The crowd had preceded the delegates to the Place Aly N’Guer. Weary with the long hours of waiting, first at the union building and then before the offices of the company, most of them were sitting on the dusty ground, but others gathered in little animated groups, discussing the events of the day, while the sun blasted their sweaty shoulders and arms and skull with the last of that day’s fires. Penda, Dieynaba, and Mariame Sonko tried as best they could to maintain some semblance of order among the excited women, but it was not until the delegation arrived and took up its position at the center of the square that the clamor finally subsided.
Lahbib spoke first. He gave them all of the details of the meeting with Dejean and his associates, but he was a bad speaker and he knew it, so he performed his duty as rapidly as possible and turned the platform over to Bakayoko. The trainman waited until the murmurs which had followed Lahbib’s account died down. His voice was clear and distinct and could be heard at the farthest corners of the square. Since they already knew what had happened that afternoon, he spoke first of other things, beginning with a brief history of the events which had brought the line into being, and then speaking of the strike of September 1938 and of the men who had died in it. He knew that he would provoke the anger of the crowd when he concluded, ‘And now they refuse to give us what we are asking for, on the pretext that our wives and our mothers are concubines, and we and our sons are bastards!’
Again he had to wait for silence, and then he said, ‘Well, we are not going to give in to them and go back to work! And it is here that this strike must be won! In every town I have visited in these past months I have been told, “If Thiès can hold out, we will hold out.” Workers of Thiès, it is here, in this city, that there is a Place du Premier Septembre, in honor of the men who died in 1938, and it is in their name that you must hold out now. You know that there is support for you everywhere – from Kaolack to Saint-Louis, from Guinea to Dahomey, and even in France itself. The time when we could be beaten by dividing us against ourselves is past. We will maintain the order for an unlimited strike, and we will continue to maintain it until we have won!’
Shouts and roars of approval came back to him from the crowd, where even the few who had remained seated were standing now and waving their fists with the others. But in the midst of this unleashed tumult, a little group of women managed to make its way through the crush and approach the delegates. Bakayoko saw them and raised his arms, calling for silence.
‘Our gallant women have something to say to us,’ he cried. ‘They have the right to be heard!’
It was Penda who addressed them, hesitantly at first, but gathering assurance as she spoke.
‘I speak in the name of all of the women, but I am just the voice they have chosen to tell you what they have decided to do. Yesterday we all laughed together, men and women, and today we weep together, but for us women this strike still means the possibility of a better life tomorrow. We owe it to ourselves to hold up our heads and not to give in now. So we have decided that tomorrow we will march together to Dakar.’
For a moment Penda’s voice was lost in confused murmuring that linked astonishment and misgiving, and then she spoke again, more firmly.
‘Yes – we will go together to Dakar to hear what these toubabs have to say and to let them see if we are concubines! Men, you must allow your wives to come with us! Every woman here who is capable of walking should be with us tomorrow!’
Again there was murmuring and shouting, and some applause, but there were also cries of remonstrance and protest. Bakayoko took Penda by the arm.
‘Come to the union office with us,’ he said. ‘Your idea is good, but you can’t start on something like this without thinking it over carefully.’
As they crossed the square, through the gradually scattering crowd, they passed dozens of little groups discussing this new development. It was the first time in living memory that a woman had spoken in public in Thiès, and even the onslaught of night could not still the arguments.
The discussion at the union office was no less heated. Balla expressed the opinion of many when he said, ‘I’m against letting the women go. It’s normal that they should support us; a wife should support her husband, but from that to a march on Dakar … No, I vote against it. The heat or their anger or something has gone to their heads! Lahbib, would you take the responsibility for letting the women go?’
‘We can’t possibly listen to everyone’s ideas or opinions about it. If you wish, we can take a vote.’
Bakayoko interrupted the argument that threatened to break out. ‘We have no right to discourage anyone who wants to strike a blow for us,’ he said brutally. ‘It may be just that blow that is needed. If the women have decided, all that is left for us to do is to help them. I move that the delegates from Dakar leave immediately to warn the local committee of their arrival. You’re from Dakar, aren’t you?’ he asked, speaking to Beaugosse for the first time. ‘How long do you think it will take them to get there?’
‘I’ve never gone to Dakar on foot,’ Beaugosse answered, ‘but I don’t think it is anything for women to try. Besides, there is no water there; when I left, Alioune and all the other men were scouring the city for a cask or even a bottle of water – which is what the women should be doing. Instead of that, they have been battling troops in the streets and starting fires. Now the soldiers and the militia are patrolling everywhere. You would be sending those women straight into the jaws of a lion.’
‘You can keep your French for yourself,’ Bakayoko said. ‘The men will understand you better if you speak their language. As for the men in Dakar looking for water for their families, the time when our fathers would have considered that demeaning is past. If all the workers thought like you, we might as well say good-bye to the strike and to all the months of sacrifice.’
