One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  Transfixed, he watches servants squeeze Suna’s assortment of sacs amidst tufts of hair. He also wants to touch and pull but Mother warns him that Suna is not a toy to be played with. A cow — especially a cow like Suna — should be treated with respect.

  “You must talk to her kindly, tell her what’s happening, why you need to do certain things.”

  Charles is finally allowed to milk her. He floats into the dim air of Suna’s underside brandishing a bowl with one hand and groping for her udder with the other. At last, he makes contact, pulls on her soft furry teat. “Be gentle,” warns Mother.

  “I love Suna,” he says. “Suna is my cow!”

  “Yes, Suna is your cow,” she reassures him. “But you must be still and calm around her or she will give no milk.”

  And when he looks deep into Suna’s big eyes, he sees that she, too, knows things very old and deep, things that never change. She knows about the green taste of grass and the blue sting of rain, about the flies at her nostrils and the sun burning her back, about dirt and tree trunks and deep snorting sounds, about smells in the air, about the magic way the oven in her body turns all these sensations into the rich white liquid that flows directly from his ancestors.

  Suna knows how she and Charles’ people began the world together. These tall graceful people of the cow. People who prize the milk of their cattle and all its products. People who help their cows make more milk, when the animals have difficulty, by playing tunes on the flute.

  When Charles looks at the deep folds in Suna’s neck he wants to make a song for her. Dance with her, for her.

  Was there really a time, wonders Charles, when Suna and his people truly lived as one, wandered together over the hillocky streams and swamps, stretching themselves in the fine grasslands, grazing under quiet clouds, moving toward water holes, with the slow tolling of bells?

  Within the fertile garden and busy compound of his parents’ home, Charles feels the ancient force. When he is with Suna. When he drums. When he dances.

  Charles watches his mother prepare for her spirit church — laying out the glistening white dress and turban in which she will sing and pray.

  “Luli, Luli, Luli,” she intones softly, her eyes looking far away.

  “What is Luli?” he asks.

  “It means the mercy of Jesus Christ,” she says. His mother’s wisdom glows in white.

  But the moment is shattered by the sound of excited voices and the roar of a car humming along the road. The whole village has quickened. Women stop their busy garden work. Men look up from the dim depths of the pavilion where they have been absorbed in a board game. Charles runs from his mother’s bright stillness to his front door. He peers through shadow into the dusty glare. The sunlight hurts his eyes. He is watching his father’s official car drive slowly through red dust towards them. As the vehicle slows to a stately pace, thick fumes spiral up behind it, demanding attention. Charles and Debra fight for the door, excited at the possibility of a visitor.

  The car stops a little distance from the house, in full view of the people so that everyone can witness the ceremonial disembarking of the guest. Kanyunya steps down first, his official robes billowing out around him. Then he turns and extends his arm courteously towards the seated figure, still somewhat obscured by the windscreen and swirls of dusty air. What uncoils slowly out of the vehicle is a long, lean being in a suit the colour of sun and a broad brimmed hat over shiny yellow hair. He is lavishly introduced to the assembled villagers as the District Commissioner. A man with skin the colour of elephant tusks and eyes like blue sky.

  Terrified, Charles and his sister immediately run off into the bush. As far as they are concerned, the most important man in the village has driven up with a ghost. A “white” man.

  Charles has had nightmares about such creatures, dreaming of death, dreaming that they will eat him if he’s bad, capture him if he leaves the house alone at night, if he fails to wash his feet before bed. The District Commissioner could well be the man-eating monster, Kitinda, in disguise, whose time had perhaps come for appeasement, who needs human flesh. Charles’ fantasies are now filled with pale blood-sucking demons, loose wet things of foul-smelling air and green eyes looming out of the night, attaching themselves to him, sucking out his life, draining his body’s colour, leaving a ghostly mist, an evil spirit who will relentlessly wander the village terrifying family and friends.

