Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  I nodded, smoked, didn’t say anything. We wore the stars on our shoulders like a spangled cape.

  “I miss you, Adama. Even though you are still here, I miss you. All of these years together, you are not a whiteman to me any longer. You are Adama Diomandé, Jacques Diaz. You are my friend. This is the way that I think of you. To say good-bye to you is a thing I can’t imagine.”

  “Mamadou, let’s never say it. Life can be long, why not? Every dawn will bring a new day when we can hope to be together.”

  “I will hope that.”

  “I will, too.”

  “We will smoke together and hunt the francolin in the fields.”

  “We will sit in the night under a mango tree and talk about women.”

  “We will clear brush together and sing the working songs.”

  “We will watch our children play in the dust.”

  “Am I your friend, Jacques, though I am African, a black?”

  “Adama. Call me Adama. Soon I will go to where no one knows that this is my name. Mamadou, you are not my friend. You are not even my brother. You are something to me beyond words. When I think of you, I think of myself.”

  “I’m scared, Adama.”

  I am, too.

  “Nothing will be as it was.”

  “We’re going to have to change. We’re going to have to become better men than we are.”

  The women lined up outside my hut in the morning to beg me for color, and one by one, I painted their doors. I worked as quickly as I could. I began with my close friends, worked my way down. With the four colors that I had, I was able to make each door unique. The chief’s was a yellow star painted on a background of green, the color of Islam. Mamadou’s was blue like mine. The witch doctor’s was red with yellow dots representing the stars of his vast knowledge. On the blacksmith’s I painted the yellow flame of the forge on the blue of the water he cooled metal in. On each of the witch doctor’s four wives’ doors, I painted various plants at the fruit stage of their growth: corn, yam, cassava, rice. On the doors of the chief’s four young sons I painted the symbols of a deck of cards, representing their affection for the game they played together every evening, Huit Américain. For the tailor, I painted stripes, representing bolts of cloth. Weeks went by and the village was awash in color. Every night I listened with Mamadou to the news, to vague reports of trouble in Abidjan.

  Working for PWI had become the major event of my life, though I’d done volunteer service before. Why this value had gotten instilled into me had to do with how hard my father had worked at selling life insurance, our comfortable life in Chicago, the idea that my Catholic parents had that life was about giving back. My mother, a schoolteacher, had spent the late ‘70s helping resettle Vietnamese boat people; my father always donated money to the Red Cross.

  One of the first volunteer jobs I’d ever had was spending evenings with seniors at an old folks’ home in Rogers Park, where we lived. It was a part of a work service through our parish, and I remember the antiseptic stink of the place that barely covered the shit smell of the incontinents. Every Saturday afternoon I went there on the bus and helped the old people play bingo. They wanted to touch me as I moved about making sure they recorded the numbers on their cards with beans, they wanted to grasp my arms with their cold hands, to make me listen to their stories. In many ways, being among those old people had been much worse than the worst times I’d ever had in Africa. But one old man I had liked. He hadn’t yelled for me to come to him, hadn’t beleaguered me with laments about his kids who wouldn’t visit. He waited, months, saying hello now and again from his wheelchair, letting me attend to the others who seemed to need me more. Then one night, exhausted from listening to another old woman tell me a long story about how important she’d once been, how beautiful, I went and sat in the foyer under the statue of the Virgin, where there were poinsettias lined on the sills for the coming holidays. The old man was in his wheelchair with his oxygen tank beside him. I realize now he’d stalked me all that time.

  “What do you think about all of this, Jack? All these old people whining how they’re about to die? What do you really think about all of us pathetic wretches?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Pociask.”

  “How old are you? Twelve? You’re a kid. You shouldn’t have to think about all that yet. Am I bothering you? Let me know. The last thing I want in my life is to think I’m bothering somebody. I know you work hard. I’ve seen what you do for all these whiners. I was in a war, Jack. World War II. The Asian theater. I fought the Japs. I killed some. I killed three men. Now I’m here. What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s good. That’s better than a lot of people. It isn’t good to kill. Not even for your country. Do you believe me? We fall for the bullshit when we’re young. Then we do things we shouldn’t have. Then we have to live with it, and then we end up here. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t ever kill anyone, Jack. It isn’t worth it. It’s better to die. Do you believe me?”

