Whiteman Read online

  Mazatou was my neighbor’s granddaughter come from a village in the near west. My neighbor, an old woman, had injured herself badly while chopping palm nuts out of a tree in the nearby swamp. This otherwise ancient old woman had climbed the trunk of a palm tree to get at the bundles of nuts in its crown, and in chopping them loose with an ax in one hand and hugging the tree with her other as she’d been doing all her life, something happened and she’d fallen out, impaled her hand clean through on a stick on the way down.

  “How did you fall, Old Mother?” everybody in the village wanted to know.

  “A genie pulled me out,” she had explained, and cried, sitting on a stool outside her hut with that stick through her hand like a pencil. “That tree belonged to my sister who died. She doesn’t want me stealing her palm nuts even though she can’t use them anymore. She was always jealous of me. So she sent a genie to pull me out.”

  “Maybe you are too old to be climbing trees, Old Mother.”

  “Too old? It was a genie! I saw him. He was white all over, and he had a terrible white face. He pulled me down and laughed and then ran off into the swamp. Everybody has seen genies there. What do you mean saying I am too old to climb trees!”

  One of her sons came, chastised her for going to the swamp by herself, gave her a piece of goat hide to bite with her gums, and while she looked away, he yanked the stick free. Her hand bled freely until there was a pool of blood in the dirt, and he put leaves on both sides of the wound, and wrapped it tightly with an old rag. The old woman made dinner for herself that night, and of course, before the week was out, she was feverish on her mat in the dark of her hut, her hand swollen up like a latex glove filled with water.

  “Adama,” she called to me weakly from her mat when I poked my head in to give her the morning greeting, “the healer wants to cut my hand off. Don’t you have whiteman medicine for me in that box of yours? Can’t you make it heal? If they take my hand from me, I’ll be no good to anyone. Then I know I will die.”

  “I can probably heal it,” I told her. “But if you let me treat it with whiteman medicine, you have to follow what I say. You can’t put mud on it again after I’ve cleaned it.”

  “I promise, Adama.”

  I boiled water, washed her hand in her hut as she cried, squeezed the pus out so it dripped in gobs to the mat, and washed it again with soap. Then I smeared both sides of the wound with triple-antibiotic cream and covered it loosely with sterile gauze. I had no penicillin to give her, but knew she’d get better if only she’d keep it clean and dry. Her fever broke in the night, and after three days of my cleaning and dressing her wound for her, she was chopping wood again. Healing the woman’s hand was one of the small ways I justified my presence among them as a rural relief worker, when really, I spent most of that first year simply trying to make it through each day. She pounded sweet foutou for me from plantains she’d gotten somewhere, and in our morning greetings, she would bow deeply to me as she invoked Allah’s name to bless me. Then Mazatou arrived in the village, and I wondered if she wasn’t a part of the old woman’s thanks as well.

  Every morning, Mazatou would shake her curves as she pounded the hulls off the day’s rice, and I would blush, pretend as I washed my face that I didn’t notice her. It was the height of the dry season, and there wasn’t work to do in the fields. Men repaired their thatched huts and lounged about; women spun cotton and cracked palm-nut pits with rocks under the mango trees for the seeds inside that they’d turn into soap. I played soccer with the men my age, listened to them tease each other about women, learned new and important words. Families spent hours together under their compound acacias, and young men and women went for walks around the village in the dark at night, trying to find a secluded corner to start families of their own. The way Mazatou flirted with me brought the blood up all under my skin, made my body feel as hot around me as the intense heat of the noontime sun. It began to make me crazy. It began to make me consider doing crazy things, like waving her to come into my hut when no one was looking, and closing the door on us. But I didn’t want to offend the village’s hospitality or trust, and so she shook her hips and licked her lips, and I became as frustrated as a tethered goat.

  “Have you seen this girl Mazatou?” I said to my friend Mamadou as we sat on our haunches outside his hut, brewing Arab tea, the night sky a vast and spangled drape around our shoulders.

  “Who hasn’t seen her? She’s as ripe as a late-season mango.”

  “Anyone get to her yet?”

  “People from this village are afraid of people from her village. Haven’t you noticed that nobody talks to her? Besides, they say she has a fiancé in Abidjan. He’s trying to make a little money, and then he’s going to come back to claim her.”

  “Why would people from here be afraid of people from there?”

  Mamadou poured some of the tea into a small and dirty glass on the tray between us. He blew on it, tasted it, poured it back in the pot, shrugged. “They live by a great rock where there’s a python that eats men’s souls.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes. Nobody from this village has the magic to go there. Anyway, her people are crazy.”

  Mamadou was the companion the village had given me when I’d first arrived. They’d chosen him because we were roughly the same age and he spoke French. It was his duty to teach me how to behave politely, to know what was taboo and what wasn’t. Mostly what he did was watch me make horrific mistakes, and then, after weeks of letting me make them, he’d say to me in a small voice, “Are you sure you really want to sweep your hut out at night, Adama? The ancestors take it as a great insult. It means you are sweeping away their welcome as they look for a place to sleep.”

