by Tony D'Souza
“Your mother is fat!”
“Not that fat.”
“Is this your wife, Adama?”
“My sister.”
“Is this your village?”
“More or less.”
“What is all this water?”
“That’s the ocean.”
“Your mother’s hair is the color of ripe rice.”
“She put the color in it.”
“But henna makes things dark, Adama.”
“It’s another kind of henna.”
Djamilla accepted the pictures one by one, studied them closely as though trying to enter America through them: the house I grew up in covered with snow, my sister beside some boyfriend or other in his new Camaro, my mother at her retirement party, me in my black coat on Michigan Avenue, snowflakes on my shoulders.
“What does snow feel like?”
“Cold like the moon.”
“Where is the grass?”
“Far from where we live.”
“Who do these pigeons belong to?”
“To no one. They live like that. Nobody eats them. Old women whose children have left like to feed them peanuts and talk to them.”
“Is it a good place to live?”
“Sometimes.”
“You must be very rich, to have pigeons you do not eat, to let old women throw away the harvest to them.”
Without realizing it, we were sitting close together on the floor. Our fingers touched again and again as I passed pictures to her, as she pointed things in them out to me: a girl in a background’s red boots, a woman wearing green mittens. Djamilla smelled faintly of cream and butter, the amber beads of her earrings familiar to me now, the tattoos around her lips as though all women had them.
“What is this? A dog in a bed? Is America so rich that even the dogs sleep in beds?”
It was my sister’s rottweiler, Daisy, up on her bed when she’d been a puppy. I held the picture and smiled. “Sometimes they do,” I said.
“How could I live in such a filthy country? Where dogs sleep in beds?” Djamilla said, leaned against me as she laughed. Her body was warm, almost heavy. All around us on the floor now were pictures of a faraway place, the people in them looking back up at us from gray landscapes of concrete and snow. Djamilla touched a picture of my mother with the back of her hand, like trying to feel the curve of my mother’s cheek. I held Djamilla close to me as she did.
“Your mother won’t accept me because I am black.”
“My mother will accept anyone I choose.”
“I will pound corn toh and peanut sauce for her.”
“She might like that.”
“I will make it so your mother will never touch a pot the rest of her life.”
“I don’t think my mother has done that for a long time.”
“And how can I honor your sister?”
“You can plait her hair.”
A shadow darkened the doorway. It was the old woman, her stick in her hand for chasing away ducks. She peered in, let her eyes adjust. “Fla muso, come out of Adama’s hut. Take up your milk before it curdles. Go to your father’s house,” she said in a low voice, stern but not angry. Djamilla went out, and the old woman helped her lift the calabash to her head. Then I went out, too, to watch Djamilla walk away.
“Adama,” the old woman said to me, “don’t you have women where you come from?”
“We do, Mother.”
“Then why do you trouble this girl?”
“I’m not troubling her, Mother.”
“Adama,” she said, and poked me with her stick, “is this all that you are? A man? Another man to trouble a girl? Go to the fields and work, you lazy goat. The whiteman this, the whiteman that.’ Since I was small, people have said it. Ah, Adama, if your mother was here, she would scold you. Go to the fields now before I beat you with this stick. Toog gbenna aug gbenna, konanifo la whella.” ‘In the forest or fields, the duiker is the duiker.’ “What a disappointment!”
Did I love Djamilla? I loved Africa, loved being in the fields with Bukari and his cattle, the tender hands he laid on their haunches. I loved the sound of the children singing at night, the long drape of the stars. I loved the forest and being in it. I loved it when it rained and the air was so clean it wasn’t like there was any air at all.
After a long day with Bukari, the herd corralled and lowing, I’d say good night to him, salute a few hearths here and there, and then Djamilla would find me in the dark. We’d walk the paths in the tall grass along the edge of the village like lovers from an older time, the moon waxing above us. She’d worry that she’d be cold in America, and I promised her that I’d buy her a coat to keep her warm. I’d tease her that she could sell milk in those steel labyrinths she’d seen in the pictures, that she could trap those pigeons that belonged to nobody and sell them, too. She’d laugh and slap my hands, this tattooed girl from Mali.
