Diamond Boy

by Michael Williams

  Another man clambered out of a hole, blew out his candle, and, after a brief exchange with our new guide, joined us. He, too, carried a sack on his back, and used an iron rod for support. A short distance away, I turned to look back at the diamond field that now seemed dark and empty and a bit less frightening.

  “They mine at night to avoid sharing their ore with the police,” explained Boubacar. “Some do work during the day—the Live Show, they call it—but then they are watched by the police, who breathe down their necks looking for ngodas.”

  “Ngodas?”

  “Raw diamonds.”

  “And the iron rods?” my father asked.

  “They are sharpened to chip away the rocks and break the earth. Then they load the ore by hand into those sacks,” said Boubacar.

  “Basic artisan mining techniques,” mused my father. “The diamonds here are low-quality industrial diamonds often found in shallow alluvial deposits. They are accessible to anyone with a sharp tool, plenty of muscle, and an abundance of optimism.”

  “Shut up, Joseph,” snapped the Wife. “You’re showing off.”

  The Wife got a second wind, now that we were closer to her brother’s camp. She left my father and walked next to Boubacar, who ignored her endless chatter. I dared to hope that our journey was coming to an end. Climbing into the car early yesterday morning was now wrapped up with the faraway past of leaving Bulawayo. With each step through the darkness toward the Banda camp, I was moving farther away from the life I had had in the city. How could I ever tell Sheena anything of what had happened to us since then? She would be waking up soon, having breakfast, putting on her school uniform, and walking the familiar road to Milton High School, refreshed and ready for just another ordinary day, whereas I had no idea what was waiting for me in Marange.

  The guide stopped, cocked his head as if listening for an imagined sound. He whispered hurriedly to the man behind him and pointed at figures running toward us. A loud police whistle blasted the night air and was followed by angry voices. The men dropped their ore sacks and metal rods and sprinted away, leaving us standing out in the open. If this was the end of our journey, caught by the police and driven away in the back of a van, then so be it. I had had enough of this long night.

  Boubacar passed the sleeping bundle of Grace to my father and instructed the Wife to stand behind him. He swung his backpack to the ground and lightly twirled his iron bar in his left hand. The knife was again in his right hand as he stood tall, waiting for the police, treading heavily toward us.

  But they were not police. Instead, four men wearing balaclavas and armed with knives and rods, and one with the handle of a pickax casually slung over his shoulder, approached us.

  “Magombiro,” said Boubacar, raising his knife before him. “Miners who failed as diggers and who steal from others. The worst kind of Marange parasite. We’ll see if they have the stomach for a fight.”

  The four men stopped. They spread out to surround us. My father pulled me close to him, while the Wife clung to his arm. Boubacar merely stood his ground as the beam of the flashlight lit up a look of scorn on his face.

  “What do we have here?” said the one who appeared to be the leader, a police baton twirling from his wrist. “Trespassers? Stealing what doesn’t belong to them?”

  Boubacar, his gaze firmly fixed on the masked man in front of him, did not reply.

  “You know what we want, big guy. You can’t be as stupid as you look. We can take it with blood or without. The choice is yours.”

  Boubacar’s size, stance, and silence unsettled the leader enough that he had stopped a healthy distance away. The other three men moved cautiously to the side of their leader. Boubacar’s resolute stand was not the response they expected.

  “You step aside,” the leader demanded. “Do you hear me? I mean what I say.”

  “Does your father know what you are doing, boy?” Boubacar finally replied.

  The man’s head jerked as if Boubacar had slapped him.

  “Does he know you prowl the night like the coward hyena? What would he do to you if he found out that you prey on those who cannot defend themselves, stealing their day’s honest work?” Boubacar’s tone left little doubt as to what he thought of these magombiro.

  “And do you give your father anything of what you steal?” Boubacar lifted his knife and pointed it slowly at each of them in turn. “Or do you and your friends hide it from the Banda syndicate?”

  Unsettled by Boubacar’s questions, the men glanced nervously at one another.

  “And what would your father do to your friends if he found out you’re running your own little business on the side?” Boubacar goaded the leader. “Have any of you clowns ever thought about that?”

