I was dancing with him now; he was playing me, and logic could not stand against him. His words, though scarcely original, a medley of bleak clichés, had tapped into the core of my weakness, and all the fear I had nourished over long years in Africa, all the peculiarly African fear, the apprehension of spirits, of lion ghosts and magical presidents and the long-legged, licorice-skinned, lickety-split demons of the talking drum dancing with arms akimbo on the margins of one’s campfire light, ready to pounce with their red-hot spears and golden teeth… all this was loose in me, raving like a storm inside my skull, and I had the unshakable presentiment that if I didn’t move I would be trapped with this man who claimed not to be a man in that little white cell forever. I scraped back my chair, staggered against the wall, the wall infected with blood and darkness, and as I moved haltingly toward the door, Buma smiled at me. The cracks in his wrinkled, youthful face seemed to deepen so drastically, I thought his skin would fly apart into a kind of weathered shrapnel, releasing the all-consuming, crocodile-reeking blackness beneath.
“Remember, Michael,” he said. “Have patience. No matter what befalls the world, whether fire or ice, if you have patience, you will thrive.”
Dusk came suddenly as I left the jail, dragged in—it appeared—by flights of crows that swooped just above the rooftops, screaming down harsh curses on the people below. I badly wanted a drink, and since I was now persona non grata with Dillip, I headed for the nearest shanty bar, a construction of warped boards alternately painted pink and yellow and blue, furnished with picnic-style tables and lit by a kerosene lantern, all topped off by a rust-scabbed tin roof. The bartender, an enormous woman in a flowered dress, her hair wrapped in a white cloth, provided me with a bottle with a Jim Beam label that did not contain Jim Beam, but something yellowish-brown and vile and strong as poison. I drank it gratefully. Soon the woman came to resemble a deity, marooned by a spill of lantern light in the soft darkness behind a two-plank countertop, her shiny black plump breasts the source of all fecundity, her broad round face as serene as those faces at the corners of antique maps that signify the east wind. At another table sat three men, all young, muscular, two of them wearing polo shirts and jeans, the other jeans and a pink T-shirt decorated with the image of a pony. Pink T-shirt was fiddling with the dials of a transistor radio, bringing in static-filled reggae. Now and then he would glance sternly at me, as if he disapproved of my presence. But I didn’t care. I was ablaze with the happiness that only a satisfied drunk can know, liberated from—yet not unmindful of—my troubles. They seemed manageable now. Even the pronounced possibility that I was experiencing mental slippage seemed a trivial matter, one that could be reconciled in due course. And what if I was perfectly healthy? That was a possibility, I realized, that I had not given sufficient credence. It was not utterly beyond the pale to think that Buma was the king of the crocodiles, or that Mobutu’s curse was despoiling the Kilombo, or that Patience was more than a simple virtue. Then, too, it might be true both that I was slipping and that the world was mad enough to support crocodile kings and rule by voodoo. But it was unlikely that anyone could decide these questions, so why worry about them?
“You are an American Negro, I believe,” said Pink T-shirt, who without my notice had come to stand by my table, his pals at his shoulder. I could not deny the fact, though I found the word “Negro” rankling. Pink T-shirt introduced himself as Solomon, and he and his friends, whose names I promptly forgot, joined me.
“Are you a student of history?” Solomon asked, enunciating his words with the profound dignity and slow precision of the very drunk. His friends did not appear capable of speech. Drifting, eyes rolling, almost on the nod. I told Solomon I was a student of snakes, but he did not respond to this; his impassively handsome face was arranged in a contemplative mask. “I am a student of history,” he said, “at the university in Kinshasa. I have studied the history of the American Negro.”
“I see,” I said. “And what have your studies taught you?”
He nodded, as if I had made a statement and not asked a question. Tiny yellow circles of reflected lantern light lensed his pupils. “I am curious about the American Negro’s perspective on Africa.”
Having been elected the American Negro for purposes of the conversation, I felt a responsibility to offer something cogent in reply. “It’s a complex subject,” I said. “After all, Africa is not one thing, but many. And the American Negro is a term that embodies a number of perspectives.”
In the gathering dark outside, two little girls in pale smocks came chasing after a huge sow, one of them flicking at her rump with a long switch.
“It is my thesis,” Solomon said, regarding me with what I suspected he thought was an imperious stare, “that because he both venerates and despises the African, the American Negro stands closer to a white perspective on the continent than to the African. In effect, he is no longer part of the black race.”
The black race, I thought. A mystery novel. A description of the River Styx. A nighttime cycling event. I wanted to feel respect for Solomon… or if not respect, then sadness. I suppose I felt a little of both. He had, after all, managed a university education—not the easiest thing to achieve in the Congo—and his simplistic take on his subject implied an unfruitful and outmoded agenda that was, in its historical context, sad. It was also sad that Solomon was apparently unaware of his subtext, in which—if he examined it—he would find reflected a specific variety of self-loathing endemic among failed or inadequately prepared African intellectuals. But what I mainly felt was annoyance. I had been involved in far too many of these spurious philosophical discussions to feel challenged by them, as Solomon—I believed—wanted me to feel. Though it was possible to gain insights from indulging in such quasi-intellectual pissing matches, the type of insight one gained was in essence judgmental and inclined to make you feel superior to the Solomon-of-the-moment. And even if those judgments were relevant, even if they illuminated some twist of African behavior, some intricate contradiction that in turn illuminated a fragment of colonial history or post-colonial politics, they tended to make you think that you understood Africans… and if you believed that, then you had fallen into the same sort of simplistic trap as had Solomon, as had many journalists and sloppy novelists, who transformed such encounters into pithy anecdotes. It was impossible to avoid making judgments, but why bother to deify them? No, annoyance was the proper reaction. Solomon was spoiling my drunk.
“You know,” I said, as one of his friends slumped against the wall and began to snore, “I used to believe in approaching subjects like the American Negro and his perspective on Africa from an academic standpoint. But now, I guess I think that all this shit—y’know, life, Africa, the rules of chess, love, all that—I guess I think the best way to understand it is just to feel it along your skin.”
Solomon took a moment to absorb this. “You are laughing at me,” he said.
“Not at all. I’m speaking to you exactly as I would speak to anyone who said what you said to me. If what I say doesn’t validate you in the way you’d like, I’m sorry.”
Two young women entered the bar and began chatting with the bartender. One was pretty, wearing a simple yellow dress; she looked over to our table and smiled.