As we reclined and sipped tea one night, the moon finally full, Bukari said to me, “You are truly like my son, Adama. Anything you desire, ask and it shall be yours.”
I went to Mamadou’s. I’d neglected him a long time, but he still brushed off a stool for me. He smiled and said, “Ah, Mr. Fla ché! Long time. Are the cattle well?”
“I think I want to marry Djamilla.”
Mamadou’s smile faded. He looked at me in earnest. The night was dark, the hearth fires glowing in it. He said, “Djamilla is very beautiful. She is calm and works hard. Any man would desire her for a wife.”
“I need you to talk to Bukari for me.”
“Does it mean that you would always be near me?”
“Perhaps.”
“And are you certain that this would make you happy?”
I nodded.
After a day alone hunting francolin in the forest, I felt sure of my love for Djamilla, and I came home to the village and told Mamadou to visit the old man. I looked at the stars from under his mother’s mango tree and smoked cigarettes as I waited. Here it was, my life. When Mamadou came back, he sat down beside me and sighed as though spent. He said, “Adama, Bukari accepted almost as soon as I stepped into his courtyard.”
“What happens now?”
“We wait. He will send word to Mankono, and the mother will decide. That is their way.”
The days became long. I avoided Djamilla’s compound as was the custom, and she avoided me. A hush ran through the village. I could tell from the long looks people cast at me that they knew. What they thought of it, I couldn’t tell. But they didn’t call me Mr. Peul any longer, as it wasn’t any longer a joke. Many nights and lying awake in the dark of my hut, I felt that I’d made a terrible mistake that I couldn’t now undo. Then I’d see Djamilla in her beads and wraps and coins across the village, bent at the waist and drawing water from a well, and I’d think to myself, ‘That is my woman.’
I went to work in the fields with my neighbors to pass the time. For some reason, I was glad now to be with the Worodougou again, singing the hoeing songs and back in that familiar rhythm. I looked at pictures of my mother and sister now and again in my hut. They felt like people I had never known. A young and somber Peul came from Mankono on foot. Word had finally arrived. A buzz ran through the village. I waited under the stars with Mamadou for the messenger to present himself at my hut, to tell me which way my life would turn.
He was tall and lean. His boubous was green satin with gold filigree embroidered about the neck. He stood before us like a desert prince. Mamadou offered him a stool, but he refused. He said, “If the whiteman wants Bukari’s daughter, then Bukari’s daughter is his. That is the word of her mother. It is finished.”
The young man asked leave, and I heard Mamadou give it to him. Then Mamadou shook my shoulder. He said, “Rejoice, Adama! What you have desired is delivered. Allahu akbar! You are to be married!”
I wasn’t married to Djamilla that time, or any other. In the morning, I jumped on a logging truck to Séguéla, stayed in the city a week, two. When I went back to t
he village, Djamilla had gone. I didn’t explain myself to Bukari; I was too embarrassed. Also, he was a Peul, and I didn’t have to.
For weeks, no one said anything to me about it. Then one night as we lit cigarettes and leaned back against the mango tree after dinner, Mamadou said to me, “Milk or meat, Adama. Those are the only times we deal with the Peul.”
I nodded, smoked my cigarette, considered the stars.
A wandering bead trader came through some days later with a story. I was in the fields and didn’t see him. A beautiful Peul girl in Mankono had fallen in love with a whiteman, and had been scorned. For some days, she had been very ill, and then she was well again. Now she was becoming famous for giving alms of milk to the albino beggars in the Mankono market. When people asked her why she did, she told them it was because the albinos reminded her of the man she loved. The villagers found the story hilarious. They would stop me now and again over the coming years to recount it, laughing hard to remind me that it wasn’t a funny story at all.
