Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “I’m sorry,” he said, coming into the room. He sat down next to her, and folded his hands tightly between his knees.

  “She’s better,” Lily said.

  “She doesn’t sound better.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, she does.”

  “I hate it.”

  “I think we’ve established that, Dom. She’s not having any fun, either.”

  He seemed surprised, straightening a little, frowning. “I mean I hate it that she’s having to go through this.”

  “It’s a little flu,” Lily said. “She’ll be all right.”

  “People have died of flu, Lily. Lots of them. Millions.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, nobody’s dying.”

  He said “Forgive me. I’m scared—okay? Please.”

  It occurred to Lily that he had merely expressed out loud her own fears in this bad, long, ominous-feeling night.

  He stood and began to pace. “Violet’s in another world,” he said.

  “She’s the one we have to worry about,” Lily told him.

  This turned out to be true. Mary was markedly better in the morning, and improved rapidly from then on. Violet’s flu turned to pneumonia, and she had to be hospitalized. Manny was beside himself. He didn’t sleep, and in the few hours he was home, he couldn’t sit still. He moved from room to room, ashen-faced, nursing his fear. His mind kept running ahead, and he would stop and gaze at one of Aunt Violet’s statues of the Virgin and begin to quail and sob.

  Because the baby had so recently been ill, they couldn’t take her out, so Lily stayed behind in the house when the two men drove to the hospital to be with Violet. The vigil over the old woman was therefore all going on at a remove from Lily, who received progress reports each day like bulletins from another part of the same battlefield. By this time, she herself was down with flu—a mild case, headache and cough and fever. But there was the baby to care for, and she couldn’t rest or do anything to doctor herself.

  It wasn’t until the week of Thanksgiving that Violet came home.

  Her improvement had been so slow and she was so frail that secondary problems developed, all of which required more time in the hospital, and occasioned more agonized imaginings and suppositions by poor Manny, who could not be calmed or comforted. Dominic told Lily that on several nights he simply held the other man, that they were like two children huddled against the blast of a terrible storm.

  Thanksgiving was quiet. Manny brought home a cooked turkey breast from Central Grocery, and Dominic put the dinner together—boiled noodles and gravy, canned string beans and cranberry sauce. Nobody had much appetite. Aunt Violet said the prayer, a simple “Thank you,” her gaze lifting slightly to the high, carved ceiling.

  Dominic cut the turkey. They were all coughing now, the tail end of the siege, as Violet called it. The color had come back to her face, and when Mary grew fussy, she brushed one thin finger gingerly across the left side of the small round face and said, “Look at the bounce in that cheek. This child is healthy again. You can always tell by the bounce in the cheek.”

  After dinner, they sat in the living room for a couple of hours, but no one felt much like talk. Aunt Violet put the little portable television on and watched a movie. Dominic read; Manny napped. Lily helped the baby move from one area of the room to the other—Mary was beginning to want to take steps. Lily stood her up, and walked with her gently across the living room floor and back again. The others watched.

  “I’m scared,” Aunt Violet said suddenly. “Oh, Lord, am I scared.”

  They all gazed at her.

  “Tell us,” Dominic said.

  “Nothing to tell. I just had this awful scare come over me.”

  “Can I get you something?” Lily asked.

  Violet shook her head.

  “What are you afraid of?” Manny said.

  Violet turned to him. “Don’t be an idiot, cher.”

  Lily bent down, lifted Mary, and held her, feeling the cloud of worry about Violet, but reveling in the coolness of the little forehead, the arms.

  “Your name is Lily,” Violet said to her.

  Lily nodded.

  “I couldn’t remember it for the life of me.”

  “You’ve been sick,” Lily told her.

  “Couldn’t call it up. I was watching you and the baby and I couldn’t remember your name to save my soul.”

  “I get that sometimes,” Manny said.

  “Not this, cher. Not like this.”

  They were all quiet for a moment.

