This Side Jordan Read online

  Nathaniel glanced down at his shirt. It was mended. He had only two good enough to wear to school. Perhaps if he dressed better, he would impress the boys more.

  – A silk shirt. A gabardine suit. Here endeth the first lesson. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher. All is vanity. Oh, Nathaniel.

  – Ghana. The future is YOURS, the sign said.

  Nathaniel wondered if he managed to teach these citizens of the new Ghana anything at all. He felt sometimes as though he were talking to himself. He had shaken one boy awake today, and the boy hit him, and Nathaniel, who knew he could have beaten the tall nineteen-year-old, had not dared to touch him in case Mensah found out.

  Nathaniel taught History. He did not have the gift of spoken words – only of imagined words, when he made silent speeches to himself. In class he referred too often to the text, and the boys had discovered that if they all stared hard at him he would begin to stammer.

  Only in one course did he hold their interest, his own fire breaking through his anxiety.

  He had begun teaching African Civilizations of the Past. Victor Edusei, who was a journalist, made fun of him, claiming there were no African civilizations of the past worth mentioning. Victor was wrong. But it made no difference. They were still right to teach the course, even if every word of it was a lie.

  In some way, this course was his justification.

  – Nathaniel the Preacher. Nathaniel the Prophet.

  – There must be pride and roots, O my people. Ghana, City of Gold, Ghana on the banks of the Niger, live in your people’s faith. Ancient empire, you will rise again. And your people will laugh, easily, unafraid. They will not know the shame, as we have known it. For they will have inherited their earth. Ghana, empire of our forefathers, rise again to be a glory to your people.

  When Nathaniel was eight years old, a visiting priest had come to inspect the mission school. As the man was leaving, a crowd of boys, Nathaniel among them, had surrounded him and asked for a dash. Nathaniel could still hear his own voice, whining at the whiteman.

  Mastah. I beg you. One penny.

  The priest’s look of disgust had startled the boy and made him uneasy in a way he did not then understand. The priest had hissed at them.

  Beggars! Shame on you!

  It was like a curse, a still-potent curse that made him search for a counteracting spell.

  – Ghana, rise again, your people proud, proud and without shame. Rise up to be a glory to your people.

  Quietly, with the soft bouncing catlike tread common in big men, Jacob Abraham Mensah entered Nathaniel’s classroom.

  Jacob Abraham’s grey hair gave his massive head a distinguished appearance, which he took pains to further by wearing clothes that clearly had cost a great deal. Today he wore a grey pinstripe suit, a yellow shirt of fine poplin, a blue Paisley tie, all shouting guineas, guineas, guineas. His features were heavy, but handsome, almost Semitic. His skin was pale brown, like unpolished mahogany. Nathaniel always suspected that this lightness of skin secretly pleased him.

  ‘Oh, Amegbe – if you could spare me a moment –’ An unnecessary politeness that always smacked of irony, Nathaniel thought. He reached up automatically and straightened his spectacles.

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  Classes at Futura Academy were conducted in English, but the masters out of class often spoke to one another in the vernacular, Ga or Twi or Fante. But not with Jacob Abraham. With him they always spoke meticulous English.

  ‘About that boy you mentioned – young Cobblah,’ a short laugh indicated the triviality of the subject, ‘he’ll have to go, Amegbe. I’ve spoken to his father again.’

  ‘He still won’t pay?’

  ‘Yes. He refuses absolutely. After all, the boy is living with his mother. His father is married again. And the mother pays five shillings here, ten bob there. It’s no use. She can’t or won’t –’

  ‘She can’t,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I have seen her. She would do almost anything to educate him. I think she would even go on the streets, but I guess she is not young enough or pretty enough for that.’

  ‘There is no need,’ Jacob Abraham’s voice grew hoarse with annoyance, ‘there is absolutely no need to be insolent, Amegbe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘School Cert. men,’ Jacob Abraham said with a friendly smile, ‘are more common than they were when you joined our staff. And no one is indispensable, you know.’

