This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  ‘He is chief only over one town and a handful of villages,’ Adjei said bitterly, ‘is that it? Who are you, Nathaniel? Who do you want to work for – the Asantehene himself?’

  ‘It is not that at all. I knew you would not see it.’

  The old man sighed gustily.

  ‘Are you well, Nathaniel?’

  Nathaniel threw out his hands in despair.

  ‘Yes,’ he grated through his teeth, ‘quite well.’

  The old man’s eyes gleamed cruelly.

  ‘I thought you must either be mad or very wise,’ he said. ‘Try me again, Nathaniel. You say Nana Kweku is a good man, and yet you refuse to work for him. Why? I am perhaps a little deaf these past years. That part was not quite clear to me –’

  ‘Because I would end by hating him, if I worked for him,’ Nathaniel snapped. ‘Oh – many clerks of chiefs despise their masters, make no mistake about it! I’d have to watch him, every day, every day, not able to read or even write his own name, not knowing anything outside his little province, but still able to command, to move people this way and that. I don’t want to see it.’

  The old man looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘Now I know you are mad. Your sisters will grieve. Certainly, they will grieve.’

  Nathaniel looked at him helplessly, as though from a great distance.

  ‘Listen to me, uncle. Just once. I mean no disrespect. Can’t you believe me?’

  Adjei’s eyelids lifted a little.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he murmured, ‘wonderful. You would strangle your brother, I suppose, telling him all the while that you meant no disrespect?’

  ‘I know,’ Nathaniel said, ‘I know it sounds like that. But it is not. I do not say anything against the chiefs. Only that their time is past.’

  ‘You think,’ the old man’s voice was a soft hiss, ‘that because we have fallen low, and are ruled by foreigners and apes from the coast, that it will always be so? I tell you, Nathaniel, there is a wind rising in Asante more scorching than the Harmattan. It speaks of fire and it speaks of blood. Asante will be again what it once was.’

  His words rang out clearly, the thin-voiced silver bell gathering itself to toll.

  ‘I know – you believe that,’ Nathaniel said. ‘The nationalists are trying to break Asante away from the union, to get a separate independence, to establish the old kingdom again. But I do not want my people to be what they once were. I want them to be something more.’

  ‘And what is wrong with what we once were?’ Adjei demanded angrily. ‘Our people are not the apes and dogs of the coast, eating their filth and living godless in caves. We have borne kings, and their strength gave us strength and their life gave us life. And they are with us, and the strength of their spirits will be as the fire of the sun in our veins –’

  The old man’s eyes burned, and Nathaniel felt himself being drawn into that fire, fire of the sun, fire of gold.

  ‘No – ’ he said, then, bringing his hand down hard on the table, ‘no! Old tales, all of it. Our souls are sick with the names of our ancestors. Osei Tutu, he who made the nation, and Okomfo Anoye the priest, he who gave the nation its soul, and Nana Prempeh exiled by the English – I know, I know them all. I respect them, although you do not believe it. I honour them. But they will not save us. They are dead, dead, dead, and we are alive. Our future does not lie with them, or with the living chiefs, or with Asante alone. Africa is a big place, uncle.’

  ‘That is like a young man,’ Adjei said. ‘You would throw it all away. You would let the souls of your ancestors die for want of tending, not seeing that you die with them.’

  ‘I do not want to throw it all away,’ Nathaniel said painfully, then his voice rose to a cry, ‘but how can you keep part without keeping all? Keep the chiefs, the linguists, the soul-bearers, the drummers, and you will keep the “sumankwafo,” dealers in fetish, and the “bayi komfo,” the witch-doctors. You will keep the minds that made “atopere,” the dance of death, a man hacked slowly to pieces and made to dance until too much was butchered for him to move. That is what you will keep.’

  “‘Atopere” has been forbidden for many years,’ Adjei said sternly, ‘and it is not fitting for you to speak of things you do not understand.’

  ‘All right,’ Nathaniel said. ‘So I do not understand it. I am a city man. I do not know about these things. I do not want to know about them. They do not interest me. Things are changing, uncle, changing more than you see. The wind that is rising is rising all over Africa, and it speaks of something new that has never been before.’

