by Vamba Sherif
‘What’s in it?’
‘Our history.’
He clasped the manuscript to his chest.
‘Study hard and help us all.’
I ran to join my friends. The school boasted a library, a football field, and a plot of land where before the war we had cultivated pineapples, eddoes, cassava, melons and beans. Under a tree was the huge bell whose peal launched the beginning or end of the school day.
Our principal, who had lost an arm during the war, stood before us after the bell had rung and waved his left hand as he spoke. We had seen things not even grown-ups should see, he said, things that had marked us forever. Now we must have the courage to go on. He announced a new set of rules, a new curriculum that would enable us to become better students. ‘If this war has taught us anything, then it has to be that it is terrible. Out of our loss we have to forge a new beginning. For the sake of those we lost, for the sake of the man who did everything to avert this war.’
One of us hoisted the flag and we saluted it. The reverence we held for that symbol at that moment was so profound that none of us stirred or coughed as the flag rose, fluttering in the cold morning air.
The history teacher, my mentor Mr Wilson, entered the classroom. We stood up to greet him but he ignored us and went to the window. He gazed at the birds, nodding as if he had unravelled the mystery of their language.
Before the war he had been severe, punishing latecomers or ill-dressed students by caning them or compelling them to work on the school farm or to fetch firewood for him or the other teachers. We all knew his story. His wife had died in the war and he was left with his two daughters. Unable to bear the responsibility of raising them, he had abandoned them and taken to the mountains. After two days of absence, the city mayor had launched a search for him. They found him sitting under a giant tree believed to be inhabited by spirits, babbling in a strange language. The men who found him did not approach him for fear of being haunted by evil spirits. They called in the help of a Muslim cleric, who concluded that Mr Wilson was talking about things to come and advised that a sacrifice be made to help restore him to normality.
Mr Wilson then took up the habit of gathering millipedes. Before dawn, he would set out for the forest and then return with basketfuls of the coiling insects. He would divide them according to colour and size, giving each a name and claiming they were incarnations of his ancestors.
Now he diverted his gaze from the birds to the millipedes in a jar on the table in front of him, then to the birds and back to the jar.
A student threw a paper aeroplane at him. Others followed. Mr Wilson did not stir. I tried to stop the students, but they ignored me. Our teacher wore such an intense gaze that looking at him I felt a chill run down my spine, and I feared what he would do next.
Then he moved to the blackboard and with a chalk drew our city, drew its major buildings, the city hall, the hospital, the church and mosque, my father’s farming cooperative store. He drew our mayor and reduced his figure to that of a crawling child; he filled our school with disfigured children. He drew a map of our country, drew every county and every district, every city and town, every river and mountain. He drew with a red chalk, then yellow, then white and then blue. He drew our flag, the red against the black board, like the red teeth against the black beak of our dreaded masked being. He drew a woman who looked like his late wife and drew his two daughters with strength in their limbs and arms.
No one spoke, we were all held in thrall.
‘The genies taught him,’ one of us said.
Mr Wilson went on drawing until the school bell rang, and we left him still drawing and went out to roam the forest.
It was an old habit. Streams and the shade of tall trees had appealed to us before the war. We came upon an opossum burrow and decided to light a fire to smoke it out. We waited patiently, our hearts pounding with excitement whenever we heard a squeak or a scuffle from the burrow. That was our prey, perhaps two of them, we told ourselves. We dreamed of building a fire like we had seen our parents do and roasting and relishing the meat. We sang songs about masked beings and of spirits of the night without fear, for the war had taken away the tradition associated with them. The Poro Society had become ceremonial. War and time had made it so. It had ceased to function as a symbol of unity. Alone in that forest, we had become masters of our own destinies and could do whatever we desired, and we did.