  “I don’t know.” It was snowing outside. I looked at the falling flakes.

  “Do you believe in magic? You should. I’ll tell you a story. I was marooned on an island. For three weeks I was stuck there. Then the fleet got me. I was lucky. Everybody was drowned when our ship was sunk. Good friends of mine. But I lived. While I was there, I lived in this village. Couldn’t even communicate with the people. There was this pretty girl. I wanted like hell to talk to her, but I couldn’t. I saw magic there. People flying around. Devils. But I was sick, swallowed a lot of seawater. Maybe that was it. There isn’t any god, Jack. Do you understand me? Not any god in the way that people can say it. Not that statue or anything like it. But God is everywhere. Not all this hocus-pocus and knowing what God wants us to do and funny robes and prayers they tell you God wants you to say. Nothing as simple as that. You ever look at a candle when you were a little kid?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s good. That’s what you are supposed to do. That’s why kids stare at fire. It’s magic. You have a piece of wood and it burns. Who says it’s supposed to burn? But it does. That’s magic. God. Water is magic. Look at it sometime, put your hand in it. Then your hand gets wet. That’s magic. And that’s God.”

  He’d gone on awhile like that, and I’d stared at the snow, the way it covered the walkway, the way it dressed the two shrubs outside until it looked like they were wearing coats. Then my mother had come in our car and honked the horn, and when I looked back at the lighted foyer from the window as she pulled us away through the snow, I saw the old man sitting there, looking at nothing.

  But the other thing he had told me was this: The only proof of God in the world was color. Everything would have worked the same without it. So why would the world have been made so full of color if there wasn’t a God?

  It became my goal to paint every door of the village, so long as the paint lasted. It went on for weeks, and though I kept expecting people to get bored with it, they never did. The rowdy young men who never seemed to have enough to do wanted to help me, and though I didn’t want to give up this task I’d made for myself, I handed over the brush and let them. Then I became a supervisor. The hag’s door was painted, the griot’s. Even the dwarf’s door was painted red, as though in warning against the magic of his strangeness. In this way, I was able to spend time at each and every hearth in a way I never had.

  People stayed home from the fields to sit with me as the rowdy boys took turns with the brush, painting their doors. They were old people and young: some were missing fingers from leprosy, one old man was missing both front teeth and his left eye. They wanted to know about America, and I told them what I could. Many of the oldest women wanted to hold my hand to thank me as their doors came to life in vibrant hues.

  In the night under his mothers mango tree, Mamadou and I would smoke and contemplate the stars. It pleased me to see his da
ughter, Bijoux, born since I’d been there, attempting to walk now. It made me nervous how quickly she’d run to her father; when she’d fall, I was the first to leap to her rescue. I liked to hold her warm body. I felt proud of her for my friend. Often, she’d fall asleep in my arms, and then Mamadou would call his girlfriend from the fire she sat at with his mother to take the child in to bed. I’d say to Mamadou, “I haven’t accomplished one thing I was sent here to do.”

  He’d say back, “The ant cannot see the road that waits for him over the next grain of sand.”

  I, like everyone, expected the war at any moment. I knew now that I’d be going home. Every man who had a radio walked about with it pressed to his ear, every rider who came into the village was greeted with ears hungry for news. I talked to Mamadou about how I planned on sending him a little money each month once I went home and found a job. “A letter now and again will be enough,” he told me. “I am content to know in my heart that you are my friend.”

