“She ju-ju woman,” the driver said.
Constance stared at him. Then, overwhelmed with her anger, she got out of the car and walked inside the hut. The place was partitioned with an old shower-curtain of cracked plastic speckled with grey mould and patterned with ferns and fishes. The outer room was bare–only a wooden chair with one leg missing, and a chipped enamel dish containing a tin spoon and a congealed chunk of fu-fu. Constance drew aside the grimy plastic and stepped into the other room.
She blinked away the darkness and soon she could make out a packing-case topped with a piece of orange velveteen which was spotted with oil from a red clay bowl bearing a smokily burning wick. For a long moment she focused her eyes upon the makeshift table before she could summon stamina to look further. On the greasy plush surface lay innumerable oddities–a bundle of dried and darkened roots, a saucer of leaves snipped into shreds, black bowls full of bluestone and raw yellow sulphur, a leather amulet, a pocket mirror cracked across its face, a string of small rusty bells, iron keys, an ivory crucifix daubed with pale clay into which had been set the glittering green and amber splinters from broken beer bottles.
Constance forced her eyes up and away, and saw a woman kneeling, forehead almost touching the earth floor. It was Love.
Nearby, the ju-ju woman squatted. She was enormously fat, puffed out and spreading like a blowfish in some cavern of the sea. Her cloth, black and red, quivered and shook with its burden of flesh. She wore no headscarf and her unbraided and unoiled hair sprouted from her head like a black gigantic dandelion gone to seed. In her huge silver-ringed hands she held a cord dotted with lumps of clay and cowrie shells. Her eyes were almost lost in flesh, but when at last she looked up, the eyes unburied themselves, grew to diamonds, hard and sharp. She did not speak. She gazed for a second, then hawked up phlegm from her throat and spat into the dust at Constance’s feet.
“Love–” Constance spoke more loudly than she had intended, and the girl, startled, jerked up her head. Her face took on a defensive look.
“I pay wit’ my money, madam. I sell tamantas for market. Dis no be money wey you give for Sunday.”
“Never mind that.” Now Constance was able to infuse her voice with steadiness and confidence. “We’re going home, Love. Come on.”
Love shook her head and spoke almost inaudibly. “I can no do so.”
For the first time Constance felt frightened, but of what she did not know. She spoke severely, scoldingly.
“Love, get up at once. You’re coming back with me. Do you hear?”
The girl, staring up at her, started to obey. She had half risen when the old woman began to speak, crooningly, a slow outpouring of words that washed and waned like tides. Harsh and soothing by turns, the words beat upon Love, and she sank down again until she was crouched on all fours like some small soft-furred animal in a cage it cannot see but knows to be there.
“Love!” Constance cried, astounded at the pain in her own voice. “She can’t do anything for you. She can’t! It won’t work. Don’t you see?”
Love looked at Constance as though she did not recognize her. The ju-ju woman put one hand on the girl’s forehead and began stroking the skin, lightly, insistently. Then she spoke, not gloatingly, not even with emphasis, simply a statement.
“Mek you go, madam. I t’ink she no hear you propra dis time.”
Constance turned without a word and walked away. When she had pushed through the plastic curtain and emerged once more into the daylight, she found her face was wet with tears, but she did not know whether they were for Love or merely for herself, that she had lost.
She had the driver stop at Guy Bennington’s office. She wiped her streaked face and walked in. She had not intended to tell him everything, but she did.
“You’ll have to see her again,” she finished. “There must be something else you could try. At least you could explain to her that she mustn’t go there. She won’t accept it from me, apparently.”
“That’s what hurts, isn’t it?” Guy said.
Constance began to deny it. Then she remembered how she had felt at the ju-ju woman’s hut, and could not reply after all. The whole business had begun with such clarity, but now she was no longer sure of her own reasons.
“I really didn’t want to tell you,” Guy continued, “but I suppose I shall have to, now.”
“What is it?” Constance felt a quick fury, like that of a child who realizes the grown-ups are keeping something from her and yet cannot force them to reveal the violent mysteries of their exclusive world.
