Dr. Abana was a short man, short enough to rest his folded arms flat on the surface of the lectern that hid three-quarters of his body. His uninflected voice was high-pitched, small, and raspy. It was his habit to speak with no attempt to entertain or provoke. He wore a long elaborately woven white robe and a brimless white cap that listed forward on his head halfway between the hairline and the gray-flecked mop of the brow.
He was an attractive man of fifty-four years who had been told repeatedly as a teenager that he was black and ugly by the younger daughter of his British colonial missionary school teacher, a certain Mr. Horsford.
He looked overlong down at his notes. Because he was short, his face fell close to the white paper on which his notes were scrawled in an indecipherable hand. The thick eyeglasses he wore gleamed opaque and white in the bright reflected light of the lectern lamp.
Dr. Quarles had been uneasy before the program. He worried that his friend detested public speaking and was purposely not good at it, holding that ideas spoiled when bellowed and that the public speech was necessarily the tool of one form of demagoguery or another. This was a relatively new view that Dr. Abana had developed in reaction to a mistaken impression that public speaking in America was characteristically sermonic. Making his acknowledgments, Dr. Abana turned and looked at the empty chair on the stage in which the school’s president had been expected to sit.
He began to speak in a quiet voice as if he were alone in the room. Were not the microphone, owing to his lack of height, so close to his mouth, no one would likely have heard him begin with little preamble from what seemed the middle of a foreign and strange tale.
“How do you see me?”
Pausing, he looked about the vast, scantly populated hall into puzzled faces. Students were not accustomed to convocation speakers beginning their remarks with a question.
“What joins us, if anything more than your discomfort over what we should mean to each other and our mutual ignorance of each other’s circumstance?”
A rustle of disquiet could be heard over Dr. Abana’s long pause.
“The differences that are obvious set me apart from you, no? How I appear to you. How I dress. How I speak English.
“You may even see me as a complete stranger, a stranger to be shunned, a stranger with embarrassing custody of your past, a past you remain ambivalent about, a past you have been caused long since to involuntarily discard. You have new names and manners and ways now. I am the leper obstructing your flight from yourselves. Or for those of you who are rather more psychologically advanced, at best you see me as the inconvenient cousin who, during your long centuries of bondage, disappeared from the family portrait. Cropped from memory by a grand interloper.”
He sensed that he sounded cantankerous, unpleasant, and that the few who were listening had shrunken from him.
“Other than our separate experiences of shame and degradation, we have no common memory. Thus, absent memory, there can be no proud, joyous, painless we that joins us, you and me. For the only memory that survives reposes in the photographs that others have taken for their own purposes, where the camera of our common experience was never moved far enough back in time to frame us all—one whole family in one common, unbroken belonging.”
He noticed that some students sitting about in pairs had begun to talk to each other. He then swung around to glance at Dr. Quarles who was sitting forward in his seat on the stage. Dr. Quarles smiled inscrutably. Turning back to the audience, Dr. Abana sighed and changed the meter of his speech.
“How many of you have any idea of what I’m talking about?”
Three hands rose. One of the three but halfway.
Dr. Abana had not wanted to strengthen any welldeveloped social complexes he strongly suspected many of the students were afflicted by. This concern caused him to speak next in a more sympathetic tone.
“Make no mistake. We are not alone in our long, costly experience with powerful forces in the world. The truth often has ruthless enemies—enemies so powerful they can all but make the truth disappear, go away—our truth, and the painful truth of other peoples you probably don’t know much about.”
He paused to decide how best to explain himself.
“One of your presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, is believed by most in your country to have been a great president. While this may have been true on American terms, Theodore Roosevelt was not just the person many of you have heard about. For instance, he believed that the most desirable lands in the world should by natural right belong to the white race, the race he very wrongly believed solely responsible for world civilization. He expressed this view in 1897 before becoming president. These are his words: Nineteenth-century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new world’s surface. In 1906, after becoming president, Roosevelt wrote, The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands.
“In much the same conquering American spirit,” Dr. Abana continued, “Mexicans lost most—and American Indians all—of the lands they had once owned in North America. Calling Filipinos Pacific Negroes, Roosevelt, wielding brute American military force, simply took the Philippine islands from that country’s people. So you see, we are not alone. A great many others in the world, including myself, have suffered in ways that no one has told you about.”