  If Jacob Abraham sacked him, where would he go? What other school would take him?

  None, obviously.

  Or if one did, it would be worse than Futura Academy, difficult as that might be to imagine. Mensah’s school was not rock-bottom, but it must be very close. The country swarmed with private Secondary Schools. Some of them – the mission schools and others of high quality – were government-aided. This status indicated that they had a recognized standard and had passed government inspection. Futura Academy was not on the government-accepted list.

  If it had been, it would never have employed Nathaniel Amegbe.

  For Nathaniel was teaching in a Secondary School having himself failed Secondary School. He had no teacher training, no School Certificate. Sometimes his lack of qualifications terrified him. He tried not to think of it.

  His father had died a few weeks before Nathaniel wrote his final examinations. Victor Edusei had won a scholarship that year. But Nathaniel had failed. He knew he did not have Victor’s brains. But he was not stupid, and he had worked hard. It had meant everything to him to get through.

  He could remember the fear now. Overseas Cambridge School Certificate – it was like a regal title, hated and coveted. Sometimes, in the state of mind he had had then, the words took on a peculiarly evil, feminine quality – repelling him, beckoning, repelling again. He had not honestly known whether he wanted to pass or fail. He had felt the unnerving desire to fail, as though it would be a penance.

  The examination room had been still, only the scritch-scratch of pens, and the priest, white skin and white robe, absentmindedly tapping his great ebony cross on the desk. Nathaniel remembered his own dry mouth, how he could not make the saliva flow, for the dry taste of fear in his mouth. He kept wanting to urinate, and finally did not care about the examination paper, as long as he could leave the room for that purpose. But when he handed his paper in and went out to the bush, nothing came.

  He had not thought about it for a long time. His mind drew away, like a hand instinctively withdrawing from a flame.

  He had met Mensah three years after leaving mission school. Nathaniel could still hear the deep syrupy voice – ‘Failed School Certificate, eh? Never mind. These things happen. One could really say you have Secondary. You could teach History? I like to help young men. You realize, of course, that as far as salary is concerned –’ Jacob Abraham had taken him because he got him cheaply.

  Six years ago. He could still go back and get his School Certificate, couldn’t he? But what would he and Aya live on while he studied? And he had no confidence, anyway, in his own ability. However small and grimy his niche, Nathaniel did not feel capable of leaving it now.

  And yet his life here was growing insufferable. He was made to grovel apology for every insignificant remark that Mensah chose to interpret as insubordination. Nathaniel sometimes thought the headmaster kept him on only for his sport.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Nathaniel repeated, stammering a little. ‘I didn’t mean to be insolent. It was only that – that – Cobblah was one of the brighter ones.’

  ‘I am not running a charity organization,’ Mensah said.

  ‘I know.’

  The big man became confiding.

  ‘You know your trouble, Amegbe? You are a dreamer, A dreamer. Unrealistic. Do you think in England a boy would be allowed to continue –? Of course not. Pay or go. Pay or go. That is the policy. But because this is the Gold Coast, we should be kind-hearted, eh? The new Ghana, eh? Well, let me tell you –’

  He broke off and stared at
Nathaniel.

  ‘By the way, Amegbe – Cobblah’s family comes from the same part of Asante as your own – is it so?’

  Nathaniel looked at him steadily.

  ‘Yes. But it was not that way.’

  At least he did not take bribes. Perhaps Jacob Abraham would respect him more if he did.

  ‘Naturally, naturally,’ Jacob Abraham’s voice was acid overlaid with oil. ‘I had forgotten. You’re our honest man, eh? Well, send him in to my office tomorrow, will you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The headmaster still hovered, like an absurd gigantic mud-wasp vacillating over the choice of nest.

  ‘Another thing –’ he said. ‘I am asking all the masters to make suggestions about Independence Day celebrations in the school. There will be some suitable service. People will expect it. I thought we might solicit among parents to get some lasting memorial.’

