by Tony D'Souza
“They didn’t have clothes, Adama.”
“Did you see those women?”
“How could I not? How can one not see mangoes in a mango orchard?”
“Well, little brother, now what? Do we go back and try again? Or do we go home?”
Mamadou thought for a long time in the dark. We hadn’t been home in a week, were tired. Still, we’d talked about AIDS to hundreds of people, all of the villages but this last one. He said, “That chief, he said to me, ‘Small boy, go home.’ Did he not see my identification tag? My shirt? We’ll sleep now, Adama, and I’ll dream. The penis will come to me. It will tell me what to do.”
In the morning, Mamadou said that the penis wanted him to go back. The chief of Soba saw us off. He touched Ma madou’s face, then mine, with his stubs. He said, “How the gazelles prance when they are young! And in the evening, how they run! Don’t go back there. Stay here and work in my rice fields for all the running that you will have to do.”
We walked quickly, smoked once along the way. Then we came into the clearing that was Djigulachédougou. The village was shrouded in mist. The fat chief was wrapped in a shawl, drinking rice tea from an old calabash. He motioned to an attendant to sweep the ground before we sat. Then, as we looked at our toes, he said, “I think I’ve seen you before.”
“Great chief,” Mamadou said, “we came yesterday.”
“Ah, yes. You are selling beads and pagnes, no? You are a Dioula merchant, and this fair one, he is a Peul, is he not?”
“Father, I am a Worodougou. And this one, he is a whiteman.”
The chief coughed in a short fit. Though he seemed fat and healthy at first glance, he was really sick. “Ah, whiteman,” the chief wiped his mouth and said to me. He wheezed as he talked. “You’ve come here to tell us a great thing and ruin our lives, is it not? Is it Jesus you’ve come to talk about this time? That is what you wanted the last time you came. I know all about Jesus. So great he was, wasn’t he? You want to tell us about Jesus and that all our ways are foolish.”
“We haven’t come to talk about Jesus, Father,” Mamadou told him. “We’ve come to talk about AIDS.”
“Yes, you’ve come to talk about this AIDS today. You will talk to the children, and they will laugh. You will give them bonbons. Then tomorrow you will whisper to them, ‘There are no ancestors. There is only Jesus.’ I don’t trust whitemen. What good has a whiteman ever brought to us here? Go back to Soba, whiteman. You are not welcome. And, small boy, if you ever come back to my village, come back alone.”
We went back to Soba. We smoked cigarettes with the chief, told him all that had transpired. “Don’t cry for two eggs, Adama, when you have been given one,” the Soba chief laughed and said from his hammock. “Be thankful. You never have to be insulted by that fat chief again.”
Mamadou remained determined, slept with the penis under the mat beneath his head, and in the morning, he set out alone. I watched him recede into the gloom of the forest feeling something like longing, and he looked back a last time and smiled, as though he understood how I felt. Then the forest swallowed him up.
I passed the day harvesting rice with Soba’s young men my age. At first, they teased me about my color, about if I knew how to do this work properly, and then we settled into the rhythms of the labor, the reaping songs. Under the heat of the midday sun, I forgot, as I often did, that I wasn’t black.
Mamadou didn’t return that night, and I sat on a stool beside the old chief in his hammock. Perhaps he could sense that I was hurt, because he didn’t joke with me the way he had the days before. Beneath the laughter, he was a different man altogether. He said, “Is it easy for you to live here, Adama?”
“Not easy, Father.”
“And why don’t you go home?”
“Something inside me compels me to stay.”
“It is good, Adama. You are an example for that boy.”
The old chief told me a story. When he was a young man, the French came to the village: a French officer and his black soldiers. He imposed a levy. Soba had to give five young men to fight the war in Europe. Many ran away into the forest. Of those who remained, there were only cripples, half-blind albinos, dwarfs, and old men. But three fit young men had stayed in the village, and the French officer had his soldiers tie ropes around their necks to lead them away on the long road to the coast. “I was one of those three,” the old chief told me. “As the son of the chief, I could not abandon the village. The other two were my cousins.”
