by Tamar Myers
Then an old crone, who must have been fresh from the bush, stepped shakily from a hut. Her naked breasts hung down to her belly like a pair of ripe avocados at the end of twisted black socks. When she saw three white people coming directly at her, she bleated pitifully and staggered backward out of sight. But as she was the only person they had encountered thus far, Pierre had them stop so that he might question her.
“Baba,” he said without looking at her, “do you know where everyone is?”
“Aiyee,” she said. “Truly, I know nothing.”
“Surely you must know something, mother.”
She cackled nervously. “I know that I am very old, master. Very, very old.”
“How old is that, Baba?” Pierre asked. It was not an insulting question; to the contrary. If one was old, one was blessed. To be old meant having survived tribal wars, famine, a host of tropical diseases, and the most dangerous thing of all: the capricious white animal known as the Bula Matadi—the Belgian.
“My name is Locust Swatter,” she said, “for I was born in the year of the great locust plague. Therefore, I can be certain of my age.”
“This woman is fifty-eight years old,” said Pierre after some quick mental arithmetic.
“Surely you are mistaken,” Amanda said. “No one can look like that and be just fifty-eight! Besides, she claims to be ancient.”
“But she is ancient!” Madame Cabochon said. “In the Congo, if you make it to forty years of age, you are old. Beyond fifty, you are ancient, believe me.”
“She is right,” Pierre said. “Sixty is almost unheard of in the rural areas.”
Locust Swatter cackled again to get their attention. “How old is the one with the ugly eyes?” she asked.
Pierre laughed. “Guess.”
“We didn’t come to play guessing games,” Amanda snapped in English. While it was true that she didn’t need to be so touchy about her pale eye color, they really were wasting time, weren’t they? Because somewhere, perhaps in the direction of the market, she could hear what sounded like the roar of a crowd cheering. Then silence. Followed by more cheering.
“Baba,” Pierre said, his ugly blue eyes sparkling with barely disguised amusement, “we recognize your status as an ancient woman, and we can see that you are a woman greatly to be respected. In the light of this new knowledge, I must humbly ask you again: where is everyone?”
“E, that, master. Why did you not ask this sooner? They have all gone to the marketplace, to hear this new preacher by the name of Jonathan Pimple.”
“Jonathan Pimple?” Amanda cried. “That man is no preacher!”
The crone recoiled at the force of the young missionary’s reaction and stumbled back into the darkness of her hut. Amanda lunged after her, but she was stopped abruptly by one of Pierre’s strong tanned arms.
“Mademoiselle,” he said curtly, “that is not wise.”
“I won’t hurt her,” Amanda said. “I just want to know what’s going on.”
“As do I. But she is musenji—an uncivilized one from the bush—and she might hurt you. She may appear to be frail, yes? But she has many years of experience that you do not have.”
They headed straight for the marketplace after that, and with every step they took, the old hag’s words were confirmed. Sure enough, the entire village had turned out to listen to the ranting of one man. He stood on a homemade wooden table at the north end of the square. It was there that the Belgian flag was raised every morning at dawn, and then lowered again at dusk, but as no Belgians had been there to enforce the rule as of late, the pole remained empty.
Jonathan Pimple held a megaphone to his mouth. It was the sort used by cheerleaders back in Rock Hill. At first he seemed oblivious to the new arrivals, as were his rapt listeners, so Amanda was forced to resort to colonial protocol.
Congo culture was one of jostling, not of silly “excuse me’s” and “Pardonnez-moi’s.” Of course whites were above all that. They simply had to make their presence known by speaking a word or two in their clumsy accents (assuming their presence wasn’t already known), and any crowd was guaranteed to part like the Red Sea. In the villages, older women unaccustomed to white faces would emit little shrieks of terror, babies would scream, and although some youths would laugh to showcase their bravery, not a soul dared stand his or her ground.
The citizens of the Belle Vue workers’ village were more sophisticated, so that when Amanda and her entourage (for Pierre now followed her) worked their way through the throng, they initially went unnoticed by Jonathan Pimple.