One of us suggested we dig a hole to reach the opossum and trap it. ‘My father does it all the time,’ he said, but it would involve a lot of work. We did not want to work. We went on smoking the hole, by turn throwing branches at the opening. Our eyes became blood red from the smarting smoke, and because we had yet to catch our prey, the oldest of us decided we stuff the hole with wood, so that the animal would have no escape. We were about to give up when the nervous animal jumped out and scurried away to safety before we could catch it.
Our failure only fired our determination to go on hunting. We set our sight on the birds. We used ropes to set up a net and picked fruit to spread below the net. But it was all to no avail. We cleared the surroundings of small bushes, hid the ropes attached to the net, and lurked in the brush. After a few hours we gave up.
Our adventure led us to an abandoned farm with its huts still intact. I moved away from the group and touched the front door of one of the huts to open it. The door fell apart. The birds that had made it their home banged away into flight. Outside there was a pit for milling palm oil. Around the huts there were pawpaw and banana plants, which were not ripe for consumption. We left the farm to return home.
On our way, not far from the farm, we came upon a yellowish skeleton. The eldest in our group decided to assemble it. We watched him, stricken with awe but fascinated, as he joined the skull to the neck, the arm bones with the shoulders, the ribs with the spine, the hips with the legs.
‘Let’s fasten a rope to it,’ he said.
‘No, that’s enough, let’s leave,’ I said.
‘You, what’s wrong with you?’ he said.
He was of my height and my build, and before the war he had depended on me to help him with homework. Out in the world, he seemed stronger, invincible, as he toyed with the skeleton.
‘They say your ancestor died to avert the war. Well, did he? Tell me? Did he really offer himself to avert this war?’
‘You are desecrating the dead,’ I said.
He threw the skeleton at me, and before I could react he was on me. I did not know where the blows came from, but they were frequent, sustained, directed at my head, over and over again.
‘If he died to avert this war, then explain why my mother died in this war. Explain why my sisters perished. You will explain it to me.’
No one intervened, and the thought that he would kill me or wound me terribly became so overwhelming that I managed to throw him off and took to my heels. He chased after me.
‘Don’t let him go, catch him,’ he told the other boys. But I was too fast for them, and I escaped and headed home. By then my eyes had swollen and I was bruised all over. I washed my face at the river, and at home I tried to avoid my mother, but failed.
‘What happened, Halay?’ she said.
My father was not home. I went to my room without answering her, and she did not bother me. I didn’t want to tell her that the fight had awoken in me a keen sense of belonging to my ancestor and what it meant to bear his name. Did my very presence in this world, my every action depend on the past that involved him? Was my very being locked up and my future determined by the consequences of his deed?
I was alone in my room when the professor visited. I was thinking of the skeleton. Was it that of a man or a woman? I tried to give it a form and a face. I tried to picture the person as a living human being, with different shades of moods, happy, sad, irritated and angry, a person with a home, a family, a trade and a past. But my pencil failed me.
The professor knocked at my door. He bore with him the smell of dust and sweat, but his ey
es were stern, which made me apprehensive. I could not remember being nervous in his presence. I realized that my fear had nothing to do with him but with my mother who was standing just behind the professor, her rage bottled up.
‘Child, how was your first day at school?’
‘It went well, prof,’ I said.
‘I mean outside school.’
I did not answer.
‘Halay, will you tell us what happened outside school? Will you look at Professor Richards and tell him what happened when you left school. Will you tell him the truth? Yes, the truth,’ she said.
‘Jowo, the boy is exhausted,’ my father said from the living room.
‘Frederick, stay out of this. If you go on encouraging him, it will be the end of us, you hear me? Now, Halay, we are waiting.’
I couldn’t speak, her anger had paralysed me.
‘Some children were caught playing with a skeleton today,’ the professor said.
‘Playing with a skeleton, Halay. Do you hear that, Frederick. Children playing with a skeleton and you want to defend them.’
My father burst into the room.
‘Were you among them?’ he asked.
I maintained my silence.
