The Headhunter's Daughter

by Tamar Myers

  The question remained, however, of where to leave the girl for the night. All the jail cells were currently unoccupied, and although they were undoubtedly better than anything the girl had ever slept in, somehow it did not seem right. And since he couldn’t very well invite an unmarried white girl to stay with him, well, that left only one other solution as far as the young captain could see.

  “Amanda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have room for the girl here?”

  “Yes—but do you think she will stay?”

  “This is outrageous,” said Mr. Gorman. “This is a savage we’re talking about. She can’t stay inside—not with my daughter and wife here.”

  “Then perhaps your wife and daughter should sleep outside,” Amanda said.

  “Why you impudent little thing! I will be sending a telegram to the Mission Board in the States first thing in the morning in which I will be reporting your abominable behavior. I am sure that the Board will demand that you return on the very next plane.”

  Amanda blanched. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “I often speak before I think. It’s my worst habit; one that I pray that I outgrow. Please forgive me, Mr. Gorman. Mrs. Gorman. Peaches.” Mother and daughter nodded, but the father didn’t seem to have heard her.

  “Peaches can move in with Father and me,” Mrs. Gorman volunteered. “And we can shove the bureau in front of the door. I’m sure we’ll be just fine. But it’s you and Dorcas that I’m worried about.”

  “May the Lord guard my tongue,” Dorcas said. “We’re talking about a Mushilele girl—at most a Mushilele woman. She’s unarmed. She’s not an army of Amelekites, for Pete’s sake. She’s as afraid of us as we are of her—perhaps ten times more so. She isn’t going to come anywhere near us. No, the real question is, Where is her father going to spend the night?”

  “Her father?” Mrs. Gorman said. “Where on earth did he come from? I didn’t hear any planes land today.”

  “Don’t be daft,” Mr. Gorman said. “She’s referring to the native who came with her. That great big fellow just outside with the six-foot bow and the monkey-skin quiver full of arrows.”

  “He’s not really her father, is he?” Peaches said. “I mean, not really.”

  “Of course not, dear,” Mrs. Gorman said to her daughter. “Now run along, honey. I spotted a collection of Grace Livingston Hill novels in the living room this morning. Why don’t you pick one out and take it to my room?”

  “But Mother, you said those were trash—”

  “Now be a good girl and just do as I say.” The spoiled teenager stomped away in a huff, in total contrast to the poor but apparently calm Mushilele girl Pierre had found himself forced to bring in.

  Orders from the top aside, looking at her now in Amanda’s kitchen, it was clear to Pierre that this strange hybrid girl could not be anywhere else except for somewhere in the civilized world. It would have been morally wrong to leave a girl of her complexion, of her genetic heritage, to be raised by the Africans out in the bush. It just wasn’t done. Case closed. Besides, her very existence under these circumstances bespoke of a crime, and that, of course, had compelled him to act in the first place.

  Ugly Eyes could bear it no longer. She had done everything as Father had commanded her to do up until now. She had followed him in silence. She had climbed into the metal elephant, and when it bucked and roared into life, she closed her eyes and shivered, but she did not cry out. When the nighthawk flew in through the metal elephant’s eye and the silly foreign women screamed, even then Ugly Eyes had remained as silent as the striped antelope that haunts the forest shadows.

  But now it seemed that the Bula Matadi wished to separate her from her father. The young one, who had been gabbling at Ugly Eyes in her incomprehensible tongue, had grabbed one of the younger girl’s wrists and was attempting to pull her deeper into the strange house built of stone. This meant that Ugly Eyes could no longer see her father.

  Ugly Eyes felt her knees go weak. At the same time her heart began to pound between her ears, and she felt as if her body would burst out of her skin if she had to endure this feeling for one more second. Something had to happen; anything! So that’s why Ugly Eyes lunged forward and bit the younger Bula Matadi on the arm. She had no intention of eating her—or even just killing her—but something had to happen.