  Nathaniel glanced around at the shabby classroom with its unswept earth floor, its straight wooden benches shredded at the edges by pocket-knives, termites and time. On the wall hung a torn map of the world. The blackboard at the front was ridiculously small and permanently dulled by chalk.

  ‘We need new benches,’ he murmured.

  Jacob Abraham Mensah laughed merrily.

  ‘My dear chap,’ he said, ‘not that sort of memorial. No, no. I mean something that will make an impression. An Independence window, perhaps, or a brass plaque on the front of the building.’

  The front of the building was plaster over mudbrick. The façade had been chipped by inhabitants fifty years before Futura Academy was born, stained and furrowed by rain, glued with paper bills proclaiming funeral rites or this week’s dances at Teshie and Labadi, chalk-scrawled, chicken-scratched, urinated against by humans and dung-splattered by goats.

  A brass plaque, thought Nathaniel with a bleak inward grin, would look wonderful on the front of the building. ‘That is a fine idea,’ he said soberly.

  Nathaniel took the bus home. He tried to stop thinking about his talk with Mensah, but it would not go away. What hope was there now of a rise in salary? None. Nathaniel felt vulnerable and without bargaining power.

  His failure at the mission school was the thing that had set the course of his life. He had never told anyone what had made him unable to write the examinations properly. He would not even think of the details in anyone’s presence, as though he might blurt it all out in his anxiety not to do so.

  He had been a fool to be afraid. But that was nine years ago. He was eighteen then. He had lived at mission schools since he was seven, only going back to his village in holidays. The stamp of the mission was deep on him.

  His father. Kyerema, Drummer to a Chief. He who knew the speech of the Ntumpane and the Fontomfrom, the sacred talking drums. His father, with the proud face and cruel eyes of a warrior of Asante. His father, who prayed to Tano, god of the River, Lord of the Forest.

  The Kyerema would not be acceptable to God. That had seemed very clear at the time. Had not the mission priests taught it? ‘I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me.’ The Drummer would walk among the howling hordes of hell to all eternity, his dark eyes as haughty and unyielding as they had been in life.

  Damned. The Drummer, damned. That had seemed very clear at the time. (Oh, young Nathaniel, having eaten the mission’s consecrated bread, year after year, having eaten faith and fear and the threat of fire.)

  He, Nathaniel, had damned his father to that eternity. The father had been damned by his son’s belief.

  Nathaniel had taken part in his father’s funeral rites with a fervour that surprised the uncles.

  – He had not forgotten the ways of his people, they said.

  He had feared, himself, that he might have forgotten. But then he knew there were some things a man never forgets, though they may lie untouched in the urn of his mind for years. The urn is unsealed and they are there, relics of another self, a dead world. Around Nathaniel’s head was bound the ‘asuani’ creeper, whose name means ‘tears’. The rust-hued mourning cloth, colour of Africa’s earth, was twisted around his body. And the lamentation, the ancient lamentation, had risen to his throat unbidden.

  – Alas, father!

  And the dirges came out of the unsealed urn. At the wake-keeping, the dirges came back as though he had heard them every day of his life.

  ‘Whom does death overlook?

  I am an orphan, and when I recall the death of my father,

  Water from my eyes falls upon me.

  When I recall the death of my mother,

  Water from my eyes falls upon me.

  We walk, we walk, O Mother Tano,

  We walk and it will soon be night.

  It is because of the sorrow of death that we walk.’

  The dirges that the women sang were as familiar to him as though he had heard them every day of his life. The keening voices entered into him, became his voice, mourning for the dead Drummer.

  His sister Kwaale, like a she-leopard caged, paced the room as she sang her mourning, arms clasped across her breast, sorrow distorting her handsome face, her strong face. She was the oldest child. She, not Nathaniel, should have been the son, for she was strong, strong, and the Kyerema had always known it.

  ‘Father, do not leave me behind –

  Please do not leave me behind –’

  And her plea for gifts from the dead, that was a plea for love:

  ‘Send us something when someone is coming this way –’

  The Drummer was also mourned by those of his own calling. The Drummer’s drum was silent, and the drums mourned. The drummers, sons of the Crocodile who drums in the River, mourned their brother:

  ‘The river fish comes out of the water,

  And asks the Crocodile,

  Can you drum your own names and praises?

