Makeda

Iwas reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Sounds from the television in the bedroom played through the door into the small apartment’s living room where I’d sat making small headway.

… Swedish scientists today in Uppsala, Sweden, released the first known computer-enhanced photograph and orbit simulation of a tiny, little-known star which moves in an elliptical fifty-year orbit path around the larger star, Sirius. Doctor …

Baldwin’s book fell from my hands onto the floor. I ran from the living room into the bedroom. With my eyes fixed upon the small black-and-white screen, I inched laterally toward the foot of the bed and dropped awkwardly into a sitting position. Finding something in the moment mildly frightening, it was difficult for me to focus on the image that filled the screen. The lines in the image appeared to swim and undulate. I felt a gallop in my chest and my temples. My cheeks began to bake and itch beneath the skin. My eyes started to water as if I were about to cry. I took a succession of small breaths in an effort to gain a measure of control over my faculties.

I blinked hard and stared at the high-resolution photograph on the screen. The image had been caught through a high-powered telescope by a Dr. Jan Bergman, a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Astronomy and a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist. The NBC announcer described the image as the first picture ever taken of the small star, shown moving along an elliptical fifty-year path around the big star Sirius, the blue queen of the north sky.

The announcer called the little star not Po Tolo, but a name that meant nothing to me. There had been no doubt, however, no doubt at all. The picture on the screen was virtually a perfect copy of the sketch my grandmother had made from her dream about a previous life with her Dogon father. The drawing was in my closet, still stored in the ten-year-old plastic sleeve. I would get it down later and review it, though I would have no real need to do so. My grandmother’s recreation of her father’s diagram had been burned long since into my memory.

The photograph remained on the screen while the announcer interviewed an American astronomer from Princeton about the little star’s significance. I couldn’t pull my eyes away.

It was Po Tolo. It was some sort of miracle. Some gift from the spirit world. “My God! My God! My God!” I shouted at the walls of my apartment.

I squeezed my eyes and lay back on the bed with my arms stretched hard behind me in joyful catharsis. Then, for the first time in nearly ten years, I cried.

March 26, 1970

Mrs. Makeda Gee Florida Harris March

521A Duvall St.

Richmond, Virginia 23232

Dear Grandma,

How are you?

Much of this letter is about your “travels.” Stop Mrs. Grier now if you don’t want her to read it to you.

I am sorry that I will not be able to be there on your birthday. I am literally tied to the library here trying to complete the requirements for my master’s degree so that I can participate in the commencement exercises in May.

Mama tells me that you are well. That is wonderful news.

I still, however, miss very much hearing the sound of your voice. I miss having our talks. I am planning to drive down in the first week of May to spend a day with you so that we can catch up.

I have been accepted into the English literature PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. Mama seemed very pleased by this news but I can never really tell for sure, things being what they are. In any case, it is more important to me that you are proud of what I have been able to accomplish academically. I have worked very hard, but, I am beginning to think, for many of the wrong reasons. I am not happy, and have not been for a long time. The grind, rigor, and regimen of academic life serves only to distract me. The harder I work, the less I think about what happened. This and, I am afraid, only this, explains the high honors I have won. But more on this later.

First, the good news, and it is, I believe, fascinating. I have kept the notes I took on what you told me in high school about your Dogon dream, your father, the holy man, the big star that the Western scientists call Sirius and the little star that your father said orbited around the big star. Your father in the dream called it Po Tolo and said it was made of a heavy material called sagala that did not exist on Earth. I also kept the sketch you made of the ancient Dogon drawing showing the elliptical path of the little star around the big star. Well, Western scientists did not know until recently that the little star existed. They had seen its companion, a star they called Sirius A, through a telescope in 1862. But a Dogon drawing, made hundreds of years ago before the telescope was invented, has recently come to light. It shows that the little star, Po Tolo (whose orbit around Sirius, the Dogon have celebrated in their ceremonies since, at least, the thirteenth century), moves around the big star in an elliptical orbit. What is more fascinating is this. The ancient Dogon drawing that was recently discovered looks exactly like the drawing you made of the one your father, the priest, showed you in your dream. What’s more, Western scientists now say that Po Tolo, which they call Sirius B, is made of a substance so dense that a teaspoonful of it weighs ten thousand pounds.

This whole thing has stumped Western scientists, and perhaps me as well. How could the Dogon people have known, maybe for thousands of years, about a star that cannot be seen without the aid of a telescope? How could they have known about the path of its orbit and the substance it is made of? That it spins on its axis and makes the big star wobble because of the heavy material Po Tolo is made of. That the little star’s orbit around the big star requires fifty years. No one any longer questions that the Dogon knew these things, but how is this possible?

What is even more fascinating, Grandma, at least to me, is how you could have known all of this. Everything told to you by your father, the old Dogon priest, in the dream you described to me ten years ago when I was fifteen, has recently been established by Western scientists as scientific fact. Every detail.

I never doubted that you dreamed what you dreamed. I even began to believe much of it after I found out about the Dogon at the high school library, but tonight on the network news, they showed the first photograph of Po Tolo with its orbit path drawn in. I don’t know why I was stunned but I was.

I don’t understand. But maybe there are things that are not to be understood.

The rest of what I need to talk to you about I shouldn’t put in a letter and I think you know what I am referring to.

I’ve met a girl that I care for very much, but I’m a mess, you know, and no good for her or anyone else.

I’ll be home soon.

Your loving grandson,

Gray

Three days after I posted the letter, my grandmother telephoned me from Mrs. Grier’s house. She sounded guarded.

“I’m sorry, Grandma. I knew I shouldn’t have put the dream business in a letter, but what I found out was so unbelievable that I guess I didn’t use the best judgment.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, son. Mrs. Grier couldn’t make any sense of it. If anything, it’s you she thinks might be a little bit fruity, not me.”

“I still have the drawing and my notes stashed away in that plastic sleeve. The rest of the information I’ve gathered fills up two drawers in my file cabinet.”

“I trust you’ll know what to do with it. You’re a grown man now and out in the big world, a bigger world than I ever had a chance to learn much of anything about.”

I thought about what she said and how cosmically far it was from the truth. “Grandma?”

“Oh, I knew that, but even then you said those words for a reason, Gray. Some people’s puzzles have more pieces than other people’s puzzles. The people with a lot of pieces have to worker harder and longer to put the picture together than ordinary people with a piece or two, but in the long run, when they stick it out, they make the best pictures. You’re one of those people, Gray.”

“That’s part of what I need to talk to you about when I come down. Something I want to write about.”

“I worry about myself.” I pulled myself erect in the chair in which I had slouched. “I’m sorry I missed your birthday party. How was it?”

“Oh, everybody came. Alma baked a cake. Mrs. Grier helped out. She’s got a good heart, you know. I think everyone had a good time.”

I hadn’t the courage to inquire further and we fell silent for a while. Then she said, “I’ve had another dream.”