  “Of course you are afraid of white people,” says Father that evening. “They do strange things. Some come here to study our snakes. They don’t know enough to run from them as we do.” And everyone laughs. Kanyunya has safely deposited their visitor in the guest house.

  But the five-year old Charles puzzles over it all. Do white people not know about Magobwi, the snake demon? Have they not seen how chickens must be thrown to Magobwi in his great ravine down in the belly of the earth where he slides through the endless tunnels of his dark kingdom? Do they not know that when he is hungry, he can appear anywhere — at night when you are sleeping — and attack you? Magobwi moves below you everywhere. The very ground you walk trembles with him.

  Mother does not refute any of this. She merely adds her own practical observation. “Don’t be afraid; the Commissioner is only a man. He is staying here for a couple of days.”

  The next morning Father brings the District Commissioner into their house. The children have eaten breakfast and now kneel before him mumbling greetings. As the son of the household, Charles is pushed forward to touch his hand. The boy hesitates only a moment, seeing a snake looking hungrily out at him from behind the Commissioner’s blue eyes. Magobwi curled in yellow hair, ready to strike.

  Then the District Commissioner begins to speak in their own language. From his lips it sounds different but Charles recognizes what he is saying. Familiarity is a relief. The District Commissioner moves towards him, enthusiastically clasping the boy’s shoulders. “I understand you are a fine dancer,” he declares. Charles beams.

  The Commissioner eventually invites the children to feel his miraculous blonde hair, later taking them for a ride in his official car. Charles brings Samuel along as well, the two boys now achieving celebrity among their peers, connected to a white man who brings marvels and beneficence to the village, a wondrous figure from another world.

  By the time Charles is eight and Debra ten, Father has begun to take him into that other world. Proud of the son who looks more like him every day, Kanyunya wants him to know life beyond the village. These adventures are full of surprises for Charles, and they never cease to thrill him with their perilous hints of the unknown.

  One day Father announces Charles will go with him to the Catholic District. This pleases Kekinoni who wants her children exposed to Christian things. Her husband’s motives, however, have less to do with religion than bravado. He would like his son to see how far his influence extends, how he is received in other areas. He would like his son to know him as a benefactor, one whose wide fame reflects also upon his children. They will visit when the Bishop is there.

  Kanyunya knows what a picture they make on his grand motorbike. He and Charles pluming ochre dust as they speed by green plantations, roaring and laughing. Charles loves to feel the machine throbbing beneath them. It shudders through his whole body. It is the sound of energy, the sound of father and son. As they go, they are joined by children on bicycles, swirling out of the bush and pumping to keep up with them, ringing their rusty bells along the road.

  “Hujambo,” shouts out Father in Swahili. “How are you?”

  Some of the children shout back greetings. The women wave, beaming in their sun-splashed cottons. Father points at a flash of black and white plumage rising out of the dense bush. “A hornbill,” he says. And Charles giggles at its low cronk, thinking of Suna’s wail when she needs milking. He looks up and sees two grey parrots, gone before the sound of their rapid wing-beats leaves his ears.

 
Kanyunya and his son are welcomed with food and drink and dancing at every stop. “This is my partner,” Father says. “He is my official aide. I rely on his opinion.” There is laughter and Charles feels important.

  The women are particularly attentive at these stops. In their rain-cloud dresses, in their green-lake dresses, in their dresses scarlet as sunset, they come out to greet Kanyunya and his special son, offering sweets and soft drinks, beer and melon. For Charles, it is like having mothers wherever he goes, mothers who pet him and fuss over him. Mothers who always say without fail, “We love you Charles.” Then they look at Father with a little question in their eyes. Wordlessly he answers them and they leave, smiling.

  Several miles from their destination — from what Charles has called “the Catholic kingdom” — he spots a spire, glinting in the distance. “Father, look. A spear waving at us from the hill.”

  “It is the Catholic church, my son, and it is waiting for us.”

