by Ninie Hammon
Dan slapped his hand down on the arm rest, “Alonzo! We’re talking about helping blacks!”
“I know that. Just hear me out.” Washington crossed the room and sat down again on the couch across from Dan. “My big ace in the hole is that Avery Thompson is one of the big three, and he’s been sort of my mentor ever since I got here.”
Dan was impressed. Washington’s star must, indeed, be rising if he’d caught the eye of one of the most powerful men—black or white—in the House.
Washington leaned toward Dan and spoke slowly and deliberately. "I’ve thought about this long and hard, and there is only one way I can do you any good right now. And that’s to arrange a meeting for you with Thompson and the others.”
Dan felt like he had just been handed the pole position at the Indianapolis 500.
“You come in and do your dog-and-pony show, answer questions, that kind of thing...”
“That’s all I’ve ever asked, Alonzo, a chance to give people the facts. Simple reality here is so compelling it doesn’t need ribbons or wrapping paper.”
“But I want to be straight with you about one thing up front.” Washington’s tone held none of Dan’s exuberance.
“I always like to know what to expect.”
“I can’t afford to go down with you if this ship sinks, Dan. I’m telling you right now that whichever way the wind blows, I go. I’ll introduce you, set you up. You’d better have all your ducks beak to tail feathers before you get there because once we’re in that paneled room, you’re on your own. If they support you, I’ll support you. If they don’t, I don’t.”
There was a long pause before Washington asked, “You in?”
Dan put out his hand and gave Alonzo’s a firm shake. “I’m in.”
Ron had wrapped the last roll of film in a pair of socks and was about to hide it deep in his knapsack when Dr. Greinschaft walked into the room.
“The radio message I sent out on the high frequency the other day got to Chumwe OK,” he said.
Greinschaft’s mission organization operated a feeding center in Chumwe, and he had offered to get in touch with associates there and ask them to help Ron and Masapha.
“I told them who you are and hinted at vhat you are doing in Sudan. They vill figure it out; they are smart people. I know they will serve you in any vay they can. For sure, they will send zumbody to meet you at the dock in Kosti. And they will pass a message on to your BBC contact in Cairo, too.”
“Now you’re talking, Doc!” Ron was delighted.
“But ve’ve got a problem.”
Ron stuffed the film into the bottom of his sack. “How so?”
“Come with me and see for yourself.”
Masapha and Koto were sitting on the steps outside the clinic when Ron and Greinschaft approached.
“What’s up, Masapha?” Ron asked.
Masapha pointed to the boy. “He says he is going with us.”
When he saw Ron’s response, he hurried on. “I have told him we go to the north to do another thing that is not about him, but he is certain anyway that we are going to help him.”
“You need to tell him that wishin’ don’t make it so. That boat’s actually going to be here today, and you and I have a lot of lost ground to cover!”
Ron was approaching an urgency-anxiety meltdown. The decision to wait at the clinic for the steamer had cost them almost a month. The first steamer had been 10 days late, then blew a boiler the morning they were set to depart. The second steamer never showed up at all. Dr. Greinschaft had confirmed by radio that the third would be at the dock in Lusong within the hour.
“We’ve been sitting on our thumbs here for way too long, and I’m not wasting any more time.” Ron knew as soon as he said it that “thumbs” was not going to compute. “Look, just tell him no. Plain and simple. No.”
Ron had taken only a couple of steps toward his stack of equipment when Masapha spoke. “Ron... ”
Ron’s shoulders slumped.
“Masapha, we can’t go on a hunting expedition for this kid’s brothers.” He turned back to face the two small people—one Arab, one black—sitting on the porch. “I know you want to help him, and we did. Shoot, we saved his life! But we have a job to do now, and we’ve got to keep the main thing the main thing.”
“You know what he will do if we do not take him with us,” Masapha said. “He will do what you or I would do. He will go alone to find his brothers.”
Ron could feel himself getting sucked into an argument that wasn’t going anywhere. Why were they even talking about this? They couldn’t possibly help this kid find two slaves among hundreds of thousands.
“How in the world do you expect us to... ?”
Masapha interrupted him; he had it all figured out.
“I would like to proposition you.” Ron let it pass. “Your plan is that you are to go to Khartoum while I stay behind and ask more information, right?”
Ron nodded.
“We can help the boy only this much—we can take him with us to Kosti. I will stay there with Koto while you make the journey to Khartoum. When you return, you and I will take the boy to the place of the doctor’s friend in Chumwe. He can stay there safe with the workers at the feeding center, and we can be away to do our job!”
Masapha’s plan had more holes in it than a wino’s raincoat! That boy would not stay “safe” in Chumwe. If he was determined to find his brothers, nobody could stop him from looking. Besides, what the boy did or did not do was none of their business; he wasn’t their problem anymore.
Ron was about to point all that out to Masapha when it suddenly hit him what was really going on. None of this made any sense because it didn’t have to make any sense, at least not to Masapha. The truth still in the husk was simple: Masapha wasn’t ready to give this kid up. Maybe he never would be—which opened up another huge can of worms!—but he certainly wasn’t ready now. All the rest of it was smoke and mirrors.
