by John Harris
At the chattering which broke out at their appearance, half a dozen babies, asleep in their mothers’ arms, awakened with a series of yells and cotton dresses and lappas were opened for them to be breast-fed and quietened.
Mrs Swannack indicated a seat at the front of the church where, to Jimmy’s surprise, Earnshaw already sat, dressed for the occasion in a striped shirt and an ugly satin tie. Underneath his chair was a grey American fedora.
“Didn’t expect to find you here,” Jimmy whispered as he pushed past.
“Anything’s exciting, old lad, when there’s nothing to do,” Earnshaw pointed out simply. “Me and Old Doc never miss nothing new. Helps to keep it on the run.”
He indicated the man sitting in the next chair who turned and held out his hand.
He was plump and elderly and his face was damp with perspiration. Down the back of his shirt was a dark moist patch.
A pair of shrewd blue eyes stared appraisingly at Jimmy through thick, old-fashioned spectacles. “Seems we’ll be neighbours,” he said. “Name’s Romney.” He shook hands hurriedly, as though it were a hardship, using Jimmy’s arm like a pump handle.
“Doctor Romney,” Earnshaw corrected him. “You get your first dose of malaria,” he informed Jimmy with weighty foreboding, “Old Doc’ll pull you through it. Twenty-five years and more on the Coast and him nearly seventy. He’s the reason this place ain’t known as the White Man’s Grave any more.”
“Not enough malaria to worry your head about,” Romney assured Jimmy gruffly. “Healthy a place as you’ll find in Sierra Leone. Took long enough but it’s working.” The old man’s eyes, shining under his bushy eyebrows, had a sudden absorbed look, as though they stared out on his life’s work.
“Ain’t the diseases, old lad,” Earnshaw said gloomily to Jimmy in a stage whisper. “It’s the food. This wog cooking. It’s awful. I got stomach ulcers out of it big as house bricks.”
“God, those ulcers,” Romney interjected wearily without turning round.
“I suffer terrible,” Earnshaw continued. “Everything outa tins. I can’t hardly eat a thing afore I start getting pains in my guts.” He screwed up his wrinkled face into an agonised grimace for Jimmy’s enlightenment. “That and foot rot. I always got that. Foot rot, gut rot, and nut rot. That’s Sierra Leone all over.”
“Nut rot?”
“Melancholia, old lad. Going off yer chump. Like I said, you got to keep it on the run else you go barmy.”
“So we buy a gramophone,” Romney said, “and drive everyone else barmy instead.” He glanced at Jimmy. “You’ll already be acquainted with the apotheosis of Carmen Miranda.”
“She’s a good singer,” Earnshaw pointed out.
“Doubtless. It’s just that you have her sing so often.”
Earnshaw looked at him pityingly. “You got to have something to do of a night, aintcha?” He turned to Jimmy and the Africans nearby leaned forward to listen. “Me, I got everything to keep you busy, old lad. Canasta. Monopoly. Dominoes. Cards. Beer. Gin. Everything that opens and shuts. I shown the boys how to play–”
“In fact,” Romney interrupted again over his shoulder, “we’ve brought mental atrophy to a fine art, and now we’re instructing the natives in it.”
Earnshaw’s voice became high with indignation. “It’s either that else boozing,” he said. “Twiggy goes for the booze. The way he drinks sometimes, you think he got holler legs. I go in for Carmen Mirandy and tiddly-winks with Suri and the boys. Cheaper and better for me ulcers. You sure they’re ulcers, Doc? I think they might even be gallstones. Thought I could hear ’em, in fact, rattling round like a lot of marbles.”
“Teeth. That’s what it is. You should have your teeth out. I’ve been telling you so for years.”
“What, all of ’em? I’d look like the entrance to the Severn Tunnel.”
“There’s such a thing as false teeth.”
“I’d look dandy going to see Zaidee with a set of machinery in me mouth.” Earnshaw flicked a hand across the church. “That’s Zaidee,” he said to Jimmy. “There, with her dad. Pays for the dressing up, don’t she?”
