The day after my grandmother told me her dream story, I stayed after school to meet with Mr. Garver to find out what I could about the Dogon constellation. He not only taught integrated science, but that particular year, 1960, he served as faculty advisor on the yearbook committee. The yearbook for Armstrong High School was called the Rabza. I did not know why it was called that and, to this day, I do not know why. Curiously, no student during my years at Armstrong was ever provoked to investigate the word Rabza, which ought to have seemed a conspicuously peculiar name for a yearbook.
Mr. Garver was a big barrel-chested man who wore a big black brush mustache that cast a shadow over his mouth.
“Graylon, why is it that I have the impression you’re someplace else when you’re in my class? I had Gordon when he was a freshman like you and he was an exemplary student.”
Gordon was pictured in the 1960 edition of Mr. Garver’s Rabza in no fewer than five places: in cap-and-gown with the graduating class, as captain of both the football and basketball teams, in a group photograph of the school’s National Honor Society, and as president of the class of 1960.
“Your brother set an example that we all expect you to equal.”
I hated Mr. Garver, the only colored man in America, as far as I knew, who played the hneh, a bamboo oboe-like instrument he had picked up during his travels in Burma, travels about which he had recounted insufferably to our fourth period class on numberless occasions.
“I’ll try my best to do better.”
Mr. Garver was surprised that I’d stopped by but dutifully said all the things that I had heard all too many times before: that I had been gifted with as much ability as anyone, that I was wasting that ability, and, not least, that I was causing my mother and my father a great deal of needless worry and pain.
Hanging over the blackboard from hooks was a large oilcloth illustration of the solar system. Focusing on it, I asked him the question I needed answered about the big star that the Dogon priest had described in my grandmother’s dream, the star I had found in the sky the night before.
“Which way were you facing when you saw it?”
“North.” I showed him.
“Was it bluish in color and the brightest star in the sky?” I told him yes. “Then the star you saw would be Sirius. It is large and close, only eight and a half light-years from Earth. It is larger even than the sun.”
I asked him, “Is it orbited by another tiny star?”
“No, it is not.” He looked at me quizzically.
From the door, I asked, “Have you ever heard of the Dogon?”
“No. What is that?”
“They are people, sir.”
“Where do these people live?”
“Well, I don’t quite know.”
The school, built in 1951, was a two-story brick example of the American modern public school minimalist idea, replete with low ceilings and endlessly long hallways lined with vented metal student lockers that deafened at school day’s end with the racket of a tool-and-die factory. Near the building’s front door were Principal Herbert Bean’s office, the auditorium, and the library, my next destination, which was run by Miss Martha Botts who by all appearances was a mirthless woman of bone-straight posture.
“Miss Botts, have you ever heard of the Dogon people?”
She sat behind the counter in the library on a high stool, looking sterner than usual. “No. What are they? An ethnic group? Where do they live?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s just see, Mr. March. Come with me.” She led me to a table in the reference section and ordered me to sit. She then disappeared into the stacks and returned in five minutes with four heavy oversized volumes.
“Look through these. Tell me if you don’t find what you’re looking for. Then we’ll look some more. Okay?” She was nicer than I thought she would be.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The first book was The Butcher Encyclopedia of the World’s Peoples. I searched the index and discovered that the word Dogon appeared nowhere in the 2,075-page tome. Second in the stack was a book of maps for which I held out little hope. I turned my attention to the third book, which was titled Culture and People of the Global Community by C. T. Hoppes and Vivian Kornegay. I drew my finger down the index entries under D and found halfway down the page, Dogon Tribe of Peoples, 52–53 passim.
The sight of the word Dogon in print on a page in a book gave me a stir of jittered excitement. I turned quickly to page 52 and there it was, text and pictures. The pictures were of a breathtaking topographical feature and a black family dressed in flowing white robes. The first picture had under it a caption which read: The Bandiagara escarpment, a 600-foot sandstone wall that runs for 120 miles south of the Niger River.
I got up and walked to the end of the long table where an unabridged edition of Webster’s Dictionary rested on a book stand:
es • carp • ment (noun)
a steep slope in the form of a fortification.
a long cliff.
My God. The cliff. The river.
