Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

“Rupert Olford tried to warn...”

  “Hold it!” Dan’s grand orator’s voice could have drowned out a smoke alarm.

  The room went instantly silent.

  “I have been away and obviously I missed a major news event that involves my brother.”

  “I’ll say it was a major news event!” Chad Mattingly gushed. “Why it...”

  “And I don’t have a clue what’s going on!” Dan rumbled. “I go to the House floor for the vote on my bill in less than two hours. The press is barred from this office, no calls either—understood?”

  Seven voices replied with the perfect unison of a Greek chorus: “Yes, sir!”

  “Chad, I want video of everything that has run on any station, all the networks.”

  “Done.” Chad scurried away.

  “Shelly, get me copies of all the big daily newspapers, for today and yesterday.”

  “They’re on your desk right now, sir.”

  Dan turned toward his private office. “Hold all calls. All calls for the next half hour.”

  Then he went into the office and shut the door firmly behind him.

  Ron watched the never-ending line of starving villagers file into the largest of five buildings at the Chumwe Feeding Center. Faoud’s jeep was hidden in a shed behind it.

  Omar had returned the rental to Kosti. He’d nosed around while he was there and returned with a smile that highlighted his shiny gold tooth. He said the slave trader had pulled out all the stops to find the American, and the mercenary, Leo, who had helped the infidel and his friends escape.

  “Faoud thinks Leo orchestrated the escape, and I am happy to let him keep right on thinking it,” Omar said.

  Masapha came out and sat down on the porch beside Ron, and the two watched the flowing crowd. They sat in silence for a time. Five days after their beating, the bruises on their backs had gradually changed color, from angry red and purple to green and yellow. Only a few lacerations were still open wounds. The others had left puffy, red ridges that would one day shrink to white scars, permanent tattoos, a lifetime souvenir from Faoud the slave trader. “You are thinking about your brother, yes?”

  Ron knew that on the other side of the planet, it was the morning of the House vote on Dan’s Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill.

  “Just wondering if our stories will do any good, that’s all.”

  “Your BBC friend said they splashed large.”

  Ron turned to his Arab friend with a smile. “Yeah, they splashed large. I just hope the water got the right people wet.”

  Dan stared at the picture of the little girl, big eyes, dimples, her ankle tied to a stake in the ground. He couldn’t wrench his eyes away from the image. He had to force himself to put the newspaper down on his desk. Then he turned in his swivel chair and looked out the window.

  Chad Mattingly knocked gently on the oak door, opened it a crack and stuck his head into Dan’s office.

  “Sir,” he said tentatively, “I think you really need to see this.”

  Dan turned back from the window.

  “What is it, son?” he asked absently. He couldn’t get the story—a teenage girl walked into a river and let crocodiles rip her apart!—out of his mind.

  “This, sir,” Chad said.

  He crossed to Dan, set his laptop down on an acre of cherry desktop, opened it so his boss could see the screen and clicked play.

  While the intro credits for the CBS Evening News rolled across the screen, Chad told Dan, “This story ran all day yesterday. It was on in the morning, the noon news, 6:00 and 11:00 p.m.”

  Dan stared at the screen, at trucks in a semi-circle on the desert floor. Groups of people, mostly women and children, were tied to each other and to the trucks or to stakes in the ground.

  Dan watched in fascinated horror as a teenage boy raced away from the trucks, watched a bullet slam into him, watched him hit the ground, roll over, get up and continue to run. Koto. At the meeting that never happened, the members of the Black Caucus had heard that boy tell his story. Yesterday, they saw his words come to life.

  Dan’s secretary peeked in, saw Dan and Chad at the computer screen and seized the moment to speak.

  “Sir, a man named Rupert Olford with the BBC wants to talk to you before you leave for the vote,” she said breathlessly, in a rush to get it all out before Dan cut her off. “I know you said no media, but he said that your brother...”

  “I’ll take the call.”