  Charles cannot contain his excitement. “It is not mother’s church, is it?” he asks.

  “Not at all. Hers is just an open porch where people go to speak with God.” Kanyunya knows he should not be talking like this to his son but he resents Kekinoni’s spirit church because it takes her away from him and makes her strange. Reports of her visions make him uncomfortable. Reports of people — mostly women — so overcome with rapture in their singing and swaying that they begin to speak in unknown tongues. It is witchcraft disguised as church-going.

  Into the church precinct wheels the delegation of two, just in time to join the official parade. Cars are honking and bands playing. There are decorations everywhere — Catholic decorations for the Bishop visiting from Kampala — bright yellow streamers, blue robes around the statue of the Virgin Mother, banners with strange words.

  What impresses Charles most, however, is the church itself, soaring and huge. “Why is it so big, Father?”

  “Because Catholics believe God needs a big house,” comes the reply.

  They are walking with the official party now up the front steps. As the Bishop enters softly into the gloom, an electric generator whirrs into action. Lights blaze up brightening every corner, every statue and picture, each gold leaf. “Did God do this?” Charles asks. “Is this all God’s?”

  “Of course,” whispers Father.

  The very floors make the young boy dizzy. They are tiled in colours and patterns, squares and triangles and curls. He sees leaves and flowers. A whole forest is growing beneath his feet. The chandeliers that bloom are clusters of stars dropped down from the sky, just for him.

  “God must be very rich and very powerful,” he says.

  With the other dignitaries, father and son proceed slowly up the aisle to a row of benches. Each is as beautiful as Father’s judging chair, carved and shiny. They sit with others who are dressed in their best. Men in suits and ties. Men in their finest kanzu attire. Women tottering on high heels, wearing short dresses with buttons and zippers. Women wearing the bright flowing colours of the Baganda he is now used to.

  “You see the congregation is very respectful,” says Father. “They believe you must always wear your most expensive clothes in God’s house.” Charles hears the solemnity of the word “congregation.” He understands its meaning: jewels and finery. Great celebration. God’s mansion.

  Holy pictures intrigue him, their figures in softly hued robes, their faces gentle and smiling or sad and serious, telling stories of Jesus and the kingdom of God. He has never seen anyone like the white people in these pictures. They move through their silent lives with a light that seems to come from another place. “Where do they live?” he asks.

  “In heaven. It is a place where very good people go when they die. They are saints.”

  “Will we go to heaven?”

  Charles looks at all the saints in the windows of the church, blue and gold against the sun.

  Suddenly, stern-looking men in long gowns of green and deep pink have begun to mutter strangely. They are swinging a large glittering lamp from which smoke puffs up around them.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They are priests and they are saying Mass.”

  “Where are the drums?” Is Omugabe coming?”

  “No drums!” Father smiles down at him. “No Omugabe. No Kabaka either.”

  After the service, Father and Charles walk over every inch of the church, accompanied by one of the white priests. About to leave, the priest gives the boy a little card, a picture of a serious-looking man with a grey beard. “Here, my son. Take this and keep it in a safe place.”

  When they are alone, Charles asks Father, “Who is this?”

  “St. Jude. He will be your personal guardian now, your helper.”

  Charles is unsure why he needs guardians and helpers. What could possibly be a danger to him? “Who is your guardian, Father?” he asks.

  “I think you are, Kiti. I think you are.”

  “Are you afraid of anything?”

  Kanyunya’s mind is a shield for Charles, a round silver shield.Shining. Blazing in the dark. It will help him grow strong.

  Father is regularly called in the middle of the night to “investigate” things. Charles cannot even imagine what this means, nor is he allowed to ask questions or speak in any way of these adult matters. But ethnic enmities are a continuing fact of life in Uganda. Raids into other villages. Attacks on farms. Often on government compounds. When Charles hears of such things, he thinks of dead animals, chickens with their necks wrung or their heads chopped off. He cannot yet connect such events to human beings.

