Black Mamba Boy

by Nadifa Mohamed

  I would rather die, thought Jama. He was in a belligerent mood, a Shidane mood, his patience and optimism exhausted.

  “You Ajis always think everything is owed to you.”

  “What?”

  “Deep down, you’re surprised when things don’t fall into your lap,” Liban persisted.

  “You don’t know what I’ve been through, Liban, nothing has ever fallen into my lap!”

  “It has, think about it. You have a strong clan behind you, someone wherever you go will give you food and water, will think you’re important enough to milk their camels for.”

  “Liban, shut up, what camels are you talking about? From the age of six I slept on the streets in Aden with any passing maniac liable to drop a rock on my head. You had a father watching over you, a mother, sisters, cousins.”

  Liban stared at Jama, lightning in his eyes. “Yes, I had a father, a father who could only watch as my mother was beaten up by an Aji, for a goatskin of water she had walked miles for!”

  “Ooleh! Shut up, you two!” yelled the bus driver. Liban moved clumsily to a seat at the back of the bus.

  “Suit yourself,” yelled Jama.

  Sarafand was a town holding its breath; within a year it would be a ghost town, with stray dogs sleeping on mattresses and storing bones in the deserted kitchens. If only a place could speak, or howl, or bark a warning. In May 1947 the women of Sarafand collected olives, gave birth, drew water from the well, and arranged marriages as they had done for centuries on their native soil, the soil in which their mothers, fathers, and stillborn infants were held. But Sarafand held a secret. After the harvest and winter rains, a rolling black barrel filled with explosives and fuel would trundle along the main dirt path and stop outside the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse for strangers. After the blast, Jewish men would come with machine guns and order everyone to leave, destroying the old mudbrick homes with grenades.

  The sprawling British garrison was the only clue to the coming devastation. Jama and Liban waited sullenly outside this garrison for the Somali askaris that Samatar had described to them. “I’m sorry that happened to your mother,” Jama finally said.

  “I shouldn’t have shouted at you, brother.” Liban held out his hand. Jama took it and shook it hard.

  They spotted the askaris late in the afternoon, three Somali men in their thirties and forties in tidy uniforms. The askaris knew the procedure; they each gave a pound to the boys, and Jama’s clansman walked them to where the other Somali worked. The clansman’s name was Jeylani, and like the others he repaired shoes, holsters, and other leather goods for the British soldiers; he was a former nomad who had acquiesced to this unclean but profitable work. Jeylani had been taught to work leather by Mahmoud, the Yibir man they were about to meet.

  Jeylani was not impressed by Jama and Liban’s escapades. “Go home, boys. You look intelligent, I know you speak good Arabic, but don’t waste your lives being pushed around in Arab lands. Go home, there is nothing for you here, there is going to be nothing but violence. My advice is to head into Jordan, then Arabia, do your pilgrimages and then get a boat home. Every week I see boys like you fleeing from God knows what.”

  Jama listened carefully to what their elder was saying and nodded in agreement, but Liban walked on ahead with his wide, optimistic strides, certain that he would never return to Somaliland a poor man. Mahmoud was a gentle, thin man with deep wrinkles across his forehead, who poured tea for them and asked how they had found him. He smiled knowingly at mention of Musa the Drunk, and was quick to give his share of the langaad, tipping Liban with an extra pound as Jeylani had done with Jama.

  Mahmoud took a deep breath and said bismillah before biting into a slab of bread and meat. “I was just telling these boys to go home, to stop wasting their time here,” Jeylani said.

  Mahmoud waggled his head. “Oh, they won’t stop until they have tried and exhausted their luck. I didn’t either, only after the seventh failed attempt to cross to Port Said did I give up.” Mahmoud laughed. “Each time I walk, they pick me up, I walk, they pick me up; my feet were cut to shreds!” he said, lifting up his black army boots. “If you two are desperate to get to Egypt and have better luck than me, I will tell you everything I know, no one knows that route better than me.”