  The leader adjusted his balaclava to get a closer look at Boubacar.

  “Boubacar?” he exclaimed, pulling off his mask and gesturing to his companions to step back.

  He laughed, a tight, high-pitched snuffle that seemed even scarier than his anger. He quickly stuffed his balaclava into his back pocket, while the police baton swung loosely from his wrist. Boubacar, however, did not lower his knife as he approached.

  “Musi?” The Wife broke away from behind my father. “Musi Banda, is that you?”

  The man froze at the mention of his name.

  “It’s me. Auntie Sylvia. You remember me? Sylvia from Bulawayo,” she said, with a girlish laugh. “We should have arrived yesterday but that driver deserted us after the first checkpoint. We had to walk. It’s been a terrible journey.”

  Confusion, laughter, embarrassed embraces, and hurried introductions came rapidly. Musi had transformed himself from a dangerous thug into his family’s welcoming representative. With all the noise, Grace woke up and looked around in a daze. Boubacar stood to one side, letting Musi take charge, sending one of his friends ahead to wake his father. But before we were swept along, two of the men quietly hid their sacks behind a clump of rocks and covered them with a bush. Then Musi ordered them to carry our luggage. He talked loudly, laughing at the misunderstanding, shaking my father’s hand more vigorously than was necessary and embracing the Wife as if it were he who had rescued her.

  “My father will be so pleased I found you, Auntie. I come here only to watch for strangers in our fields. Everyone steals from everyone else. I thought you were magombiro. You’ll tell him that, won’t you?”

  “Of course, Musi, of course,” said the Wife, leaning on his arm. “We’ll tell him exactly that.”

  “And your face, little cousin,” he said to me, cuffing me painfully on the shoulder. “You looked like you had seen the devil himself!”

  Boubacar, forgotten in the excitement, put away his weapons and stood apart, observing our strange family reunion. He motioned for me to follow my family, but before I did, I slipped off his tie from Grace’s neck and looked up into his scarred, ugly face, which was no longer the least bit scary.

  “Thank you, Boubacar.” I handed him his tie.

  “We would never have made it without your magic tie,” said Grace.

  He fixed her with his sternest gaze but a flicker of a smile played on his lips. “I hope you will like your new family,” he said, glancing at Musi, who was now leading the way. “You will have a new life, Patson, one that will require all the courage you have inside you.”

  “I will never forget what you did for us,” I promised.

  “You can have my necktie, Mademoiselle Gracie. It will keep you safe.” Boubacar slipped the tie back around her neck and turned to leave.

  “Boubacar, where do you come from?” asked Grace.

  “The Congo,” he replied. “Go now. Tomorrow is here already and your uncle will be pleased to have another pair of hands working in his syndicate.”

  When I finally woke up nine hours later, my cousin Jamu was sitting at the foot of my bed. The first thing I noticed was his smirk. I’d seen expressions like his before on other boys, sometimes mean, sometimes superior, but always hiding some insecurity
. His face was round, with thick lips and a stubby, flat nose that looked like he’d come up short in a long fistfight. His chubby legs were covered with gray dust and his shins and bare feet were coated with mud. Then I saw the reason for his smirk: He had been reading my diary.

  “My father says you’re lucky to be alive.”

  The contents of my backpack were strewn about the floor and he was flicking through the pages of my diary like it was a magazine.

  “Give me that. You have no right—” I lunged at him.

  “You write lots of stuff,” he said, waving the notebook, then tossing it onto the pile of my clothes.

  “It’s mine. And it’s private.”

  “You didn’t bring much, but your phone is cool,” he said, pulling my phone from his pocket. “Who is this Sheena chick?”

  I sprang out of bed and grabbed my phone. Jamu fell backward, slamming his head on the corner of a cupboard. When he took his hand away it was sticky with blood. Like a baby he wailed in pain and ran out of the room calling for his mother. Serves him right, I thought, and angrily stuffed all my things into my backpack.

  My father entered the room. “Patson? What’s going on?”