SABINA
The job allowed me to travel down to Abidjan every few months, and as a respite from the rigors of the Iron Age, I began to. I dated an Abidjan hooker during my second year: Sabina. Even then, I knew those girls standing on the Rue des Jardins corners were brave: Linda, Sandra, Jan, Fatou, Celeste, Bintou, Margarite, Awa, Judith, Luce; tall in their lithe bones, long in their fleshed limbs. Their braids, synthetic fibers grafted onto their slender heads, reached down to their waists like the manes of ponies. They were riddled with AIDS, though they didn’t know it yet. They were Liberians and Nigerians and poor Dioula girls from Kankan and Odienné. They’d all been raped a dozen times. They were what was left in a place where all that was left were whores. It cost $2 for an hour, $5 for the whole night. And if you paid them for it, they would tell you any lie you needed to hear:
“Your penis is so huge.”
“You are a magnificent lover.”
“You are handsome, baby, so good-looking.”
“I love you, man.”
Sometimes soldiers would round them up for kicks, fuck them, beat them, drop them off in some faraway quarter. They were always back the next evening.
Sabina wasn’t the prettiest on the street, but she didn’t gather her things together and leave as soon as the transaction was over. Maybe she had nothing better to do in the early mornings. Maybe that dull hotel room I took her to was better than where she actually lived: the grim Abobo quarter, perhaps? In a plywood shack with six other girls, sickness all around, open sewers, a brutal pimp, rats? The hotel was nasty, all I could afford on my relief-worker’s salary: hot cinder-block rooms with no fans, televisions in wire cages playing loops of white porno that the owner must have thought the whiteman liked. Now and again it was a white woman getting fucked by a dog; other times it was a white woman getting fucked in both holes by two men at once. The bed was a foam mattress on a plank frame. The night attendant, a sleepy old man who seemed to keep his eyes shut through everything, tossed sheets as thin as tissue over the lovemaking platform. No matter how much I tipped him in advance, there were always dark stains on those sheets. There were roaches stilled on the walls, gathered together in shiny armies up by the crease of the ceiling. And bolted on the wall, a long and filmy mirror let me watch my white body humping hers if I’d chance to glance over. That scene always startled me. Even when I wasn’t drunk, I couldn’t imagine that those people were also us. The toilet was a hole in the floor in the only other room, logs of shit floating in it, the flies, torpid with the cool night, clinging to the shit like black men on lifeboats.
In the silver glimmer of the television after sex, I’d become human again. We’d sit up and smoke cigarettes together in bed, drink the remainder of the beer I’d brought with us. As we sat there one of the first times I was with her, I asked Sabina, “Why are your breasts flat like that?”
“Why the fuck not, man?” she said, the sweat drying on her upper lip in the hot night.
“You have children, don’t you?”
“Two. So what? The girl is dead. The boy lives with his father in Monrovia.”
I said, “Why do you do this, Sabina?”
Sabina said, “Don’t you know that it’s for money?”
I said, “Are you free tomorrow? I’d like to buy you lunch somewhere. I’d like to take you shopping for a nice dress.”
She said, “Where will you take me? To Cococé? To some rich man’s place like that? There will be people there who will look at me. I don’t want them to look at me the way they will if I am with you.”
I held Sabina to me, stroked her hair, and after time, she slept. Every few months after that when I’d come down, I’d cruise Rue des Jardins, ask around for her until she appeared. “It’s my boyfriend,” she began to say, snapping gum as she materialized from the shadows. I gave her too much money every time, imagined strolling down Michigan Avenue back home in Chicago with her on my arm. Why not? We’d look at the Christmas displays together in the windows of Macy’s; I’d dress Sabina in long furs so she would never be troubled by the cold. We’d have hot chocolates in some warm bar in Lincoln Park, and my mother and friends would drop in to greet her and say hello. In Western clothes, she’d fit right in. Who knows where the money would come from?
One night, I trolled for her, couldn’t find her. There were a dozen to take her place. “Where is Sabina?” I said to a slender Sierra Leonean in an electric blue vinyl miniskirt.
“Sabina? Who’s that?”
“Sabina. Liberian. Little nose. Long legs. She talks about me. She’s tall.”
