Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  We turned west before reaching Seguela, into the high country.

  “They ignore the curse, of course,” said Devoe.

  “Excuse me?” The land fell away so steeply below my window that I’d been concentrating on what was road and what was air. Devoe drove carelessly, draping his wrist over the steering wheel.

  “All the big stones are cursed. Evil follows the big ones. If you could get the diamond without the bad luck, that would be a trick. The man who first stole the Hope Diamond was devoured by dogs. Who would want that? It sank the Titanic, you know.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. Tough looking brush, higher than our bumper, filled the middle between the two, ratty ruts our road had become, and it scraped the car’s bottom.

  “Yes, an American millionaire owned it, and the Atlantic took him. His granddaughter committed suicide after wearing it.”

  “So the workers don’t make enough money, and they hang on for La Fête de Diamants thinking it might save them?” I didn’t figure Devoe would give honest answers if there were abuses, but it wouldn’t hurt to put my cards on the table.

  He downshifted to get us through a deep puddle, then jumped into the higher gear when we were through. My feet suddenly felt damp. Water drained through the floorboards.

  “My great-grandfather told me when he lived in the Alsase, he plowed his fields with two horses who lived twenty years each. The first year he gave them sugar cubes from his coat pocket to reward them for their work.”

  We crested a small ridge, and the land before us flattened. Low mountains shaped the horizon.

  “What’s your point?”

  Devoe laughed. “He only gave them sugar the first year. For the next nineteen, when he wanted them to pull harder, he put his hand in his pocket. They’d break their backs as long as they thought he’d bring something out. He never did. You know, someone writes a story about the pits every couple of years. It never makes a change. Africa is not like America.”

  I made notes, resting the pad against my knee, the pen jumping with every jolt, recording my impressions. Conrad wrote about Africa, but he traveled on the Congo, beating up current in an underpowered boat, the vegetation crowding against his windows. Here, the grass rolled away, spotted with trees and brush. For miles nothing changed: no animals, no people, just hills and curvy road winding between them. We met no other cars.

  “Is this the main road?”

  “There’s a train and an airport, but it is easier this way for me.” Devoe nodded his head back to boxes piled where the car’s rear seat would have been.

  “What is it?”

  “A man has to make a living. An assistant to the assistant manager’s job, whew! The paycheck does not keep him in socks. I have family in Europe. They expect money every month.”

  We turned a sharp corner around a thick cacao trees stand, and entered Seguela. Crumbling brick facades whipped by my nose, inches away. Pedestrians slipped into doorways as we passed. Then we hit a larger street, crowded with busses and rusty streetcars screeching down the middle. I had no time to form an impression other than dusty age. I saw no shiny thing. As quickly as we entered town, we left, climbing for several minutes on a path that tried to rip the transmission right from the car’s bottom. John the Baptist, the patron saint of roads, would have found nothing to like about this trail. One more good jolt and I figured my head would be on a platter. The clutch clattered while Devoe cursed the car up a last, rock-laden, rutted stretch that would have challenged a four wheel drive vehicle.

  “This is the back route. It’s quicker.”

  “If we make it,” I said, bracing my hands against the dash.

  Dirt ground against the undercarriage, then we topped the hill, heading for the mountains. I didn’t speak. Past Seguela the air grew heavy—more moist or stagnant, as if a thunderstorm threatened, although the skies were clear. Breathing the weighted vapor repulsed me. I wanted our bouncy trip to end. Devoe’s casual dismissal of the workers nauseated me, or maybe it was a persisting effect from the long sea voyage. I shut my eyes and pictured the serene St. Sebastion’s cathedral in Josephine Bay in the afternoon, where the stained glass art glowed and the Chesapeake glittered outside the heavy, wooden doors.

  At age seven I saw the cathedral for the first time. My father gave me canned food to put in the basement: creamed corn, tomato soup, mushrooms, asparagus. He stored them there for emergencies. There was a little survivalist in him. Instead, I put the cans in my wagon and pulled it to the Sisters of Hope shelter next to St. Sebastion’s. It took most the afternoon, clicking wagon wheels over concrete sidewalk seams to reach the shelter. Sweat ran down my face.