  He nodded a thanks to Chad and lifted the receiver off the phone on his desk as the aide picked up his laptop, left the office and closed the door softly behind him.

  When Dan replaced the receiver in the cradle a few minutes later, he dug through the newspapers on his desk until he came to one with the picture of a man on the front—the ugliest man Dan had ever seen. It was a tight shot of the man’s face, and the caption warned that the pictures on the jump page inside were not suitable for children to see.

  Dan read the story all the way through twice. In the past decade, just one slave trader had sold more than 20,000 people into slavery and pocketed millions of dollars. He looked at the picture of the vacant-eyed twin boys. He thought about what this man with the beady eyes and the pockmarked face had done to his brother and what he had threatened to do.

  Dan felt a sudden blind fury rise in his chest, a rage so raw and fierce it stunned him. Dan knew in that moment, with absolute certainty, that he could kill another human being. If that slave trader had been within his grasp, Dan would have fastened his huge hands around the fat man’s neck and choked him until there was no breath left in his body.

  Chad stepped into Dan’s office again and pointed to his watch. “You have fifteen minutes, sir.”

  Dan put the newspaper down and swiveled back toward the window. He stared out into nothingness for perhaps a minute, then stood and crossed to the coat rack beside Chad.

  “My little brother is...” His voice was too full of emotion to continue. He picked up his suit jacket, slipped his arms into the sleeves, then patted his pockets and looked around. Chad went to the desk.

  “Looking for this, sir?” He handed Dan his Palm Pilot.

  “I sure hope it doesn’t take me as long to get the job done in America as it did Wilberforce in England.” Dan looked in the mirror and straightened his tie.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Wilberforce. William Wilberforce. He worked his whole political career to get Parliament to ban the slave trade in the British colonies.”

  Dan picked up a folder from his desk and headed to the door. “That was almost two hundred years ago, and it’s still not over.”

  A gang of reporters pounced on him as soon as he stepped out of the elevator.

  “How do you think the vote will go today?”

  “Will it be close?”

  “How did your brother manage to get the networks to run his slavery series right before the vote on your bill?”

  Dan took that question.

  “My brother didn’t have anything to say about the timing of the series, and neither did I!” There was a hard edge to his voice the reporters couldn’t miss. “Ron has been a little too busy lately to micromanage the release of his series. This time five days ago, my brother had been whipped until he was unconscious and was lying in a slave trader’s dungeon waiting to have his head chopped off.”

  Dan’s words exploded like a howitzer and sparked a mighty roar of excited follow-up questions. Dan ignored them and used his size to snowplow through the journalists and into the House Chamber. As he walked to his desk, he noticed that the chamber was as full as he had ever seen it, and the normal bank of radio and television microphones, cameras and monitors, was more crowded, too.

  Good! The legislators would have to answer to more than their consciences for how they voted. There was nowhere to hide.

  Dan noticed something else a little unusual, too. Several black congressmen looked up when he walked onto the floor. A couple acknowledged him with a slight nod a
s he took a seat at his desk.

  What happened between the time he sat down at his desk and when the vote was called on the Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill blew by Dan in a blur. Pinned in the center of the bulletin board of his mind was a newspaper clipping with a picture of Faoud the slave trader. Dan tried very hard not to think about Olford’s description of what had happened to Ron. Not now. There would be time for that later. Even so, words popped like firecrackers into his consciousness.

  Dungeon. Shackles. Whipped. Beheaded.

  The speaker’s voice suddenly penetrated his consciousness in midsentence, and Dan’s pulse kicked into a gallop.

  “...all those in favor of PL 99-057 please say aye.”

  He had time to think, “This is it!” before he joined his grand orator’s voice to a mighty rumble of other voices.

  “Aye!”

  “Those opposed, please say “no.”

  An equally loud roar filled the chambers.

  “No!”

  The volume of ayes and nays had been so similar Dan couldn’t tell which had been louder. And volume was how the Speaker would determine which way the vote had gone. Unless...

