Mother Africa

All the long flight across the Atlantic, Willamette McCoy stared into the night, watching for the first hint of brightness in the east. When at last the Kampala runway stretched before her, a lacework of cracked cement, her heart sank. Africa didn’t look anything like the Promised Land.

The touchdown nearly jarred her teeth out of her head. From the airport, she rode with her family in an old cattle truck labeled, “Villages Reclamation Project.” The truck stank of manure, and the slatted sides were chewed and splintered. After a few minutes, Willamette’s chest went all tight and wheezy from breathing the dust-hazy air.

They waded through the city, the families assigned to each village project keeping together. There were people everywhere, people the color of her African dreams. They shuffled along the sidewalks and squatted in front of baskets of chili peppers, mango, millet, and sorghum.

The streets teemed with battered cars and trucks, hand-pulled carts, scrawny buffalo, donkeys, even a camel. Barefoot children shrieked and scampered between men bent under stalks of bananas or crates of live chickens, women with sacks balanced serenely on their heads. Willamette’s ears filled with the sound of radio music shrilling from opened doorways, horns blaring, peddlers calling out their wares. Back in Troit, there had been gunfire and sirens, too, but always on the other side of the razor-wire fences. She’d lived all her thirteen years with those sounds.

A boy not too much older than Willamette slouched on the dirt, his back to the wall of their hotel, stick-thin legs outstretched. One hand lay palm up on his lap, as if begging. Flies clustered around his eyes and the open sores on his ankles. Willamette thought he was dead until she saw the pulse in his neck.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked Mama.

“Slim disease.”

Everything had a different name here. Willamette heard Dad say that AIDS was the reason they’d been able to sign up for a farm. The old tribal villages were gone and everyone who wasn’t sick had left for Kampala or Mbale to find work.

“Why doesn’t someone take care of him?” Willamette asked.

Mama’s mouth went tight. “He’s probably here alone, with no family.”

A man lounging beside the hotel doorway said, “All the people from the southern district are gone. Dead, or back to the quarantine areas.” The way he said it, there wasn’t much difference.

When her brother Stephen bent over to speak to the boy, there was no response. The man at the doorway spat out a wad of something green and disgusting and asked, in sing-song English, how much Stephen wanted for his sister. He didn’t mean slavery, but bride wealth, gifts from the groom to the bride’s family—so many cattle, so many vials of AZT—or at least that’s what Willamette hoped he meant. She’d studied such customs in the Reclamation Project classes.

The hotel room was a dark, stuffy, peeling cell. Out of the corner of her eye, Willamette caught bedbugs crawling across the single lumpy mattress she shared with Mama. Because Mama was afraid to let them drink the water, all they had were warm Cokes, so old they’d lost their fizz. On the other side of the wall, a baby cried fitfully.

The next morning, all the families assigned to their village crowded into the dingy hotel lobby for the ceremony that would transfer the official land-use right to them. The Reclamation Project agent said they all had to be there. Packed in between her oldest brother Joseph, who was six feet one, and a lady from Pitts who smelled of garlic and was bigger than two of Mama, Willamette couldn’t see much. The baby who’d cried all night curled on his daddy’s shoulder, snuffling and whimpering.

Three old men, bent over and scrawny in their bright-colored robes, tottered to the center of the circle. One carried a pile of battered school notebooks. These were the village registers, records of every birth, marriage, death. In voices so softly musical that Willamette could hardly hear them, the elders described the history of the village, the places to be respected. Then Dad went up with the other grown men to receive the registers. Through the press of bodies, Willamette caught a glimpse of a dark, wrinkled face, eyes lingering for a last moment on the old notebooks.

“It is good that there will be children in the village again,” the elder said.

After the ceremony, the Reclamation Project lady said everyone must be ready to leave first thing in the morning. Willamette didn’t catch all the details, but it had something to do with clan fighting in another part of the city.

“It is the same old story,” the Project lady said, “each group blaming the other for slim disease. First it was prostitutes, then truckers, then anyone from the south or the west. You are Americans, you have nothing to do with these troubles. But still, it is not safe to stay long in the city.”

Back in the room, Willamette lay on the bed beside Mama. Her mouth tasted of metal. The dust had worked its way into her lungs. She used her inhaler twice, more than she was supposed to, and it left her too jittery to sleep. She couldn’t think straight, she only knew she didn’t want to wake Mama up. The walls seemed to press in on her, smothering her.

Out in the city, she heard gunfire, but maybe she was dreaming being back in Troit. Then a big boom, like a bomb or a gasoline tank exploding. There had been plenty of those back home. She knew the sounds by heart.

