The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence

  Tetteh looked at the other man curiously.

  “Those old ways–why you like them so greatly?”

  “I told you,” the white man said in his gentle voice. “They have a terrifying splendour.”

  “I hear you,” Tetteh said, shrugging, “but I do not say your words are staying in my ear. What was bringing you here, anyway?”

  “Sorry. Ought to have introduced myself sooner. I’m Philip Hardacre. Ever heard of the Hardacre Mine? Diamonds. My grandfather discovered it and leased the mineral rights, crafty old bastard. Family felt I ought to visit the place, I can’t think why.”

  Tetteh whistled. “Diamonds–in your own hands, all those diamonds.”

  Hardacre smiled tiredly. “They ought to belong to you–I suppose that’s what you’re thinking. Don’t fret, your government will find a way of getting them back one of these days. You could have the whole bloody lot as far as I’m concerned. All I ever wanted was to become an anthropologist, but of course the family wouldn’t hear of it.”

  Tetteh regarded Hardacre thoughtfully and with a new interest. It seemed to him that the white man’s linen suit was covered with miniature lights, and the lights were diamonds, and the diamonds pierced at Tetteh’s eyes and shone in a blaze of stars.

  “Those bush people you mention,” he said offhandedly. “I am remembering one small village which is known to me, very deep in the bush. No proper road there, and no one entering that place unless with greatest difficulty. In that village of Gyakrom is one old man who owns some very strong ju-ju, or so I heard it. He is priest for some python god, and is calling frequently many pythons out of their forest. You are acquainted with pythons? No poison, but they strangle. Yet for this old man they never strangle. At all.”

  Hardacre dropped his bored expression. “Look here, are you serious?”

  “In my life I am never more serious than this moment.”

  He would need a few days, Tetteh stipulated, to convince the ju-ju man of Gyakrom, for such practitioners of magic were well known for their reluctance to perform before the eyes of foreigners. With the proper observances to the god, however, the matter could be arranged. Hardacre contributed willingly enough the funds for palm-wine libation, but when it came to Tetteh’s fee he showed an unexpected tendency to haggle. Tetteh remained firm.

  “Myself, I would not walk even one step for such a thing. If I see this man for you, then you must pay. Fifty pounds–for you this is not such an amount.”

  Hardacre yielded at last. The night was balmy and the streets nearly deserted when the two of them ambled out of the now-peaceful Paradise Chop-Bar. Hardacre placed his solar topee on his flat pale hair.

  “I’m a bit squiffed. Hope I shan’t regret this tomorrow.”

  “At all!” cried Tetteh. “I tell you, it was Luck brought you to me.”

  He toasted with an imaginary glass the unseen presence.

  “I thank you, Uncle,” he said.

  At daybreak, after three hours’ sleep, Tetteh boarded a mammy-lorry. He was wearing his best clothes. He would not appear in his village in anything less. His trousers were a little threadbare, but well pressed and still recognizably grey flannel. His nylon shirt shone in electric orange like a neon light. The other passengers, several dozen of them, sat or crouched or perilously clung at the back of the lorry, amid the sacks of sugar and crates of yellow soap. But Tetteh paid the extra and rode beside the driver. The mammy-lorry was green and lustrous as a mango leaf; and it had KING KONG painted on the front and GOD SAVE SOULS on the back.

  “The old road, Kofi, into Gyakrom,” Tetteh said, “what is it like now?”

  The driver laughed. “Gone. It is gone. Fallen into the river. Grown over with vines and mangrove. What do you care about the old road?”

  But Tetteh only smiled and donned his sun-glasses, which he never wore except when he visited Gyakrom, and generously offered the driver a cigarette.

  The village faced the river and was surrounded on the other three sides by forest, a heavy green wall of palms and ferns and small thorny bushes, all tangled and matted together like snarled hair or cats’ fur full of burrs. The marketplace was still crowded when the lorry pulled up, although it was almost dusk. The driver shouted, and a swarm of small dust-silvered boys ran to help him unload the sugar and soap.

