As soon as I had her good and terrified I’d slip away. I’d go hunt for the Pygmies, who are supposed to be dwelling right under our noses in the forest, or for monkeys (easier to spot). Or I’d cut up fruit for Methuselah, still hanging around begging, and catch grasshoppers for Leon, the chameleon we keep in a wooden crate. Mother lets us keep him on the condition -we never bring him in the house.Which is funny, because I found him inside the house. His bulging eye sockets swivel whichever way they please, and we love to get his eyes going so one looks up and the other down. He catches the grasshoppers we throw in his box by whipping out his tongue like a slingshot.
I could also try to talk Father into letting me tag along with him. There was always that possibility. Father spends his days making rounds through the village, trying to strike up chats with the idle old men, or venturing farther afield to inspect the state of grace in the neighboring villages.There are several little settlements within a day’s walk, but I’m sorry to report they all fall under the jurisdiction of our same godless chief, Tata Ndu.
Father never lets me go that far, but I beg him anyhow. I try to avoid the drudgery of housekeeping chores, which is more up Rachel’s alley if she can stoop to being helpful on a given day. My view of the home is, it is always better to be outside. So I loiter at the edge of the village, waiting for Father’s return. There, where the dirt road makes a deep red cut between high yellow walls of grass, you never know what might be coming toward you on dusty feet. Women, usually, carrying the world on their heads: a huge glass demijohn full of palm wine, with a calabash bowl perched on top like an upside-down hat; or a bundle of firewood tied up with elephant grass, topped off with a big enamel tub full of greens. The Congolese sense of balance is spectacular.
Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you’ll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they’ve already seen most of what there is. Married eyes. And the younger girls-if they are too young to be married and too old to be strapped on someone’s back (which is not a wide margin)-why, they come striding along swinging their woven bags over their shoulders and scowl at you, as if to say, Out of my road, can’t you see I’m busy! They may only be little girls tagging after their mothers, but believe you me, with them it’s all business.The girls are usually just about bald, like the boys. (Mother says it’s from not getting their proteins.) But you can tell the girls by their stained, frilly dresses, castoffs from some distant land. It took me aback for months that they look so much like little boys in ruffly dresses. No girl or woman wears pants, ever.We are the odd birds here. Apparently they think we’re boys, except maybe Rachel, and can’t tell a one of us apart from the other. They call us all Beelezi, which means
Belgians! I mean to tell you, they call us that right to our faces. It’s how they greet us: “Mbote, Beelezil”!
The women smile, but then cover their mouths, embarrassed.The little babies take one look and burst out crying. It’s enough to give you a complex. But I don’t care, I’m too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.
Right smack in the middle of the village is a huge kapok tree, which is where they get together and have their market every fifth day. Oh, that’s something to see! All the ladies come to sell and bicker. They might have green bananas, pink bananas, mounds of rice and other whitish things piled on paper, onions or carrots or even peanuts if it’s our lucky day, or bowls of little red tomatoes, misshapen things but highly prized. You might even see bottles of bright orange soda pop that someone walked here all the way from Leopoldville, I guess, and will walk a long way more before they’re all sold. There’s a lady that sells cubes of caramel-colored soap that look good to eat. (Ruth May snitched one and took a bite, then cried hard, not so much from the bad taste as the disappointment, I imagine. There’s so little here for a child in the way of sweets.) Also sometimes we’ll see a witch doctor with aspirins, pink pills, yellow pills, and animal pieces all laid out in neat rows on a black velvet cloth. He listens to your ailments, then tells you whether you need to buy a pill, a good-luck charm, or just go home and forget about it. That’s a market day for you. So far we’ve only purchased things from around the edges; we can’t get up the nerve to walk in there whole hog and do our shopping. But it’s fascinating to look down the rows and see all those long-legged women in their colorful pagnes, bent over almost double to inspect things laid out on the ground. And women pulling their lips up to their noses when they reach out to take your money.You watch all that noise and business, then look past them to the rolling green hills in the distance, with antelopes grazing under flat-topped trees, and it doesn’t fit together. It’s like two strange movies running at the same time.
On the other days when there’s no market, people just congregate in the main square for one thing and another: hairdos, shoe repair, or just gossiping in the shade. There’s a tailor who sets up his foot-pedal sewing machine under the tree and takes their orders, simple as that. Hairdos are another matter, surprisingly complicated, given that the women have no real hair to speak of. They get it divided into rows of long parts in very intricate patterns so their heads end up looking like balls of dark wool made of a hundred pieces, very fancily stitched together. If they’ve got an inch or two to work with, the hairdresser will wrap sprigs of it in black thread so it stands up in little spikes, like Mama Boanda Number Two’s. The hairdo business always draws an audience. The motto seems to be, If you can’t grow your own, supervise somebody else’s. The elderly women and men look on, working their gums, dressed in clothes exactly the same color as their skin, from all the many ground-in years of wash and wear. From a distance you can’t tell they have on anything at all, but just the faintest shadow of snow-white hair as if Jack Frost lightly touched down on their heads. They look as old as the world. Any colorful thing they might hold in their hands, like a plastic bucket, stands out strangely. Their appearance doesn’t sit square with the modern world.
Mama Lo is the main hairdresser. She also runs a palm-oil business on the side, getting little boys to squash it out of the little red oil-palm nuts in her homemade press and selling it to the other villagers just a little each day, for frying their greens and what not. Mama Lo doesn’t have any husband, though she’s as industrious as the day is long. With the way they do here, it seems like some fellow would snap her up as a valuable add-on to his family. She isn’t a whole lot to look at, I’ll grant you, with her sad little eyes and wrinkled mouth she keeps shut, morning till night, while she does everybody’s hair. The state of her own hair is a mystery, since she always wraps her head in a dazzling cloth printed with peacock feathers.Those lively feathers don’t really match her personality, but like Tata Boanda in his ladies’-wear sweater, she seems unaware that her outfit is ironic.
If I settle down on a stump somewhere at the edge of the village square, they’ll forget about me sooner or later, I’ve found. I like to sit there and keep an eye out for the woman with the great big white purse, exactly like what Mamie Eisenhower might take shopping, which she carries proudly through the village on her head. And I love to watch the boys climb up palm trees to cut down the oil nuts. Way high up there with the sunlight falling reddish-brown on the palm trunks and the boys’ narrow limbs, they look beautiful. They seem touched by the Lord’s grace. In any event, they never fall.The palm fronds wave around their heads like ostrich plumes.