Now she was really scared. She tried to call out, but she couldn’t get enough air to make a sound. She shook all over. Something hot and silvery clawed at the back of her throat.

Mama woke up. She knew something was wrong, the way she always did. She got Willamette calmed down and put a damp washcloth across her eyes. Willamette drifted back to sleep in the close hot darkness, knowing that Mama would take care of everything.

The next morning, Dad told her the news. The ruckus last night was a gunfight over by the lot where the Reclamation vehicles were parked. Some of the guards belonged to one clan, the raiders to another. The big noise was two of the crawlers being blown up. There weren’t enough left working for all the families, so they drew lots to see who would get one. One family had to wait in Kampala until theirs could be repaired. The McCoys would get a ride to Mbale, where a replacement crawler had been arranged.

Joseph got that tight look on his face when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to. Mama patted him on the arm and said this was Africa and they had to learn to think like Africans. Everything would come right in the end.

After three days of Willamette being afraid to breathe for fear of setting off another asthma attack and then sure she was going to murder that Stephen if he said another word to her and hoping she wouldn’t cry in front of Mama, who needed her to be brave and strong, they were ready to go.

The city seemed to go on forever, dirt roads and shacks and people sitting in the shade like piles of old laundry. But everyone was feeling good to be on their way again. Dad and Joseph sang songs in English and then in Swahili.

“They teach you that back home?” the Reclamation guide said. His rich brown skin gleamed in the sunlight as if it had been oiled. He held the steering wheel with one hand and his Uzi with the other.

Dad’s shoulders bunched up tight. Joseph said, “This is the land of our ancestors—”

“A blind man can see your people came from out West Africa.”

Until now, the guide had been easy and soft-spoken. Now there was an edge to his voice, as if he somehow associated Willamette’s family with the centuries-dead slave trade. She didn’t understand how people could blame each other for things that happened so long ago.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mama said quietly. “We are Africans now.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but no. Not till Africa leaves her mark on you. It’s you who belong to the land then and not the other way around.”

Willamette looked away, her vision fanning over the grasses. The sense of something waiting rose up like billowed dust. She looked for lions, but none appeared. That night, she dreamed of their tawny shapes sifting through the wind-rippled grass.

From Mbale, they went on alone. The Reclamation Project supplied them with tools, food, and prefab shelter, as well as incubators for the chickens and disease-resistant cattle embryos. They piled everything into their crawler, a patchwork cobbled together from Yugo and LandRover parts with an ancient Toyota drive. They took turns walking beside the crawler in the shadow of its outstretched solar wings.

The road went from gravel to dirt to nothing. They saw only abandoned villages, twiggy fragments of skeletons instead of huts.

It wasn’t nearly as hot as Willamette had expected, not here at three thousand feet. Jacaranda and hibiscus grew wild from the rich volcanic soil. Even the air smelled different, reckless and strong. The sky seemed to go on forever and had colors in it Willamette had never seen before.

Stephen spotted the first gazelle. He’d been riding on top, crouched between the crawler’s curving solar wings, while Dad eased it over the tufted ground. Willamette ran ahead, smelling the grass and the sky, wishing she had unpacked the football. At Stephen’s shout, Dad braked.

There they were, the color of sand and caramel, heads popping up like jack-in-the-boxes, ears pricked, tails wiggling. Willamette thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

The gazelles decided they were safe and went back to grazing. “Once,” Dad said, sweeping the horizon with one hand, “all this land was desert, overgrazed with the white man’s cattle, overrun by armies carrying the white man’s weapons. But in the end, Africa took back her own.”

Africa, Willamette thought, Mother Africa.

They spotted more gazelle and giraffe, a herd of zebras and another of the dark shaggy beasts that Mama said were gnus and then Stephen made a joke about “No gnus is good news” and everyone groaned.

Then the elephants came, gray as shadows against the horizon. Willamette thought that if trees could walk, they’d move like that.

“Oooh,” she said, “let’s go closer.”

“No, baby,” said Dad. “Let them be. When I was a kid, everyone said how soon there would be no more elephants left. They’re miracles.”

“Oh, LeVar, you’re such a dreamer,” said Mama, and gave a little laugh.

Willamette looked from one parent to the other and something came bursting up in her, something hot and bright and singing.

They made camp, checked for termite hills and snakes, cut a bare patch in the matted grass to set the solar stove. Mama poured out the water carefully. They were running low and had given up washing their clothes, or even changing them every day. When they reached the river, they’d disinfect enough water to refill their carriers.

