The Tomorrow-Tamer Read online

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  The Drummer of All the World

  The Perfume Sea

  The Merchant of Heaven

  The Tomorrow-Tamer

  The Rain Child

  Godman’s Master

  A Fetish for Love

  The Pure Diamond Man

  The Voices of Adamo

  A Gourdful of Glory

  Afterword

  By Margaret Laurence

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For

  Nadine and Kwadwo

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  These stories have appeared in the following publications:

  The Drummer of All the World–Queen’s Quarterly, 1956.

  The Perfume Sea–Winter’s Tales 6, 1960; Saturday Evening Post, 1961; Post Stories, 1962.

  The Merchant of Heaven–Prism, 1959.

  The Tomorrow-Tamer–Prism, 1961 (awarded President’s Medal, University of Western Ontario, 1962).

  The Rain Child–Winter’s Tales 8, 1962.

  Godman’s Master–Prism, 1960.

  The Pure Diamond Man–The Tamarack Review, 1963.

  The Voices of Adamo–Saturday Evening Post, 1962.

  A Gourdful of Glory–The Tamarack Review, 1960 (awarded President’s Medal, University of W. Ontario, 1961).

  THE DRUMMER OF ALL THE WORLD

  My father thought he was bringing Salvation to Africa. I, on the other hand, no longer know what salvation is. I am not sure that it lies in the future. And I know now that it is not to be found in the past.

  The mission where I was born was in a fishing village between Accra and Takoradi, on Africa’s salt-steaming west coast. I lived there all my early boyhood. A missionary–how difficult it was to live down my father’s profession. I almost wish I had not tried.

  A missionary had to have a genuine calling in those days. Nothing less would have withstood the nagging discomfort of the place. Our bungalow was mudbrick, dank and uncleanable. Our lights were unreliable hurricane lamps, which my father always forgot to fix until the sudden surging arrival of night. Our bath was a cement tub where grey lizards flattened themselves for coolness. A green fur of mould grew over everything, especially over my father’s precious books, irritating him to the point of desperation. Diarrhoea was a commonplace, malaria and yellow fever only slightly less so.

  I did not notice these things much. For me it was a world of wonder and half-pleasurable terror. Our garden was a jungle of ragged banana palms and those giant leaves called “elephant’s ears”. In front of the bungalow, the canna lilies stood, piercingly scarlet in the strong sunlight. Sometimes the nights were suffocating, and the mosquito net over my bed showed scarcely a tremor of breeze. Every lizard nervously hunting for insects, every cockroach that scuttled across the floor, seemed to me the footsteps of asamanfo, the spirits of the dead. Then the rains would come, and at night the wooden shutters would slam against the house like untuned drums, and the wind would frighten me with its insane laughter.

  The chief thing I remember about my mother is that she was always tired. She was very pale and thin, and often had malaria. In a sense, she even welcomed it.

  “It is God’s way of trying us, Matthew,” she would say to me. “Remember Job.”

  She never gave in. She went on, thumping the decayed hand-organ in the little mud church, chalking up the week’s attendance, so many black souls for Jesus. I think she would have been happier if she had even once admitted that she hated Africa, hated the mild-eyed African women who displayed in public their ripe heavy breasts to suckle their babies, and the brown-skinned men with their slender fingers, their swaggering walk, their bare muscular thighs. I suppose she must have realized her hatred. Perhaps that is why she worked herself to death–trying to prove it was not so.

  When I was young I had an African nurse. She was old Yaa, the wife of Kwaku, our cook. I don’t suppose she was really old. Her second son, Kwabena, was my age, and the younger ones kept coming for years. But she seemed ancient as stone to me then, with her shrewd seamed face and her enormous body. It was Yaa and Kwabena who taught me Twi, taught it to me so thoroughly that by the time I was six I could speak it better than English.

