Whiteman Read online

  “When is it going to open again?”

  “Open again? Ha! Don’t ask me crazy questions,” he said, and laughed. “You whites. You walk on the moon before you walk on the ground.”

  “Hasn’t anyone come by and said anything about the bank opening?”

  “Everyone came by and asked about the bank opening. Look at the bank, whiteman. Ha ha! It’s closed!”

  “I need money,” I said, mostly to myself, and the old man said, “Money! You need money! Ha ha! Why don’t you go find money on the moon! Don’t you know what time it is? It is time for the bank to be open and the bank is closed. So you tell me what time it is now! Les blancs! Don’t you make the time, Coo? Ah, les blancs! Bank and time! Money and the moon! Oh, whiteman! Hahahahaha . . .”

  Next, I decided to go see an acquaintance, Diomandé Kané, at his compound. He had recently gone from being my preferred Séguéla cigarette vendor to a Muslim insurgent. I’d had beers with him at the Club des Amis Christian bar on my odd weekends in the city, but in the past week I’d heard he’d bought a boubous and started praying. So it was serious with him, and I knew he’d have news. His narrow compound was set in the vast camp of impoverished Dioula south of the main market square, beyond the towering and yellow-painted Grand Mosque of Séguéla, its minarets capped in brown onion domes, its latticed windows intricate and mysterious and dominating everything.

  As I rode toward the market—a sprawling shantytown of corrugated tin shacks in whose passageways one instantly became lost like in a North African souk—a mixed mass of women and children came spilling out from it like a school of baitfish chased by sharks. They were darting and changing course together suddenly just like fish, coughing and shouting, “Lacrymogène!” which meant ‘tear gas,’ and nobody stopped to call me ‘whiteman,’ so I knew they weren’t exaggerating. The crowd swept me down the hill past the mosque to Tirnité Quarter, the poorest section of town, until I pulled myself out of it at a compound I knew there, and where I’d taken refuge before, when I’d newly arrived in Séguéla, just as I’d been waiting for a logging truck to take me into the bush to my village posting for the very first time.

  Back then, a throng of young men had come running down the road, stopping only to pick up and hurl stones at another crowd of young men who were chasing them, who were stopping in turn to snatch up the bouncing stones and throw them back again. I’d been carried away by the crowd of onlookers who’d gathered themselves up to run away from that, carried down to hardscrabble Timité as though in a wave. In my fright, I’d found shelter in the first compound after the omelet kiosk with the big mango tree rising up beside it like a giant in a coat of green feathers by banging on the gate as hard as I could and yelling, “M’aidez! M’aidez!” and passed an afternoon in silence, stared at by four assembled generations of a Fulani family freshly arrived from Mali to try their luck in relatively prosperous Ivory Coast as many from the neighboring countries did. They’d never seen a whiteman up close before, and the smallest children pulled my toes to see if I was real, while the women simply stared. Now I was at their gate and banging on it again.

  “C’est qui?” someone shouted, trying to sound larger and more menacing than he really was.

  “Sidibé, restes-toi tranquille. C’est Adama, ton blanc.”

  The gate was pulled back to reveal the old patriarch of the family in his flowing blue boubous and wide-brimmed hat with the circular Peul designs tooled into the leather. His face was thin and bright beneath the hat, his beard stringy and white. He said in stumbling French as he tugged me in quickly by my shirt, “Oh, Adama. How nice of you to come and pay us a visit again! Please come and sit with us like before. Tell us all of your news.”

  I passed some hours in Sidibé’s dirt-floor parlor listening to the ticking of his wall clock—a round-faced Seiko, his only real possession—after we’d run out of things to say. One of his grandsons made periodic forays into the city to assess the situation, and came back again and again so breathless and worried that the old man folded his hands on his lap and said, “Oh, Adama, it has been so long, isn’t it? Let us drink another tea.”

