Black Mamba Boy

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Amid all the flattery, Jama could not hear the whispers of locusts flying toward Gerset. Millions upon billions traversing the miles with a blind hunger fell upon the village without warning. The ugly warriors from the Nile Valley ate the crops, the roofs of tukuls, ate through baskets to get at hidden grains and pulses, ate the food out of children’s mouths, and what they didn’t eat they maliciously defecated on, poisoning everything. Jama tried to throw cloths over his crops but the locusts ate the sheets as he laid them down, and his workers ran away to save their own fields, lunging at the insects with torches. Within hours all that was left of his farm were stiff stubs where the sorghum once stood and piles of locusts that had died in the frenzy. Jama ran through the ravaged village, staring dumbfounded as he went from field to empty field. The women screamed and rent their clothes, but it was too late to pray, to do anything. By the next day, every farm had been ruined; children would go unfed, debts unpaid; animals would have to be slaughtered before they starved to death. In his mind Jama canceled the debts that the distraught women owed him.

  He went to find Bethlehem in the hills; even the grass was gone. She ran to him. “I saw them from here, I was so frightened I thought they had eaten everyone! They blotted out the sun, Jama!” She had been crying.

  “They have destroyed everything we worked for,” Jama said, taking her hand. He walked her back to Gerset to see the damage.

  It was a backward miracle, something made into nothing, and the suddenness of the destruction kept women wailing in shock. They believed in discipline and patience but that didn’t seem to matter now, when bounty could be reduced to penury in the blink of an eye.

  Jama and the women of Gerset put their shoulders to the plow and worked from dawn to dusk collectively. They plowed the stalks, sowed the few seeds they had saved, and smoothed manure over the earth. They sang defiant songs of Kunama unity and sisterhood to raise their spirits, heckling when Jama tried to sing along with them. Bethlehem was relieved of her shepherdess duties, and she and her mother worked side by side in Jama’s field as well as in the others. There was no joy in the work, only furrowed eyebrows and dirty hands. Jama had lost most of his appeal to the women but a modicum of magic glittered around him, and they kept him as a totem of former hope. Bethlehem became desperate and fearful, worried that the man she loved would fail again. The month of the long rains was late coming, but then came a sickly, squalid deluge that formed stagnant pools in which mosquitoes copulated and multiplied. Jama’s malaria had come back every year since he had been infected in the askari camp in Omhajer, but this year he was as weak as an old man. Bethlehem’s mother advised putting a cup of sugar in water, leaving the mixture in moonlight, and drinking it in the morning, but it just gave him nausea and sore teeth. Many people were falling sick. Bethlehem collapsed at the farm and was carried home. When she returned to work, she told Jama that a medicine man had been sent for. He had asked her where the pain was, she pointed to her stomach, and he bit it, so hard that he had drawn blood, which he spat out and read for clues. To her shame he diagnosed lovesickness and said he had no cure for that. Fortunately, the people were agitated and distracted from everyday gossip. They consulted oracles, sacrificed livestock, prayed to their goddess, but they were not heeded. Like a curse, locusts again darkened the sky. In one day the second harvest was destroyed and Gerset beggared.

  Jama felt ashamed. He remembered the story his mother used to tell him about a king who had become insane and was thrown out of his palace to wander the desert, telling insects and scorpions of the sumptuous life he had once lived. Gerset was a different place now. All the men had left to find work as laborers in Kassala, and the women called Jama the eunuch in the harem. He was nothing but a sickly eighteen-year-old with a fluffy mustache, they laughed. Bethlehem was abused for the airs and graces she had assumed as his betrothed, and the only solution she saw to this disparagement was a swift wedding.

  Everyday Bethlehem cornered him. “Well, Jama, go and find work so you can pay for my dowry.”

  Jama began to fear her, her desperate eyes burning into him, her tongue sharper with each hesitation on his part.

  “I should have known you wouldn’t understand anything about how real families work,” she bullied. “Do you understand how you’ve made me look? Chasing after you, working on your accursed farm, I have made a fool of myself, you stupid foreigner.”

  In the calm solitude of his tukul, he opened his father’s cardboard suitcase for the first time since leaving Omhajer. The musical instrument he now recognized as a Sudanese rababa, the toy car covered in orange rust that made the tiny wheels squeak against his fingertips, and the other paltry detritus of his father’s life seared his heart. His loss came sharply back to him, and that night he stayed awake in the dark, pinned to the dirt floor by grief for everyone he had lost. Surrounded by his father’s belongings, Jama began to imagine himself as his father’s sole legacy; everything that once had been his father was now contained in him. It was up to him to live the life his father should have lived, to enjoy the sun and rivers, the fruit and honey that life offered. He picked up the rababa and strummed its five strings, imagining the tunes his father had played to his army friends on their long marches. Jama couldn’t put the rababa down, it sat against his thigh and played him, it sang to him and brought back memories that had lain dormant since infancy, his father’s hair, eyelashes, the glint of his teeth all restored to him in startling detail, and he could feel his father’s stubble tickling his breastmilk-fat stomach and the head rush of being held upside down.