Willamette lay awake after the others had gone to sleep. She gazed up at the stars, so many and so far, and thought how strange it was that the night could have so much light in it.

She woke startled, as if her body jumped all by itself. The sky was no longer dark, but that milky color before sunrise turned it yellow. The earth gave off a sweet damp smell. The insects hadn’t woken up yet; she could almost touch the quiet. Every once in a while, she heard a faint familiar snoring.

The scratching noise sounded like claws on metal. If she hadn’t been holding her breath, listening, she might have missed it. Something was scavenging in the aluminum food bins.

Soft as she could, she rolled to her hands and knees. Stephen would have shouted to scare the animal off, but some lonely part of her didn’t want it scared off. She would tame this wild creature, this part of Mother Africa, and they would belong to each other forever.

A rounded shape huddled beside the dark rectangle of the crawler. She crept closer. Her palms pressed soundlessly into the cool dirt. Grass roots tangled around her fingers.

The sounds stopped abruptly. She froze. The creature’s head shot up. Two round eyes, rimmed with white, met hers. She glimpsed a nose like a button and a shirt that was a collection of string, nothing more. The kid looked to be about six, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Geez!” Willamette managed to keep her voice to a whisper. “You scared the daylights out of me!”

The kid scuttled backward so fast he crashed into the crawler’s tire and fell over. He curled himself into a little ball, hugging his knees to his chest and whimpering.

“Hey!” Willamette said, making her voice soft. “Hey, I won’t hurt you.” She held out one hand the way she would to a frightened puppy, if she’d ever had one. “It’s okay.” Maybe the kid couldn’t understand English. She tried again in Swahili, but the kid only looked more terrified than ever.

Willamette looked around for something she could offer him. She spotted a tin of candy bars in the pile of food bins. She ran her fingernails over the lid.

The whimpers stopped. She pried the lid off, took out a bar, crinkled the wrapping foil. The kid uncurled a little more. She tore open the wrapper, took a nibble. The smell and taste of the chocolate filled her head. “Mmmm,” she hummed, rubbing her tummy and smacking her lips. His mouth fell open and his tummy rumbled.

She held out the rest of the bar. “Come on, you can have it. It’s good. Aren’t you hungry?”

The kid whimpered again and for a moment she thought he’d bolt, famished though he was. She crouched there, holding out the bar. The chocolate felt slippery between her fingers. The kid launched himself at her, snatched the candy, scrambled backward, and stuffed it into his mouth. He reminded Willamette of a Tidepool Museum crab, all jerky legs and bulgy eyes. She put one hand over her mouth, smothering a giggle.

“You want more?” The sound of her voice seemed to soothe him. That, or he was too busy eating to care. He finished the candy bar, licked his filthy fingers, and held out one hand, “M-m-m-”

She dug out a second bar, tore open the wrapper. This time she didn’t hold it out so far. He came closer and swiped at it with one hand. She snatched it closer to her. “Come and get it,” With a little jockeying back and forth, she got him to sit while she handed him gobs of the sticky, half-melted stuff.

Dad stirred in his sleep. The kid jumped. Joseph woke up with a gurgling start. Before the kid could take off Willamette wrapped her arms around him. He mewed like a terrified kitten and struggled, but didn’t try to hurt her.

The next moment Mama and the others were standing all around Willamette and the kid had gone rigid.

“My lord,” said Mama. “Come here, you poor thing.” She gathered up the child. He wrapped his dirty arms around her and hid his face against her breasts.

“Mama!” cried Stephen.

“Corinne, just what in God’s name do you think you’re doing?” Dad said.

“I found him and he’s mine!” Willamette said.

“He’s just a baby,” Mama said in a crooning voice. She stroked the kid’s hair. He kept on shivering.

“Get away from him this minute!” Dad shouted.

“If you mean slim disease, he doesn’t seem to be sick,” Mama said. “He’s not running a fever. But he can’t make it on his own out here.”

They went on like that for a while, Dad pacing and shouting, Mama rocking the kid, who was holding on to her like one of those monkey babies. Finally Mama put the kid aside and got to her feet. “I will not leave a child to starve to death.”

“His own folks—” Joseph began, but hushed at Mama’s glare.

The only thing Dad said, once they were under way again, the kid still in Mama’s lap and her in the passenger seat, “We better get to that river pretty soon. Kid’s gonna need a bath.”

They came to the river marked on their maps later that same day. Almost, Willamette thought, as if Mother Africa were giving them whatever they needed to take care of the kid. By then, the kid had relaxed enough to start talking. He knew English, after all.

