This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  ‘My friend came today,’ she said. ‘You remember – Charity Donkor. Victor spoke of her. She is staying with her aunt at Teshie.’

  Nathaniel began to wash, pouring the water carefully from the earthen vessel into the tin basin that stood on the dresser.

  ‘You still haven’t told me why she’s in Accra.’

  ‘She has been very unfortunate,’ Aya said, giving him a quick appraising glance. ‘She wants a child. She has been married five years.’

  ‘Too bad,’ Nathaniel said without enthusiasm.

  ‘That is why she came here,’ Aya went on. ‘Her aunt was writing to her all the time about this new “suman” –’

  Nathaniel swung around to face her.

  ‘This new – what?’

  ‘Fetish,’ Aya repeated patiently. ‘Its priests have brought it down here from the Northern Territories. Its home is near Tamale –’

  ‘All right – go on.’

  ‘Well, Charity said she tried her best with the “abosom” at Koforidua. And she prayed to her husband’s “ntoro,” and to Tano, Son of Nyame, who is the god of her people – as of ours. I mean – as it used to be. Also, Charity is a Baptist, and she said she prayed every day for a child. But nothing worked. So she is going to –’

  ‘Aya!’ Nathaniel cried. ‘That’s enough. She’s a Baptist and a pagan, and she hasn’t even the decency to stick to one pagan god. She’s like a woman in the market – which piece of fish is the cheapest, the freshest? Which god shall I buy today?’

  ‘She is my friend,’ Aya said with dignity. ‘It is not necessary for you to insult her. Victor was right, for once. I should not have told you.’

  ‘Look –’ Nathaniel said patiently, ‘I’ve told you, Aya. We went into this long ago, when you miscarried. There are many reasons for a woman not having a child. I don’t understand them all, but doctors do. Charity could pour libation every day for ten years, but it still wouldn’t –’

  ‘What harm does it do to try? You don’t understand what it is, Nathaniel. You don’t know how it feels to want a child, and not be able – but I know.’

  Nathaniel’s throat ached.

  ‘And what “suman” did you try,’ he said slowly, ‘before, when you thought you couldn’t hold a baby? What one did you go to, without telling me?’

  She turned away.

  ‘None,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I was afraid. You would not let me, and – oh, Nathaniel – I am ashamed of it now, but sometimes I hated you for it. For not letting me try.’

  He believed her. But his desire to hurt could not be suddenly quenched.

  ‘And when you were pregnant,’ his voice ground out, ‘I suppose you thought you wouldn’t take any chances this time. I suppose you saw the “sumankwafo” to get charms so no one could harm the child by witchcraft –’

  He laughed harshly.

  ‘You couldn’t have the cuts made on your forehead for the “boto” to be rubbed in,’ he said. ‘I would have seen it.’

  Aya buried her face in the pillow.

  ‘Why do you speak of it?’ she cried. ‘I would not go – where you said. We are Christians.’

  ‘I am nothing!’ he stormed. ‘A man is better off to have no gods. They’re all the same. They take, take, but they never give.’

  She raised her head and looked at him, wide-eyed.

  ‘You are a Christian,’ she insisted. ‘You went to Mission School. You go to church, sometimes anyway.’

  ‘That makes me a Christian,’ he said bitterly. ‘Good.’

  ‘It is Victor,’ Aya said. ‘He is a bad influence on you. How can anyone live without a god?’

  ‘I knew you would say that. It isn’t him. Sometimes I believe. Sometimes – I can’t. But in the old gods – never. Not any more. That’s gone. Don’t you understand? It’s gone.’

  ‘For me, also,’ she said. ‘I would not go to the fetish priest.’

  He looked at her, exasperated, and yet moved by her loyalty, which was loyalty to him.

  ‘You lie like a child,’ he said. ‘Like a little girl.’

  ‘I am not the right wife for you,’ Aya cried. ‘Why did you not marry someone who could read?’

  He took her hands in his, and held them tightly, so she would not think the same question had ever occurred to him.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he said.

  She clung to him.

  ‘You will not take a second wife, Nathaniel? I do not want that.’

  ‘We are Christians,’ he said with a grin. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  She struck at his hands, half angrily, and he laughed.

