Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  “It will be as strong as what you feel in your heart, whiteman,” the old man said. He tossed bones—antelope joints—on his mat, read them, then assembled a packet of herbs and fur drawn from the many bundles of them he had tied in the rafters of his hut like an alchemist’s workshop. He wanted 5,000 CFA—about $8—three kola nuts, and six eggs to get the old woman’s genies off my back, gave me the burlap concoction to bury behind my hut.

  For some days, the old woman and I exchanged hard stares when we’d pass each other in the village, as hard as what we felt against each other. The whole village seemed to await the outcome of this battle, and everyone, even Mamadou, kept their distance from us lest the genies circling about our huts would think they were caught up in it, too. Soon enough, the old woman cut her foot while chopping wood for her hearth fire. She was carried to her home village, Kenegbé, on the back of a young nephew, and there, despite the Kenegbé healer’s best efforts, the wound grew gangrenous, and she died.

  After he returned from her funeral, Mamadou said to me, “So it’s over, Adama. Good. But know that the bush pig who uproots a baobab tree eats well for one day. After that, he starves.”

  I’d be leaving soon because of a war, though I didn’t know that yet. In many respects, the death of the old woman was my end in Tégéso anyway. It wasn’t about the way people treated me. It was how I felt about myself.

  Nothing I’d done there was what I had been sent there to do. Now I’d killed an old woman. What was the meaning of this? How had any of this love or witchcraft made my life or theirs any better?

  A letter came on a logging truck addressed to me, Diomandé Adama, Whiteman, Tégéso village. On the seal, it read: “Devine.” ‘Guess.’

  Inside, there was an address in Abidjan. The words on the paper said simply, “I wait for you as on the new moon.”

  I took a transport to Séguéla the next day, was in Abidjan within three. The address was in a squalid and dangerous neighborhood of Adjamé, and as I made my way through the fetid alleyways of tin-roofed shacks in the darkening evening, youths and menacing toughs followed in my wake. At her shack, I rapped on the door. Sogbo opened it. His smile was broad and open under his thin mustache. He said, “Adama! I told you that you would visit my house. Come in, Mariam will prepare a special meal, a feast! I hear my mother has died. I’m very sorry for that. But first I thank you for the help you gave Mariam so that she and my son could join me here.”

  In the corner, in the lamplight, she was spreading shea butter on her chest; unconquerable, unknowable, as beautiful and resolute as always. She did not look up at me.

  COLORS

  The times were ugly: massacres on the coast, massacres along the lake, whole quarters of Abidjan burned down. For two weeks, the principal towns of the north revolted against the Christian government, and the flagpoles that hadn’t been broken in half by the people now flew the colors of Burkina Faso in declaration of a Republic of the North that hadn’t yet had time to design a banner of its own. Businesspeople abandoned the country in droves for Europe and America. For the first time in my nearly three years there, real news of Ivory Coast made the front pages of the world’s dailies.

  Of course, the Republic of the North was short-lived. With no infrastructure, army, or export commodities to speak of, the north had no real access to foreign currency or negotiating power. We were all called down to Abidjan and put up in those same fancy hotels where the bellboys had long since learned our names. Behind us in our villages, the government sieged and starved the north into submission while the television station played music videos and the national anthem on a loop as though bedlam wasn’t really happening. Half of the PWI workers went home. I said good-bye to Ryan. He was the last one of my old friends from training still there. Still I stayed. What was any different now from my first days there?

  The voyage back to my village after the embassy sounded the all clear was what my flight south during the beginning days of this uprising had been: endless checkpoints beside piles of burning tires, search after search of my small daypack and documents by jumpy young soldiers who held beer bottles in their hands and cocked their weapons at the slightest hint of complaint. Where fires had raged on my way down—in markets, roadside huts, government outpost buildings—now lay piles of ash. The back roads teemed with refugees carrying their households in bundles on their heads. Everyone was wary and tired. The northern Muslims had been humiliated and beaten again. Though the land was fecund and green, the mood was gray.

