Black Mamba Boy

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Jama stopped at the gangplank and took a last look at Africa. Beyond the faux European skyline of Port Said lay his heart and home, the mountains and deserts of Somaliland and the valleys of Eritrea. He knew that if he died this would be the last thing he saw in his black eyes. The hot red dirt of Africa, scintillating with mica as if God had made the earth with broken diamonds, would not be found anywhere else. But like the Somali women in Aden, Africa struggled to look after her children and let them run with the wind, giving them freedom to find their own way in the world. Jama placed both feet firmly onto the Runnymede Park and waited to be borne away.

  EXODUS, MAY 1947

  I think this is going to be a strange voyage,” said Abdullahi, Jama’s clansman. Abdullahi had been told at first to expect a short trip to Haifa then Cyprus, but on the journey to Port Said he had seen the captain in huddled conferences with military men. He took Jama to the cabin that they would share: a small porthole funneled in light and two bunk beds with thin mattresses stood with a night table and lamp between them. There were twelve Somali firemen to stoke the engine, and the rest of the crew were white British men, all senior to the Somalis. Jama was the youngest on board apart from a slip of an English galley boy with fine blond hair. Abdullahi took Jama from fore to aft, into the holds, around the engine room, through the coal bunker, past the steering room to where the lifeboats hung lifeless. Jama was happy, happy, happy, and when Abdullahi presented him to Captain Barclay, he genuflected, curtsied, and held on to his hand as if it were the hand of the emperor of the world. Jama’s pay was set at nineteen pounds a month, a quarter less than the British sailors, but still a fortune to a boy who had once fought cats and dogs over bones. He intended to send half to Bethlehem when he was finally paid. Jama asked what they would be transporting. “Jews,” said Abdullahi.

  Jama’s work could not have been simpler. He had to shovel piles of coal into the giant furnace in the boiler room, while a trimmer wheelbarrowed the coal in from the bunker and deposited it at Jama’s feet. Four hours of work, eight hours of rest, and by the time they had reached Haifa in Palestine, Jama had fallen easily into the rhythm his life would run by for the next fifty years. In his leisure hours, Jama observed the construction of a cage on deck. A small lavatory block had been built inside the cage, but that was the only sign it was being made for human habitation. Haifa port was a battleground when they docked. Five hundred gunners of the British marines stood alongside tanks, trucks, military jeeps, their guns aimed at a broken-down steamship renamed Exodus 1947 and the unruly Jews on board it. Four thousand refugees were trying to force open the British quota into Palestine and were in sight of the Promised Land. The Exodus had been rammed by three British ships, including a navy destroyer, and it now lay motionless like a gutted whale, with Jewish refugees peering out of its bowels. The refugees from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka were once again separated from their belongings and marched into shacks where they were sprayed with DDT and pushed onto the waiting prison ships. The hard young men and women on board the Exodus had to be forced from the wreckage with batons and gunfire, and three corpses were bundled by the British into waiting ambulances. Jama watched in amazement as thousands of bedraggled people trudged toward the Runnymede Park, toward his pristine ship, old men hobbling along as best they could, while children with lost eyes stifled tears. They looked nothing like the turbaned Jews of Yemen, these pale, haggard people. They looked over their shoulders, at the black jute sacks of clothing, food, jewelry, and mementos that the British had pried from them and dumped haphazardly on the dockside. A desperate cry rang out when part of the pile collapsed into the water and sank to the bottom of the sea. Two other prison ships, the Ocean Vigour and Empire Rival, were also waiting to collect the refugees, and Jama waved to the Somali sailors he could see distantly on their decks. Eighty Royal Marines boarded the Runnymede Park along with the refugees, the glossy young men with tanned skin and golden hair squashed under red berets seeming like a different species of human to the thin, angry Eastern Europeans they were pushing into the hold. After the Haganah zealots who had organized the Exodus revolt had been identified and placed under guard, women, children, and the elderly were allowed on deck. Some refugees had squeezed themselves into all the clothes they had rather than put them in the jute sacks, and now they peeled them off, clothes from their past lives, from the death camps, from the DP camps, their history folded into a few items beside them. Unlike the marines who only had eyes for the bewitching Hungarian girls with the sorceress green eyes and wide feline faces, Jama’s attention was caught by a woman sitting boulderlike by the railings away from the other refugees. She was heavyset but made larger by the woolen coat she continued to wear in the heat, and an infant slept at her breast; something about her gave Jama a powerful sensation of Ambaro. It was as if his mother had been transplanted onto the ship. For a long time Jama watched her stare into the sea, unconcerned with the hustle and bustle around her. She adjusted her headscarf and cast a weary look over the potato sacks that contained her worldly goods.

