Makeda Page 3

  “In the last dream, over 550 years ago, the year was 1394 to be exact, I was a Dogon girl of fourteen living in my family’s large compound in a small village at the foot of a high stone cliff beside a river. My mother’s name was Innekouzou. My father’s name was Ongnonlou.” The names which were completely foreign to me had rolled off her tongue with a practiced fluency. “I had five sisters and three brothers. But neither they nor my mother were in the dream. Only my father and I and a mammoth old banyan tree that stood on gnarled stilt roots in the middle of our courtyard. My father and I sat on the flat two-foot-high knees of the roots and faced each other in the cool shade of the tree’s dense canopy. My father was a holy man and I was the youngest of his nine children. In the dream, it was my day for religious council which was always given weekly by my father to all of his children in the late afternoons in the lee of the family’s ancestors’ tree, the very same large and ageless banyan tree.

  “By then, he was an old man, though I did not know in the dream what his actual age was. His skin was dark and smooth. A small man of handsome countenance, his compelling features counted a mouth that hinted of inner peace and eyes that held in them some great unplumbable wisdom. The only hair he displayed was worn under his chin in a thick white brush that matched in color his long unadorned flowing cotton robe and the soft sock cap that folded against itself in the direction of his left ear. He spoke softly but with great purposefulness.

  “How are you faring, my daughter?

  “I am faring well, Father, I said to him.

  “Your teachers tell me that you are quite an able student. Of this, I am very proud.

  “Thank you, Father. You do me great honor.

  “May the immortal Amma keep you seated.”

  Without comprehension I wrote this down much as I would the sound of a foreign language. I asked her to explain. Her eyelids remained drawn. The interval between my question and her answer was longer than it would have been under normal circumstances.

  She said, “Amma is the Creator God, the most important god of the Dogon people. To be seated is to be stable and safe and at peace with the immortal god Amma.

  “My father was a village priest who served under the high priest, the hogon, who lived high up on the cliff face, separated from the village. My father was bound to secrecy by our customs from sharing much of what he knew. Nonetheless, he began my religious education early. At the very foundation of Dogon religious knowledge is a far-reaching understanding of the role in our lives of the stellar world.”

  “Stellar?”

  “The stars, son, the stars.”

  It was growing dark in the little parlor. The sun had fallen behind the dingy line of row houses to the west. I chose not to turn on the floor lamp standing beside my grandmother’s chair. I remained still. Waiting for her. A police siren sounded and died away in the distance. Joined to me only by a slender filament of trust, she appeared pressed by some great duty to unburden herself of her strange vision.

  I could scarcely see to write. She began again: “In the dream, my father began his council talking generally about Dogon knowledge of the stellar world. Yalu Ulo, or what you call the Milky Way galaxy, is the constellation of heavenly bodies in which the Earth turns on its axis. It does this as it moves around the sun in an orbit the Dogon call the Earth’s space. My father likened the movement of these bodies to the circulation of blood in the human body.

  “I remember him speaking to me of Dana Tolo and Dana Tolo’s four children.”

  “What did he mean?”

  “Dana Tolo is Jupiter and the children are its four moons. Using the Dogon names, my father also described how Venus follows Jupiter around the sun. He then withdrew several Dogon drawings from a goat-skin bag at his feet and showed me one of Saturn with a ring around it.

  “Amma, my father said, created everything, the universe, the Earth, its movements, and its living creatures.

  Amma created as well the living creatures that dwell on other earths.

  “My father then did not speak for what appeared to be a long period. I knew well to remain silent until he was ready to speak again. After a time he took from his bag another drawing which was that of a stretched circle. The stretched circle enclosed five small distinctly irregular figures of some kind.

  “I asked him, What is that, father? He said, It is the pure place of stars from which Nommo on the Day of the Fish came to Earth to purify it and initiate society. Humans rebelled on Earth at creation and remained impure. Nommo came in a sacrifice of himself to cleanse the Earth. He was crucified on a tree. A star will one day appear in the sky to herald his resurrection and return to us.

