Possessing the Secret of Joy Page 2

  We must have been quite a sight. We had been weeks on the march that brought us to Tashi’s village and were ourselves covered with the dust and bruises of the journey. I remember looking up at my father and thinking what a miracle it was that we’d somehow—through jungle, grassland, across rivers and whole countries of animals—arrived in the village of the Olinka that he’d spoken so much about.

  I saw that he too took note of Tashi. He was sensitive to children, and often stated as fact that there could be no happy community in which there was one unhappy child. Not one! he used to say, slapping his knee for emphasis. One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe! It would have been difficult to ignore Tashi. Because though many of the faces that greeted us seemed sad, she was the only person weeping. Yet she uttered not a sound. The whole of her little cropped head and reddened brown face bulged with the effort to control her emotions, and except for the tears, which were so plentiful they cascaded down her cheeks, she was successful. It was a remarkable performance.

  In the course of our daylong welcome Tashi and her mother disappeared. Even so, my father inquired after them. Why was the little girl crying? he asked, in his stiff, newly learned Olinka. The elders seemed not to understand him. They shifted their robes, looked genially at him and at us and at each other and replied, looking about now over the heads of those assembled, What little girl, Pastor? There is no little crying girl here.

  And Tashi and her mother did seem gone forever. We didn’t see them for a long time, after they’d spent several weeks on Catherine’s farm, a day’s walk from the village. They turned up at vespers one evening, both Tashi and her mother dressed in new pink gingham Mother Hubbards with high collars and large flowered pockets, their faces similarly set in the look of perplexed, instinctive wariness that characterized Catherine’s face whenever she encountered “the Pastor,” as they all called my father, or “Mama Pastor,” as they called my mother.

  We did not know that on the morning we arrived in the village one of Tashi’s sisters had died. Her name was Dura, and she had bled to death. That was all Tashi had been told; all she knew. So that if, while we were playing, she pricked her finger on a thorn or scraped her knee and glimpsed the sight of her own blood, she fell into a panic, until, gradually, she played in such a way as to take no risks and even learned to sew in an exaggeratedly careful way, using two thimbles.

  But she forgot why the sight of her own blood terrified her. And this became one of the things the other children teased her about. And about which she would cry.

  Years later, in the United States, she would begin to remember some of the things she’d told me over the years of our growing up. That Dura had been her favorite sister. That she had been headstrong and boisterous and liked honey in her porridge so much she’d sometimes stolen a portion of Tashi’s share. That she had been very excited during the period leading up to her death. Suddenly she had become the center of everyone’s attention; every day there were gifts. Decorative items mainly: beads, bracelets, a bundle of dried henna for reddening hair and palms, but the odd pencil and tablet as well. Bright remnants of cloth for a headscarf and dress. The promise of shoes!

  TASHI

  THERE WAS A SCAR at the corner of her mouth. Oh, very small and faint, like a shadow. Shaped like a miniature plantain, or like the moon when it is new. A sickle shape with the points toward her ear; when she smiled, the little shadow seemed to slide back into her cheek, above her teeth, which were very white. While she was crawling, she’d picked up a burning twig that protruded from the fire and attempted to put it into her mouth.

  This was long before I was born, but I knew about it from the story that was often told: how bewildered Dura had looked, as the twig stuck to her lip, and how she, instead of knocking it away, cried piteously, her arms outstretched, looking about for help. No, they laughed, telling this story, not simply for help, for deliverance.

  Did anyone help her?

  This white witch doctor scribbles, only a little, behind his desk, on which there are small stone and clay figures of African gods and goddesses from Ancient Egypt. I noticed them before lying down on his couch, which is covered by a tribal rug.

  I think and think, but I can not think of the rest of the story. The sound of the laughter stops me before I can come to the part about the rescue of my sister Dura. I know that the twig, ashen, finally dropped away, having burned through the skin. But did my mother or a co-wife leap to gather the crying child in her arms? Was my father anywhere near? I am frustrated because I can not answer the doctor’s questions. And I feel him, there behind my head, pen poised to at last capture on paper an African woman’s psychosis for the greater glory of his profession. Olivia has brought me here. Not to the father of psychoanalysis, for he has died, a tired, persecuted man. But to one of his sons, whose imitation of him—including dark hair and beard, Egyptian statuettes on his desk, the tribal-rug-covered couch and the cigar, which smells of bitterness—will perhaps cure me.

  OLIVIA

  YOU HAVE TO KEEP US in mind, Tashi would say. And we would laugh, because it was so easy to forget Africa in America. What most people remembered was strange, because unlike the two of us, they had never been there.

  ADAM

  PERHAPS IT IS ODD, but I do not recall my first meeting with Tashi. But children don’t exactly “meet,” do they? Unless it is a formal occasion; which, to think of it, our arrival in Olinka certainly must have been. The villagers were smiling anxiously at us, when we arrived, and were dressed in their colorful and scanty best. There was food cooking in pots and roasting on spits. There was even a warmish melon-flavored drink that made me think, longingly, of lemonade. I noticed the small boys my own age, their knobby knees and shaved heads. Their near nakedness. I noticed the men: the seedlike tribal markings on their cheeks and the greasy amulets they wore around their necks. I noticed the dust and the heat. The flies. I noticed the long flat breasts of the women who worked barebreasted, babies on their backs, as they swept and tidied up the village as if in expectation of inspection. I was too young to be embarrassed by their partial nudity. And so I stared, mouth open, until Mama Nettie poked me firmly in the back with her parasol.