  Dan pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.

  “Mr. Speaker, I respectfully request a standing vote.”

  A wave of murmurs washed across the chamber like ripples from a stone skipped across a still pond.

  Dan didn’t sit back down. He wanted to be the first to stand up against the evil of slavery in Sudan.

  “As many as are in favor of PL 99-057 will rise and remain standing until counted,” the Speaker said.

  He’d asked the members of the Black Caucus at the meeting that never happened who among them would stand with him. Now, he was about to find out.

  All over the chamber, his colleagues began to get to their feet. Dan knew each of them, knew their stories, understood what this was costing them.

  He watched the television cameras pan the room, stopping to focus on first one face and then another:

  Alonzo Washington from Michigan. Alonzo fairly leapt to his feet. He had obviously decided Dan didn’t stink, or he didn’t care anymore if Dan’s stink rubbed off on him.

  Margaret Bryan from Missouri. Margaret had pointed out the American Gum/TriCola elephant in the room when Dan first met with the Black Caucus. She knew which side her political bread was buttered on, but she was as tough as boot leather when she needed to be.

  Charles Dubois from Louisiana. Dan recalled the elderly black Congressmen’s concern that when the big companies started to lay off workers in his district, that bird would come home to roost in his front yard. The old fellow must have decided to make fried chicken.

  Dorothy Warden from Ohio. Dottie was Dan’s “neighbor” from Cincinnati who had questioned why Dan had gone on this crusade in the first place.

  Raleigh Sutherland from South Carolina! Dan was floored. He tried to make eye contact with the old man who had opposed him on every bill he’d ever proposed, but Sutherland resolutely stared straight ahead.

  Avery Thompson from Virginia. The oldest and the most influential member of the Black Caucus was the only one of the group who had asked no questions of Dan at either meeting. His stony silence had been deafening.

  Lamont Walters from New York. The Muslim. Walters turned toward Dan, looked him in the eye, and gave a small nod, in clear view of the other delegates on the floor.

  A simple glance around the room displayed the obvious: the Black Caucus had united around this issue, had stood together to make a decisive, powerful statement.

  After the ayes had been counted, the Speaker called for the nay votes. Only one of those was any real surprise to Dan. Greg Alexander from Idaho stood beside his desk and refused to look at him. When the Speaker stepped to the microphone to announce the results, the chamber grew instantly quiet and still.

  “By a vote of two-nineteen to two-oh-three, PL 99-057, which calls for economic, and if necessary, military sanctions against the government of Sudan, shall be enacted, and shall remain in force until proof is supplied by U.S.-approved U.N. inspectors that all forms of human slavery there have been abolished.”

  Alonzo Washington rose to his feet and slowly clapped his hands. Dorothy Warden followed suit. Others joined them. And then others. The wave of applause spread to the gallery, where it became a thunderous roar. CNN and all the major network cameras pulled in tight shots of Dan. They captured the smile on his face and the tears in his eyes.

  Colleagues seated nearby reached out to him, shook his hand or patted him on the back. Washington actually hugged him. But much of that response was a blur. Overwhelmed, Dan’s mind was still in replay mode: the little girl with dimples, the teenage boy slammed to the ground with a rifle shot, and the ugly face of the evil slave trader, Faoud.

  When Dan filed out of the chamber with other members of the House, reporters and photographers swarmed over him, pushed microphones at him, snapped pictures, babbled a cacophony of questions. He was about to make a statement when he noticed a group of his black colleagues just beyond the journalists.

  “Excuse me, please,” Dan’s booming voice was loud enough to get everybody’s attention. “I’ll answer any question you have, tell you anything you want to know, give you as much time as you’d like, if you’ll give me just a moment first. Deal?”

  The reporters backed off and Dan approached the group of lawmakers. For a moment, no one spoke. Then the Muslim reached out his hand to Dan. Walters’ grip was strong and firm.

  “For the Middle Passage,” he said.