  An elderly nun, her knuckles painfully large, dampened her habit’s sleeve in a fountain and bathed my forehead. I remember the cloth’s smooth coolness; how camomile followed her. She took me into the cathedral, showed me the heavy leaded glass, the wall of martyrs, sun shining through beatified faces. I had never been inside a church, and I wondered if God lived there, but I didn’t see him, only mellow sunlight transformed in colored glass. The nun said, “They were God’s tools. The spirit filled them like empty vessels, and they did God’s work.” She held her hands clasped at her chest.

  “My family is atheist.” I didn’t even know what it meant then. “But I want to give these cans to the poor.”

  She said, “You’re an absolute saint, child. An absolute saint.” My wagon floated on the way home. I went back often afterwards to do chores for the nuns, and when I wasn’t busy, I crawled beneath the pews, searched the vestibule, peeked in the Father’s private study for some sign of God, but I never found him. I prayed for God to fill me, to make me his tool, but my folded hands were empty when I opened them, and even as a little kid, I thought speaking words to a silent room was ridiculous. The saints were real, though. The devout turned them into paintings and leaded windows.

  I saw nothing so moving again until at twenty I visited the Vatican’s library. Morning light pierced the high reaches where motes swirled like tiny angels. Intricately illuminated texts, hundreds of years old, lay open in heavy glass cases. And once again, saints and martyrs stared out, their heads shrouded in halos, their images curiously separate from the background scenes, as if they didn’t belong to the landscapes. These men and women gave all they had to their faith. They persevered in service, a greater good than their own. I rested my fingers on the glass, and, before I left, burned a votive candle for them. “Hail Mary,” I said, “full of grace,” but I didn’t know the rest. To be full of grace. To be utterly outward turned. To do good. It’s corny sounding, I know, but it’s the highest calling. I didn’t believe in God—I saw no evidence for the supernatural—but I believed in good.

  We arrived at the mining headquarters at sunset. Sun burnished hilltops, while shadows filled the valleys. The foreman’s shed, an unpainted two-story building with plastic sheets for windows leaned against a sandy bluff. Below, huge pits tore into the grass and brush. Sterile dirt piles, plantless and cut through with erosion channels, surrounded each pit. Devoe parked our car beside one, the sloped sides falling twenty feet down to a lumpy and muddy bottom that reached a hundred yards to the other edge. Dirt crumbled under my shoes, so I backed away.

  I couldn’t see the latrines, but I could smell them. My nose wrinkled as I pulled my duffle bag from the car.

  Devoe shouted a French phrase at workers below. Some looked up, but none waved. I hadn’t noticed them at first; they were dirt colored, and moved slowly, like animate rocks, bent over, digging with picks, dumping pebbly soil into bags beside them. A worker—I couldn’t tell the age or sex—slung a bag over a shoulder and climbed toward us, one hand pressed against the ground for support.

  “They take the ore to the stream to wash it,” said Devoe. “Shaker boxes separate worthless material from the diamonds. Maybe we find a couple thousand carats a year. Last year the company made 73 million francs from this pit… um… about $120,000 American.”

  The thin-limbed wo
rker pushed toward the top, every step up resulting in a half-step slide back. A yard from the edge, the worker looked at us; a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I couldn’t tell; she was boy-slender but tall. Mud dappled her face, and her eyes looked tired. Very wide, and tired, as if she needed to sleep for a year.

  Devoe stood back, his arms crossed on his chest. “The biggest diamond we found last year was just a half carat, not gem quality.”

  I offered a hand to help her up. She stared at it for a long time, not moving, a hand jammed into the dirt, the other clenched around the bag’s top. Then she reached for me. Her fingers were callused and hard-ridged, almost stone themselves. “Merci,” she said.

  “Be careful of that one, Bailey. She thinks she’s a shaman.” Devoe winked at her although she had looked away from him.