  “Really?” I had said to him that time as I’d stood up with my broom.

  “Oh yes. It’s a really terrible thing to do. All your neighbors are complaining.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that weeks ago?”

  “Why remind a blind man that he is blind?”

  Or, walking around the village with me one morning as I saluted old men as they came out of their huts, just as I did most days, he said to me in that small voice of his, “Are you sure you want to salute people before they’ve washed their faces?”

  “Since you put it that way, Mamadou, I know that I don’t. Now that you’ve let me do it for months, please tell me why I shouldn’t.”

  “Talking to people before you’ve washed your face in the morning is like talking to them with shit on it. It’s very humiliating. People have been complaining for a long time that you make them humiliate themselves each and every morning.”

  “Wonderful,” I’d said to him, because I’d learned there was no use in arguing. The secrets of the village would reveal themselves to me in their own time, if they ever would.

  But four months in, much had happened, and I felt that I knew my way around their taboos, even if I didn’t. At that fire where the tea was brewing, I said to Mamadou, “I think that girl looks at me in a way she shouldn’t if she’s got a fiancé.”

  “Are you sure, Adama?” he said, and lifted his eyebrow. “Maybe she’s only got something in her eye. As the ancestors say, A hungry goat will eat even his brother’s wool.’”

  “I’m sure, Mamadou. As the ancestors also say, ‘If a cripple tells you he will win a race, know that he knows the other runners have no legs.’ Isn’t that right?”

  “Okay, Adama,” he said, and laughed. “Take her. Call her into your hut. If she looks at you that way, then she’s yours.”

  “But what about her fiancé?”

  “One can never say with these things. She isn’t married until the bull is slaughtered. And even if she was, you could still call her into your hut.”

  “And no one would care?”

  “Oho,” he said, and laughed in the dark, rocked on his heels. “No, Adama. If she was married, people would care.”

  “What would they do?”

  “They would whip you and chase y
ou into the forest. If you came back, they would kill you. Then they would drag her to her husband’s family, and her husband’s family would whip her. Then they would stuff her vagina full of chili peppers.”

  “God.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if she’s not married?”

  “Nobody cares.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Adama.”

  Mamadou leaned back against the trunk of the mango tree we were under, looked at me with hooded eyes. “You’re hot all of a sudden, aren’t you? That’s good to know. People here have been wondering if it’s just African women you don’t like, or if it’s women in general. That’s a very dangerous thing, Adama, to be a man here and not like women. But don’t worry. I’ve defended your honor. I tell them that you have a wife in America and that whiteman ways are not like ours. An African could not wait for his wife for two years, or even one. I’m glad to see this new vigor you have for Mazatou. But remember, when you pray for rest, you also pray for work.”

  The next morning, I washed my face, and when Mazatou tossed her hip at me, I spoke the first words I’d ever said to her in the few weeks that she’d been there: “Mazatou, where is your fiancé?”

  “My fiancé, Sergio?” she said, leaned that long pestle on her shoulder, unhitched her colorful wrap and gave me a glimpse of her waist and thighs, arranged it again. “Who said I have a fiancé?”

  “Everybody says it.”

  “Why are you asking everybody about me behind my back? I’ve been here for how many weeks now, Adama? Why haven’t you asked me that, or even said hello? It’s almost as though you are shy. Like a boy. A shy whiteman boy,” she said, and curled her lips around her teeth in a dangerous smile.

  “Mazatou?”

  “Yes, Sergio?”

  “Come here. Come inside my hut and let me show you how shy I am.”

  She set that pestle like a long and heavy spear against the mango tree, looked around through the morning half-light at the village, which was only beginning to wake, then sauntered across my courtyard until I felt charged and dizzy. From a few feet away, she ducked down her head to peer beneath the thatch and into the gloom of my hut. “I’ve been wondering what the inside of a whiteman’s hut would look like. But it’s too dark in there, Adama. I can’t see anything.”

  “Come closer,” I said to her. “Come inside and I’ll show you everything there is to see.”

  She inched one sandaled step closer, waved her hips behind her with her hands on her thighs and said, “Hmm, Adama. I still can’t see. Is there gold in there? Silver? Everyone thinks that’s what you have. What do you want to show me?”

  “It’s better than silver and gold, Mazatou. I promise you. Come inside and find out.”

  “Better than silver and gold, Adama? What could be better than silver and gold?”

  “A red stick, Mazatou.”

  “A red stick, Adama? Bring it out here. Let me see it.”

  “Come inside. You’ll see it. I’ll even let you touch it.”

  “Is it very big, Adama? Is it a big red stick?”

  “It’s long. Like a pestle. A long pestle you hold in your hand for crushing shea nuts into butter.”