“There’s nothing wrong with Love,” Guy said bluntly. “She’s as able to have children as you are.”
Constance could not believe it. “Then why–?”
“The medicine? Quite harmless. A glucose mixture.”
“But,” Constance cried, “that’s no better than the old woman’s–”
“Not a bit better,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t actually prescribing for Love. For you, rather.”
“For me!”
“Well, you were determined that something had to be done, weren’t you? Now please don’t take umbrage, Constance. I haven’t time to cope with hysterical women.”
He handed her a cigarette and lit it for her.
“You didn’t know what happened to Sunday’s two previous wives, Constance?”
“Wives? He told me Love was the only one.”
“There were two before Love. He sent them away. Because they didn’t bear him any children.”
“That’s–” Constance stammered. “Why, it’s monstrous.”
“Is it? Not to have children is something of a disgrace. Not merely a heartbreak. A deep shame. I don’t think he’ll send this one away, though. He’s getting old. And she–well, she bears his anger. Fortunately, she’s able to.”
“How can she? How can she stand it?”
“She may accept the blame as rightfully hers, for all I know. If not–well, she’s wise enough not to cast it up to him.”
“It’s damned unfair,” Constance said.
Guy met her reproachful eyes. “Do you think so? To be a cook in a European house–it’s not as fashionable as it used to be, you know. Several of his nephews are clerks, and another’s studying law. I suspect he may have found it relatively easy to be proud, once, but now not so easy. As for this–there could be any number of causes, and the chances are that I wouldn’t be able to help him. I’d rather not risk it. Perhaps he knows it’s his burden. Perhaps he won’t let himself know. But if he were forced to recognize and admit–could he bear it, do you think?”
Constance remembered the necessary haughtiness of the man, the white apron clenched in his hands, and the way he had covered his eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I–can’t know.”
“No more can I.”
It was only then that she wondered how Guy could have learned as much as he had about Sunday’s life. Then she realized.
“Why didn’t Brooke simply tell me? Why didn’t he tell me?” “If he had,” Guy said, “wouldn’t you have wanted to persuade Sunday to consult your ju-ju man?”
Love walked back to the bungalow that day. Neither she nor Constance ever mentioned their encounter in Tintown. The orderly routine of living went on unchanged. Love did Small Thomas’s washing, and sometimes she sat beside him while Constance went to a friend’s for morning coffee. The medicine bottle was not refilled, and one day Constance, seeing it there with its slimy remnants, threw it out. Sunday never spoke of it. He was accustomed to employers’ spasmodic enthusiasms and the inevitable dwindling of their interest.
Occasionally there would be an uproar in the compound, and Constance would hear Sunday shouting his grief, and Love’s voice, soon turning to silence. From time to time the girl displayed a gold bracelet or a bright beaded necklace, which Constance dutifully admired. Love’s face remained impassive.
One morning, rising earlier than usual to feed a dismally howling Small Thomas, Constance looked out of the
bedroom window to the garden and saw Love. The girl was kneeling on the hard earth. She held a carved figure, a child of wood. Her hands cradled it. She broke upon it an egg, and her fingers rubbed the yellow life into the wooden arms, the wooden legs and belly.
Then she lifted her head. The stolid look was gone. In its place, a hopeless and enduring hope burnished the un-suspected face of Love.
THE PURE DIAMOND MAN
One year ago, when I was young,” said Tetteh, “I was always thinking I am Luck’s very boy.”
Daniel smiled. “Scientifically, you realize, a consistently lucky person is an impossibility. You didn’t honestly believe you were an exception?”
Tetteh had not changed in the five years since they last met. If anything, he seemed younger now to Daniel, who had changed so much. Their mother-tongues were different, so they spoke together in English, and Tetteh’s speech, as haphazard as ever, made Daniel wonder a little uncomfortably if his own careful precision gave an effect of pomposity.
