This Side Jordan

by Margaret Laurence

  At the vegetable stalls, Miranda asked innumerable questions. The big round wooden platters that held the neatly piled tomatoes – where did they come from and could she buy one? Nathaniel did not know. And the red and green peppers, where were they grown, how were they used?

  She fingered the green okra, the yellow garden-eggs, the groundnuts, the yams, the calabashes full of corn and dried cassava, the trays of coarse salt and onions. She asked him about African cooking.

  ‘I don’t know much about that sort of thing,’ Nathaniel said. ‘My wife knows.’

  ‘I’d love to ask her about it someday.’

  ‘Someday,’ Nathaniel said uneasily, to pacify her.

  They passed the stalls that sold mammy-cloth, the stalls where women were cranking out shirts on hand-run sewing machines, the stalls where clay cooking-pots were stacked.

  But Miranda was forging her way determinedly towards those other stalls. Nathaniel knew all this was only a prelude. He tried to distract her. But it was impossible. Quite clearly she had been here many times before, and she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

  Here they were, then. The medicine stalls.

  Miranda was only mildly interested in the bundles of roots, herbs, leaves, twigs, the raw materials of brews that could cure or kill, depending on which of the two you required.

  ‘Look –’ she insisted, ‘over there.’

  The place was a blind alley, and there were only three or four stalls. It seemed dark and airless as though it were out of the sunshine of the general market.

  Miranda’s fingers, eager, alert, touched, touched, touched.

  What was it that made some Europeans behave this way when they came in contact with these piles of rotten bones? What was it made them want to touch, touch, touch, and stare – as though to remember a past that was for them so comfortingly long ago?

  ‘What’s this?’ she cried. ‘How do they work? How do they make ju-ju out of them?’

  ‘You don’t want to see this rubbish,’ Nathaniel said gruffly.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘It’s tremendously interesting.’

  She could draw back any time she chose, into the safety of the thousand years that parted them.

  Nathaniel stood beside her, staring stupidly. He had a headache, and his briefcase felt heavy in his hands.

  – What can I say? That this is my heritage? The heritage of Africa, the glorious past.

  – The crocodile head was put out in the sun, and the sun rotted its flesh, and the ants picked it clean. And here it is, the bones grating against the husk of brittle skin. Here it is, in its power. And the monkey head, dried and hairy, eyes closed, dead nostrils puckered with the stench of death, here it is in its power. And the clenched hands of dead monkeys, they are here. And the putrid bird heads, blood dried on the mouldering feathers, they are here, their beaks sharp in their power. And the skulls of small animals that died running, they are here. And the patches of crocodile skin, leopard skin, snake skin, half scraped, stinking in the sun. And the dead chameleons, tails curled as they curled in life, bones rattling inside grey decayed almost-transparent skin. They are here in their glorious power.

  – Oh my people. Oh my children.

  – Soul is abroad in the world. Soul is stronger than flesh. We believe it. And believing it has led us to this. The taste of death is in our mouths. The stench of death is in our nostrils, and we pray to old bones. Our crops are blighted and our children die. The husband is cut down by his enemy, and the wife bleeds to death in birth. What can we do? The taste of fear is in our mouths, and we pray to old bones.

  – My heritage was the heritage of gold, the heritage of kings, of women splendid as silver, and the brave message of the drums. And my heritage was reeking bones, dried leaves, stones, sea-shells curiously curved, small jingling bells, medicine yam like dead brown phalli, rock sulphur, bluestone, gourds that rattle when you shake them. Death beats his drum in the quiet night. Oh my people. Play with your toys. Pray with your toys.

  – The fetish priest danced, and his eyes were topaz, his eyes were flame, his eyes were the sun. Writhe, writhe, and work the work you were paid to do. The priestess danced, and her breasts were painted white, white as the moon. Writhe and work the work you were paid to do.

