Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

  “The only way to inside your head is I cut open and look, or you speak it out.”

  “I thought—”

  “You think men of bush and river grunt and bark like dogs. That we don’t wipe the ass when we shit. Maybe we rub it on our skin. I talking to you as man.”

  You, inquisitor, are a man who collects words. You collect mine. You have verse for a cool morning, verse for the noon of the dead, verse for war. But the setting sun does not need your verse and neither does the running cheetah.

  This wise man did not live in the village, but near the river. His hair was white from ash and milk cream. The only time I witnessed my father undress, I saw dot scars like stars in a circle on his back. This man had a circle of stars on his chest. He lived alone in the hut he built with wild branches for the wall and bush for the roof. He rubbed the walls with black rock dust until they shone, then drew patterns and paintings, one of a white creature with arms and legs tall as trees. I have never seen the like.

  “And a good thing that is, for you would not be alive to tell me of it,” he said.

  I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, woke up, and saw a great white python wrapping around a trunk, woke up and saw the snake fade against the wall. Sunlight came in, lit up the walls, and I saw we were in a cave. The walls shaped like candlewax melting on candlewax. In the dimness, parts of it looked like a screaming face, or elephant legs, or a young girl’s slit.

  The wall, when I rubbed my hand against it, felt like yam skin. Near the opening was soft with shrubs sticking out like loose hairs. I rose and this time did not fall. Wobble I did, like a man soaked in palm wine, but I stepped outside. I staggered and pressed against the rock for balance, but this was not rock. Nothing like stone. Tree bark. But too wide, too big. I looked as high as I could look and walked as far as I could walk. Not only was sun still behind the branches and leaves, but this trunk was without end. By the time I walked around it, I forgot where it began. Only at the top were there branches, stubby like baby fingers and sticking out in a web of twigs and leaves. Little leaves, thick like skin, and fruit as big as your head. I heard little feet scrambling up and down, a baboon and her child.

  “The monkeybread tree was the fairest in the savannah,” the witchman said behind me. “This was before the second dawn of the gods. But what a thing—the monkeybread tree knew she was pretty. She demanded all makers of song sing of her beauty. She and her sister prettier than the gods, even prettier than Bikili-Lilis, whose hair became the one hundred winds. This is what came to pass. The gods gave birth to fury. They went down to earth and pulled up every single monkeybread tree, and thrust them back in the ground upside down. It took five hundred ages for the roots to produce leaves and five hundred more to sprout flower and fruit.”

  In one moon every member of the village came to the tree. I saw how they looked at him while hiding behind branches and leaves. Once, three of the strong men of the village came. They were all tall, broad in shoulder, rippled where fat men had bellies, with legs strong as the bull. The first man dressed himself head to toe in ash, white as the moon. The second marked his body with white stripes like a zebra. The third had no colour but his dark and rich skin. They wore necklaces and chains around their waists that needed no further adornment. I did not know what they came for, but I knew to them I would give it.

  “We watch you many times in the bush,” the striped one said. “You climb trees and hunt. No skill, no craft, but maybe the gods are pushing you. How old are you in moons?”

  “My father never counted moons.”

  “This tree ate six virgins. Swallowed them whole. You can hear them scream at night but it comes out as a whisper. You think it is wind.”

  He stared at me for a while, then they laughed.

  “You will come with us to the Zareba rite of manhood,” the striped one said.

  He pointed to the moonlit one.

  “A snake killed his partner right before the rains. You will go with him.”

  I did not say that I was saved from snakebite.

  “We meet at the next sun. You should know the way of warriors, not bitchmen,” said the moonlit one.

  I nodded a yes. He looked at me longer than the others. Somebody had carved a star on his chest. A ring in each ear that I knew he pierced himself. He was taller than the others by a head at least but I only noticed then. Also, these men won’t still be boys in Juba.

  “You will go with me,” I heard him say, though I did not hear him say it.

  In the Zareba, the rites of manhood, there are no women. But you must still know of their use to man. The Zareba is in your mind; the Zareba is out in the bush a journey from sunrise to noon. You arrive at the hall of heroes, with clay walls and a thatch roof. And sticks, and spaces for fighting. Boys enter to learn from the strongest fighters in all the villages and all the mountains. You cover yourself in ash so that at night you look as if you’ve come from the moon. You eat durra porridge. You kill the boy who is you, to become the man who is you, but everything must be learned. I asked the moonlight boy how to learn of women with no women to learn from.

  Will you hear more, inquisitor?

  One morning I caught the smell of kin following me to the river. A boy who thought I was his uncle’s son. I was hunting fish. He came to the bank and hailed me like he knew me, until he saw that he did not know me. I said nothing. His mother must have told him about the Abarra, the demon that comes to you like someone you know, with everything but a tongue. He did not run, but walked away slow from the bank and sat on a rock. Watching me. He could not have been more than eight or nine in years, with a white clay streak from ear to ear and over his nose, and white dots like a leopard’s all over his chest. I was a boy of the city and would have no luck catching fish. I dipped my hands in water and waited. Fish swam right into my hands but slipped out every time I tried to grab one. I waited, he watched. I grabbed a big one but it wriggled and frightened me and I tripped and fell into the river. The little boy laughed. I looked at him and laughed as well, but then came a smell in the forest, moving closer and closer. I smelled it—ochre, shea butter, underarm stenches, breast milk—and he smelled it too. We both knew the wind was carrying someone, but he knew who it was.

