The Zulus of New York Page 11

  ‘What part of play don’t you understand?’ asks Davis. ‘It’s a play. We are bloody playing.’

  ‘Bloody? You’ve been keeping too much company with Slaw.’

  ‘A great play must have morality lessons on good versus evil. Otherwise what’s the point? The king and his generals represent evil, and the British and their commanders are a force for good.’

  ‘Not where I come from,’ says Em-Pee, getting agitated. ‘We were a force for good, fighting to protect our lands and cattle against invaders.’

  Davis tries very hard to mollify him. ‘You and I know that,’ he says gently. ‘But Broadway audiences do not. They will not accept a situation where White Christian folks are accused of being evil, and heathens are the good guys.’

  Em-Pee is still not satisfied. He grumbles under his breath. If the practice of theatre thrives on truth-twisting, then it is not for him.

  ‘This is our big break, man,’ says Davis, pleadingly now. ‘I mean, your big opportunity. Your chance to be a hotshot Broadway actor in a play you assisted in writing. You heard Skildore will take nothing less. We need a motivating force for this king; without the devils and the demons we don’t have that.’

  ‘I am not going to have that in my play,’ says Em-Pee with finality. He walks to the door, opens it and gestures to Davis that it’s time to go.

  ‘Your play? This is my play. I am the writer. You are merely the assistant.’

  Em-Pee indicates that he has nothing more to add.

  ‘I was going to make you rich, you know, just as I have made many other Zulus rich. Tell you what, I was talking with Slaw and Samson the other day. They told me about your Dinka person. I told Slaw I can put money down and we can buy her. We can make a lot of money.’

  He does not seem to notice that Em-Pee is almost exploding with rage.

  ‘I know her owner. Duval. He’s my neighbour. A good-for-nothing bourbon-soaked gambler. We can negotiate a good price for your Dinka person, including the wagon, the mule and the cage. She can sit in the cage during the day making money for us, and you can have her all to yourself at night.’

  He is wide-eyed when Em-Pee pounces on him, grabs him by the scruff of the neck, and pushes him out. After shutting the door behind him, Em-Pee stands there for a while, hyperventilating, uttering in his language invective whose translation you wouldn’t want to know.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for the muse to recede after the woman had receded. For days she had become fainter, until she refused to be summoned. Em-Pee’s foot-stomping became weaker and unsteadier with each performance. This coincided with the return of The Great Farini to Madison Square Garden, the glorious venue on the north-east corner of East 26th Street and Madison Avenue, rather than Madison Square Park itself, where Dinkie the Dinka Princess used to be displayed before the park was revamped.

  Fans deserted Em-Pee’s troupe for Farini’s Zulus, who performed blood-curdling savage dances, rather than the namby-pamby Friendly Zulus who did not have a single ferocious bone in their bodies, and whose dances had become tired and limp.

  To add to their woes, Samson deserted them. He returned to the fold of The Great Farini, and the funambulist welcomed him back, if only to spite the biggest traitors of all time, Slaw and Em-Pee.

  The Friendly Zulus had no choice but to limp on as a two-man troupe. They could not come up with any gimmick that they could sell, and Slaw missed the creative genius of Davis, the only man he thought could save them. After all, he was the impresario who conceived The Wild Zulu. But Davis had extricated himself from their company and had not been seen for almost a month.

  Today is not much different. Supplies are running short and The Friendly Zulus must busk. Em-Pee tries to get Mavo from the Industrial House to drum for them, but he claims his hands are sore from working on one or other machine. He has been making quite a few excuses lately. Sometimes a headache or a stomach ache or a dizzy spell, even though Em-Pee had just seen him jump about playing catch with the other boys before he spotted his father.

  Em-Pee busks with Slaw. Just the two of them. Perhaps they should change their name to The Black and White Zulus. That might be a new selling point. He will try to sell the idea to Slaw. Slaw. He wonders what keeps him loyal to a failing outfit. Perhaps it’s not loyalty. Lack of choice? He is sure he would return to The Great Farini in a jiffy if the maestro would have him. Perhaps he was hoping to get closer to Davis, get a piece of his action, and become a mogul with a brownstone mansion on Madison Avenue.

