by Okey Ndibe
ONE DAY, STANTON TOLD how the Great God sent his Son to die hanging on a cross, flanked on either side by robbers. One of the robbers, thanks to his penitence, was bestowed with mercy; he ascended with Christ straight into God’s palace in the sky. The other, a proud, loquacious oaf, was cast into a cauldron.
Listening, one convert named Okafor was both consoled and scandalized. Okafor was a shiftless man and drunkard. The people of Utonki said of him that whenever he walked past, something was bound to get lost. He was moved by the story of a thief who, on his last day, had enough sense to speak kindly to God’s Son—and thus earned an eerie flight to the sky.
Yet, an aspect or two of the narrative rattled his fledging faith. He raised a hand and addressed the interpreter.
“Tell the white man not to think that I drink a horn or two of palm wine, and my head fills with questions. Explain to him that our elders have said that he who asks never gets lost. There’s a kernel I’d like the white man to crack for me. Ask him to explain what God’s Son did to deserve such great punishment. We know that a son’s skull is sometimes too hard to absorb his father’s word. Perhaps that’s what happened with God’s Son. If so, I, Okafor, will still say that death was too strong a punishment. I don’t know what the white man knows, but I know that a son who shuts his ears to his father should not be killed. In truth, to hear it jangles the ear! Why bind your son’s hands and feet and put him in the midst of efulefu? And this was an only son.
“I have three sons. Sometimes, they don’t hear any word I say. But even when their heads become hard, I never snatch a machete and cut their heads! No, I fetch a cane and let it speak to their buttocks! That’s what a father does. So why did your God hand over His own Son to be made a jest of? Why allow efulefu to shred his Son’s clothes and kill him on a tree? Why do I call them efulefu? Because no sensible man would kill a god’s son, even if the god asked him. Tell the white man that I, Okafor—this is what I’ve said.”
Okafor grinned, self-satisfied. The interpreter tightened his lips, like a man ashamed of baring rotten teeth, and glared at Okafor. In his career as interpreter, he’d seen and loathed many like Okafor. Okafor was just another native heretic who fancied himself clever. A drunk who was out, without question, to make a fool of the white man—and of God.
“Wild animal,” the interpreter muttered under his breath. He peeled his gaze off of Okafor, but his irritation was hard to conceal.
“Are you bloody mute?” demanded Stanton, impatient to know what Okafor had said at such length.
The interpreter made to speak but instead fidgeted, stuttered, and stopped.
Unlike the people of Utonki who only knew Stanton on the surface—as a splotchy-faced, hairy-chested man who spoke nasally—the interpreter knew the ease with which the missionary could fly into a rage. And the sting of that rage!
“I can understand pagans uttering profane thoughts about God,” Stanton would scold as he made a sport of thrashing the interpreter. “They’re yet to know God. But you! You ought to know better! You know better than to repeat their idolatrous language. Does it count for nothing that we’ve shown you the light? Bloody hell, you’re even baptized! We’ve washed off your original sin! We’ve even given you a first-rate Christian name! Is all that wasted on you? Must you return to the path of the infidel?”
“Jacob,” Stanton called, taking note of the wavering interpreter.
“Sah!” the interpreter blurted out.
“Don’t stand there shaking like a hag! Tell me what the fellow said.” He glowered at the interpreter. “And don’t waste my time!”
“Yes, sah!”
But, no, Jacob the interpreter wasn’t going to bear the brunt of Okafor’s drink-induced silliness. Not today. He had to find an innocuous translation, words that would spare him Stanton’s thundering slaps. The trick was to buy more time. In an imploring tone, he said, “Sah, na think I dey think. The man ask question which hard well, well.”
“Your job’s not to think,” Stanton said in a harsh tone. “I do the thinking around here. Your job is just to tell them”—he swept his hand to indicate the gathered converts—“whatever I ask you to tell them. And when they have questions, you tell me what the questions are. It’s that simple. Is that clear to you?”
“All clear, sah! Sorry for me to think at all at all. I know is against law for me to think, sah. No more thinking. I can’t make law vex, sah.”