At first, Jimmy thought the girl alongside the elderly Syrian was white. Her hair was black and straight, like an Italian’s, and her skin was olive – one of coffee, two of milk, as Earnshaw had said – but her clothes stamped without question the coloured blood in her. She was wearing a tight yellow blouse and a purple scarf in a way no white woman would have dared and a pair of bright green trousers which, leaving nothing to the imagination, were studied with awe and envy by the mammies who stood nearby.
Three-D and colour by Technicolor, thought Jimmy, who had never seen anything in his life like them before. Obviously they had been made by an over-enthusiastic African tailor with a keen eye to fit and Jimmy couldn’t take his eyes off them. She looked wanton and as lusty as a young animal.
“Walks like Marilyn Monroe,” Earnshaw pointed out proudly. “She don’t come ’ere much but ole Swannack’s a sport. Always a welcome for ’er–”
He fell silent in mid-sentence and, looking for the cause, Jimmy saw the intimidating figure of Mrs Swannack heading down the church again.
“Big day today.” She flashed her false teeth at them like a badge of office and shouted out the words so that the whole congregation could hear her. “There’s my daughter, Stella, at the organ.”
Jimmy, who had expected something like Mrs Swannack with a mouth as hard as an old hack’s and a bush hat flat on top of mousy hair, was startled to see a tall girl cool in a white frock and straw hat sitting at a small harmonium. Her features were certainly her mother’s, however, and he realised that in later years, unless she had something of her father’s gentler nature, she would probably look exactly like that intimidating gospeller.
She waved at them with her fingers, and smiled, and Jimmy smiled back, blushing with embarrassment at the sudden wide grins that appeared on the interested black faces round him at the gesture.
“We won’t be long now,” Mrs Swannack boomed. “Never late here. Routine’s the thing. My, I’ve never seen such a congregation before. It’s all you young folk, I guess. The Lord loves young folk.”
Apparently at a signal from her father, Stella Swannack started to pedal the harmonium and a bronchitic wheeze came from it as she started to play, plucking up the keys with her finger nails when they stuck.
“Stand up, stand up, for Jesus!” Mrs Swannack suddenly faced front like a drill sergeant and began to bellow in a deafening contralto alongside that made Jimmy jump. “Ye Soldiers of the Cross.”
“Lift high His royil banner,” came an answering shout that was half drowned in the scuffling as the congregation scrambled to its feet from chairs, benches and the hard earth floor. “It mus’ not suffer loss.” The sudden noise started the babies howling once more and for a moment there was a considerable amount of agitation as black breasts were uncovered again.
From the back door of the church Swannack appeared, the tufts of black hair sticking straight out from his face in his fervour so that he seemed to be staring through a quickset hedge. He was followed by a choir of small black boys whose high-pitched treble voices, none too much in tune, flung the echoes crashing to the apex of the iron roof where the cheap coloured-glass window finished. A woman in the row behind, whose over-youthful yellow frock and picture hat looked oddly out of place against her black face, passed over a dog-eared card without halting her singing, but, too occupied with staring, Jimmy merely mouthed the chorus of the hymn. On one side of him, he could hear Earnshaw and Romney clearly enjoying themselves at the top of their voices and on the other, Gotto, like himself, only murmuring the words.
As the choir passed, Mrs Swannack swung into line with the precision of a guardsman and joined on the end, eventually taking her place on the bench that acted as the choir stalls where she could keep a sharp eye on the small boys.
“Praise the Lord,” Swannack intoned loudly. “Praise the Lord Who has brought us onc
e again to this glorious Sabbath Day.”
There was a chorus of Hallelujahs and Stella Swannack ceased pedalling the harmonium which wheezed to silence as she sat back and mopped her face.
“Brothers and sisters in God,” Swannack said. “Let us praise the Good Lord.”
“Amen,” shouted Mrs Swannack intimidatingly.
“Hallelujah,” responded the congregation.
“I say,” Jimmy whispered to Earnshaw. “What denomination is this?”
“Gawd knows,” Earnshaw whispered back. “Between you and me and the gatepost, I think it’s one old Swannack made up hisself.”