Tetteh’s fingers were tapping in seeming absentmindedness at the empty glass, and finally Daniel relented and ordered another beer. At mid-morning the chop-bar was almost deserted. The proprietor, bulging with beery flesh under his dirty white trousers and green striped pyjama top, was washing glasses in a tin basin enamelled with overblown carnations. Above the bottles of Blood Wine, Iron Wine, orange squash, grenadine and gin on the shelves, corpulent blue flies buzzed lazy and slow, like old drunks without the price of solace. The fat man left his dishwashing and brought the beer, yawning as he placed the tray on the flimsy table with its fancy wrought-iron legs leprous with rust.
“I was believing with strength,” Tetteh admitted. “Say I found a silver coin in the dust. My thought would be–this coin is quite natural to find, because of this friendly liking which Luck has for me personally. If some man freely gave me some good–like you, Daniel, this moment, a beer to a friend who owns plenty of trouble but no pence–why, then I would return for him thanks in best manner, but saying as well, quietly, Thank you, Uncle, for I was Luck’s nephew in those happy and bygone days. It was so all my life. When I was a small boy in my village, people always calling me Luck Child, and even many strange stories you could hear then in Gyakrom about me.”
“Tales of your miraculous powers, I suppose.”
“Well, people saying one day I walk out in the bush, and when my eye meets some giant fern, I say ‘Fern, I greet you, and what have you got for me today?’ And at once a large toad with muscled back legs hops out from those branchy weeds and lands in my hands. And when I say ‘Thank you, Fern, this is a fine present for a man who never in his life was owning a toad’, then at once that toad changes into a weighty emerald and its eyes–what else?–gold, of course. I am only telling you what the Gyakrom people saying, Daniel. It is not known who was first starting that story. Maybe my Uncle Luck whispered it into some person’s ear, for after that day many young men eagerly hire my Luck to do some little work for them, for reasonable fee (I would take money or palm wine; I was not a difficult boy) until the Reverend Timothy Quarshie of Saint Sebastian Mission in our village unhappily was discovering it and had my father beat me with a bamboo cane.”
“It was a good try, anyway.”
“When I was at mission school,” Tetteh went on, “–do you remember, Daniel, drinking strong brews together, you and I, while hiding behind the latrines, before you go off to England for college and to learn drinking of sherry and other dainty potables which by no means having liveliness enough for healthy African stomachs?–well, in those times my Luck was staying by my side day and night. Father Halloran himself–remember that man’s big voice and how his big spectacles all surrounded by copper frames and when he takes them off you see two green spots like mould on his nose?–he was often saying to me, ‘You are getting through on luck, Tetteh, sheer luck.’ Why he need to tell me? I was knowing better than he was knowing that thing. If I help my Uncle, in the examinations, just a little–why, if your Luck helps you, then you must help your Luck, too, some time, you agree?”
“You didn’t need to help your luck,” Daniel said. “You didn’t need luck, either, if it comes to that. You were smart enough, if you’d only believed it.”
“At all, man. I was in need. Those many years I was being Fortune’s boy, even (so I believe then) on that night, one year past, when I stroll chancefully to this same Paradise Chop-Bar.”
Tetteh glanced out the window at the pink and white lettering of the chop-bar sign, the old enamels peeling in shreds or puffed out in tiny bubbles from the heat and damp. Then he teetered back on the spider-shanked chair until it nearly went spinning, rocked forward again, crashed his shining shoes, yellow as jaundice, down on the concrete floor, and slammed on the shivering table his bare brown hairless arms. He tilted to the back of his head a green fedora decorated with three round button-pins–Freedom & Justice, Nothing-with-Man, and Amaryllis Light Ale. He grinned and grimaced, flung open his arms so that the sunflowers on his mauve mammy-cloth shirt seemed to sprout high and wide, concealing his skinniness with their plump golden petals.
“This very place,” he cried, “which the sign telling us is some proper heavenly dwelling. You are a believer in signs, Daniel? I am believing in all such things.”
He laughed.