  She came out of the trees as if out of the trees she sprung. A taller woman, an older woman, her face already cut sharp and gruff, her right breast not yet lanky. Her left she wrapped in a cloth slung over her shoulder. A band, red, green, and yellow around her head. Necklaces of every colour but blue piled one on top of the other, like a mountain all the way up to her earlobe. Goatskin skirt with cowries over a belly fat with child. She looked at the boy and pointed behind her. Then she looked at me, and pointed the same way.

  On a morning with a lazy sun, the witchman woke me with a slap, then walked out of the hut, saying nothing. He laid beside me spear, sandals, and fabric to wrap around my hips. I rose quick and followed him. Down the river the village opened itself up with huts spread across a field. The first we passed were mounds of dry grass with a peak like a nipple. Then we passed by round huts of clay and dirt, red and brown with a roof of thatch and bush. In the center, the huts got bigger. Round and built in a cluster of five or six huts so that they looked like castles, with walls joining them together saying this is all for one man. The bigger the huts the shinier the walls, from those who could afford to rub the walls with blackstone. But most of the huts were not big. Only a man with many cows could have one hut for grain and another for cooking it.

  The man with the biggest huts had six wives and twenty children, none of them a boy. He was looking for a seventh wife to give him a son at last. He was one of the few who came out of their huts to see me. Two boys and a girl, naked with no paint, followed the witchman and me until a woman shouted something in a harsh tongue and they ran to a hut behind us. We were now in the middle of the village, outside this man’s cluster. Two women were spreading a fresh lay
er of clay on the side of a grain keep. Three boys about my age came back from a hunt with a dead bushbuck. I did not see the moonlit one.

  The return of the hunters woke up the town. Man and woman, girl and boy, all came out to see the fruit of the hunt, but stopped when they saw me. The witchman said a name I did not know. The man with six wives came out and walked right up to me. A tall man, with a big belly. A clay hair bun to the back of his head in gray and yellow, with five ostrich feathers on top. The bun for he was a man, each feather for a major kill. Yellow clay lined his cheekbone and victory scars covered his chest and shoulder. This man had killed many men, and lions and one elephant. Maybe even a hippopotamus. Two of his wives came out, one was the woman at the river.

  The witchman said to him, “Father who speaks to the crocodile so that he does not eat us during wet season, hear me.” Then he said something to the man that I did not understand.

  The man looked at me from head to toe, and toe to head. He came in closer and said, “Son of Aboyami, brother of Ayodele, this path is your path, these trees are your trees, this house is your house, and I am your beloved uncle.”

  I did not know these names. Or maybe these were just names for people who had nothing to do with me. Family was not always family in the bush, and friend was not always friend. Even wife was not always wife.

  He took me past the entrance and inside the yard, where children chased chickens. They smelled of clay and pollen and chicken shit underfoot. The house had six halls. Through the window, two wives grinding flour. Beside the grain keep the kitchen let out the sweetness of porridge; beside the kitchen, a wife washed herself under a stream of water pouring through a hole in the wall. Beside that a wall, long and dark, spotted with nipples made of clay. Then an open area under a thatch roof, with stools and rugs, and behind that the longest wall. My uncle’s sleeping room, which had a huge butterfly above the sleeping rugs. He saw me looking and said the circles in the center were rippling pools of water, meaning renewal each wet season, or whenever he dips into the wet of his new wife’s wiwi. Beside his hall was the room for storage, and for the children to sleep.

  “This house is your house, these rugs are your rugs. But those wives are mine,” he said, and chuckled. I smiled.

  We sat in the open area, me on a rug, him on a chair set back so far that he was lying, not sitting. Cut with a curve to fit his buttocks, firm in the back with three slats carved to look like three lines of eggs. I remember my father sighing as he rubbed his own back against one like it. A headboard curved like a huge headdress of horns. The big back and chubby legs made it look like a bush buffalo. My uncle lying there changed into a powerful animal.

  “Your chair. I have seen the like, beloved uncle,” I said.

  He sat up. He seemed disturbed that there were two.

  “Did your people make this?” I asked.

  “The Lobi, wood masters in the city, claimed to have made only one. But city folk lie; that is their nature.”

  “You know of city streets?”

  “I have walked many.”

  “Why did you return?”

  “How do you know I left village for the city and not city for the village?”

  I couldn’t answer.

  “Where did you see this chair?” he asked.

  “In my house.”

  He nodded and laughed. “Blood still behaves like blood even if separated by the sand,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder.

  “Bring my blood palm wine and tobacco,” he shouted at one of his wives.

