by Marlon James
My father said he left his place of birth because a wise man showed him that he was among backward people who never created anything, never knew how to put words down on paper, and fucked only to breed. But my beloved uncle told me different. Listen to the tree where you live now, for your blood is there. I listened to branch upon branch and leaf upon leaf, and heard nothing from the ancestral fathers. A night later I heard my grandfather’s voice outside, mistaking me for his son. I went out and looked up in the branches and saw nothing but dark.
“When will you avenge your father’s killer? Restless sleep rules me, it waits for justice,” he said. He also said, “With Ayodele slayed, you are eldest son and brother. That defiles the plan of the gods and must be avenged. My heat has not gone cold, my weak son.”
“I am not your son,” I said.
“Your brother Ayodele, who is eldest, is here with me, also in troubled sleep. We await the sweet smell of enemy blood,” Grandfather said, still mistaking who I was.
“No son of yours am I.”
Did I look so much as my father? Before I had hair, his was gray, and I have never seen myself in him. Except for stubbornness.
“The quarrel runs fresh.”
“I have no quarrel with crocodile, no quarrel with hippopotamus, no quarrel with man.”
“The man who killed your brother also killed his goats,” my grandfather said.
“My father left because killing was the old way, the way of small people with small gods.”
“The man who killed your brother still lives,” my grandfather said. “Oh how big the shame when that man in your house left the village. I shall not speak his name. Oh what a shameful way, more weak than the bird, more cowardly than the meerkat. It was the cows who told me first. The day he saw that I would not rest until he took revenge, he left the cows in the bush and fled. The cows took their own way back to the hut. He has forgotten his name, he has forgotten his life, his people, hunting with bow and arrow, guarding the sorghum field against birds, caring for the herds, staying away from mud left by flood for that was where the crocodile sleeps to keep cool. And you. Shall you be the only boy in a hundred moons that the crocodile hates?”
“I am not your son,” I said.
“When will you avenge your brother?” he asked.
I went around the back and found my uncle drawing snuff from an antelope horn, like rich men in the city. I wanted to know why he left for the city, like my father, and why he returned, unlike my father. He was coming back from a meeting with a fetish priest, who had just returned from reading the future at the mouth of the river. I couldn’t read on his face if the priest foretold more cows, a new wife, or famine and sickness coming from a petty god. I smelled it on him, the dagga he was chewing for second sight, meaning he didn’t trust the priest with his news and wanted to make sure for himself. This sounded like something my uncle would do. My father was an intelligent man, but he was never as smart as Uncle. He pointed to the white line on his forehead.
“Powder from lion’s heart. The priest mix it with woman’s moon blood and mahogany bark, then chew it to tell the future.”
“And you wear it?”
“Which would you choose, to eat the lion’s heart or to wear it?”
I did not answer.
“Grandfather’s ghost is a mad spirit,” I said. “He asks, over and over, when shall I kill my brother’s killer. I have no brother. He also thinks I am my father.”
Uncle laughed. “Your father is not your father,” he said.
“What?”
“You are the son of a brave man but the grandson of a coward.”
“My father was as old and frail as the elders.”
“Your father is your grandfather.”
He did not even see how he shook me. Silence grew so thick I could hear the breeze shake leaves.