“Bloody buffoon,” Stanton said. “Who talked about the law? No, I’m not about to send you off to prison for thinking. It’s a matter of, shall we say, convenience. I happen to be the one who knows about the true living God. That’s why it’s best that I be the one doing the thinking, the one to answer any questions. Your own place is clear. You know the tongue of your fellow Negroes and possess a smattering of English. You’re to help me to convey the good news. Do that, Jacob, and there won’t be any problems. But try to think too much and you might find yourself in a little bit of trouble. Not in jail, hell no. But trouble you wouldn’t like. So, tell me what the man said.”
“The questioner man humblily want to know … No, he ask to know … Sah, he appeal that you use your wiseness to educate himself as to pertains to one matter … In short, what can make him happy, reverend sah, is to want know why the Almighty …” He hesitated, hedged, lost in the maze of words.
“The question hard, sah,” he said finally. Then he began to laugh. It was an awkward, high-pitched laughter. He laughed so hard he folded into a crouch, like a man just fallen under the cloud of madness.
A growl formed on Stanton’s face. Shoulders bunched, he reached Jacob before the man, consumed by a peculiar laughter, could collect himself to duck. A pummeling ensued.
As the villagers remembered it later, Stanton seemed to fly through the air before landing on Jacob. So ferocious was the rush that the Bible loosened from his grip, flew in the air, somersaulted, and then landed, bang, on a female convert’s head. His knuckles, knees, and chest smacked into Jacob’s bent body. The interpreter reeled backward and then collapsed onto the floor. Unable to check his own fall, Stanton pitched forward and landed on top of the spare-bodied interpreter. The converts let out a collective gasp and then looked on in hushed shock. Stanton gathered himself up and sat astride the interpreter’s splayed legs. Eyes narrowed, he fixed his prone foe as a famished predator might a prey. His chest heaved violently as he breathed in and out of his mouth. Helpless, the interpreter glanced up at his assailant in a morose, stunned stare. There was a hint of blood at the ridge of Jacob’s nostril.
A few moments passed, and then Stanton slowly rose.
“Don’t make an animal of me, Jacob,” he said in an even, almost entreating voice. “Christ enjoins us to forgive our brother seventy times seven times. In the Christian spirit, I forgive you. This time. Now get up and get to your job.”
Jacob picked himself up with effort, dazed still by the force and surprise of the attack. As he flipped dirt and dust off his shirt, Stanton asked, “So what was the man’s question?” There was impatience in his voice.
Three dribbles of blood dropped in quick succession from Jacob’s nose onto his shirt. He stanched the flow with his left cuff. Then he began to speak.
“De man want to know what offense your God Son commit? What he do for his papa to let sinner people kill him? He ask, Which kind of papa be that? Daz what the man want know the answer for.”
Filled with rage, Jacob didn’t mind risking another attack. He stood with his legs apart, firmly planted, poised to ward off his assailant. “Tell the questioner,” Stanton said in a quavering voice, then paused. “What’s his name?”
“Okafor,” said the interpreter.
“Tell Okafor that God sent his Son to die for our sake. To wash us of our sins. Tell him that God didn’t act out of wickedness—God is all good and all loving. Tell him that a good Christian must trust God. Faith is at the center of a Christian’s life. As the holy book tells us, faith is the evidence of things not s
een.”
Stanton then told the story of Thomas and his doubt. At the end, he said, “Tell Okafor not to be a doubting Thomas. For the sake of his soul.”
EACH MORNING, EVEN BEFORE the women had stirred from sleep to go to the banks of River Utonki to fetch water, Stanton was at the river. He swam with less skill than most other people, but his glee matched theirs. He was at home in the river, even though he was less a smooth swimmer than a splasher.
By the time the women and children arrived to fetch water, he was done swimming. He lay on his back on a wooden ledge, his imposing torso sheathed by a pair of slim white underwear, hands raised to his eyes to shield them from the sun, biting even at that early hour.
