“And a good thing that is, for you would not be alive to tell me of it,” he said.
I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, woke up, and saw a great white python wrapping around a trunk, woke up and saw the snake fade against the wall. Sunlight came in, lit up the walls, and I saw we were in a cave. The walls shaped like candlewax melting on candlewax. In the dimness, parts of it looked like a screaming face, or elephant legs, or a young girl’s slit.
The wall, when I rubbed my hand against it, felt like yam skin. Near the opening was soft with shrubs sticking out like loose hairs. I rose and this time did not fall. Wobble I did, like a man soaked in palm wine, but I stepped outside. I staggered and pressed against the rock for balance, but this was not rock. Nothing like stone. Tree bark. But too wide, too big. I looked as high as I could look and walked as far as I could walk. Not only was sun still behind the branches and leaves, but this trunk was without end. By the time I walked around it, I forgot where it began. Only at the top were there branches, stubby like baby fingers and sticking out in a web of twigs and leaves. Little leaves, thick like skin, and fruit as big as your head. I heard little feet scrambling up and down, a baboon and her child.
“The monkeybread tree was the fairest in the savannah,” the witchman said behind me. “This was before the second dawn of the gods. But what a thing—the monkeybread tree knew she was pretty. She demanded all makers of song sing of her beauty. She and her sister prettier than the gods, even prettier than Bikili-Lilis, whose hair became the one hundred winds. This is what came to pass. The gods gave birth to fury. They went down to earth and pulled up every single monkeybread tree, and thrust them back in the ground upside down. It took five hundred ages for the roots to produce leaves and five hundred more to sprout flower and fruit.”
In one moon every member of the village came to the tree. I saw how they looked at him while hiding behind branches and leaves. Once, three of the strong men of the village came. They were all tall, broad in shoulder, rippled where fat men had bellies, with legs strong as the bull. The first man dressed himself head to toe in ash, white as the moon. The second marked his body with white stripes like a zebra. The third had no colour but his dark and rich skin. They wore necklaces and chains around their waists that needed no further adornment. I did not know what they came for, but I knew to them I would give it.
“We watch you many times in the bush,” the striped one said. “You climb trees and hunt. No skill, no craft, but maybe the gods are pushing you. How old are you in moons?”
“My father never counted moons.”
“This tree ate six virgins. Swallowed them whole. You can hear them scream at night but it comes out as a whisper. You think it is wind.”
He stared at me for a while, then they laughed.
“You will come with us to the Zareba rite of manhood,” the striped one said.
He pointed to the moonlit one.
“A snake killed his partner right before the rains. You will go with him.”
I did not say that I was saved from snakebite.
“We meet at the next sun. You should know the way of warriors, not bitchmen,” said the moonlit one.
I nodded a yes. He looked at me longer than the others. Somebody had carved a star on his chest. A ring in each ear that I knew he pierced himself. He was taller than the others by a head at least but I only noticed then. Also, these men won’t still be boys in Juba.
“You will go with me,” I heard him say, though I did not hear him say it.
In the Zareba, the rites of manhood, there are no women. But you must still know of their use to man. The Zareba is in your mind; the Zareba is out in the bush a journey from sunrise to noon. You arrive at the hall of heroes, with clay walls and a thatch roof. And sticks, and spaces for fighting. Boys enter to learn from the strongest fighters in all the villages and all the mountains. You cover yourself in ash so that at night you look as if you’ve come from the moon. You eat durra porridge. You kill the boy who is you, to become the man who is you, but everything must be learned. I asked the moonlight boy how to learn of women with no women to learn from.
Will you hear more, inquisitor?
One morning I caught the smell of kin following me to the river. A boy who thought I was his uncle’s son. I was hunting fish. He came to the bank and hailed me like he knew me, until he saw that he did not know me. I said nothing. His mother must have told him about the Abarra, the demon that comes to you like someone you know, with everything but a tongue. He did not run, but walked away slow from the bank and sat on a rock. Watching me. He could not have been more than eight or nine in years, with a white clay streak from ear to ear and over his nose, and white dots like a leopard’s all over his chest. I was a boy of the city and would have no luck catching fish. I dipped my hands in water and waited. Fish swam right into my hands but slipped out every time I tried to grab one. I waited, he watched. I grabbed a big one but it wriggled and frightened me and I tripped and fell into the river. The little boy laughed. I looked at him and laughed as well, but then came a smell in the forest, moving closer and closer. I smelled it—ochre, shea butter, underarm stenches, breast milk—and he smelled it too. We both knew the wind was carrying someone, but he knew who it was.
She came out of the trees as if out of the trees she sprung. A taller woman, an older woman, her face already cut sharp and gruff, her right breast not yet lanky. Her left she wrapped in a cloth slung over her shoulder. A band, red, green, and yellow around her head. Necklaces of every colour but blue piled one on top of the other, like a mountain all the way up to her earlobe. Goatskin skirt with cowries over a belly fat with child. She looked at the boy and pointed behind her. Then she looked at me, and pointed the same way.
On a morning with a lazy sun, the witchman woke me with a slap, then walked out of the hut, saying nothing. He laid beside me spear, sandals, and fabric to wrap around my hips. I rose quick and followed him. Down the river the village opened itself up with huts spread across a field. The first we passed were mounds of dry grass with a peak like a nipple. Then we passed by round huts of clay and dirt, red and brown with a roof of thatch and bush. In the center, the huts got bigger. Round and built in a cluster of five or six huts so that they looked like castles, with walls joining them together saying this is all for one man. The bigger the huts the shinier the walls, from those who could afford to rub the walls with blackstone. But most of the huts were not big. Only a man with many cows could have one hut for grain and another for cooking it.
The man with the biggest huts had six wives and twenty children, none of them a boy. He was looking for a seventh wife to give him a son at last. He was one of the few who came out of their huts to see me. Two boys and a girl, naked with no paint, followed the witchman and me until a woman shouted something in a harsh tongue and they ran to a hut behind us. We were now in the middle of the village, outside this man’s cluster. Two women were spreading a fresh layer of clay on the side of a grain keep. Three boys about my age came back from a hunt with a dead bushbuck. I did not see the moonlit one.
The return of the hunters woke up the town. Man and woman, girl and boy, all came out to see the fruit of the hunt, but stopped when they saw me. The witchman said a name I did not know. The man with six wives came out and walked right up to me. A tall man, with a big belly. A clay hair bun to the back of his head in gray and yellow, with five ostrich feathers on top. The bun for he was a man, each feather for a major kill. Yellow clay lined his cheekbone and victory scars covered his chest and shoulder. This man had killed many men, and lions and one elephant. Maybe even a hippopotamus. Two of his wives came out, one was the woman at the river.
The witchman said to him, “Father who speaks to the crocodile so that he does not eat us during wet season, hear me.” Then he said something to the man that I did not understand.
The man looked at me from head to toe, and toe to head. He came in closer and said, “Son of Aboyami, brother of Ayodele, this path is your path, these trees are your trees, this house is your house, and I am your beloved uncle.”