulgar as you do in the south, like the Mugawe men who wear women’s robes so you do not see the hole you fuck. You look like a basha, a buyer of boys. And why not? Boys are pretty beasts; the gods gave us nipples and holes and it’s not the cock or the koo, but the gold in your purse that matters.

  Shoga fight your wars, shoga guard your bride before marriage. We teach them the art of wife-being and house making and beauty and how to please a man. We will even teach the man how to please his wife so that she will bear him children, or so that he will rain all over her with his milk every night. Or she will scratch his back and curl her toes. Sometimes we will play tarabu music on kora, djembe, and talking drum, and one of us will lie as woman, and another will lie as man and we show him the 109 positions to please your lover. You have no such tradition? Maybe that is why you like your wives young, for how would they know if you are a dismal lover? Me and Kava only used our hands. I thought it was not strange, maybe because I still carried the woman on the tip. I once asked the witchman to cut it off, after my uncle forbade it. He looked at me with all his wisdom gone, and nothing left but puzzlement, a wrinkle between his brows, and his eyelids squeezing like a man losing vision. He said, “Do you wish for one eye as well, or maybe one leg?”

  “It was not the same,” I said.

  “If the god Oma, who made man, wanted you cut to reveal such flesh he would have revealed it himself,” he said. “Maybe what you need to cut away is the foolish wisdom of men who still make walls with cow shit.”

  * * *

  —

  Two. The next day Leopard kicked me in the face and woke me up. I opened my eyes and looked at his face, his wild shrub hair and eyes, white with a tiny black dot in the center. I was more afraid of the man than the Leopard. His big head and shoulders a warning that he can still carry up a tree beasts three times as heavy. He stepped on my chest, a bow slung over his right shoulder and a quiver of arrows in his left hand.

  “Wake up. Today you will learn how to use a bow,” he said.

  He took me from the house, down the twisting trunks to another field that felt far away. We passed the little iroko tree where he let Kava fuck him. Beyond that, and beyond the sound of the little river, to another field of trees, so tall they scraped the sky and branches like spider legs all tangled together. Behind him the hair on his head went down to his neck, across his back, and down to a point and disappeared above his buttocks. Hair sprouted back on his thigh and went down to his toes.

  “Kava said when he first saw you, he tried to kill you with a spear.”

  “What a storyteller he is,” the Leopard said, and kept walking.

  We stopped in a clearing, a tree about fifty paces away from us. The Leopard took off his bow.

  “Are you his and is he yours?” I asked.

  “What Sangoma says about you is true,” he said.

  “That woman can go lick between the ass cheeks of a leper.”

  He laughed.

  “You’ll be asking of love next,” he said.

  “Well, do you have love for the man, and does the man love you?”

  He looked straight at me. Either he just grew whiskers, or I just saw them.

  “Nobody loves no one,” he said.

  He turned away and nodded at the tree. The tree spread its arms to welcome him and exposed a hole right near where the heart would be, a hole that I could see right through. The Leopard already had the bow in his left hand, the string in his right, an arrow between his fingers. Before I even saw him raise the bow, draw the string, release the arrow that went through the hole in the tree with no sound, he had already drawn and shot another. He drew and shot another, then handed me the bow. I thought it would have been light, but it was about as heavy as the baby in the forest.

  “Follow my hand,” he said, and held it right to my nose.

  He moved left and my eyes followed him. His arm went too far and I turned my neck to see if he was about to slap me, or some other little evil. Then he moved his hand right and I followed him with my eyes until I couldn’t see it.

  “Hold it with your left hand,” he said.

  “Your arrow,” I said.

  “What of it?”

  “It shines like iron.”

  “It is iron.”

  “All the Ku arrows are bone and quartz.”

  “The Ku still kill children whose top teeth grow first.”

  This is how the Leopard taught me to kill with bow and arrow. Hold the bow on the side of the eye you use less. Draw the bow from the side of the eye you use more. Spread your feet until they are shoulder wide. Use three fingers to hold the arrow on the string. Raise and draw the bow, pull the string to your chin, all in the quick. Aim for the target and release the arrow. The first arrow went up into the sky and almost struck an owl. The second struck a branch above the hole. The third, I don’t know what it struck but something squealed. The fourth struck the trunk near the ground.


  “She is getting annoyed with you,” he said. And pointed to the tree. He wanted me to retrieve the arrows. I pulled the first out of the branch and the little hole closed up. I was too scared to pull out the second, but the Leopard growled and I yanked it quick. I turned to run but a branch hit me flat in the face. The branch wasn’t there before. Now the Leopard laughed.

  “I can’t aim,” I said.

  “You can’t see,” he said.

  I couldn’t see without blinking, couldn’t draw without shaking, I couldn’t point without shifting to the wrong leg. I could release the arrow, but never when he said so and the arrows never hit anywhere I pointed. I thought of aiming for the sky just so it would strike the ground. Truth, I did not know the Leopard could laugh this much. But he would not leave until I shot an arrow through the hole in the tree, and every time I struck the tree, it slapped me with a branch that was either always there or never there. Night sky was heavy before I shot an arrow through the target. He grabbed arrows and started walking, his way of saying we were done. We went down a path that I did not recognize, with rock and sand and stone covered in wet moss.

  “This used to be a river,” he said.

  “What happened to it?”

  “It hates the smell of man and flows under the earth whenever we approach.”

  “Truly?”

  “No. It’s the end of rainy season.”

  I was about to say that he has been living with the Sangoma for too long, but didn’t. Instead I said, “Are you a Leopard that changes to man or a man that changes to Leopard?”

  He walked off, stepping through the mud, climbing the rocks in what used to be a river. Branches and leaves blocked the stars.

  “Sometimes I forget to change back.”

  “To man.”

  “To Leopard.”

  “What happens when you forget?”

  He turned around and looked at me, then pressed his lips and sighed.

  “There’s no future in your form. Smaller. Slower, weaker.”

  I didn’t know what to say other than “You look faster, stronger, and wiser to me.”

  “Compared to whom? You know what a real Leopard would have done? Eaten you by now. Eaten everyone.”