He was taken to Grand Bassam, put on a ship to France. The voyage was long, and many times he knew he would never see Africa again. It was very cold in France; the air burned his face, came out of his nose like cotton. There were black men from many strange tribes. No one shared a common language, and though they were all black, they could not talk to each other. The French put them into uniforms, then into ranks, made them march in the cold, taught them how to shoot. The French were very mean, but later, American soldiers they met in Stuttgart gave them chocolate.
One day during training, the French officer, perhaps the same one who had taken him from his village—who could tell, all whites looked the same—assembled the regiment in the yard. He had them build a fire in an oil drum. He said, “Tomorrow, you will go to war. If you brought medicine against bullets, throw it in the fire. War is a very serious thing. I don’t want any of you to get reckless because you believe that bullets won’t kill you.”
Of course all of their mothers had given them medicine against bullets when they’d been taken from their villages. The officer came down among them, took the medicine bundles from where they’d hidden them in their boots, under their tongues.
“I swallowed mine, coughed it up into my hand later. I killed many whitemen. All the other black men died. I kept my medicine that my mother had given me. I did not die. I learned that whitemen are also men, that if you shoot them, they die. I saw many great cities, many great things we do not have here. I enjoyed seeing these things. I did not like the killing. I have no desire to go back there. It is finished,” the old man said to end his story, and then he lifted himself out of his hammock under the stars, coughed and spit, blessed my coming sleep, and went into his hut to bed.
For three days, I stayed in Soba, working sometimes, often sitting with the chief, while Mamadou was in Djigulachédougou. The chief told me tales of his time in Europe, of the snow, of the stone cities of France and Germany where he fought. Part of me didn’t want to believe him. How could this old man really have done all of that?
Mamadou came back on the evening of the fourth day, smiling, walking jauntily, and I understood that we would soon be going home. He lay on the dirt of the Soba chief’s compound, lit a cigarette, and I pulled my stool in close as the old man roused himself in his hammock to listen. “That chief,” Mamadou said, “he made me wait all of the first day in the sun! I watched him eat, I watched him drink. Then he called me to him. If he thought I would be frightened without you, Adama, I was not. I held up the penis and put a condom on it. I told him of the dangers; of Abidjan, of the men who come home from the city with the disease inside them. For some time, that chief was quiet. I could see in his eyes that he was troubled.”
The Djigulaché chief had called for the clown mask to dance that night, and the people gathered around the bonfire to laugh and sing at its tumbling antics until the moon was high. Then the chief had ordered them to sit and listen to Mamadou, and they had. Yes, the old man was a great chief, Mamadou said, very strong in his heart, though it was certain that his days were short. He had found the wooden penis funny, and Mamadou had left it with him. Mamadou’s eyes gleamed. He said, “I will go back there soon and salute that great chief of our people.”
We tied up our packs in the morning, bid farewell to the old Soba chief, started on the road home. Something was missing in me now that hadn’t been before; Mamadou seemed taller to me than he had been as he walked along beside me. After some time, I put away what was troubling me, mad
e myself happy for him. I said, “And what about your penis, Mamadou?”
“My penis? Ah, Adama, my penis now has a journey of its own. Besides, I can carve another one. After you have gone, I will carve many penises, take them to all the old chiefs. Now, if only I had a mobylette. If I had a mobylette to ride, I could move quickly on my own between all these villages. But as always, there is the problem of money. Do you have any idea how to remedy this?”
After a moment, I nodded at him. In fact, I did.
BAMBA
At the end of my second year, the regional supervisor, Cathy, came to my village to see how I was doing. In some ways, this was ridiculous as I’d already been there for twenty-four months. But that was how the organization worked.