  Then Mahmoud began a finely nuanced recital of roads that led to Egypt, referring to an internal map that included humps in the sand, electricity pylons, noteworthy bird’s nests, forks in sandy paths, and shallow marshes in the Red Sea. So detailed, in fact, that Jama and Liban had to ask him to repeat everything from the beginning; they could not read or write but they memorized everything with a skill found only in the illiterate. He ordered Jama and Liban to follow the coastline of Palestine during the day and sleep in villages at night, and to avoid any wealthy areas.

  With the few pounds they had collected in their pockets, they left Sarafand and began to walk. Jama was still tempted to turn in the opposite direction and go to Jordan and then Mecca to perform the hajj, but Liban would not hear of it, and deep down Jama was frightened of going alone. Only later in life do we see the tugs of fate with clear eyes, the minute delays that lead to terrible loss, the unconscious decisions that make our lives worth living; fate told Jama to head west to Egypt, and he listened.

  The Palestinians they came across were not recognizable from the portrait of irascible bigots that Joe Louis had painted. Each night Jama and Liban turned inland and went to the nearest village, and each night they were accepted and led to the beyt al-deef, the guesthouse that every village, however poor or remote, maintained. The hospitality was usually brisk and businesslike but very generous; every household brought something: bread, water, meat, eggs, milk, fruit, dates, rugs and blankets. No questions were asked of the strange boys and no one reported their presence to the police, they treated Jama and Liban as otherwordly spirits who would report their compassion or meanness to a higher authority. The lingering awkwardness between them following their argument on the bus dissipated in the comfort they found in the beyt al-deef. They talked late into the night under the goat-hair blankets. Liban told Jama that he had six older sisters, that his parents were musicians, and that he had served in Eritrea but had avoided the battles; if he weren’t Yibir his life would have been enviable. The journey to the Egyptian border was almost fun. The long day’s walking gave them a purpose and they competed to see who could go faster, while at night they relaxed and enjoyed the grilled lamb and rice. Near Khan Yunis, they stopped to rest at a village and found a wedding in full flow, and the guesthouse occupied by a band armed with ney, darbucka, oud, and kanun. They hovered at the entrance, listening to the songs, until the singer beckoned to them to sit down and they crept in. The music thumped at the walls and glided over them and out through the window. After a large meal of mansaf, the men went out to perform the dabke, twirling handkerchiefs over their heads. The musicians whipped the guests into a frenzy, the beats on the darbucka working faster and faster, until Jama and Liban lost all shyness and added their feet to the dancing centipede. Unlike in Somaliland and Eritrea, the Muslim men and women here celebrated separately, but the chants and piercing ululations of the women could clearly be heard even when the men began to tire and drift away. When the bride arrived, she was a sight to behold, seated sideways on a white horse, her head covered by a shawl twinkling with coins, her proud mother, aunts, and sisters flanking her in gorgeous dresses. Bethlehem would have looked so beautiful in those clothes, thought Jama, regretting his own rushed wedding. The bride took all attention away from the musicians and only then did they quieten down, playing delicate wedding songs as Jama and Liban laid out their rugs under the stars.

  They walked beyond Khan Yunis, and a few hours later crossed the border into Egypt. On the outskirts of Al-‘Arish, they waded far into the Mediterranean to scrub their filthy bodies, and had a quick snooze under a palm tree. They chased each other to Romani, and were delighted to find there the pylons that Mahmoud had described. It was the last ou
tpost of civilization; there were no more villages to sleep or be fed in until they crossed the Suez Canal. By the sea at Romani, they nervously approached a group of fishermen resting around a fire, pushing each other to speak to them. Jama asked for any leftovers they might have but the fishermen gesticulated to the empty bowls and fish bones. One man passed over his bowl and Jama handed the tiny handful of rice to Liban, expecting another bowl to be forthcoming, but there wasn’t, and within a few seconds Liban had wolfed it all down. Jama would have kicked Liban if the fishermen weren’t watching, but they laughed at the choked-down annoyance in his face. They passed fresh water to Jama, and he drank enough to fill out his stomach before handing it to Liban.

  “Where you boys from?” they asked.

  “We’re Egyptian. We wanted to find work in Palestine but the police told us to go back, so we’re walking to Port Said,” Liban lied, afraid they would alert the beret-wearing Egyptian police camel corps.