  Kwabena and I used to run, whooping and yelling, beside Yaa as she walked back from the market, her great hips swaying under the thick folds of her best green and mauve cloth, and her wide brass headpan piled high with mangoes and paw-paw, yams and red peppers.

  “Ei ei!” she would cry, as the goats and chickens scattered out of her way on the narrow street. “Another week of this walk and I am finished! The bottom of the hill–that would not have suited God, oh no! If the master had less worry about my soul and more about my feet–”

  When Kwabena and I stole eggs to give to the fetish, she whipped us. I would have died rather than tell my father–not for shame, but for love of her.

  “A hen treads on her chicks,” she would tell us the old proverb, “but not to kill them.”

  In the rains I used to lie awake, listening to the thunder that seemed to split the sky, and thinking of Sasabonsam, the red-furred Great Devil, perched on his odum tree with those weird folk of witchery, the mmoatia who talked in whistles. Then I would hear the soft slapping of Yaa’s footsteps in the passage, and she would come in and rock me in her arms.

  “Do they think he is a man yet?” she would demand angrily, of no one. “Sleeping in a room by himself! Listen, little one, shall I tell you what the thunder is? In the beginning, when Odamankoma created all things–”

  And soon I would be asleep.

  I found out accidentally that Yaa had suckled me at her breast when I was a baby. My mother never knew.

  “I asked what day I was born,” I told Kwabena. “It was a Tuesday.”

  His face lit up. “Then we are brothers in one way–”

  Kwabena’s name was given to the Tuesday-born. Yaa laughed.

  “You are brothers anyway,” she said.

  And then she told me. I do not know why that should make a difference to me, even yet, when I think of her. Perhaps because her love, like her milk, was plentiful. She had enough to spare for me.

  My father was an idol-breaker of the old school. He hated only one thing more than the heathen gods and that was the Roman Catholic Church.

  “Formalism, Latin–all learned by rote,” he would say. “They have no spontaneity. None at all.”

  Spontaneity to my father meant drilling the Mission Boys’ Fife and Drum Band to play “Nearer My God to Thee” until their mouths were sore and puckered with blowing and their heads spinning with the uncomprehended tune.

  The mission had a school. My father taught the boys to read and write; and who knows, in the eternal scheme of things perhaps that is all he was meant to do. But he was not a very patient man. Once when a family of rats died in the well, and the merchant cheated him on the price of cement for a new one, he beat six boys in a single afternoon. I cannot say that I blame him. He worked hard and had so pathetically little to show for his toil and his poverty. He would have been superhuman if the light of holiness had not flickered low from time to time.

  For twenty years he tried to force, frighten or cajole his flock away from drumming and dancing, the accompaniments of the old religion. He forbade the making of wooden figures. I suppose we have to thank men like my father for the sad fact that there are so few carvers of any merit left in West Africa.

  He broke idols literally as well as
symbolically. Perhaps it was necessary. I do not know. I heard the story of Moses and the Golden Calf so often that after a few years of almost tasting the powdered gold harsh against my throat, I passed into the stage of boredom.

  “I have discovered another fetish hut,” my father announced importantly one day.

  I nearly betrayed myself and the whole village by asking which one.

  “Where?”

  “On the shore, between the palm grove and the fishing beach. I am going to break into it.”

  I knew the one. The obosom there was a powerful one, Kwabena had told me. I stared at him with wide eyes. My father probably thought I was full of admiration for his zeal. In fact, I was wildly curious.

  “He will–of course–die,” Kwabena said when I told him.

  My father did break into the fetish hut, and he did not die. He did not even have indigestion or a fever. The fetish inside the little hive of woven palm leaves was part of the vertebrae of an enormous sea creature, possibly a whale. It was very old, and crumbled when he kicked it. I suppose it was a blow for truth. But I was ashamed.

  I still am. Moses broke the idols of his own people.

  The parades were something my parents organized and bore with, but never liked. They took place on saints’ days or whenever the attendance of the Band of Jesus was falling off.