  The old man’s expression told Nathaniel he had gone too far, had wounded more than could ever be excusable.

  ‘Adjei – I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I cannot help it. But I’m sorry.’

  Adjei scuffed one sandal on the floor and stared down at it, avoiding Nathaniel’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said, and his voice was not quite steady, ‘I do not think you are sorry. Because you have forgotten your own land. That is a strange thing to do, Nathaniel.’

  Nathaniel could not speak. The old man’s voice seemed to repeat the words over and over, buzzing in his head like the shrill voices of a thousand cicadas.

  – You have forgotten your own land. You live in the city of strangers, and your god is the god of strangers, and strange speech is in your mouth, and you have no home.

  – Oh, Nathaniel, how can a man forget? A man cannot forget. Deep, deep, there lies the image of what the eye has lost and the brain has lost to ready command.

  – The forest grows in me, now, this year and the next, until I die. The forest grows in me. See, there are the high trees, the tall hardwoods, mahogany and ofram, and the iron-grey cottonwoods buttressed from their roots like great forts, the cottonwoods with their high green umbrellas of leaves. From the half-rotted trunks of the oil palms the parasite ferns grow, clothing the old bodies of the trees with obscene frivolity, tickling them with their fronds, their green green plumes. The forest spills over with life and death. The trees are hairy with strangler vines, beautiful green-haired death. The jungle lilies and the flowers of the poinsettia are red as the fresh blood of a sacrificed cockerel. The small blue commelina clutches the soil, the flower we call ‘God will die before I do’. The forest floor is carpeted with ferns, and beneath the live green lies the rotting flesh of the plants’ last growth, and their death gives new life to the soil. The forest is rank and hot and swelling with its semen. Death and life meet and mate.

  – The forest grows in me, rank, hot, terrible. The fern fronds spread like veins through my body.

  ‘I have not forgotten,’ Nathaniel said in a low voice.

  His uncle glanced at him, the old eyes unblinking as a lizard’s.

  ‘You want to forget, then,’ Adjei said, ‘and that is just as bad.’

  Did he? Did he want to forget? Nathaniel looked away.

  – When I was a boy, on my father’s farm, the forest was peopled with a million ghosts, a million gods. Stone and tree and root, a million eyes. I was not brave. I was slight and small for my age, and my mother had protected me too much. I was not brave. Was anyone? I thought the other boys were, then, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps they were afraid, too. The forest was enclosed, shadowy, like a room filled with green shadows. It was my home. The voice of the forest was shrill all day – a million million bees, a million million cicadas, a million million screaming birds. And at night the silence of the snake.

  – The farms were hewed and hacked out of the bush. The matted brush closed in like a solid wall, and the bush paths were hacked out with machetes, until you had a tunnel through the undergrowth, a green tunnel where the ant-men scurried to and fro from their farms. The cocoa trees grew richly, with their pale brown-stained trunks and yellowing pods. The cassava grew, and the guinea corn, and the yams with leaves like elephants’ ears.

  – It was not so bad, when I was young. I did not know I would ever leave, then. I did not know that soon the mission school would give
me a new name and a new soul. It wasn’t so bad. At dusk we used to go back home, running through the green tunnels. We used to come out onto the road the white-men had forced through the forest, the great road. And there was excitement! It seemed then that the world walked on that road. The women trudged along with the baskets of bananas, plantains, cassava on their heads, the bundles of firewood on their heads. But we boys stopped to stare at the lorries that passed, or we loitered beside the palm shelters where palm-wine was sold in old beer bottles. Sometimes we saw strangers, men with shifty eyes, thieves or God knows what, or just travellers who couldn’t afford to ride a mammy-wagon. And sometimes we saw bands of northern desert men, dressed in their coarse blue and white tunics, driving their herds of long-horned cattle to the coast. It seemed the world must be passing by on that road.

  – It wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t so bad. But I always wanted to know where that great road went, and what was at the other end.

  Adjei Boateng was looking at him curiously. Nathaniel turned away. He did not want to see the pain in the old man’s eyes.

  ‘Do not forsake your own people,’ Adjei said gently, ‘or life will be a bitter leaf in your mouth.’