‘All right, Bakayoko,’ Lahbib said. ‘Calm down, and let’s get back to practical matters. If the women have decided to go, we must help them and prepare an escort for them. We’ll have to do something about the children, too – at least about those whose mothers will be leaving. I suggest that we try to find some trucks and send them into the villages in the brush country. Everyone here has relatives in the villages. As for you, Penda, you will have to be sure that the men who come with you do not bother the women; and if you find that this march is too hard for the women, stop them and make them turn back. There will be no shame in that, and no one will hold it against you.’
If the truth be told, although Bakayoko, with his manner of disregarding destiny or bending it to his will, was the soul of this strike, it was Lahbib, the serious, thoughtful, calm, and modest Lahbib, who was its brain. Lahbib counted each one of God’s bits of wood, weighed them, and balanced them, but the strength that was in them came from Bakayoko.
While the men discussed the measures to be taken at the union office, the women prepared for their departure. An inky night flowed through the city, somber and viscid, as if the heavens had decanted a layer of crude oil across the earth. The cries and shouts that pierced the darkness were like fitful flashes of lightning, but the ceaseless sound of the tam-tams seemed to carry with it a promise that dawn would come.
The compound of Dieynaba, the market woman, had been turned into the major place of assembly, although she herself was not to leave because Gorgui was dying. Shadows came and went in the courtyard, challenging and calling to each other; the squalling of children and the excited chattering and laughter of the old women who were being left at home added to the hubbub and confusion, but at the same time there was a steady trampling of purposeful feet, like the sounds of a legion lifting camp.
Another group was making ready in the Place du Premier Septembre, just across from the militiamen who stood guard in front of the police station. Prevented by their orders from talking with the women, and uneasy in the flickering light of the lanterns they had brought from the guardhouse, they watched this gathering of shadows without knowing quite what to do, but there were some among them who listened to the drums and knew what was in the air.
At last, toward two o’clock in the morning, when a few venturesome stars had succeeded in stabbing through the obscurity, the two groups came together. A cloud of white dust, pushed up and out by a lazy wind, rose to the sky and a meeting with the darkness.
‘Now we are leaving!’ Penda cried.
Like so many echoes, hundreds of voices answered her. ‘Now we are leaving … leaving … leaving …’
Preceded, accompanied, and followed by the beating of the drums, the cortège moved out into the night.
At the first light of morning, some of the men who had gone out with the women to speed them on their way turned and went back to Thiès.
‘Do you think they will get there safely?’ Bakary asked.
The bowl of Bakayoko’s pipe glowed briefly in the gray dawn. ‘Yes, Uncle,’ he said. ‘We have faith in them.’
To observe the ceremony of the women’s departure properly, Bakary had girded his arms with amulets and fetishes. His upper arms were completely covered by circlets of red, black, and yellow leather, and his forearms with bracelets made of antelope horns edged with horsehair or covered with red cloth sewn with cauris, the little shells which once had been used as money. On the index finger of his right hand he wore an enormous ring of raw metal. He had sworn that none of these charms would leave his body until the women’s journey had ended.
When he returned to his home, he found a letter from Bamako waiting for him. As soon as he had read it he went out again, hurrying to the union building as fast as his decaying lungs would permit, in search of Bakayoko.
‘There is bad news from Bamako,’ he told the trainman. ‘Read it – it’s a letter from Assitan. The police came and took Fa Keïta away. Your mother is dead, and little Ad’jibid’ji was hurt.’
Bakayoko recognized the handwriting of Tiémoko. Assitan must have dictated the letter to him.
‘You will be leaving for home, my son?’
‘I must go first to Dakar, Uncle. Preparations have to be made for a meeting after the women arrive.’
‘My son, there is no longer a man in your house. You have read the letter – your family needs you.’
‘There are many houses such as mine, Uncle; houses in mourning, as there were in 1938. We must fight for the living and not give our time to thinking of the dead.’
‘Sometimes,’ Bakary murmured, almost to himself, ‘I wonder if you have a heart.’
His tired old eyes studied the precise features and well-shaped profile of the man before him, seeking out some sign of emotion and finding none. Suddenly he reached into the folds of his tunic and brought out a long dagger. It was a beautiful, pointed blade, sharp as a razor and sheathed in elaborately carved, curving horn.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take this, you may need it.’
‘But, Uncle, I am going to Dakar – if I should be taken with that, I will be sent to prison.’
‘My son, my son – I have had this blade for almost fifty years. It sees the sunlight only on Fridays, when I use it to trim my hair. It has never been used to kill anyone, and if you should meet a toubab who asks questions about it, give him my name and tell him that I will explain.’