I returned to the book by Hoppes and Kornegay and began reading the text section on the Dogon people.
The Dogon people migrated to an area near Timbuktu in Mali, West Africa, sometime during the fourteenth century. It is not known where they came from. They settled at the foot of the Bandiagara escarpment. The Dogon speak a language of the same name and are believed to place religious significance in the movements of the stars and planets …
I reached my grandmother’s house before four-thirty. On the bus ride across town, I thought of little else besides the dream. How could she have known such things, things that the well-educated people I knew, knew nothing of? How could she, a retired blind laundress with a grade-school education, possibly have ever heard of any Dogon people at the foot of a cliff beside a river in Africa? Yet I believed her that she had dreamed it. I believed further that she believed what she had dreamed. Climbing the weatherbeaten wooden steps to her small front porch, I told myself that I would make notes on all that I had learned (or not learned) from Mr. Garver and from my library researches immediately upon reaching home. I would secret the notes in the plastic sleeve where I’d put the drawing and dream notes yesterday in the locked metal box on the top shelf of my closet.
Recognizing the special antic tempo of my bell ringing, my grandmother called through the door’s oval glass window, “Gray, is that you, son?”
“Yes, Grandma. It’s me all right.”
“Come on in, son. Take off your coat and come sit down so we can talk awhile.”
Grandmothers are put on Earth for harmless conspiracies, for telling things, things that cannot be told to parents—parents who are ever woebegone beneath the weight of rules, responsibilities, and a well-understood need to lie to their children about their own adolescent misadventures.
There were flowers in a vase on my grandmother’s little mahogany coffee table, yellow carnations standing roundfaced on a spray of jasmine that scented the close air.
“Those are pretty flowers, Grandma.”
She took this as a request for explanation. “You know Agnes Sally, don’t you?”
“You mean the lady from the deaconess board?”
“Yes. Well, she sells vegetables down at the 6th Street market. Got these flowers from a neighbor’s stall. Brought them not long before you got here. Sweet of her, don’t you think?”
“Y-yes, I guess.”
“Oh, son, she knows I can’t see them. But I can smell them. That’s jasmine you’re smellin’. You like it?”
“It’s great.”
She paused and then said abruptly, “Why are you here today, Gray? You don’t usually come two days in a row like your father who, bless his heart, comes just ’bout every day.”
When I did not answer immediately, she said, “You want to talk some more about my dream, don’t you?”
“My science teacher said that the big star is called Sirius.”
Her arms surged with alarm from the wide drape of her exotically embroidered shift. “You didn’t tell anybody what I told you, did you, son?”
“No, Grandma. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I don’t want people thinkin’ I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, Grandma.”
“Who you tellin’?” she said and laughed.
“Grandma, had you ever read about or heard about the Dogon people anywhere before?”
“No. Where would I?”
“I don’t know. This is just all so, you know, strange.”
“You found out somethin’, didn’t you? What is it? What did you find out?”
“There are people that are called Dogon.”
“I know that, Gray. They were in the dream.”
“They live in Africa.”
“I knew it. I knew it in my bones,” she said sotto voce.
“West Africa.”
“Yes, yes,” announced in muted celebration.
“In Mali.”
“Where?”
“Mali, Grandma.”
“Is that so?”
“At the foot of a huge cliff.” My grandmother began to rock slowly. “Along a great winding river called the Niger.”
“I knew it. I knew it,” my grandmother said, almost whispering. “God be praised. God be praised.”
We sat together for a long while saying nothing. My grandmother, Makeda Gee Florida Harris March, head resting against the chair back, rocking in a slow swim, wearing on her smooth brown face the enigmatic smile of one who had gazed full upon the face of time.
It was I who spoke first, disturbing her back into the dark little room.
“Grandma.”
She drew in a punctuating breath.
I was reluctant to share with her the other piece of information I had come by that might appear to offset the good news I had brought.
After putting on my coat, I said, “My science teacher said that there was no small star that orbited the big star.”
This did not bother her as I had expected.
“Don’t worry, son. Your science teacher will learn soon enough about the heavy little star Po Tolo. My father, the priest, knew this in 1394. His people, the Dogon, have known this for 5,000 years. Of this I am certain.”