  ‘It will not happen so.’

  ‘You are young,’ his uncle said. ‘Some day you will know where you belong.’

  Nathaniel grinned, and bitterness welled up in him.

  ‘I belong between yesterday and today.’

  Adjei Boateng smiled also.

  ‘But that is nowhere.’

  ‘I know,’ Nathaniel replied. ‘Yes, I know.’

  Adjei had friends whom he wanted to visit, so he refused Nathaniel’s invitation to stay. Nathaniel felt ashamed at his own sense of relief.

  Aya and Akosua had stayed in the other room while Nathaniel talked to his uncle. Aya emerged now, but she did not ask him what the old man had said; she would certainly have listened and heard it all. Instead, she held up a length of new cloth for him to see.

  ‘My church,’ Aya said, ‘is going to have a parade.’

  She always referred to it as ‘my church’. Nathaniel did not belong. He still attended the traditional church in which, as a boy at the mission school, he had been brought up. Sometimes the old anger stirred and he would not set foot in the church for months. Then, out of need or habit, he would return, never entirely believing, never entirely disbelieving, doubting heaven but fearing hell.

  Aya went with him on Sunday mornings, but her real enthusiasm was for the evangelical church she attended with her women friends. She would arrive home from the sessions strangely exalted, and she did not seem to mind when Nathaniel made fun of her. Maddeningly, whenever he asked her about it, she could never tell him, only that the singing had done her good. Nathaniel sometimes wondered how much of the teaching touched her at all. Jesus did. But Aya did not see Him as The Redeemer.

  ‘That Jesus,’ she would say, clucking her tongue in soft sympathy, ‘that poor boy.’

  ‘He grew up to be a man,’ Nathaniel would remind her.

  But to Aya He remained a child-god. Men had brought Him gifts of gold, honouring his godhead, and then, envying his powers, they had slain Him. On Good Friday, she mourned Him like a mother.

  ‘It was a hard command God laid on Him,’ she said once.

  And she was astounded when Nathaniel laughed. But Aya had said ‘hyebea’ for command, and for God, ‘Nyame’. Nathaniel had seen it, for a moment, through her eyes and had known by what beliefs she interpreted it. She thought of it in terms of the faith of her people. The ‘kra’, the soul, of some royal sinner, probably David the King, to whose house Jesus belonged, was reborn in that poor boy, that miraculous child, and told to come to earth and perfect itself. And the solemn command of Nyame to the ‘kra’ could not be evaded.

  But when Nathaniel questioned her, Aya grew bored and restless, and denied thinking anything at all.

  ‘I suppose you think that Sunday was Jesus’ name-day,’ he teased her once, ‘and that He used to take part in the soul-washing ceremony then.’

  And Aya had looked confused, knowing he was making fun of her, but not quite understanding how.

  Now she draped the material around herself. It was deep blue, with a pattern of drift-tailed fishes and unnamed sea-creatures in swirling lines of yellow and orange.

  ‘We have all bought new cloth for the parade. How do you like it? No – do not say it is too expensive. It is my own money. Remember when I sewed for Mrs. Ansah?’

  ‘You should not go,’ he said. ‘Not – like that.’

  Aya laughed.

  ‘How can it harm the baby? He does not have to do the walking.’

  She would never change. Never. The country might go on, leaping century after century overnight. But Aya would remain the same.

  ‘Why do you want to go?’ he asked peevishly. ‘A bunch of women dancing highlife to the hymns – showing their foolishness from Christiansborg to High Street. It’s almost as stupid as the fetish priestess dancing with ashes on her breasts –’

  She stood quite still for a moment, and her oil-dark eyes shone with anger.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she cried. ‘I must have nothing to do with the “abosom” and now I must not go to my church, either. What do you want me to do?’

  What did he want her to do? Nathaniel knew. He wanted her to go to church on Sunday mornings only, unobtrusively, to his staid and respectable church.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathaniel mumbled. ‘You will go with your friends. It is all right. And the cloth is a fine one.’

  ‘Why did you change?’ she asked bluntly. ‘What made you change like that?’

  Nathaniel shrugged.