  “I pointed to the drawing of the stretched circle and asked my father, Where is this place that Nommo came from to Earth? He placed his finger on the crossed line-and-sickle figure in the lower right quadrant of the stretched circle.

  This is the brightest star in the sky. It is larger than the sun. Tonight you will see it there. He pointed to an area in the northern sky. It wobbles as it turns.

  “Is that where Nommo came from?

  “No, my daughter, Nommo’s star, the star of all creation, is Po Tolo, the little star that orbits around the big star along the outline of the drawing. See here?

  “He traced his finger along the line of the stretched circle and said, Po Tolo revolves such. It requires fifty years to go all the way around the big star which wobbles because Po Tolo is made of sagala which is the heaviest substance in the universe and not found on Earth. It is so heavy that nothing on Earth can lift it.”

  The little parlor fell silent. “Grandma.”

  “Yes.” The voice was raspy and low and did not sound like my grandmother’s.

  “I can’t see anymore. May I turn on the lamp?” I asked. Again, a space, a silent space, longer than normal.

  “Yes, son.”

  I turned on the floor lamp and said, “Grandma, I’m trying to understand.”

  “Yes?”

  “You think you could draw what your fa— the priest showed you in the dream if I put paper in your lap?” I took a sheet of typing paper from my bag and fastened it to a clipboard. I put it on her lap and placed in her right hand a marker and positioned it in the center of the paper. “Try to draw the stretched circle, Grandma.” She pulled the marker around the paper in the line of a rough ellipse. “Try to draw the five figures.” I placed her marker within the quadrants of the ellipse as she instructed.

  “Label this one bright star,” she said, “and this one down toward the right bottom Po Tolo. Here, place the star, Emme Ya. It is, my father said, larger than Po Tolo but four times lighter. The Dogon call it the sun of women. The fifth figure in his drawing is not a star but a planet. Place my hand inside the left line toward the bottom … There. There. I hope that this looks like what I picture in my head from the dream.”

  She rested her head against the high curved back of the rocking chair. “You must be running along now. But remember what I told you. Tell no one and never let what you have written down out of your possession.”

  “Why, Grandma, did the priest and the Dogon people call the heavy little star Po Tolo?” I asked.

  “In Dogon, tolo means star and po is a cereal grain, the smallest known to the Dogon. In the dream, my father said that the heavy little star rotated on its axis in a period of one year and that the Dogon celebrate the rotation in what is called the bado rite. The Dogon believe the little star is the starting point of all creation.”

  “Grandma, who were the Dogon people, and if they existed, where did they live?”

  My grandmother raised her eyelids. “I don’t know, Gray. I don’t know. I don’t remember that from the dream.”

  Now she sounded like my grandmother again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Looking back now on that strange afternoon of ten years ago in my grandmother’s parlor, it is clear enough that what she divulged to me there, as well as the place of trust she accorded me, had a considerab
le impact on me, a midterm adolescent of unsuspected merit. She had seen something of value in me, if nothing more than a curious and open mind, and perhaps a certain congenital appreciation of the metaphysical. The bond between us, sealed forever in the tidy little over-furnished sitting room, was one of the two major watershed events in my life. The second event which lay just ahead, I could not have withstood had my grandmother not made me the sole caretaker of her great and improbable secret.