Ron threw in the towel. “OK,” he said.
“OK he can come with us?”
“Yes, OK he can come with us.” Before Masapha had a chance to respond, Ron continued firmly. “But we need to have an understanding here. When I get back from Khartoum, you and I go bye-bye and the boy stays in Chumwe. Are we on the same page about that?”
“Our pages are the same.” Masapha beamed.
He turned to translate the verdict for Koto, but the boy had read their faces and said something to Masapha in Lokuta.
“Koto said to tell you that on your outside you are a white man, but”--he tapped his chest--“on your inside, you are a Lokuta warrior.”
“Swell. That’ll be a real conversation-stopper around the operating table if I ever have my appendix out.”
Masapha didn’t understand and Ron didn’t expect him to.
The steamer actually pulled in at the Lusong dock only three hours late. Ron picked up his assorted gear and the sack of food—including homemade bread!—that Helena Greinschaft had prepared for their trip.
“Doc, I don’t know how to thank--”
“You tell your story, that will be tanks enough.” The old man took Ron’s hand and shook it firmly. “Helena and I vill pray every day that God keeps you safe.”
“You do that!” Ron said.
And he meant it.
Chapter 15
The meeting room door was open. Inside, an assortment of House members and Senators milled around, talked and enjoyed their after-lunch coffee, served on a table by the window.
When Alonzo Washington spotted Dan, he smiled and crossed the room to greet him.
“Glad you could make it.” He reached out and shook Dan’s hand, then held on a beat after the handshake. “I look forward to what you have to say.”
Dan’s arrival served as a signal, and the legislators began to take their seats around the long conference table in the center of the room. Dan’s assistant, Chad Mattingly, went to the window and closed the heavy drapes, then quietly hooked his laptop to ca
bles that came out of the wall.
At Representative Washington’s cue, Dan set down his briefcase and joined him behind a small lectern at the head of the conference table.
“I want to thank all of you for coming to this special meeting,” Alonzo began. “I know we’re all busy, so we’ll get started.”
He turned and nodded toward Dan. “We’ve all read Congressman Wolfson’s statements in the congressional newsletter and the newspapers, so we don’t need to talk about why we’re here. Our colleague is the sponsor of PL 99-057, the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act. You all have copies of it. In brief, the act is an effort to force the government of Sudan to stop human rights violations or face steadily stiffer sanctions from the United States. The representative from Indiana has requested a private, confidential meeting with the leaders of the Black Caucus. And that’s what you have agreed to—nothing beyond that. We’re here to listen to what he has to say.”
Alonzo glanced at Dan and smiled. “I would like to remind each of you that in the past, Dan has strongly supported initiatives dear to our hearts.”
Two light claps of applause sounded at the end of the table, and Washington relaxed a little at the show of support.
“He has been a friend to the state of Michigan, and I am honored to present him to you...even if he is a Boilermaker.”
A few chuckles around the table lightened the atmosphere. Alonzo moved over to give Dan the space behind the lectern.
As Washington made his way to his seat, Dan surveyed the room. He had worked with some of the men and women seated there on key legislation; others he had strongly opposed on issues. They all sat expressionless; there was no way to read them. The only thing clear right now was that they wouldn’t give an inch. If he wanted two points, he would have to dribble the ball all the way down the court and dunk it by himself.
“Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today,” Dan said, his normally booming orator’s voice subdued for the smaller room. He nodded to Chad, who pushed a button, and a screen slowly descended from the ceiling on the wall to Dan’s right while he spoke.
“I care deeply about Sudan, and I passionately believe that we will have to answer to our consciences, to history and to God, if we sit idly by and allow the carnage there to continue unchallenged.”
He nodded again, and Chad started the PowerPoint presentation. A brightly colored map of Sudan flashed on the screen. The young man stepped to the wall switch, and the paneled room was plunged into semidarkness, except for the glow from the screen that lit up Dan’s face.
“This is simplistic, but in general terms, the northern part of Sudan is populated by Muslim Arabs, and the southern part is a conglomeration of more than 500 different tribal groups who are predominantly Christian, though there are a good many animists there, too.”
Dan gave a succinct history of the origin of the turmoil in the region, as Chad deftly coordinated his words with bullet points on the screen.
“After Sudan split off from Egypt in 1953, Khartoum allowed a separate regional government to administer the affairs of the south. But when Lieutenant General Omar Hassan al Bashir and the Sudanese People’s Armed Forces took power in 1989, the south’s democratically elected government was dissolved.”
A picture of al Bashir, in full dress uniform, flashed on the screen. Dan looked up at the picture as he spoke.
“Al Bashir’s government is controlled by a fundamentalist group called the National Islamic Front, and they instituted a program to force everyone in the whole country to convert to Islam.”
Dan stood in shadow with the light from the projector behind him, but even in the dim light, the legislators seated at the table could see the intensity on his face.
“And when the six million southern tribals didn’t play ball, the north began to systematically wipe them out—massacred them by the thousands.”
Chad flashed a more detailed map of Sudan on the screen. Dan walked over to it and pointed to southern Sudan.