  ‘You dance like a White Zulu lately, guv,’ says Slaw, self-satisfied that for a change he is the better dancer.

  ‘Shut up; let’s dance,’ says Em-Pee, and starts singing a war chant, clapping his hands for rhythm.

  Slaw responds to the chant and starts creeping around Em-Pee like a wild cat ready to pounce on its prey. Em-Pee stamps his feet hard on the sidewalk for more rhythm. Two or three spectators look on curiously. One gets bored and leaves after deciding nothing more exciting is likely to develop here. Three ragamuffins, perhaps Street Arabs, join the dance mockingly, and laugh as the dancers try to shoo them away.

  A hansom cab stops on the pavement next to their sidewalk. The driver, still perched on his high seat, waves a letter at the dancers. Slaw jumps for it, and after a quick glance he hands it to Em-Pee. He scowls as he reads it. It is from Maria-Magdalena. He must come quickly. Acol wants to see him. He had vowed to forget about Acol. But he must go. Acol is calling. He jumps into the cab without further ado. Slaw reaches for the hat containing two measly coins on the sidewalk, and holds on to the cab, trying to climb on too.

  ‘My instructions are that I am picking up one gentleman, not two, sir,’ says the driver. ‘The Black one.’

  Slaw ignores him and sits next to Em-Pee. The driver shakes his head and flicks the horse into a canter.

  ‘What’s this all about, guv?’

  Em-Pee does not respond. They are silent for the rest of the way.

  Maria-Magdalena is waiting outside the mansion. ‘She’s at the park,’ she says and dismisses the cab driver.

  It is Em-Pee’s turn to ask what this is all about. Instead of explaining, Maria-Magdalena turns to Slaw, who is tagging along, and asks, ‘Who’s this one?’

  ‘I’m Czeslaw Trzetrzelewska, at your service, ma’am,’ says Slaw, giving a polite bow.

  ‘He talks funny,’ says Maria-Magdalena.

  ‘’Cause am a Londoner, ma’am, born and bred.’

  At the park Acol is aiming her ancient Scovill at a bug perched on a leaf.

  ‘There she is, wasting pictures on leaves and bugs when there are people to photograph,’ says Maria-Magdalena.

  Acol shushes them; they will frighten her subject. This nonchalant reception is not what Em-Pee expected. She summoned him. He is here despite himself. He stands to attention. And all her focus is on a bug?

  When Acol is done taking a picture to her satisfaction, she signals Em-Pee to follow her and they move to a bench further away. Slaw is about to follow them but Maria-Magdalena stops him and they find another place to sit.

  ‘Last time, you forced me to remember,’ says Acol as soon as they are sitting on the bench.

  ‘I didn’t think the journey we took to your land of butterflies and honey was forced on you,’ says Em-Pee. ‘You seemed to flow into it.’

  ‘My body rebels against remembering. Except for the butterflies and honey, which I couldn’t connect to anything, I have never remembered until you remembered your First Fruits Festivals. Only then did my body relent and I could remember. I learned from you how to remember, without knowing I was learning. I realised after you were gone that I was a bad pupil and had forgotten as soon as you left. I want you to help me remember again. I long to remember.’

  She says this with so much emotion that Em-Pee stares at her face closely, only to see lurking in her eyes, a film of unshed tears. They look like they will congeal and become glass if she does not allow them to roll down her chee
ks.

  He is disappointed, and his face cannot hide it. She is too involved in the anguish of her lack of memory to detect the disappointment. He had hoped she summoned him because she wanted him for himself. It does not do his ego much good to learn that she merely wanted him for his ability to make her conjure up her domaine perdu.

  ‘How are they?’ She opens her mouth and shows him her teeth. They are sparkling white, almost translucent at the edges. ‘I had bread and tea for breakfast. Tea and coffee stain my teeth. I hate to stain my teeth.’

  ‘I don’t see any staining at all. Your teeth are the most beautiful I have ever seen on any person.’

  Maria-Magdalena may keep the distance but will never lose the line of sight. Her attention is divided in three directions – her charge Acol, a penny dreadful, and Slaw who, Em-Pee suspects, is irritating her like he always does him with his boastful prattle. She must be trying to figure out what Acol is doing showing her teeth to the man. Some kind of African flirting, perhaps?

