Chui nods again, then stalks out into the night. “I’m going to check on the goats,” he says over his shoulder.
I say nothing. Enzi is the closest thing to a father I’ve ever known. Even if he never really liked me, he was all that I had. Now he’s staying behind. I want to say something, but I feel like I have no words. Even if I did, they probably wouldn’t want to hear them from me, anyway. Other than the occasional bleat of a goat, it is so quiet in the house that I can hear the rustling of the grass outside and the whine of the cicadas and, when the wind changes direction, the muffled sound from over the hill of Chui crying.
It takes us most of the night to organize ourselves: leaving Enzi with the goats and the things he’ll need and packing everything else into bundles we’ll be able to carry on our heads.
When everything is ready we stand beside our packs for a minute, looking at our house. Mother’s hands rattle by her sides like dry palm fronds in a wind. Finally, Enzi says, “Let’s go.”
With the first step I feel a terrible shift in my chest. This leaving is not like leaving for the river or school. This leaving is the kind of leaving you do at a gravesite. It’s a leaving that is also a giving up. Our home is no longer our home. Our farm is no longer our farm. I make the mistake of looking back one more time.
I hope that everyone will think I’m rubbing at my eyes because I can’t see well in the dark. But tonight no one teases me, not even Chui.
2.
The bus to Mwanza leaves from Arusha at six in the morning, and we decide not to bother sleeping. My family plods, bored and tired, along the long path from our village to the city, but I crane my neck around, wishing it was daytime so I could see.
I’ve never been to Arusha. The farthest I’ve been from home is our village school and the places I wander when I’m grazing the goats. I know where I’m supposed to stay: in our house, in the shadows of the wall, in the shade of the trees. Out of the sun and out of sight. The scorched path of gray dust leading from our little village into Arusha is not my place. I learned this the day I tried to follow Asu as she left for secondary school in the city. I made it as far as the front yard when Mother grabbed me by the arm and hauled me inside.
Don’t even think about it, Habo! she had said. Don’t you dare think about shaming us in the city, too.
I had stared up at her then, unable to say anything, terrified by the intensity in her voice. Mother and I have always been like the two posts of a door frame, unable to move closer or farther away, and the emptiness that sits between us is the shape of my missing father. He left right after I was born, when the whispers started that Raziya gave birth to a white son—not a good brown child like the three born before him, but white. White like ugali in the pot; white like the teeth in your face; white like a tourist who isn’t where he should be. Why do I look like this when my parents and my brothers and sister are a deep, warm brown? I don’t know what to think. But whatever it was that my father thought, he thought it hard enough that he left and has never come back.
Was he a superstitious man? Did he believe, like the old women in our village, that I’m an evil spirit? Or was he a practical man? Did he believe a white man was my real father, not him? I’ve wondered that, too, though it’s a dishonorable thought. I wonder it every time I hear people mention Americans or Europeans, the tourists that come to Arusha to go on safaris. I want to think the best of my mother, but I have no way to judge, because I’ve never seen a white person. When I look up in the sky I can see the silver flash of the airplanes that bring them here, and when I let the goats wander extra far toward the road I can see the clouds of dust kicked up by the boxy Land Rovers that are taking them to the parks, but I have never seen them. Perhaps they’re trying to stay out of the sun, like I have to. Perhaps I’d be normal somewhere else.
No one in my family can tell me what I need to know. Chui tells me to shut up. I don’t dare ask Mother or Enzi, and every time I’ve asked Asu, we have the same conversation:
What are they like? I ask.
Well, they’re white, Habo, she replies.
White like me? I ask.
A little, she says.
I’ve tried to figure out what “a little” means, but haven’t been able to.
Do they have yellow hair? I ask.
Sometimes, she says.
Do they have light eyes? I ask.
Some do, she says.
Do their eyes shake like mine? Do they have trouble seeing, too?
I don’t know, Habo, I’ve never talked to one. Some wear glasses . . .
