The trip to Mali was to begin in just under a month. It loomed large before me as something of a consummation of sorts, intangible but important, no less so than the physical intimacy Jeanne and I were forestalled still to explore.
We had made plane reservations to fly from D.C.’s Dulles airport to Paris on Air France, and on to Bamako from Paris via Air Mali. We had still to make arrangements for travel from Bamako to Timbuktu, and from there to the land of the Dogon. We were to leave America on June 17 to arrive in Bamako late in the afternoon of the following day.
When I had first broached with Jeanne the idea of a trip to Mali, I was not entirely forthcoming about my reasons for wanting to go.
She had asked, “Have you been to Africa before?”
“No, I’ve never even been outside the United States.”
“Why Mali? I mean—why just Mali?”
I lied, but only by omission. “I want to study the work of ancient African writers at the library in Timbuktu.”
Jeanne had had a passport for some years. I had applied for mine at the passport office on K Street in Washington in early May. I was told that it would take a minimum of six weeks to process my application unless I were willing to pay an additional fee of seventy-five dollars to accelerate matters. So I wrote out a check for the larger amount. Although I could ill afford it, I paid for the two airfares and put Jeanne’s ticket in the mail to her. While it may not have made perfect sense, I thought that buying and mailing the ticket to her would help me deflect the vigorous effort she would mount to pay her own way. The same day, I stopped at the Embassy of Mali on Massachusetts Avenue and collected from a friendly and solicitous cultural attaché an assortment of coated-paper color brochures and other materials about the culture, topography, history, and political system of Mali.
The next day, a Saturday, I called Jeanne to sort out our plans for the weekend.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I was feeling uncharacteristically good about nothing in particular.
“You choose this time. It’s your turn. If it’s a movie, you choose the movie. If it’s dinner, you choose the food. It doesn’t matter. I only want to be with you.” Although she said this playfully, it caused in me an unmitigated spike of intense pleasure, literally thrilling me in some viscerally neurological way.
“Well then, I suggest, by the authority vested in me, that we eat in this evening and work through our plans for the trip.”
“Okay. That’s fine with me. Why don’t I come to your place for a change?”
I hesitated before responding slightly less cheerfully, “Oh, Jeanne, you don’t want to come here.”
“Oh, but I do, sweet prince,” her voice at once cheerful and serious. Soft metal in a silk sleeve.
“Come on, Jeanne, not here, please.”
“Yes, Gray. There.”
“My place is a disaster and I don’t have time today to fix it. How about the next time?”
She was quiet for a moment and then decided not to push the point, although I could hear in her voice that my response had meant something more to her than I intended.
“O-okay, I’ll see you here then at what? Seven?” Jeanne asked without light or lift.
“Seven is fine.”
I spent the morning reading through the materials on Mali that the cultural attaché had given me. He was an engaging man who seemed genuinely pleased that I was planning to visit his country. I was somewhat embarrassed by the thought that I had relatives who decidedly were not. A great aunt on my father’s side had called me and said, “I hear you’re going to Africa,” which to her was not a continent, but a country.
It wasn’t a question, and I considered not responding at all, but thought better of it. “I’m going to Mali, Aunt Clarice.”
“What’s a Mali?”
“Mali is a country, Aunt Clarice. It’s in Africa.”
“Where in Africa?” This was asked skeptically as if she suspected I may have been trying to bamboozle her. For what reason I would do such a thing, I had no idea.
“It’s in West Africa, Aunt Clarice, the part where we came from.” My voice was flat. Unprovocative.
“I didn’t come from no Africa,” she had said, offended.
“Where did you come from, Aunt Clarice?” The barb flew wide of its mark and it was just as well.
Since I was fifteen, I had wanted to go to Mali—since that late afternoon my grandmother told me in her little parlor about the Dogon dream. I hadn’t consciously realized before that day how much I needed to hear something good said about Africa, where our people (who were being treated so shabbily here in America) had come from. I’m embarrassed to confess that I did not know much of anything reliable about the land of our origin. The painful truth is that about all I’d been told, virtually from birth, was that we were a backward people from a backward place. Given the intensity and the relentlessness of this line of attack, it was hard as hell not believing that Aunt Clarice may have been right in her estimate of us. Think about it for a moment. Willie Best, the bubble-eyed, slow-moving, dim-witted Negro handyman on The Stu Erwin Show, was a household name in the country, while Dr. Dubois, the giant Negro intellectual, could walk through most of our neighborhoods unnoticed, and although Daddy had told us that the Negro film director Oscar Micheaux had done his level best in the 1930s to have us appear like normal everyday people in his motion pictures, nobody I knew, knew anymore who Oscar Micheaux was. It was virtually impossible to deny that practically every image of us selected for broadcast to the whole country made us look dumb and worthless, while the vast majority of the Negroes I knew were just like my parents, but I almost never saw people like my parents on television or on the screen at the Hippodrome on Saturdays. What concerned me most was that we seemed to have begun acting like the hired idiots we’d been given no choice but to watch on the national broadcasts, which brings me back to my grandmother.