  And now when Olivia says, But don’t you remember, Adam, Tashi was weeping when we met her! I am at a loss. For that is not the little girl I remember.

  The Tashi I remember was always laughing, and making up stories, or flitting cheerfully about the place on errands for her mother.

  Sometimes I think Olivia and I remember two entirely different people, and now, because Tashi and I have lived together for so many years, I think my recollection of her as a child is sure to be the correct one. But what if it is not?

  TASHI

  THEY WERE ALWAYS SAYING You mustn’t cry!

  These are new people coming to live among us, and to meet them in tears is to bring bad luck to us. They’ll think we beat you! Yes, we understand your sister is dead, but… time now to put on a good face and make the foreigners welcome. If you can’t behave, we will have to ask your mother to take you elsewhere.

  How could I believe these were the same women I’d known all my life? The same women who’d known Dura? And whom Dura had known? She’d gone to buy matches or snuff for them nearly every day. She’d carried their water jugs on her head.

  It was a nightmare. Suddenly it was not acceptable to speak of my sister. Or to cry for her.

  Let us leave here, Mama, I finally said in despair. And my mother, her face stern, took my hand in hers and walked off with me toward our farm.

  We stayed there seven weeks; long after our crops had been tended. Besides, there was a boy who lived on the farms who would have looked after our plots if we had decided to go back to the village. But my mother and I stayed, until even the groundnuts had been pulled up, placed on racks—the round ones that from a distance look like little hats—and dried. Then we stripped the nuts from their shriveled yellow stems and carried loads of them home to the village
on our backs.

  How small I felt, especially since Dura was no longer around to measure myself against. Not there to tease me that I had grown perhaps the thickness of a coin but still had not caught up with her…. And there was my mother, trudging along the path in front of me, her load of groundnuts forcing her nearly double.

  I have never seen anyone work as hard as my mother, or pull her share of the work with a more resigned dignity.

  Tashi, she would say, it is only hard work that fills the emptiness.

  But I had not previously understood her.

  Now I watched the backs of her legs and noted how they sometimes quivered with the effort to ascend a steep hill; for there were many hills between our farm and the village. Indeed, the farm was in a completely different climate from that of the village: hot but moist, because there was a river and still a bit of forest, whereas the village was hot and dry, with few trees. I studied the white rinds of my mother’s heels, and felt in my own heart the weight of Dura’s death settling upon her spirit, like the groundnuts that bent her back. As she staggered under her load, I half expected her footprints, into which I was careful to step, to stain my own feet with tears and blood. But my mother never wept, though like the rest of the women, when called upon to salute the power of the chief and his counselors she could let out a cry that assaulted the very heavens with its praising pain.

  TASHI

  NEGRO WOMEN, said the doctor, are considered the most difficult of all people to be effectively analyzed. Do you know why?

  Since I was not a Negro woman I hesitated before hazarding an answer. I felt negated by the realization that even my psychiatrist could not see I was African. That to him all black people were Negroes.

  I had been coming to see him now for several months. Some days I talked; some days I did not. There was a primary school across the street from his office. I would listen to the faint sound of the children playing and often forget where I was, forget why I was there.

  He’d been taken aback by the fact that I had only one child. He thought this unusual for a colored woman, married or unmarried. Your people like lots of kids, he allowed.

  But how could I talk to this stranger of my lost children? And of how they were lost? One was left speechless by all such a person couldn’t know.

  Negro women, the doctor says into my silence, can never be analyzed effectively because they can never bring themselves to blame their mothers.

  Blame them for what? I asked.

  Blame them for anything, said he.

  It is quite a new thought. And, surprisingly, sets off a kind of explosion in the soft, dense cotton wool of my mind.

  But I do not say anything. Those bark-hard, ashen heels trudge before me on the path. The dress above them barely clothing, a piece of rag. The basket of groundnuts suspended from a strap that fits a groove that has been worn into her forehead. When she lifts the basket down, the groove in her forehead remains. On Sundays she will wear her scarf low in an attempt to conceal it. African women like my mother give harsh meaning to the expression “furrowed brow.”

  Still, the basket itself is lovely and well made, with a red and ochre “sisters elbow” design that no one weaves more neatly than she. That is all I care to think about. But not all that I will.

  I did not carry you to term, she has told me, because one day when I was coming back from bathing I was frightened by a leopard. She was acting strangely, and charged me.

  I try to imagine a leopard on the path between our farm and the village. Now there are wild dogs and jackals, but nothing so beautiful as a leopard.

  M’Lissa came to look after me.

  And was I an easy birth?

  But she will only look over my head, to the side of my ear. Of course, she murmurs. Of course you were.