Bakayoko accepted the old man’s gift, and then, before leaving the city himself, he went with Lahbib to see Aziz, the shopkeeper. They wanted to borrow the Syrian’s truck, but the matter was not easily arranged. Lahbib, in fact, was forced to resort to blackmail. For some years he had been going to the shop of the Syrian once each week to keep the accounts in order, and it was not until he had alluded, very politely, to some transactions that might be of interest to the police that the old Chevrolet was grudgingly rented to them.
With the matter of transport to carry the children to the outlying villages thus arranged, the two men left. When they arrived at Dieynaba’s house to pick up the articles Bakayoko would need for his journey, they found the usually bustling and noisy courtyard silent and empty. The market woman was seated on the ground beneath the little projecting roof of her cabin. Her pipe hung loosely in her hand, and she was staring unseeingly at the jumble of walls. She turned her head when she heard the whisper of their sandals on the hard-packed ground.
‘Are you at peace, Dieynaba?’ Lahbib asked.
For a long time she did not answer, but simply stared at the two men as if she were searching for something beyond their figures. They could see that her eyes were streaked with red. At last, with a sound like a sigh that had welled up somewhere deep within her, she murmured, ‘Gorgui is dead. His leg rotted away, and it rotted all the rest of his body.’
Bakayoko walked over to her. ‘Give me your pipe,’ he said gently.
‘I have no more tobacco.’
Bakayoko took the pipe from her hand, drew a leaf of tobacco from his pocket, and crumbled it carefully between his palms before filling the pipe. Then he lit it himself and handed it back to Dieynaba. For a moment his hand rested on her shoulder, and then he went into Penda’s cabin, where he had left his pack.
‘We will bury him tonight,’ Lahbib said.
‘He is the son of true believers, from both his father and his mother, and he is unclean …’
‘Don’t think about that. I will find some men and we will bathe his body and dress it as it should be before it is put into the earth.’
Dieynaba did not appear to be crying, and yet, one by one, tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped to the cloth that covered her breasts. She murmured, ‘Why can’t we just kill all the white men?’
‘Woman,’ Lahbib said, ‘you must not let hatred enter your heart. We want no more blood, we want no more children killed, but hatred cannot be our guide. I know that it is difficult …’
Bakayoko came out just then, with his pack on his shoulder and his walking staff in his hand. He had heard Lahbib’s last words, and he looked at him in astonishment, muttering between his teeth, ‘… and turn the other cheek …’ He shook his head angrily and said aloud, ‘It would be better if you arranged to bury him tomorrow morning – it will be too late today. I must leave now – I want to arrive in Dakar before the women.’
He looked down at Dieynaba, whose shoulders were now racked with sobs, and turned to go, but he had walked only a few steps when Lahbib rejoined him.
‘Write as soon as you can,’ he said, ‘and take care of yourself.’
Lahbib had put his hand on Bakayoko’s arm, and the trainman sensed the warmth and friendship in the gesture. It did him good. Certainly he was one of them, he was fighting for them and with them, and yet sometimes he felt himself far from them, very far away, and lonely.
*
Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life.
Now the day had come. The road was too narrow for them, and they moved forward spread out in the shape of a fan, so that some walked in the dust and others in the dry grass beside the road, while still others followed the tracks of the railroad, and the younger ones amused themselves by leaping from tie to tie. The colors of waistcloths and blouses and headcloths flowered across the landscape. Dun-colored burlaps and striped and checked drills and ticking mingled with bright splashes of prints and the faded cottons of old tunics. Open collars and rolled-up sleeves revealed well-rounded shoulders and elbows, blanched with a film of dust, and hitched-up skirts betrayed slender, handsome legs as well as hammy thighs.
The sun was behind them, beating ever harder on their backs, but they paid no attention to it; they knew it well. The sun was a native.
Penda, still wearing her soldier’s cartridge belt, marched at the head of the procession with Mariame Sonko, the wife of Balla, and Maïmouna, the blind woman, who had joined them in the darkness without being noticed by anyone. Her baby was strapped across her back with an old shawl.
The men of the little escort group followed at some distance behind the women, and several of them had brought bicycles in the event that they should be needed. Boubacar had strung a necklace of cans and gourds filled with water from the framework and handlebars on his. Samba N’Doulougou was perched like a scrawny bird on an elegant English machine. His rump beat irregularly against the saddle, and his feet parted company with the pedals at every turn.