  The next day, when Nathaniel entered the gate, he knew Aya’s mother was in the house. The hoarse throaty laughter was unmistakably Adua’s. He could tell from the sweet-acrid smell that she was preparing palm-oil chop for him. He sighed. She did not do it for nothing. He wondered what she wanted this time.

  The old woman sat unmoving beside the charcoal brazier, a gourd ladle in her hand. Her cloth was black and red, patterned in hands outspread. It billowed hugely around her, and the dozens of scarlet hands clutched at that massive body. She gave Nathaniel the customary greeting, but she did not smile or look up. Always the same – her laughter stopped when he appeared. He was glad to avoid her eyes. Once he had a dream about the old woman. All of her had melted in the sun, leaving only those wise-ignorant eyes, those eyes that searched him, running about on their own tiny legs in the puddle of oil on the ground.

  Aya would never admit anything. And yet he knew that whatever understanding and knowledge of the new ways he patiently wove into her, the old woman busily unravelled it.

  Aya looked pleased to see him, but something else as well. Frightened? Apprehensive? Her face was tired. The child was growing heavy, and the lines of strain showed in Aya’s face. Nathaniel felt a sudden pity for her, who had to grow in her slow earth what he so quickly sowed.

  ‘If Nyankopon gave me nothing else,’ Adua said in her wheezy breathless voice, ‘he gave me the hands to cook with.’

  ‘You make the best palm-oil stew I have ever tasted, except my own mother’s,’ Nathaniel agreed politely.

  ‘She has done it for you,’ Aya said with a hesitant smile. ‘She brought the fish and oil.’

  Nathaniel nodded. He was getting a headache. He did not feel like dealing with another of those family arguments where everyone’s heart gets sore and bruised and nobody wins. As Adua had promised, the stew was good, the palm oil just the right red-gold, the pieces of smoked fish succulent and plentiful. She had prepared ‘kenkey’ to go with it, balls of steamed fermented corn dough. No matter how much Nathaniel worried, it never made him lose his appetite. But he felt, with resentment, that each bite put him in her debt. When the women had eaten, after he had finished, Adua wrapped her cloth around her, belched, then sighed.

  ‘Nathaniel,’ she whined, ‘Nathaniel, I am getting old. I have lived here too long.’

  Nathaniel felt a rush of relief. She wanted to go back to her village. And then, despair. The fare for the mammy-lorry. He couldn’t. He didn’t have the money. He would gladly have borrowed it, at any interest, to get rid of Adua. But he had refused money to Kwaale, and if she heard of it she would never forgive him.

  ‘If it is the money –’

  She waved one hand, brushing his words away.

  ‘No, no. My cousin owns a lorry. Had you forgotten? He will take me as far as Kumasi.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Nathaniel,’ she said eagerly, ‘Aya should bear her child among her own people. And she is tired. Look at her. You can see how tired she is. She is alone here. I try to help her, but I have no man to work for me, no rich relatives. I must work. There, her cousins could help her. She would have help with the child, too, when it is young.’

  She paused, and her heavy bosom shook a little. Her eyes searched Nathaniel’s face. His own mother was dead, long ago. She was trying to make him believe it was his mother speaking. Her eyes held him, f
orcing her terrible terrible love.

  ‘Nathaniel,’ Adua said, ‘come back, Nathaniel.’

  Aya sighed, gently, as though she had been holding her breath until the thing was spoken.

  Nathaniel felt stabbed, betrayed.

  ‘Aya –’

  Aya looked away so he could not see her face.

  ‘You do not know,’ she whispered. ‘It is not easy for me –’

  No, it was not easy for her. How could she hold to the future when the old woman kept on and on at her, touching her homesickness and her fears, using every trick?

  He turned to Aya’s mother.

  ‘I do not want you to talk about it again,’ he said. ‘I am not going back. This is where I work and where I live.’

  ‘You could work there,’ Adua replied. ‘This Accra, Nathaniel, it is no good.’

  ‘What is wrong with it? Can you tell me?’

  ‘“It is hard to meet a good man in a big city”.’

  He remembered the proverb from long ago. But he knew how to counter it.

  ‘“Where you have had joy is better than where you were born”,’ he replied.

  It was another proverb, and for a moment Adua did not know how to answer.

  ‘You have grown to hate your own people,’ she said finally.