It was his contemplative ritual. Lying there, Jacob had told some converts, the white man communed with God. Ideas took root in his mind; he grasped germs of the message he must give to the unsaved souls of Utonki. Some water fetchers stared at his bared body, the folds of his belly that sagged like pouches on either side of him. Children chortled at this massy scoop of flesh. The naughtier women fastened their gaze on the slight rise in his wet underwear, the stump of his penis that was the man’s only modest part.
“Such a big man with a baby’s stick!” some cheeky woman would say in a low, puzzled tone.
Other women would giggle in conspiracy.
“Indeed, it’s like a child’s.”
“What do you expect? Don’t you know the thing shrivels from hunger? The man wandered far away from hearth and wife. His thing has been hungry. A starved penis coils up, ready to die.”
“But nobody knows if he has a wife or not.”
“You think a grown man like him can be without a wife? Then there must be madness in his eyes.”
“Who would marry a man with that sickly stick? Rather than pleasure a woman, it must cause annoyance.”
“Yes, what can that one do?”
More giggles.
“Make you pregnant!” one woman would interject, snickering.
“Tufia!” the teased woman would swear. “That thing can never find its way to my thighs.”
If Stanton was aware of their ogling and salacious comments, he did not let on.
Each evening, after dismissing the converts, he returned to the river. He stripped himself to his underwear. Then, standing near the shallow banks, he washed himself the same way the villagers did. Bent at the knee, he scooped water with both hands and then threw it on his upper body and over his back. He bathed unhurriedly, as if the water were a balm that soothed the pain of his desultory labors, a palliative for the many frustrations of a man fishing for souls, an antidote for a spurned bearer of light in Darkest Africa. After bathing, he lowered himself in the water and then swam out to the river’s deeper parts. For an hour or so, he’d thrash about in the river. Sometimes he’d submerge himself beneath the surface, a twisty ripple indicating his zigzagging path. He often lingered for a long time, then shot up to the surface, exhaling air and water.
Many in Utonki watched Stanton at his awkward maneuvers. Unlike his morning routine, seen only by women and children, men formed the bulk of the spectators in the evenings. Until Stanton’s arrival in their midst, the people of Utonki had believed that no person born outside their community could swim the river without drowning. Or without being snatched up and eaten by aguiyi, the crocodile believed to inhabit the river’s depths. Once Stanton defied that belief, the men of Utonki said that the white man was a long-lost son of the river. He was, they said, an albino who’d been captured by Abia warriors when Utonki was still young. Now he had returned to life, but he spoke a strange tongue. The story added to Stanton’s mystique.
Stanton’s feet were always shod in a mammoth pair of sandals that he left unstrapped, so that they dangled about, awkwardly, as he walked at a brisk, hurried pace. He wore white khaki shorts and a brown khaki shirt. By the time he came out to preach each morning, the shirt would be wet, discolored by two huge rings of sweat under both armpits. Then he perspired more as the day wore on and he worked himself into a holy frenzy. Sweat formed on his brow and snaked down to his chin. Sometimes it dripped to the floor, like dew sliding from the deep receptacle of ede leaf. Sometimes, it would start raining as Stanton preached. He stayed under the downpour, unfazed.
But on the seventh day, he shut himself up in the hut the new believers built for him. All day long, nobody would see him. Once, some curious villagers tiptoed close to the hut. They reported hearing his voice, raised and fevered, like a madman apostrophizing unseen demons. One day, some men searched out Jacob and asked why the white man shouted in the solitude of his hut.
The interpreter seized the opportunity both to enlighten them and to hurl insults at them.
“Vile heathens,” he said. “Blind pagans! Why do you call prayer shouting? Your heads are so full of shit you don’t know prayer when you hear it. If you were not snakeheads, you’d know that the white man was not barking but praying. What you heard was the white man praying to the true God. And it’s your blackened souls he’s praying for, too!”
The men were not impressed. Among them was a former convert, a slacker back to paganism.
“Rump of a man,” he said to Jacob. “How dare you insult us, you whom the white man uses to wipe his anus? If his God is everywhere, then why does the man need to shout to be heard? Or is his God deaf?”