They were traveling across a countryside laid waste by the dry season. The torrents of the sun had struck at the hearts of even the grasses and the wild plants and drained away their sap. The smallest leaves and stalks leaned toward the earth, preparing to fall and die. The only things that seemed alive were the thorny plants that thrived on drought and, far off toward the horizon, the lofty baobabs, to whom the comings and goings of seasons meant nothing. The soil was ridged and caked in an unwholesome crust, but it still bore traces of ancient cultivation; little squares of earth pierced by stumps of millet or corn, standing like the teeth of a broken comb. Once, a line of thatched roofs had been drawn here, against the bosom of a rich, brown earth; and countless little pathways – coming from no one knew where, going no one knew where – crossed this master road, and the hundreds of feet that trod them raised a cloud of reddish dust, for in those days there was no asphalt on the road from Dakar.
Quite early on the first night they came to a village. The inhabitants, bewildered at the sight of so many women, plied them with questions. But their hospitality was cordial, although a little ceremonious because of their surprise at such an event. At dawn, their thirst assuaged, their stomachs calmed, their feet still sore, they left again, to a concert of compliments and encouragement. Two hours later they passed the bus to Thiès, and some of the women performed a little dance in the road to acknowledge the cheers and waving of the travelers. Then they took up their march again.
And the second day was very much like the first.
*
It was at about noon of the third day that their fatigue began to show itself. They had passed through Pouth, where the villagers formed a double rank to applaud the singing women, but little by little after that the procession had lengthened out. The sun upended its caldrons of live coals on the earth, and the movement of their knees and ankles became steadily more difficult and painful. Like a river which, having amassed all its strength to pass through a narrow gorge, spreads out and moves sluggishly when it has reached the plain, the troop of women straggled across the landscape.
Maïmouna, who was still walking with the group in the lead, put her hand on Penda’s shoulder. ‘I don’t hear the singing any more,’ she said.
‘That’s true – I hadn’t noticed. How long has it been?’
‘Since we saw the snake that had been crushed by an automobile,’ Mariame Sonko said, and she sat, or rather, fell back against the rim of the embankment.
Penda studied the horizon. ‘Get up, Mariame. This isn’t a good place to rest; there are some trees up ahead.’
‘They are a long way off, your trees!’
The little group started out again, but they had gone only a short distance when Boubacar came up to them on his bicycle, with four of the other men following.
‘There’s a whole group back there that won’t go any farther,’ Boubacar said to Penda. He had shown so much enthusiasm for his role as her assistant that even Maïmouna had begun to wonder about the reasons for it.
‘They must go on,’ Penda said. She gestured to the men with Boubacar. ‘You – take the water cans and go on ahead to those trees; and don’t give anything to drink to anyone until they get there. And you, Boubacar, take me back to that group.’ She climbed on the back of his bicycle, and they set off toward the rear of the column.
Most of the women were walking by themselves, in Indian file, too tired even to group together and gossip. The largest and heaviest seemed to be suffering most; little rivers of sweat rolled down their faces and arms and naked thighs. They had pulled their skirts up high around their waists in the hope of making movement easier, and some of them had cut branches and walked like old people, leaning on their canes. When they passed a clump of bone-white, skeletal cade trees and a flight of vultures rose heavily into the air they were seized with panic, and those who had been walking in the grass hurried to join the others on the road. In all of their ancient legends these birds and these trees were the living homes of evil. Their presence together could be nothing but a warning of disaster to come.
A little beyond this point Penda and Boubacar came across the group of the younger girls, led by Aby, who had been one of Penda’s assistants at the distribution of rations. They, too, were tired, but they were still laughing and talking as they walked. Boubacar braked the bicycle and put out his enormous feet to steady it.
‘You can do better than this,’ Penda called out. ‘You’re not old women!’
‘We’re not the last,’ Aby said.
‘I know, I know, but keep going just the same. We’ll rest up ahead in the shade – and sing; it will help you and it will help the older women.’
A few voices picked up ‘the chant’, but it was a scattered, half-hearted effort. Penda shook her head, and they went on to the rear, pausing frequently to encourage women who were walking alone and urge them to join with one of the little islands into which the whole column had now broken. When they finally arrived at the group which had refused to go farther, almost an hour had elapsed since they left the head of the column.
Something like a hundred women were sitting or lying along the shoulders of the road or the slope of the railway embankment. Branches thrust into the ground and strung with skirts and blouses formed makeshift shelters from the sun, and some of them were sleeping with just their heads inside the little patch of shade. The rest of the men of the escort were waiting a little farther on, seated on the edge of a shallow ravine.
‘All right,’ Penda said sharply, as she got down from the bicycle. ‘You have rested long enough. Now we have to go on.’
‘Go on? With a sun like this? Do you want us dead?’ It was Awa who had spoken, the wife of Séne Maséne, the foreman carpenter. Comfortably installed, with her back resting against the embankment and her head in the shade of a little shrub, she looked like a queen bee surrounded by her drones.
‘Get up,’ Penda said, striving to remain calm.
‘We are tired. What difference does it make whether we leave today or tomorrow? If you’re in such a hurry, go on ahead – we’ll see you in Dakar.’