“After three days—just like Jesus Christ—I too rose from the dead.”
A great cry went up, a hundred voices woven into one. “E, bulelela!”
Amanda was dumbfounded. Just a few weeks ago she might have given Jonathan Pimple the benefit of the doubt and supposed that he was trying to be ironic—in the most inappropriate, sacrilegious way imaginable—or else that he was playing some sick joke. But these were not the words one would hear from the mouth of an African, not unless he actually meant them. That left only one other possibility: Jonathan Pimple was possessed by the devil.
“In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to leave the body of Jonathan Pimple,” Amanda shouted. She held one hand high above her head and the other over her heart. Back home, at the tent revivals, the preachers had held a Bible over their hearts. They had also spoken with a great deal more confidence than Amanda. Then again, none of them had felt brave enough to come to the Congo and preach, had they?
“Mamu!” said Jonathan Pimple. “Please take a seat by the Roman Catholic priest, for I have saved you this chair. And yet another for the madame. Regrettably, there is none for the Bula Matadi.” Jonathan Pimple no longer sounded the least bit possessed, nor did he sound angry.
Amanda looked to where he pointed and spotted Monsignor Clemente, then made haste to join him. When Madame Cabochon was also seated, and with Pierre squatting between them, Jonathan Pimple resumed his sermon. Or was it a political speech? Amanda wasn’t sure at first.
“The followers of the Apostle preach that on Independence Day you will receive everything that is in your heart. Everything that belongs to the white man—if you desire it—it will be yours: his house, his car, even his woman and children. But I, Jonathan Pimple, who have likewise risen from the dead, am here to tell that this is not true. And it is all for our own good that these stories are not true.”
“Speak for yourself, Mupende,” an elderly man of the Bena Lulua tribe said. There was a drift of gray in his hair, which was rare to see, as few men lived to such a ripe old age. “I wish to have this white woman, the young one with the small breasts who is seated before you. She appears to have strong arms and would be of help in pounding the cassava flour in our mortar. My wife of many years has the ‘weakening of arms’ disease.”
Amanda was dumbfounded. Gobsmacked, as her British friends would say. She had come to Africa to gather in lost souls for Christ, and instead, in front of the entire village on a Sunday morning, she was being spoken of as a commodity. As if she was a workhorse about to be auctioned at a farm sale. Or perhaps even a slave.
“Kah!” A bearded young man with a comb stuck into the back of his hair—a distinctly modern, urban style, to be sure—had pushed his way to the forefront of the assembly. “This white is indeed young, and thus she will need a nice hard tree to keep her happy.” He thrust his hips a couple of times in Amanda’s direction to underscore his point, and the crowd roared with laughter. Small children—of both genders—who had witnessed this shameful act immediately began to imitate what they had just witnessed, thrusting their tiny hips suggestively as the crowd grew ever more boisterous.
There is only so much humiliation one can take. Even missionaries have their limits.
“Stop tormenting me!” Amanda cried out in a loud voice as she jumped to her feet. The crowd convulsed
with hysterics. Even adults began to mimic Amanda’s outburst. The really embarrassing thing was that some of the men were doing a darn good job with their falsetto voices. Why didn’t Pierre do something? After all, he was the chief of police. Undoubtedly some of the men there had to be in his employ. At the least he could have blown that stupid whistle he insisted on wearing around his neck everywhere he went—even to dinner parties. But oh no, he just sat there, like a blond sphinx, with the slightest of smiles spread across his too-handsome face. It was a face that she suddenly wished to slap, because she now saw it as arrogant.
Pierre Jardin had warned her not to respond on a personal level to provocations of this nature. He had made it very clear to her that Africans did not laugh for the same reasons that Europeans and Americans laughed. He had urged her not to judge them on that account.
Yes, she had heard all that he had to say on the matter, but that didn’t mean that Pierre’s conclusions were the morally right ones. What if the Lord had called her to Africa to teach the natives how to behave as responsible citizens of the world? Face it, if no one corrected their rude behavior, how on earth would they someday be able to conduct themselves on the world stage? All this talk of independence—in the light of how they were behaving now, that was just so much silliness, wasn’t it?