  – My sister was ill. It was a long time ago. She was two years old. She vomited again and again, and her skin burned to the touch. My mother had some money saved. She kept it buried in a clay pot deep in the earth beneath her sleeping-mat. She dug it up. She went to the fetish priest. They are very skilled in medicinal herbs. Oh, quite true. But some are more skilled than others. This one said the child had been polluted by an evil touch. She was two years old. I crouched in a corner while the rites went on. I was frightened, and there was so much noise. The child cried, but only a little, and then she died. My mother did not cry. She did not cry or wail or move. She was stone and her eyes were dead.

  ‘This little clay vessel,’ Miranda was saying, ‘it looks as though it were meant to mix medicine in. Is it?’

  Nathaniel almost struck it from her hands.

  ‘Why are you interested?’ he cried. ‘What does it matter to you? Let it be!’

  ‘I don’t understand –’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I know.’

  Slowly, she put the vessel back on the heap.

  ‘You don’t want to think about it, do you?’ she asked.

  He did not reply.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Miranda said. ‘I didn’t know –’

  ‘Come,’ Nathaniel said roughly. ‘Let us go.’

  Meekly, she followed him.

  ‘Have I offended you?’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘It is nothing. I am sorry.’

  She looked at him, wanting to understand. Her eyes pleaded with him to explain.

  ‘It is nothing,’ Nathaniel repeated. ‘I – I have a headache. It is very hot and noisy here. Yes, that is all. I just have a headache. I must leave.’

  Jacob Abraham stuck his massive head inside the door of the classroom where Nathaniel was sorting out last term’s essays. He beckoned urgently, and Nathaniel, surprised, followed him out.

  ‘You have a visitor – a lady,’ Jacob Abraham leered. ‘A European lady.’

  Nathaniel stared at him, appalled. It could be only one person. Why did she keep troubling him?

  ‘I have told her she could see you in my office,’ Jacob Abraham hissed, his fish eyes agape with curiosity.

  Nathaniel blinked and wiped the sweat from his chin. Now she had seen Futura Academy. In all its glory.

  ‘Well,’ Jacob Abraham said, with a trace of impatience, ‘don’t keep her waiting, Amegbe.’

  Stiffly, as though he were performing in front of an audience, Nathaniel stepped into Mensah’s office.

  Miranda was leaning back comfortably in one of the armchairs. She was regarding with interest the lace doilies and gilt-framed photographs on the small tables.

  Her face, well-carved in the angular way the English admired, looked young, and incongruous above the unwieldy body. The severity of her hair, plaited across her head, made her face look even less like a woman’s. It was something Nathaniel had noticed before in whitewomen. Their faces grew yellow and tired here, but retained a strange look of boyishness. They could bear children, even, without seeming aware of their own womanhood, as though it were unimportant to them. He wondered if these boy-women could change, suddenly, at nightfall, become soft and hungry and supple. It was ridiculous. He could not imagine it.

  ‘Good morning,’ Miranda said humbly. ‘I hope you don’t mind my coming here, Mr. Amegbe.’

  And then he was conscious again of the building outside this carpeted office – the cracked plaster, the corridors strewn with refuse, the empty classrooms with their unswept mud floors.

  ‘I know you must be busy,’ she hurried on, ‘but I wanted to tell you – look here, though, before we go further, you’re not still annoyed about the other day, are you? The market,
I mean –’

  ‘No, no, it was nothing,’ he mumbled. ‘I have told you. I had a headache.’

  At her quizzical look, fury rose in him.

  ‘A simple headache. Why do you trouble me about it?’

  Miranda Kestoe flushed, a bright dye along her cheekbones.

  ‘I – I’m sorry,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I never seem to –’

  Either they never apologized for anything or they apologized all the time for everything. Nathaniel’s face went blank.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I beg you – forget about it.’

  He realized too late that he had said ‘I beg you’. It was a pidgin phrase. Every beggar, every market urchin used it. She would think he could not speak proper English.

  – Mastah, I beg you. You go dash me one penny.

  Nathaniel could not look at her. But she did not seem to have noticed.

  ‘Very well,’ she was saying, ‘let’s forget it, then. The thing is – my husband tells me he’s got to find boys for those posts within the next week, if possible. It would be a shame for you to miss the opportunity –’

  Nathaniel did not know what to say. Because now he wanted to go and wring those jobs from Johnnie Kestoe, a niche for the dispossessed, an awakening for the dream-addicts who had chewed the sweet bitter kola nut of unreality.