  “He was reading my diary and he took my phone.”

  “Remember we are guests here, son.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he can—”

  “Patson, I know you to be better than this. I want you to apologize to Jamu.”

  I hurriedly dressed, smarting at my father’s rebuke and the unfairness of it all. I followed him down a corridor and into a lounge that looked more like a toolshed. It was filled with pickaxes, iron rods, sieve trays, and ore sacks. Musi and one of the men from last night lounged on an old leather couch drinking beers. The large flat-screen television mounted on the wall was on mute, showing the strutting moves of a rock star with bling flashing from his wrists and ears. From the backyard came the thump-thump of a huffing generator. Grace was working in the kitchen and ran to me, but the Wife pulled her back to the sink, scolding her to finish her work. Another woman was standing at a stove cooking. Jamu was being attended to by an older woman who scowled at me as we walked into the room.

  “Jamu,” said my father, “Patson has something to say to you. I trust it’s not a deep cut, Prisca?”

  “Deep enough,” the older woman replied. “It’s still bleeding.” Her hair was cut short like a boy’s and she wore a loose T-shirt and red boxer shorts that didn’t quite cover her bloated belly. Her legs were coated with the same dust that marked every member of the Banda family. This was not the normal dress of Shona women; but this was no normal family.

  The younger woman left her cooking to peer under the cotton wool pressed to Jamu’s head. “You’ll be all right,” she said brightly.

  “I suppose so, Amai,” he mumbled.

  “It’s nothing to worry about, Joseph. I’m sure it was an accident,” she said.

  “Thank you, Kuda,” said the Wife. “But Patson must apologize. He is your guest, after all.”

  “Yes. Guests. Mmm,” said Prisca, not taking her eyes off me.

  “Joseph?” demanded the Wife.

  My father gently pushed me forward and I stood before Jamu, who glared at me. I mumbled my apologies.

  “I can’t hear him, Amai,” complained Jamu.

  “I said I was sorry you hurt your head.” My father squeezed my shoulder painfully. “And that I pushed you.”

  “He’s not really sorry, Amai. Make him say it again. Properly,” Jamu protested, grinning at me the way a cat plays with a bird.

  “Jamu, did you take something that was not yours?”

  Every head in the room turned toward James Banda, sitting at the head of a table and bent over a small pile of stones spread on a black velvet cloth. A cylindrical magnifying glass seemed stuck in his right eye, and made his whole face look like a dried-up prune. With a pair of tweezers, he plucked a dark green pebble from the pile and studied it intently. He was a large man, with a thick, flabby neck and broad shoulders. His shaved head glistened with oil.

  The Wife had often told us that her brother had once been the heavyweight champion of the Mutare region with sixteen knockouts to his credit. Although he had long since lost the muscles of a prizefighter, there was no doubting he could still knock out a man with a single blow. Yet his thick, gnarled boxer’s hands handled the tweezers and small stones as delicately as a surgeon’s.

  “Come here and bring your cousin,” he said, not looking up from the table.

  His words had an immediate effect on Jamu. The smirk slid from his face and he scrambled off the chair, pushed away the fussing hands of his mother, and dragged me toward his father. Uncle James continued sorting the pebbles, examining each briefly, then placing them, one by one, in smaller piles on the table.

  Jamu and I stood before him, and Musi swiveled on the couch to get a better view. Then he pointed two fingers at me and cocked his thumb like the hammer of a gun. I wanted to wipe the stupid grin from his face with a shovel.

  “Now, Jamu, you must answer me truthfully. I will ask you again. Did you take something that did not belong to you?” Banda spoke softly, like he might be asking about nothing more important than the weather.

  Jamu was clearly terrified. Suddenly I felt sorry for him, being so afraid of his father.

  “I was only looking at his phone,” mumbled Jamu.

  “So you didn’t take his phone?” Uncle James lifted another stone toward the light.

  Jamu hesitated.

  “Jamu?”

  “I took his phone.”

  “Good, Jamu, you have spoken the truth. Now I will show you what happens when you take something that does not belong to you.”