Amanda raised a clenched fist, more determined than ever to educate these poor lost souls. “Nuenu,” she said, “nudi bana—”
At the same time that Pierre jerked Amanda’s hand down, the monsignor, struggling with his skirts, got to his feet. He raised both arms, with his palms turned to the sky, and faced the people. A calm smile lit his handsome Mediterranean face. Some might have thought that it was by magic, or witchcraft, that the laughter ceased abruptly. For Amanda, who remained steadfast in her faith, the scene she observed was a reenactment of Jesus stilling the stormy waters on the Sea of Galilee.
Jonathan Pimple clapped delightedly. “It is good that the people listen to you, priest. That means that they still subscribe to superstitions. All the more then will they believe the great truth that I will reveal for them.”
The monsignor was a master manipulator. He bowed ever so lightly; it was a dip of his head, really—just enough to be ambiguous.
“Please begin your revelation, Monsieur Pimple. For those of us who arrived late”—he seemed to look at Madame Cabochon specifically—“please start at the beginning. How did you die? Who found you dead?”
After asking his questions, the monsignor took his time arranging his skirts and resuming his seat. Jonathan Pimple waited patiently.
“It was the heart-stopping disease,” he said at last. “As I watched the great tree filled with monkeys sailing by, I began to feel pains in my chest and thought only to sit in my own chair again. The desire became strong, and so foolishly I ran, but when I reached my own compound I found that I could not breathe. Not even one breath—not the breath of a newborn infant. With great difficulty I struggled to sit in my chair, but then my memory on this earth stops.”
“You passed out,” Father Reutner said. “You were drunk.”
Jonathan Pimple remained unflappable. “I do not drink, old man; I am a Protestant.”
“The dead stay dead,” Father Reutner said.
“How about Lazarus?” Amanda said, and then clapped her hands over her mouth.
One of these days her big mouth was going to get her into serious trouble. Pierre, the consummate pessimist, once said that it might even get her killed.
Chapter 32
The Belgian Congo, 1958
Virtually everyone in the marketplace that morning, even the non-Christians, had heard the story of Lazarus rising from the dead. It was the sort of tale that was easy to translate and was well suited to being told around the hearth fires at night. To the hardworking inhabitants of the Belle Vue workers’ village, almost nothing could have been funnier than hearing the young white girl besting the old white man at his own game—and not just any old white man either, but one who had brought a switch down across many a black buttocks just because it had not sat still during church, or perhaps it had squirmed a little during class.
The people cheered and clapped. They danced and stomped their feet.
“Mamu, Mamu,” they chanted.
Amanda gave serious thought to bolting. At the same time, her heart was pumped with evil, undeserved pride. She had bested an old man at his game, a man about to retire after decades of service to the Congolese people. The fact that he had nothing to bring them concerning a true understanding of Christ did not negate the work he had done in running a first-rate primary and secondary school; sadly, the Belgian government left the education of its subjects totally up to the missionaries.
So it was that while Amanda’s soul struggled, balancing pride with shame, Jonathan Pimple raised his arms high above his head the way the monsignor had. However, Jonathan Pimple’s hands gripped a thick pole or a staff—depending on how you chose to look at it. Amanda preferred to see it as a staff, for Jonathan Pimple emitted an aura. She saw in him elements of a modern-day Moses. After all, as soon as the noisy throng beheld the staff held high, they fell silent; the babies stopped crying and the old men ceased coughing. Obviously, this was not to say that Amanda bought into any of the nonsense that Jonathan was preaching.
“Muoyo wenu,” he boomed. Life to you.
“E, muoyo webe,” the crowd roared in one voice.
“Listen, good people,” Jonathan said. “The followers of the Apostle believe that on Independence Day an automobile will magically appear in the sheds of anyone who has the faith to build such a thing. As you know, it must be built in the cemetery of one’s ancestors. But in order to have the knowledge needed to drive this automobile, one must first mix the brains of a white man with palm oil and then smear it on one’s own head. Good people, have you heard this prophecy before?”