  I am the drum of the Crocodile,

  I can drum my own names and praises –’

  The wake was a time of fasting. The drums were not still day or night. The dark air and the bright air, both were hot and wet, the air was sweat, the air was the sweet over-ripeness of palm-wine. And Nathaniel fasted and drank palm-wine and listened to the funeral songs for the dead Drummer, his father.

  Somewhere there was another god, not Nyame, not Nyankopon, not Tano, not Asaase Yaa, Mother of the Dead. Somewhere there was another – God.

  But He was far away. The Latin words were far away, and the altar and the wine-blood and the wafer that was a broken body. They were far away, and Nathaniel had come home.

  Then one of the uncles spoke to him.

  ‘They have not stolen your soul, Nathaniel, the white priests.’

  – They have not stolen your soul.

  In the compound, men were firing old Arab muzzle-loaders, a courtesy to the dead. Nathaniel could hear the now-wild voices of his sisters, wailing sorrow into the night. And the drums, the drums, the drums –

  He knew then.

  – I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God –

  Nathaniel had looked at his father’s body. It was lying on its left side, dressed in the best cloth it had owned in life, a magnificent vari-coloured Kente. The ‘kra sika’, the soul money, was bound around its wrists, and the ears had been filled with gold dust. Beside it lay the food for the soul: eggs, mashed yam, roasted fowls, earthen pots of water. The Kyerema would not want on his journey.

  Nathaniel’s heart was gripped by a terrible love, a terrible fear.

  ‘They have not stolen your soul,’ the uncles repeated, satisfied.

  And the boy had agreed, his aching body sweating and trembling lest the lie should strangle him and lest his father’s gods should hear and slay him.

  The noise of the drums was the howling of lunatics, and the palm-wine had the taste of death. Then he had drunk himself insensible.

  On the third day, the Drummer’s body was taken to the ‘samanpow’, the thicket of gho
sts, for burial. Again, the drums, the guns, the heat, men reeling from hunger and exhaustion and palm-wine, the stench of the living and the stench of the dead. And the Drummer’s only son, his voice more frenzied than the voice of the drums, shouted his confused despair into the ancient formula.

  – Alas, father!

  When he went back to the Mission, Nathaniel had gone alone to the chapel one night. He had stood before the statue of God’s crucified Son. And he had spat full in the Thing’s face, his heart raging to avenge his father. But it did not work. For he believed in the man-God with the bleeding hands, and he could not spew that out of himself. For a moment, before an altar that was both alien and as familiar as himself, his fear became panic. He waited, waited, and the night chapel was a coffin. But God was sleeping. Or He had punishments more subtle than lightning. Nothing happened, and after a while Nathaniel’s fear was only that one of the priests might discover him there and see the spittle on the plaster face.

  It had occurred to him then that the Kyerema would only have laughed if he had seen. This was all his son could do – this secret slime at night. And there would have been bitterness in the Drummer’s laughter.

  Shame swamped Nathaniel. He had never been brave enough to burn either Nyame’s Tree or the Nazarene’s Cross.

  Nine years ago. He had been a fool. He could see it now. Now he was different. Both gods had fought over him, and both had lost. Now he no longer feared.

  Except sometimes.

  THREE

  ‘The sample bolts have arrived from London,’ Johnnie said. ‘Cooper thought you might want to know.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ James Thayer said eagerly. ‘I think I’ll just nip down and have a look. Care to come along? You might find it interesting.’

  Together they walked down the iron-banistered stairway. It was going to be a busy morning on the textile floor. The swarms of women traders were already pattering up and down the narrow aisles, their bare or sandalled feet slapping softly on the grey splintered wood. They would buy cloth wholesale and resell it in the markets. A twelve-yard bolt made two robes, and many African women who did not have the money for the whole piece were willing to pay more per yard to obtain half a length from the market mammies.