6
6
Why do we waste so much time with sorrow and pity for ourselves ? It is true now that we are men, but not so long ago we were helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through bursting motherholes, trail¬ ing dung and exhausted blood. We could not ask then why it was necessary for us also to grow. So why now should we be shaking our heads and wondering bitterly why there are children together with the old, why time does not stop when we ourselves have come to stations where we would like to rest? It is so like a child, to wish all movement to cease.
And yet the wondering and the shaking and the vomiting horror is not all from the inward sickness of the individual soul. Here we have had a kind of movement that should make even good stomachs go sick. What is painful to the thinking mind is not the movement itself, but the dizzying speed of it. It is that which has been horrible. Unnatural, I would have said, had I not stopped myself with asking, unnatural accord¬ ing to what kind of nature ? Each movement and each growth, each such thing brings with itself its own nature to frustrate our future judgment. Now, whenever I am able to look past the beauty of the first days, the days of birth, I can see growth. I tell myself that is the way it should be. There is nothing that should break the heart in the progressive movement away from the beauty of the first days. I see growth, that is all I see within my mind. When I can only see, when there is nothing I can
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 73
feel, I am not troubled. But always these unwanted feelings will come in the end and disturb the tired mind with thoughts that will not go away. How horribly rapid everything has been, from the days when men were not ashamed to talk of souls and of suffering and of hope, to these low days of smiles that will never again be sly enough to hide the knowledge of be¬ trayal and deceit. There is something of an irresistible horror in such quick decay.
When I was at school, in Standard Five, one of us, a boy who took a special pleasure in showing us true but unexpected sides of our world, came and showed us something I am sure none of us has forgotten. We called him Aboliga the Frog. His eyes were like that. Aboliga the Frog one day brought us a book of freaks and oddities, and showed us his favorite among the weird lot. It was a picture of something the caption called an old manchild. It had been born with all the features of a hu¬ man baby, but within seven years it had completed the cycle from babyhood to infancy to youth, to maturity and old age, and in its seventh year it had died a natural death. The picture Aboliga the Frog showed us was of the manchild in its gray old age, completely old in everything save the smallness of its size, a thing that deepened the element of the grotesque. The manchild looked more irretrievably old, far more thoroughly decayed, than any ordinary old man could ever have looked. But of course, it, too, had a nature of its own, so that only those who have found some solid ground they can call the natural will feel free to call it unnatural. And where is my solid ground these days? Let us say just that the cycle from birth to decay has been short. Short, brief. But otherwise not at all unusual. And even in the decline into the end there are things that re¬ mind the longing mind of old beginnings and hold out the promise of new ones, things even like your despair itself. I
74 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
have heard this pain before, only then it was multiplied many, many times, but that may only be because at that time I was not so alone, so far apart. Maybe there are other lonely voices de¬ spairing now. I will not be entranced by the voice, even if it should swell as it did in the days of hope. I will not be entranced, since I have seen the destruction of the prom¬ ises it made. But I shall not resist it either. I will be like a cork.
It is so surprising, is it not, how even the worst happenings of the past acquire a sweetness in the memory. Old harsh dis¬ tresses are now merely pictures and tastes which hurt no more, like itching scars which can only give pleasure now. Strange, because when I can think soberly about it all, without pushing any later joys into the deeper past, I can remember that things were terrible then.
When the war was over the soldiers came back to homes broken in their absence and they themselves brought murder in their hearts and gave it to those nearest them. I saw it, not very clearly, because I had no way of understanding it, but it frightened me. We had gone on marches of victory and I do not think there was anyone mean enough in spirit to ask whether we knew the thing we were celebrating. Whose vic¬ tory? Ours? It did not matter. We marched, and only a dis¬ honest fool will look back on his boyhood and say he knew even then that there was no meaning in any of it. It is so funny now, to remember that we all thought we were welcoming vic¬ tory. Or perhaps there is nothing funny here at all, and it is only that victory itself happens to be the identical twin of de¬ feat.