‘No – there can’t be any stragglers; we must all arrive together. If there are some of you who want to go back, do it now, but the others will go on.’
‘Hé!’ Awa cried. ‘You’re not the one to give orders here! My husband is a foreman …’
‘Awa, I warn you, don’t start that with me again! You have a short memory if you’ve forgotten already what happened at the ration distribution.’
Awa turned her head slowly on her enormous shoulders, as if calling on her companions to witness what she was about to say.
‘I am staying,’ she announced. ‘We don’t have to obey Penda. It’s just because she can’t have children that all the men run after her. And there are deumes in that group with her! Yes, there are women possessed of the evil spirit, and she wants us to mix with them! Well, piss on her!’
Penda could no longer control her anger. She strode rapidly over to the embankment and began kicking down the branches and snatching away the skirts and blouses. The women cried out in protest, and Awa screamed, ‘The whore won’t dare to touch my cloth!’ but Penda went grimly on with her work until she had destroyed the last of the flimsy shelters.
Then she looked around her and, seeing that some of the women were still lying or kneeling on the ground, she began to count them out, lifting her fingers one by one.
‘One, two, three, four …’
‘Witch!’ Awa cried. ‘You have no right to do that!’
‘No, no! Don’t count us, please!’ Séni said, getting quickly to her feet. ‘We are God’s bits of wood, and if you count us out you will bring misfortune; you will make us die!’
‘I want to know how many of you are against the strike,’ Penda said. ‘… five, six, seven, eight …’
‘Stop!’ Awa cried, scrambling to her feet. ‘We will be eaten alive! My dream was true! I dreamed that spirits carrying pointed knives came and cut me in pieces to devour me!’
With fear and anger dividing their hearts, the women gathered together their clothing, knotted the cloths around their heads, and went back to the road. The men followed at a little distance, led by the giant Boubacar.
*
When the stragglers rejoined the other women, they were given a surly welcome. The trees in the area Penda had chosen for the halt were few, and there was little shade. Most of those who had arrived first were already sleeping, and they were angry at being disturbed.
‘Hé, you’re the last to get here, and now you want all the best places!’
‘We’ve been walking through hell – we want to rest!’
‘And what about us? We didn’t walk through hell?’
‘Just move over a little.’
‘Hé, look where you’re sitting! You’ve got your ass in my face – if you farted, you’d smother me!’
‘Awa, just because you’re so fat doesn’t mean you can do anything you please. Move your big ass!’
‘Watch your words, Yaciné!’
‘And you watch where you put that big rump, Awa!’
‘Look out there! You’re stepping on me!’
‘I’m swimming in my own sweat – I don’t need yours!’
‘Is there anything to drink?’
‘No; the water is all gone. The men have gone to look for some.’
At last, however, the newcomers settled down as best they could. Fatigue overcame irritation, nerves and muscles relaxed, and the women slept.
Maïmouna had managed to save a little corner of shade for Penda, and the exhausted girl lay down beside the blind woman. She unfastened the buckle of the cartridge belt and pulled her skirt up high above her knees, sighing with relief, but just as she allowed her head to sink gratefully into the dry grass Boubacar appeared.
‘Penda, Penda …’
‘Now what?’
‘The men who went for the water haven’t come back yet,’ the smith said awkwardly. The warm scent of female bodies and the sight of all these recumbent sleeping women made him uneasy. He lowered his eyes, trying not to stare at the long legs of the girl on the ground beneath him.
Penda propped herself up on an elbow. ‘Well, send some others then. If there are no more bicycles, they’ll have to go on foot. We can’t stay here long, and we have to have water before we leave.’
‘I’ve already sent a second group.’
‘Then why are you bothering me? Tell Samba N’Doulougou I want to see him; I have something to tell him.’
Boubacar did not answer. He stood there for a moment longer, then turned his massive back and disappeared among the trees, walking cautiously to avoid stepping on the women.
Maïmouna had trembled at the mention of Samba’s name, and Penda had noticed it at once. She lay there, motionless, watching the blind woman. The sighs and snores of the sleeping women seemed enormous in the silence of the torrid afternoon. Séni was sleeping at Penda’s feet, a little thread of saliva bubbling from the corner of her lips.
‘Penda,’ Maïmouna said gently, ‘why are you so hard on Boubacar?’
‘What do you mean? I’m not hard on him. Is he the father of your children?’
‘No. Why is it that people who have eyes can never see?’
‘Well, if he isn’t the father, why is he always hanging around you?’