“When you were only a few years, though we do not count in years, the Gangatom tribe across the river killed your brother. Right after he came back from the Zareba rite of manhood. On a hunt in the free lands, owned by no tribe, he came across a group of Gangatom. It was agreed by all, there should be no killing in the free lands, but they chopped him to death with sharp hatchet and ax. Your true father, my brother, was the most skilled bow and arrow man in the village. A man must know the name of the man on whom he is taking revenge, or he runs the risk of attacking a god. Your father listened to no man, not even his father. He said that the blood that runs in him, a lion’s blood, must have come from his mother, who had always cried for revenge. Her cries for revenge drove her out of her husband’s house. She stopped painting her face and never groomed her hair again. Some think it foolish to avenge the death of one son with the killing of another son, but it was the time of foolishness. He avenged the death, but they also killed him. Your father took up his bow and six arrows. He set his aim across the river and vowed to kill six living souls he saw. Before noon, he killed two women, three men, and one child, each from a different family. Now six families were against us. Six new families now meant us death. They killed your father in the free lands, when a man living there said the skins he bought from him fell apart after two moons. Your father went to see about the complaint and defend his good name. But the man had betrayed him to three Gangatom warriors two moons before. A boy took aim with his bow and struck him in the back, right through the heart. The story of the bad skins came from the Gangatom, as this man had no art in him to come up with a clever deception. That is what he told me before I cut his throat.”
Also this, my uncle told me. My grandfather grew tired of killing and took my mother and me from the village. He was the one who left the cows. This is why from when I was young, my father was old, old as the elders here with humps on their backs. Running made him thin, with skin and bone. He always looked ready to flee. I wanted to run from my uncle to my father. Grandfather. The ground was right now not the ground, and the sky was not the sky, and lie was truth and truth was a shifting, slithering thing. Truth was making me sick.
I knew my uncle had more words to tell me; words that would give my head sense, because it had taken up foolishness and I could not believe my own ancestors. Or maybe I believe everything. I believe an old man who was not my father and a younger woman who was my mother. Maybe she was not my mother. They slept in the same room, in the same bed, and he climbed on top of her like husbands do; I had seen them. Maybe my house was not my house, and maybe my world was not the world.
The spirit in the upper branches of this tree was my father talking to me. Telling me to kill for my own brother. And the village knew. They came to my uncle’s house to ask. The old women sent word with the children, When will you avenge your brother? The other boys asked me as they taught me to fish, When will you avenge your brother? Each time someone asked the question, the question had new life. After years of wanting to be nothing like my father, I now wanted to be him. Except he was my grandfather; I wanted to be like my grandfather. My grandmother had gone mad from her need for revenge.
“Where does she live?” I asked my uncle.
“A house built then left behind by large birds,” he said. “Half a day from this village if you stay on the riverbank.”
I sat behind the grain keep.
I stayed there for days.
I spoke to no one.
My uncle knew it was wise to leave me alone. I thought of my grandfather and my uncle, and tried to make in my head what my father looked like. But that always died and left me with my grandfather and my mother, both naked but not touching. What does the bearer do with the thing he can’t bear, throw it off? Let it crush him underneath? I was a fool for they all knew. I was an animal who would kill the first person to speak of fathers and grandfathers. I hated my father even more. My grandfather. So many moons telling myself that I did not need my father. We came to punches and blows, me and my father. And now that I have none I want him. Now that I know he would have made a sister also an aunt, I wanted to kill him. And my mother. Rage, maybe rag
e would lift me up, make me stand, make me walk, but there I was, still by the grain keep. Still not moving. Tears came and passed without me even knowing it, and when I knew it I refused to think it was so.
“Fuck the gods, for now I feel like I can skip on air,” I said out loud. Blood was boundary, family a rope. I was free, I told myself. And would tell myself all night and all day for three days.
I never went searching for my grandmother. What would she have done but tell me more things I did not want to hear? Things that would make me understand the past but give me more tears and grief. And grief was making me sick. I went to he who was building a fire outside his hut. Why his hut, his grain keep, his fires were all without the company of woman, I did not ask. For a boy who was not yet a man, he was raising himself.
“I will take you to the Zareba, and you will gain manhood. But you must kill the enemy before the next moon, or I will kill you,” he said.
“I call you moonlight boy in my head,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because your skin was dark-white like the moon, when I first saw you.”
“My mother calls me Kava.”
“Where is she? Where is your father, sister, brothers?”
“Night sickness, they all die. My sister was last.”
“When?”
“The sun circle this world four times since.”