  From Romani to Port Said was the deadliest, most treacherous part of the journey, forty miles of sand dunes and lifeless rock. There was just sea on one side and murderous desert on the other. They would not be able to find food or water, and if they were caught by the midday sun or the camel corps, they were finished. Mahmoud had warned that Somali skeletons lay on that stretch of sand, and it was the most perilous journey of all the journeys in Jama’s life. Liban and Jama decided to rest hidden in the sand until sunset so that they could travel in the cool night and evade the police patrols. Sunset came and they scuttled out of the sandbank like crabs, the moon lighting the way forward and the crash of waves applauding their progress. It was too dangerous to enter Romani and buy food and water, and they would lose precious hours of darkness, so they decided to struggle on until Port Said. The beyt al-deefs had lulled them into dangerous nonchalance but now they felt superhuman, too defiant to think about turning back.

  Jama turned to Liban and said, “If I can’t walk with you, don’t wait. And if you can’t walk, I won’t wait for you, I’ll go on so at least one of us can survive.” They shook hands and carried on side by side.

  Neither fell back, their desire and hunger were too strong, their paces identical, unstoppable. In sixteen hours they walked more than forty miles, they resembled two slivers of soul light more than men made of flesh and blood. They broke the tenets of human survival: dehydrated, starved, exhausted, they did not stop, they would not stop until they got to Port Said. The land began to fragment into reedy marshes as they reached the end of the Sinai. Jama and Liban held on to each other when they saw how close they were to their promised land, the white light of the Port Said lighthouse calling them in.

  A salt lake yawned between them and Port Fuad. Mahmoud had told them it was too deep to cross except at one point, where the pylons were planted on each bank. Mahmoud’s memory was photographic, and as he had said, the water between the pylons was shallow and thick with salt. They waded slowly across, both frightened of the water, which reached above their waists. Jama crossed the Red Sea with his father’s battered suitcase held up over his head and his heart in his mouth. They reached the other bank panting with relief and excitement, they had performed a feat of human endurance, but the Nubian man shouting “Hey, Hey!” and running at them with a stick had no concern for that. The Nubian chased Jama and Liban, caught the weak men in his strong hands, put them in a car, and drove them to a nearby villa.

  He went and told the manager that he had found two layabouts crossing his water, but the man was in no mood for action, his hair was stood up, sleep in his eyes. “I don’t give a damn about them, look at the time! Don’t wake me up again, you fool.”

  The Nubian sheepishly led them out of the villa. “You want to buy me tea?” he asked audaciously, but they were so happy to be let loose that they agreed.

  The last task was to cross the Suez Canal to Port Said, and with the money given by the Sarafand men, they bought two boat tickets for two pounds. They boarded the ferry, and Jama scanned furtively around for undercover policemen, moving with solemn poise to a secluded bench. The sun appeared from behind the one scrappy cloud in the sky, and its spilled rays lit up the lateen sails of the feluccas as they skated between the clumsy cargo ships. On either side of the canal were fishing villages crowded under giant palms, and beyond them telegraph poles stretched into the distance, holding hands.

  “Mahmoud said we leave the ferry at exit gate ten for the garden, didn’t he?” checked Jama.

  “Yes,” guessed Liban. All they knew was to head for a garden where there was a tea shop frequented by Somalis.

  “We’ll sit apart in case one of us gets caught,” ordered Jama as the boat started its engine. He sat next to a bedu and made small talk to calm his nerves.

  “This is gate ten,” said the bedu man at last, and Jama signaled to Liban, bade the bedu a safe journey, and disembarked. Liban wanted to rest on a park bench but Jama was unable to stop, he was a bloodhound with a scent, and he led Liban out of the garden and finally to the teahouse.

  “Oh God, it cannot be, you little hoodlums!” the crowd shouted as they caught sight of Jama and Liban. Jama looked around as if in a daze and saw all the boys he had met outside Rafah, the ones who had told him to go to Sarafand in the first place. They had made the same journey across Palestine a week earlier and were still recuperating. “Tell them the news, then,” said Gaani, his face full of mischief.

  “The tea shop owner has some bad news for you,” said Keynaan gravely.

