Ancestors, page 2
Rebecca had trouble with the word soul. She always had, even though her mother explained it many times. “Soul,” she always said as she swept her slender arms wide open to the sky, “is the greater you, Becky, the little girl who will grow up to be big and strong and powerful one day, larger in all ways than yourself now, like the great trees and the sky and the heavens and angels.” Even though she loved to hear these words in her mother’s soothing, soft tone the word soul eluded and agitated her.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Now she felt panic because her mother spoke with a kind of fervor that was beyond what she was used to.
“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”
She did not like this part of the psalm. She never had. Why would you put oil on your head? Whose cup runneth over? It never made sense.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
“Mother!” she screamed, “Mother! It’s me, Rebecca. Please get up. Let’s go home. Let’s go home now. I don’t like it here. These are savages and they will scalp us. Please Mother, stand up now!” She was sobbing and gulping and knew her mother would never let her get this worked up. There was something wrong, very wrong. Her mother would have responded, she would never let Rebecca’s panic get out of control like this.
The warrior appeared, strode up and softly pushed her mother over. She slumped down off the log like a rag doll with her legs and feet splayed out on the ground. The old dog-eared Bible that Rebecca recognized and knew so well tumbled off her lap into the dirt. Her mother’s head flopped forward and out of the ripped-off top spewed a mass of red, like bright cherries flying from a toppled bowl.
Rebecca woke with a start at 6:00 a.m. Juno was making little whiffing sounds, her big cinnamon head reaching across the pillow to lick Rebecca’s cheek with her soft blue-velvet tongue. Rebecca looked into Juno’s large brown eyes buried in fur. “Hey,” she said, reaching over to stroke her head. “Did I worry you? Wake you up?” Rebecca was covered in sweat. “You wouldn’t believe the dream I had.” Dido jumped on the bed to join them. “Okay, okay!” Rebecca laughed as they both jumped around and nuzzled her head covering her with dog kisses. “Let’s get out and greet the morning and go for a walk. I need some air.”
Outside on their leashes The Queens settled into their more poised selves. They were unruffled by other dogs in the neighborhood and trotted along in front of the houses sniffing all the bushes and looking around with a composed air. This was their time together. Rebecca talked to them as if they understood every word she said. They would even stop to look up at her if they heard in her tone that she was making a particular point.
“So,” she said as they walked along their familiar route, “that dream was intense. It was about my great-great-great-great-great — I think it’s more — grandmother. Do you guys get that? She lost her mother, too. Even younger than when I lost mine. Only hers was scalped, along with her little brother. They say her husband, a man named Matthew, died later of a broken heart. Like you guys might if I abandoned you. Which of course I never would except over my dead body.” The dogs shuffled along, tails wagging, two flagships leading the way.
Rebecca receded into the dream, wondering what it was really about. Why now? What’s going on with me? Last week she had been reading a book a friend had given her called The White. It was about a little girl in the mid-eighteenth century who had been taken into captivity by an Indian tribe. The story had been well researched and although it was not clear if the author had been related to this girl or her family in some way she wrote it after she had spent a long time imagining the little girl’s life among the Indians. By the time the girl in the story was an adult, married to an Indian, bearing his sons, she could not go back to the white ways, having become what she was. She was old enough when captured, about nine, to remember her white family and especially her mother, yet she could not go back. She was Indian. What impressed Rebecca most was when she was in her fifties the tribe had offered to let her have some of the land that the whites, her original people, had taken, and she responded with: “I don’t understand ownership. Doesn’t the land belong to everyone? What would I do with all that land just for myself?”
Rebecca wondered out loud to The Queens, “What would have happened to my ancestors if we had thought to share our lives and the land with the Indians? I guess anyone with half a brain wonders that now — but I really did come from those people, Scotch-Irish Calvinists. Tough stock. That was 250 years ago. Until then, those Algonquin tribes had occupied that river valley basin for thirty thousand years. I can’t get my mind around that. My ancestors must have wondered, too. I grew up hearing about the little girl playing in the cornfield when her mother and brother were massacred — scalped — and the Delaware stole the little Simonton boy who grew up and became an Indian. Not so rare as we think.” Juno and Dido stopped and looked up at her as if to nod agreement. Rebecca laughed.
As she drove to work it crossed her mind: The dream is showing me I am that little girl across the centuries.
3
At its core, the Vodou is an ancestral tradition. The Vodou gods come in the blood of the African, and many are even born from direct lineages of these gods. It is they who experience the most profound disturbances in their lives when they forget either deliberately or through social conditioning/amnesia who they are.
Interview with African-American Voodoo and Mami Wata Priestess: Mama Zogbe (2001)
The next day after work at 5:30 p.m. Moremi walked to her car in the parking lot. She could feel the hot wind on her face. The air was sultry and uncharacteristic for this area, yet everyone recognized that these winds were getting more frequent this time of year, threatening wild fires. They still talked about the fire twenty years ago, before she arrived in America, that burned hundreds of homes and killed twenty-five people. When she heard these stories she could only imagine but not really empathize. In Africa there is no such threat. The winds come from the northern desert, hot and furious, and fires break out, but loss of property is not a consideration. The shanties that burn down are rebuilt in a day. Africans are used to many kinds of winds that come out of the desert and savanna, all different kinds of winds such as the dust-filled Harmattens. Her maternal grandmother would look her window to listen, her hand cupped behind her ear, and exclaim, “The winds are singing to us from far away.”
