Walking with Abel (4 page)

“Anna Bâ! Fulani Bâ! General de Gaulle! Bienvenue, bienvenue.” We toasted with orange Fanta.

I walked up to the flat roof. Effervescent dusk. White guineafowl perched in a eucalyptus grove. The town’s sole generator droned. In a thin web of orange streetlights Djenné’s oblique adobes crowded narrow and asymmetrical and surreal. The floodplains around the town reflected the mauve and blue and crimson of the dying sky and the town seemed suspended in air. Beyond spread the thorny and flat Sahelian wilderness that belonged to the cows and their cowboys. I would be joining them in the morning.

Then the generator quieted and the lights went out, the town disappeared, and a full moon rang into the sky like a bell.

E
arly the next day, Afo, Pygmée, and I sat in the freckled shade of a windtwisted thorn tree with Oumarou Diakayaté and Fanta and their many kin and watched cattle egrets float down from the sky into hippo grass thickets that scissored in the wind. The white birds parted the grass and puckered the fen’s glossy surface with their long legs. A low northbound warplane thundered overhead. A few days’ walk away from the camp the French air force was bombing the Sahara. In the fen terrified cattle jolted and tripped and bawled. On the other side of the thorn tree a cow calved quietly and licked the calf to life. The Diakayatés had been in the bourgou a week.

“This is Anna Bâ,” Afo said and the Diakayatés laughed. “Bâ? Anna Bâ? A Fulani? Good, good. Welcome, Anna Bâ.”

Oumarou asked me if I had any cows, and whether it had rained where I came from. Was America in France? Afo said it was on the other side of Mecca, which meant very far. One of Oumarou’s nephews said: “In your land don’t you also have a city that loves cattle, named Kentucky?”

I had no cows. But I, too, went on pendular journeys in the world’s margin lands. I grazed for stories, I explained. I herded words.

Oumarou laughed again and said I could tag along as far as I wished. The women laughed as well and said I would have to take turns pounding their millet. They showed with their arms—and
down!
and
down!
and
down!
—in case I didn’t understand.

One of Oumarou’s nieces said, “There are three ways to study, Anna Bâ: with your feet, with your eyes, and with your mind. Now I know you study with your feet because you have come here to live and walk with us.”

I had come to study, it was true. I also was pursuing something, a measure of healing. I was not on a pilgrimage—that would have been fatuous, a folly. But secretly I hoped that all the old pathways of my hosts somehow could triangulate into an inarticulable and uncharted solace, because just four months earlier, as I was readying, in cold autumn, to travel to West Africa, my beloved had left me.

We passed around a calabash with foamy buttermilk that Fanta had churned that morning. A communion, a nomad’s toast. From the northeast the harmattan blew minuscule particles of the Sahara. Sand granules. Tiny travelers. Each speck a capsule delivering to the Sahel echoes of drought, of war, of a space vast and arid and pitiless. The cow had licked her calf dry and clean and had eaten the afterbirth and the calf was trying to push away the ground with its new legs. Oumarou sent a grandnephew to take a look. It was a male calf, the boy reported. More likely to be sold in case of emergency: the females were valued for their milk. The old man said that he would name it Anna Bâ, in my honor, and everybody laughed some more.

Only Mama, his stepdaughter, was worried. She was thirty-two, and she lay on a mat feverish and curled up with a migraine and a bad sinus infection.

“You say you want to tell our story,” she said. “But we don’t know how the story ends.”

Besides, she said, how would I walk? I didn’t know how to carry water on my head.

C
arrying water was woman’s work. Water for laundry and washing and cooking came mostly from the triangular hippo grass swamp west of the camp that each morning exploded in spalls of reflected sunlight.

“Aren’t you worried about drinking water from that marsh?”

“Oh no. Our cows drink from it, so we know it’s good. But who knows who put water in your plastic bottle? Aren’t you worried about drinking from it?”

But it was true, the women conceded, that well water was less cloudy. The closest well was about half a mile away. Two or three times a day the women would balance empty jerrycans and plastic pails on their heads and slowly flipflop to it.

The path to the well changed with the seasons from morass to mud to the hard corduroy of fossilized footsteps, as though each season the most recent itinerants recast out of oblivion the traces of the ancients. It linked Oumarou’s campsite to the two mostly parallel ruts that bore tracks of horsedrawn carts and pack donkeys and of feet bare and sandaled and the serpentine imprints of motorscooters and wobbly Chinese bicycles, and that meandered north deeper into the bourgou and south toward the sewage-sluiced snarl of the narrow daub alleys of Djenné.

Settled people lived along that unnamed road. Nearest the camp, each less than half a mile away, sat two hamlets, Doundéré and Dakabalal.