  Jama’s knees buckled. “What?” he whispered.

  “I had two customers here from Alexandria, they had just picked up their passports and saw two other names on the list. I’m sorry to say both your passports have arrived and are waiting for you in Alexandria,” the chai-wallah boomed. “The luck some people have!”

  The men picked them up and threw them into the air, cheering and singing.

  Jama and Liban held hands over the men’s heads and shook with hunger and happiness. They knew they might now make something of their lives. The chai-wallah, the only man there with any money, opened the leather pouch hanging from his belt and gave Jama and Liban eight shillings each to buy return tickets to Alexandria. They collapsed onto his dirty kitchen floor and slept for many, many hours before venturing to the train station.

  _______

  NAME: Jama Guure Mohamed

  DATE OF BIRTH: 1/1/1925

  EYES: Brown

  HAIR: Black

  COMPLEXION: Man Of Colour

  NATIONALITY: British

  PLACE OF BIRTH: Hargeisa, British Somaliland

  This thin description of Jama in the dark green passport was all that the Western world needed to know about him; he was a subject of the British Empire. The passport determined where he could go and where he couldn’t, the ports where his cheap labor would be welcome and the ports where it would not. In Alexandria, Liban and Jama were constantly asked by the other Somali boys to show their precious passports. The documents were passed around in awed silence. Jealous boys leafed through the pretty watermarked pages and fingered the embossed lion and unicorn on the covers, stared at the black-and-white snapshots, scrutinized the cross that Jama had made as his signature, wondered if they could do it better.

  “You’re going to become Fortune Men,” “No more jail for you,” “Sell it to me,” they said before handing the passports back.

  Liban and Jama were now gentlemen; all they needed was a job to enter the richest caste of Somali society. Stoking the boilers of steamships could earn them in a week more than they had lived on in a year. They headed back to Port Said on their return tickets, where the British Shipping Federation officers recruited new sailors. Liban sat back in his seat, smiling at the villages and towns running past the train, confident that the British consulate would now save them from harassment. Neither Jama nor Liban knew anyone in Port Said but they expected to turn up and find a ship ready to take them aboard. The reality would turn out that way for one of them but not the other.r />
  Liban and Jama found lodgings with other prospective sailors, and the word was sent out that they were looking for work. A Somali elder who had remained in Port Said after losing an arm aboard a British ship was the local headhunter, spending his days arranging work for clansmen. As Ambaro’s clansman rather than Guure’s, the Somali elder was not compelled to help Jama, but he called him in for an audience. Liban was less fortunate, as he was the only Yibir in all of Port Said, and with scarce work for Aji Somalis, he was locked out of the old nomad’s network. As Jama was shuttled from one meeting to another, Liban was left to wander around the docks, looking for work as a stevedore or panhandling for food. With a useless passport in his pocket, he thought of the walk from Romani with growing bitterness as a failed escape from a family curse. The Somali elder had found an Eidegalle sailor on a British ship sailing to Haifa, and the sailor was sure that with a certain kind of sweetening, the captain would take Jama as part of the crew. The elder arranged a collection and raised five pounds from Jama’s clan, and this was smuggled to the ship’s captain, who then signed Jama on as a fireman. Within sixteen days of collecting their passports from Alexandria, Jama had his first navy job and Liban was wondering where else in the world he could go.

  Jama gave Liban all the money he had before departing for the ship. “When I come back, brother, I’ll help you find a job.”

  Liban nodded as if he believed him and embraced Jama in his new shirt and trousers. “Take care of yourself,” said Liban, hiding his envy and sadness.

  Their goodbye was protracted and uncomfortable; Jama kept trying to reassure Liban. “Who knows! Maybe when I get back you’ll be away working.”

  “Go, man, don’t keep him waiting,” said Liban finally.

  Jama’s clansman walked him to the ship that had taken nearly a year of his life to reach. She was a leviathan, the tallest, longest, greatest thing he had ever seen, stretching like a steel town along the canal, black hull bobbing gently in the water. Jama pointed at the meter-high white letters near the prow and Abdullahi read them for him: “Runnymede Park, London.”