There was the violence, first of all. If that was not something entirely new, at any rate the frequency and the intensity of it were new things. No one before had told me of so many people
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 75
going away to fight and coming back with blood and money eating up their minds. And afterward, those who might have answered me if I had asked them before would not take any notice of me, so busy were they all with looking and wondering what it was all about, and when it would end, and if it would end at all. There were no answers then. There never will be any answers. What will a man ever do when he is called to show his manhood fighting in alien lands and leaving his women behind with the demented and the old and the children and the other women ? What will a man ever do but think his women will remain his even though he is no longer there with them ? And what will a woman do for absent men who send back money not to be spent but to be kept for unknown times when they hope to return, if return they ever will? What new thing is money if it is not to be spent ? So there were men who, against the human wishes of some women they had married in their youth, did not die in foreign lands but came back boldly, like drunken thieves in blazing afternoons and cold nights, knowing before they had even drunk the water with the lying smile of welcome that they had been betrayed. Their anger came out in the blood of those closest to themselves, these men who had gone without anger to fight enemies they did not even know; they found anger and murder waiting for them, lying in the bosoms of the women they had left behind. All that the young eye could see then was the truth; that the land had be¬ come a place messy with destroyed souls and lost bodies looking for something that could take their pain and finding nothing but those very people whose pain should have been their pain, and for whose protection they should have learned to fight, if there had been any reason left anywhere. It was also the time of the fashion of the jackknife and the chuke, the rapid unthinking movement of short, ugly iron points that fed
j6 The Beautyjul Ones Are Not Yet Born
wandering living ghosts with what they wanted, blood that would never put an end to their inner suffering.
A lot found it impossible to survive the destruction of the world they had carried away with them in their departing heads, and so they went simply mad, like Home Boy, endlessly repeating harsh, unintelligible words of command he had never understood but had learned to obey in other people's countries, marching all the day, everywhere, and driving himself to his insane exhaustion with the repetition of all the military drill he had learned, always to the proud accompaniment of his own scout whistle with its still-shiny metal sound. Some went very quietly into a silence no one could hope to penetrate, something so deep that it swallowed completely men who had before been strong: they just plunged into this deep silence and died. Those who were able picked up the pieces of shattered worlds and selves, swallowed all the keen knowledge of betrayal, and came with us along the wharves to search for some humiliating work that could give meaning to the continuing passage of unwel¬ come days; a hundred or so men waiting with eyes that had gotten lost in the past or in the future, always in some faraway place and time, any faraway place and time, provided it was not the horrible now and here, a hundred men waiting too quietly to fill places enough for seven.
Kofi Billy was one of the lucky ones, picked to do work that was too cruel for white men's hands. He did his work well. At the end of a day he was always tired, but he had found some sort of happiness in all of this, and that was something very val¬ uable indeed. He was one day moving cargo, pushing it with his giant hands across some deck when somewhere some fresh young Englishman sitting at some machine loaded too much tension into even the steel ropes on board and one of them snapped. The free rope whipped with all that power through
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 77
the air and just cut Kofi Billy's right leg away beneath the knee. He said for a long while he felt nothing at all, and then he felt everything a man could ever feel, and the world van¬ ished for him. The Englishman said he deserved it: he had been playing at his work. Had he moved faster, he would not have been there when the steel rope snapped. Before him I had never actually known anybody with a wooden leg like that, and he himself was unwilling ever to talk about it. He just sat looking at the space which the wood-and-metal limb could never fill, and said nothing. Sister Maanan found refuge in lengthening bottles, and the passing foreigner gave her money and sometimes even love. The wharves turned men into gulls and vultures, sharp waiters for weird foreign appetites to sat¬ isfy, pilots of the hungry alien seeking human flesh. There were the fights, of course, between man and man, not so much over women as over white men asking to be taken to women, and the films brought the intelligent mind clever new fashions in dress and in murder. There were the more exciting, far more complete fights between large groups of violent men, when soldiers for some reason no one cared to know would be fight¬ ing policemen, or solid Kroo men would stand and fight the returned warriors. These were acts of violence directed out¬ ward. I do not believe that even this was fully half the horror we all felt. I know that my friends felt the way I felt. And what I felt inside was the approach of something much like death itself. The thing that would have killed us was that there was nothing to explain all this, nothing outside ourselves and those near us or those even weaker than ourselves that we could attack. There was no way out visible to us, and out on the hills the white men's gleaming bungalows were so far away, so un- reachably far that people did not even think of them in their suffering. And for those who did, there were tales of white
7« The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
men with huge dogs that ate more meat in a single day than a human Gold Coast family got in a month, dogs which could obey their masters' voices like soldiers at war, and had as little love for black skins as their white masters.