  Sometime later, though, a black truck appears with a white Chief of Police, to inquire and make a report. One man has killed another. A jury will be selected. A trial. A sentence of death. His Father never disagrees with the verdict. And it is Father who must pronounce the death penalty. His own Father who smiles and waves at everyone, who kicks up dust and laughs with well-wishers. Father, the blustery force, sweeping in and out. Kanyunya, never leaving anything quite the same, like a strong wind that settles for a while on its own mountain, huffing and puffing before it whirls off again.

  By now Charles takes for granted their huge home. He is accustomed to its rules. He is not allowed into the guest area, a space kept immaculate with white bed covers and blue curtains for official visitors. Indeed the compound, surrounded by its woven reed fence, has grown to include a police station, a clubhouse, a nursery school, and a jail. Even a special room for the live-in guard.

  Charles spends a lot of time in the kitchen area at the back of the house. Opening into a shelter for the goats, it is a welcoming place with pungent smells. Here Charles and Samuel play among the millet bowls and water pots while Debra, engaged in helping with food preparation — shaping steaming mounds of millet into loaves between tin plates — constantly shoos them away from hot stones piled around the cooking fire. Charles laughs when it rains on the cooks stirring their large pots, dances through puddles and squeals as drops pelt bare skin, the cooks’ big wooden spoons working the hot mixtures rhythmically in the coolness that showers down.

  “Go and play with the goats you crazy boys,” says Debra, now pretending to be Mother. “The goats like you. Go and be their friend.” Charles and Samuel leave and then send one of the skittish animals careening among the serious business of meal-making while Debra yells again in protest.

  Charles knows from Debra that large sums of money are kept in the guard room extension of the house, in a steel wall safe with a combination lock. The money is watched over by a tall man with a ceremonial spear and a gun in his pocket. Soldiers and policemen intermittently come through the compound and take away the funds in an armoured truck. Only after a pick-up is there no guard. That is the day Debra and Mother sweep the room clean.

  Long wanting to investigate, Charles follows Debra and her broom, seeing for the first time that the room real
ly is quite bare — a bed, a chair, and a small red curtain covering a section of the wall. Charles introduces the room to Samuel and over several secret months they get to know its special character. Indeed they can recognize every guard but they do not understand why these men are always so nervous.

  “Why don’t other families have guards?” Charles wonders.

  “Because,” says Samuel disdainfully, “their fathers are not chiefs like yours.”

  Kanyunya is away overnight on official business when a sharp sound shatters the quiet night. Mother slips into their room, her face as stiff as a mask, her eyes wide and staring. The children make no sound. “Thieves,” she whispers. “If we are still, they will ignore us.” She huddles with them behind the bedroom curtain, looking out.

  Intruders are now inside their home. The guard cries out before a single shot silences him. Unable to open the safe, the outraged thieves charge through the house smashing anything in their path, frantic for someone who might know the combination.

  Kekinoni’s grip on her children is like iron. She holds them close. The three of them are trembling so violently Charles fears they will fly apart. She keeps them still, pushes back the whimpering that rises out of them.

  Fearing wholesale slaughter, Kekinoni suddenly jumps up, runs to the bedroom window and begins roaring for help. Chaos erupts. Husbands and brothers and sons living close by rush in, knives flashing, clubs flying.

  The compound runs blood. Bright and sticky, staining the ground, smelling like rust.

  For days, no one talks about it. Not even Father. Ultimately, every trace of carnage disappears. And from that night of knives, Charles knows the meaning of fear. A piece of his childhood sliced out.

  A piece of himself brutally taken.

  At school Debra is a model student but Charles remains a reluctant one. To him, school always smells of wet plaster and burnt candle wax. He hates sitting on the reed mats covering the hard mud floor just waiting for class to begin. He and Samuel are constantly in trouble for making jokes.