  The one time I left the parlor to cross the courtyard to squat over the flyblown latrine hole seething with fat maggots, I saw the smoke from the fires rising up into the sky in columns from the different quarters of the city like trailings, vultures circling lazily around them, high up, as if there was all the time in the world for what they had to do. Then there was gunfire, automatic and small-arms, staccato, right here, far away, patterned layers of jarring sound, just like the Fourth of July in Chicago, where I was from. It was the smoke from the fires that did it, the way it curled into the sky like the black smoke of sacrifices of people invoking the ancestors for help. It filled me with a stunned dumbness, a weight, a dread, a fatigue that spread through my body like exhaustion. Was this really happening? I mean to say, I did not know how to feel. Fear, exhilaration, nerves, adrenaline: These were all the same species of creature, and ever since I’d arrived in Ivory Coast, life had been this way. Did they really want this fight, this North-South, Muslim-Christian, colonization’s hangover civil war, or did they not? Did I? I don’t believe anyone could truthfully tell then. Yes, of course people would die, but didn’t everyone think, ‘Not I! Not I!’? And didn’t everything taste sweeter since the violence: that cold, cold Coca-Cola, the last Marlboro of the day, sex with your girl, the joy of breathing because the day had ended and you were still alive! Everything had become heightened, everything myopic and refined. How much fun to be had by all!

  And of course I couldn’t help but pick a side. Forty years of abuse and neglect by the Christians since they’d inherited power from the French at independence, forty years of watching roads and electricity and schools and development traverse the south, while here in the Muslim north it was all hunger and harmattan, military harassment, the men gone to labor in the cocoa fields, coming home once a year with AIDS, no money, no medicine, no schoolbooks for the kids, and even the northerners’ nationality stripped away because of the new interpretation of the Constitution. There were good guys and bad guys and I could see them, and over all of this stood the basilica in Yamoussoukro, the largest church in the world, air-conditioned seats, miles of stained glass and Italian marble for a congregation of three hundred on good days, none on most, to spell out the way things were as clearly as its gold dome and crucifix standing up against the horizon. How many hospitals could have been built with that money? How many deep-bore water pumps? And Boigny, the first president, had himself placed at the feet of Jesus Christ in the glass, unleashing this mess! Where was the mosque to stand beside that church? What about this half of the country?

  Lastly, there was reality. I was a whiteman. No matter how well I spoke Worodougou or gnushi French or Dioula or that I obeyed my village’s customs and let them take my old name, Jack Diaz, from me, and baptize me with a new name, Diomandé Adama; no matter that I lived with them as they did and was ready some days to take up arms with my friends, to stand with them as though their families and grievances were my own, this was a place I did not belong and, more than that, a place where they would not let me belong.

  We were the last foreign-aid group still in the field. The last round of rioting had seen even the missionaries driven out. It was only three weeks ago that that Dutch woman, Laurie’s friend, was sitting in our living room, where we’d gathered for safety, gabbing, fingering the wooden cross on its rope around her neck, laughing nervously, saying, “Well, now that those funny Japanese people have packed up and left, you know, it looks like it’s you water people and us Bible people.”

  Then it was only us because the churches were burned all over the north and they went to the Dutch woman’s house in Séguéla in a mob where she lived behind where they welded bicycle frames beyond the military post, thought she wasn’t home, and proceeded to loot everything. It was only while they were dousing the walls with kerosene that someone—maybe my friend with his rainbow wig
—noticed the bed that they had forgotten to take in the back room, and lifted up the mattress, and there she was like a dusty treasure found in the back of a closet, an old dress your grandmother wore seventy years ago to the prom: a middle-aged Dutch woman who had come to Africa to bringjesus to Muslims, her skirt damp from her own urine, crying with her hands hiding her face like she wanted to be a child again, and did she curse them as black devils finally is what I want to know? But the crying and her age and the piss struck a chord in someone, because they helped her up, helped her to gather herself together—to brush her hair from her eyes, to wipe the tears away—helped her find her keys, helped her pick them up when she dropped them from her trembling hands as certainly she did, helped her stagger out of that house on their shoulders, shook her out of her dream of her childhood in Amsterdam—the clouds reflected in the canals, the yellow hay fields of the countryside of Gouda—ducked her head down with their hand so she wouldn’t bang it as she got into her car, let her drive away. Then they torched her house, anyway.