“I feel sick from the talk of fathers. And mothers. And grandfathers. All blood.”
“Cool that rage like me.”
“I wish blood could burn.”
“Cool that rage.”
“I have them and I lost them and what I have is a lie, but the truth is worse. They left my head on fire.”
“You will go to the Zareba with me.”
“My uncle says I am not for the Zareba.”
“You still take word from your blood then.”
“My uncle says I’m not a man. That the woman at the end of this has not been cut away.”
“Then pull the skin back.”
Behind his hut was not far from the river. We went down to the banks. He had a gourd in his hand. He scooped water in his hand, poured it into the gourd, and waved me over. I stood still and he took some of the wet white clay and painted my face. He marked my neck, my chest, my legs, my calves, and my buttocks. Then he dipped his hand in the water and marked my skin in lines like a snake that tickled. I laughed, but he was stone. He marked lines on my back, down my legs. He grabbed my cock foreskin and pulled it hard and said what to do with this shriveled foro? Words were spoken up in the trees, but I ignored them. Kava said, “I wish I had an enemy to avenge my mother and father. But which man has there been, that has ever killed air?”
THREE
Here are the things I have seen.
Three days and four nights in Kava’s house. My uncle made no fuss. He was the man of this house in sun and in moon, and thought I looked at his wives with the same open mouth and loose tongue they looked at me. Truth, my uncle’s house was large enough that we could go a quartermoon and never meet. But I could smell out what he hid from his women—expensive rugs from the city under the cheap ones, precious skins from great cats under cheap skins of zebra, gold coins and fetishes in pouches that stunk of the animal whose skin it was cut from. His greed made him squeeze in on himself to hide everything, which made him smaller even with his big belly.
But Kava’s hut.
He had cloths and skins on the ground that were garments when I pulled them up. Black dust in a gourd for shining walls fresh. Jars of water, jars for churning butter, a gourd and a knife for drawing cow blood. This was a home still run by a mother. I never asked if his parents were buried right under him, or maybe his father left him with his mother so he learned woman’s work, since he never went to hunt.
I did not want to go back to my uncle, and I would not talk to voices in trees, who never gave me anything but now demanded something. So I stayed at Kava’s hut.
“How do you live alone?”
“Boy, ask what you want to ask.”
“Fuck the gods, then tell me what I want to know.”
“You want to know how I live so good without mother and father. Why the gods smile on my hut?”
“No.”
“The same breath carrying news of your father tell you he is dead. I cannot—”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“And your grandfather is a father of lies.”
“So.”
“Like any other father,” he said, and laughed. He said this also: “These elders, they say it and sing with foul mouths that a man is nothing but his blood. Elders are stupid and their beliefs are old. Try a new belief. I try a new one every day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stay with family and blood will betray you. No Gangatom looking for me. But I envy you.”
“Fuck the gods, what is there to envy?”
“To know family only after they are gone is better than to watch them go.”
He turned in to the dark corner of his hut.
“How did you know the ways of woman and man?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Watching the new men and women in the bush. Luala Luala, the people above the Gangatom, have man who live with man like a wife, and woman who live with woman like a husband, and man and woman with no man or woman, who live as they choose, and in all these things there is no strangeness,” he said.
How did he know since he was not yet a man, I did not ask. In the mornings we went to river rocks and painted what sweat washed away in the night. In the night I knew him as he knew me, when he wanted to sleep, his belly touching my back when he breathed. Or face beside face, his hand between my legs scooping my balls. We would wrestle and tumble and grab and jerk each other until lightning struck inside both of us.
You are a man who knows pleasures, inquisitor, though you look selfish with yours. Do you know how it feels, not in the body but in the heart, when you have made a man strike lightning? Or a woman, since I have done so with many. A girl whose inner boy in the fold of her flesh was not cut out is blessed twice by the god of pleasure and plenty.