Dr. Abana had only arrived in the United States three weeks before the convocation, and it was his first visit to the country. He had read much about American Negroes and had spoken at length about them to Dr. Quarles during the historian’s several visits to Ghana. But not until that precise moment in his talk did it appear an absolute certainty to him that the American Negro had no insides left to speak of. All that seemed to remain was the will to fight against an immediate or proximate nemesis like the white Southern segregationists. This seemed the only facet of their problem left visible to them. The far past and future, they seemed to have lost the ability to see and find sustenance in. The years of slavery and the cultural isolation it imposed had produced in the American Negro an apparent partial loss of self. They were no longer their own they but someone else’s, a they born of the afflictions of a terrible and sustained oppression, a group dismembered and rebuilt by its “dismemberers” in the form of the missing self the “dismemberers” had removed and hidden.
“Let me then tell you a story to illustrate my point, a story that, though you may not have heard it, belongs as much to you as it does to me. Remembering the story, telling it, moves the camera far back in time. Far enough back so that it pictures not only the people named in the story, but by inference, all of their direct and indirect cultural and racial descendants who have fanned out all across the world in the centuries since the events took place nearly 1,000 years before the birth of Christ. Like all accounts of religious history, the story is part fact, part legend, part verifiable, part thesis of faith.”
The auditorium was funereal with a kind of embarrassed disturbed quiet. I sensed a thin sweeping dislike for Dr. Abana in the room. I did not share this antipathy, however, and oddly wanted to interpose myself between the unwitting professor and the students who, I suspected, had mistaken intellectual candor for rebuke.
“Before coming to the United States, I read that there was a great church in Harlem, New York, called Abyssinian Baptist Church, once pastored by the Negro congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The name of the church comes from a place in ancient Africa called Abyssinia. Abyssinia is today known as Ethiopia. At the time of the story I am going to tell you, Ethiopia was a land called Axum and Sabaea, or Axum and Sheba. The Queen of Axum and Sabaea from the year 1005 B.C. is referred to in the Old Testament of the Bible in Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, Matthew, and Luke. The queen lived in the capital of Axum, which was in the south of her vast lands. Ethiopia was a much bigger country then than it is today. Then as now, however, Axum was, and remains, in Ethiopia. The lands of Sheba, once northern Ethiopia, are now a country called Yemen. The Queen of Axum and Sheba ruled over her sprawling empire more than 1,500 years before the Arabs arrived in the region. The people of Axum and Sheba are said to have been tall, attractive people with woolly hair. Ye are black of face, wrote the ancient priest Azariah of the queen and her subjects in Ethiopia’s most sacred book, the Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings).”
Dr. Abana stopped to study the students’ faces for an index of interest and detected a spark, caused, he guessed, by his mention of a name and word familiar to them, Powell and Abyssinian (known only to us in reference to the church, just as Rabza, a desert in North Africa, had been known only to me as the name of my high school yearbook).
Dr. Abana then began to speak extemporaneously. In the back of his mind, he knew that this was ill-advised. It was a mistake he had made before when falling prey to feelings of angry futility.
“How many of you have heard of the Queen of Axum and Sheba?”
This time, no hands were raised, not even mine.
“Now, how many of you have heard of the Queen of Sheba?”
As far as I could tell, every hand in the auditorium went up.
“Well, her formal title was Queen of Axum and Sheba. She lived all of her life in Axum, the part of her kingdom that roughly corresponds to modern Ethiopia. During her life, she only saw Sheba once while passing through its lands en route north with her royal caravan to visit King Solomon in Israel.
“Do you find nothing suspicious here, dear young people?”
If anyone did, no one seemed to know specifically what it was.
“After 3,000 years, ‘history’—not the history of the Kebra Nagast, not the Ethiopians’ version of history, their own history, but history written by outsiders—has altered the queen’s title. Why? Why was this? Why has history misidentified her as the Queen of Sheba? And why did it not choose, if it felt compelled for some unscholarly reason to shorten her title, to misidentify her as the Queen of Axum, which lay fully on the African continent where she was born, where she reigned, where she spent the entirety of her life? Perhaps it was the arrival of the Arabs in the region, 1,500 years after the queen’s death, that gave foreign historians the idea that this beautiful dark queen with woolly hair from the heart of Ethiopia—this impressive monarch that Jesus Christ 1,000 years later would call, while citing her virtues, the Queen of the South—could be passed off as something other than the black woman that she was. This is but one of the many outrageous distortions written cunningly by others that fog our view of ourselves—this one, this lie, so large, so pervasive, so invidious, that an Italian actress named Gina Lollobrigida got to play the queen in the American movie about her relationship with King Solomon. And few in this country—and I daresay none of you here—found anything strange about a white woman playing a black queen of ancient Ethiopia.”