  Half my village came to meet me when I arrived on a crowded transport truck. Many of these covered pickups were rolling now: People who’d gone to try their luck in the city were coming home for safety, as empty-handed as when they’d left. Everyone I cared about came to greet me from the maze of huts of the village: The chief embraced me a long time, the witch doctor’s sons quarreled over who would carry my bag, and Mamadou pushed through the women who’d come to touch my hands and welcome me home, to lead me to my hut with his arm around my waist. No matter how many times I’d failed these people over the years, they’d forgiven me. Again and again, Mamadou said, “Adama, you cannot know how these past weeks have been. Every day I waited for you. Every night I felt certain I would never see you again.”

  This time, I had seen dead bodies, body parts. I saw an arm lying on the side of the road in Séguéla, across from the great mosque. Bullet casings lay around it like gold. The arm had looked like the severed talon of a great bird, as much a piece of trash now as any dung pile or torn bag that always gilded the streets of that city. As for my own safety, this time I’d been concerned.

  Outside my hut after unpacking and drinking water from my cistern to collect myself, I sat on my stool and considered the children who gathered in my courtyard to look back at me. Always, there seemed to be more of them. I lit a cigarette, passed one to Mamadou. We smoked together and let the past weeks settle over us, and the hungry children pressed in as though expecting a story. Who had the energy now to chase them away? Why had I ever done that in the first place? “Were things bad here?” I asked my friend.

  “Not so bad, Adama. Not bad like other places. Everyone stayed in the village. When troops came by, we hid inside. What else could we do? There was gunfire at the Kavena checkpoint. We could hear it here. Some people took food and slept in their fields. Others stayed at home. Where was there to go? The teachers left again. They haven’t come back. What does it matter now? What did it matter before? Many of the Senoufo have headed north. The cotton will soon be ready for harvest. Who will harvest it? We stayed quiet and prayed. What else was there to do?”

  “It was the same in Abidjan. We sat in hotels and listened to the fighting.”

  “Was it frightening?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you did not go home?”

  “Here I am.”

  “Adama, dark days are ahead of us. Ahead of the whole country. All that was good before is now silly. All that was bad has risen up to take the place of the good. Now is not a time of sense. Now is not a time of men like we are.”

  My mother, in her letters, wanted to know why I wouldn’t come home. Her words were urgent—almost frantic—and I could hear her voice as I read them in my hut by lamplight. What good did I think I was doing in such a dangerous place? How did I think I could help the world if I was dead? It had even made it onto CNN, she wrote, so I shouldn’t try to lie to her about how fine things were. What in the world was I still doing there?

  What I wrote back to her was this: I don’t know what good I’m doing, and: I’m not dead yet.

  Though the radio spent hours recounting a fashion show at the Hotel Ivoire, the high test scores of children in the southern schools, we knew it wasn’t true. This was a tense, new way of living, and soon enough, as people always manage to do, we got used to it. The villagers worked harder in their fields, trying to put up more food than usual. Men regretted aloud now in the evenings that they hadn’t taken this growing season more seriously
. The mosque was full every evening, parents huddled at night with their children around their hearth fires, and the witch doctor’s compound was a long line of people seeking magic.

  I went on the unregulated back roads to Séguéla more frequently than I ever had. Many people were moving on them now. Whole families were walking; the smallest of children were walking in their bare feet. There seemed to be no sense to the direction they were taking: For each one heading north, another went south, east, west, all the directions. It was as though everyone knew safety lay at the end of none of them. At the PWI flophouse in the city, I called my mother every other week when the phone was working, assured her that I was okay. Sometimes I was scared, other times excited to be witnessing something I’d only otherwise read about in books. There was a glamour to it, a sense of pride. At times I let it quicken my pulse, though I know I shouldn’t have.