This goes on and on. All of which is no help at all. What I want to know, what I need to know, is Are they like me? Am I like them?
It’s still dark when we arrive at the far outskirts of Arusha. We walk through neighborhoods where men stand just beyond the light of streetlamps and women with dead eyes lean in open doorways. Places where the smell of burnt cooking oil and urine is strong, and we have to step carefully around the trash and trickles of water in the street. I’m glad to leave those places quickly.
By the time the first light of dawn is streaking the sky, we’re walking through better streets, full of the smells of people cooking ugali and women turning ears of corn on open braziers. Here, the concrete of the buildings has paint on it, and the little shops have their wares out on the side of the street for people to see: carved wooden bed frames, motorcycles lined up for repair, small hills of used tires. I stare and stare, but I don’t see anyone who looks like me. I keep my head down, grateful it’s July and lots of people are in long sleeves because of the dry season’s cold nights. Otherwise, I’d stick out twice as much. As it is, I can feel the people’s stares pulling at the sides of my face. I curl inward like a turtle and walk faster.
Soon, though, my pace is determined by others. Even though it’s still early, the sidewalks of Arusha are becoming more crowded than I could ever imagine: Boys selling sunglasses on large trays dodge around women carrying black plastic market bags. Merchants are lining the broken sidewalks, laying out rows of shoes, or vegetables, or music discs to sell. On some blocks sewing machines take up half the sidewalk, waiting for their tailors to sit behind them; on others, men are folding down the scrap wood sides of little kiosks where they will fix and sell mobile phones and watches.
Enzi asks one of these stall boys what the time is, and when he tells us, everyone starts to walk a little faster. I’m following them closely, not wanting to get lost, when the sound of voices speaking a language I don’t know and the metallic popping sound of a car door being opened make me turn my head. And I see them: Two women and three men are hefting their bags into a long white Land Rover, ready to go out on safari.
They are white people.
They are not like me.
Their hair ranges in color from corn-tassels to tea-with-milk and falls around their faces in soft waves. None of them has tight knots of yellow hair. Their eyes are a range of colors, too—sky blue, mud brown. One even has my light, bluish-color eyes, but none of their eyes shake from side to side, not even the one who is wearing glasses. And their skin, their skin is not white. It is pink, or eggshell-with-brown-spots, or the color of the inside of finely cured goat leather, but it is not white.
Then a woman with bright hair and sky eyes sees me, and her mouth goes round. She says a startled sentence to the man beside her, and he turns to stare, too. That’s when I know for a fact that I’m the freak I’ve always been called. Even to the strangers, I am strange.
I turn away from their wide foreign eyes and their surprise that marks me as different and jog to catch up with my family.
We get to the bus station with less than half an hour to spare before the bus leaves. Mother quickly finds a shop with a phone in it and pays the shop owner to make a call to Mwanza.
“Yes, Neema,” Mother bellows into the phone receiver. Maybe you have to speak loudly to make you
r voice carry all the way to Mwanza. I don’t know. I’ve never used a phone. Who would I call? I have a brief mental picture of me calling our goats on the phone. Get into your pen! I would shout into the receiver. I smile to myself. Mother continues: “No, I don’t know when we’ll get there . . . We’ll call you along the way if we can . . . Kwaheri!”
She hangs up the phone and Enzi leads us through the crowd, pushing with his elbows toward a long bus, painted blue and yellow. People jostle him, but he doesn’t let them change his path. When we finally get to the bus, the news is not good. The cost is 25,000 shillings a person, no exceptions. And everyone has to pay 1,100 shillings for park fees, too, to get the bus through the gates of Ngorongoro and the Serengeti. Enzi argues with the bus driver, but there’s no way to change the price.
Enzi scowls furiously as he and Asu step to one side to count our money. Mother doesn’t help them, but I can tell from the way the lines on her face sag that she knows we don’t have enough. Not even close. Enzi looks grim as he grips the money. Asu goes up and quietly asks the driver if we can ride halfway for half the price. He agrees to that.