Dr. Abana sighed, shook his head slightly, and collected himself. The room was silent. He then studied his notes and bore doggedly on with his prepared lecture.
“Axum and Sheba was a wealthy and highly developed country with advanced systems of irrigation and hydraulic energy production. Its people built massive wells and dams reaching heights of sixty feet to produce an abundance of food. The country was also rich in gold and spices which it traded along hundreds of miles of road and sea as far away as Israel. Saffron, cumin, aloes, and galbanum were to be had by broad numbers of the country’s people.
Myrrh both healed and perfumed. Frankincense eased a body’s pain and appeased the gods.
“The queen was said by the ancient scribes to have been a beautiful woman. She was born to great wealth in 1020 B.C. and took the throne at the age of fifteen upon her father’s death. She ruled Axum and Sheba, the ancient texts tell us, for forty years with wisdom and skill. The historian Josephus wrote that she was inquisitive into philosophy, and one that on other accounts also was to be admired. The queen herself wrote in her memoirs, Perhaps many people will say that I am inquisitive, but that is simply because they do not understand me. I am always anxious to learn and serious minded.”
Dr. Abana, by then, had won a small listenership, even though we had little to no idea where his story was leading us. Already I felt from his telling of it both familiarity and surprise. For years, I had heard unexplained references to “the Queen of Sheba,” a common first cousin to phrases and words like the “Wreck of the Hesperus” and the “Midas touch.” But I had known nothing further, neither that “Sheba” was a misnamed country of the ancient world, nor that the country was the modern Ethiopia of East Africa.
I sat alone midway back in the graduated seating of the vast hall that had been built two years before as a multipurpose facility for large lectures, major theatrical productions, and the commencement exercises that drew thousands in the spring. The high ceiling and walls were clad with an acoustical material of a cut and quality common to state-funded middle–twentieth century architectural expediencies.
“Early in the queen’s reign, while beset with doubt owing to her inexperience in the art of statecraft, she decided to travel to observe and learn from the legendary King Solomon of Israel. One night, after plying the young queen at dinner with a variety of royal wines, King Solomon was to slake his lust upon the defenseless body of his comely guest.
“That night, God revealed to King Solomon in a dream that the line of religious succession and responsibility would be transferred to a new order that was to be realized upon the birth of the king’s son now growing in the queen’s womb.
“Born in Axum, the capital, after the queen’s return from Jerusalem, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem at the age of thirteen, whereupon later wishing to return to Ethiopia, he refused his father’s offer to make him the crown prince of Israel. Upon leaving Jerusalem, Menelik is said to have taken with him the Ark of the Covenant which he stole from King Solomon, his father, with the approval of God, who levitated Menelik and his cargo across the Red Sea before the king’s men could give chase.
“It is written in the Kebra Nagast that Menelik defeated his father and avenged his mother’s humiliation with the consignment by God of his covenant with man to Ethiopia. Thus, according to the writers of Ethiopia’s holiest book, the Kebra Nagast, Ethiopians became God’s chosen people and Ethiopia Israel’s successor.”
During the question-and-answer period that followed Dr. Abana’s remarks, a student named Herbert Brody walked to one of the two standing microphones that had been placed in the hall’s two aisles. The room fell quiet in anticipation. Even in the semidark, we knew it was Herbert from the shape of the large head which rested on his body like a macrocephalic boulder. His nickname was Brain and he was a 4.0 student headed the following year to Harvard Divinity School.
“Do you believe that Menelik really took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia, Dr. Abana? And where is it now?”
Dr. Abana peered through his thick eyeglasses into the gloom at the well-confident Herbert Brody and paused for what seemed an age. Sensing what was to come, Dr. Quarles’s face wore an expression of restrained amusement.
“The Ark of the Covenant, containing God’s decalogue of law, is believed to have been made by Moses. The Ark is said by the historians to be a gold-plated hardwood box measuring four feet long, two and a half feet wide, and two and a half feet deep.