  “Adama!” she said like blushing. She stood up then so she seemed even taller than she really was, rubbed her belly with her hand so her breasts lifted and fell under her blouse, grinned down at me when I was crouching inside my hut’s low doorway, and said, “I don’t know, Adama. Maybe I’ll look at your red stick tomorrow. You can show me how you crush shea into butter with it then. But I’m hungry right now. ‘Morning opens the mouth.’ I have to finish my work if I want to eat rice.”

  I cast a hand out to catch her wrist, missed, and she stepped back and turned up her nose. She said, “If that’s how you whitemen act, maybe you should keep that red stick thing of yours to yourself.” She stomped across the courtyard in a great show, picked up the pestle, leaned it in the rice in the mortar, and winking at me, opened her wrap to give me a glimpse of those dark thighs, shutting them away again as she cinched it around her waist. By the next morning, this torturous ritual was established between us, and often were the times after making a snatch for her hand that I’d fall back on my mat in the pulsing rage of lust and frustration she stoked in me with every wink and tease, my red stick a painful thing, angry with me, too, for not having been able to put it to the use for which it was made.

  When I had first come to the village, the chief had tried to give me a girl. It was the custom in much of West Africa, I’d heard in training, as much as offering a visitor water, a girl to help around the household, a gift the village could afford to give to an honored visitor for his time among them. The girl they offered me was in her midteens, and she followed me to my hut that first evening with a broom as though to simply clean it out for me. When she was done getting out all the cobwebs, I thanked her in French because even despite my three months of training, I hadn’t been able to speak passable Worodougou yet, and my first sense of disquiet occurred when she didn’t go home, but sat on the root of the mango tree growing by my doorway I tried to shoo her away, but with all my neighbors looking on with blank faces and the girl not moving, I had stopped that. I went to Mamadou’s hut with my hurricane lamp in the evening and passed a quiet meal with him, fumbling to eat rice with my hands from the pot we shared. When I went back to my hut, I was relieved to see that the girl had gone home. I opened the door to go to bed, and there she was, stark naked in the lamplight, her body flat as a board on the mat, her arms at her sides, her eyes looking at me and trembling. It took me a moment to understand it, then I picked up her wraps from the floor and covered her with them. Somehow, I remembered one of the Worodougou words banging around in my head: Taga: ‘Go!’ She wrapped herself covered, then grasped my leg as I tried to push her to the door. She shouted scared things at me, and I at her, and my neighbor, whose hand I would heal six months later, came and dragged the girl by the wrist from my hut.

  Mamadou was at my hut door at first light. He pushed open my door, came and crouched above me. He said, “What did that stupid girl do?”

  “She didn’t do anything,” I said, sitting up.

  “Her mother will whip her, don’t worry, Adama. We’re very sorry. We’ll find you an even better one.”

  “Mamadou,” I said, and grabbed his hand, one of the only times I had touched him in any way but greeting. “Don’t send me another girl. In my country, a man always finds his women for himself. I won’t stay here if you send me another.”

  “The chief is upset, Adama: with the girl, with her family. If you didn’t want her, why did you take her? Girls are offered as is custom, but nobody ever accepts one. You did.”

  “I thought she was going to sweep.”

  “She did sweep. I saw her.”

  “And the other part?”

  “You didn’t like her? You don’t think our village daughter is pretty?”

  “No, she’s very pretty. Look, this is all getting very confused. Let me thank the chief and tell him the girl didn’t do anything wrong. Then we’ll start things over, and I’ll take care of my hut with no girl.”

  “But it’s good to have a girl, Adama. Good for you, and good for the village. If you don’t have sex, you’ll get sick. And also, the other men won’t have to worry about their wives and daughters.”

  “They don’t have to worry about their wives and daughters now, Mamadou. Not from me.”

  “Ah,” he said, and nodded. “I understand. Crickets sing with crickets, ants march with ants. You don’t like African women.”

  “For God’s sake, Mamadou, I like all women. All colors.”

  “Of course you do, Adama,” he said, and winked. “You are like the Lebanese merchant in Séguéla. He doesn’t sleep with black women, either.”

  “Mamadou, don’t go around telling people that I don’t like black people. That girl was too young. In my country, it’s a shame to sleep with any girl who is not very
close to your age.”

  “Really?” he said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go see the chief.”

  Because I was new there, everybody was still interested in absolutely everything I did, large or small. So this thing with the girl was a large thing, and everyone who was on hand came out to watch. It was my punishment, I felt, for having so easily accepted having someone else do work for me that I could have done on my own. The chief sat in his chair in his courtyard wearing his long green boubous like a robe, his white Muslim’s prayer cap on his head like a crown. He was ancient and thin, his left eye clouded with a thick blue cataract. Flanking him on either side were the assorted old men and sages of the village on stools in their many-colored bonbons, holding their chins in their hands. Mamadou helped me work through the salutations for a chief, shaking hands with each of those men, greeting them in the name of Allah. Then we sat on stools across from the chief with the bodies of the village a thick ring around us. I wasn’t supposed to look the chief in the eyes, and I didn’t.