‘Halay, you more than anybody else should be the one to tell the truth. Why are you silent?’ the professor said.
‘Frederick, talk to your son,’ my mother said.
‘Halay, tell your mother what happened,’ my father said.
The professor shook his head.
‘Never play around with a skeleton, child,’ he said.
With that, the professor left. My mother sucked her teeth.
‘Frederick, what’s happening to us? Why would our child, who should know better, play with a dead body? How would that reflect on us, on our name, on our past? Do you realize what he’s done?’
I could not remember my father ever whipping me before. He told me once that whipping marks a child forever, but now he fetched a cane and used it with a force that left me dumbstruck. I sought refuge between his legs, and when he got confused, overwhelmed, dazzled by his own fury and weakened by it, he gave up.
It dawned on me, lying in bed that night, that I had withheld the truth from my parents. I hardly slept that night as the shame mounted with every passing minute and with it the guilt of my action.
In the morning I rushed out of bed with the intention of throwing myself at my mother’s feet to beg for forgiveness. No one was in the house. I came out only to be grabbed by two men sent by the city mayor.
The skeleton belonged to one of the farmers who had worked with my father. He had taken his family to safety across the border and was returning to help others when he was shot. He had died on his farm.
3
There were six of us. We stood on the verandah of the mayor’s house while a huge crowd waited in the square below us. The house, one of the largest in the city, was built of concrete with steps leading to a spacious verandah that had bamboo benches as furniture and a black swivelling chair that the mayor sat on, flanked by a group of elders, including a retired judge. The mayor was munching a kola nut. A huge black and white portrait of him in a richly patterned gown stared down from the wall behind him, the eyes weak and sad. He was old, he could remember the first missionaries who came to our city and helped maintain the school Edward Richards had built and his career rested on a singular achievement: he had made it possible for a road to reach our part of the world, starting a flurry of activity that led to a boom in business across the borders and with other cities in Liberia.
My eyes swept the crowd for my parents but could not find them. They had abandoned me. I could hear people spitting on the ground to avert the evil we had awoken in their midst, our crime being that we had played with a dead body, with a skeleton, an abomination.
The mayor was silent, munching his kola nut. Mr Wilson broke the tense silence when he walked through the crowd with a jar of his millipedes, and the mayor shook his head. Mr Wilson climbed the steps and stood before us, gazing into my face as if I alone was at fault.
Over and over again the mayor shook his head as Mr Wilson left. And when he spoke, his voice was low, fragile. ‘Child,’ he said.
He was referring to me, and I felt my feet about to quake under me. ‘Child,’ he repeated, and I moved away from the group and flung myself on the floor before him. ‘You of all people,’ he said.
‘Let us render the severest punishment,’ the retired judge, famed for settling disputes outside the courts said.
‘I will come to that; I will come to that,’ the mayor said. ‘But do you know who this child is? Do you know?’
The elders nodded.
‘How could he then commit this … this …’
He stopped and held his face in his hands.
‘We should banish them from the city,’ the judge said.
‘But we cannot do that,’ the other said.
‘Why not?’ the judge said.
‘One of them is a relative of our saviour,’ the other answered.
‘Which saviour?’
‘Don’t you know our past?’
‘Which past?’ the judge asked.
The elder sucked his teeth.
‘I mean the past that concerns Halay, our saviour,’ he said.
‘He was not my saviour,’ the judge said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I lost my household in this war.’
‘You must all stop this,’ the mayor said.
But the judge pressed on.
‘After years of waiting and when we had forgotten all about it war came and I lost my children. Don’t talk to me about a saviour,’ he said.
‘Silence,’ the mayor said.
‘The children have to be punished,’ the judge went on.
‘I said silence,’ the mayor said.
He stood up to address the crowd, but just then we heard the sound of a car, honking as it came to a halt in front of the crowd. Cars had become such a rarity after the war that the mere sight of one was enough to interrupt the proceedings intended to alter our lives forever.