Moremi climbed into her Toyota Camry and sat in the driver’s seat for a few minutes feeling the stillness of the interior in contrast with the frenzied world around her. She was still not used to the rushed life in America even though she had been here twelve years.
Peter prided himself on being completely Americanized and demanded she be the same. “Africa is finished,” he often stated. No discussion. His entire family had left. Some to England and Switzerland, only Peter to America. Both his parents died several years ago within a few years of each other. Peter was their only son and close living relative and he’d been in America for thirty-seven years. He was American. Their son Ayo, raised in a small university town on the American West Coast, was American, yet he felt special because of his African parents.
Moremi was not comfortable with American liberalism. For her, difference was tribal and community-based. She knew the consequences and horror of primeval impulses that could catapult fear into a genocidal force. The third world lived with this reality every day, but not in America. To her, Africa was its own victim and perpetrator in a way Americans could not fully understand no matter how hard they tried. She could never tell Ayo what she thought but she believed in her bones the way out of racism was a genuine acceptance of difference, not blindness to it. In America Moremi encountered people’s fear of offending her. She wished people would be more offensive and would have trusted such honesty more. She understood her own racism but here she couldn’t express what that meant. Self-disclosure to the ignorant was not an option. She took solace in her maternal grandmother’s words from her childhood. They stayed with her, an echo of home: We all belong to our own past. We come from them who gave us life and we die into them. Don’t let anyone tell you different my child.
Today Peter would pick up Ayo from school and together they would head for soccer practice and then home to cook supper. They would be a team in the kitchen, rooting through the refrigerator pulling out whatever looked appetizing, concocting a meal together and eating it at the kitchen table. They would talk about the soccer game or Ayo’s school and how he liked his new teacher and the other kids in his class. Their camaraderie would be light and focus on encouraging Ayo to compete and get ahead, which he would accept. They would not miss her.
In the beginning when Ayo was little Peter had not paid much attention to him. Moremi was tall and lithe which made carrying a child around easy and natural. Ayo climbed onto her like a little monkey and sometimes she wrapped him to her in an old shawl. After Ayo started school Peter grew interested and began to create his own separate bond with Ayo, which she encouraged. Moremi could see Peter was stepping up the pressure on Ayo and it made her uneasy, but she did not want to rock the boat. At least not yet.
Ayo was bright and sociable with a big open face, curious and interested in the world around him. He would go far. Peter would make sure of that. Ayo took his mother for granted and called her “Mom,” which she could not get used to but didn’t dare suggest he call her “Mami.” When he enthused about the Pokémon characters they both knew she couldn’t relate, except superficially. She tried, and wondered if she should keep trying. Which was worse: pretending or just telling the truth? Her own parents would have told her the truth. Moremi, those are your spirits in your mind. They’re not for adults to understand. Ayo would not have understood that. From Peter’s point of view adults indulged their children’s thoughts, enshrining them with urgent praise, idealizing their intelligence. That was what they both expected from her.
She looked at the clock and realized she had been sitting in her car for fifteen minutes and might be late for her 6:00 p.m. appointment, her first with a therapist. She started the car. How did my life come to this?
A friend from the lab had told her everyone does it. “They’re like spiritual counselors. You can tell them whatever you want and it’s confidential. You need to talk with someone who can understand what you feel.”
Moremi was skeptical and did not want to talk to a stranger, especially someone who did not know her childhood culture, but she had begun to feel desperate.
She could not talk to Peter. Her parents and brother had died before she left Africa. She had not stayed in touch with friends because Peter had convinced her she might be putting them in political danger, even now. She had left Nigeria during the worst reign of political reprisals her family had ever known, and had lost her family because of it. Peter’s family had rescued her. Now their marriage felt as if it were unraveling slowly but surely, and she feared there was nothing she could do about it. She missed her family more than ever.
Despite her misgivings she had called the therapist, who sounded warm and intelligent. She decided to take the chance and go at least once. Peter would barely ask where she was. He had grown used to her taking off to class in the evenings and showed little interest in her personal world especially now that he was so focused on Ayo. As long as she preferred her role as wife and mother, like an American, he was content.
Peter had no clue that Moremi kept an altar to Mami in their basement cupboard near the washer and dryer. It was her only connection to her family and her life in Africa. She couldn’t let go of the altar even though she felt conflicted about having it. She was comforted knowing he never went down there — even if he did she assumed he would not recognize what it was: her mother’s and grandmother’s connection to her and the matrilineal line of their family.
•••
At 5:30 p.m., Rebecca was in her leather chair chewing on a ballpoint pen, staring at the opposite wall in her office. Although she stared at the Rothko print she did not see it. She knew she had one more hour to go, a new patient.