Dad told everyone for the tenth time that morning that they could splash around all they liked after they’d dosed themselves with Flukegard, but every single drop they drank had to be disinfected first. And to use the bug repellent, because tsetse flies were a problem in brushy areas. They’d had all the shots, but the bites were supposed to be painful.

Joseph stopped the crawler at the edge of the trees. Everyone jumped out, laughing. Mama took her bag and started upriver with Willamette. The kid went with them, clinging to Mama’s hand. Stephen made a face that said he thought it wasn’t right, but Dad motioned him to hush.

Willamette stripped and waded out into the thick, greeny-brown water. She splashed it over her shoulders and up in her armpits, shivering and laughing. Back on the bank, Mama had coaxed the kid out of his rags. His ribs were a row of slats and his shoulder blades jutted out like angel’s wings. Mama carried him into the water, talking to him the whole time. She got a brick of soap from her bag and lathered him up good. He kicked the water and giggled.

My Mama, Willamette thought, could charm the socks off a snake.

Willamette swam out to the center of the river, taking long, lazy strokes. The current tugged at her, colder. She thought of crocodiles or giant snakes lurking in the hidden depths. She kicked hard and headed back.

In the bag were clothes for the kid, a shirt and shorts, almost clean. They were too big for him, being Willamette’s. She didn’t say anything after she’d caught the smile on the kid’s face and the look in Mama’s eyes.

“We’ll stay here another day or two,” Mama said as they got dressed. The kid had let go of her hand, although he still stayed close. “While the drinking water disinfects, I want to wash every single piece of dirty clothing.”

They all sorted laundry and carried it down to the river, scrubbed it, found flat clean rocks to spread it to dry. Willamette and the kid stayed close to Mama. Mama sang, “The Water is Wide” and “Wading in the River”; she didn’t care where a song had come from so long as she liked it. The boy hummed a little. Willamette wondered if he remembered singing with his own mother.

They headed back toward the crawler the way they’d come, not following the river but back along a little path through the trees. They heard men’s voices before they saw them.

Dad and the boys stood talking to four or five men. They wore cut-off jeans and shirts that might have been red but were now mud-colored. They held spears, long sticks, and one banged-up rifle. A dozen or so scrawny cattle had waded into the middle of the river. Flies covered the sores on their hip bones.

Willamette could tell Dad was uptight by the way his shoulders hunched. The kid took one look at the men and jumped into Mama’s arms, almost knocking her over.

“What’s going on?” Willamette whispered. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gun. All the stories about tribal feuds came rushing into her head, all the warnings.

“It’s all right,” said Mama.

The men had spotted them and shouted. One of them waved his spear. Mama set her lips together and took hold of the kid.

Willamette’s knees were knocking together. She kept telling herself the things Dad had said, that these were their own people, their brothers. The man with the rifle didn’t look very brotherly with his lips pulled back from broken teeth.

Dad said something about this being his wife and child.

The man jabbed the kid with the end of his rifle. The kid let out a yip and grabbed Mama tighter. “This no child of yours.”

Mama lifted her chin. “This is a child we are caring for.”

Another jab. The kid squirmed and whimpered. The man laughed. Then he launched into a gabble in his own language. The other men said stuff that sounded like they agreed with him. One gestured toward Mama.

“Now just a minute!” Dad said in his you-better-not-mess-with-me voice. “I told you that’s my wife. You keep away from her.”

“Not hurt woman. We take child. Send him south to quarantine district.”

“And who will take care of him there?” said Mama.

The man shrugged, as if this was no concern of his.

The next instant, Dad put his six feet three in between the man with the rifle and Mama. “You lay one finger on my woman or my child or anything else in my camp and I’ll personally wring your neck.” He looked like he could do it, too, even though he’d gone a little paunchy since he played tight end at college.

“Our grandfathers told us once this land was rich. We had many cattle. Our granaries were full. Then foreign devils come from the south.” The man sounded frantic now. “They bring slim disease and all manner misfortune! Foreign devils must go home!”

He means us, too, Willamette thought.

“The only devil I see is the one standing in front of me,” said Dad.

The man motioned to the others. They rounded up the cattle, who by now had made a muddy mess of the river bank, and herded them away.

Willamette went to the nearest rock and sank down. Her heart pounded hard enough to jump out of her chest. She couldn’t tell if she wanted to cry or laugh or throw up. Mama told her to put her head between her knees.

“They’ll be back,” Joseph said. He got their rifle out of the crawler.