  Something else happened on the bus ride home from Duvall Street that day, which I took, in the unusual context of things, to have more significance perhaps than it warranted. I had turned fifteen on May 1, 1960, five months before my grandmother told me the Dogon story. This was a month or so after my family moved from our flat in the Jackson Ward section near my grandmother’s house to a block in the Church Hill section of Richmond that changed from all white to all black within months of our moving there. That night, I took the East End 30 bus on Broad five blocks south of my Grandmother’s house and got off at 37th and M, two short blocks from my house on the corner of 39th and M. My stop was only minutes from the end of the line and no one was on board save the driver and me by the time we reached the next-to-last stop at 35th and M. It was after six o’clock and dark when the bus pulled away from the curb. Just as it was doing so, I heard someone cry out, “Hold up! Hold up!” I called ahead to the driver to stop, which was something drivers, as often as not, refused to do. Business that night, however, was slow and unhurried. The driver stopped. The door hissed and opened to an elderly black man who appeared winded from running alongside the moving bus. The man heaved twice, caught his breath, smiled at the driver, and said, “Thank you so much. I guess tonight is my lucky night.” He smiled as he walked past me and took a seat in the middle of the empty rear bench seat. The bus rolled two blocks before it turned left and pulled to a stop with its big air brakes wheezing in front of the all-white East End Junior High School. The school had remained open after our arrival in the neighborhood. Within months, however, the school’s student body would be all black.

  I got up to exit by the rear door and noticed the pleasant elderly man slumped on his seat with a narrow rivulet of blood negotiating a path from his left ear across the rise of his dark face and into his nose. “Driver! Something’s wrong with this man!” But by then I knew that the man, without having made a sound, was dead.

  From that day on, whenever I thought of the dream my grandmother had described to me, I would think of the old man who had vanished from the realm of the living without whirl or whisper.

  My grandmother seemed to believe that she had visited the dead that the old man had silently joined. Perhaps that was what she meant by souls traveling light.

  We lived in a modest redbrick colonial at the edge of a wood on the last street in Church Hill. I did not have a house key. My mother was at home, as she almost always was. She did not work, or at least outside our home she did not work. This was not as she wished it, but my father was strongly opposed to the idea of her having a job outside our home.

  “You’re late,” she said absently.

  “I stopped by Grandma’s.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. Is Gordon home yet?”

  “No, he had football practice but he should be along in a few minutes. Your father too. We’ll eat at seven.”

  I went upstairs to my room, the smallest of the three small bedrooms in the house, and closed the door. From the top shelf in my closet, I took a battered tin tongue-lock strong box that my father had discarded to me as a toy when I was ten. I tore the three pages from my notebook on which I had written what my grandmother told me and inserted them along with the drawing she had made into a page-sized plastic sleeve. I placed the package in the strong box, locked it, and returned it to a place at the back of the highest closet shelf where it could not be seen from the floor by my mother, who, when no longer able to bear the room’s usual dishevelment, sometimes waded in to restore a semblance of order.

  I sat on my bed and attempted to gather my thoughts about what I had learned. Unbidden, the names my grandmother had recited to me—Innekouzou and Ongnonlou—sounded in my head. I had never before heard an African name said aloud before my grandmother told me an hour ago that they had been her Dogon parents in the dream. Staring now at the dark brown skin on my arms, I wondered why. And why such had never before occurred to me. I’d heard around all sorts of foreign, even ancient, maybe antediluvian names without it occurring to me that I’d never heard any African names at all. Not one. Not a single one. I knew from school a Hezekiah who’d been named by his parents after the King of Judah. I even knew from my third period English class a Mordecai who’d been named for the Bible’s Mordecai who someone told me was a relative of Esther’s. A Moses played on the football team with Gordon. Just that morning in history class, our teacher Mr. Brown had taken up most of the hour telling us about Agamemnon and the Trojan War before allowing that both the king and his war may have been a myth. No one that I knew outside my family ever spoke about Africa without disparagement. That is, if they mentioned Africa at all.

  I went downstairs and into the kitchen where I found my mother removing a casserole of baked lasagna from the oven. I started down the steps which led to a tiny utility room and the back door of the house.

  “Where are you going, Virgil?”

  My mother was the only person in the world who called me by my first name, Virgil. Everyone else called me by my middle name, Graylon.

  “Outside for a minute to catch some air.”

  “You just got home.”

  “I know. I’ll only be a minute.”

  “In the cold?”

  I did not answer and opened the back door. My mother called after me, “You’re acting mighty strangely, son,”

  but she was by then already distracted by what she was doing.