  “Hold my hand,” Violet said, reaching for Lily.

  Lily moved to the chair next to her, sat down, with Mary on one knee, and took the extended aged slender hand. The fingers were surprisingly warm. “Better?” Lily said.

  Violet smiled. “No. But I can withstand it now.”

  PART• 6

  The Shores of Home

  TWENTY-THREE

  1

  THE RIVER OF LOST SOULS, the early missionaries called it. They used this great equatorial river to travel inland, where violence and fever and death awaited them among the exotic peoples they saw as benighted and in need of the word of Christ. They brought it with them, possessed of the hopes of zealotry, the bravery and belief of their time and place: they were fishers of men, as the words of Jesus had called the apostles to be. But along with their zeal and their goodwill they brought European varieties of sickness that hadn’t reached this part of the world. A place that, aside from a few tentative and then rather quickly forgotten incursions of the Portuguese—who named the area (they called it Gabao, which translates as “hooded cape”)—had been free of any other influence for centuries. With the new influx of Europeans, whole tribes were decimated by illnesses that barely affected the white visitors; conversely, there were sicknesses in this tropical tangle that no European had been exposed to, and many of them died as well.

  With few exceptions, the Europeans also brought an unwillingness to understand the people they were giving everything of themselves to save, or serve. They found the Africans repugnant and considered them inferior. The misunderstandings were of course reciprocal, and in all too many instances, disastrous. Back in the 1860s, when Mary was a little girl, traders began using the river, building way stations for the traffic in palm oil, ivory, and rubber; and for transporting rum and guns and powder, beads and charms and calico to the natives upriver, although there had been one kind of trade or another going on up and down its banks long before Europeans found their way here—longer still before the French expeditions, led by the explorer Brazza, came in conquest, back in 1880.

  The Ogowe courses from the Congo Plateau more than seven hundred miles to the Atlantic. Three major tributaries lead into it. In recent years a tribe has begun to displace other tribes on the river, coming from the uncharted—at least by Europeans, and by this time most Europeanized Africans—lands north and east of the Ogowe. These are the Fang, or Fan, and everyone fears them. They are purported to be cannibals (the word itself, Mary knows from her father’s papers and from her reading, comes from the Caribbean, and is the bastardized form of the word Caribel, used by the people of that region of the world whose custom was the partaking of human flesh). The few Fan that Mary has seen in her travels seem more directly dignified and powerful than other Africans, even though these also have been, to some extent, Europeanized. It seems to her that she can only really study the beliefs of these people by going among them where they have not yet been exposed so much to Europeans, and the European influence.

  She’s staying at the governor’s house in Calabar, with Lady MacDonald. There is an epidemic of typhoid, and so her services have been required—long nights of sitting with delirious men and women and children. Even in exhaustion, she stands at a window overlooking the town, where for days she has been nursing these patients and in many cases helping them die, and thinks about getting away, going south to the Gabon, and the great river. She imagines finding her way to the country of the Fang, and wa
lking among them, new.