“Eyo!” cried the people as if in one voice. “We have heard this.”
“Friends,” said Jonathan Pimple, “I have risen from the dead to tell you that this prophecy is all nonsense!”
“Kah?” Hundreds of people all said the same thing.
Jonathan Pimple grinned. “Think about it, friends; what if the brains came from a very stupid white man? Believe me, I have met many such men.”
The people laughed. Amanda laughed with them, pretending to be oblivious to the glares from both Pierre and Father Reutner.
“These B’Apostela have already begun their quest for knowledge by digging up a white grave up in Port Francqui and removed from it a dead white man’s brains. Now I ask you, my friends, what will you learn from a dead white man’s brains? For it is their belief that after death the white man’s spirit travels far to this place called heaven and the body rots, is eaten by worms, until all that remains is dust. Do these B’Apostela up in Port Francqui territory now know how to communicate with worms?”
It was plumb amazing to watch the way Jonathan Pimple worked the crowd, causing the people to explode into laughter and then silencing them just as quickly with his upraised staff. Of what did he remind her? Oh yes, a concert conductor. A black Moses concert conductor—what a spellbinding man! And to think that he had sought out Cripple for advice.
“It is far better,” Jonathan Pimple said, now jabbing the staff in a multitude of directions, “that each one of you who so desires to drive an automobile learn how to operate the machine in a special school that I will establish just for this very purpose. I will find and recruit men who have served as chauffeurs to the white masters, and they will teach you everything that they know. I assure you, friends, that the citizens of the Belle Vue workers’ village will drive far better than worms.”
On and on Jonathan Pimple preached; nothing he said was seditious, and nothing was really sacrilegious barring his first statement that he had risen from the dead. When he finished forty-five minutes later, the natives had been whipped i
nto a joyous frenzy and the whites, with the exception of Madame Cabochon, were foaming at the mouth.
“Truly, after rising from the dead, I am very hungry,” Jonathan Pimple said. “Who among you has sufficient meat in his pot such that he might share with one who has peered into the future? Let it be known, however, that I am a Mupende and prefer the taste of cassava mush that uses millet as its base, and not corn.”
“What a cheeky bastard,” Pierre said.
“Our Risen Lord did not eat,” Father Reutner said. “This man piles blasphemy upon blasphemy.”
“What did you think of this performance, Amanda?” Madame Cabochon asked.
“The man performed very well,” Amanda said curtly. “As a manipulator of human emotion, that is. But as to whether or not Jonathan Pimple is a cheeky so-and-so, well, I have no idea if his parents are married or not.”
“Touché,” the monsignor said. His hand rested lightly on Amanda’s right shoulder as they pressed through the crowd. Then it slipped, accidentally to be sure, before glancing off her elbow, and grazing her hip. For a split second it was even pressed against her right buttock; but this was to be expected when you were worming your way through such densely packed humanity!
Humanity. Bantu. Whites are people too, Cripple reminded herself. It was a concept she struggled with every day. She had become very fond of the young mamu from America, the young woman she called Ugly Eyes, but from the time she could first remember, Cripple’s ears had been subjected to the stories of the atrocities perpetrated on the black man in the Congo by the white man, things that only creatures lacking empathy could possibly have committed.
It has been said that even a leopardess will sometimes spare a newborn antelope fawn in favor of the doe, and is not the leopard the animal most lacking in empathy of all the beasts that roam the earth? How is it then that a white man, King Leopold of Belgique, had commanded that the right hand of each black man should be chopped off with a machete if he did not supply the king a certain quota of wild rubber tree sap? Chop, chop, chop; thousands of black hands severed by machetes—not to lie rotting on the forest floor—but to be collected by overseers and stacked in piles. And photographed! Millions more black backs bent under forced labor building roads and bridges and structures that were said to brush the clouds, so great were their height. All the while those accused of intransigence, or crimes, against the crown were beaten with strips of hippo hide, which dries to the thickness of two men’s thumbs pressed together. When this hide is kept supple, there is nothing that can equal the pain that it delivers.