  On the road south, she was joined by a convoy of them, whites with their Bibles piled around them in their Land Rovers like sandbags, their churches and missions burned, for some of them their life’s work burned, and nothing left to do now but sift the remains from the ashes of their memories and turn the other cheek. In Sidibé’s house then we could hear the singing of the muezzin, a long and mournful wail, like an air-raid siren in the shock and length of it. Sidibe winked at me and tapped the side of his long nose. “If God says that it is all right to go out now, Adama,” he said, smiling, “then certainly it must be all right.”

  And I did go out into the city again, and I did see many other things to make me feel very quiet inside myself in the memory of them, but here now in the telling of this story, I’ve lost my direction. What I’d like to tell about now is a monkey.

  Across from our house in Séguéla, where I would go on to spend the night under the bed with gunfire and the shouts of angry men around me in the city like the madness in a crazy man’s head, there lived a monkey on a chain. This was in the courtyard of our neighbor Méité Fanta, the same woman from the morning, the grandmother of many, many happy children, a kind enough woman who sold us water once on a hot day when we didn’t have any. Anyway, they kept a young monkey on a chain attached to a pole in the courtyard and the monkey was really a baboon, but if you were to ask anyone what sort of animal it was, they would simply say, “A monkey.”

  This monkey’s name was Rita—I asked—and I grew fond of her. The children spent many long hours teasing her with leafy tree branches, with bananas she could not reach, and there was also a famous game in that neighborhood called Touch the Monkey, in which each child brave enough would venture forth when they felt Rita was not looking, cross into her sandy area—the radius of her chain, the chain being as long as two or three paces, enough space for a monkey in a poor compound in West Africa, if that can be accepted as a unit of measure—touch her like slapping, scream and flee, and often I was pleased to see her leap onto a child’s back and sink her short-yet incisors into a neck. I harbored untold sympathy for that tormented creature who somehow managed to keep her spirits up. I got it into my head that she could recognize me, that she could pick me out of the crowd as the one person who did not want to amuse myself at her expense, and she would break into a funny little half-step dance on seeing me, banging her fists against the sand and then leaping and turning as she howled. Of course, this was because I brought her bananas and papayas and other things monkeys like to eat every time I came to town.

  “Oh, thank you, Adama Diomandé,” Méité Fanta came to me and said one day with the sun beating down on our necks, the gritty harmattan wind caking our pores with dust, chapping our lips and the insides of our nostrils. “Thank you for feeding the monkey. When she is grown and fat we will call you and you must come and share the meat of her with us.”

  There is little sentiment to be wasted in a place where hunger is a real thing, where meat is scarce and a small and personable baboon like Rita would help the children grow. Still, I chased the children away from her when I could, bribed them with cheap candies to leave her alone, trying to make her short life more endurable, chained as she was around the hips to an immovable pole in a dusty courtyard where chickens scratched for ticks. I honestly believe that she came to recognize me, that she would say to herself on seeing me, ‘That is the good one among them.’

  Then one day when I was caught in Séguéla while Séguéla burned around me, I opened my door in the late afternoon to a small gang of bandits. They showed me knives, and then they hid them in their sleeves again. I could not get past them or close the door on them and still I did not let them in. In my hand was a crowbar, which in the end I was not able to swing. “You will give us money,” the leader of the trio said, and I tried to see his face behind his mirrored sunglasses but could only see my own reflection. It startled me, how white I seemed, and then, how odd. What was this white person doing in this place? I opened my wallet and gave them the money that I had. It was a few U.S. dollars in their currency, perhaps ten, not much by any standards, not much by theirs.

  “This isn’t enough,” he said, holding the money on the flat of his hand as if offering it back, giving me a second chance. “This is nothing. You must give us more money.”

  “Please,” I said. “The bank is closed today. This is all I have. Please.” Some long moments passed. I do not know how many. In the silence I heard myself say to them from a faraway place, “Please. Please.”