  After a month of it, the paint ran out. The cans stood in lopsided stacks under the eaves of my hut like the detritus of a party. It cast a sadness onto the children; it cast a sadness onto me. The witch doctor received a crate of guns from a Burkinabé rider late one night. He put them in the back of his hut, but we all still knew they were there. Who of the village would fight in this war? Mamadou had no interest in it, and, though I sympathized with the north, neither did I any longer. The rowdy young men came to the witch doctor’s hut night after night, asking to see the guns. The witch doctor smoked his cigarette at his fire and said that it wasn’t yet time.

  It was at this time that the chief died. He’d been ancient from the day I’d first set foot in Tégéso, but something about the way he cared for me promised that he would live through the whole time I was there. He didn’t.

  It wasn’t until he was dead that I understood I loved him. He was funny in his old age; he had always had a smile for me. When I’d visit him to honor him as was his due in the evenings before dinner, without fail he’d tell me some story or other, about the spotted cat, about the mole. He’d been another of the old men who’d been conscripted away to fight in Europe in World War II, though he’d never talked about what had happened to him there.

  The village entered a period of mourning. The women shaved their heads and smeared their faces with ashes; the men gave up meat and cigarettes. An important imam came from Séguéla and sang an all-night vigil over the chief’s corpse as his wives washed and anointed it, wrapped it in fine gauze. I shaved my head, beat myself with knotted palm straps as we walked in procession behind the corpse on a mule cart to the graveyard in the bush.

  I was crying. I missed the man, yes, but I was also crying for Ivory Coast. The old generation that had known the terrors of war was leaving us. The new generation was taking its place, and all that the loudest among them wanted was that same thing.

  The graveyard was nothing really, a cleared patch in the forest where holes were dug, bodies lowered into them. There were many mounds there, most tamped and weathered by time, weeds on them; others new like scars against the earth, the record of what AIDS was reaping. The chief’s sons—boys, really—stood sobbing as those of us unrelated to the family by blood took turns jumping into the hole to dig. I wanted my turn, but had to wait a long while. Every man of the village wanted to show that he’d honored the chief on his last day When it was my turn, I jumped into the hole in my ceremonial boubous, and Mamadou tossed the spade that the blacksmith had spent the night hammering into shape down to me. The hole circled my shoulders; the soil was rocky, red, thick with stones and roots. I worked until the sweat began to trickle down my neck. I tossed bladeful after bladeful in a high arc out of the hole, and even when they called my name to tell me that I’d done enough, I dug as if trying to reach another world. Then hands pulled at my shoulders, the spade was taken from me, and they caught me about my arms to lift me out. Soil spilled to the bottom from where my feet sought purchase. My boubous was filthy.

  The old chief was laid in the bottom of the hole wrapped like a mummy. Then the imam said a last prayer and the women let up a trilling wail. The imam tossed in a handful of red dirt and it soiled the white muslin. Then everyone tossed in handfuls of dirt to say good-bye, and the blacksmith’s sons began to fill in the hole with their short-handled hoes.

  “Now we have no chief,” Mamadou said to me as we left the graveside. I walked back to the village, through it, out through the forest, and into my old field. That there had ever been a farm there was now impossible to believe. I pushed through weeds taller than I was and found my old field hut, sat under it, reclined, closed my eyes, let the faces of the past years whirl through my mind as I mourned my chief in my own way.

  The news spread through the region, reached Séguéla, and the préfet, who had been driven out the month before by mobs, came in his long Mercedes to pay his condolences. Why was the village willing to receive this man who so many of them wanted to kill? But a thatch sunshade was constructed of palm branches, and the virgins painted their faces white and danced in a procession to meet his car. The préfet in his French suit and mirrored sunglasses was flanked by commandos with automatic rifles. He sat on the chair under the sunshade, and we each went to him in turn, bowed our heads, and thanked him for honoring our chief. When it was my turn, he said to me, “You are the white Worodougou I’ve heard so much about, is it not?”

  “I live here with these people.”

  “And do you think you are doing them any good?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, boy, help me with my jacket. It’s very hot here in the bush. Hold it up so that it won’t be wrinkled.”

  I held his suit coat as he shucked his great body out of it. For thirty minutes I stood holding his coat, and after being honored by every last man, he stood for me to dress him again, and the soldiers led him to his car.