  That was the terrible thing – he wanted to go. She had talked and talked, and he had begun thinking about it, and now the wish was there.

  And yet he held back. He did not want to accept anything from her. She was so eager to offer help. She urged and pleaded. She thrust her goodwill down his throat. And Nathaniel gagged on it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know –’

  He wondered if Miranda would tell her husband what the school looked like, its every crack and stain, the bedraggled goats lying in the courtyard, the stench of the open latrine.

  Then he knew, and even in his relief he despised her for it, that she would not tell.

  ‘Why are you so anxious for me to do this, Mrs. Kestoe?’

  ‘Well, it would help Johnnie tremendously in his job, you see, and also, it might show him – it might convince him –’

  She stopped, as though realizing the implications of what she had said.

  ‘I don’t mean that you’re just a means –’ her words faltered and fell into silence.

  Nathaniel looked at her gravely, hardly able to contain his elation. He owed her nothing. If he arranged for the jobs, he would not owe her any thanks. She wanted him to go for her own reasons.

  ‘A fine opportunity!’ Nathaniel cried. ‘A fine opportunity to show what Africans can do! To show what good fellows we are! Eh, Mrs. Kestoe?’

  – Black man, black man, come down from the trees,

  Show how you pound those typewriter keys!

  ‘I will go!’ Nathaniel’s mouth twisted with soundless mirth. ‘Yes, yes, I will go!’

  Miranda looked mildly surprised.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ she said simply. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it worth while.’

  He walked with Miranda to her car. She talked about the most recent in the series of bribery trials. Corruption in high places, she said, was a social phenomenon that appeared in every culture. There was more excuse for it here, she said, because the first loyalty of an African was to his tribe and family. The nation, as a social unit, was new here, she said, and could not hope to command the same loyalty for at least another generation. Nathaniel, sipping the sweet poison of his soul, agreed loudly and profusely with everything she said.

  When he went back to the school, Jacob Abraham was hovering in the corridor like a jovial vulture.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what did she want?’

  Nathaniel saw curiosity bulging from the eyeballs, protruding like rolls of fat under the skin.

  ‘An invitation,’ he said, ‘she wanted to give me an invitation.’

  As the vulture stared at him, he howled with laughter. His cruel laughter boomed and howled around his head like the voices of the unresting dead.

  Even to his own ears, there was desolation in the sound.

  Wriggling his shoulders so that his orange shirt shimmered like fire, the Highlife Boy capered up to Nathaniel on the street. He pulled a grimacing face.

  ‘Hey, boy!’ Lamptey cried. ‘Seen ’em?’

  Nathaniel felt a tremor of excitement.

  ‘You don’t say the results finally got here?’

  ‘They are here. Sure, man. I got a belly-ache, I laughed so much.’

  ‘Did anybody get through?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Lamptey said. ‘Two. We got two bright boys, Nathaniel. Fine, eh? Last year, four bright boys. This year, two. Next year, none. Best thing Mensah can do is turn old Futura into a nightclub. Wha-at?’

  ‘Who got through?’ Nathaniel asked dully.

  ‘Ofei and Ampadu. When I saw old Jacob Abraham’s face, man, I thought sure I’d throw a fit, I want to laugh so bad. Old man’s face, it looks like – well, I swear to you I can’t say what it looks like, he’s so insulted. Goddamn boys, he says to me, goddamn bastahds, are they trying to ruin me or what? But when some of the boys come in, he says – my dear chaps, I’m deeply grieved, deeply, but don’t you worry your good selves too much, I pray you consider all the members of the Legislative Assembly who never in their life got their School Cert.’

  Lamptey was still wheezing with mirth when Nathaniel walked away. At least he would have plenty of candidates to choose from now.

  Nathaniel entered the old whitewashed building that housed Allkirk, Moore & Bright. He had felt reasonably confident when he started out. But at the door of Johnnie Kestoe’s office, he had to pause and remind himself that he was a professional man, a teacher of History.

