Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  Still we sat, and when I looked to Chauffeur for guidance, he gave me none. When all had quieted, the francolins came into the field as they had before. Chauffeur passed his gun to me stock first, and when the dominant male of the flock leaped to a termite mound to cry his health and position to the morning, I sighted him in at his bulging breast, exhaled, drew back the trigger, and killed him.

  “U-a-o fa,” Chauffeur said to me, touched my back as we walked through the orchard to collect the bird’s body, ‘Francolin hunter.’

  Over the next two years, I killed a hundred francolins, discovered my own methods of taking them on the wing. The most important thing I learned was this: If your senses told you they were there, then they were; and if you waited long enough matching your will to theirs, they would flush from even the thickest of rice. I learned many things about the francolins those years. I learned that if you shot an old male and didn’t reveal your position, in time his sons would come to mourn his body, and then you could shoot them, too. I learned the call of a lost chick to draw the hen from the forest, and the call she made to attract a mate. Most important, I learned the dominance call of a fully fledged male. When I’d make this from a thicket of grass, soon enough a young male would rush into the clearing, his wings spread and ready to fight with his spurs. Many were the evenings I’d return to the village with three francolins tied to my belt. I shared the meat among my neighbors and wove the francolins’ tail feathers into the braiding of my gun’s sling. Even in neighboring villages on days when I’d go to their markets for news and shells, young boys would touch my elbow as though trying to absorb something from me and whisper, “U-a-ofa.” No one but the smallest children ridiculed me anymore.

  What I wish to tell here is about my neighbor Chauffeur, who taught me to hunt the francolin, and how once he did, I began to understand who we both were.

  My proximity to Chauffeur gave me a new standing in the village, and the young men at the chief’s compound who had once been happy to tell me that my nose was my nose and my eyes were my eyes now addressed me as Va, ‘Father.’ Mamadou began to call me Dosso, ‘Mystical Hunter,’ and all about me I felt a certain space that in English we call respect. People stopped asking me for gifts, and sometimes among them, in a line and harvesting the season’s rice, I’d forget that I wasn’t black.

  Until Chauffeur had paid attention to me, I’d worn blinders against the goings-on of his compound. Now, he was all that I noticed. My hunter training didn’t end with that first day, but continued in increments. One night, he made me sit in the frightening forest by myself until dawn, and another time he told me to bring him a stone from the top of a granite hill twelve miles to the west before dusk fell. Everything he asked of me, I did. Always, I was eager for more. The bundles of foliage he brought from the forest in the evenings made me wish I’d studied botany. But it’s enough to say that under the eaves of his hut dried all manners of leaf and flower and vine, and of mushroom. Why had I thought that the people who came to his hearth each evening were simply villagers paying him his due respect as an accomplished man? Now I saw that they weren’t. They were women with their shawls drawn over their heads and obviously sick. Chauffeur would listen to them patiently, talk with them a bit as he smoked, then pass a bundle of herbs to them, which they’d accept with profuse thanks. He knew the plants of the forest and how to heal with them, and his wives didn’t quarrel amongst themselves because they understood the importance of what he knew. Chauffeur was the keeper of magic inherited from the reservoir of his people’s culture.

  There are two stories I must tell to end this one. This first is about Bébé, and the second is about something else.

  The first is this: Bébé was the strongest young man of the village, built like an ox; he could clear a line of thick brush in half the time it took Yacou, the next-strongest man. But for all his bone and muscle, Bébé was also simple, and he fell in love with a clear-faced girl from Sualla, the neighboring village. Khadija was beautiful in every sense of the word; her long arms were like calf’s legs, her rump was like a hen’s, but there was something wrong with her as well. Some said she loved a Senoufo brush-cutter who worked as a slave in her father’s cotton fields. Some said genies counseled her in her dreams. Whatever it was, Bébé wanted her, and brought a red steer to her father’s hut. Who could say no to Bébé when he was the best one of a strong village like Tégéso? But even Mamadou would shake his head in the night as we’d eat rice from a bowl with our fingers under the mango tree of his mother’s compound, the stars on our shoulders. “If the viper lifted its head at you, Adama,” he’d say to me, “would you offer your hand to it?”