Cathy’s visit caused a huge commotion. Women set their pestles down beside their mortars to escort her to my hut like the arrival of royalty. They sang and clapped, danced as they came through the village, Cathy at their center with a smirk on her face as though she found the hubbub as embarrassing as I did. I was sitting in the dirt and sharpening my machete between my feet with a file after a long day of clearing brush with Mamadou in his father’s fields. What could I do but accept that this was happening? “Adama Diomandé!” The woman came as they sang and clapped. “Rejoice! Rise up! Your white wife has finally come.”
The women refused to understand that someone my age wasn’t married, and even if they could have, they didn’t want to. Their basic questions to me during my three years in Tégéso were, “Adama, where is your wife? Adama, why won’t you get married?”
“Your wife, Adama! Hey! Sing and rejoice! Adama, your wife has finally come!”
Cathy was tall and pretty in traditional wraps, into her fourth year in Ivory Coast. I smiled up at her. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said.
“Hello, darling,” she said sardonically.
“Looks like you’ve been welcomed to Tégéso.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” she said, and looked at the women who’d stopped singing now to listen to our strange English words. Ama Bintou, an old woman with strong limbs and steel gray hair, smiled and clapped her hands. She said to the others, “Don’t you see what Adama is saying? He is saying to his wife who has come, ‘How long you have been away from me, wife! How long I have missed you! Oh wife, my hunger has been great. Come now into my hut and feed me a great dinner!’” That made all the women double over with laughter, of course.
“What are they saying?” Cathy asked, and looked at me warily. The women stopped laughing again to listen.
“What do you think they’re saying?”
“That we’re about to do it?”
“Yep.” I stood and brushed the filings off my field pants, picked up her bag from where the women had set it. “It’s hot. Come on in and let’s get away from them. It’s nice to see someone from the outside. What’s been going on in the world? Come in and tell me all the news.”
Cathy ducked under the thatch of my doorway, and as I followed her in, I paused to look back at the women who were ducking now to look inside, put my finger to my lips, and winked. Then I went in and shut the door. The women let up a cheer such as I’d never heard.
What was new in the world? What was ever new? Politics at home was depressing; we were at war again. Here in Ivory Coast, there had been massacres of Bozo fisherfolk along the Beoumi side of the lake, Peul murdered south of Korhogo. Berebi had burned out its Dioula for the third time. The government had built a plaza near Plateau in Abidjan to commemorate those killed in the uprisings the year before, which didn’t do anything but cause more contempt that such serious problems could be salved as easily as that. Money was still frozen everywhere; it seemed reasonable now to think that there would never be any sort of funding. Despite everything, new relief workers had completed training, matriculated in. The retention rate was still running below 50 percent. Most of those I’d trained with had gone home. I knew as she told me the names of who’d left that I’d never cross paths with them again.
“And I went to Liberia,” Cathy told me as she sat on the stool. Mamadou’s mother had brought rice and mushroom sauce for us in calabashes; Mamadou himself had stopped by to greet Cathy and say hello. In fact, the day had seen most of the village ducking their heads into my doorway to call the afternoon salutation and take a look at my long-hoped-for wife. Even the chief had come to grin and exchange words. Cathy had been in Ivory Coast long enough to know all the basics of Dioula salutation, and that had pleased everyone, too, even though they were Worodougou. My old chief had put his hand to the side of his weathered face and said, “Adama, it is good. Your wife speaks our language, though she mumbles. Keep her with us for some time. Then she will speak Worodougou as you do. My heart is content, son. It is good that a man should have his wife close at hand. It makes the spirit happy and guards against insanity”
It had rained the day before, and as we talked into the settling evening, my neighbors placed hurricane lamps in their courtyards, wide basins of water around them. Soon enough, termites filled the air around the light of the lamps in fluttering clouds of gossamer wings, and the women and children knocked the fat insects into the basins with brooms, their hands. They plucked off the wings, fried the termites’ white bodies in skillets of red palm oil. My neighbors brought us a steaming mound of them on a banana leaf, and we moved outside to eat them like popcorn under the stars.
“Liberia? What were you looking for over there?”
