Mostly I did. He tasted like tobacco and salt and the whole experience was very wet. Finally I pushed him away.
“That’s enough of that,” I said. “If we do anything, we should do it where people will see us, you know.”
“Well, well.” He was smiling, and ran the back of his hand along the side of my face. “I’d expect more modesty from a preacher’s daughter.”
“I’ll show you preacher’s daughter. Go to hell, Axelroot!” I turned around and started walking fast back toward the village. He caught up to me and put his arm on my shoulder to slow me back down to a stroll.
“Mustn’t let Tata Ndu see us having a lovers’ quarrel,” he said, leaning down into my face. I tossed my head so my hair flew right in his nosy mug. We were still in the forest anyways, nowhere near Tata Ndu’s house or anybody else’s.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Give me a smile. One pretty smile and I’ll tell you the biggest damn secret in Africa.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. But I was curious. I glanced at him. “So what’s the secret? Does my family get to go home?”
He laughed. “You still think you’re the epicenter of a continent, don’t you, Princess?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. I would have to ask Leah if an episender sent out good things or bad. If a man you are supposedly engaged to calls you one, you ought to know.
He’d slowed me down till we were walking at an absolute snail’s pace. It made me nervous. But he was going to tell me his secret if I just waited. I could tell he was itching to, so I didn’t ask. I know a thing or two about men. Finally, here it came.”Somebody’s going to die,” he announced.
“Well, big surprise,” I said. “Somebody dies around here about every ten and a half seconds.” But of course I wondered: Who? I felt a little scared but still didn’t ask. We kept walking, step by step. I had to. He still had his arm around me. “Somebody that matters,” he said.
“Everybody matters,” I informed him. “In the eyes of our Lord Jesus Christ they do. Even the sparrows that fall out of their little nest and what not.”
He positively snorted at that. “Princess, you have much to learn. Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.”
I was sick of his guessing game. “All right then, who?”
He put his mouth so close to my ear I could feel his lips on my hair. He whispered,”Lumumba”
“Patrice Lumumba, the President?” I asked out loud, startled. “Or whatever he is? The one they elected?”
“As good as dead,” he said in a quiet, so-what voice that chilled my blood.
“Do you mean to tell me he’s sick or something?”
“I mean his number is up. He’s going to get it.”
“And how would you happen to know that?”
“I would happen to know that,” he said, mocking me, “because I’m in a position to know. Take my word for it, sister.Yesterday Big Shot sent a cable to Devil One with orders to replace the new Congolese government by force. I intercepted the news in code on my radio. My own orders will be coming before the end of the week, I guarantee you.”
Now that was so much bunk I am sure, because nobody in our village has a radio. But I let him go on talking in his little riddles if that was what buttered his toast. He said Devil One was supposed to get his so-called operatives to convince the army men to go against Lumumba. Supposedly this Devil One person was going to get one million dollars from the United States to pay soldiers to do that, go against the very person they all just elected. A million dollars! When we couldn’t even get fifty measly greenbacks a month for our bread and board. That was a likely story. I almost felt sorry for Axelroot, wanting so bad to impress me into kissing him again that he’d make up ridiculous stories. I may be a preacher’s daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, when men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that’s going to change the whole wide world.
Adah
PRESENTIMENT-is that long Shadow-on the Lawn- Indicative that Suns go down- The Notice to the startled Grass That Darkness-is about to pass- Pity the poor dumb startled grass, I do. Ssap ot tuoba. I am fond of Miss Emily Dickinson: No snikddy lime, a contrary name with a delicious sourgreen taste. Reading her secrets and polite small cruelties of her heart, I believe she enjoyed taking the dumb grass by surprise, in her poem. Cumbered in her body, dressed in black, hunched over her secret notebook with window blinds shut against the happy careless people outside, she makes small scratching sounds with her pen, covering with nightfall all creatures that really should know what to expect by now, but don’t. She liked herself best in darkness, as do I.
In darkness when all cats are equally black, I move as gracefully as anyone. Benduka is the bent-sideways girl who walks slowly, but ben-duka is also the name of a fast-flying bird, the swallow with curved wings who darts crookedly quick through trees near the river. This bird I can follow. I am the smooth, elegant black cat who slips from the house as a liquid shadow after dark. Night is the time for seeing without being seen. With my own narrow shadow for a boat I navigate the streams of moonlight that run between shadow islands in the date-palm grove. Bats pierce the night with bell voices like knives. Bats stab! And owls call out to the bikinda, spirits of the dead. The owls, only hungry like everyone else, looking for souls to eat.
In the long perishing of children from kakakaka I saw the air change color: it was blue with bildla, the wailing for the dead. It came inside our house, where our mother stopped up her ears and her mouth. Bi la ye bandu! Bi la ye bandulWhy why why, they sang, the mothers -who staggered down our road behind small tightly wrapped corpses, mothers crazy-walking on their knees, with mouths open wide like a hole ripped in mosquito netting. That mouth hole! Jagged torn place in their spirits that lets the small flying agonies pass in and out. Mothers with eyes squeezed shut, dark cheek muscles tied in knots, heads thrashing from side to side as they passed. All this we saw from our windows. Two times I saw more. The Reverend forbade us to observe any ritual over which he was not asked to preside, but twice, at night, I slipped out to spy on the funerals. Inside a grove of trees the mothers threw themselves on mounds of dirt that covered their children. Crawled on their hands and knees, tried to eat the dirt from the graves. Other women had to pull them away. The owls croon and croon, and the air must be thick with the spirits of children dead.
Months have passed since then, and the Reverend has spoken with every mother who lost children. Some are pregnant again. He reports to his family after a long day’s work: these women don’t wish to speak of the dead. They will not say their children’s names. He has tried to explain how baptism-the batiza-would have changed everything. But the mothers tell him no, no, they had already tied the nkisi around the child’s neck or wrist, a fetish from the Nganga Kuvudundu to ward off evil. They were good mothers and did not neglect this protection, they tell the Reverend. Someone else just had a stronger evil. Our Father tries to make them understand the batiza is no fetish but a contract with Jesus Christ. If baptized, the children would be in heaven now.
And the mothers look at him slant-eyed. If my daughter were in heaven could she still watch the baby while I work in my manioc? Could she carry water for me? Would a son in heaven have wives to take care of me when I am old?
Our Father takes their ironical and self-interested tone to indicate a lack of genuine grief. His scientific conclusion: the Congolese do not become attached to their children as we Americans do. Oh, a man of the world is Our Father. He is writing a learned article on this subject for the Baptist scholars back home.