The other men chuckled, impressed by the slacker’s repartee.
On occasion, the people of Utonki poked fun at Jacob. Sometimes, their barbs targeted the white man himself. Still, they saw Stanton as an extraordinary being, a man who was in some ways like a spirit. Who but a spirit could have uprooted himself from his land and arrived in Utonki to speak tremulously about a deity nobody had before seen or heard about? They marveled at his book, his ability to decipher secrets concealed in contorted symbols that crawled all over his book.
“Only a strong medicine man would hear things said by leaves,” one man said, shrugging with wonder.
“He has spirit eyes,” another said. “Spirits can look into air and see things in it. They can see portents in smoke. They can gape at sand and discover the secrets of the gods. They can peer into vapor and, by studying it, know what’s going on at distant markets.”
“True talk,” said another.
“False talk!” bellowed another man. “He’s not a spirit but a wizard. Wizards see as spirits see, but wizards are not spirits. He’s a man like you and me, but he’s eaten the meal of wizardry.”
Stanton did not understand their language, but he sensed that there was some verbal skirmish—and guessed that he was at the center of it. He squelched the temptation to ask the interpreter to explain what the ruckus was about. There was something alluring about the cadence of their language, he thought. A time would come, he told himself, when he would converse with ease in Igbo.
Aside from his pastoral calling, Stanton was also a polyglot—fluent in Latin, French, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, and Italian. There was also Flemish: a language he adored but spoke imperfectly.
Given his dexterous flair, Stanton developed certain quirky theories about languages. One was that a language achieved its height of musicality when deployed in a fight. “The sad paradox of language,” he once wrote to a friend who was a fellow linguist, “is that men beat it, twist it, bend it to convey emotions of love. Yet, language displays its innermost archaism and flaunts the fullness of its odd beauty when at war. It’s at its sweetest, most natural eloquence when deployed at the pitch of battle. War, I daresay, brings out the best in poetry. Milton’s poetry proved it. Words at war embody the passion and pizzazz that love strains, at great cost and often futilely, to approach.”
“A wizard!” repeated the man. “That’s why he sees what he sees.”
From their facial countenances, Stanton could divine that a quarrel was brewing.
“But wizards see only at night,” a woman said.
Several eyes fixed her, filled with agitation and suspicion.
�
�How do you know?” challenged a woman.
“Only a witch would know how her kind see,” sneered a man.
“Your wives and mothers are witches!” the woman retorted, defiant.
Stanton, his face aglow, observed the quickening feud.
“Brothers and sisters!” shouted Jacob, borrowing Saint Paul’s chastening formula. His intervention dampened the escalating row. Stanton cast an angry glance at the interpreter, as one might a zany idiot, but Jacob remained oblivious of his master’s displeasure. “Why give yourselves stomachaches when I’m here? I know the things of the white man. I can explain everything to you.”
A few converts gave him doubtful looks, as if they regarded him as an impostor.
“If you know the white man as much as you claim, then tell us how come he can peer into a book and the book talks to him.”
“You must give me something before I break the secret,” Jacob demanded. “A mask doesn’t dance before it’s given what it eats.”
“If you think yourself to be a mask, you will eat shit!” hissed a burly man, the village carrier of Ijele, a grand, lavishly decorated masquerade. “Did you hear me? Shit is what we feed masks like you!”
“Easy, Nwafo,” cautioned an older man. “You’re a young man and your blood is too hot. A wise man doesn’t walk to a market and ask where he can buy a fight. How has the man wronged you? He said he knows what we want to know, but he won’t tell us until we deceive him with a little gift. Is that an offense? If a man asks for something and you don’t want to give it, tell him so. If the man said he was looking for shit to eat, then you would be right to send him where he can find enough to fill his belly—and more to take home to his wife. But why send the man to the bush when he didn’t ask for shit?” Having scolded Nwafo, the old man turned to the interpreter. “Don’t take offense at words spoken by a young man. I’ll take care of what your stomach will eat. If you know how the white man hears from the book, please tell us.”