  Bébé brought his bride to his hut, and three times she ran away. Each time, Bébé’s brothers and brothers-in-law brought Khadija back kicking and screaming. But Bébé was strong, and after the final time, he closed the door of his hut with a slam, and in many respects, that was that. This was at the end of my first year there, and it seemed a sort of joke to me. Soon enough, Khadija was seated on the dirt under the mango tree of Bébé’s compound, and as the months went by, her pregnancy grew. Bébé was ecstatic, and he labored in the fields even harder than usual. I suppose many assumed that with the birth of the child, Khadija’s will against her husband would break.

  I was a francolin hunter only a short time when it happened. Khadija was due, and Bébé was talking openly in the fields about the son he knew he would soon have. Then his bride was so pregnant, it seemed she was inflated with water. We came back from the fields one day, and Bébé’s mother and sisters rushed to him, touching his arms. Khadija had gone.

  Khadija disappeared for three days, and even in her home village, no one knew where she was. On the morning of the fourth day, she came back to Tégéso, haggard and worn, her maternity pagne torn to ribbons about her. She wasn’t pregnant anymore.

  The chief called a council, and all the men went. Khadija sat on a stool with her head in her hands, and Bébé sat beside the chief in his finest blue boubous. “Where is the baby?” the chief asked Khadija, and she rolled her head in her hands and moaned out her story again:

  “The pains came on me and I fell into a dream. The ancestors called to me and told me to walk to my village. While I was in the forest, white genies came on me. They took the child from me and I could only hold on to a tree as they did.”

  She led us all to the place in the forest where she said the white genies had taken the child. Bébés brothers hacked about with their machetes, but there was no blood, no sign of the child.

  “Is this the place?” my old chief asked Khadija, condescending to talk directly to a woman because of the importance of the situation.

  “Here, Father,” she whispered, and gathered her shawl about her. “This is where they took it. Please, Father, believe me. I have told you everything. Let me go home to my mother.”

  There was nothing to do, and we all went back to the village. For some days, a terrible cloud hung over the village, and Khadija sat under the mango tree looking at nothing. Mamadou wondered at night to me if the chief would release Khadija to return to her people. I didn’t speculate at all because I knew now that it wasn’t my place.

  Soon, one night, Bébé came to Chauffeur’s compound; they went together into Chauffeur’s hut. For a long time, they sat in the darkness, and all of us, Chauffeur’s wives and sons and I, didn’t speak to each other, but let the weight of the stars lay on our chests. Then Bébé came forth with a bundle in his hands, and Chauffeur stayed inside. “Medicine,” Chauffeur’s first wife said under her breath as we watched Bébé go.

  For three days, Khadija vomited blood, and then she was dead. Bébé’s brothers buried her at the edge of the village, and not even her mother came. The cloud that had hung over everything lifted, and for a few weeks I noticed that the village was calmer than usual; that everyone’s wives seemed to get along, that the pubescent girls ready for the dry-season excision weren’t moaning about what they were about to undergo.
>
  The last part of the story is this: The more secrets I learned from him, the more Chauffeur took an interest in me. One night when the moon was new, he came to me smoking a cigarette and said, “Could you live among us forever, whiteman?”

  “I could, Father.”

  “Do you respect our ways?”

  “I do.”

  He told me to lift myself up, and I followed him barefoot into the forest. For a long time, we walked in that black ink. He led me far into it, to a place I’d never been. Then he said to me, “Adama, whiteman, tell your people about what you are about to see.” I followed him to the edge of a small clearing where a fire was burning. My eyes adjusted to the light, and we did not enter the clearing, but stood at its edge. In it, I saw young men, the quiet and respected young men of the village. All were naked and glistening with sweat, as though oiled. None knew we were there. Half of them, a half dozen, were writhing on the dirt that someone had swept clean, moaning, some screaming, and the other half seemed to be in trances, seated and fanning their writhing brothers with fistfuls of broad leaves. On the post before the fire was a mask The light of the fire shone through its eyes. The writhing young men seemed to be in the throes of a vicious death, and while I knew that I could never understand the visions they were experiencing, I also knew that it was what I wanted.