“The Ethiopians believe that the Ark of the Covenant remains to this day in Ethiopia. There is a fair body of evidence that at least until recent times it was preserved at Axum, the ancient capital. Axum is a place in Ethiopia that you should visit. I should add that Menelik’s return to Ethiopia with the Ark was assisted by a group of Jews who left Israel to come with him. The modern Falashas of Ethiopia are Jews who trace their descent from these ancient people.”
Herbert Brody looked as though he thought Dr. Abana might be trying to make fun of him by suggesting that he visit Axum, which was not the case.
“May I ask your name, young man?”
“Herbert Brody. My name is Herbert Brody.”
“Mr. Brody, do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?”
The question was unexpected and it momentarily startled Brody. “Yes, I do believe in the divinity of Christ, but what does that have—”
“Do you know, Mr. Brody, that Jesus, who had been considered an influential but mortal prophet, was not given divine status until nearly four centuries after his death?”
“With all due respect sir, I don’t see what your question has to do with mine.”
Dr. Quarles sat back in his chair and folded his arms, looking pleased.
Dr. Abana’s demeanor did not change from its initial fix. “Have you ever heard of the Council of Nicaea, Mr. Brody?” This was asked quietly after another of his long pauses.
“No, I have not.”
“The Council was convened by the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire,” pausing, “a pagan who worshipped the sun just as the Queen of Axum and Sheba had 1,400 years before him. She converted to Judaism before her son brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. Emperor Constantine was baptized as a Christian only on his deathbed—unwillingly, it is believed. It was Constantine, a pagan Roman politician, who organized the ecumenical meeting known as the Council of Nicaea to vote on the matter of making Jesus Christ divine. That which you believe, Mr. Brody, was accomplished for you by a pagan Roman emperor who did not believe in Christ’s divinity himself. He did what he did for political and business reasons. The Roman Empire was divided by the growing Christian movement. In one stroke, the clever, cynical Constantine co-opted the Christian movement and consolidated political and economic power for the Roman Empire and, not unimportantly, for the Roman Catholic Church.”
Dr. Abana stopped and looked at Brody who found himself suddenly unnerved and without a riposte.
More kindly, almost sweetly then, Dr. Abana continued, “You asked if I believed that Menelik took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. The historical evidence would suggest that he did. The queen had been both a good mother to him and an important coming figure in the history of two of the three great Abrahamic religions, Judaism and, through her line, early Coptic Christianity. Menelik loved his mother and he was very much Ethiopian. He, on the other hand, had little reason to love his father, King Solomon. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that he did return to Ethiopia, and with the Ark of the Covenant. I do not believe, however, Mr. Brody, that he did so by levitating over the Red Sea, but then I do not believe that Christ walked on water either. The mortals who wrote the Kebra Nagast and the Bible were indeed fanciful and poetic. It was the literary fashion in those days. But all that they wrote was not meant to be taken literally.”
Brody stood at the microphone alone, with no one in line behind him to speak. He very much wanted to get back to his seat.
Dr. Abana began again, but more solicitously this time. “We have all been taught that Christ died on a cross. The Dogon people of Mali, however, believe that their Creator God, Amma, sent Nommo to Earth to sacrifice himself to cleanse the Earth. They believe that Nommo was crucified on a tree.”
I listened with fascination to Dr. Abana’s affirmation of the story my grandmother had told me when I was fifteen.
“Would it surprise you to learn, Mr. Brody, that the New Testament of the Bible, in Acts 5:30 and I Peter 2:24, describes Christ not to have been crucified on a cross, but to have been hanged on a tree, not unlike, in addition to Nommo, the tree-slain savior figures of Krishna, Maryas, Odin, and Dodonian Zeus?
“Things may not always be as told to us. It is particularly important that we understand that, you see, Mr. Brody?”
Brody, feeling bested, did not know what to say. He felt somewhat foolish and was glad that the hall was dark.
“Mr. Brody,” Dr. Abana said as the young man turned to walk back to his seat, “I believe in the divinity of Christ. I have reached that view without fear of discovering the full glorious story of civilization. Read all that you can, curious and unafraid. Education requires that we open books, not close them. I doubt that what you find will weaken your faith. It, more likely, will strengthen it.”