  Later we discovered someone had shot and skinned her mate and her cubs, my mother sighs.

  And that was the official story of my birth.

  So that my mind too veered away from myself and my mother’s ordeal and went off into the world of the leopard. Soon enough I could see her clearly, licking down her cubs, or having intercourse with her mate. There in the dappled shade of the acacias. Then, the sound of thunder cracking, and all her loved ones down in a flash. And she, to her shame, forced to run away in fear, even as she smelled the blood and saw the bodies sprawled ungracefully. And later, coming back, she would discover all those she loved, just as she’d left them, but stiffly dead and without their skins.

  And I could feel the horror in the leopard’s heart, and the rage. And now I see a pregnant human appearing on the path, and I leap for her throat.

  The other children used to laugh at me. Look at her! they cried. Come see how Tashi has left our world. You can tell because her eyes have glazed over!

  TASHI

  OLIVIA BEGGED ME not to go. But she did not understand.

  There was a bird that always cried when friends were parting forever, though the missionaries never believed this. It was called Ochoma, the bird of parting. I heard it as Olivia pleaded with me. I was arrogant, and the Mbeles had sent a captured donkey for me to ride.

  I listened to Olivia trying to control her breathing as she held on to the rope bridle. She was crying and there was a part of me that longed to trample her.

  She was like a lover.

  Tell me to do anything, and I will do it, she said.

  Tell me to go anywhere, and I will go, she said.

  Only, don’t do this to yourself, please, Tashi.

  The foreigners were so much more melodramatic than Africans ever dared to be. It made one feel contempt for them.

  We’ve been friends almost all our lives, she said. Don’t do this to us.

  She hiccuped, like a child.

  Don’t do it to Adam.

  I had in my mind some outlandish, outsized image of myself. I sat astride the donkey in the pose of a chief, a warrior. We who had once owned our village and hectares and hectares of land now owned nothing. We were reduced to the position of beggars—except that there was no one near enough to beg from, in the desert we were in.

  They are right, I said to her from my great height astride the donkey, who say you and your family are the white people’s wedge.

  She stopped weeping. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and nearly laughed.

  Tashi, she said, are you crazy?

  I was crazy. For why could I not look at her? I stole glances down alongside her face and let my eyes slide over the top of her head. Her thick hair was braided in two plaits that crossed at the nape of her neck, just as she always wore it. Never would she wear the mealie row fan hairstyle that was traditional with Olinka women.

  I had taken off my gingham Mother Hubbard. My breasts were bare. What was left of my dress now rode negligently about my loins. I did not have a rifle or a spear, but I had found a long stick, and with this I jabbed at the ground near her feet.

  All I care about now is the struggle for our people, I said. You are a foreigner. Any day you like, you and your family can ship yourselves back home.

  Jesus, she said, exasperated.

  Also a foreigner, I sneered. I finally looked her in the eye. I hated the way her hair was done.

  Who are you and your people never to accept us as we are? Never to imitate any of our ways? It is always we who have to change.

  I spat on the ground. It was an expression of contempt only very old Olinkans had known how to use to full effect.

  Olivia, who knew the gesture, seemed to wilt, there in the heat.

  You want to change us, I said, so that we are like you. And who are you like? Do you even know?

  I spat in the dust again, though I only made the sound of spitting; my mouth and throat were dry.

  You are black, but you are not like us. We look at you and your people with pity, I said. You barely have your own black skin, and it is fading.

  I said this because her skin was mahogany while mine was ebony. In happier times I had thought only of how
beautiful our arms looked when we, admiring our grass bracelets, held them up together.

  But she was suddenly stepping back from the donkey. Her hands at her sides.

  I laughed.

  You don’t even know what you’ve lost! And the nerve of you, to bring us a God someone else chose for you! He is the same as those two stupid braids you wear, and that long hot dress with its stupid high collar!

  Finally, she spoke.

  Go, she said, and raised her chin sadly. I did not understand you hated me.

  She said it with the quietness of defeat.

  I dug my heels into the flanks of the donkey and we trotted out of the encampment. I saw the children, potbellied, and with dying eyes, which made them look very wise. I saw the old people laid out in the shade of the rocks, barely moving on their piles of rags. I saw the women making stew out of bones. We had been stripped of everything but our black skins. Here and there a defiant cheek bore the mark of our withered tribe. These marks gave me courage. I wanted such a mark for myself.

  My people had once been whole, pregnant with life.

  I turned my back on the sister of my heart, and rushed away from her stricken face. I recognized myself as the leopard in her path.

  TASHI

  AND WHAT ABOUT your dreams? the doctor one day asks me.

  I tell him I do not dream.

  I do not dare tell him about the dream I have every night that terrifies me.

  ADAM

  YOUR WIFE REFUSES to talk about her dreams, the doctor says, mysteriously. Above the couch, on which I imagine Evelyn lying, there is a blue, overarching figure of Nut. The body of woman as night sky. I sit uneasily in my chair, as if I am being interrogated as a spy, my damp palms resting on top of talons that end the chair’s arms.