The service consisted almost entirely of hymns, all popular tunes which the congregation apparently knew and enjoyed, and they bellowed them with all the gusto of a Saturday night Salvation Army meeting. The sermon was one which offered blood and fire and eternal damnation as the alternative to a good life with salvation hereafter, but the black flock lapped it up, though at one point when Swannack paused for a breath before a final assault on their consciences, Jimmy distinctly heard Earnshaw saying in a loud whisper to Romney next door, “Yes, but you should of led clubs, Doc, then I could of got out my ace.”
Apart from the heat – and that crowded church in the windless humidity of Sierra Leone seemed to swell with it so that it came up from inside his shirt in waves and almost suffocated him – Jimmy found himself thoroughly enjoying the experience. There was a strong smell of charcoal, cheap perfume and perspiration from the black lady behind which mingled none too successfully with the scent of flowers, dust-dry wood and the baked corrugated iron of the roof.
Jimmy was watching Zaidee Soloman staring at Stella Swannack from her position by her father, the old Syrian. She sat bolt upright, untroubled by the temperature, her eyes constantly in the direction of the harmonium instead of on Swannack, bold and brightly-hued as a parakeet and conscious of her own beauty.
For a moment, Jimmy wondered what had brought these two to the welcome service for Swannack’s daughter, particularly as Indian Joe would inevitably be a Muslim. Then it occurred to him that for them as well as for himself and all the other people in the town, Stella Swannack’s arrival was an event, something which lifted that particular day out of the long succession of dazzling days that stretched through the year. It would have been the same, he realised, if there had been an accident or a mad dog.
The Swannacks’ house was next door to the church, beyond the little graveyard where the red headstones of dead missionaries crumbled among the ant heaps. It was full of people when they arrived after the service, and their entrance was made through an avenue of grinning Africans assembled outside to see the fun so that once again it was brought home to Jimmy that anything that happened in Amama was exciting, however trivial it might be.
As they pushed through the crowd, a storm of shouting broke out at the back among the banana plants and Jimmy heard a deep voice chanting with the timbre of a big drum.
“An’ I see a new Heaven an’ a new eart’. For de fuss Heaven an’ de fuss eart’ are passed away; and de sea is no mo’. An’ I see de Holy City, Jerusalem–”
“Samuel Assissay,” Earnshaw commented, placidly unmoved. “Playing it big and using both hands. It ain’t taken him long to wind hisself up. ’Im and Jesus is buddies,” he explained.
Assissay, an incredibly tall man, gaunt in his tattered clothes, was standing on the fringe of the crowd, waving long arms like antennae. Jimmy had seen him before on the boat on the way up-river from Ma-Imi but then he had huddled on the stern, a disconsolate bundle of arms and legs. This wildly gesturing sermoniser was a different person and it was obvious that Mrs Swannack recognised him as a threat to her influence.
“This is the Lord’s house,” she shrieked from the doorway. “If you’re blaspheming His name, Samuel Assissay, take yourself off His Holy Acre.”
“Have no fear,” Romney commented to Jimmy. “Assissay will lose this round. The opposition’s more than strong enough to hold its own.”
He studied the uproar for a while. “I’m glad you’ve seen him in action,” he said. “He’s a sort of black John the Baptist and it’s a help to know all about him if you have to meet him socially.”
The crowd were laughing and jeering at Assissay now, tormenting him and shoving him from one to another as he continued to chant his plaint at the top of his voice.
“All black men downtrodden,” he was yelling. “By-n’-by, black man savvy white master de oppressor of de poor and lowly. He rise up–” he staggered across the road from a shove in the back and collapsed on his knees in a puff of dust – “De Lord of Hosts hab” sworn it. It shall come to pass.”
The crowd was shrieking with laughter now and trying to drown his noise with a chant of its own.
“Arfar Chart Nevn. Harold be thy name. Thy Kindon come. Thy Willie Dunn…”
Two or three men advanced on Assissay whose mouth was still opening and shutting ineffectually against the din as he waved his dusty pink palms, and picking him up they tossed him into the undergrowth to the huge delight of the onlookers.
“OK, Missis Swannack,” they grinned, turning towards the house. “We fix ’um.”