  The young Bula Matadi screamed and dropped Ugly Eyes’ wrist. Perhaps that might have been the end of the violence had not the old man—not the one with the gun—jumped into action and struck Ugly Eyes with the back of his hand. Hard. Hard enough to knock her across the large stone room. Then all the women screamed, and this time the young man—the one with the gun—hit the old man. Then there was silence, except for the deep breathing that comes with intense emotion and sudden exertion.

  At that point Ugly Eyes was grateful that Father heeded his own council and did not come inside and become part of the fray. Father could have—would have—killed everyone, even the young Bula Matadi with the gun. Only one person in Ugly Eyes’ village owned a gun; that was Born With One Fist Extended. He had built his own gun; having made it from memory preserved from his service in the Bula Matadi’s army. Born With One Fist Extended had actually managed to take down a she-buffalo with it by hitting her at the base of the skull where it meets the back of the ear. That was the occasion of a great feast, and was also the only time that Ugly Eyes could remember when her father’s position in the tribe had been threatened.

  Ugly Eyes struggled to stand before Father could see her lying on the floor. “You are very fortunate,” she told her onlookers. “Had this happened in our village, you would not live to tell your children about it.”

  She turned to the old man who had struck her, and took some small pleasure in the fact that now, under the younger man’s intense stare, he seemed to have drawn back into himself, like a chicken in a rainstorm.

  “You, old man,” she said, “have an especially large head. Your skull—after it has been cleaned thoroughly by ‘the ants that travel’ will make some lucky man a very nice drinking cup. It is so large that it will not have to be refilled. As for the rest of you—bah, you are a mixed bag at best. There is not one man in our village with an appetite so strong that he would take to the bed the most desirable of you. You are as white and ugly as the grubs that feed on logs that litter the forest floor. Truly you disgust me.”

  The Headhunter marveled at all that he saw that day. The Bula Matadi were a clever race to have produced such astonishing things—even if they did so on the backs of other peoples. A metal elephant! One could slice off as much meat as needed, yet the beast did not die. To the contrary.

  There was a secret location on the stomach where one could grab a strip of skin and pull. The stomach then opened wide and as many as three people could climb inside and be seated. Perhaps the most difficult thing to believe was the fact that somehow this man-made beast could be made to obey, to move along the Bula Matadi’s wide trail at the speed of a plunging eagle.

  With such a means of locomotion at their disposal, the Bashilele could relocate an entire village under the cover of one night! Never again would the Headhunter’s people have to live in fear of marauding tribes or vengeful Bula Matadi. Of course first one had to learn the ways of the white men and that would require a great deal of courage, for they were a strange, dangerous, and unpredictable people. But a people, nonetheless—of that he was sure, unlike some of the more ignorant members of his tribe. Ugly Eyes had taught him that. And as Ugly Eyes learned the ways of the Bula Matadi, she would teach them to him.

  Someday she might even take a Bula Matadi man as one of her husbands, and in the course of time bear that man children—yala! Would those children also be white? Perhaps so—although most likely not. Ugly Eyes had been living a long time with the Bashilele people, and she was one of them. Her whiteness was but a thin layer that did not extend down to her soul or to her woman parts; of that the Headhunter could be sure. In the meantime, why was he n
ot showing a father’s concern? Was he not afraid for Ugly Eyes? Was she not as much his daughter as if she had been born of his wife? These were silly questions to ease the mind; Ugly Eyes was not only his daughter, she was much more than that! Let it be known that Ugly Eyes was as brave as any son—and as clever as any two sons. Yes, let that be known.

  In the meantime—and this he had made very clear to his daughter—they were not to give the white man the satisfaction of knowing that anything he did, or said, had any effect on them, the representatives of the Bashilele people.

  In the end it was decided that father and daughter should be kept together temporarily in what used to be the woodshed (in the days before the Missionary Rest House was hooked into the boundless electricity supplied by the falls)—no matter how improper it might appear to Mr. and Mrs. Gorman to have a black man spend the night alone with a young, nubile white girl. Normally, this strange girl’s whereabouts would have been of no further concern to Cripple (given that she’d lied about speaking the Bushilele language)—but since the woodshed was where she kept the uniform that the white mamu now required her to wear, it was ordained that the two strong souls should meet again.