  “If only the girls would just walk along,” my mother would complain, “instead of–what they do. And to the hymns, too.”

  “I know,” my father soothed her. “But it’s necessary. We will just have to keep impressing them with the desirability of dignity. But we can’t cut out the parades. Remember, they’re like children, these people. In order to be drawn to the church, they must have the pageantry, the music–it’s better than their own heathen dancing, anyway. Besides, the Roman Catholics have parades.”

  My father marched with the parade only once, and that time the District Commissioner’s wife happened to see him. He was so humiliated he never went again. I can still see those parades, headed by the mission banner in purple and yellow silk. I wish you could have heard the Mission Boys’ Fife and Drum Band playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” with a syncopated jazz beat, hot as the forest’s pulse. The words, badly translated in Twi, were chanted by the snaking line of girls, their hands outstretched, their shoulders lifting to the off-beat, their whole bodies giving back the rhythm. Dignity! They could no more stop themselves from dancing than they could from breathing. Every sinew, every bone, in their bodies responded to rhythm as to a lover’s touch.

  One Easter my father discovered that I had gone with Kwabena, as always, and joined the parade at a distance from the church.

  “I can’t understand,” my father began, more in sorrow than anger, “why Kofi let you stay. I’ve told him–”

  Kofi was one of the monitors, one of the very few of his flock whom my father trusted.

  “He didn’t see me,” I replied abruptly.

  He could hardly have missed seeing me, turning cartwheels with Kwabena at the head of the parade. But Kofi was the last person who would have tattled. Fortunately for my father, he never found out, as I had done, that Kofi was one of the most renowned fetish priests along the coast.

  “We have explained it all to you, Matthew,” my father went on. “The parades are not–proper–for you in the practice of your faith.”

  “Why not?” I was still excited. “It was fun–why shouldn’t I go?”

  “Religion is not fun,” thundered my father. “It is serving God.”

  How can I describe Kwabena, who was my first and for many years my only real friend? I cannot think of him as he is now. The reality of him is the little boy I remember, slighter than I but more wiry, braver but less far-sighted. Until my mother objected, he used to run naked, his brown body paled with dust. He had Yaa’s aggressive spirit and his laughter was like hers, irreverent, deep, flooded with life. He was totally unlike the charming, indolent Kwaku, his father.

  I used to go with him into the village, although my parents had forbidden it, into the mudbrick huts thatched with dried palm leaves, the fusty little dwellings stinking of goats and refuse and yellow spicy palm oil. The filth and the sorrow–I hardly noticed them. I was shown a girl child who had died of malaria, the belly bloated, the limbs twisted with the fever. And what interested me most was that they had left her gold earrings on. Avariciously, I longed to steal those thin bright circles before they were wasted in the earth.

  I do not know when Kwabena began to notice suffering. Perhaps the knowledge of it was born in him.

  When I was with Kwabena, the world of the mission and Band of Jesus did not exist for me. However powerfully my father preached, he could not stop the drums playing in the evenings. Kwabena and I would sit under the casuarina tree in our garden and listen to the thudding rhythm, the tempo building up and up until you knew the drummer was hypnotized with the sound.

  “Ei! That one! It is almost like the voice of Drum himself,” Kwabena would say.

  And I would imagine the vast-bellied giant, the Drummer of all the world, drumming on himself, the Drum of drums. For years I thought of the great grinning mask each time the drums pulsed in the moon-grey night, seeming to shiver even the ribboned leaves of the banana palms.

  The casuarina tree was a special meeting-place for Kwabena and me. It was there that the wind spoke to us, whispering through the feather fans of the branches like the warning voices of the ancestors themselves. It was there that Kwabena used to tell me stories about Ananse Kokuroko, Ananse the gigantic spider, who desired greedily all power and all wealth, and who wove his web of cunning to ensnare the stupid and the guileless. Whenever I saw a spider I always sidestepped it, out of respect for the Father of Spiders, and for a time I half believed they could understand what I was saying.