Cathy shook her head and smiled, gazed at the night as if deciding whether or not to tell me her story. She was from a small town in rural Oregon, had been homecoming queen of her high school: Though she didn’t look it as she sat comfortably in her satin boubous, she was as far from home as anyone. “If I tell you, you have to keep it to yourself. I don’t want word to get around. If the office knew about it, they’d send me home.”
“Who am I going to tell? What do you think they’d do if they knew all the things I’ve been up to?”
“There’s a girl in a Yacouba village on the border. Justine. She trained after you did. I’d never been out that way, so I went to check up on her. She’s crazy, doing very well, really deep into it, everybody in her village loves her. She says to me, ‘Want to go to Liberia?’ Who wouldn’t want to go to Liberia? The Yacouba are on both sides of the border; half her village goes across every day to trade in the markets and work the fields they have there. She’d been going across now and again with her neighbor. So we crossed the Cavally River in his dugout. We took food, water, bangi, like we were going on a picnic. We walked around in the forest, saw some monkeys, looked at her neighbor’s fields: banana and cassava. It rained awhile and we ate our rice and sauce under his field hut. Everything was the same as here. When we went back to the boat, these guys with guns were there. Not little peashooters like yours. Real guns. AK-47s. They had on these uniforms, odds and ends. One guy had on a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. So right away I think to myself, ‘Cathy, this is bad. You are not going to see Klamath Falls again.’ I mean, how awful would that be? But I was scared. I said to Justine, ‘You know these guys, right?’ She didn’t say anything. It was like she couldn’t hear me.
“They were rebels of course. And they were pissed, Jack. They put their guns on us right away. They were shouting. Ever heard a Ghanaian speaking English? These Liberians were twenty times worse. They put their guns on Justine’s neighbor. They were going to shoot him. They’re shouting, ‘Why not to shoot? Why not to shoot?’ An old guy, right? He starts crying, sobbing. We just stood there. What did we think we were doing in Liberia, anyway?
“They marched us through the forest. We held our hands up. I’m stumbling around getting all wet, my hands in the air. Then we were in this nowhere village, and they locked us in a hut. The neighbor was outside, tied to a pole. We could hear them beating him up and him crying. Then it rained and they stopped. Then the raining stopped and you could hear the water dripping everywhere. We could hear them talking outside the door, all qui
et, like talking about what to do to us. We could smell them smoking cigarettes, then ganja. Then there was music from a radio, and then it was nighttime. We didn’t say one word to each other. It was like we thought that if we were quiet enough, they would forget that we were there. I fell asleep for a while, and then there was an argument outside the door. It was men. It was that time of night, you know? It got louder and louder. I thought, ‘Man, we’re done.’ Then it got quiet again.
“In the morning, we heard a motorcycle pull up, the engine cut out, the guy kick out the stand. Then there was a commotion and they opened the door. We were blinking from the sun. It was an officer wearing mirrored sunglasses. He says, ‘What are you doing in our country?’ Justine says, ‘We just wanted to go for a canoe ride on the river. We didn’t even know we were in Liberia.’ ‘Are you spies?’ he says. We both said, ‘No.’ He says, ‘How can I know if that is true?’ We just looked at each other. Justine looked like hell. Do you have any idea of what just one night of that can do to you?
“I got this bright idea. I said, ‘We have money. We can give you the money we have with us.’ He shakes his head. He says, ‘This is not about money.’ That’s when I got really scared. Who’s ever heard of things not being about money? I mean, I was scared before, but this was a kind of scared I didn’t even know you could be. He asked a lot of questions. I remember those guns and my lips moving.
“They escorted us back to the canoe, kept their guns on us until we were across the river. Justine’s neighbor was all beat up. He kept apologizing to us the whole time, his eyes swollen shut and his lips all bloody. The officer says to us just before we get into the canoe, ‘You are very beautiful women. So sorry times are such as they are. Who knows what could have been in a better time? Perhaps even love, is it not?’ When he let us get into the canoe, I thought that I loved him, too. It took us all day before we could even begin talking about it.”