Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [27]
The scene was grim. The steps were slippery with a fine layer of ash, the walls were sooty, and a strange odour permeated the air. One had the distinct impression of being in the mouth of a mine shaft. They went up. Askia was surprised by the stamina of his friend, who never paused to catch his breath. The loft finally came into view. Astonishingly unencumbered. The pillars were oddly clean. The beam of the flashlight swept over the walls, starting from the nearest corner to their left and then covering the entire space, as if seeking to shed light on the mystery of every surface in the dark loft. Secrets. Things and beings buried in the shadows: a precious casket, a man hidden behind the concrete partitions.
They followed the lighted arc curving and moving back and forth in the space and the silence of the walls. In front of them the Songhai frescos, three-quarters destroyed. Petite-Guinée sighed and carried on with his inspection. The meddling flashlight illuminated the shadows, the secrets of that corner on the right, where a rustling noise made them both jump. The shadow leaped forward, brushing against Petite-Guinée’s jacket before scurrying away. Askia dashed after it into the black hole of the stairway where it had disappeared. When he finally got outside, the shadow was turning the corner of the first street on the right. He glimpsed something falling from the flounces of her long white dress, little pieces of cardboard that turned out to be train tickets bought in various cities, some far away — Matera, Coimbra, Naples, Saragossa — others nearer — Marseilles, Nantes . . .
Petite-Guinée came out behind him and shut the door. He said there was nothing up there but mysteries and shadows. Among the tickets that had fallen from the shadow’s pocket, the one from Nantes seemed ancient, printed in another century, at the beginning of the mass insanity that had cast people out on the road. Beings belonging to Askia’s kind, when other niggers named Sidi were bartered for a double-barrelled shotgun and expelled from Ouidah, Saint-Louis du Sénégal, to be shipped as slaves and deported ultimately to Virginia.
31
A FIELD IN Virginia, the journey’s endpoint, where the curse could finally be played out. Collapse in the weariness and emptiness of the body of Sidi’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, who bore the same forename, which on arriving in Virginia he was forced to relinquish in exchange for the ludicrous moniker of Waldo. Meanwhile, another Sidi put out to sea in Guinea as the manservant of a shipowner and ended up loading crates in Nantes before the slave ship weighed anchor for the trading posts of Gorée, Joal-la-Portugaise, Assinie, Coromantin, Winneba, Fort Saint-Antoine, Mitumbo, Saint-Georges de la Mine, and Gwato, where the voyage began again.
In the entrails of the slave ship, Sidi the slave ancestor hoisted a heavy bale on his back, climbed up on the deck, and found himself facing a lady who was standing on the wharf in the shade of a tiny parasol. Salt breeze. Grey waves. The two individuals eyed each other. Surreptitiously. Around them, a beehive of activity. Traders and shipowners, the noise of unloading and, farther along, beyond the docks, shuttered buildings and silent streets. The lady with the parasol saw this man, Askia’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, and felt certain urges. She saw herself being fucked by the fury of the ancestor, who meanwhile wondered how it would be to venture into the belly of the parasol, if it would be like exploring the open forest of his Keidou, the generous one, with whom he had fathered a clutch of kids before being captured in the Gulf of Guinea early one cynical morning.
He set his bale down on the deck