I did not know these names. Or maybe these were just names for people who had nothing to do with me. Family was not always family in the bush, and friend was not always friend. Even wife was not always wife.
He took me past the entrance and inside the yard, where children chased chickens. They smelled of clay and pollen and chicken shit underfoot. The house had six halls. Through the window, two wives grinding flour. Beside the grain keep the kitchen let out the sweetness of porridge; beside the kitchen, a wife washed herself under a stream of water pouring through a hole in the wall. Beside that a wall, long and dark, spotted with nipples made of clay. Then an open area under a thatch roof, with stools and rugs, and behind that the longest wall. My uncle’s sleeping room, which had a huge butterfly above the sleeping rugs. He saw me looking and said the circles in the center were rippling pools of water, meaning renewal each wet season, or whenever he dips into the wet of his new wife’s wiwi. Beside his hall was the room for storage, and for the children to sleep.
“This house is your house, these rugs are your rugs. But those wives are mine,” he said, and chuckled. I smiled.
We sat in the open area, me on a rug, him on a chair set back so far that he was lying, not sitting. Cut with a curve to fit his buttocks, firm in the back with three slats carved to look like three lines of eggs. I remember my father sighing as he rubbed his own back against one like it. A headboard curved like a huge headdress of horns. The big back and chubby legs made it look like a bush buffalo. My uncle lying there changed into a powerful animal.
“Your chair. I have seen the like, beloved uncle,” I said.
He sat up. He seemed disturbed that there were two.
“Did your people make this?” I asked.
“The Lobi, wood masters in the city, claimed to have made only one. But city folk lie; that is their nature.”
“You know of city streets?”
“I have walked many.”
“Why did you return?”
“How do you know I left village for the city and not city for the village?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Where did you see this chair?” he asked.
“In my house.”
He nodded and laughed. “Blood still behaves like blood even if separated by the sand,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder.
“Bring my blood palm wine and tobacco,” he shouted at one of his wives.
The people called themselves and their village Ku. Once they controlled both sides of the river. Then the enemy, the Gangatom, got bigger and stronger and many more joined them, and drove the Ku to the setting-sun side. Ku men had skill with bow and arrow, leading the cattle to fresh fields, drinking milk, and sleeping. The women had skill with pulling grass for thatch roofs, plastering walls with clay or cow shit, building fences to keep in the goats and the children chasing after goats, fetching water, washing the milk skins, milking the cattle, feeding the children, cooking the soup, washing the calabashes, and churning the butter. The men went out in the nearby fields to sow and reap their crops. They dug in water. I nearly fell into a hole dug so deep you heard the old devils, big as trees, rustle in their sleep at the bottom. The moonlight boy told me that it was soon time to gather the durra harvest, for the women to come to the fields with baskets to take the crop away.
One day I saw nine men who came back to the village, tall and shining from new paint on some, red ochre and shea butter on others, men who looked like they were just born as warriors.
At nighttime they sang and danced and fought, and sang again, and put on Hemba masks that looked like the chimpanzee but Kava said was in the image of all the elders gone, to speak to them in the spirit trees. They sang in Hemba masks to break the curse of many moons of bad hunting. The drum beat a kekeke. Bambambam, lakalakalakalaka under the wind.
The village woke up to a new smell and it was everywhere. New men and new women ripe to burst. I watched them from the man who would be my uncle’s house, as he watched his wives and scratched his belly.
“A boy told me he would take me to the rites of manhood,” I said.
“A boy promise you the Zareba? Under whose command?”
“By his own hand,” I said.
“Is that what he tell you now?” he said.
“Yes. That I will be his new partner as the old one died by snakebite. I speak your tongue now. I know your ways, beloved uncle. I am your blood. I am ready.”
“Which boy is this?” my uncle said.
But I did not know where lived this boy. My uncle rubbed his chin and looked at me. “You were born when you were found, and that is not even a moon. Do not rush to die so soon,” he said.
I did not tell him that I was a man already.
“You have seen them. Boys running around, smaller than the men who came back to the village.”
“What boys?”
“Boys with red tips, the female cut off from the male.”
I did not know what he was talking about so he took me outside. The sky was gray and fat with waiting rain. Two boys ran past and he called at the taller one, his face red, white, and yellow, the yellow a line in the middle of his head going all the way down. Remember, my uncle is a very important man, with more cows than the chief, and even some gold. The boy came over, shining from sweat.
“I was chasing a fox,” he said to my uncle.
My uncle waved him closer. He laughed, saying the boy knows he has the mark of the end of youth, and wants the village to know. The boy flinched when my uncle grabbed his balls and cock as if to weigh them. Look, he said. The paint almost hid that the skin was gone, cut away, leaving the bold blossom tip. In the beginning we are all born of two, he said. You are man and you are woman, just as girl is woman and she is man. This boy will be a man, now that the fetish priest has cut the woman away, he said.
So stiff was this boy, but he tried to stand proud. My uncle kept talking. “And the girl must have the man deep inside her cut out of her neha for her to be a woman. Just as the first beings was of two.” He rubbed the boy’s head, sent him away, and went back inside.
Off on a rock men gathered. Tall, strong, black, and shining with spears. I watched them stand still until the sunset made them shadow. My uncle turned to me, almost whispering as if telling me horrible news around strangers.
“Every sixty times the earth flies around the sun, we celebrate death and rebirth. The very firstborn were twins, but only when the divine male loosed his seed in the earth was there life. This is why the man who is also a woman, and the woman who is also a man, is a danger. It is too late. You have grown too old and will be both man and woman.”
He watched me until his words spoke to my mind.
“I will never be a man?”
“You will be a man. But this other is in you and will make you other. Like the men who roam the lands and teach our wives woman secrets. You will know as they know. By the gods, you might lay as they lay.”
“Beloved uncle, you cause me great sadness.”
I did not tell him that the woman was already raging inside me and I desired her desires, but otherwise did not feel like a woman for I wanted to hunt deer, and run and sport.
“I wish to be cut now,” I said.
“Your father should have cut you. Now it is too late. Too late. You will be one always on the line between the two. You will always walk two roads at the same time. You will always feel the strength of one and the pain of the other.”
That night the moon did not come, but when he appeared outside the hut, the boy still glowed.
“Come see what new men and women do,” he said.
“You must tell me your name,” I said.
He said nothing.
We went through the bush to the place where drummers were sending messages to gods of sky, and ancestors in the ground. The moonlight boy walked fast and did not wait. I was still afraid of stepping on a viper. He vanished through a wall of thick leaves and I stopped, not knowing where to go until a white hand pushed through the thick leaves, grabbed mine, and pulled me in.
We came upon a clearing where the drummers drummed, while others beat sticks and others whistled. Two men approached to start the ceremony, and we hid in the bush.