  Tetteh, ignoring the market and its people, flew out of the lorry like a locust spreading his orange wings, and made for home. It was a hut like any other, mud plastered over woven sticks and thatched with palm boughs. Tetteh’s brother Kwaame was outside. He was a powerfully built man, and although he was two years younger than Tetteh, he always seemed older, for it was he who had stayed home to help with the cocoa farm, and his face already bore an enclosed and habitually worried expression.

  “Tetteh!” Kwaame looked up. “You are in trouble?”

  Light-limbed, Tetteh capered and twirled, his shirt glittering in the last frail sunlight. He clapped his hands, whistled like a tree toad, moved his shoulders and narrow hips to a highlife beat.

  “No! No trouble. Money. Money, money, money. We are going to be rich.”

  Tetteh’s mother appeared in the doorway, a large and heavy woman wearing a dark blue cloth patterned with trees that branched fantastically like sea-coral.

  “Tetteh! It is really you!” Tears came immediately to her eyes. She spread her arms and gathered Tetteh in like a slip of driftwood to some great shore. Then she held him away at arm’s length, scrutinized and scolded him.

  “Why do you not come home more often? Your bones show–do you never eat at all in that place, that city? It wounds my heart to see you.”

  “I am a boy born to wound his mother’s heart,” Tetteh said cheerfully, putting his arm around her waist and leading her into the hut. “See how thin you are growing with worry.”

  Tetteh’s father was inside. He scowled and blinked his eyes when he saw his son.

  “You! What has made the paramount chief honour us with his presence? I thought you had forgotten where Gyakrom was.”

  “Welcome me, papa.”

  “All right,” the old man grumbled. “I welcome you, then. Here–what are you doing with those, Tetteh?”

  Tetteh had begun busily collecting an assortment of objects and placing them outside the hut door. Three blue saucepans; a headpan and basin of Japanese manufacture, enamelled with peacocks and gigantic peonies; half a dozen tin spoons; a hurricane lantern; two shaky rush-bottomed chairs which had been purchased cheaply from an impecunious merchant twenty years ago; a gilt-tasselled white satin pillow bearing the elephant and palm insignia of the old Gold Coast Regiment; three china saucers with the cups missing, embellished with Biblical scenes and given to Tetteh’s mother in the distant past by some missionary’s wife at whose confident knock the gates of heaven had no doubt long since opened wide; Tetteh’s baptismal certificate from Saint Sebastian Mission, with a floral border of forget-me-nots; a green glass vase cracked at the bottom; a third of a bottle of De Kuyper’s Dutch gin; a box of Blood Purifying Pills; a large alarm clock; and, finally, a small gramophone which lacked a handle and which only Kwaame, who had a mechanical flair, could ingeniously wind with a piece of wire and a twig.

  “Are you mad?” Tetteh’s father cried. “Put them down at once. Does my own son rob me?”

  “Please, papa, trust me. I am not taking them far. They will be looked after. It is only for a few days. Come here, Kwaame. I need you. You must get the boys busy, all the boys in the village. A python hunt. Two shillings for a dead, five for a living one. You’ll do it?”

  Kwaame hesitated, then his laughter boomed through the hut. Not so much happened in Gyakrom, and Tetteh had the ability to make life eventful.

  “For you, madman, I will do whatever you say, this once. But why?”

  Tetteh half-closed his eyes.

  “We are going to play a game,” he said. “It is called Casting Nets For The Diamond Fish. Listen, and I will tell you.”

  Tetteh pulled up th
e rented lorry in front of his father’s dwelling. Philip Hardacre climbed out, groaned, cautiously felt his limbs for possible dislocations, and vainly attempted to brush off his white linen suit which was covered with a fine powdering of red dust and a number of black oil smears from the lorry.

  “Oh, my Lord,” he said, “I can hardly move. No wonder the village is isolated. I’ve never seen such a road in my life. I swear I thought we weren’t going to make it, Tetteh.”

  Kwaame bounded around the corner of the hut. He appeared to be clad only in a leopard skin, although in fact he wore his loincloth unobtrusively beneath it, for decency. Tetteh recognized the pelt. It had hung in Opoku the Drummer’s hut for as long as he could remember, and was in consequence slightly bald in patches, for the fur had been nibbled at by cockroaches throughout the years. On his head Kwaame wore a gazelle skull with one horn missing and small red feathers stuffed into the eye sockets. He brandished his machete, newly-sharpened, within a few inches of Hardacre’s face, and the Englishman drew back.