  It was an unwise remark. He could see that Aya knew.

  ‘She did not mean –’ Aya stumbled.

  ‘I do not hate them,’ Nathaniel said. ‘You know I do not hate them. But I will not go back.’

  ‘We send our sons to school, and they spit on us,’ the old woman said bitterly.

  Nathaniel peered at her. She really believed it. That was the impression his generation gave.

  ‘No,’ Nathaniel said. ‘No. You do not know.’

  – You do not know that I mourn everything I have lost. I mourn the gods strangled by my hand. You do not know how often I have wanted to go back.

  ‘I live here,’ he repeated stubbornly. ‘I work here. I cannot go back.’

  ‘For Aya’s sake,’ she pleaded, ‘and the child’s –’

  ‘No!’ Nathaniel shouted. ‘It is for him that I stay! No! Do not talk of it any more. You hear? No more.’

  Adua seemed to sag, as though the bones had crumbled within that hulk of flesh. Nathaniel saw that her eyes were no longer compelling. They were only the flat, unsurprised eyes of an old woman who plotted and plotted, scarcely expecting to win.

  ‘Now I do not know whether to go or stay,’ Adua said plaintively. ‘I wanted to hear my grandchildren’s voices.’

  Nathaniel tried to remember all the superstitions and fears she had given Aya. He tried to be angry once more. But he could not. It is not the malice in a family that drowns us and not their greed. It is their love, stifling, inescapable.

  Aya reached out and touched his arm.

  ‘I think you have forgotten that a woman goes to her mother’s people when she reaches the eighth month,’ she said. ‘But I will not do it, Nathaniel, even if Adua goes back. I will stay with you.’

  It was a triumph for him, that Aya spoke the words in the old woman’s presence. But Nathaniel did not feel triumphant.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said helplessly, to both of them.

  He felt he could not bear it. Anger was easier.

  At last, well after midnight, Nathaniel slept.

  – All night long my soul wrestled with the devil. Yes –

  – My soul wrestled with the devil in the night. The devil of the night. My soul wrestled with the Sasabonsam in the night. His fur was black and his fur was red and his face was a grinning mask of rage. His hands plucked at me, and his breath was evil. He jumped up and down like the great mad gorilla, and he drummed on his chest. Yes, he drummed on his chest like the mad gorilla. He drummed on his chest till the blood trembled in my heart. And he put on a sombrero like the happy boys wear, and he covered his fur with a pink nylon shirt. He pranced down the street in a pink nylon shirt, and everyone laughed as he danced a highlife. And he cried, ‘I am the City. Oh yes, I’m the City, I am the City, boy, come and dance!’

  – I knew he lied. I knew he lied. I’d seen him in the forest, old as the shadows. I knew he was the Forest. I knew he was the River. But I was afraid and I wanted to run. I wanted to run back and back and back.

  – When I was a boy I used to swim in a green pool. The palms were green above it and around it, and the water was cool and green. The village goats came there to drink, stepping lightly, lightly, lightly, stepping lightly in the cool brown mud. And the old men sat in the shade chewing kola nut, and their voices, thin like spiderwebs, spun gossip while the young ones laughed. I laughed and I swam like a little lithe fish, until my mother called me home. She would be bending over the great wooden bowl, the wooden pestle in her hand, pounding yam or guinea corn. She would smile at me. She had four daughters but only one son. ‘Is your belly empty, little fish?’ Mammii-O! Mammii-O!

  – I came to a forest and I stepped inside. And there in a clearing I saw a judgement. I saw the judgement, what it would be. The thief was there, with one hand severed, and the stump dripped blood as he howled with pain. The adulterer was there, and his face was gaunt with shame, and he bore a black gaping wound where the branch of life had been. And I was there, yes, I was there. I walked in the clearing with my head held like a dried gourd between these hands. And my neck shook itself at the self it could not see, and the eyes stared at the blind thing. And I fled, I fled, I fled. I ran away to hide myself in the streets.

  – All night long my soul wrestled with the devil. You lie, Sasabonsam.

  – Then the devil called down from his ‘odum’ tree – ‘You will be cursed, Nathaniel. The blood in you, it is your mother’s. Will it not turn sour, will it not clot with this damnation laid upon you who spit on your people? Have you not your father’s “ntoro”? Will not your very spirit rise up against you?’