An elegant woman stepped out of the car. She wore a chequered dress of precious material and white shoes. Her hair was braided in two rows, and there was a mole on one side of her upper lip that accentuated her nose and pronounced lips. She carried a leather bag with a brass lock. Her driver, a sullen-looking man with a trimmed moustache, followed her, as if he were her bodyguard.
The mayor hurried down the steps towards her, and we followed him. When he greeted her, his voice seemed to belong to someone else, someone much younger, confident, playful and august at the same time. The mayor seemed to have recovered from the horror of the incident with the dead body. We waited, anxious for her response.
‘I came in search of my ancestor,’ she said, and the crowd stirred. I edged my way closer to her. ‘His name is Edward Richards. He died here, in this town. I was told one of his descendants lives here.’
‘Fetch the professor, child,’ the mayor turned to me.
I bolted into a run and raced toward the professor’s house. I met him asleep, for he had no clock and took no notice of time. His house was strewn with books, on shelves and tables – books on every subject, ranging from mathematics, literature to astronomy, which was his favourite subject.
‘You honour me with this visit, Halay,’ he said.
The house smelt of dust, of old books and of the forest, where the professor sometimes wandered for hours. He was smiling. He had on a simple long-sleeved shirt and trousers, his Afro as impressive as ever.
‘You bring good tidings, I suppose.’
‘Yes, I do, prof. Someone is here to see you.’
‘I have no friends, no family but you.’
‘This woman says she’s family.’
‘A woman? Now I am curious. Let’s go and meet her, Halay.’
The crowd seemed not to have moved since my absence, as though everyone was waiting for what was to unfold.
The woman turned to us, her eyes fixed on the professor as we approached, and, suddenly, she was trembling. She rushed and flung herself at the professor, who held her reluctantly.
‘Tell me who you are,’ he said.
‘Father,’ she said. ‘Father, you are alive. I was told you were dead, that’s why I did not go in search of you. You are alive.’
We were astounded as much as the professor, for as he held her, he wore a weary look on his face, as if he were in the dark concerning this woman. The professor had a daughter? The man many of us perceived as mad had a daughter as elegant as that woman?
‘This calls for celebration,’ the mayor said. Turning to me he added, ‘Child, we will deal with you later, but for now we welcome the professor’s daughter. Let’s fetch her something cold to drink.’
The mayor tried to dismiss the crowd, but no one left, for everyone was anxious to know the woman’s story. But she did not seem to be interested in our curiosity but in the professor, who led her up the steps to the verandah to calm her down. The professor was sweating; he was yet to recover from the shock of the revelation; he was lost for words.
Her name was Elizabeth. She told us her story when the professor brought her to meet my parents who had been too ashamed to witness our trial. Her mother had met the professor at the university, where the two had had a brief relationship. Her mother had not told her about the professor because she thought he was not one to raise a family. Elizabeth was brought up in America, and it was only years later and after much insistence on her part that her mother told her about her father and her ancestor Edward Richards who had built the famous high school.
‘I left America in search of you,’ Elizabeth said.
‘You have a sister now, Jowo,’ the professor said. ‘You are not alone any more. When I am gone, you two will live on,’ he said.
And I saw a light flash in my mother’s eyes.
‘So all is not lost after all,’ she said.
4
‘Wake up, Halay,’ my mother said. ‘Why must I do this every morning? You are not a child any more. You will be late for school.’ There was no hint of anger in her voice, in fact she sounded mirthful. Her life had changed. In one of the rooms of our house slept a woman with whom she had not stopped talking since the professor introduced her to us weeks ago. Aunt Elizabeth’s presence had altered her mood, but she was not alone. For the first time since our return from exile, I could sense a vague but persistent urge growing in me to draw again. I had been suspended from school for the past month, and I spent the time nurturing that urge but failing at every attempt. But the urge remained, unmistakable.