The listening mind is disturbed by memories from the past. So much time has gone by, and still there is no sweetness here. Out on the road to school, the long lines of trees with lit¬ tle mangoes just growing on them, setting the impatient teeth on edge with their acid bite. And yet it was not possible to wait. There were so many children with so many hungers and desires. Stones flying upward and arcing down, bringing not the wanted fruit but entire bunches of unready mangoes. The sunshine feeling after a morning of short, unusually gentle rain, the water not yet dried up off the beautiful grass coming all the way down the long sides of white men's hills. Here and there the unbelievable smoothness of mounds of sand, the white people's playthings on the golf course. Occasionally the hurting inward dart of sunlight hitting small clear balls of wa¬ ter lingering on the green of grass and hibiscus plants and bouncing out and away into coming eyes and vanishing again. Three boys in khaki running races across and up the hill, with their suspenders falling over small shoulders. Irresistible rides down clean, smooth bottoms of gutters cutting down the hill to mix the unchanneled mud below with water. And the water coming from the hills was always clean, like unused water, or like water used by ghosts without flesh. So clean that at the bot¬ tom of the hills all the lepers used it for washing their clothes and for bathing their own sores, catching its cleanness before it reached the mud. Around the white bungalows on the hills
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 79
no hungry children had thrown any stones and the mangoes that would long ago have disappeared hung heavy and ripe and beautiful, and the white men in the bungalows did not even want to eat them. The feel of sunlight on naked neck just above the khaki collar, and the short whistle of wet grass under naked feet making the climb up toward shiny white bunga¬ lows. Fences and hedges. Fences white and tall with wooden boards pointed and glinting in the sun, hedges thick and very high, their beautiful greenness not even covering their thorns. Looking for almonds, the white man's peanuts. Almonds big as mangoes, and some so ripe they had grown all red. Man¬ goes hanging big and gold, and outside eyes looking and long¬ ing. The third boy finds a hole down on the ground, under¬ neath the hedge. Small hole, three boys, three khaki uniforms ruined with thorns and dirt. It seems maybe true that the white men are living ghosts themselves. For a place where people live, there is no sound here at all. But it is impossible to see in¬ side, beyond the netting at all the windows. Nothing like a long pole lying around. Never throw stones around a white man's bungalow. So three little boys turn their backs to the white man's bungalow and bring down ripe mangoes with un¬ ripe ones fallen on the ground before. Keeping quiet. The white man, in case he exists, must not be waked up. Then sud¬ den noises of footsteps within, moving out. Such a lot of man¬ goes and such big almonds to have to leave behind, and the hole is far too small and the thorns are cruelly sharp, coming through the khaki all the painful way into the flesh. The back¬ ward glance brings terror in the shape of two dogs, and they look much larger than any angry father. Down a steep hill it is easy to run fast but impossible to run well. Dogs are much faster anyhow. So much speed overturns the runner. In the midst of everything there is a filling satisfaction that a boy can
8o The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
run so fast sometimes. Even grass is painful when the face of a runner rubs hard against it and it yields unto the earth be¬ neath. Does the dog actually bite, or is it no more interested in the fallen form, or can a dog also roll a child over and leave it feeling thoroughly beaten by life ? Behind the dogs come tall black men in singlets, with long whips bending in their hands. The black men are truly angry, angrier than the dogs, and there is no mistake about the sharpness of their whips. Would it have been enough just to frighten three little boys away? That did not seem to be the point. The tall black men whipped like men in a struggle for life over death. Behind them the white man had come out and with a little white boy was watch¬ ing calmly from the hill. The sun still shone so beautifully when it came off the white walls behind the white man, and three boys came together again and wondered whether it would be worse to go back or to go home.