  – When I was a little boy, in my mother’s womb. When I was a little fish, in the place where my father poured out his life. When I was a little boy, in my father’s tomb. I have drawn my blood from my mother, and I have drawn my life from my father’s life. And they will curse me, for I have forsaken them. Alone, Nathaniel, alone.

  – My soul wrestled with the devil, whispering doom in the night. And I was falling, I was drowning. Down, down, down.

  – Onyame, the Shining One, Giver of Sun, help me. Nyankopon, Soul of Nyame, Shooter of Life’s Arrows, help me. Tano, God of the River, Lord of the Planted Forest, help me. Asaase Yaa, Old Mother Earth, mother of the dead, help me.

  – I called upon my gods. I called upon my gods. But I knew they would not answer.

  – I knew my gods would not answer, for they were dead. My gods were dead in me. They died long ago. How can a god die? What a great death, when a god dies. The death of a king is only the death of a small boy, when a god dies.

  – Onyame, the Shining One, is dead. In the compound where offerings were placed on the altar, only the chickens scratch in the dust. Nyame’s Tree is bare. The altar is deserted.

  – Nyankopon, the sun, has died in me and the sun still shines. Odamankoma, the Sculptor, He Who Hewed The Thing, he is dead. They say he created Death and Death killed him. It was not Death that killed him in me.

  – My gods do not answer. Asaase Yaa, Mother of Earth, is dead with her dead. And Tano lies dead beside his River.

  – Only, in the night, the Sasabonsam is not dead, and I fear, I fear, I fear.

  – ‘I am the City, boy, always and always. If you don’t like me, you know where to go.’

  – Hear him. Sh – listen.

  – ‘Sometimes I am known as Dr. Paludrine, sometimes Mr. Telephone, Q.C., or simply Sasabonsam Happy Boy. Charming names. I love them all, and have a silk tie for each. You see me every day. We often meet. I always smile.’

  – You lie. I’ve seen you in the Forest, old as the shadows, mad gorilla with feet that point both ways. Mocker of men, doom-dark hunter, haunter of dreams – you lie.
You lie. YOU LIE! (Oh – I cannot hear myself speaking. Am I speaking?)

  – All night long my soul wrestled with the devil. Who will hear me?

  – Jesus, my Redeemer, hear me (if You are there). Jesus, my Redeemer, be there. Hear me. For I am drowning. Save me. Jesus, I beg You (if You are there).

  – King Jesus came riding on a milk-white horse. And He crossed the river of Jordan. Yes, He crossed the River. He crossed the River. He crossed the River, came up into the Land. King Jesus, reach out Your hand.

  – King Jesus came riding, He Who Held The Beginning Of Time. King Jesus came riding and His armlets were gold. His bracelets were gold, His anklets were gold. King Jesus came riding, and His shoulder chains were gold, and the rings on His hands were gold. His robe was blue and gold, and the amulets on His headband were gold. King Jesus came riding, all in gold, and the brown skin of His body was afire with the dust of gold. Gold is the sun, gold is the King. He is my King, too. What do you think of that, you whitemen? He is my King, too. King Jesus rides, all in gold; He rides across the River, and His hands stretch out to the drowning men. Oh hear me.

  – All Angels Pray For Me. The song says, all angels pray for me. Pray, you angels, pray. Oh my Redeemer, reach out Your hand (if You are there).

  – Sasabonsam, you lie. I will not be cursed. I am on the side of the King. See Him; He rides all in gold. And He crosses the River (Lord, take me with You!) and He comes up into the Land –

  Nathaniel awoke, moaning. Beside him, Aya slept. His body was cold with sweat. He tried to remember. But it was gone. Then he remembered one thing.

  Jesus, fantastically, had been arrayed like a King of Ashanti.

  The insistent voice of the Forest did not cease. Like the menacing song of the wild bees, it hummed in Nathaniel’s head. One evening, returning from work, he heard the chip-chip-chip of steel on hardwood, and a voice bawling a bawdy song in Twi.

  The man was sitting cross-legged under a rough shelter of new palm leaves in the compound. Around him were wood-carver’s tools, and already a little heap of shavings and splinters covered his feet. Yiamoo’s youngest son squatted nearby, his eyes bright with curiosity and suspicion.