‘Penda, could it be that there was always only one place in your heart, and now Bakayoko has taken it?’ Maïmouna was speaking very softly, not wishing to disturb their neighbors. ‘That man will occupy your heart, and then pass through it, leaving nothing but bitterness. He will destroy everything. You see, with us – with women – we love a man when we know nothing of him, and we want to know everything. And we will pursue the one we have chosen no matter what happens, no matter how he treats us. But when we have learned what we want to know, and there is nothing left, no longer any mystery, then our interest is gone. The ones like Bakayoko will always be our bane. They do with us as they will. Before you have time to say “no”, you have already said “yes”.’
Penda was studying the face of the blind woman as she spoke, searching for the thoughts behind the sightless eyes.
‘How do you know all this?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t always been blind. After I lost my sight, my ears replaced my eyes. I have learned to know what people are thinking, and to understand what is said between the words that are spoken, and I tell you this: in Bakayoko’s heart there is no room for anyone. He is blinder to his neighbor than I am …’
‘Who is the father of your children?’
‘You are just being stubborn. That is of no importance any longer. I was not betrayed by that man. He thought that he was possessing me, but it wasn’t true; my flesh was calling out to be satisfied, just as his was. I knew that he would abandon me, and in my heart I had already abandoned him. We will be in Dakar soon, and I shall stay there. I will be among my brothers, the beggars, and with my child, who will always be mine. A child may not know its father, Penda, but what child can question the body in which it lived for nine long months?’
‘You will stay with me,’ Penda said.
The blind woman was silent for a moment. ‘Rest now, Penda,’ she said at last. ‘Soon the wind will come up, and there will be a great storm.’
*
It was during the next stage of the march that the crisis occurred which seemed certain to bring about the failure of the whole enterprise.
It had not been easy to rouse the women, who groaned and complained bitterly, pressing their hands against their aching limbs and backs, trying to rid themselves of the stiffness brought on by an hour’s rest. Penda tried to cheer them up by joking with the group of younger girls.
‘Be sure you don’t let the men get too close to you. I don’t want to have to answer to your families when your bellies start to swell!’
‘We haven’t done anything,’ Aby said indignantly.
‘And I suppose if you did you would come and tell me about it right away, hé?’
But no one was in a mood to laugh. Water had become the only thing they thought about. The few cans Boubacar’s men brought back had been enough to supply only a few drops to each person.
‘I’m as filthy as a pig,’ one woman said, displaying the scales of dried sweat, caked with dust, that had formed on her legs.
‘I’d like to get in the water and stay in it, like a fish!’
‘When I get to Dakar, I’m going to do nothing but drink for the first hour!’
‘Those beautiful, well-scrubbed boys in Dakar won’t be interested in our dirty bodies!’
Little by little, however, the column reformed. There was no laughter or singing now, but a curious new thing seemed to have come to them: the sort of hope, or instinct, that will guide an animal searching for a new place to graze.
More and more often now, Penda left her own group and walked back along the length of the column, gathering in the stragglers, stopping to talk to the old and the more feeble, encouraging them to go on. On one such journey she heard Awa talking to a group of her friends, in a loud, frightened voice.
‘I swear to you, there are evil spirits among us. My dream came back while we were resting – but I’ve taken precautions; they won’t want me.’ Saying this, she untied a corner of her skirt, which she had made into a large knot. ‘Before we left, I covered myself with salt, and every now and then I eat a little of it. That way, when the deumes come to devour me, they will find that they don’t want me.’
Several of the others held out their hands eagerly, and Awa gave them each a pinch of salt. In their fatigue and discouragement, the women were beset again by all the fears instilled in them by age-old legends. The sky itself seemed to threaten them; little clouds the color of Dahomey ivory, bordered in dark gray, raced across the horizon, throwing the bony fingers of the cade trees into stark relief.
‘You are right, Awa,’ one of the women said. ‘We must be very careful. These offshoots of hell can change themselves into grains of dust, or into ants or thorns, or even into birds. I’m going to warn my sister.’
‘You’re a bunch of fools,’ Penda said angrily, ‘and you ought to…’
But she was interrupted by a piercing, disjointed shriek, followed by the sound of hysterical screaming from the rear of the column. She began to run in that direction, and a few of the more curious among the other women followed her, but most of them remained frozen where they were, and some even fled in the opposite direction.
Séni was rolling in the dust in the middle of the road, her limbs writhing horribly, her back arched and twisted in convulsions. Her skirt had been torn off, a slimy foam dribbled from her mouth, and her eyes rolled back into her head until only the whites stared out.
‘I told you!’ Awa cried. ‘It’s a deume who is devouring her! We’ve got to find it!’
The great orbs of her eyes, rolling in terror, suddenly came to rest on the tiny figure of Yaciné, seated by the side of the road a few feet away. The old woman had cut her big toe, and since it was bleeding profusely, she was trying to bring her foot up to her mouth to suck the blood away.
‘There she is! There she is!’ Awa screamed. ‘Look – she is sucking Séni’s blood through her feet!’