  The bag may have weighed more than she did. She walked around the car to a path along the bluff’s base. A stream burbled in the background below a constant rattling. Later I found out these were Devoe’s fourteen shaker boxes, three feet wide and eight feet long. Water poured in one end where the workers dumped their bags. Old men rocked the boxes from side to side, washing away dirt and separating the sand from the occasional diamond, shiny chips that looked like quartz or hazy glass.

  “One day we’ll find a big diamond, and I’ll be quit of this place,” said Devoe. He took a folding table from the car’s trunk and set it on the uneven ground. Then he tore the top from a box in his car. Batteries filled it. “I make more selling these than my salary.”

  “Batteries?”

  “Twenty kilometers to Seguela from here, and no other manager thinks to bring back batteries. These people all have a radio or a tape player or those little hand held video games. They don’t mind my markup.” He grinned his brown smile. I wondered when he’d last seen a dentist.

  The girl came back, her bag empty, and trudged past Devoe as if he weren’t there.

  “Her name is Seydou. Hey, witch doctor Seydou. Show the foreigner your scars, eh?”

  She turned at the pit’s top and spat French and a dialect I didn’t recognize at him. He lifted his hands, palms up, eyes wide and mock-innocent, as she slid down the slope toward the other workers filling their bags. In the pit a child set torches in cast iron sleeves on the ground, igniting each with a lighter he wore around his neck.

  “She’s beautiful, no? If you are lucky, she will show you tribal marks. They’re on her backside. I’ve seen them more than once. Yes I have, I’ve seen them.” He licked his lips and rolled his eyes.

  By the time I thought to take pictures, darkness had risen. Torches flickered in the pit, belching gasoline odors. Shadows moved: workers, the new shift, digging, filling bags, toting them one by one to the stream for washing. Beyond, in the hills, other lights pulsed sluggishly. Devoe told me the company ran fifty-six pits like the one at our feet. Silent blacks formed a line ending at his table. Men, women, children. Many children, underfed, muddy clothes. I wondered how they afforded radios. Most wore the same outfits: canvas shorts, short sleeved T-shirts, all mud-stained. Nothing like the colorful prints the natives displayed on the train. Women wore scarves tied over their hair, or braided it into a dozen tight strings. They slid small papers across the table to him, then he counted out batteries, sometimes clinking them together like dice. Mentally, I took notes.

  None looked up. Their hands dangled at their sides. When they bought their batteries, they vanished into the darkness.

  “Where do they go?” I said.

  Devoe waved behind him, encompassing half the night. “Villages back in the bush. Don’t go there. At least not during Dipri. These are Wé tribesmen. I told you. They walked here from Ghana. It’s not the twentieth century there.”

  “I want to see.” If I was going to accomplish my mission, I’d need documentation. If what I suspected was true, I’d find indentured servitude, an obvious arrangement. The tribesmen moved to the pits for work, where the company provided food, clothing and shelter. They were charged more than they could earn, so they fell behind until they had to trade away wages they wouldn’t earn for months for today’s goods. When the debt became impossible, they offered their children’s work. The basic con. Amnesty International ran seminars on it.

  Devoe shook his head. More batteries came from his box in exchange for scrip. The line shortened. A face at the end caught my eye. Seydou looked at me, eyes much older than twelve or thirteen. No expression. Unblinking. I raised my hand for a tentative wave. She didn’t move at first, then she lifted her head in acknowledgment.

  “You’ll need a guide. You already know Seydou. I’ll have her take you in the morning. There’s a room in back for you, and food in the kitchen.” He said something to Seydou in the same indecipherable French hybrid. She answered back, her tone curt and dismissive. When she passed her note to him, he grabbed her wrist, his hand looking huge on her delicate arm. He forced her hand over and pushed an extra battery into it. After he let go, she dropped the batteries into her pants pocket. She didn’t walk away from the table though. Without looking away from him, she licked her palm and wiped the dirt off her cheeks, one at a time, a deliberate gesture. The whole performance looked prideful and insulting. She licked slowly, staring, then rubbed the dirt.

  “Come,” she said to me in clear French.