“Maybe this sign has no special meaning for you, Daniel, now you are a big newspaper man, or for Sam Etroo–you remember him–he is Doctor Samuel Etroo now, and when I meet him in the street I think he has some specks of dust in his eyes, for he is unable to see me. Or Darku, in politics–you must take off your hat, when you see him, and if you are wearing no hat, then take off your head–he does not greatly care what, but you must show respect in proper manner. You are ‘been-to’ men, my friend. What should you be needing with heavenly signs? But I am a boy from Gyakrom, and I am following my Luck and greatly wishing for some divine happenings to provide me with sufficiency of cash. Cash, Daniel–a sweet word. This cash I want for purposes which I now tell you. Namely, to start some small business of mine which will grow quickly and giantly, like some paw-paw tree, making full fruits for me. There, you see–I dash you my dream, free, for nothing, and now I am in your power. So that night when my eye meets that gentle sign PARADISE, pink and white as we are told of angels, I at once sing Lead, Kindly Luck. In my pocket this sum–three shillings and fourpence.”
Tetteh paused.
“On that remembered night,” he said, “I first was setting my eyes upon my pure diamond man.”
The small chop-bar was crowded that evening. Tetteh had to work his way around the drinkers, around the bumping and shuffling boys and their high-heeled girls who had to dance even here. Tetteh paid for one glass of beer and carried it high above his head to avoid spilling any of it. The only vacant chair was at a table beside an open window. With every tweak of breeze, the light curtain lifted and the city scents of night fluttered and spun in–the salt sea, peppery soups, heat, bodies, dust, and peeled oranges the roadside stalls sold. Tetteh sat down and sipped his beer slowly. He did not notice the man sitting beside him at the table, until the other spoke, to himself but aloud.
“Sickening.”
Tetteh turned. The voice was distinctly English. Europeans did not often patronize the chop-bars. The man was young, with yellow hair plastered flat to his scalp with perspiration. His face was long, his hazel eyes large and despondent. He wore a white linen suit, and on the table beside him lay a piece of headgear long fallen from fashion here–a solar topee. Tetteh leaned towards him.
“Excuse me. You are not finding this drink suitable for your delicate stomach?”
“What?” said the stranger. “Oh, I see. No, you misunderstand. I was referring to the dancers. The way they’re dancing, you know, and the music. Calypso. Highlife. Just cheap jazz, really, nothing else.”
The chop-bar proprietor cranked the handle of the gramophone and put on another record.
I gev my money to my wife
For m
ek me chop–
Time I come back from beezniz
My wife run away.
“So,” Tetteh said, smiling his annoyance, “highlife is not for you. Then why do you stay?”
The European sighed and ordered another gin.
“You don’t see the point, do you? You’re like all the rest. Selling your birthright for a mess of gramophone records.”
Tetteh opened wide his eyes and clenched his fists.
“How is that again, please?”
But the stranger only waved a weary hand and drank half his gin-and-tonic at a gulp.
“Don’t be offended. And don’t for heaven’s sake expect me to fight you. You look rather undernourished, I must say, but I don’t doubt you could win. I never fought anyone in my life, and I most certainly don’t intend to begin now. No–all I meant was that I’m disappointed. Sleazy nylon shirts. Pidgin English–a depravity, if I may say so. This highlife caper. Signs advertising political meetings and anti-malarial pills. All of it so dreary. The Lord knows England is drab enough. I thought it would be different here.”
“What you think to see in this place?” Tetteh enquired unpleasantly. “Men with big spears and wearing maybe one banana leaf?”
“You may not believe it,” the stranger said, “but I’ve read extensively about the structure of tribal society here. Always had a personal interest in this country, owing to my family’s finances. Your ancient culture had a weird magnificence about it–witchfinders’ dance, festivals of the dead, offerings to the river gods, the medicine man’s phenomenal sense of the dramatic. To me, those things constitute the true Africa. What’s more, it still exists. But how to discover it? That’s the maddening part. I’ve been in villages, but people clam up so. I found one revolting crone who purported to be a fetish priestess, but she turned out to be only another Bible spinner. Stabbed verses with a meat skewer. Didn’t read them, of course–gave them to her clients, to swallow like pills. Universal cure-all. Grotesque–one should be grateful–but hardly African. It’s the pure customs which interest me, not these dilutions.”
The Tomorrow-Tamer Page 17