  There was a deserted palm hut on the shore, a mile from the village. Kwabena said it was where Death lived. We always walked far to the side of it and never looked at it directly. Kwabena was especially mindful of taboos, for he wanted to be a fetish priest when he became a man.

  In the sweltering afternoons Kwabena and I would steal away from the bungalow and go to the lagoon. The sea was nearby and clean, and we were allowed to swim there. I suppose that is why we preferred the lagoon. Kwabena would peel off his scanty garb.

  “I can dive better than you, Matthew!”

  Often I hesitated, some deep English fear of unclean water stirring within me.

  “It is forbidden–”

  Kwabena would spout brown water from his mouth like a whale.

  “You are afraid! If I had such fear I would go and hide myself in the forest, for shame!”

  So I would strip also, indignantly, and jump in. I never got bilharzia–some kindly spirit must protect the very foolish.

  The shore was ours, with its twisted seashells and moss-hair rocks and stretches of pale sand where transparent crabs scurried like tiny crustaceous ghosts. Ours the thin-prowed fishing boats that impertinently dared the angry surf each day. Ours the groves of slender palms, curved into the wind, and the bush paths with their tangled vines and tree roots torn from the red earth by storms. Ours was the village, too, with its baked mud streets where old gossiping men squatted and children slept and big-breasted women walked with babies slung on their backs and laden brass trays balanced on their heads.

  This was my Africa, in the days of my childhood, before I knew how little I knew.

  I was ten when I first saw Afua. She was Yaa’s niece, and when her mother died she came to live with Yaa and Kwaku. She was a thin and bony little girl, and as though she sensed her ugliness she was very shy. No one ever noticed her except Yaa, who would chatter away encouragingly as the two of them pounded fu-fu in the shade of the mango tree.

  “I know–you are a little owl now, but it will not always be so. There is beauty in you. You will fatten and grow tall, and one day all the young men will want you. You will not have to marry a poor man.”

  And the ch
ild would look at her gravely, not believing.

  Afua had been living in our compound for nearly two years before I really saw her. She had changed in that time, without my realizing it. Perhaps I, too, had changed. My childhood was nearly over, although I did not know it then and still longed for the slow years to pass.

  It was afternoon and the sun filled the street with its hot orange light, making vividly dark the shadows on the earth and walls. Afua had been carrying a basket of melons home from the market. Now the basket lay forgotten in the festering gutter.

  Afua was dancing with her shadow. Slowly, lightly, then faster, until she was whirling in the deserted street, her hands clapping, her hips swaying with a sudden knowledge of her womanhood. I had to stop and watch her. For the first time I saw her ripening breasts under her faded cotton cloth, and the beauty given to her face by her strong fine-shaped bones. When I saw Kwabena coming along the street behind me, I did something totally strange to me. I turned and went to meet him, and led him back the other way, so he should not see her.

  My father had forbidden me to take part in the mission parades, and I never went again. I wondered afterwards what he would have thought if he had known what I did instead. When the talking drums sounded in the evening, I got Kwaku to tell me any of their invocations which he understood, or the proverbs and parables which they drummed forth.

  Odamankoma created the Thing,

  The Carver, He hewed out the Thing–

  I learned some of the other names of Nyame–the Shining One, Giver of Rain, Giver of Sun. Once for a whole year I called God by the name of Nyame in my silent prayers. I tried to find out from Kwaku–and was laughed at–the meaning of the saying “Odamankoma created Death, and Death killed Him”. When my mother was ill for the last time, I invoked Nyankopon’s strong name, Obommubuwafre, not for love of her but as a duty.

  God of my fathers, I cannot think You minded too much. If anything, I think You might have smiled a little at my seriousness, smiled as Kwaku did, with mild mockery, at the boy who thought Africa was his.