Here is my belief. The first man was jealous of the first woman. Her lightning was too powerful, her screams and moans loud enough to wake up the dead. That man could never accept that the gods would gift the weaker woman with such riches, so before every girl becomes a woman, man sets up to steal it, cut it away, and throw it in the bush. But the gods put it there, hid it deep so that no man would have business going to find it. Man will pay for this.
I have seen more than these things.
The day was out, but the sun was hiding. Kava said we go into the bush and shall not be back for more than a moon. I thought good, for everything in me was growing sick from the thought of family. Of anything Ku. I thought if I stayed here much longer I would turn myself into a Gangatom, and start killing until there was a hole in the village as big as the hole I see when I close my eyes. A dead thing never lies, cheats, or betrays, and what was a family but a place where all three bloom like moss. “As long as it takes for my uncle to miss me, then,” I said.
I hoped it was a hunt. I wanted to kill. But I was still afraid of the viper, and Kava stepped through bowing trees and kneeling plants and dancing flowers as if he knew where to go. Twice I was lost, twice his white hand pushed through thick leaves and grabbed me.
“Keep walking and shed your burden,” Kava said.
“What?”
“Your burden. Let nothing stop you and you will shed it like snakeskin.”
“The day I heard I have a brother is the day I lost a brother. The day I learned I had a father is the day I lost a father. The day I heard I had a grandfather was the day I heard he was a coward who fucks my mother. And I hear nothing of her. How do I shed such skin?”
“Keep walking,” he said.
We walked through bush, and swamp, and forest, and a huge salt plain with hot cracked white dirt until daylight ran away from us. Every
moment in the bush jolted me and I fell asleep and jumped awake all night. The next day, after some long walking, and me complaining about long walking, I heard footsteps above me in the trees and looked up. Kava said he had followed us since we turned south. I did not know we were heading south. Up above us in the tree was a black leopard. We walked and he walked. We stopped and he stopped. I clutched my spear but Kava looked up and whistled. The Leopard jumped down in front of us, stared hard and long, growled, then ran off. I said nothing, for what could be said to someone who had just spoken to a Leopard? We went farther south. The sun moved to the center of the gray sky but the jungle was thick with leaves and bush, and cold. And birds with their wakakakaka and kawkawkawkaw. We came upon a river, gray like sky and moving slow. New plants popped out of a fallen tree that bridged one side of the river to the other. Halfway across there rose out of the water two ears, eyes, nostrils, and one head as wide as a boat. The hippopotamus followed us with her eyes. Her jaws swung open wide, her head split in two, and she roared. Kava turned around and hissed at her. She sunk back under the river. Sometimes we caught up to the Leopard, and he would run off farther into the forest. He waited for us whenever we fell too far back. Though the bush got colder, I sweated more.
“We climb,” I said.
“We climb from before the sun gone west,” he said. We are on a mountain.
You only need to be told down is up for down to change. I was not walking south, I was walking up. The mist came down on the ground and floated through the air. Twice I thought it was spirits. Water dripped from leaves and the ground felt damp.
“We are not far,” he said, right before I asked.
I thought we were searching for a clearing, but we went deeper in the bush. Branches swung around and hit me in the face, vines wrapped around my legs to pull me down, trees bent over to look at me and each line in their barks was a frown. And Kava started talking to leaves. And cursing. The moonlight boy had gone mad. But he was not talking to leaves but to people hiding underneath them. A man and a woman, skin like Kava’s ash, hair like silver earth, but no taller than your elbow to your middle finger. Yumboes, of course. Good fairies of the leaves, but I did not know then. They were walking on branches until Kava grabbed a branch and they climbed his arms up to his shoulders. Both of them had hair on their backs, and eyes that glowed. The male sat on Kava’s right shoulder, the female on the left. The man reached into a sack and pulled out a pipe. I stayed behind until my jaw came back up to my mouth, watching tall Kava, two halflings, one leaving a thick trail of pipe smoke.