  “My word, he doesn’t look very friendly.”

  “He is a tempered person,” Tetteh agreed, “but you he will not harm. He is the ju-ju man’s helper.”

  He grasped Hardacre’s elbow and took him inside the dwelling. The room was bare of furniture–not so much as a stool. A pile of calabashes and earthen pots stood beside the door. The hut had been decorated by Kwaame, following Tetteh’s instructions. Strings of bush-rat bones and chicken feet were festooned across the room. Large bunches of leaves and grass, dotted with pellets of clay, hung from the thatched roof. Several wooden clubs stood in one corner, with feathers and clusters of cowrie shells tied around them. Hardacre sank down onto a grass mat.

  “What’s the significance of the leaves, Tetteh?”

  “Magical medicine,” Tetteh said sternly. “Do not touch, please. Special for the gods of this house.”

  “Perhaps the old man will be kind enough to elaborate on the question of the household gods,” Hardacre said, “and their connection with the broader tribal deities. The relationship of gods, of course, mirrors the structure of the extended family group. I wish I didn’t have such a rotten headache. What a ghastly ride that was. Good heavens, who’s this?”

  Tetteh’s mother was wearing a skirt of dried palm fibre, a fringe of fresh banana leaves around her full bosom, a shaky-looking headdress of white hen feathers, and an exceedingly surly expression. Tetteh grinned.

  “Wife of the ju-ju man. Real bush lady, this one.”

  “I have prepared a good groundnut stew,” Tetteh’s mother said crossly. “I worked all morning. I wish now I had rested instead. Your white man probably cares only for drink, anyway.”

  “It would be such an advantage if I spoke the language,” Hardacre said regretfully. “What did she say, Tetteh?”

  “She is saying she has ready a great feast for honouring you, man. Look, here is the python priest now.”

  Tetteh’s father had been persuaded to don the grimy loincloth he wore when he worked in the fields, and to strap a dagger around his chest, but beyond this point he would not go. He dragged himself into the hut with painful slowness, as though suffering from partial paralysis. After a swift and shamefaced glance at Hardacre, he turned to his son.

  “Greed is an affliction of the soul. You will have us all in serious trouble one of these days.”

  Tetteh politely translated for Hardacre. “The old man, he is welcoming you to Gyakrom and praying his python god to give full blessings for you.”

  Hardacre looked pleased. “That’s decent of him, I must say. When will he perform the rites?”

  “First the meal,” Tetteh said, holding out a bowl of palm wine, “and then the snake-calling.”

  After the trip Hardacre was thirsty, and once he had downed the first bowlful he found the palm wine quite palatable.

  “My meeting you like that–” he said feelingly, after the fourth bowl had been emptied. “You were absolutely right, Tetteh–it was a real stroke of luck.”

  Tetteh lifted his wine bowl in salute. “Live long, Uncle, and never leave me.” Then, seeing Hardacre’s puzzled expression, he explained. “Just some words I say when I drink. No meaning for you, man.”

  When they had eaten, Tetteh grabbed a small drum and thrust it into his father’s arms.

  “Drum, papa!”

  With a look of disgust, Tetteh’s father picked up the curved stick and tapped once. Then he threw it down.

  “I cannot.”

  Kwaame seized the stick and began to drum, clumsily but with verve. Tetteh tore out to the lorry and came back with a paper bag, from which he took half a dozen crudely-carved fetish figures. Hardacre examined them.

  “Intriguing–where did you get them, Tetteh?”

  “Secret place,” Tetteh said. “Perhaps later I will be telling you.”

  Tetteh’s father frowned. “I do not like those things here.”

  “They are nothing,” Tetteh said in his own tongue. “Nothing has been done to them. They come straight from the carver. Nothing has been said over them. They are harmless.”

  “Still, I do not like it.”

  “Papa, it is all right. They sell them like baskets of groundnuts in the city market. Anyone can buy them there.”

  “That is what you say.”

  “No difficulty, is there?” Hardacre asked anxiously.

  “No, no, man,” Tetteh swung into English. “The old fellow wanting to be sure all things are correct for his snake god, that is all.”