  With great emotion, Dan echoed, “For the Middle Passage.”

  Ron had returned to the front step of the building after dinner. It was cool there, and he’d watched the sunset, watched the stars begin to sprinkle the sky like freckles on a kid’s nose. His mind was not a million miles away, but it was at least 11,000 when Bergstrom charged through the door and let the screen bang shut behind him.

  “I just heard on zee radio.” Excitement brought out his Swiss accent. “The bill passed. Your brother’s bill passed!”

  It took a beat or two for it to sink in. It passed!

  Then a dam burst somewhere and a river of relief flowed over Ron along with a wave of salty tears in a delicious, warming flood. All the steam valves popped open, spewing out months of pent-up pressure in a glorious, liberating whoosh. Ron would have leapt to his feet and cheered, but his back wasn’t up to so boisterous a celebration. Bergstrom would have slapped him on the back to congratulate him, but had the presence of mind to merely grab his hand and shake it furiously.

  Somebody had finally noticed! Somebody had finally stood up to the bully. The U.S. House of Representatives had spoken with clear, moral authority. “No. This is wrong. It has to stop.”

  Finally!

  The bill still needed approval in the Senate and the president’s signature, of course. But it was on its way. And the whole world was watching.

  Dan had made it happen. Oh, how Ron wanted to grab the big dude in a bear hug and tell him, “Way to go!”

  But he would settle for finding a little dude, his partner, a man who had taken the same beatings he had for the same cause.

  “Where’s Masapha?” Ron stood up too fast and pain shot through his back. He didn’t care. “I want to be the one to tell him. I want to watch his face.”

  Chapter 24

  A villager at work in the millet field spotted them, leaned on his grubbing hoe for a moment and stared. A man was making his way down the hillside trail with a little girl behind him.

  Suddenly, recognition dawned. The villager turned, shouted at the other farmers in the field and pointed at the two approaching figures.

  “Idris! Look, it’s Idris! And Akin!

  Word spread across the field and through the village faster than a sprinting cheetah. Every person in Mondala dropped whatever they were doing and ran past the pastureland and the fields to the base of the mountain trail. Then they stood in awe and wonder
as the father and daughter came down the trail toward them.

  Omar had driven Idris and Akin in Faoud’s jeep as far as Malakai to catch the Nile Steamer to Bor. He’d brought Idris north; he would take him back and put him where he found him. Equipped with plenty of supplies from the feeding center, they traveled only at night, took no main roads and skirted around every village in their path.

  The father and daughter babbled for hours as they bumped along in the back of the jeep. Sometimes they laughed, often they cried. Omar didn’t understand anything they said, just drove in silence and listened to their chatter.

  Idris knew that when they got to the dock in Malakai, he had to communicate somehow with Omar. He had to arrange to pay Omar the rest of what he owed him—the additional 500 Sudanese pounds the mercenary was to receive if he actually found Akin and brought her back safely.

  And Idris wanted to thank him, to somehow express the profound depth of his gratitude.

  When they arrived in Malakai, Idris searched for hours to find somebody, anybody, who spoke both Dinka and Arabic. The tall tribal with the bead necklace and the ebony spear went from one person to the next, up and down the dock. The mercenary watched his efforts in amused silence. Idris could find no one.

  Omar paid the fare for Akin and Idris to travel upriver to Bor with the last few dollars he had in the pouch attached to his leg. He had told no one the price he’d paid to return the little girl to her father. He pushed a protesting Idris toward the steamer and gestured that he and Akin were to get aboard.

  Then he spoke, as he had spoken at times during the journey north—in Arabic. He knew the Dinkan farmer couldn’t understand.

  “You found her, father.” His gold tooth sparkled in the midday sun. “You got a bigger lion and went north and found your daughter—before you did not get a little girl back at all.”

  Omar shook his head, an odd half-smile on his face. “A miracle. Take her home and guard her well, my black friend.”

  Then he turned and walked away.