“The forces of the Lord have prevailed once more,” Romney pronounced solemnly as he mounted the steps to the bungalow. “We can now enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The party consisted mostly of black people – with the addition of a couple of white ministers who had driven out especially from Freetown and were obviously keenly interested in Stella. There was also a black minister from up-river, three or four black school-teachers, and one or two foremen from the mine, among them Alf Momo, a lanky man with a lean sensitive face and the sad spaniel eyes of his race.
Mrs Swannack, unmoved by the stifling heat that glowed through doorways and windows in spite of awnings and slatted blinds, was in her element, noisy and happy and energetic as she helped the black servant to pass round the cakes and tea and the discreet glasses of home-made wine.
Like the church the old-fashioned little parlour was packed to its limits. All the white men and one or two of the black men huddled in a group round Stella Swannack, vying with each other in their attempts to claim her attention. Even Gotto managed to put in a stiff, humourless remark from time to time but no one appeared to take any notice of what he said and his conventional chit-chat was soon swamped in the noisy comments of the others so that whenever Jimmy looked at him he appeared to have been elbowed out of the conversation.
Later, when Swannack had handed round nips of gin to the men – Earnshaw downed his at a single gulp before the rest were served – Jimmy found himself alone with Stella in the garden.
Earnshaw watched them through the window, disinterested, weary and bored. “Think he going to shape up?” he asked Romney.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
“Gotto, o’ course.”
“What can Gotto do?”
“What can a boil on your neck do? Twiggy oughta kep’ him down at Ma-Imi for a bit and sent someone else up – or kep’ Gotto down there. Blimey, he’s only a few months to go before he’s finished. Why they have to send him up here? If I was young Agnew, I’d be feeling like Joe Rotten.”
“I shouldn’t worry,” Romney said, glancing through the window at Jimmy. “That young man has a lively look. He’s the sort who survives.”
Meanwhile, outside in the tumultuous garden where gaudy flowers hid beneath gigantic banana leaves, Jimmy was finding Stella Swannack as bewildered as he was himself by the confused impressions of Africa.
“I guess it takes some getting used to,” she was saying. “I was born out here, but I’d forgotten what it was like and it comes at you a bit unexpected when you come back.”
“Miss the bright lights?” Jimmy was thinking of skyscrapers and sleek cars and neon patterns and ballyhoo.
“You don’t know Morrisonville,” she smiled. “The only difference between Morrisonville and Amama is that back home we’ve got a drug sto
re and a pool room.”
“And how long are you staying?”
“Oh, just a little while.”
“And when you go back?”
“Teach, I suppose.” She didn’t seem too sure and didn’t appear to relish the prospect. “I’ve got truckloads of note-books and pencils. I’m going to fill ’em all and give a few lectures to the kids back home. I’ve got three cameras and films by the crate.”
“What do you want with three cameras?”
“Take pictures, of course. Why?”
“Yes, I know. But wouldn’t one do?”
“Three will make a better job of it. Some pictures will be this shape” – she gestured vaguely with her hands – “some will be that shape and some will be another shape.” She laughed. “That’ll make for variety even if the pictures are lousy.”
She hoisted herself on to the veranda rail and sat swinging her legs, her eyes on the ground. “The United Evangelists will always be interested in lectures about the work out here,” she said. “The only trouble is, I’m not sure that I am. At least, not interested enough to make it my life.”
“What shall you do then?” Jimmy hitched himself up at the other end of the veranda rail and sat facing her.
“Oh, look around. Visit Europe on my way back to the States. I stopped at London on the way here – that’s some city! Guess I might try Paris if the funds run to it. I might get a job in England for a bit on an exchange system. I’d like that. Then I suppose I’ll eventually get married.”
“Oh! Who to?”
“Oh, just somebody I know, I suppose.”
“Engaged?”
“Gosh, no!” She sounded indignant. “I’ve only just started looking ’em over. I mean I’ll get to know someone and decide to settle down with him. That’s all. It’s quite usual around my age.”
“Why not marry me?” Jimmy grinned. “I’m free just now and it’ll save you the journey home.”