Doundéré, to the southwest, was an old outpost of compact adobes that crowded uphill toward a tiny steepled clay mosque. Doundéré’s elevation was a compression of cultural layers, of uncounted generations of mudbrick homes raised and crumbled and raised anew. Everyone knew it was very old but whether it was three hundred years old or a thousand no one could tell: years did not count, were not counted in these parts. Its residents were Bambara rice and millet farmers and rimaibe, former Fulani slaves who treated the nomads with a combination of respect and mistrust. Oumarou’s sons and grandnephews who were old enough for such things sometimes went to Doundéré to drink tea and prattle with other cowboys and for a few pennies to charge their cellphones, using a motorcycle battery one rimaibe family owned, and to buy cigarettes and small paper cubes of gunpowder green tea from China and counterfeit medicine. Married Diakayaté women avoided Doundéré. On some nights, after their parents had fallen asleep, teenage girls would sneak out to the village to flirt with young visiting cowboys in smoky rooms.

Dakabalal, to the northwest, was a haphazard cluster of homes that an extended family of Bozo fishermen had tossed upon a slight rise, in Oumarou’s lifetime. The Bozo traced their ancestry to capricious man-eating water spirits and amphibians and may have been seining and trapping the Niger and the Bani since the Stone Age; their name,
bo so
, was an epithet given them by the Bambara that, in Bambara, meant “bamboo hut,” for the riparian dwellings they would set up when they moored. Many remained transient, floating down rivers in redwood pirogues. They were nominally Muslim but they worshipped the river, did not wash for burial the people who had died by drowning, and considered drowned animals halal to eat. Dakabalal had no mosque. I once saw Dakabalal children play with a white egret the way children elsewhere would with a cat. The women in the village kept small and silent yellow dogs and smoked fish on large gridirons day and night, and around these gridirons toddlers played with tackle. The women were heavy from lifetimes of childbirth and they often sat in front of their grills like river goddesses, naked from the waist up, knees spraddled inside colorful pagnes, a small child on the breast.

Two or three miles north of Dakabalal lay Somena, a carefully swept arrangement of fifty or so tidy clay huts. Settled Fulani cattlemen had built it half a century earlier on a mound left by some previous village of some previous people no longer remembered. To the south, past Doundéré, on the way to the Massina Empire’s first capital at Senossa, tall mopped doum palms and mango trees in geometric bloom of dirty pink flanked the villages of Weraka and Wono. These villages were larger than Doundéré, and rimaibe and Bambara and settled Bozo lived and farmed behind their tall mudbrick walls, and during the dry season the Diakayaté women walked there to barter buttermilk for grain. Two fastpaced hours farther south lay Djenné, with its fabled mosque, its disorienting and overwhelming Monday market, its perfunctory district hospital, the only one around. Costly pharmacies, indifferent magistrates, extortionist gendarmerie.

This was the southern tip of the bourgou. In satellite images it looked like the big toe print of a southpointing green flat foot, the foot of a nomad.

Most winters each village was an island until the end of February. The swales filled with stagnant water in which small black herons slouched and cheery white-faced whistling ducks grazed on sodden leftovers of the grain harvest. By January scores of nomadic families set up camp on the low rises dry enough to sleep on, each campsite a neatly swept circle of mats, chicken, guinea hens, goats, sheep, cattle. To the black kites that wheeled over the fens in silent concentration they must have looked like salvages from a shipwrecked ark, their poultry like something to snatch up and eat. For centuries, slavers had shuttled the wetlands between the villages and camps in pirogues during the rainy season and kidnapped luckless children and young women to sell at the markets of Djenné, of Ségou, of Timbuktu. Some of their victims became rimaibe. Some were resold out and out toward the Atlantic coast and of those many ended up toiling on plantations in the West Indies, in the American South. For the most part the abductions ended when France colonized western Sahel, swapping one kind of bondage for another.

—

The well the Diakayaté women favored sat beside Dakabalal: a stack of concrete rings in a rectangular enclosure of poured concrete. Water laced with clay sloshed piss-yellow in the fourteen-foot drop. But on some days within the rings there quivered a blue disk of sky.

At the well the women would remove their sandals and leave them at the enclosure’s threshold as if they were entering a hut or a house, the house of water. They would pull up hand over hand a pail of rubber or goatskin on a yellow manila rope and drink from the pail and let the water run down their chins. Luxuriously, even decadently. They would fill their containers and sometimes they would strip out of their boubous and shirts and wash their shoulders and arms and breasts and laugh at water running down their spines to tickle under their calico pagnes and between their skinny legs. And sometimes, though the Fulani women considered themselves more worthy as a race because of their lighter skin tone and almost Semitic profiles, they would condescend to joke with the Bozo laundresses in Bozo or in Bambara and the laundresses would respond, and women’s laughter and the slapping of laundry would bounce off the concrete in playful echoes.

Then they would set the buckets and canisters on their heads again and walk single file back to camp, the containers in static equilibrium. The weight would compress painfully the vertebrae in the women’s necks. The women always walked back to camp quickly, almost on the double, the sooner to offload their freight, and to pour the water into the earthenware jugs each of them kept inside her hut by the door, and to stretch. They kept joking to distract themselves.

About halfway to the camp the path skirted a small grove of eucalyptus planted here during some bygone reforestation campaign. Even during the rainy season the grove always stood above the tideline. Its hard topsoil hid at least two unmarked graves.