“This is where the atrocities have been reported. In the last fourteen years, more than two million Sudanese, most of them black Africans, have been killed there—by their own government. More people have died in Sudan than in Rwanda, Uganda and Kosovo put together.”
Dan turned and walked back to the conference table. He placed his hands on it and leaned toward his listeners.
“And more than a hundred and fifty Sudanese have been sold as slaves to the highest bidder.”
He let that point sink in for a beat or two before he continued.
“The pictures I’m about to show you were sent to me by a BBC correspondent in Cairo. They’re hard to look at, but they’re reality. The photos were shot by an undercover reporter inside Sudan.”
A woman’s voice came from the darkness. “Your brother?”
“Yes,” Dan said, and he was surprised at the swell of pride he felt. “My brother, Ron, is risking his life to document the bloodbath in Sudan.”
Then the black legislators looked through the viewfinder of Ron’s camera at a nightmare world; one awful image after another filled the screen.
In one, a blank-faced child cradled the body of a dead little girl in her arms.
“See these marks.” Dan stepped to the screen and pointed to red welts on both girls’ shoulders. “Slave traders don’t brand captives. These children had already been purchased when they escaped. The little one died when she angered her master and he put insects in her ears, stuffed wax in behind them and let the bugs eat out her brain.”
Dan heard a muffled groan from somewhere in the darkness.
Another picture: bullet-riddled bodies lying in pools of blood, with huts in flames behind them.
“The government’s usual game plan is to send in fighter planes to strafe and bomb the villages, then the troops come in behind...”
An image appeared on the screen of a pile of dead bodies slashed and hacked apart, many of them missing body parts.
“...and attack the defenseless villagers with guns and swords. But their weapon of choice is the machete.”
The images flashed one after another. Dead children. Bombed villages. Burned crops and dead livestock. After a while, Dan stopped his narration and moved out of the glow of light from the screen. These people didn’t need him to tell them this was genocide.
After the last image, Chad turned the lights back on, and Ron returned to the lectern.
“General al Bashir has already massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people. I have drafted legislation to force him to stop the bloodbath or face serious consequences.” He paused. “And right now, ladies and gentlemen, that legislation doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.”
There was a murmur in the group; Dan’s candidness surprised them.
“I need your help, plain and simple. Without it, the scenes you saw on the screen will be replayed again and again and again until there are no southern tribals left to slaughter.”
Dan could have said more. But it was time to hear from his listeners. “Questions?”
The most senior member of the group was a congressman from Louisiana. “We have already made a commitment to help the U.N. raise another fifty million dollars in aid support.” Representative Charles Dubois had left the bayou but not the accent behind. “That’s not enough?”
Dan shook his head. “It would be a good start to relieve the suffering in the south, if it actually got to the people who needed it. But it doesn’t.”
Dan explained that the United Nations notified Khartoum where and when an aid drop would be made, which ensured the slaughter of anybody foolish—or hungry—enough to show up to claim it.
“And humanitarian aid doesn’t address the basic issue here,” he said. “We have to do more than provide the survivors a hot meal and a blanket after their government has bombed their villages and soldiers have hauled off their women and children to sell to the slave traders.”
His final two words drew a response from a well-gro
omed New York congressman. When Lamont Walters leaned forward in his chair to speak, Dan had time to think: OK, here it comes. “As you may or may not know, I am a Muslim,” Representative Walters said in a resonant baritone. “Like many other people, you condemn what you do not understand. And it is obvious to me you don’t understand Islam.”
He picked up the pen beside the notepad in front of him and pecked it on the table to emphasize his next words.
“Islamic law forbids slavery; Christianity does not. For two hundred years, American slave owners used the Bible to justify kidnapping the ancestors of every man and woman in this room.”
There were murmurs in the group, but Dan couldn’t tell if they were agreeing or disagreeing with Walters.
“Actually, I know enough about Islam to know that the Koran does not allow a Muslim to enslave another Muslim,” Dan fired back, a little stronger than he meant to. “But if you’re not a Muslim, all bets are off! And the people hauled away in trucks to the north to spend their lives in bondage are Christians or animists. Sharia law allows Muslims to enslave them—they’re fair game.”
The congressman from New York responded with fire of his own. “Reverend Chavis and Benjamin Grover traveled to Sudan to see for themselves what was really going on, and there were no signs of slavery. If that many people had been hauled off in bondage, surely somebody would have noticed.”
“Those men were wined and dined and shown only what al Bashir wanted them to see,” Dan retorted. Then he grabbed hold of his emotions—nothing to be gained by a shouting match—and continued in a more measured tone.
“You saw pictures right there”--Dan pointed to the screen on the wall--“of things they never saw. I didn’t invent the pictures. That’s reality, not the five-star hotel tour the government gave Chavis and Glover.”
Dan turned and asked Chad Mattingly for the bound folder the young man had carried in with his laptop.
“Representatives Burns and Johnson didn’t get a guided tour.” The two congressmen had traveled to Sudan unannounced and had gone unaccompanied to inspect the southern provinces. Dan had included their report in the information he’d dispersed in recent months to members of both the House and the Senate, so its contents shouldn’t have been news to anyone in the room.