  “Why did we receive him?” I asked Mamadou in the night.

  “To honor our chief,” he told me.

  “Was the visit of a man like that an honor to our father?”

  “What is a greater honor, Adama, than for those who hate us to acknowledge what we’ve lost?”

  “It was humiliating.”

  “Now is our time to be humiliated.”

  For one week, the village was allowed to drift without a chief, without any real discussion about a new one. Then a council of elders was called. They met in the chief’s courtyard in their finest boubous. Word had been sent to the chief’s eldest two sons who were away working in France, but neither of them wanted to come back to take charge of a nondescript village in the West African bush. The chief’s other sons were still too young. A list of candidates was determined by the old men as we listened to their lengthy deliberations. Gaussou, Bobi, Chimokro, Shwalar; great care had to be taken to choose our new father.

  The old men retreated to their huts to weigh the options. The new chief should not be so old that he may also die soon; he must not be so young that no one would respect him. The times were difficult, the list of choices short. People began to campaign and loud arguments could be heard in the night.

  Gaussou was too vain in his heart, everyone knew, too shamed in the people’s eyes by his public cuckolding. But he was the eldest son of an important family and had to be considered. It wasn’t beyond him to demand a tithe of yams from each compound in exchange for filling the position, to use its power for punishing everyone who had laughed at him. Shwalar was kind and old but knew nothing but growing rice. Chimokro owed money to many men in surrounding villages. Bobi, though strongly built and of the perfect age, had a violent temper: In his youth, he’d shot dead a Peul who’d let cattle into his father’s rice fields. Bobi had served two brutal years in the Séguéla jail for this, before the old chief had finally raised enough money from the village to pay the Peul’s family’s blood money and buy him out.

  Who would it be? Mamadou and I hunted francolin together in the afternoons, spitted them now an
d again over a small bush fire as we had on our travels the year before: It was as though we were trying to relive old times. We smoked cigarettes, lay back against termite mounds to gaze at the clouds scudding across the sky. Among the rowdy young men, sentiment ran toward Bobi; the fact that he’d killed a man had changed in these new days from a stigma to a boon. Many of the older people felt Shwalar was best in his measured and deliberate ways. Though he knew nothing of the world but the cultivation and growth of rice, weren’t people also like rice in that they also had to be developed? Old Shwalar was closer to the ancestors in his respect for the earth, but Bobi seemed more prepared to deal with the times as they were. The young men wanted Bobi: Only a man like Bobi could see the village through the coming days of war. As we smoked, both Mamadou and I wanted Shwalar. What we really wanted was our old chief, but Shwalar was enough like the old man had been to keep the village on its peaceful course. Even as we debated it, we knew that the decision had been made.

  The young men painted white stripes on their faces, danced in a thick group in the evenings through the village holding up their machetes like swords. Bobi was a warrior, they sang; the men of the old day should listen to the men who owned tomorrow. Old women walked about in the mornings, visiting hearths. Shwalar knew the difficulty of the growth of rice, they pleaded; he could guide the village to harvest. Neither man campaigned in any way. They spent their days at their hearths, awaiting the outcome.

  The old men picked Bobi.

  The rowdy young men had shadowed the deliberations with much murmuring, with menacing poses, and when the decision was announced outside the old chief’s hut, they let up a cry to celebrate, raised their machetes. Some came and circled Mamadou and me where we stood. They said to us with their painted faces, “Tomorrow has arrived, older brothers! Regret that this day is not of your time. No more shall we cower. No more shall we bow before those who listen to the weak talk of women.” A bull was slaughtered, Shwalar making the killing cut as though to accept the decision, and the old men who had voted on it wandered back to their huts as though what had been determined wasn’t a thing worth celebrating. For three days, the village feasted, and girls of the last excision sought me out as a bachelor to dance with them in the ancient and rigid pass. They were like younger sisters to me now. Though I danced across the bonfire from them, I knew that none would ever become my wife.