  Johnnie looked up from his desk. His dark hair was tousled over his forehead, and beads of sweat glistened around his mouth.

  ‘Oh. It’s you,’ he said. ‘Well, what do you want?’

  Under the scrutiny of those eyes, Nathaniel found himself growing angry before he had said a word. He must not. It would be stupid to have come here only for that.

  ‘I came to see about some students of mine,’ Nathaniel said loudly. ‘Mrs. Kestoe said –’

  Johnnie Kestoe’s pencil tapped impatiently on the desk.

  ‘My wife,’ he said, ‘has nothing to do with this office.’

  ‘Didn’t she tell you –?’

  ‘She told me nothing,’ Johnnie Kestoe snapped.

  ‘I thought –’ Nathaniel stammered. ‘I mean, she told me you were looking for reliable clerks – boys you could train for higher posts –’

  Surprisingly, Johnnie rose and closed the door to the outer office.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ he said, a little more civilly. ‘But I certainly hadn’t thought of you as a possible source. These boys of yours – they have some semblance of education?’

  ‘They have Secondary School education,’ Nathaniel said quickly. ‘They have knowledge of typing, which we teach as an extra. They are keen and ambitious.’

  Johnnie Kestoe looked thoughtful.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, almost as though he were talking to himself, ‘it’s as good a chance as any, I suppose. There’s no one else in sight.’

  Suddenly brisk, he turned to Nathaniel.

  ‘All right. When can you send them?’

  Nathaniel hid his surprise and his glee. He was businesslike, competent.

  ‘One day next week?’

  ‘Can’t you make it sooner? If they’re any good, I’d like to have them within a few days.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nathaniel said doubtfully. ‘I have to find out who is interested and pick the most suitable. Perhaps by next Wednesday –’

  Johnnie Kestoe grinned sourly.

  ‘Typical of this place. Nothing ever happens when one wants it to. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. Wednesday, then, about this time. Send two, to begin with, will you? And make sure you pick them carefully. I want boys wh
o are capable of learning something. That’s the main requirement.’

  ‘You will be pleased with them,’ Nathaniel said earnestly. ‘I can assure you of that.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Johnnie said, ‘that if I employ one of them you will expect some kind of fee, Mr. Amegbe?’

  Nathaniel’s brief elation was gone.

  ‘No, no,’ he muttered, ‘nothing like that –’

  The European lifted one eyebrow.

  ‘I see. It works the other way round, then?’

  It was a moment before Nathaniel understood.

  ‘I take no fees from anyone, Mr. Kestoe,’ he said roughly. ‘These boys are my students. If I can help them –’

  Johnnie Kestoe laughed.

  ‘Well, it sounds good, anyway, doesn’t it?’

  Nathaniel said good morning, smiling pleasantly. He walked out, closing the door quietly behind him. The building was silent, but as he walked down the stairs it seemed to him he could hear the whiteman’s laughter echoing in his ears.

  – If I had stayed a boy on my father’s land. If I had stayed a boy in my father’s village, clearing in the forest, huts of mud and grass. If I had stayed, where would I be now? Beating back the forest, from now until I die.

  – I would be happier and not happier. No fumbling, no doubt, no shame. No ‘Mastah, I beg you’. No. None of that. Only sweat and the forest, and at night songs and love. That was Eden, a long time ago.

  – Nathaniel, plant the koko yam,

  Nathaniel, plant the water yam,

  Nathaniel, plant the koko yam,

  And never wonder why.

  – But something said – GO. Something said – vomit it out, the forest, the stinking hut, hoe and machete, dead men’s bones. Something said – don’t stay here, boy, sure as God don’t stay here. Something said – a man got to live until he dies, and that’s a long time, Nathaniel, a long time to wonder what he might have done if he’d tried.

  – So now you’re finding out. The city of strangers is your city, and the God of conquerors is your God, and strange speech is in your mouth, and you have no home.

  ‘Where shall I go, where shall I go,

  Seeking a refuge for my soul?’

  It was a song he had heard in this city that was now his city. But he could not remember the answer, or even if there were an answer.