  “Aiyee!” Cripple cried upon opening the door to the woodshed the following morning. The white Mushilele girl was supine upon a very comfortable-looking sleeping pad on the cement floor, covered by a real blanket. She appeared to be alone; still, Cripple half expected the girl’s father to leap down from the rafters and lop off her head. She glanced up and was vastly reassured by the same cobwebs that had not seemed so friendly the day before.

  Meanwhile the girl jumped to her feet and was hastily attempting to dress in some of the real mamu’s clothes. Frankly, it was more than Cripple could bear. First the luxuriously soft sleeping pad, and now these rich clothes! Even Cripple had yet to be favored by any of the white woman’s castoffs.

  “What has this wretched creature done to deserve such favoritism?” she cried. “Anyone can be born with a sickly white skin. I too would have been born with such a hideous condition, had but I known the treasures that lay in store for one such as this.”

  “Then truly it is a shame that you did not listen to your mother’s womb,” one of the spiders in the rafters said. “I listened, and as you can see, I have been richly rewarded.”

  Cripple raised a clenched fist. “So now even you spiders mock me?”

  “Oh you silly Muluba woman,” said a voice closer at hand. “How much palm beer did you consume last night?”

  Cripple dropped her fist and stared at the white African. “If it were possible that you could understand me, I would not speak thus; I drank no beer last night, nor did a drop of honey wine pass my lips. I am not a betting woman, but if I were, I would bet the lives of my sister wife’s children that you spoke just now. For either that is the case, or I have crossed over to the land of departed souls and we are both dead.”

  The white girl clapped her hands and laughed. What impertinence that child showed!

  “We are neither of us dead, Mamu,” she said. “It is me, the wretched white creature that you tore from the bosom of her mother yesterday in the Bashilele village.”

  “Nonsense,” Cripple said. “You are speaking to me in Tshiluba, which is my own tongue, not yours. You would have no way of knowing my language.”

  “Mamu, how is it that you supposedly came to know my tongue?”

  “Well, I had a friend—but I lied.” Cripple’s ears burned with humiliation. “You overheard that conversation? Why did you not say something?”

  “Mamu, it was not my conversation.”

  “Tch, you are most annoying. So tell me then, from whom did you learn to speak like a civilized person?”

  “I learned to speak thus from my mother and father, Mamu. But I learned your tongue—this primitive tongue—known as Tshiluba, from my mother’s dear friend, Iron Sliver, who learned it from her mother.”

  Cripple’s legs felt exceptionally weak, even more tired than they had the day before after the long trek to and from the village. Without further ado—and really, as befit her rights as the elder of the two—she plopped down on the soft mat. My, but it really was soft. No wonder the whites were unable to perform their own work; they’d been pampered so much by their own inventions that they had lost the ability to do anything labor intensive. Indeed, it was a wonder that their arms could even lift a spoon.

  “Is your mother’s friend—this woman, Iron Sliver—is she a slave?”

  “Nasha, Mamu. But she was a slave until she married. She is the chief’s sister; they were both captured as children.”

  “Aiyee! If she is a free woman, why does not she leave?”

  The white creature smiled licentiously. “We have a saying, Mamu. Those who take a Mushilele husband will never leave the tribe of their own accord.”

  Cripple felt the urge to jump up and strike the child—along with the urge to laugh. Lacking the energy to do the former, she engaged in the latter. After all, the girl was sporting breasts; true, they were not the round, full breasts of a woman, but mabele nonetheless. She would understand soon enough what this loose talk was all about, if she did not already.

  “Do your parents also speak my language, strange white one?” she asked.

  “Of course they do!”

  “Kah!”