  They went away. I cannot remember what direction they took as they left, or what they looked like as they walked away. I could not now pick them out of a crowd. I cannot know how much time passed as I hung there in my doorway, but then, as if waking from a deep, deep sleep, I was in the world again. And what a raucous world it was! In the distance, gunfire, and here, the explosion of goats and dogs and chickens and sheep and dust and feathers and the many and bare-bodied grandchildren of my neighbor screaming as they were chased through the street by Rita—a baboon mistaken for a monkey—her chain broken and free, pursuing wildly now these children who for so long had tortured her. For an instant, I felt a wave of pleasure course through me like love at the sight of the mayhem of her freedom, and for that one instant I can say this: I was happy, I was happy to my core. Then the monkey spotted me, and my happiness turned to white-knuckled fear as barreling toward my doorway was an openmouthed creature with fangs and shrieking and I don’t know what she planned on doing, on seeking asylum behind my legs, or on sinking her teeth into them, for suddenly I was face-to-face with what I wanted to know but couldn’t, Africa, Africa unchained, and there was no other recourse at that moment but to guard hearth and home, and slam shut the door.

  THE LAHOU BIRDS

  Mazatou was all bust and butt. One morning a few months after I arrived, I got up and opened the door of my hut, and there she was, framed in the doorway like a painting, standing and pounding rice in a wide mortar on the edge of my courtyard. When she saw me looking, she unhitched and opened her wrap so I caught a brief flash of her full and bare thighs. Then she shut the wrap, refastened it, smoothed its folds over her ample rump, and began to sing and pound that rice in a way that tossed every curve she had at me.

  I was in Tégéso, a Muslim village in the bush near Séguéla, where I had been sent to help the people find a way to have clean drinking water. Life was more basic there, harder in many ways, tied to the natural world. Many were the mornings that I did not want to leave my hut, had trouble working the heart up to it. People called me Sergio at first, the name of the lead character on the Mexican soap opera the whole village watched on a black-and-white set they ran off a car battery. Nothing about me resembled him but my white skin and dark hair, but to some of them, Sergio and I were one and the same. No matter that I’d begun to live among them as humbly as they did, I was a creature set among them from the magical world of television. Even after a year, children would sit in
a group on the dirt of my courtyard to watch me do the simplest of things as though watching television still: sweeping out my hut, coughing from the dust, spitting, mending my sandals, sharpening my machete, taking a sip of water from my gourd. “What is the whiteman doing now?” I’d hear a small one whisper in Worodougou, and another would whisper back, “Don’t know. But it looks like he’s drinking water.” “Do whitemen drink water, too?” “Don’t know. But that’s what it looks like he’s doing.”

  Other mornings, in a burst of assertion, I’d get up and chase them away with a stick. Adults, for the most part, did not treat me like such an overt novelty; to some who had seen whites in the city, I wasn’t, and others acted as if I was a normal thing among them because they wanted to seem more sophisticated than they really were. Still, even the old chief, who should have known better because he’d fought in Europe in World War II as a forced conscript, called me Sergio from time to time with a wink and laugh, and I understood that at the core of each of them in that Iron Age village was a child who looked at me and wondered, ‘Do whitemen drink water, too?’ I’d been eager to get in the field for PWI, but since 9/11, project money had dried up. I kept my notes, urged people to boil, dreamed about all that clean water—silent and vast and dark as time—waiting to be tapped in the aquifers below us, but without money for new deep-bore pumps, I spent most of my days in Tégéso waiting for the world to right itself and the aid valves to flow again. I didn’t have much to do but live among them, and I didn’t want to go home. Many were the nights I went to sleep praying I’d wake in the morning with my skin turned black.

  Sometimes, when the stares and giggles of the children reached through the hard veneer I’d learned to cover myself with, I’d hike into the forest for a respite. The children were afraid of the forest—even the adults were—and I’d sit in the long roots of a towering ebony tree as if in a hammock and listen to the clacking of the long-billed lahou birds in its canopy, their calls like the sound of people laughing at a party. In conversations with the dosso—the witch doctor—I’d learned that lahous were one of the birds a hunter must never kill, or the ancestors would kill him with an illness in turn. Lahous watched the world of men for the ancestors from the tops of the tallest trees, remembered what they saw, wove the incidents into funny stories that they would tell to each other again and again. For this reason, every storyteller mask had a carved lahou bird perched on its crown, the long toucan bill seeming to curve down all the way to where the mask could hear what it had to say. The lahous clacking in the tree above me were the birds telling funny stories of men to each other, and listening to their raucous laughter awhile, I’d feel I had joined them in it. Then, in the forest twilight with the night spirits beginning to dart about in the gloom in the corners of my eyes, I’d go back to the village and give it another try.