“I am not needed here.”
Babu did not answer and his sister was not there to fill up the spaces between us with chatter. When we had finished our quiet meal I preempted those many child-maids, gathered the plates together and walked in the direction I’d seen those girls go, toward the last room in the block, which turned out to be a bedroom. I stood in the dim light, unsure what to do next, when one of the half a dozen sleeping children in there raised his head from their single bed, saw the load in my arms and pointed me through a curtain. I found myself outside, in the yard again, but this was the back yard, and here were the grandmothers and some of the older girls, crouched around several tubs of water in which clothes were being washed with large bars of gray soap. A circle of solar lamps illuminated the scene. As I came upon them work paused to observe some live animal theater: a cockerel chasing a hen, overpowering her, putting his claw to her neck, driving her head into the dust, finally mounting her. This operation took only a minute, but throughout the hen looked bored, impatient to get on with her other tasks, so that the cockerel’s brutal sense of his power over her seemed somehow comic. “Big man! Big man!” cried one of the grandmothers, spotting me, pointing at the cockerel. The women laughed, the hen was released: she wandered around in a circle, once, twice, three times, apparently dazed, before returning to the henhouse and her sisters and her chicks. I put the plates where I was told to, on the ground, and came back to find that Lamin had already left. I understood it was a signal. I announced that I, too, was going to bed, but instead lay in my room in my clothes, waiting for the last sounds of human activity to fade. Just before midnight I took my head-torch, made my way quietly through the yard, out of the compound and through the village.
? ? ?
Aimee had thought of this visit as a “fact-finding trip,” but the village committee considered everything a reason for celebration, and the next day, as we finished the school tour and entered the yard we found a drum circle awaiting us under the mango tree, twelve late-middle-aged women with drums between their thighs. Even Fern hadn’t been warned, and Aimee was agitated at this new delay to the schedule, but there was no way to avoid it: this was an ambush. The children streamed out and formed a second, huge circle around their drumming mothers, and we, “the Americans,” were asked to sit in the innermost circle on little chairs taken from the classrooms. The teachers went to get these, and among them, approaching from the very other end of the school, over by Lamin’s maths class, I spotted Lamin and Hawa walking together, carrying four little chairs each. But I did not, when I saw him, feel in any way self-conscious, nor was I ashamed: the events of the night before were so separated from my daytime life that it felt to me that they had happened to someone else, a shadow body who pursued separate aims and could not be forced into the light. I waved to them both—they showed no sign of seeing me. The drumming started. I couldn’t shout over it. I turned back toward the circle and took the seat offered to me, next to Aimee. The women began taking turns in the circle, laying their drum aside to dance in dramatic three-minute bursts, a kind of anti-performance, for despite the brilliance of their footwork, the genius in their hips, they did not turn outwards to their audience but instead remained facing their drumming sisters, their backs to us. As the second woman started, Hawa entered the circle and took the seat next to me that I’d been saving for her, but Lamin only nodded at Aimee before sitting himself on the other side of the circle, as far from her, and I suppose from me, as he could manage. I squeezed Hawa’s hand and offered my congratulations.
“I am very happy. It was not easy for me to be here today but I wanted to see you!”
“Is Bakary with you?”
“No! He thinks I am buying fish in Barra! He does not like dancing like this,” she said and moved her feet a little in echo of the woman stamping away a few yards from us. “But of course I won’t dance myself so no harm is done.”
I squeezed her hand again. There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion. At the same time a paternalistic—or perhaps I should write here “maternalistic”—impulse surged through me: I kept hold of her hand, too tightly, in the hope, the irrational hope, that it would—like some cheap charm bought off a marabout—confer protection, keep her safe from evil spirits, whose existence in the world I no longer doubted. But when she turned and saw the creases in my forehead, she laughed at me and freed herself, clapping to welcome the arrival of Granger into the circle, who moved round it as if it were a break-dancer’s ring, showing off his heavy-footed moves, to the delight of the drumming mothers. After a suitable minute of reticence, Aimee joined him. To avoid watching her, I looked around the circle at all the adamant, inflexible love, sadly misdirected. I could feel Fern to my right, staring at me. I watched Lamin look up every now and then, his glances directed only at Hawa, her perfect face wrapped up tightly like a present. But in the end I could not evade the image of Aimee, dancing for Lamin, at Lamin, to Lamin. Like someone dancing for a rain that will not fall.
Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. Aimee had extemporized, Granger had historicized—moonwalk, the robot, the running man—but I still had no ideas about dance, only instincts. I watched them for a minute, the two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through everything. Five minutes later I was done and more tired than if I’d run six miles.
I collapsed next to Hawa, and from some fold of her new hijab she produced a small piece of material with which I wiped some of the sweat from my face.
“Why are they saying ‘too bad’? Was I that bad?”
“No! You were so great! They are saying: Toobab—this means—” She traced her hand across the skin of my cheek. “So they are saying: ‘Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black!’ I say it’s true: you and Aimee, both of you—you really dance like you are blacks. It is a big compliment, I would say. I never would have guessed this about you! My, my, you even dance as well as Granger!”
Aimee, overhearing, burst out laughing.
Seven