Twenty mouths screamed with her now. ‘There she is! There is the deume! Catch her, catch her!’
Yaciné leaped to her feet, panic-stricken, and tried to run, but she was caught in an instant. A dozen hands seized her roughly, and others hurled branches and stones at her.
‘You’ve all gone mad!’ Penda shouted, trying to protect the old woman, whose face had been gashed by a stone and was beginning to bleed.
Awa was still screaming hysterically. ‘I told you so! I told you so! We have a deume, and Séni is going to die!’
‘Fermez vos gueules!’ Without realizing it, Penda had spoken in French. ‘You’re the ones who are deumes! Let this woman go, or I’ll eat you alive myself! Mariame! Go get Boubacar and the men and bring Maïmouna, too!’
She succeeded at last in freeing Yaciné, half dead with fright, her clothing almost torn from her body. Séni was lying on her back in the road, surrounded by a circle of women. Her legs were straight and stiff, and her teeth were chattering violently.
Boubacar arrived, followed by five or six men on bicycles, one of them carrying Maïmouna behind him. She leaned over the prostrate woman, her fingers moving swiftly over her face and feeling for her pulse.
‘It isn’t serious,’ she said. ‘It’s just the heat. She’ll have to inhale some urine.’
‘All right, some of you sluts go and piss!’ Penda cried.
Some of the women climbed over to the other side of the embankment, and Maïmouna followed them. She came back a few minutes later, carrying some clods of humid earth. Seating herself in the road, she kneaded them into little balls, which she passed back and forth under Séni’s nostrils, while Penda held up the unconscious woman’s head.
In all this time, Awa never once stopped shouting. ‘There are others! I tell you, there are others! Séni is going to die – I can smell the odor of death from her already. They brought us out here because it would be easier to devour us here – it’s just like it was in my dream!’
Penda could no longer control herself. She rested Séni’s head on the knees of the blind woman and hurled herself at Awa.
‘Now, you are going to be quiet!’
Her fists were as hard as a man’s, and she hammered at the other woman’s face and stomach until she stumbled and fell against the foot of a tree, screaming with pain and fear.
Then, her anger drained out of her by this explosion of physical energy, Penda walked over to the giant smith, who had been watching her in amazement.
‘Boubacar, some of the men will have to carry the women who are sick,’ she said, pointing at Awa, the weeping Yaciné, and Séni, who was now sitting up, with her head resting calmly on Maïmouna’s shoulder, next to that of the baby sleeping on her mother’s back.
The men lifted her from the ground and installed her on the seat of a bicycle, where they could support her as they pushed it along. Boubacar took Awa on his powerful back, and the column formed up once again. All of the women seemed to want to walk behind Maïmouna, as if she trailed a protective wake in which they would be safe. The wind she had prophesied earlier was rising now; huge black clouds, running before it, cast fitful shadows across the road, frightening the marchers. Disembodied twigs and leaves danced across the earth, carried by waves of dust.
And suddenly, as the road twisted around a little hill, a man’s voice called out, ‘Tialaverd, Tialaverd, ban’ga! Here comes the storm!’
It was really just a minor whirlwind, and not the great storm Maïmouna had predicted. As it approached them, three columns of dust twisted up to the sky, flattening the grasses in their paths and tearing the leaves from the bushes and shrubs. The terrified women flung themselves into a nearby ravine flattening their bodies against the ground and burying their heads in bushes or clumps of grass. Their headcloths were whipped away and carried up into the trees, catching against the branches and streaming out like pennants. One woman’s waistcloth was torn from her, and she was hurled, naked, against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree.
They had all seen hundreds of dust storms just like this one, but their nerves were already stretched to the breaking point, and even after it had passed their despair persisted. Penda went from one group to another, encouraging them, pointing to the columns of dust vanishing in the distance, urging them to get up and go on.
Boubacar was still carrying the mumbling and cursing Awa, Yaciné was still weeping, and Séni, held in the seat of the bicycle by two men, kept murmuring. ‘My heart… my heart …’ Even the men were beginning to complain. Only Maïmouna, her baby strapped across her back, walked steadily forward, humming one of her endless refrains.
‘What a blind woman can do,’ Penda said, ‘the rest of you should be able to do!’
At last, just as night was falling on the weary and haggard procession, they heard a joyful beating of drums approaching them. The people of the village of Sébikoutane, told of the women’s arrival by their children, were coming out to meet them. In gourds, in tin jugs, in cooking pots, and in old cans they were carrying water.