  2

  July 19, 1895

  I’ve written several brave letters home, and have managed to sound in good spirits, intrepid and entirely free of dire imaginings. Nothing, no amount of reading, could have prepared me for the harshness of the life all around me here, and nothing could have forearmed me as a witness to the failures of the various systems of European supervision of these lands and these divided tribes. I have had to use all my powers of persuasion to get the official governments to allow me to progress at all, and in each instance, even with the help of people like Captain Murray and the MacDonalds, I have had to deplete my already depleted funds to gain what little access I have been able to accomplish. First, I had to go through this typhoid crisis in Calabar, and there was a terrible outbreak of violence in the neighboring town of Brass, so Lord MacDonald’s presence there was required. He left shortly after Lady Mac and I arrived. The violence has to do with conflict between independent traders, or “middle men” as we have called them, and George Goldie’s Royal Niger Trading Company. Goldie’s men had been preventing the middle men of Brass to trade on the Niger, and a smallpox epidemic broke out. The Brassmen, starving and sick and unable to support themselves except by trade, and prevented from doing so by the Royal Niger Trading Company, sacked the company headquarters in Akassa and put everyone to the sword. Lord MacDonald is off to find some solution, and is of course at odds with George Goldie, whose company men and women were so terribly slaughtered and, in some cases, eaten. I’m fond of both men. I would like to get out and away from all of this, since I can’t involve myself one way or another. Poor Ethel tries to be effective here, but cannot understand my fascination with the people, and continually finds fault with me for my language. It is all friendly; even to some extent meant as good-natured teasing. I have for some time had the habit—I may even have gotten it as far back as Cambridge—of using the Lord’s name in vain. What is worse, according to Ethel, is my use of the term Allah as an expression of emphasis or alarm. I have, it seems to me, used both for some time: Jesus, and Allah, in the same way—both as a prayer, and an exclamation. Ethel finds this upsetting, and so along with curbing my urge to wander about and see what I can see, I am forced to watch my tongue, like a child in church.

  Here in Calabar, I have made the acquaintance of a woman the natives call The Mother of All the Peoples. Mary Slessor has been in Africa for twenty years and is a fine woman. We spent several evenings together, talking of this country and its people. She knows them well. There will be more to tell you about her, I’m sure. For the present, I’m dazzled, and I have the gift of being able to make her laugh. She’s the only person I have spoken to directly about my plans to leave the Europeanized areas of the country and see these people in a purer state.

  Very soon now, I am going to have the men and the wherewithal to start on a journey up the Ogowe River. And the country of the much-feared tribes of the interior. We’ll go beyond the trade routes, though we intend to trade. There is no reason to believe we can’t do that in any part of this astonishingly extreme continent. I am going to the heart of Gabon.

  Toward the end of June, she hires four Ajoumbas (also called Ajimbas, and Ajumbas) to go with her to explore the lower part of the Ogowe River (also called the Ogooue, and the Ogawe). She is finding out that names of places, and things, and even of people are spelled and often even pronounced differently, depending on where she is and who she’s with. The four Ajoumbas have names so similar-sounding in their language that she dubs them according to their features: Gray Shirt is the leader of them. The others are: Singlet, for the English jersey undershirt he wears and for his Irish accent and manner; Pagan, who is blacker than the others, the deepest blue-black, with wide whites in his eyes and black round irises that look like glossy stones; and finally a thin, elderly man she first calls the Earl of Kent, but then, noting the worry in his features at the many syllables, decides simply to call Silent. The names please them; it is as if she has shown them some sign of her admiration and respect for them. Gray Shirt and Singlet are Christians; Pagan and Silent are fervent believers in witchcraft and magic.

  They depart in a long canoe, with Mary seated in the center and two men each in front and in back of her. In the bottom of the canoe is her portmanteau and several bags of goods to trade. She is wearing the usual dark dress, with high collar, and long sleeves, and white lace on the cuffs. She sits erect in the canoe and observes the changing splendors of the banks on either side: colors inside colors, the richest jade hues, limned with gold that looks as though it could have dropped intact from the blazing sun that comes brokenly through the thick branches overhead. Her anxieties and her impatience have begun to wear off. All the sounds of the bush come to her like warnings of their advance along the glassy brown surface. She breathes the odor of the men—a strong, pungent smell that exhilarates her, as does the redolence of mangrove marsh and the dung of crocodiles on either side, mingled with the heavy fragrance of wildflowers whose lavender heads angle out from the banks like soft bells caught in the act of swinging.