“You go with me if I tell you where she at?” the girl said, cocking her head, snapping gum.
“You won’t tell me otherwise?”
“Man, this is business. Out here is business only.”
“Then yeah. Just tell me where she is.”
“Sabina, she go there. Other side. Her daughter, you know. She got to do something about that daughter.”
The first time I knew it was possible, that sleeping with those girls standing on the corners was a thing that men really did, was after the second serious outbreak of violence.
Fighting between tribes had flared up again all over Ivory Coast at the beginning of my second year, and the organization had pulled everyone down from the villages to Abidjan for safety. Though there were still a hundred of us in-country at that time, half would soon be going home, and the organization put us up, four to a room, in the small luxury hotels scattered all over the Rue des Jardins foreign quarter in Deux Plateaux.
All day during the consolidation, there were meetings at the U.S. embassy where the clean-cut CIA men asked us for information about what was going on up-country. Though they were responsible for our security, they couldn’t even pronounce the names of the most important tribal leaders correctly. The CIA men’s shaking us down for information irritated me; the man from Washington charged with running the consolidation in his three-piece suit did, too. Even in the air conditioning, his face was red, and the time gunshots rang loudly outside the embassy, he ducked the way I had when I’d been new.
It was good, at least, to see the others: those hopeful friends who’d suffered through training with me, three months in a comfortable southern cocoa village, Africa all around, and still, in the draconian regulations of training, at arm’s length. Everyone now had their tribe, their African name, their hut. They had changed physically. Gone were the closely shorn haircuts, the makeup and Western clothes, the softness. Now the men were lean, the women in African wraps. People seemed older, darker. We told stories fueled by alcohol on those hotels’ pool decks: a cobra killed on a doorstep, the first dance of the village masks, the dark trails through the jungle, the pubescent girls marching out in a line with the old women for their excision rites. We talked about births we’d witnessed, deaths. “Do you still believe in AIDS?” we asked one another. Some said, “Oh, hell, yes.” Others shrugged and said, “People die of everything here.”
And the
re was violence to talk about. The young men of one girl’s village sharpened their machetes, smoked ganja, wove crowns of mango leaves around their scalps: the war dress. Another girl had hidden behind the counter of the Elf gas station in Korhogo while mobs burned the city, lit piles of tires on fire on the street corners as though claiming territory.
Everyone dealt with what was happening in their own ways. Yes, many did decide to go home, and a bus was charted to take them to the airport in an exodus. “Good-bye,” we said to them on the steps of the embassy—no real good in it—their Embassy Marine escorts stone-faced in the flanking jeeps. Of those who stayed, some ate too much pizza from the Lebanese shops, some danced all night in the clubs, some went shopping in Cocodi for sandals and trinkets, some smoked Grand Bassam beach pot, many, many got drunk, and a few took Valium and went to bed.
Ryan and I went out into the Abidjan night to drink tall and sweating bottles of 66 among the Africans in the open-air bars, where the Cameroonian music, makassi, Sam Fan Thomas, blasted from the tape decks so loudly, we couldn’t even say who it was we were any longer. What was the plan those few hours before the shoot-to-kill curfew fell over the city like a drape? To talk about our lives in our villages, to be friends in this shared experience, to be drunk, in an easier, jocund place.
On the dimmest corner of that street, the most bustling, too, for all its lack of light, was the Hacienda. Maybe the owner had dreams of traveling to Spain, maybe he’d actually made it there. Who knows why it had that name? It was another open-air place with a woman frying fish on the smoking grill in the corner, a sleepy boy on a stool peddling loose cigarettes from a cup. The beer was cheap, tall and sweating bottles of Bock Solibra, and at a table in the corner behind a potted palm sat a veteran volunteer named Charles. He was with a girl, an African. Ryan and I approached him. I said, “Can we join you? Say the word if not. We’re cool. We don’t want to bother you.” I’d already learned that the one thing that could really bother a whiteman in Africa was another whiteman who still thought that everyone white in Africa shared something in common.