  “Oi, Sambo! Stop mooning at the white women and get back to your cabin,” yelled the donkeyman at Jama, beckoning with his thumb to the hot cabins below. Jama, only understanding the tone and hand gesture, turned away toward his cabin.

  “Leave him, Bren, he ain’t hurting anyone,” called down the engineer, Sidney, who had observed the exchange. Jama loitered by the metal steps to try and decipher what the Ferengis were saying about him.

  “Poor fella, yer true to yer title, Bren, you ride those Mohammeds as if they were donkeys. Me ’eart goes out to ’em. Poor, puzzled buggers never complain,” said Sidney.

  “I’ve got to, matey, they might be quiet but they’re conniving bastards, they’ll have our jobs and our birds as soon as we turn our backs,” replied Brendan, the donkeyman.

  “Good luck to ’em, if I owned these ships I’d employ ’em too, they’re like fucking barnacles, however bad it gets they hang on. Don’t see ’em bellyaching like you paddies, live off a stick of incense a week or a whiff of an oily rag. Ain’t surprised the bosses wanna keep ’em on. As for our women,” teased Sidney, “you know you ain’t that scrupulous in your dealings with colored girls when we dock in Bongo-Bongo Land either.”

  The cabin rocked Jama gently to sleep, the distant roar of the engines and sea becoming part of his dream life. He had one of the top bunks and his dreams often made him leap from it, to wake up suddenly on the floor with a sore hip or elbow. It was usually hyenas that pursued him, frothing at the mouth as they pounced, or Italian gunmen kicking in the door and opening fire with machine guns.

  Small muscles had formed on the top of Jama’s arms and his cheeks had filled out with the regular meals. Good dreams consisted of feedings that never ended, dish after dish served on the plastic trays he had grown to love. The white steward would smile and proffer the strange canned beef, the sweet corn, sardines, mashed potato. The hot, noisy inferno of the engine room never appeared in his dreams but dominated his waking life, every twelve hours he went down to feed the glowing fire, communicating over the scrape of shovel and coal with hand signals and lip reading. The ship was a world propelled forward by Jama and the other Somali firemen, an ark with more than two of each, English, Irish, Scottish, Somali, Polish, Hungarian, German, Palestinian: the Runnymede Park carried them all on her back away from the Promised Land to an unknown shore. The Jewish refugees had been told that they were being taken to a camp in Cyprus, but that was a lie, Cyprus lay far behind them and they were heading for Europe to be made an example of. The eighty marines kept a close watch on the young men and women, fearing the Haganah militants among them. At night a huge lamp was shone into the cage and over the Mediterranean, casting a ghostly eye over the bundled families and mysterious sea. The refugees were separated, with the most virile and threatening held under guard in the hold. Women, children, the elderly, and the sick were allowed on deck to visit the hospital, to prepare their meals of five-year-old a
rmy rations, and for the elderly to teach Hebrew to the children. There was little interaction between the crew and the refugees, but one day a determined-looking man made a beeline for Jama and presented a navy sports jacket with gold buttons. “You buy!” he declared.

  Jama tried the jacket on. “One pound.” Jama held up one finger, and through hand gestures the Jew and the Somali haggled hard, until they agreed on an acceptable price and shook hands.

  That was the only time the refugees acknowledged Jama, usually they looked through him with a baleful expression of suspended animation, of people caught between life and death. Even the children had suspicious adult gazes, demanding chocolate without childish gaiety but with a bullying tone learned in the camps. The woman who had reminded Jama of Ambaro was forever on deck, her overcoat folded underneath her large bottom. She had two daughters around six and eight years old as well as an infant son, and her girls were the happiest on the ship. Jama gave them the Bourneville chocolates he bought in the ship’s store. The mother never noticed when they ran up to Jama and pleaded for the red-and-gold-wrapped chocolates that he hid up his sleeve or behind his ear, neither did she help the women prepare the rations during the day. Instead she sat with her face upturned to the sunlight and ignored everyone.