  “Your surprise baffles me, Mamu. Your unpleasant language—which frankly grates on my ears like the noise of so many crickets—is the dominant language of this region of the Congo. Therefore a great many in our village have gone to the trouble of learning it because someday it might become useful for our survival.”

  “But yesterday neither you nor your father seemed to understand a word of it! And it does not grate on your ears.”

  “Yesterday I obeyed my father; today he is not here, as you can see. By the way, I have a name, and it is not ‘Strange White One.’ ”

  Cripple lay back upon the mat. How soft and welcoming it was. How gently it cradled her twisted frame. With this for a bed, she could sleep like a kitten and wake each morning with a smile on her face.

  “I suppose you wish to tell me what your name is,” Cripple said.

  “My name is Ugly Eyes.”

  “Kah!” Cripple sat. “That cannot be!”

  “Eyo, it is exactly so, just as your name is Cripple.”

  “How did you know thus?” Cripple demanded.

  “So you were called yesterday,” Ugly Eyes said.

  “Mesu Mabi is the name of the white woman who brought you here. It is for her that I work—”

  “You are her slave?”

  “Aiyee!” Cripple struggled to her feet. “You are an ignorant child; you have so much to learn. Who will teach you the Bula Matadi’s ways?”

  “My father says that perhaps it is the spirits of my white ancestors who have come to claim me. They will see to it that I learn the Bula Matadi’s ways. To that end, is it not possible that this woman who shares my name wishes also to be my teacher?”

  Cripple shook her head in wonder. “You are indeed a strange person, Ugly Eyes, for you have the look of one who is young, but the tongue of one who has survived for many years. Tell me the truth, child; where did you come from? Are you the product of a powerful witch doctor’s curse?”

  “There are those who believe this is so, and there are those who believe that I am nothing more than the abandoned offspring of the Bula Matadi. At any rate, I was found in the forest, as an infant, by the older son—now dead—of my beloved mother and father.”

  “Ah. How old are you now, child? Do you know?”

  “Nasha.”

  “Have you begun to bleed?”

  “Nasha. But my mother says the time is very near.”

  “She is right,” Cripple said. “A mother knows these things. Now back to your name—what do you think of Ugly Skin as your new name? For you must admit, your skin is hideous to the extreme.”

  “Kah! I think Ugly Skin is a horrible name,” the girl said, “and
it does not fit my skin at all. The answer is no; I will not change it. You cannot force me. The Bula Matadi cannot force me.”

  Now this was a girl who could go far. She was brave, she was headstrong, and she had a powerful self-image; something Cripple had never been privileged to possess. Surely she would make a powerful ally. Possibly even a friend—if one could truly get to the bottom of who she was.

  “Why is it that your father—this head-hunting savage—wished to keep secret the fact that you speak my civilized tongue?”

  The girl had the effrontery to clench her fists as she spoke. “I will remain calm before the Bula Matadi, so that I might learn their ways, but you, you Muluba forest monkey, I do not have to act thusly with you.”

  “Aiyee! Let it be known that this creature has feelings,” Cripple said. She was doing her best to act cavalier, while instead she felt guilty for making the girl feel bad. What’s more, she felt inexplicably maternal.

  “I am a person,” the girl said simply.

  “And so you are,” Cripple said. She smiled at the girl for the first time.

  The girl returned the slightest of smiles. “My father believes that I will learn many additional things if it is believed that I do not understand Tshiluba which, as you know, is the main trade language of this region.”

  “Your father is right,” Cripple said, without a hint of sarcasm. “Come, let us go greet the mamu, whose name is also Ugly Eyes. But do not be afraid, strange one, for I will remain at your side, and I will not give away your secret.”

  Chapter Nine

  Amanda saw Cripple enter the woodshed to get her uniform. She would have called out to stop her if it would have done any good. But the woodshed—which was really a rather tidy little brick building with a galvanized iron roof—was set well back from the main house, and therefore well back from Amanda’s bedroom. And then there was the noise of the falls. It would have been a waste of breath.