You may not believe this, but the Dogon dream she described to me that afternoon on Duvall Street when I was fifteen was the first positive thing I’d ever heard said about Africa, the place that had mothered, and like it or not, defined me, both from the outside in, as well as from the inside out. And no matter what Negroes said or had been caused to believe about Africa, we were all indissolubly bound up with her—Aunt Clarice, kicking and screaming, included.
I’d feel better, perhaps, saying that I decided to go to Mali for my grandmother, but that wouldn’t be true. I was going to Mali for myself. My grandmother had been a living eyewitness to Africa before the age of slavery. She knew who she was. She had lived and experienced who we all once had been. She did not require repair. I did. I was infected with an insidious malady of the head and spirit that no mortal uninoculated Negro could avoid contracting while breathing in social America.
Thus, it was not that I had simply wished to go to Mali to document my grandmother’s revelation. I needed to document her revelation in order to save myself.
The word black, the most recent peel-off label for our race (they were getting hard to keep track of), was just coming into vogue at that time, and Aunt Clarice threw that in, “… And I’m sick of all this black stuff, Gray. And where’s it takin’ us? Pullin’ us down, I tell ya. Jest listen to ’em. Black dis. Black dat. Black, black, black. I tell ya, I’m sick of it …”
Thank goodness my parents were never like Aunt Clarice because this was a big big problem in the black community. Every other Saturday, Daddy sent Gordon and me to get our hair cut at Ace’s Barbershop at the corner of Saint James and Leigh. The owner was called Pop, or at least that’s all I can remember. Well, Pop would expel any patron heard using profanity, whether the patron was a regular or not. That was the rule and Pop applied it without exception. There was no rule, however, against stupid talk. I know this was so because once I heard Giant Turner arguing with Beverly Taylor (Beverly was a man and touchy about his name) about whether there was a pill that could turn black people into white people. Giant Turner said that he knew for sure that there was such a pill and Beverly kept saying that there wasn’t. “Is.” “Ain’t.” “Is.” “Ain’t.” “Is.” “Ain’t.” They just kept going around and around like this. Then Beverly said that he could prove that Giant was wrong. Well, Giant asked, “How?” It was then that Beverly said, “If there was a pill that could do that, there wouldn’t be no black people.” And Giant had no answer for that. Everybody in the barbershop laughed, even though nothing was really funny as I saw it, even though I was just a little boy.
When I was young, this problem of self-hate was a serious matter for black people in America. Aunt Clarice was only unusual in the extreme way that she appeared to truly enjoy hating herself and never ever taking no for an answer. The word Africa, whenever she heard it, was just one of the many panic buttons she pressed as hard and as many times as she could to submerge herself as deeply as possible in her very own well-tended acid bath of self-loathing.
From the very beginning, as everyone ought to have known, black folk have always had a hellacious time existing sanely in America. The place has saddled us with a gaggle of debilitating complexes. Just think what a nasty psychological business it is insisting to people who’ve treated you like vermin that you are equal to them. That alone is enough to make all of us as crazy as the dickens. Reverend King even had us saying that we loved them. I knew this was only a strategy. But, God, look at the cost to our heads. I think you can see now where people like Aunt Clarice came from. And were it not for Mama and Daddy, Gordon and I would have been just like them. As it was, truth be told, we were more like them than we cared to admit. Couldn’t be helped, given the poisoned air we all had no choice but to inhale. So you see, because of Mama and Daddy, Gordon and I mostly loved ourselves a lot and hated ourselves only a little. Aunt Clarice, on the other hand, I suppose loved herself a little and hated herself a lot, which meant, laid end to end, Negroes were but mirror images of each other.
I talked about race pride, but found the genuine belief in such strangely irksome in Jeanne. It was like she was pulling at the edges of a scab covering an old and terrible wound. I must have reckoned unconsciously that I was safe under the scab even though I may have been drowning in pus there. How was that different from Aunt Clarice, except by degree? Perhaps it was because I shared this overlap with Aunt Clarice (an overlap she called mocking attention to with her ostentatiously celebrated self-loathing) that I resented her so profoundly.
So whenever off-campus parochial old Richmond kinds of black people asked me what my plans were for the summer, I’d tell them and brace for the Aunt Clarice response. Indeed, a lot of blacks I told were supportive, even envious. But, if I am remembering things correctly, the only one over fifty who thought I was on the verge of something wonderful and life-altering was my grandmother.
She seemed as excited about my plans as I was, and I don’t believe for a minute that her enthusiasm stemmed from her Dogon dream alone, because owing to me, it was that dream that had plunged our family into its current state of confusion.
My grandmother had always had this way about her, and all she would say to me was that the “life of the spirit” was thousands of years long and things that were lost in one stage of that life could be recovered in another. When I asked her to explain this she’d demurred, saying only that I’d find out for myself soon enough. She had said one thing further that I thought may have been important, and that was that I’d be doing little more than traveling around in Africa “lookin’ at stuff” unless I found a way, after “all that had happened,” to open the eyes of my spirit. I troubled over what she had meant by this right up until the time I left Baltimore for Bamako.