  Haganah activists circulated secretly among the passengers, and when a careless marine told one of them, “We’re sending you bastards back to where you came from,” the news spread within minutes and created a kind of millennial hysteria. “Palestine! Palestine!” was the chant. The refugees had borne the filth, heat, worm-infested soups, moldy crackers, and varied deprivations quietly for three weeks but now they exploded with angry yelling faces, painted gentian violet to heal the blisters and rashes that had erupted on board. By the time the ship docked at Port-de-Bouc in France, a swastika had been painted over the flying Union Jack and the marines had had to force the seething purple masses back into the cage after their riot.

  The refugees had gathered from all over Europe, some by foot, to secure a precious place on the Exodus, but now they were captives again. The Haganah men were losing control, they thought they were assisting helpless refugees, but they were dealing with men and women who had withstood every kind of possible torment. Each day there were bomb scares and the marines treated all of the refugees as potential terrorists. The British refused to give the refugees water and rations, in the hope of forcing them to disembark, and in response a hunger strike was defiantly declared. The British pleaded and threatened, the French tried to mediate, but the refugees were adamant they would disembark only in Palestine. One woman had given birth in the cage and Jama could still see her lying in her blood and gore, her baby wrapped in a dirty rag torn from her skirt. He did not understand why they would not get off the filthy, hostile ship. If he had not bent with circumstances he would have been broken by them, but these people seemed to want to be broken or at least did not care.

  The hunger strike fizzled out with the arrival of manna on launches operated by Haganah agents and paid for by American Jews; each day arrived crates of Irish stewed steak, French sardines, American evaporated milk, Spanish jam, French baguettes. The marines bayoneted the cans, to prevent smuggling, they said, but mainly out of jealousy, as they were still eating army rations. Even the crew looked on in envy at the refugees’ food aid. Books were also delivered by the launches, Torahs, novels, dictionaries, but the British confiscated these, fearing the propaganda secreted within them. Food was the only succor the refugees had. Even the weather had turned against them: it was the hottest summer on record in the south of France and the holds became ovens, the steel walls scalding bare flesh, the air fetid and unbreathable. The British were called Nazis, Hitler commandos, the Runnymede Park a floating Auschwitz. On this floating Auschwitz, the sailors and soldiers fished, sunbathed, and swam in the Med in their free time, just as SS men had frolicked in the pine resort of Solahutte near Auschwitz.

  After the heat came the deluge, a four-day storm that forced all fifteen hundred refugees into the holds. The sky was black, strong winds tossed the ship from east to west, rain poured through the grilles and the holds filled with inches of bilgewater mixed with vomit. The British Nazis waited for the storm to break the refugees’ spirit but still they refused to leave. While the refugees relived the Old Testament on the Runnymede Park, Jama and a few other Somalis went on shore leave. A bus took them to Marseille and Abdullahi showed them around, guiding them in a crocodile line as if they were schoolchildren. He explained everything: the banks, post offices, the pigs’ heads and intestines hanging in the butchers. To unbelieving laughter, Abdullahi told them that the French also ate frogs and horses. Some of the Frenchwomen wore shorts, and the Somalis giggled at their exposed thighs. The sailors crept gingerly forward as if they had landed on another planet, everything strange and outlandish, and Jama recorded every detail to recount to Bethlehem. They went down touristy Rue de la Joliette and listened to the buskers along the Vieux Port, ate long crusty loaves on La Canebière, and ended up in the seedy Ditch, in an African bar run by a Senegalese man. An American named Banjo sat by them and played wild songs, “Jelly Roll,” “Shake That Thing,” “Let My People Go.” Jama danced Kunama-style to the strange music and the bar filled with black sailors from the West Indies, United States, South America, West Africa, and East Africa. Banjo introduced them to his friends Ray, Dengel, Goosey, Bugsy, and a pretty Abyssinian girl called Latnah, and Jama smiled as he shook their hands, wondering if Bethlehem would believe that there were Habashi girls in France. There was no need for translation between the dancers, they were spiritual siblings, all they needed to know was that they had washed up in this bar to spend the night together, the money that passed from the sailors to Banjo and his friends was irrelevant.