  Jama’s revelry was broken by Bethlehem pushing her way into the tukul. “What are you doing? You’ve been in here for two days,” she demanded. He had lost all measure of time playing the rababa.

  “I’ve brought you some food.” She shoved a dish of sorghum porridge into his hand and then began her lecture. “The women want their farm back, they need the land. You are going to have to find laboring work, Jama. The Italians are back in Tessenei, you know their language, go get a job.”

  “They’re not back, it’s the other ones, the British,” Jama said patiently.

  “You go ask anyone, the British put the Italians back in charge,” persisted Bethlehem vehemently. Jama stayed silent, unable to believe the news.

  After eating, Jama picked up the rababa and played for Bethlehem. “What if I became a troubadour?”

  Bethlehem snorted. “Don’t you dare!”

  “You don’t think people in other villages would pay to listen to my music?”

  “If you want to live a low-class life like that, I can’t stop you, Jama.”

  “But you would like to stop me, wouldn’t you?”

  “You’re a free man, I know that, I just can’t see why you would want to do such things, but I forget that you have been brought up in the gutter.”

  “Shut up!” he snapped. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Bethlehem. However good I am to you, you still feel you can wipe your dirty feet on me.”

  Bethlehem grabbed her basket and stormed out. Jama could hear her tears but was too angry to pursue her.

  Jama carried the rababa with him everywhere he went, penniless but not unhappy. He had no money to pay Awate so the stall in Focka soon became threadbare and dusty, cobwebs hanging like a veil over the hatch. In Tessenei were a group of Tigre youths who spent their day ambling around, singing, drinking honey mead, and watching the world go by. They spied Jama with his rababa and asked him to join them. With a drum and now a rababa, they roamed the villages around Tessenei, busking at weddings and circumcisions. Jama grew his hair long like them, and it fell to his shoulders in wide black curls. They were wild boys who stripped off and jumped into waterfalls, and gorged themselves on the bounty of nature, wild berries, birds they caught with bow and arrow. Awate admired the new rebellious Jama and waited for him after school. Jama would pick him up at Hakim’s shop and heave the ten-year-old onto his shoulders to the villages. During daylight they all sat on the g
ranite boulders by the river and tried to sweet-talk the washergirls away from their fiancés.

  “Oh, you are beating my heart against that rock,” called out Sulaiman as he grasped at his heart in front of a giggling girl. As the day ended they were chased away by brothers and fathers.

  Jama was carefree for the first time in his life. He had just enough food in his stomach and each day brought adventure and laughter, the boys accepting him the way that only layabouts can, without judgment or demand. His fingertips swelled and hardened as he mastered the rababa, making it whine, holler, and pulsate. Awate danced with his shoulders while the other boys sang and played jokes on the audience.

  Bethlehem observed Jama’s new life silently from her hilltop, and brooded over how to reclaim him from the troubadours, but she stomped away from him when he tried to serenade her on the hillside. “Eeesh! I do not speak to vagrants!” she called.

  As Jama walked back from the hills to Gerset, Bethlehem’s words followed him. He remembered the rich, dapper-clothed seamen in Aden and looked down at himself, at the dirty white cloth wrapped around him and his beaten-up sandals, and he was suddenly ashamed of his poverty. Jama remembered the certainty with which Shidane spoke about becoming rich. Unlike Jama, his faith in himself had never wavered, and even as a street boy he had thought himself a prince whose kingdom had been temporarily lost.

  Inside his tukul, hidden from the dewy night, Jama listened to rain falling on the straw roof. It beat out a rhythm that pulsed all over the village. He prepared himself for another long, lonely night. He lit the last of Bethlehem’s frankincense, its fragrant smoke warming the hut, and stretched out his tired limbs. He was somewhere between sleep and consciousness when in the dim light he saw tendrils shifting and dancing. A man took shape from the arabesques of smoke, extricating himself from the urn like a jinn from a lamp. First his hand appeared, then a thin torso and legs wrapped in ashy robes. He stepped delicately out of the hot coals and approached Jama.

  Jama felt a rush of cold blood in his veins as the man touched his face and left a streak of black on his cheek. The man was beautiful, every eyelash, every wrinkle perfectly formed from blue, black, and gray smoke, and within his dark eyes was a pinprick of light, like the lamp of a lighthouse seen through a midnight fog.

  “Jama.”

  Jama didn’t reply, his tongue lay dead in his mouth.

  “Goode, speak to me.”

  Jama looked into his father’s eyes, felt the lighthouse beam wash over him.

  “Goode, this life is a sliver of light between two great darknesses.” Guure’s voice was raspy, whispers of smoke breaking away from him. “You cannot remain here while your fate awaits you in Egypt. The world has been broken open for you like a ripe pomegranate and you must swallow its seeds.”

  “What of my life here?”

  “You will be married with children and grandchildren but you will also ride the waves of all the seas.”

  Rain came down in broad sheets and battered at the door, cold air blew into the tukul and ripped at Guure.

  “Father, why did you leave me and hooyo?”

  “I thought my life would be long. I expected so much from it and wanted to come back when I could lay it at your feet, but I was merely a puppet with fine strings suspending me.”