  ‘Truly, I do not want to tell you everything you must do,’ he said helplessly. ‘If you want to go, then go. If you think I am always telling you what to do, it is only because –’

  Already she had grown tired of the talk, and was folding the cloth with practised hands.

  He did not want to tell her what to do. It was not right. He knew it.

  But why did she not learn?

  It was that night that Ankrah the carver stabbed Yiamoo.

  Nathaniel and Aya were wakened shortly after midnight. The compound had become a cage where anger roared and struck. They could hear Yiamoo’s deep thundering voice, cursing hotly in his own tongue. Then the carver’s voice, a snake-hiss of hatred, a high-pitched squeal as Yiamoo hit him. The wooden shutters of the house banged open, and anonymous voices cackled in the night. From the street, the noise of cars blurred the pattern of sounds in the compound.

  ‘Ankrah tried again today to get the stoep for his work,’ Aya whispered, ‘and Yiamoo spat in his face.’

  They heard the scuffling of feet, then the strangled grunt of a wounded thing. A second’s terrifying silence, then the sound of feet, running, running, stumbling. Strangely, the wooden shutters of the house began to creak closed, one after another, quietly, as though upon an agreed signal. The next morning, if the police came, no one would have seen or heard anything.

  ‘Which one?’ Aya whispered, frightened.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But he did know. Nathaniel was not surprised when, a few minutes later, they heard the soft desperate voice of Yiamoo’s wife at their window.

  ‘Come –’ she said. ‘I beg you. Come quick.’

  Nathaniel pulled on his trousers and went out. She was standing beside the window, shivering, her eyes wide with panic. He helped her drag Yiamoo into the house.

  It was a shoulder wound, and the knife had pierced from behind. It had not been meant for the shoulder. If Yiamoo had not been crouching, his wife said, already half-turned to find his slippery opponent, the knife would have slid up under the ribs and into the lungs.

  Yiamoo’s wife moaned in a low voice as she washed and bound the wound. She produced, from among an untidy pile of earthen pots, a small bottle of cheap gin, and handed it to Nathaniel questioningly.

  Nathaniel did not know what to
do. He could not remember if it was a good or a bad thing to give spirits. Finally he poured a little of it into the tailor’s mouth.

  Yiamoo was not unconscious, but he seemed to be dazed. His breath came in short gasps. He almost choked on the gin, then he drew a deeper breath and opened his eyes. When he saw Nathaniel, he put out one hand towards him.

  ‘Mek I go die?’

  ‘No,’ Nathaniel said. ‘You no go die. You rest. I go for doctor.’

  Yiamoo made a violent gesture, then grimaced in pain.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No go for doctah. I no ’gree.’

  Nathaniel shrugged. Yiamoo was a strong man. Maybe the wound would be all right without treatment. Maybe not. But he knew he could not persuade the tailor.

  Yiamoo’s wife had thrown herself down at her husband’s feet. She was sobbing noisily, thankfully, as though she could hardly believe he was still alive. It was true that Yiamoo beat her, shouted at her, tried to take her market-earned money from her. But she had no life apart from him.

  ‘What he do?’ Nathaniel asked. ‘Why he cut you?’

  He pieced together the story from Yiamoo’s halting pidgin phrases. After the day’s argument, Ankrah had gone off and Yiamoo – so he said – had forgotten about it. Tonight, as he was walking out to the latrine, someone tripped him. In a rage, he had made for the man, not knowing who it was. When he saw it was the carver, Yiamoo’s temper had given way completely and he had fought in a blind anger. He had hit Ankrah once, then the carver had twisted away and come up behind him with a knife.

  Nathaniel asked him if he would go to the police. Yiamoo shook his head.

  ‘Police palavah, he no be good,’ he replied. ‘I no got money. Ankrah, he no got pickin. He got money, I t’ink, small-small. He go dash plenty man, den dey say Yiamoo he mek trouble.’

  It was true. But Nathaniel, if he chose, could give evidence for Yiamoo. He felt, angrily, that he would like to do it.

  But they said no more about it. When Nathaniel left, Yiamoo’s wife pressed into his hand the only present she had to give, a bead necklace for Aya. Nathaniel took it, feeling once again that strange companionship that needed no blood allegiance as its base.