  My mother kept a beautiful flower garden of rosebush beds and evergreen shrubs; perennials that had all but finished the stagger of their summer show; annuals that smiled colorfully from early spring bravely onward into the teeth of the oncoming frost. Verbenas, snapdragons, periwinkle, marigolds, daylilies, touch-me-nots, all showing their fading wares in well-weeded beds that wended this way and that full around the green central lawn of the large yard.

  I walked to the center of the yard. There was little light from the house and a corner streetlamp to mitigate the yard’s inky darkness. I had come out without a coat. I shook myself to preempt shivering as I began to search the north sky.

  The star was big and brilliant and easy to find. It stood well out from the thousands that shone in the black night sky, a luminous bluish globe hanging just above the horizon where the old Dogon priest in the dream had told my grandmother it would be.

  I hugged myself against the cold and stared into the sky, searching the neighborhood of the big star for the little one that the priest had called Po Tolo. I found nothing. I looked again, hard and longer, but with the same result. I then surveyed the full stunning immensity of the shimmering blackness, as if I were looking upon the grand and mysterious beauty of the night sky for the first time. And with a point of reference. Strange, what a difference this alone made. Could it be that anything up there, near that shining light, could have something directly to do with us, me? Somehow I felt oddly, with the mere contemplation of such a question—what?—changed.

  My grandmother used to say to me, “You’re my late bloomer. My spirit child. Your mother and father love you but they just don’t know who you are yet. You don’t either, I suppose, but you will soon enough. Just you wait.”

  Gordon was the hope-star of my family. He was more handsome than I, more athletic than I, smarter than I. He was even pleasant and generous and social of temperament. That I was jealous of him seemed to demonstrate that he was, well, kinder than I as well. These were the facts. My father’s hopes revolved largely around Gordon, who was “going somewhere,” language no one used to measure my long-ter
m prospects. My mother, for her part, was captured by the energy of my father’s pride in Gordon, the grand prize that my father, an ordinary insurance salesman, and my mother, an ordinary housewife, had won in nature’s lottery of small miracles. One hardly expects fortune of such magnitude to smile twice upon the same household. Indeed, I was loved. That, I never questioned. Otherwise, though, I was largely and benignly ignored.

  All that said, as I remember it, I had not been an unhappy child, but rather one who ate, slept, and spun in a bubble of aimless spiritual and intellectual indifference. I hadn’t known what I would be, or was even supposed to be. I only knew that I was supposed to be something. Gordon would be a doctor. This seemed all but assured. This had been known to him for years and he was only eighteen. Gordon and my parents approached this as if a career in medicine were little different from a big-ticket item of merchandise toward which one simply planned for years and saved to obtain. They were solid north-south straightline flat-plane people. Unfortunately, I was not like them. I was a muddle of questions that wound around themselves. It wasn’t that I did not want to go somewhere. Indeed I did. But my somewhere required a measure of passion to reach, passion I could not generate before somewhere chose to reveal its elusive face to me.

  When I look at Gordon, I guess I can understand why people would say that we favor one another, but most of the time I can’t see it at all. Perhaps this is because I know in every other way how very different we are. What I am about to say is not to disparage Gordon at all, or at least I earnestly think not, because I love him, but Gordon is not at all, from what I can see, a complicated person. He is very smart, but he labors under no psychological compulsion to dice every unimportant social issue into an incomprehensible hash. Thus, he appears to enjoy a working happiness, or a contentment of sorts at least, that he is not driven to deconstruct into a mess of gloom. He does not despond. I despond—and as instinctively as he does not. I do not enjoy being this way (or perhaps I do), but I cannot help it. I think that I mean this when I say it, but I do not wish to be like Gordon who appears to me happy but flat with an emotional surface that is all but impervious to abrasion. The hide of my psyche is rather more corrugated than his and registers even the most inconsequential of experiences that roll across it. For this reason, it is my guess that I know him better than he knows me. There is less of him to know. Or so it would seem.