*
The last two stages of the march, from Sébikoutane to Rufisque, and from Rusfisque to Dakar, were almost a promenade. The reception given the women at Sébikoutane had been magnificent. The earth of the village square was red with the blood of sheep slaughtered for the feast, and the celebration had gone on until far into the night. But best of all had been the water; all the water they could possibly drink. The ‘marchers’, as people now called them, learned that they were rapidly becoming famous; the newspapers, and even the radio, had mentioned them. Those who had never ceased complaining while they were on the road preened themselves and strutted now, inventing vicissitudes they had never undergone and risks they had never run. Even Awa succumbed to the fever of good will, and just before their departure from the village she sought out Penda.
‘I’m not going back to Thiès,’ she said. ‘I’m going on with you, Penda. I promise that I won’t cause you any more trouble, and to prove it I am going to ask Yaciné to forgive me for what I did.’
Penda was massaging her swollen feet, but she got up instantly. ‘I’ll come with you — I want to see this …’
Seeing Awa approach, Yaciné shrank back in fear, but the carpenter’s wife fulfilled her promise.
‘Yaciné,’ she said, ‘I came to ask you to forgive me. Out there I was tired and out of my head with the heat, and I lied. You are not a deume.’
Yaciné began to laugh and cry at the same time. ‘Do you hear that, all of you?’ she shouted. ‘I am not a deume! Now I can return home without shame, and with my head high! Oh thank you, Awa, thank you!’
Just after that, the long procession set out again. The waistcloths and blouses and headcloths had all been washed, and a sky swept clean of even the smallest cloud by yesterday’s winds smiled down on the colorful horde. Between Rufisque, their last stopping place, and Dakar, they breathed the fresh sea air of the Atlantic for the first time. The ranks of the original column from Thiès had been swollen by women from the villages, and by a delegation from Rufisque; and a large group of men had reinforced the escort. The women sang again and laughed and joked.
‘We will surely see some beautiful houses at Dakar.’
‘But they are not for us; they are only for the toubabs.’
‘After the strike we will have them, too.’
‘After the strike I’m going to do what the wives of the toubabs do, and take my husband’s pay!’
‘And if there are two of you?’
‘We’ll each take half, and that way he won’t have anything left to spend on other women. We will have won the strike, too!’
‘The men have been good, though. Did you see how the smith was sweating while he was carrying Awa?’
‘Bah! For once he had a woman on his back. They have us on our backs every night!’
In the last miles before they reached their goal they passed a point from which they could see the island of Gorée, a tiny black dot in the green expanse of the ocean; they saw the vast Lafarge cement factories and the remains of an American army camp. As they approached the first buildings of Dakar’s suburbs, a breathless boy on a bicycle raced up to meet them, leaping off his machine in front of the little group at the head of the column.
‘There are soldiers on the road at the entrance to the city,’ he gasped. ‘They say that the women from Thiès will not be allowed to pass.’
The laughter and the singing stopped abruptly, and there was silence. A few of the women left the road and took shelter behind the walls, as if they expected the soldiers to appear at any minute; but the bulk of the column stood firm. Penda climbed up on a little slope.
‘The soldiers can’t eat us!’ she cried. ‘They can’t even kill us; there are too many of us! Don’t be afraid – our friends are waiting for us in Dakar! We’ll go on!’
The long, multi-colored mass began to move forward again.
Maïmouna, who was walking a little behind Penda, suddenly felt a hand on her arm.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me.’
‘You, Samba? What’s the matter?’
‘There are soldiers …’
‘Yes, I heard.’
Samba N’Doulougou did not understand too clearly what force it was that had compelled him to come here now and seek out this woman whose body he had enjoyed one night. Was it pity for the weak and infirm, or was it for the mother and the child? He remembered the shame he had lived with for months, as he watched her working in the sun while her belly grew large with the child, his child. And he remembered the way he had tried to alter his voice so she would not recognize him.
‘Give me the child,’ he said. ‘It will be easier for me to avoid the soldiers.’
‘You want your child?’ the blind woman said.
‘The soldiers are going to be there …’
‘And after that? … A father may die while a woman is big with child, but that does not prevent the child from living, because the mother is there. It is up to me to protect this child. Go away now. After I get to Dakar you will never see me again; and I have never seen you. No one knows who is the father of this child – you can sleep peacefully, and your honor will be safe. Now go back to the men.’
Just outside the big racecourse of the city, the column confronted the red tarbooshes of the soldiers. A black non-commissioned officer who was standing with the captain commanding the little detachment called out to them.
‘Go back to Thiès, women! We cannot let you pass!’
‘We will pass if we have to walk on the body of your mother!’ Penda cried.
And already the pressure of this human wall was forcing the soldiers to draw back. Reinforcements began to appear, from everywhere at once, but they were not for the men in uniform. A few rifle butts came up menacingly and were beaten down by clubs and stones. The unnerved soldiers hesitated, not knowing what to do, and then some shots rang out, and in the column two people fell – Penda and Samba N’Doulougou.
But how could a handful of men in red tarbooshes prevent this great river from rolling on to the sea?