The dream had been with her all day infusing her with the familiar feeling she could trace back to childhood, a feeling she had forgotten something important. It was as if something had happened that she knew about and then — poof — the memory was gone, leaving only the feeling of loss. How could this be? It made no sense.
When she was a training therapist she had shared this recurring sense of loss with her own analyst and a few trusted friends and colleagues. Their explanations were much like her own: You’ve forgotten what it was because whatever happened was traumatic. Probably connected with your father’s frightening and unpredictable temper or your mother’s passivity. Either way, something did happen and you are not remembering for a reason. Although Rebecca told herself this made the most sense and it did not matter what it really was that she could not remember, it still did not work. She believed the explanation was far deeper and more mysterious than the one her friends and traditional psychotherapy offered.
The light on her far wall turned on alerting her that the new client was seated in the waiting room across the hall. She checked her appointment calendar and saw the name. Moremi Abosanjo. She was two minutes early. Rebecca’s attention was pulled to the African mask on her wall. She stared at it for a few seconds, both excited and calmed by its demeanor.
She had discovered African masks about five years ago and on a whim bought one from a shop while on a trip to San Diego with her boyfriend Richard. She disliked the label “boyfriend” at her age but so far had not come up with a better alternative. “Companion” conveyed too many implications and “friend” just did not seem to cut it. She vividly remembered the purchase. They had wandered into a small shop one evening to kill time before dinner. They were visiting Richard’s son who lived there. She considered Richard the man she should have married but by the time she met him after her own divorce she had vowed never to marry again. Although Richard wanted to marry and never gave up asking, they had an agreement that he could keep trying and she would keep saying no as long as she needed.
The shop was crammed with all sorts of bric-a-brac from Africa, carved wooden giraffes and rhinos, mostly things made for tourists, and the sort of things both she and Richard disdained. Rebecca wandered into a back room filled with older masks not displayed as a high-end gallery might, with inflated prices, but were almost casually piled on tables and the floor and hung all over the walls. As she started looking more closely she realized these were intricately carved and some of them glowed not from paint but from their patina.
As she stooped down to look at some masks sitting along the floor she heard a booming, melodious male voice say, “Hello.”
She looked up into the broadly smiling face of a gigantic African man, about fifty she guessed, and noticed his huge hands. His eyes danced. She knew this man saw the world with a reservoir of wise humor. Then she thought, Oh my God, I’m such an ignoramus and he knows it.
Kneeling down next to her, he said, “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Yes. Where are they from?”
“These are Mende helmet masks. Sierra Leone. Not too old, probably carved in the sixties I imagine. They’re for the Sande, a secret society. The Mende masks are for the women’s society. Sort of their private club, separate from the men’s. The only masks in Africa made by the men just for the women, who danced them.”
She figured he knew this might be a selling point for her, and it was.
“A husband, for example, will hire a master carver to make one for his wife. It is intended to represent her beauty and status. This,” he continued, picking one up by its crown and twirling it around like a top, “has lots of fleshy rolls on the neck, see here?” He ran his finger along the neck, explaining the more layers the higher the woman’s status. “They have the elaborate hairstyles,” he said, rubbing his finger over the pompadour of carved hair, “with a full forehead and small features. Some are very elaborate. Only women can dance them, only the best dancers. They wear long strands of raffia that fall from the base of the neck.” He indicated the holes where the raffia would be tied. “The raffia is dyed black. You can only see the dancers’ feet. Extraordinary to watch.”
Rebecca stared and found herself asking, “How much is it?”
He leaned his head back and laughed heartily, as if he knew exactly what had happened to her, and told her the price. She thought it was too little.
Twenty minutes later, after Rebecca had paid for the mask and arranged for shipping with Bernard, the owner, she and Richard left the store.
Over the past five years she had bought more masks from Bernard and had met other dealers as well. Incrementally she was learning about the masks. For example she also knew an important part of the Mende female’s preparation for initiation into the secret Sande society was a clitoridectomy, female circumcision. Learning this and other facts about what the women went through to qualify to dance the mask brought her up short. She had to get past her repulsion before she could really understand the spirit within the mask.
Rebecca now owned about twenty masks from different parts of Africa. The one she stared at in her office as she sat waiting for her next and last client of the day was a cut above the rest. Approximately seventeen inches high, the lower half was the face of a female with full lips, long aquiline nose, large downward cast eyes, and elaborate geometric patterns carved all over the surface. Her demeanor was clearly in repose, serene and peaceful. Wrapped around her high forehead was an undulating design of a python, its head ending along the left side, like a bandana. Coming up over the head and biting into the python right over the forehead, in perfect symmetry, were a pair of blue crocodiles. The python was biting the tail of one of the crocodiles. The upper tableau depicted what appeared to be a violent scene of animals locked in mortal combat. It was a Yoruba Gelede mask from Nigeria and depicted the power of the woman and the balance of power in human communities. As long as each animal retained its grip on the other the tension held and there could be no change for the worse.