  There were eight of us left in the region, an unusually robust number that I attribute to the welcome our villages had shown us over the years. We bought newspapers, tried to follow the daily developments through the government’s Pollyanna rah-rah. If a peaceful strike in a cocoa plantation was reported, we tried to puzzle out how violent it had actually been. If a temporary curfew for “security, peace, and wellness” was announced, we wondered what street fighting had happened to cause it. We drank heavily, told raw jokes in the Club des Amis bar, smoked stacks of cigarettes and grew sentimental about our villages and our African friends. In the fog of our morning hangovers, we mapped out evacuation plans. Would it be better to sit tight in our villages when the fighting started, or should we head south? Sean was adamant that we should forget crossing into Christian lands to get to Abidjan, and instead head west through the forest to Guinea. Shanna, with a wink, said Mali was a better choice because they had finely tooled leather purses to buy in their markets. We knew we’d be targets wherever we went. Our only real decision was that we would stick together, once the war started.

  One day when I went into Séguéla, I saw that the Lebanese hardware store was having a going-out-of-business sale. I hadn’t had many dealings with Hassan, the proprietor, over the years because I knew that he hated Americans. After the missionaries had been driven out two years before, he was the only other non-PWI whiteman left in town, and the Africans assumed we would become friends because of that. Even Mamadou had asked me in the early days when I’d come home from market, “Did you eat with Hassan? Do you have any news of your brother?”

  “Hassan is Lebanese. I’m American. We’re not brothers just because our skin is white. Is a Baoulé soldier a brother to you? It is the same way with me and this man.”

  Hassan and I had one conversation early on. I’d gone into his store to buy batteries for my flashlight, and also because I was drawn to him as though we might in fact share something. As I’d passed him money through the slot of the wire cage he sat behind, I’d said to him, “I’ve just arrived in the area. With Potable Water International. I’m in a village not far to the south. I’m American.”

  “Of course you are American,” he’d said, and waved his hand, like waving away the sentiment. “What other country can throw away money sending its people to live with savages? Let us not waste time. You want batteries, you are welcome. Come and buy them anytime. I thank you for your business.” He was a thick man, balding, black hair on his hands and wrists; he was short and sturdy like a wrestler, the sort of build that explained how he’d made a living in this outpost. He dragged on his cigarette, punched numbers on his till; the drawer slid open, and he made change for me. As he passed it to me through the slot, he had something more to say. “We are in Africa together. So what quarrel do we have here? But don’t think I feel sympathy for your Trade Center. Every day is a Trade Center in my country, for my Palestinian brothers. It is because of your country that I must live here. So we find ourselves together in Africa. A bad fate on both sides. Come into my shop anytime. Buy what you need. But don’t think that we are other than we are.”

  West Africa, they’d told us during training, had taken in southern Lebanese entrepreneurs who’d fled their country after the Israeli invasion. Ivory Coast had the highest percentage of Hezbollah of any country other than Lebanon itself. Katyusha rockets launched into northern Israel were bought with money earned in shops like Hassan’s. His lecture served to remind me that the world would be what it was no matter what I wanted.

  But a sale was a sale, and I wandered about the aisles of the dim shop, looking at all the nails and cement and tin sheeting he’d marked down. The place was a warehouse, not clean, not modern in any way other than a whiteman owned it. It was empty inside because Hassan had a policy of allowing only two Africans in at a time. Still, he’d been successful over the years. No one else in Séguéla had the capital to offer the inventory of dry goods that he could. His guards with submachine guns were off-duty government soldiers, and he lived upstairs with his wife, who was never seen in public. Looters had been shot on the steps by those guards during the uprising. They’d locked themselves inside and shot through the slats of the metal security shutters.

  Hassan called to me from his cage that last day as I wandered the aisles of his shop. He said in French, “What are you still doing here?”

  “What are you, Hassan?” I said back.

  “I live here, isn’t it? Where else have I to go?”

  “Don’t I live here, too?”

  “You don’t live here, Jacques. You are on a long vacation. When the war starts, your Marines with their night-vision glasses will come and retrieve you. But I will have to stay. Twenty-two years I’ve lived here. When the war starts, they will loot my shop and eat me, these animals.”