The program ended there. Dr. Quarles, a full head taller than his friend, shook Dr. Abana’s hand and said the words, “Splendid, simply splendid.”
I sat awhile in my seat as one often does after watching an especially thought-provoking movie and gave fresh thought to what Dr. Quarles had said to our class about discovering how old we were.
The next morning, Dr. Quarles, appearing unusually cheerful, called our class to order. He was dressed in a carelessly cut single-breasted suit of sober tweed. He held in his hand a pair of thick rimless bifocals with which he gestured toward a student seated in the rear of the room.
“What did you take away from Dr. Abana’s lecture, Mr.
Daughtry?”
Daughtry, distracted, had heard the sound of his name and nothing more. “Sir?”
“Anybody?”
A small, dark-skinned, pretty young woman, seated in the second row on Dr. Quarles’s left, raised her hand.
“Yes, Miss Branch.”
“Well, the truth is, Dr. Quarles, that most of what Dr. Abana said was new to me and I don’t really know yet how to think about it. Something that doesn’t feel so good in me doesn’t want to believe it. I don’t know why that is. Could be that, you know, all these years no one has ever said anything close to what he was talking about.” She paused, knitted her brows together, opened her mouth to continue, and then stopped. Claudia Branch was an earnest young woman of better than average aptitude.
“What, as you see it, Miss Branch, is the purpose of education?”
“To prepare us for the world.”
“What does that mean, Miss Branch?”
“To qualify us for good jobs.”
“Is that all, Miss Branch?”
“Well, I guess, maybe, also to broaden us as human beings.” She fought off a shrug as she said this.
Dr. Quarles, not wishing to press Claudia Branch further, wasn’t sure whether she really believed this last thing, or was merely regurgitating a commonplace from school officialdom.
“What do you think, Mr. March?” Dr. Quarles had a habit of asking the question before choosing a respondent. The method allowed his students to hear the question without pressure, although it hadn’t worked quite that way with Daughtry.
“Well, a lot of what he said was familiar to me.”
“The context, Mr. March, please give us the context.”
“Well, I can tell you, Dr. Quarles, that like Claudia, I never heard in a classroom anything vaguely related to what he said yesterday.”
“Please go on, Mr. March.” Dr. Quarles’s patience exceeded my confidence which was embarrassingly small, particularly in this matter.
“My grandmother is blind,” I said. “She reads her Braille Bible and talks to me about it. She knows about the Queen of Axum and Sheba and King Solomon from the Bible. When I was a little boy, she told me about Menelik and how he brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.”
“Did your grandmother also read the Kebra Nagast?”
“No, I doubt that she’s ever heard of that book.”
“Then how could she know about Menelik carrying the Ark of the Covenant back to Ethiopia?”
“From reading the Bible.”
“The story of Menelik’s flight with the Ark of the Covenant is not told in the Bible.”
“Then I don’t know, sir.”
That evening I called my grandmother at her neighbor’s house on Duvall Street.
“Grandma, have you ever heard of a book called the Kebra Nagast?”
“Say that again.”
“Kebra Nagast.”
“No, son. I’m sure I’ve never heard of that. Why do you ask?”
“You told me once that King Menelik brought the Ark of the Covenant home from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. I thought you read this in the Bible but Dr.Quarles said the story wasn’t in the Bible. How did you know about it, Grandma?”
“My mother …”
“Your mother? Your mother told you. How could that be, Grandma?”
There was silence on the line. Then my grandmother seemed to begin in the middle of some long past experience. “I was watching the Fasika procession with my best friend Meron.” She trilled the r when she pronounced her friend’s name. “It was the Sabbath and we were consecrating one of our new churches. My mother told me the story of King Menelik and the Ark. That’s how I knew.”
“You learned this in a dream, Grandma?”
“Yes, son.”
“When did this happen? How old was I?”
“I was asleep dreaming in my rocking chair. You were seven. You woke me up when I was talking in the dream to my friend Meron.”
“Where was this? Ethiopia?”
“It was called Abysinnia then.”
“When was this, Grandma?”
“The year was 1186. I don’t know the date.”
Later, I took from the tin box the plastic sleeve from which I retrieved my notes and the Dogon map my grandmother had guided me in drawing when I was fifteen. I pored over the materials for the better part of an hour. It was then that I began, at least in my head, planning the writing of my first book.