The anger came out, but it was all victim anger that had to find even weaker victims, and it was never satisfied, always adding shame to itself. It is really so easy for a friend to begin treating a friend as a criminal to be feared. It is difficult to sit and see a friend with something you need desperately but do not have, it is difficult to sit and watch a friend keep this thing until the time comes when he will need it. There was nothing we could do, after robbing those who had been kind to us, ex¬ cept to lie down with the feeling that things were not right. It was like rushing down mossy bottoms of steep gutters from the hills with nothing to stop us. Only the gutters this time had no end, and the speed long before had become something far more than we could bear.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 8i
It had been possible to take to drink in the search for com¬ forting darknesses of the memory. In days when there was still something that could be stolen from the absent friend, it had been possible. But a time came when there was not enough anywhere around, and deep thought had to go into the spend¬ ing of what there was. Man would just have broken up and gone crazy then, I suppose, but this was also the time that we found out about wee.
It was Sister Maanan who brought it to us one evening, saying it was the thing that had made her able to look at a bottle of Schnapps and say to herself that there was just another bottle of poison and pain. Yet she did not seem to be preaching, only offering us this thing we all felt we should have had before. The way Sister Maanan was getting it, it was not a thing that needed so much money, and yet instead of blinding us the way spirits would have done, it took us years beyond our old selves and made us see so many miles beyond all those old points. It used to amaze me afterward that there was so much lying shit flying around about wee. It used to amaze me until I grew old enough to see that it is all very natural that judges willing to sit through hot afternoons sweating under foolish wigs should feel truly indignant when some poor bastard gets knocked into court for trying to see beyond the pain of the mo¬ ment, smoking wee. Those among the judges who happen to be able to read know that all the holy anger is dog shit, pure and simple, anyway. They know wherever doctors have been asked before old judges let go of their bad breath, they have said the truth. Wee is far less dangerous than beer, and it is not only that it brings no headaches after it. I have not yet seen a man or woman who has smoked wee and who can look with anything but pity on those whose job it is to condemn it without ever having tasted it.
82 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bom
Maanan brought it, and showed us how to light it and to smoke it, one of us dragging at a time. You must know there is at least this much that could frighten uncertain men away from wee, even if the lies about it were not so plentiful. Wee can make you see things that you might perhaps not really want to see. It is not a question of nonexistent things being con¬ jured up. Wee is not magic. It is just that all through life we protect ourselves in so many ways from so many hurtful truths just by managing to be a little blind here, a bit shortsighted there, and by squinting against the incoming light all the time. That is what the prudent call life. The destructive thing wee does is to lift the blindness and to let you see the whole of your life laid out in front of you. Now what you see, whether it comes up from hidden things inside your soul or from the com¬ mon facts of the waking life you lead, is not false. But its truth is the deep, dangerous kind of truth that can certainly frighten you into a desperate, gloomy act if the life you have been living is already of itself deeply gloomy and deeply desperate. That is the only sensible reason for fearing the thing. I have sat in courtrooms and heard young men sent to waste five and seven years of their lives in jail, and the judges have flatulated through their mouths for hours, yet no one has said any of this at all: that is because they want to protect the weakened and the victimized from the knowledge of what is happening to them. But judges will never know.