  The twenty-eight days docked in Port-de-Bouc passed quickly, spent either in Marseille with Banjo and the other panhandlers, or on the ship sleeping and resting. Even on this gigantic vessel he felt crowded and trapped; the angry refugees and the armed marines were like two armies on the verge of war. Everything had become discordant and fraught. The British crew drank the days and nights away, arguments breaking out like summer storms, and when they were particularly violent, Jama would lock his cabin door and hide in bed afraid that they would take their anger out on him. The Somali firemen would force him to open the door and tell stories to distract him, of lands where the men dressed like women and women married trees, of sailors thrown overboard after petty arguments, of stowaways found too late. One of the sailors had earned the epithet Grave Reject, as he had survived three torpedoed ships during the war, appearing on the surface of the water as if by magic even though he was unable to swim. Another sailor had been to Australia and met an old Somali man living alone in a desert outpost; he had arrived in the last century as a camel trainer and now couldn’t remember a word of Somali. Australia, Panama, Brazil, Singapore, these were names Jama had never heard before, they might as well have been describing moons or planets, but these countries were now part of his world. Then they started to talk about women.

  “The thing is, you can’t trust women, look at the kind of job we do! We’re gone too long, they end up thinking that we’ve forgotten them, so they forget us,” Abdullahi said.

  “That’s not true,” cut in Jama.

  “What do you know about it? The only thing you do in bed is piss yourself!” jeered Abdullahi.

  “I’m a married man, with a wife ten times more beautiful than yours!” shouted Jama. He did not confess he had spent only one night with his bride.

  “Oh yeah? Well, if she’s that beautiful and delicious, you have left your dinner out for another man to eat,” snorted Abdullahi. Jama turned his back to all of them and sulked.

  For all their stories, the sailors had to admit that Jama had chanced upon a very remarkable ship for his maiden voyage. On the twenty-eighth day, distinguished men with medals covering their chests came on board and read out a declaration to the assembled refugees. Through the
many interpretations of the Somalis who had a little English, Jama learned that the British were threatening the Jews, giving them a day to surrender or be taken to Germany. One Somali said that the Germans were the archenemies of Jews, and this was a very grave threat that the Jews could not ignore. To show their serious intent, the British handed out leaflets to the refugees and wrote the threat in many languages on a blackboard, and when the British finished talking, the Jews defiantly applauded and went back to the cage. That night launches filled with Haganah agents sidled up to the boat and with megaphones encouraged the refugees to stay on board. The British silenced them with a siren but it was too late. The next day, as the six o’clock deadline approached, only a solitary self-composed little girl, around twelve years old, left the ship. The rest stood to attention like legionnaires under their general, Mordechai Rosman, a partisan leader who had led a band of fighters out of the Warsaw Ghetto. With his long hair and bare bony chest, Rosman looked like an ancient prophet lost amid the modern world, where the Pharaoh had gas chambers, the Promised Land was subject to United Nations resolutions, and only desperate Somalis tried to wade across the Red Sea.

  With only one less passenger, the Runnymede Park set off for Hamburg. Despite their defiance, something had been lost among the refugees; they finally realized that they were prisoners, in no position to negotiate or barter, and worst of all, they felt as if the world had forgotten them. More children were born on the way to Gibraltar, where the ship refueled. These babies were prisoners of the British, but also of their parents’ dreams. Jama was back at work but even he was infected with the melancholy of the refugees; a ship full of heartbroken people has a particular flavor, a certain spirit that is hard on the soul. Jama only had to look into the faces of the refugees to be sent back to his own nightmares, to feel again deep fear, despair, and self-hate. The refugees had been treated like animals, had been mocked, beaten, degraded by men reveling in their power, as had Jama, and that humiliation never left anyone. It sat on their backs like a demon, and these demons would intermittently dig their talons into flesh and remind them of where they had been. Jama approached the large lady one day; her daughters didn’t run around anymore, just sat quietly next to her. He pressed a couple of chocolates into the mother’s hand, she hid them in her bra and took Jama’s hand, her large brown eyes read his palm while he tried to remember his words of Hebrew.