  He disappeared again and returned a moment later carrying by the feet a struggling, squawking white chicken. He tethered it and placed it on a stone block, where it lay palpitating and all at once eerily silent.

  “A cockerel for the god,” he explained to Hardacre. “While the young man is drumming magic drummings and saying magic sayings, then the python priest is cutting this same cockerel’s throat, and when the blood running down, the god drinking it, you see. Then, if we have luck, the pythons coming out of the bush.”

  Tetteh’s father was glancing dubiously across the room at the chicken. He shouted for his wife.

  “Come here, Akosua! You had better make sure this is the right hen. It would be just like Tetteh to take the young cockerel instead, and we would have no eggs next year.”

  “Papa–” Tetteh pleaded. “Don’t you think I know a cockerel from a hen? Anyway, you do not need a cockerel to get eggs, except the eggs for hatching.”

  “And a child does not need a father, either, I suppose?” the old man snorted.

  “I learned about the eggs at school,” Tetteh said defensively.

  “That is the sort of thing they taught you. No wonder you act in such a peculiar fashion.”

  Tetteh’s mother examined the fowl. “This is the right one. A hen, the lame old one. See her leg?”

  Tetteh threw up his hands. His father merely shrugged. Then Tetteh shook himself, jumped to his feet, snuffed out all but one of the wicks burning dim in vessels of oil, tiptoed across the room to Hardacre and placed wiry fingers on the whiteman’s shoulders until he flinched. The light in the hut was feeble and shot through with shadows and shadowy presences. The drum rumbled and Kwaame chanted. Tetteh’s father raised his knife. Hardacre breathed rapidly.

  But the old man, the squirming fowl underneath his hand, hesitated. The sweat stood out on his forehead, and the wrist of his knife-hand trembled. Tetteh, now sitting cross-legged beside Hardacre, half rose and then sank back again uncertainly.

  “What is it, papa? What is wrong?”

  “What if they are offended?” Tetteh’s father said in a low and distant voice. “Perhaps it will go badly for all of us here. What if they believe themselves mocked?”

  “Who?” Tetteh almost shrieked. “Who?”

  The old man looked blankly at his son. “Those whose names and powers you have forgotten.”

  Then he seemed to recover himself. He coughed a little and blinked his eyes.

  “Now I
will have to see Bonsu, to set the matter right,” he said plaintively. “Well, it cannot be helped. Let the false cockerel die, then, for it would have been killed for the cooking-pot tomorrow, anyway.”

  The knife came down and the blood spurted. Tetteh, sloughing off his momentary anxiety, danced with a reckless joy. A crackling of dry palm boughs sounded overhead, and from the hut roof three dark writhing coils appeared and began spiralling downward. Tetteh caught Hardacre’s arm.

  “The pythons from the bush, man. They are here.”

  Hardacre leaped out of the way. “My God, did it actually work?”

  At that moment a voice like a judgement roared outside the hut, and the struggling reptiles abruptly disappeared. Tetteh whirled, his startled eyes questioning his brother. But Kwaame stood paralysed, listening to the deep and godlike voice. Like dead butterflies on a pin they all stood fixed in the attitudes they had held when the voice began. Hardacre’s arms were outstretched and rigid. The old man’s hands were stiff around the reddened knife.

  Then a figure appeared in the hut doorway. A grey-haired man, a portly and rather elderly African, clad in a black suit with a high white collar. Released, the people in the hut stirred and breathed. Tetteh’s mother, palm leaves rustling, fled into the back room.

  “Two boys are on your roof, Kobla,” the Reverend Timothy Quarshie said mildly. “I shouted at them to get down.”

  His glance took in the adorned hut, the block, the bleeding fowl.

  “What are you doing here?” he cried. “What can you be thinking of, Kobla?”

  Tetteh’s father threw down the knife. “It was nothing. A jest of this boy’s. Yes, I am an old fool. Tell me.”

  The Reverend Timothy Quarshie regarded both Tetteh and Hardacre with disapproving eyes.

  “You, sir,” he said to Hardacre in English. “I do not have any idea what you are doing here, but I must tell you I think you are a bad influence on my congregation that I have spent nearly twenty-five years building up. I never thought to see an elder of my church acting so.”