  “You are nice and fat, Hassan,” I said as I looked at the price of a sack of couscous. “Sometimes when I look at you, I get hungry myself.”

  “Ah, Jacques, perhaps we could have been friends in another life. You are right. Every meat tastes good when sprinkled with salt.”

  “I’d sprinkle Lebanese meat with paprika.”

  “Then American meat should be grilled with barbecue sauce, is it not?”

  “Why are you closing your shop?”

  “Why? Because I’m not crazy. This eating business is not a joke. They eat baboon and monkey. So why not man as well?”

  “Haven’t you earned enough goodwill here not to worry?”

  Hassan grunted, laughed. He said, “We should have been friends.”

  In the end, I bought paint. It was almost free, how cheap it was. Red and blue and yellow and green; the colors of the lids called to me in the dark of the shop, and I bought them all.

  Hassan rang me up at the till, took my money through the slot in his cage. He said as he pushed the buttons, “You can paint each child one color. Any color would be better than black.”

  “Good luck to you, Hassan,” I told him as I folded my change into my pocket, checked the receipt. “Let’s hope they can see the color of our hearts when it’s time to look.”

  “Hope, Jacques? I’m not going to be around to hope. I learned that lesson once from your people. These people are even worse. I’ll be in Abidjan with my dear ones when it happens. The Lebanese quarter is a big one. Let them come for us. This time we are ready. We’ll be happy to teach these Africans what it means to suffer. We learned this lesson from you, don’t forget. Good-bye, Jacques. Go with God in all you do, inshallah.”

  The twenty paint cans stood stacked under the eaves of my hut like containers of foreign-aid food. With the lids the bright colors of the paint inside, they looked like they held ice cream. Eager boys came and tapped the cans with their fingers, to hear that they were full. “Adama,” they said, “there is enough paint here to color the whole village!”

  “Maybe that’s what it’s for,” I said as I wove shredded palm fronds into a sling for hunting on my stool outside my hut.

  “Hey, Adama! You mean that you don’t know?”

  “Perhaps I do know,” I said, and winked. “But can the monkey
know the plan of the guava he wishes to eat? Do I matter in this? Only the paint can know what it intends to color.”

  The boys looked at me strangely, lingered a bit as though trying to figure out the proverb I’d made up to confuse them, and then they shuffled away.

  I asked the witch doctor to fashion a brush for me in the morning, and he wrapped an agouti tail onto a thick stick with gazelle sinew. Then I painted the planks of the door of my hut blue. Not the blue of the sky, but the blue of water, clean water, the reason I’d been sent to Tégéso, the thing I’d never been able to accomplish. A crowd of children gathered to watch me work, then Mamadou arrived, many of the young men. As I stroked the bright color onto the wood of my door, the smallest children let up a cheer.

  Older women pushed through to the front, chewing their lemon-root sticks like cigars. They stood so close at my shoulders as I worked that I could feel the heat of their bodies, their breath on my neck. “Oh, Adama,” they said like moaning, “it is so beautiful. Paint our doors for us, too. Let us enjoy this color that you have brought.”

  In the evening, I closed the lid on the paint, wiped the makeshift brush on my mango tree’s trunk until the bark was streaked in long lines with blue and the brush was clean. Then I sat and smoked with Mamadou, as was our long-time ritual. My blue door stood out in the evening as though lit.

  Mamadou said, “Your door is very beautiful now, Adama. It shows how much magic you have. The chief has told me that he would also like it if his door was painted such as yours is. So would I. Color makes everyone happy. It is wonderful that you have brought all this color to the village.”

  “I should have thought of it sooner.”

  “That you have thought of it today is as well as if you had thought of it last year. Better. Now it is new and good. If you had thought of it then, we would have already tired of enjoying it. Adama,” Mamadou said in a voice like whispering a secret, “it is not long now that you will leave forever.”