  “Give me the medicine, too, Father,” I said to Chauffeur.

  He took my shoulder in his hand and turned me. He said, “I know that you are strong, Adama. But there are things we must keep for ourselves if we are to go on in this world as a people.”

  I followed him to the village through the forest. All the way back I felt as lost as on the day my father had died. I was the francolin hunter. But what was that? All the things I had been doing suddenly seemed as ridiculous as they really were. The forest, the people, they would never reveal themselves to me.

  I lay in my hut a long time that night. I thought about the witch doctor, about Bébé, about the village and what it had done to Khadija. When I finally slept, I dreamed of those writhing men. Who did they invoke to tell them what was right? Where did they go in their dreams, what answers did they bring back with them?

  I dreamed of stars, of moving through them like swimming underwater. I saw a field of grass: calm, quiet as the land itself, the first sunlight falling on it, wind rippling through it like fingers, beautiful: the world free of men. Then I was in it: breathing, hidden, my mind clear, as African as I would ever become, not African at all. A francolin stood on a mound to sing, his breast filling with air to rend the quiet morning with his life. I dreamed my gun lifting, the sudden crack of the shot; the tumble of the bird; its death: The proclamation of my life to this world.

  DJAMILLA

  Shortly after Khadija’s death, Mamadou brought me a sack of mandarins from his father’s orchard. I wasn’t much in a mood to be with the Worodougou after what had happened, and each morning when the families would set out for their fields, a wife or husband would salute me as I sat on my stool. “Not going to the fields with us today, Adama?” they’d ask. I’d wave them off with my hand, hold my side and say, “Djek-wadjo.” ‘Malaria.’

  I was often down with malaria, everyone in the village was now and again, but this time it was something more serious, a sickness of the heart. In my early months there, I had romanticized the Worodougou, made them out to myself to be better than they were. But I now understood that they were as flawed as anyone.

  It was nice to be alone in the village those days, everyone gone to the fields but a few scattered old women tending to their families’ hearths. I ate mandarins and watched the clouds scud across the sky.

  One morning, the village empty and quiet, a Peul girl came in her fancy wraps and silver anklets, a wide calabash of milk on her head, trading ladles of it for yams from hut to hut. The Peul were nomadic cattle herders from Mali, and a family of them lived on the village’s far western edge, near where they corralled their herd at night. Aside from trading milk, they did not bother with the Worodougou, nor the Worodougou with them. The Peul considered themselves a superior race because they did not work the soil, and the Worodougou thought them contemptible for the same reason. Despite this, Peul girls had the reputation of being the most desirable in the region. Perhaps it had to do with their mystical desert roots, the pride of their tall carriage, their shyness, their exotic language and culture. But perhaps, too, it was because of their beauty.

  The girl stopped in her tracks, surprised to see me. I had never before been alone in the village in this way: in the daytime, the time when the village belonged to women. She was tall and slender, old colonial coins hammered into a necklace that hung over her collarbone, strings of amber beads hanging from her long earlobes. Her lips were tattooed around with black ink, and her hair was woven into tight plaits, coins arranged in them, too. Of course I knew who she was: Djamilla, the Peul patriarch’s unmarried daughter. She would have been beautiful anywhere.

  Djamilla looked at me defiantly, set her hands on her hips. Maybe she didn’t like being surprised; maybe again it was because she was used to the village men calling lewdly at her for everyone to hear. She was far enough away that if I wanted to say something, I’d have to shout. Instead, as though propelled by a force other than myself, I rolled a mandarin to her. It crawled over the dust as though time itself had slowed, came to rest between her bare feet. Her eyes lined with kohl made her seem dangerous. The heavy calabash on her head made her seem taller than she was. I wondered what she would do, why I had rolled the fruit to her in the first place, why I cared. Then, like a wading bird, she ducked and picked the mandarin up.