They loaded up as much water as was ready and went on. They saw no more signs of the strange men. As they set up camp, a quiet settled over the land, as if the sky were holding its breath. Color seeped in, yellow glowing to orange and then inky blue, so rich and soft that Willamette’s eyes hurt to look at it. Her heart caught in her throat. A humming began in her bones, a feeling that all she had to do was stretch out her wings, like precious things of gold and burnished copper and inky lapis blue.

This is Mother Africa, where life began, she thought. This is where it goes on forever.

The camp exploded with noise, a shot, then two more, punching through the sounds of men shouting and a high quick scream. Willamette couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Her eyes locked on Joseph scrambling to his feet, Dad wrestling with a man in a red shirt. Mama hunched over, cursing in a hoarse voice. Another man ran toward her with something in his hands…

“No!” Willamette yelled and sprinted for the man. Her feet slapped the ground. She pumped with her arms. Every nerve in her body caught fire. The man was almost on top of Mama. Willamette leapt and grabbed, just the way Dad taught her, just the way she did with Stephen. She tackled him around the knees, his legs buckled, and they both went down.

The impact knocked the breath out of her. The man twisted like a snake and grabbed her around the neck. She clawed at his arms. His bones were hard as flint under papery skin. He shouted, but she couldn’t understand him. Pain shot down her neck. Her vision went gray. Her ears roared. She kicked out at nothing, screamed, tried to piy his fingers free.

Another shot went off. Dad yelled, or maybe it was Joseph.

Willamette sank her teeth into the man’s forearm as hard as she could. He thrashed around, his voice wild. The pressure on her neck eased. He jerked away. She heard the pad-pad-pad of running bare feet, then stillness.

Willamette lay in the dust. Her lungs wheezed and her whole body hurt. She told herself, They’re gone, it’s okay, it’s over.

From a few feet away, she heard sobbing, then shouts. Someone touched her arm. Her vision cleared a little. She recognized Stephen, looking down at her. He called, “She’s okay!” There was something wrong with his voice.

Jagged electric heat shot through her. Adrenaline. Mama always said it was the best thing for asthma. Gotta breathe to fight that tiger, Wil, she’d say.

Willamette sat up. The strange men were gone. Dad crouched on the ground, his back toward her. Joseph, holding the rifle, stood beside him. Shadows hid his face. She could see Mama’s legs sticking out. There was something spooky about the way they splayed out, so graceless and loose.

Willamette scrambled across the dust. She could hardly see. Tears had sprung into her eyes out of nowhere. Stephen tried to catch her in his arms, but she slipped by him. Then Dad turned and when she saw his face, she stopped.

“Don’t look.” Dad’s voice belonged to someone else. “She was protecting the boy.”

Willamette didn’t dare say anything or she’d break into a hundred pieces.

“That goddamned kid!” said Joseph. “I wish we’d left him where we found him. I wish we’d let them have him. Mama might still—might still—”

“Hush up!” popped out of Willamette, just like Mama would have said. She took a deep breath. “Stand aside.”

Dad hesitated. His eyes made jerky little lost movements. Stephen came around and put his arm around him. “Let her, Dad. Mama always said Wil had good instincts. Strong instincts.”

Stephen, who teased her and raced her and beat her purple, standing up for her now?

One part of her was screaming and another had gone numb and cold and gray. Yet something silent and powerful coursed through her. Her legs stopped shaking. The earth itself seemed to rise and hold her up. Slowly, as if each step had its own secret meaning, she moved to Mama’s side.

Mama lay on her back, one arm outstretched, fingers curled to the sky. The other arm cradled the boy against her full soft breasts. One half of his skull had been blown away.

Mama’s eyes were open, peaceful like a house when the people have all gone to sleep. A dark trickle ran from one corner of her mouth. Willamette wanted to touch her finger to it, to see if it were real, but a spell had come over Mama, a stillness, a sacredness.

She thought of laying Mama in the warm rich African earth. She thought of going on without her. She thought of the way Africa had renewed itself, the animals and the sky, the grasses covering the scars of bombs and plantations. She wondered if some of that aliveness might seep into Mama’s bones, might seep into her own.

The men would do the digging, metal shovel blades slicing through the living soil. They would weep, outwardly and inwardly, because it was the need of men to weep. They would turn to her and ask, “How can we go on without her?”

She would lead them, even as Mama had led them. To keep their promise, to bring life to the villages again.

The vision faded, like the night mist burning off in the stark African sun, and she was once more a girl on the brink of womanhood who had just lost her mother, but no, she would never be a little girl again, she would never be the same. Whenever she spoke, she would hear her mother’s voice ringing through hers and another voice, deeper and resonant with things she could almost feel and never imagine, and she would know that Mother Africa had left its terrible mark on her forever.