  ‘I hate them,’ says Acol. ‘Not all of them. The bottom ones. The six bottom front ones.’

  They should have been extracted when she was ten; now she remembers that’s why she hates her teeth. Her body agrees to remember, with all the shaking and facial contortions that come with remembering. It would have been a great ceremony, having her teeth removed to join the ranks of the beautiful young ladies of her clan, whose major attribute of beauty was the lack of bottom front teeth.

  The tooth-extraction ritual is performed with a fishing spear, and she, the daughter of the Master of the Fishing Spear, is ten and ready. And everything is ready. The doors of womanhood are about to open. But it is not to be. The Arab slavers come with guns and caravans of camels and abduct random members of families. They know the right time to invade, when the warriors of the village are out hunting or minding their cattle, and the women are tending to their groundnut, bean and sorghum fields. Only the young, the old and infirm, and the Master of the Fishing Spear are home. It is tooth-extraction day, so the family is home. Some members of the family are able to escape into the forests, but Acol, her father, her mother and an aunt are captured.

  ‘It was all my father’s fault,’ says Acol. ‘My aunt kept saying so throughout that journey to the north. A Jieng woman can nag as well as any and my aunt had flaming blades in her tongue.’

  ‘A Jieng woman? She belonged to a different clan?’ asks Em-Pee.

  ‘The Jieng are my people. That is what we call ourselves. Or the Muonjang. We don’t know the Dinka name. It came from outsiders, maybe the Arabs. We first heard we were Dinka when we were taken into captivity.’

  The Arabs sell the family unit to a French entrepreneur, Monsieur Duval, and it becomes a star attraction at his Duval Ethnological Expositions in Paris.

  ‘People come and stare at us. We have never known anything like this before. They just come and stare. And we just sit there and do nothing. Sometimes my mother plays with my hair, sometimes my father murmurs a story of some warrior conquest. Sometimes I doze off, and dream of playing in the river with my friends. My parents are both beautiful without the bottom front teeth.

  I am the only ugly one with a mouth full of teeth. I close my mouth all the time. The crowds of Paris must not see that I am a Jieng girl with all her teeth intact.’

  The aunt is sold to another company when her nagging is no longer entertaining. It seems to agitate the male exhibit. And that gets to the female and child exhibits as well. A sanguine exhibit works better than an agitated one. Parisian tourists, school children and even wedding parties must see only a serene family unit, self-satisfied to be sitting amid this glittering civilisation, away from the savagery of the jungle, being fed on a regular basis and getting fat as a result, without any cares in the world, just sitting there, long limbs curled on a Persian carpet. Apparently, this is not an ideal situation for the aunt. She keeps on nagging until they remove her.

  The Master of the Fishing Spear takes the nagging with fortitude though. He knows it is, as she says, his fault they are in captivity. He converted to the God of the White man and became a Christian. He went from house to house calling himself Evangelist and urging the Jieng people to follow a certain Jesus Christ from a faraway city called Nazareth. The outrage at the behaviour of the Master of the Fishing Spear began on earth, with the scandalised elders. When the elders are outraged, the clan spirits, the yieth, are outraged too, because the man who has deserted Nhialic for a White God is the Master of the Fishing Spear himself. Even Deng, the closest Divinity to Nhialic, was outraged. He spoke in the voice of thunder to express his anger and struck the man’s favourite bull with lightning. That was when everybody knew that the anger had gone far higher than just the yieth. It would even have gone to the highest plane, to Nhialic himself, if he had time to waste on the silly affairs of petty men.

  Even after the bull was struck dead and its meat could not be eaten, Evangelist evangelised, and people warned him that more calamity would befall the village. The fish warned him too, by migrating from the rivers to the swamps, where they committed suicide by drowning in the mud in their thousands. And the slavers came. And all was finished for the family of the Master of the Fishing Spear.

  Even without the nagging aunt, the patriarch does not find peace within himself. He longs for death. Often, he speaks to himself as if he is back in the village. He moans and complains of the disrespect of the youth, as if he has suddenly transitioned into dotage. He curses his age-mates for leaving him alone with insolent children who now regard him as an imbecile because he is old and always complaining. He has taken the aunt’s place and is nagging himself to a slow death.