By all that had happened.
The evening was warm and redolent with the renovating scent of spring. The sliding glass balcony door at Jeanne’s was fixed full open. The fragrant night air circulated through the apartment. The rustle of embryonic tree leaves made themselves heard in the clean night space. Jeanne looked casual and summery in a cotton tangerine tank top and faded denim jeans.
She embraced me and drew back, looking at me somewhat diffidently and less directly than usual. The small smile was marked by some new material question that I’d seen no evidence of before. She was armed with a finely tuned intuitive sensitivity with which she detected symptoms in me of a well-varnished ambivalence, symptoms, however, that she had diagnosed, I would later learn, wrongly. It wasn’t that I lacked a passionate affection for her, as she might well have concluded, but that, unbeknownst to her, my soul bore some retrograde infection that stunted the expression of that affection.
“I brought all the materials that I picked up from the embassy.”
I left a silence for her to fill but she only watched me under lightly knitted brows and said nothing.
I took the materials from my briefcase and spread them on the little coffee table. Her silence continued and extended well past the time it took me to make diversionary use of my hands. She simply watched me, not unpleasantly, but as if I were a dense puzzle, perhaps not worth the trouble required for solving.
“I’ve taken care of the tickets so we’re all set.”
“I didn’t expect you to pay for my ticket. Let me do that.”
“No. Absolutely not. In any case, it’s done.”
She lengthened her silence and looked down at her fingers which lay laced together on her lap. I stopped talking but could not hold the position. The widening spaces of quiet unsettled me, made me nervous.
I started again. “The man at the embassy was very nice. He said—” I stopped talking abruptly and looked at her watching her motionless hands. “Is something wrong, Jeanne? What is it?” She remained quiet. “What is it, Jeanne? Tell me, please?”
She continued to examine her hands then spoke strangely, in a flat voice, as if she were talking to herself.
“Why is it, Gray, that I have not been allowed to see all the places of your life?”
“I told you my place was a mess. I didn’t want you to see it that way.” My voice sounded querulous—whiny— and had risen an octave. Always with me a sign of anxiety.
“I was not talking about your apartment, Gray.” She said this softly, sympathetically, as if to indicate her loyalty and that she would be on my side were she but informed well enough to locate it.
“When have you last spoken to your mother, Gray?”
I don’t know why it is that my thinking processes addle when I am made the subject of even the mildest personal invasion.
“Not long ago. Maybe a week or so.”
“When did you last see her?”
I did not answer. She looked at me and saw the change in my eyes.
“Gray?”
I was staring past her, over her shoulder, blankly into the black night.
“Gray?”
I did not shift my eyes but turned my head slightly, moving, with it, my eyes onto hers.
“Yes?” My voice alloyed resentment with grief.
“I love you.”
She said this as a parent would say such to a small son who’d fallen on gravel and bloodied his knee. I wanted to cry and I hardly ever cried. Only twice had I cried since I was a little boy. I had not cried even when Luckbox, a schoolmate, drowned in Turner Lake the day I turned thirteen. But now, I would sigh upon Jeanne in sweet relief and feel curiously better, much better, and for no apparent reason at all.
“I know.” I had trouble with my eyes and glanced down to hide them from her.
“We have never been alone together.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Some presence seems to always be with us, suspended somewhere between us. And you always talk to me as if it could hear us, and you don’t want it to hear us, and so you don’t talk much, except in conversation with yourself, even when I’m sitting in front of you, looking at you. It’s like that now, right now. It’s here, whatever it is, and you know this is so.”
“That’s …” I hadn’t energy to invest a disclaimer with any real conviction. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t sell it. So I remained quiet.
“When did you last see or speak to your father?”
“I saw him and spoke to him when I went to see my grandmother.” Of course this was only technically so, and my face must have told her as much.
The thoughts, the pictures on the screen of my mind took leave of her and the room, wafting off, transforming themselves, helter-skelter, into short-reel snapshots of momentless nonevents in my past. The eight-year-old ruining his brand-new white Easter Sunday suit with axle grease from the underside of an old abandoned Mack truck. The twelve-year-old ripping his gray flannel trousers at recess while scaling the anchor fence at Booker T. Washington Junior High School. Gordon and I walking that night along Brookland Park Boulevard harmonizing, In the still of the night. Shoo dooby dooby do. Shoo dooby dooby do …
“Gray?”
“Yes?” I said softly.
“You told me that you had no brothers or sisters.”
“Yes.”
“Did you once have a brother or a sister?”
“Yes.”
“Which, Gray?”
“A brother.”
“Tell me about him. Tell me how he died.”
I looked vacantly at the brochures spread on the coffee table and then at Jeanne. Without uttering a word I got up and walked out of the apartment.