  Jama stared into his father’s eyes.

  “But from the stars I watch you, your mother watches you, we have been beside you during every trial.”

  Another gust of wind threw open the door. “My time is up,” gasped Guure as his spectral body was torn apart and the lamps of his eyes extinguished, leaving Jama in darkness once again.

  The tukul was overwhelmed by the scent of frankincense in the morning, and the coal in the white urn was still red hot. Jama put his few possessions over the fire until everything was full of his father’s smell. He had no English, no idea how to get to Egypt, but this was not enough to stop him, he finally knew what to do with the small fortune his mother had tied around his neck. He tracked Bethlehem down, where she sat on a rock halfheartedly watching the goats. She gave Jama an evil look as he approached. “What do you want?”

  “I want to tell you something.”

  “Well, keep it to yourself, I’m not interested in you anymore,” she lied.

  Jama sat down next to her but she moved away. “I have been given a message by my father. I’m going to find work like you want me to”—Bethlehem’s eyes lit up—“but it will mean that I have to go to Egypt and spend some time away.”

  Bethlehem looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “What? What foolishness has come over you?” Bethlehem had no idea where Egypt was, but she knew it was far from home.

  “I’m going to join the British ships and get rich and come home to you,” Jama cajoled.

  “Home, home, you won’t come home! You will be killed, the hyenas will eat you, you madman!” she hollered.

  “Calm down, Bethlehem, one minute you tell me to find work, and now this.”

  “I want you to get a real job, near here, not disappear to another world because you have been speaking to ghosts! You don’t even know where you’re going,” she cried. Jama wasn’t sure if she was worried for him or was simply angry that he was doing something she hadn’t prescribed.

  “I could come back a rich man, richer than anyone here, twice as rich as your father. He wouldn’t care that I was a foreigner then, would he?”

  Bethlehem’s face was wet with tears.

  “Why are you getting so crazy, Bethlehem? In the name of God, I’m only trying to do the right thing,” Jama said, exasperated.

  “No, you’re not! You want to run away! Just like my mother said you would,” she shouted back. “You have made a fool of me,” she sobbed.

  “If you want to make every decision for me, what’s the point of my being alive? You might as well live both of our lives for us. I’m going now, Bethlehem, you will see what I do. Judge me by my actions, that’s all I ask. I will come later to say goodbye.” Jama went to kiss her cheek. Bethlehem shook her head violently and pushed him away.

  Jama dragged his dusty feet to Hakim’s store, where Awate waited gleefully for another day with the bad boys, but he was to be disappointed. Jama picked him up. “You know, Awate, when I came to Eritrea I was the same size as you, I was a skinny, desperate little thing. I was never sent to school like you, and I learned everything the hard way. While I am away I want you to finish this school, pick every last bit of knowledge out of that teacher’s brain, and then go to Kassala. When I come back you will write my letters and read books to me. I will promote you from number one coolie to number one ma’alim.” Jama kissed Awate on both cheeks and set him on the ground. Awate stifled his tears and turned in the direction of his tukul, dragging his schoolbag along the dirt.

  Jama whistled at him. “Awate, pick up your bag. A ma’alim cannot misbehave in front of his pupil.” Awate held it to his chest and gave Jama a sullen smile.

  Jama heard a knock on his tukul and found Bethlehem, her mother, and her many sisters waiting outside for him. Bethlehem had dressed up for the occasion, in bright clothes, beads in her hair, silver jewelry hanging from her neck, ears, and wrists, but her face was angry and red-eyed.

  “Greetings,” Jama said hesitantly.

  “Greetings,” the women replied sourly.

  “Little Somali, you have made Bethlehem even crazier than she was. She won’t stop crying, she tells me you promised to marry her but are now going back to your own country because a ghost has told you to! She will not eat, work, or talk. What can I do with a child like this?” spat Bethlehem’s mother, wagging her finger in his face.

  “I’m not going back to my country, I am going to Egypt so that I can return with enough money to pay for her dowry. I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” said Jama, humiliated and unable to look at Bethlehem.

  “Forget the dowry, a sane child will be enough. Marry her now, before you leave, it’s the only thing that will bring my child back to her sense
s.”

  Bethlehem wiped her nose and eyes, looked pleadingly at Jama.

  “I’ll marry you, Bethlehem, you are all I have in this world,” Jama said, his heart racing.

  The marriage was performed by a group of red-robed old women who had some knowledge of the Qu’ran, but everything felt rushed, ramshackle. A goat was dragged over from Bethlehem’s yard and slaughtered to feed the well-wishing gossips trickling in from the fields. Jama and Bethlehem huddled together in awe of what they had just done. The scorn, anger, and misery had been wiped from Bethlehem’s face and Jama could see her beauty in full luminosity again. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He surreptitiously held her hand, unable to believe they would now be treated like grown-ups, able to do what they liked together.

  Jama laughed.

  Bethlehem smiled. “What’s so funny?”

  “I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

  “You can’t mess a Kunama girl around, little Somali. Let this be a lesson to you,” Bethlehem said, squeezing his hand.