  “It was my fault, Uncle James,” I blurted out. “I left the phone lying around and I knocked him off the bed.”

  Uncle James popped the magnifying glass out of his eye.

  “So, the son of the schoolteacher defends the weak,” he said, looking at me for the first time. “Your name is Patson?”

  I nodded.

  “I hear a young lion in your voice, little prince. I shall remember that.” He pointed the tweezers at me. “Musi, come here. Bring Xaba. I want to show you something.”

  The two young men ambled over to the table.

  Uncle James indicated the pile of pebbles on the velvet cloth. “I’m disappointed with yesterday’s work. Mostly ngodas. One or two that might be low-grade girazi but it was a day of poor-quality ore. What do you think?” he asked, inviting them to inspect the stones.

  The two of them leaned over the pile. Musi’s eyes gleamed and the tip of Xaba’s tongue flicked over his lips.

  “Look closer but no touching,” said Uncle James, lifting his hands away from the table.

  As Musi and Xaba bent lower, Uncle James clamped his hands onto their necks and smashed their foreheads into the table. With the crack of bone on wood, the pebbles leapt from their piles. Musi cried out in pain and reeled away holding his forehead, while Xaba struggled under Uncle James’s iron grip.

  In the next moment, Xaba’s whimpering grew louder. Uncle James had inserted the tweezers into his nostril and was gripping the corner of his nose. He slowly turned the tweezers, twisting the fleshy part of his nose, forcing the man to his knees. A dark pearl of Xaba’s blood fell onto the table.

  “So, Jamu, what have you learned?” asked Uncle James.

  “You shouldn’t… I mean… Never take what doesn’t belong to you,” stammered Jamu.

  “Good. And, more importantly, never take what belongs to me. If you do, I will hurt you badly,” he said, yanking out the tweezers and releasing Xaba.

  “Come here, Musi,” he demanded as he carefully wiped the tweezers on the edge of the velvet cloth. “I won’t hurt you again, but next time you think about playing magombiro, I will. Now you two will return the sacks you stole last night and apologize to Alfred Mazezuru. Then you and your friends will spend the rest of today and tomorrow working for the Mazezuru syndica
te. I will be proud to hear that you have sieved sixteen sacks each.” As the young men turned to leave, Uncle James added, “And, Xaba, instead of listening to the boss’s son, use the brains God gave you and make your own decisions. Now, get out of here, both of you.”

  Halfway out the door, Musi shot me a glance as if I’d been the one who caused him this humiliation. Before I could even think to object, Uncle James had turned his attention back to me.

  “Patson, come here.”

  I took only a small step toward him, eyeing those tweezers warily.

  “No, no, you don’t need to be afraid,” he said, and chuckled. “You’ve done nothing wrong. I want to show you my diamonds.” Uncle James lifted a few stones and dropped them into my hand. They looked like coarse chips of broken beer bottles: dark brown, black, and a strange shade of darkish green.

  “You are holding over three thousand Usahs in your hands, Patson. Yes, that’s right. Three thousand American dollars,” he said, explaining the word Usahs to me. “Your son has never seen such wealth, hey, Mr. Schoolteacher?” He glanced at my father, standing at the other end of the table. “With those ugly ngodas you can have anything you want. Look closely at them, Patson, beyond their colors, feel their knobbly, smooth shapes. These are the stones of midzimu, the land spirits of Marange. If you are good to your ancestors, they will guide you to ngodas. Once your shavi allows it, finding such stones as these is easy. But first, you have to be pure in your heart, Patson, or your shavi will hide from you. Are you pure of heart, Patson?”

  I studied the tiny stones. It was hard to believe that I was holding three thousand American dollars in the palm of my hand. It was a fortune beyond imagining. These stones could be mine. I could own all that money.

  Uncle James gripped my wrist and turned my palm firmly, until the rough, uncut diamonds fell back onto the table. I stared at the stones, no longer in my grasp. A fortune had slipped through my fingers. Uncle James studied me for a moment and then removed a small leather pouch hanging from around his neck. A single glassy stone, the size of my thumbnail, fell onto the velvet cloth.