Enzi isn’t happy that we won’t make it all the way, but we can’t stay here with no house or farm, and this makes it even clearer that we need the money he will make on the plantation, so there are no more arguments about his coming with us.
Once the price is agreed on, Enzi tosses our bundles onto the roof. Then he boosts Chui up, to make sure our packs don’t fall off. The roof is like a second bus, piled dangerously high with belongings and sacks of mangoes and millet, all tied to the thin guardrail running around the edge. Like Chui, boys of all ages sit on the sacks or balance up near the front. It looks like a lot of fun. At just thirteen, I’m the youngest and that should have been my job, but of course I have to stay inside, in the shade, useless as always. Chui’s words come back to me: You look like a ghost and you do as little work as a ghost.
Enzi gives Mother one last hug, pokes Asu in the belly, making her yell at him, waves to Chui and me, and then walks away, standing tall. I try to keep him in sight as long as possible, but soon my bad eyes can’t tell his head from the others in the crowd, and I’ve lost him. I swallow hard against the sudden tightness in my throat.
“Come on, Habo,” says Asu. She puts her arm around me and steers me into the bus.
As we walk down the aisle I can hear the hollow clanging of boys’ feet on the roof above us. I feel the vibration of it in my feet. It’s like living in a drum. Asu sits by the window in the very last row of the bus, and I sit between her and Mother. I don’t want to sit so near the window, but I don’t have a choice. Probably no one but my family would be willing to sit beside me.
All the windows of the bus are open, and the early morning sun sits on my lap like a hostile cat. I lean awkwardly to line up my arm with the thin stripe of shade cast by the window bar and sit on my hands. I can get sunburned no matter what time of year it is.
Staring out the window, I see boys and young men with baskets of fruit and trays of sweets. They mob the sides of the bus, holding up their wares and shouting. Some of them have no shirts on in spite of the cool morning air and, warm from running, their sweating chests and shoulders glisten like roasted coffee beans. I tuck my hands deeper underneath myself and imagine that I’m one of them, slapping deep brown hands against the dirty metal, smiling with perfect dark eyes at the people on the bus. Everyone would smile back.
Just then, one of the boys sees me staring at him. He lets out a cry of surprise and grabs his friend’s arm to get his attention. I turn my head away and let the floppy brim of my hat cover me as much as it can before I can see them all start to stare at me. But I still hear them.
“Hey, white boy!” they call. “Hey!”
I feel Mother stiffen beside me on the seat, but she keeps her eyes focused forward, not acknowledging them. I don’t answer, either. The boys clap their hands to get my attention and keep calling out. Asu leans out the window.
“Go away,” she snaps.
“Who’s that white boy?”
“He’s my brother.”
“No, he’s not!” I can hear them laughing as the heat creeps up my neck. Mother reaches over and picks up my hand. I glance up at her quickly, surprised. We rarely touch. She doesn’t look at me, so from anyone else’s point of view it would seem like she was ignoring both me and the boys, but her warm fingers curl around mine and give a little squeeze. I squeeze back and square my shoulders.
“Ndiyo, he is,” Asu says angrily. “What do you know? Go away!”
“Why does he look like that, if he’s your brother?”
Asu pulls her head inside, ignoring the question.
I hear a chorus of guesses from the boys below. “He’s sick!” “He was born in a cave!” “He’s really an animal!” “His father’s a white man!”
I feel Mother’s fingers begin to tremble in mine, but she doesn’t let go. The boys’ voices, used to shouting bargains, carry a long way. They’ve all forgotten that they’re supposed to be selling oranges and cigarettes. I give up trying to be brave and shrink deeper into the seat, but it’s too late. The creaks of springs and the sighs of protesting plastic tell me that everyone in the bus is turning around to see the family with the white-animal son. Mother lets go of my hand and I shrink away from the eyes.