  “I know your name,” I called to her.

  “I don’t speak Worodougou, whiteman,” she said back at me fluently in that language.

  “Dja-mil-la,” I called, the syllables rolling off my tongue like a song.

  “Who are you to say my name, you dirty Worodougou farmer? Aren’t your fingernails covered in soil and filth? Don’t you know I’m a Peul?”

  “I’m not a Worodougou,” I told her, and grinned. “And your name is in the village for all to know, as pretty as the moon and stars.”

  “I’ll tell my father!”

  “I’ll tell him myself.”

  “Then tell him. See what I care.”

  “I’ll come tonight.”

  “I’ll hide in my hut.”

  “You’ll hear my voice.”

  “I’ll plug my ears with cotton.”

  “You’ll know in your heart that I’ve come.”

  “I’ll cut my heart out, feed it to the dogs.”

  “Then I’ll pet those dogs because they’ve eaten your heart.”

  “Then those dogs will bite you because they have my heart inside of them.”

  “Djamilla, put down your milk. Come inside my hut. I want to show you pictures from my country. I want to show you a picture of my mother.”

  “You have pictures to show to me? Show them to my father. You will see what he says. Then you won’t roll mandarins at me like a Worodougou monkey.”

  “And then you won’t pick them up.”

  Djamilla looked at the fruit in her hand as if understanding what it meant. For an instant, I thought she would throw it at me, but instead she folded it into her wrap. She said as she turned and left, “My father likes to eat them, so what?”

  The funk I had been feeling dissipated into the air. I stood in my morning wrap as she receded, my chest bare, struck a pose as vivid as I suddenly felt. Then a stooped old woman came by—the witch doctor’s mother—chasing a duck away from her compound with a scrap of blue cloth tied to a stick—which is what old women used to chase away ducks—and she saw me, the parting Djamilla, understood something, and straightened. “Adama! Get in your hut,” she said, and poked me in the ribs with the stick. “That you are white is bad enough. But you are also hairy! Cover up! If you let Djamilla see how ugly you are, then she may not marry you.”

  Usually after dinner, I
’d sit with Mamadou under his mother’s mango tree where we ate, and talk late into the night about life. As a third son, Mamadou didn’t have any other options but staying in the village and helping his father work in the fields. But his dreams were vast: He wanted to go to Abidjan to look for work like his older brothers had. He wanted to own an Aiax soccer jersey and leather shoes and a cell phone, and one day, a car. I’d try to extol the pleasures of a traditional and honest life in the village to him, but he wouldn’t hear it. The lights of Abidjan called to him, France and America after that.

  “I’ll work in a cloth factory like my brother, I’ll tend a big field for a rich man. I will send some money here to my father, save the rest, and then I will open a kiosk and sell omelets and Nescafé. I’ll buy a stereo so my customers can have music. You will visit me, I will visit you in Chicago, America. We’ll be big men together. I will drive you in my car, a Citroën—”

  There wasn’t much else to do at night but talk. People were talking at the hundred hearths of the village. Voices droned on in this way, simple worn laments for rain, for love, for money. I stood, brushed off the seat of my boubous, and Mamadou was startled out of his reverie. He said, “Hey? Where are you going so late?”

  “For a walk. To salute some people,” I said vaguely, and waved at the dark.

  “I’ll come with you—”

  “Stay here. Spend some time with your go. Isn’t it time you had another child anyway?”

  “Adama, where are you going? Where is there to go? Adama, are you feeling unwell?”

  “Unwell?”

  “You are behaving strangely. When you behave strangely, it means you are getting sick. If you get sick, I will have trouble with the chief. Tell me where you are going so late. If you don’t, I will follow you.”