  They stop at the village of Arevooma, the home of Gray Shirt, who insists that she stay in his house. The house has a veranda, and is comfortably appointed: there are chairs and a small table, and a calico tablecloth. She drinks tea here, masked from the other members of the tribe by another calico cloth—a courtesy that Gray Shirt extends to her. Before her tea is done, to her surprise, a man she had briefly known in Calabar shows up. This is a Christian convert named Ndaka, who has come to attend to the affairs of his dead brother. Ndaka is an heroically ugly man, with jagged teeth and the braided scars of fetish, and his features are so bulbous and unmatched as to suggest that his face was put together from several others. Yet she remembers that she liked him in Calabar, that he was very helpful during the epidemic. He has come to Gray Shirt’s house with a lantern to fetch her for the service he intends to say over the body of his brother, who, he informs her, with a small, sad, disapproving frown, was a pagan. It has taken all his powers of persuasion to convince the other members of his family not to treat the brother’s death as an element of having been witched, but to allow Ndaka to perform a Christian service over him.

  She has a broiling headache, and is worried that she’s in for a bout of West Coast fever, but she accompanies him. The service is held in front of the brother’s house, and the lanterns draw thousands of biting and stinging insects. The Mpongwe and Igalwa sing English hymns, loudly, in a more terribly pitched screech than anyone in an English church ever heard, High Church hymns, while the gathered crowd slaps at insects and moves with increasing discomfort in the bug-clouded light.

  At last, she is led by Ndaka into the brother’s house, which is even more magnificent than Gray Shirt’s. There’s a plaited bamboo floor that seems to give slightly with one’s weight, and she crosses it with an increasing sensation that she’s about to fall through. Having already experienced this before in Africa, she says to Ndaka:

  —What is below this house?

  —Nothing, ma, he says with a smile. It will hold you all steady.

  —Will it hold all of us?

  —All one time, ma.

  At length, she makes her way back to Gray Shirt’s house, and is shown into a clean room with mirror and dressing table and great calabashes—gourds made from the tree of that name—full of some pungent-smelling liquid. She brings one to her nose and breathes the aroma; it stings her nostrils. She puts her little finger into it and touches that to the edge of her lips. Most poisons in Africa have powerful odors, and if they have no odor—as some do not—they sting inordinately on the skin. Moreover, it makes little sense for a rich man like Gray Shirt to keep poison in such quantity in his sleeping quarters. This is liquor of some kind. She sips it, and receives the burn of it, not without pleasure. It goes down easily, and she has another before she prepares herself for sleep. The bed is spread over with mosquito netting, and is covered with calico and chintz, and soft pillows. Were i
t not for the sounds outside, and the constant haranguing buzz of the insects, she might be in an English inn, somewhere near the sea. But the night is sleepless and long. The headache lost some of its searing power with the sips of Gray Shirt’s liquor, so she tries some more of it. But this time the stuff exacerbates things, and the headache grows much worse; it makes her nauseous. She paces a little, and fights off the urge to be sick, and she tries to read by the guttering candle: Gunther’s book on bird species. But it’s impossible.

  Dawn takes an age to arrive. At first light, she gets up to go out for a turn. A walk into the surrounding bush is inviting to her. She steps out on Gray Shirt’s veranda, and sees Conklin standing in the center of the village with two other white men, his hands on his hips, two long-barreled pistols crossed in his belt, a bush hat on, and a whip curled over one shoulder. He carries a bag, and there are several Ajoumbas coming up from the river, bearing boxes of goods and calabash gourds, no doubt of whiskey or rum. He’s here to trade.

  —Conklin, she says. You old coaster.

  The sun isn’t fully risen. He turns and squints at her.

  —Hello, he says. Who the devil am I addressing?

  —You are addressing Miss Mary Henrietta Kingsley, she says, sounding the H.

  He considers a moment. Evidently her name has not come through to him as the name of someone he knows. He takes a few steps forward, head tilted, staring.

  —What the devil?

  —Do you have a smoke, Conklin?

  And a broad smile comes across his whiskered face. He strides toward her, hand outstretched.

  —Why, my God, it’s Miss Kingsley. Kingsley, of course. From The Lagos. What in blazes are you doing in this godforsaken place?