  * * *

  —

  The people called themselves and their village Ku. Once they controlled both sides of the river. Then the enemy, the Gangatom, got bigger and stronger and many more joined them, and drove the Ku to the setting-sun side. Ku men had skill with bow and arrow, leading the cattle to fresh fields, drinking milk, and sleeping. The women had skill with pulling grass for thatch roofs, plastering walls with clay or cow shit, building fences to keep in the goats and the children chasing after goats, fetching water, washing the milk skins, milking the cattle, feeding the children, cooking the soup, washing the calabashes, and churning the butter. The men went out in the nearby fields to sow and reap their crops. They dug in water. I nearly fell into a hole dug so deep you heard the old devils, big as trees, rustle in their sleep at the bottom. The moonlight boy told me that it was soon time to gather the durra harvest, for the women to come to the fields with baskets to take the crop away.

  * * *

  —

  One day I saw nine men who came back to the village, tall and shining from new paint on some, red ochre and shea butter on others, men who looked like they were just born as warriors.

  At nighttime they sang and danced and fought, and sang again, and put on Hemba masks that looked like the chimpanzee but Kava said was in the image of all the elders gone, to speak to them in the spirit trees. They sang in Hemba masks to break the curse of many moons of bad hunting. The drum beat a kekeke. Bambambam, lakalakalakalaka under the wind.

  The village woke up to a new smell and it was everywhere. New men and new women ripe to burst. I watched them from the man who would be my uncle’s house, as he watched his wives and scratched his belly.

  “A boy told me he would take me to the rites of manhood,” I said.

  “A boy promise you the Zareba? Under whose command?”

  “By his own hand,” I said.

  “Is that what he tell you now?” he said.

  “Yes. That I will be his new partner as the old one died by snakebite. I speak your tongue now. I know your ways, beloved uncle. I am your blood. I am ready.”

  “Which boy is this?” my uncle said.

  But I did not know where lived this boy. My uncle rubbed his chin and looked at me. “You were born when you were found, and that is not even a moon. Do not rush to die so soon,” he said.

  I did not tell him that I was a man already.

  “You have seen them. Boys running around, smaller than the men who came back to the village.”

  “What boys?”

  “Boys with red tips, the female cut off from the male.”

  I did not know what he was talking about so he took me outside. The sky was gray and fat with waiting rain. Two boys ran past and he called at the taller one, his face red, white, and yellow, the yellow a line in the middle of his head going all the way down. Remember, my uncle is a very important man, with more cows than the chief, and even some gold. The boy came over, shining from sweat.

  “I was chasing a fox,” he said to my uncle.

  My uncle waved him closer. He laughed, saying the boy knows he has the mark of the end of youth, and wants the village to know. The boy flinched when my uncle grabbed his balls and cock as if to weigh them. Look, he said. The paint almost hid that the skin was gone, cut away, leaving the bold blossom tip. In the beginning we are all born of two, he said. You are man and you are woman, just as girl is woman and she is man. This boy will be a man, now that the fetish priest has cut the woman away, he said.

  So stiff was this boy, but he tried to stand proud. My uncle kept talking. “And the girl must have the man deep inside her cut out of her neha for her to be a woman. Just as the first beings was of two.” He rubbed the boy’s head, sent him away, and went back inside.

  Off on a rock men gathered. Tall, strong, black, and shining with spears. I watched them stand still until the sunset made them shadow. My uncle turned to me, almost whispering as if telling me horrible news around strangers.

  “Every sixty times the earth flies around the sun, we celebrate death and rebirth. The very firstborn were twins, but only when the divine male loosed his seed in the earth was there life. This is why the man who is also a woman, and the woman who is also a man, is a danger. It is too late. You have grown too old and will be both man and woman.”

  He watched me until his
words spoke to my mind.

  “I will never be a man?”

  “You will be a man. But this other is in you and will make you other. Like the men who roam the lands and teach our wives woman secrets. You will know as they know. By the gods, you might lay as they lay.”

  “Beloved uncle, you cause me great sadness.”

  I did not tell him that the woman was already raging inside me and I desired her desires, but otherwise did not feel like a woman for I wanted to hunt deer, and run and sport.

  “I wish to be cut now,” I said.

  “Your father should have cut you. Now it is too late. Too late. You will be one always on the line between the two. You will always walk two roads at the same time. You will always feel the strength of one and the pain of the other.”

  That night the moon did not come, but when he appeared outside the hut, the boy still glowed.

  “Come see what new men and women do,” he said.

  “You must tell me your name,” I said.

  He said nothing.

  We went through the bush to the place where drummers were sending messages to gods of sky, and ancestors in the ground. The moonlight boy walked fast and did not wait. I was still afraid of stepping on a viper. He vanished through a wall of thick leaves and I stopped, not knowing where to go until a white hand pushed through the thick leaves, grabbed mine, and pulled me in.

  We came upon a clearing where the drummers drummed, while others beat sticks and others whistled. Two men approached to start the ceremony, and we hid in the bush.

  “The bumbangi, the official and provider of food. Also stealer. See him in his mweelu mask of sprouting feathers and a giant hornbill beak. Look beside him, the makala, master of charms and spells,” Kava said.