I huddle into my long clothes and wait for the people to forget about me. Finally, over the sound of the boys outside our windows, I hear the clatter of the engine. The bus gives a great shudder, and a cloud of dark smoke pours in the rear windows. We’re on our way to Mwanza.
As the bus travels I stare out the window, squirming to keep my exposed skin in the moving shade of the window frame. Every few kilometers, the sky is punctured by an enormous yellow Vodafone sign or red Airtel sign. I amuse myself trying to read them as we pass. Some of them have print big enough that even I can mostly read it. But after a few hours, my eyes feel grainy and my hair is crunchy under my fingers. The dust from the road gets so far into my lungs that even coughing doesn’t clear it. For all that, though, I love the bus ride. Since I always had to stay hidden away at home, I’ve never been on a bus before. I stare out the window as village after village whisks by. I see children clustered around a water pump, joking while they fill their plastic containers; children carrying babies while running errands; children minding goats. I see Maasai boys leading long strings of humpbacked cattle across the dry fields to graze. It makes me smile to see that the cows wait for the boys’ signal before they cross the road. I wonder how they trained them to do that. Our goats never listened to me.
Some towns are well off: rows of neat concrete houses with tin roofs. Others towns are small, thatched places that look like our home. When we take the turn onto the road that runs along the ridge of the Ngorongoro crater, we see only Maasai villages with their circular huts. The air up on the crater rim is cold and misty, and I shiver in my seat until we come down the other side.
I’m sorry when, hours later, I see the entrance to the Serengeti park because I know the ride is over and we have to get out. I reach over and softly jostle Asu and Mother’s shoulders, waking them up. They nod and, when the driver pulls over at the first village inside the gate and looks at us in his mirror, we file quietly out of the bus.
The Maasai village just inside the Serengeti park gates is a small place, about ten circular mud houses clustered around a central cattle pen. When the bus pulls away, Mother, Asu, and Chui head into the village to buy some food. No one suggests I go along, not even Asu. In any village, strangers are unexpected enough. They don’t need me there, stranger than strange.
I walk away from the village, just to make sure I don’t complicate things for them. I find an umbrella acacia tree over a rise and I sit in its shade to wait. When I hear a rustling to my left and see a head duck quickly behind a bush, I realize I’ve been found by children from the village. They must
be very young to not have chores or herding to do. I try not to let their muffled laughter bother me while I wait for them to go away again. Then a small rock flies out from behind the thorn bushes.
I can’t believe it: They’re throwing rocks at me for fun, like I’m a street dog. I want to shout at them to go away, but I remember my family inside the village, trying to buy things we need. I can’t help them barter, but at least I won’t turn the village against us, either. I cover my head with my arms and let the rocks bounce off. I begin to count in my head, slowly, to pass the time until they leave me alone.
Mmoja, mbili, tatu, I count. Nne, tano, sita, saba. I can feel myself starting to bruise. Nane.
I am at thelathini, thirty, when I finally realize that they are not planning to go away until they have made me do something. I’m sore and angry, and this makes me stupid. I pull off my hat and stand up. I let my eyes wave around without even trying to focus them. I make a wailing ghost noise in my throat.
“Oooh!” I say. “You’ve made me angry! Now I’m going to curse you and your families!” I start to walk toward the bushes.
The children drop their rocks and run toward the village so fast, they stumble going down the hill. I laugh a high and ugly laugh, making sure they hear me. For a brief second, I feel a flush of triumph. A minute later, I realize how much of an idiot I am.
Rumors of a witch-boy in the fields will make it impossible for us to stay here very long, maybe not even a night. I sigh and hunker down miserably to wait for my family.
3.
Mother comes up the hill with an armload of red and purple cloth and an unusual light in her eyes. The other two follow her. Asu looks disgusted, but Chui is smiling. I don’t know what to think. I wasn’t expecting them to buy clothing. Dumping it all in a heap, Mother pulls out one long piece of red-checked cloth and starts to wrap it around herself.
Golden Boy Page 2
