Hello.” It was the cultivated voice of a professional lecturer.
“My name is Graylon March. I’m calling from Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. I am trying to reach Dr. Joyce Harris-Fulbright.”
“Speaking.” The voice sharp, curt, with a question in it.
“I read your book Reincarnation and found it fascinating—”
“Mr.… Pardon me, what did you say your name was?”
“March, Graylon March.”
“Well, Mr. March, I really don’t—”
“Please, Dr. Harris-Fulbright. I won’t take much of your time, but my grandmother remembers a past life that is every bit as unbelievable as the life of Antonia—I’m sorry, I can’t remember her full name.”
“Antonia Michaela Maria Ruiz de Prado.”
“Yes, well, my grandmother remembers a past life every bit as unbelievable as hers.”
“Maybe, Mr. March, that is because your grandmother’s story is unbelievable.” This said resignedly, not rudely.
Still, although I knew that she did not know me and had no reason to believe anything that I was saying, I was becoming annoyed.
“Dr. Harris-Fulbright, please—” I drew in a long calming breath. “I can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that ten years ago, my grandmother dreamed about the existence of a star, invisible to the naked eye—its orbit, its weight, its constituent materials—that only a month ago was confirmed by scientists to exist, at all.” This wasn’t quite the truth, but I had to win her full respectful attention before broaching the Dogon dream story that would fly in the seedpod face of every Western prejudice about Africa that she had ever been caused to inhale.
She said nothing for what seemed a long while. Then I heard her breathe out in a labored push.
“Okay, Mr. March, you have my ear. Tell me what happened to your grandmother.”
I told her about my grandmother’s dream of being a Dogon teenager in the year 1394. I told her my grandmother’s father’s name in the dream and what the old priest had told her in the shady cliff-side courtyard that day about the little star Po Tolo, as well as the path and period of its orbit around the large bluish star in the low northern sky.
“My grandmother told this to me ten years ago. This was before the Western scientific community knew that the little star existed. My grandmother is completely blind, professor, yet she traced on paper the orbit path of Po Tolo which she remembered from the map her father had shown her in the dream. The drawing she made for me ten years ago matches almost exactly the recent photograph made by Western astronomers that was shown on the national news a month ago. Dr. Harris-Fulbright, my grandmother has never been outside the state of Virginia. She is a retired hand laundress who never reached high school. She is blind. I have the map she drew and the notes I took that day when I was fifteen. There must be a way to forensically verify that the map and notes were made ten years ago. Now, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, how possibly could my grandmother have known these things had she not dreamed them? I know this must sound like a lot to take in at one time, but can you offer a plausible alternative explanation?”
Dr. Harris-Fulbright said nothing. I could hear her breathing. I waited six or seven seconds.
“Doctor …”
“Y-yes, well—I’m not sure what to say, Mr. March.
Before your call, you see, I’d never even heard the word Doogon be—”
“Dogon.”
“Pardon?”
“Dogon. The people are called Dogon.”
“Yes, I see—”
“That’s just my point, Dr. Harris-Fulbright. How likely is it that my grandmother, a retired blind laundress, could have even known of the Dogon people and precisely where they have lived in Mali, West Africa since the fourteenth century?”
“I think I see your point, Mr. March.”
I looked around my tiny sitting room and was glad that Dr. Harris-Fulbright could not see it. The walls were an oil-based institutional gray and completely bare, save for the clean-paint rectangles where a previous tenant’s pictures had once hung. The furniture had been thoughtlessly cobbled together from the distress auctions of departing graduate students. The threadbare divan listed leftward, signaling that I would likely be its last owner. Books and papers, aligned in neat rows, covered every flat surface in the apartment’s three rooms. There were no personal effects, save the toiletries in the bathroom.
“What is it that you want of me, Mr. March?”
I hesitated. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through. I read your book yesterday in one sitting. I wanted to get your reaction as soon as I could get you on the phone.”
“Mr. March.”
“Yes.”
She started to speak, then stopped and took a measure of time to think. When she started again, she spoke more slowly than she had before, as if she were calculating in her head how she would meter her forward involvement. She had looked to be in her mid-fifties at the time that the picture was taken for the back flap of her book. She was a white woman with piercing cerebral blue eyes and long wiry gray hair in a high state of scholarly misrule. It was the picture of a woman who had little interest in adornment. She spoke much as she had looked in the picture. Without waste or varnish.
“Mr. March, if you have reported accurately on this star’s recent discovery, and on your grandmother’s description of it in her ten-year-old dream, your story would warrant further investigation. Most of the stories I come across, however, are found to be without merit. Yours, or rather your grandmother’s, is, on its face, quite interesting.”
Hers was the professional scholar’s maddening habit of emotionless understatement. A near idiom unto itself.
“Here is how I propose we proceed, Mr. March. Give me a week to do some reading. There are things I would like to check out.”
“Understood,” I said with relief. I tried not to sound happy.
“If you give me your number, I will call you next Monday at eight p.m. your time and tell you what I think.”
I gave her my number and agreed on the time of her call.
“Before we go, I have a couple of questions.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Please spell D-dogon for me.”
I spelled it for her.
“And now, Mali.” I did this. “You said West Africa, right?”
“Yes.”
“And Po Tolo … Now, one last question—” I waited.
“Is your grandmother black?”
“What, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, does that have to do with anything?” I asked wearily.
She spoke even more carefully then. “It happens that in virtually all authentically regressed past lives, the remembered past life is of the same race as that of the living person being regressed.”
“I see.” Hackles quieting back into place. “The answer is yes, my grandmother is black.”
“Mr. March, may I ask what your field is?”
“I will receive a master’s in English in May.”
“And what do you plan to do then?”
“I plan to write.”
“I see.”
I suddenly felt that I may have been rashly naïve and lacking a safe course forward.