  Monsieur Duval extends his Duval Ethnological Expositions to New York City and exports the girl, leaving her parents behind, promising them that she would be back, or they would join her in America, depending on which works best. He invents the hugely successful Dinkie the Dinka Princess concept and she never sees her parents again. She hears they didn’t survive long. She believes they died because she loved them. She shouldn’t have loved them that much. Perhaps not at all.

  ‘Hugely successful? I don’t think so,’ says Em-Pee.

  ‘When you saw it at this park it was nothing. It is on its last legs even now. I used to be a star attraction to thousands of spectators at Madison Square Garden.’

  ‘You must be glad it’s coming to an end,’ says Em-Pee.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ she says.

  It makes a difference to him. Perhaps soon it will be the end of her bondage. She won’t be followed by a jailer everywhere she goes. The jailer. The last time he looked in her direction she was buried in her penny dreadful while Slaw sat next to her, arms folded, looking bored. But now he is dancing for her. He is clapping his hands, singing a pseudo-Zulu song and performing a silly jig in front of her bench. She is beside herself with laughter. Slaw is killing Maria-Magdalena with laughter.

  Acol sees none of this. Her body is immersed in remembering. And in plotting her vengeance. The plotting starts in steerage during the voyage. She explores the depth of her soul and decides that people suffer not because of their sins but because of the sins of those close to them. It is all because, as the Jieng say, Nhialic has no tears. Nhialic is heartless. From now on she will depend solely on the power of her personal spirit, her jok. She will not appeal to the God of the White man, because he has no power over her as a Jieng woman. In the same way that she could not appeal to the God of the Arabs for salvation when they marched with the caravan of slavers. Each God has power only over his or her own people. Each God is a creation of his or her own people and can control only his or her own creators. Each God lives and dies inside his or her creator. Acol can only depend on her jok, because her jok is always with her.

  ‘Why is Nhialic so disconnected from his people that she now has to depend on her own jok to avenge her shame?’ Em-Pee wonders aloud, not particularly wanting to ask her because he does not think she will have an answer to th
at.

  But she knows the answer. Every Jieng child knows the answer. It begins with creation. It happened in a distant epoch when Heaven and Earth were still in one place, in the same neighbourhood, separated only by a short rope. Nhialic was bored so he created the first woman ever, Abuk, and the first man, Garang. As Supreme Gods are wont to be, Nhialic was very stingy and allowed the couple to plant and grind for food only one grain of millet per day. But Abuk defied Nhialic, fearing that humanity would starve to death even before it came into being. She planted a whole field of millet, using a very long hoe. Unfortunately, she accidentally struck Nhialic with the hoe as she swung it up and down, hitting the ground and planting more millet. Nhialic did not take kindly to what he regarded as an assault by a woman who was defying his orders. How dare she? He cut the rope that connected Heaven and Earth, and Heaven drifted far away from humanity. Thus, Nhialic withdrew from the affairs of men and women. However, Abuk was honoured for saving humanity from famine. She became a Divinity in her own right, the Mother-God of Women and Gardens.

  Em-Pee bursts out laughing. Stories of her religion are much more fun than the grim ones of his. His uMvelingqangi is a distant God too, never prayed to directly but through the intercession of ancestors – those who once tasted the life of the living. Jieng’s stories are also more joyful than those of the White man’s religion. But what he observes in common is that it is always the defiant woman who causes the troubles of the world.

  Acol bursts out laughing and adds that it is that very defiance that has made humanity possible. ‘Where would the White people be if their Eva had not eaten the fruit?’

  Even this laughter does not attract the jailer’s attention, thanks to Slaw’s high jinks. Acol still does not notice. She is steeped in the world of Divinities. Sometimes she is Acol Aretret, the unruly Acol. The Acol who wants to wreak havoc and visit her jok on everybody, including Maria-Magdalena and Monsieur Duval, and let her jok smite them to death immediately. Sometimes she is Acol Adheng, the gentle Acol. The Acol who will bide her time and let the jok plan a careful revenge. The dignified Acol.