  Devoe said to my back as I followed her, “Make sure you see her scars. It’d be a pity to travel so far and miss a treat like that.”

  In the room Seydou showed me to, I found a mattress, a near duplicate of the one I’d used on the freighter, except not as clean. A good shaking freed several nasty looking bugs and a suspicious waft of old urine.

  Seydou picked up one of my books I’d dumped from the duffel, Butler’s Lives of the Saints in French. She thumbed to the illustrations. “Are you Christian? A Missionary? You don’t look like one,” she said, without looking up.

  “No, neither. I read it for the stories.” I straightened my clothes on the table, worried suddenly that she’d find my possessions ridiculous. “I don’t believe God exists, actually. The saints and martyrs are inspirational.”

  She shut the book crisply and replaced it on the table, as if she’d come to a conclusion about me. “Funny book for an atheist.”

  I raised my estimate of her age. Her eyes, after all, were so much older, and the vocabulary didn’t sound young. Still, she was only a child, and an exploited one at that.

  Seydou leaned against a wall then slid down so she sat on her heels. I offered her the mattress: I’d sleep on the floor. She shook her head. Obviously she intended to spend the night that way.

  I was so tired, I didn’t argue. A dirty mattress is better than none. St Francis of Assisi may have slept on an oak board most his life, but I’m not so resolute. My blanket went over it. Daytime air stifled the room. Getting cold didn’t worry me. My coat made a good pillow. I turned off the battery lamp Devoe had given me and shut my eyes. I thought Devoe intended me to have sex with her. He sickened me.

  Through the walls came the picks’ muted blows. The brook bubbled, and the shaker boxes rattled. It was almost soothing. I wondered if they worked all night. Then, from far away, a thin shriek. I bolted upright, straining my ears. It came again, a weird, wavering, thready scream on a human throat’s raw edge.

  Torchlight leaked between the room’s rough boards. I couldn’t see Seydou, but her eyes glistened. She turned her head, and I could see her in profile, a silhouette cut out across the wall. “Tomorrow is Dipri.” She said. “There will be panther men.”

  Much later than I would have thought, I fell asleep, dreaming of a huge diamond in the ground, a bloody lump wallowing in bloody mud. Devoe said, “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it.” I reached to pick it up, then dogs began to howl. They were behind me, running closer. Their hard nails clicked against rock. In the dream I knew, they were coming to eat me.

  As far as I could tell, Seydou did not move all night. Her chin rested on her chest, but she sti
ll leaned against the wall. When I got up, her eyes flickered open. We shared a thin porridge and cold coffee. Outside, someone shouted, and there was chanting. I cleaned my plate and walked from the building to the pit’s edge.

  Beneath me, the workers sat in a large circle, talking. Unlike yesterday, many wore bright clothes. None had picks. How were they to find their diamond if they didn’t have the tools to dig? Devoe manned his table with batteries spread out like fat seeds, but no one lined up. “I won’t sell a thing on Dipri,” he said spitefully. “They’ll move no ore on the company’s behalf either. When you write your report, you be sure to include we allow them this luxury. You social activists are all of a type. Because the pay is low, or the children work, or we work on weekends, you assume we are brutes. This is not Europe or America. You ask them. They are glad to be here.”

  He rolled batteries beneath his hands. “You’ll see when you go to the village. Be sure to show him, Seydou, and remember I warned you not to go.”

  I’d slung a camera bag over my shoulder, strapped a canteen to my waist and packed some granola among my notebooks. Seydou led as we walked around the pit and headed toward the forest above the compound. Already the sun pounded with moist power. Wispy tendrils eddied off pools in rock hollows, and now that we were beyond the latrines, the air smelled of green vines and mossy undergrowth. Seydou took long strides, her dark legs eating distance.

  I thought about African saints; most were martyrs in the north. St. Zoticus, St. Victurus, St. Ammon who died with forty-four other Christians in Membressa. The Romans slaughtered dozens in the early years. St. Theophilus and Helladius were killed by being thrown into a furnace. How did they do it? Did they think they saw God at the end? What would it take to face the furnace?