We followed Maanan as if she had been our mother, Kofi Billy and myself. She walked with us to the breakwater a little distance from where the market gutter opens into the sea, and we sat there and smoked. Kofi Billy, always looking qui¬ etly at the place where his lost leg should have been, was like a child, asking Sister Maanan all the time to tell him what really was going to happen. Maanan only kept passing the burning wee from mouth to mouth and with a smile in her voice told
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 83
us both to wait till we could tell ourselves the truth. And then all of life changed in a moment. In the first flash I was sure I was about to vomit, but the fear went down and I saw it was the total newness of the feeling. For a moment things outside of me did not press in on me any more. They could not. I was too busy becoming aware for the first time of what my own body was about. I think it was in my fingertips I felt it first: blood rhythm moving in the tip itself, felt for the first time and recognized. I looked, and was amazed to see that the finger¬ tips were not visible as thousands and thousands of little fluid bubbles in motion, but as a calm exterior of skin covering bone. And if a fingertip could be so many loose bodies in so much motion, what of the whole body when it felt this way ? I could hear the beat of my heart. You don't really hear it normally. I breathed out and in, and came to know that I was taking in tastes and sounds with the air. Then, though he had been close all the time, I heard Kofi Billy saying something and I was startled. His voice was not only close to me in body; but since I had thought what he said before he said it, his voice reached me as if it had been my own coming back to me from some strange place. The voice had said, "I don't like it here."
So I asked him why and he asked me if the smell had not grown too powerful for Maanan and for me. It had. We were sitting on the breakwater, above the foundation rocks thrown there on the beach by the builders and used by everybody else as a lavatory and as a bathroom. The night air carried the smell of mixed shit strongly into our stomachs and into our blood now. Maanan, still smiling, nodded slightly, and we all got up and climbed down from the breakwater, moving care¬ fully past the rocks so as not to fall in all the filth, and when we came to the water's edge we sat down on the firm wet sand and the air was clean and moist with salt water.
Down at the edge of the salt water we dragged out the last
84 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
stick of wee Maanan had brought, and took in with bodies newly opened up everything that was going on inside and out¬ side ourselves. The smoke itself inside the mouth had a re¬ peated sharpness that stung the tender skin below the tongue until we had held our breaths and it had all gone deep inside. I looked at the sea flowing toward and over the sand, and I no longer saw dead water hitting land in senseless waves of noise. The water and the sand were alive for me then; the water coming in long, slow movements stretching back into ages so very long ago, and the land always answering the movement, though in our dead moments we do not have eyes to see any of this. Sounds, the mild thunder of the night waves hitting calmer water and the sigh of retreating afterwaves, now joined together with what we saw. The sand looked so beauti¬ ful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watch¬ er's nothingness.
I looked at Maanan. The light was not very strong, but I could see clearly that she was smiling, and the way she looked made me understand that all the time I had never really looked at the woman Maanan. Or I had looked at her with my eyes and seen images, but thought nothing, and that is a dead way of seeing things, I have known since that first evening on the shore. We all knew that Maanan was one of the most beautiful women, but the way it came to me again that night was dif¬ ferent from any time before. The beauty, as always, was there in her face and in the line of the body beside me on the beach. But there was a softness in the face that was entirely new to me. It was not a weak, meaningless softness. Rather, it was as if Maanan's face was all I would ever need to look at to know that this was a woman being pushed toward destruction and
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 85
there was nothing she or I could do about it. She was smiling at me, but in myself I felt accused by a silence that belonged to millions and ages of women all bearing the face and the form of Maanan, and needing no voice at all to tell me I had failed them, I and all the others who have been content to do noth¬ ing and to be nothing at all all our lives and through all the ages of their suffering. So much of the past had now been pushed into the present moment at the edge of the salt water. I would have said something to Maanan if the things to say had not been so heavy, but even then I was sure she understood, that she had understood long before I had ever seen enough to ask her forgiveness, and that she had forgiven me as much as it was possible for the suffering to forgive those who only remain to suffer with them and to see their distress.
And then I did not feel so painfully apart from Maanan any more. Her eyes held mine and in response to her look my mind and heart opened themselves up to the pain of deep feel¬ ing. Forgive me, Maanan, forgive us all if that is possible these days. I remember we said nothing at all about love, at this time when perhaps something said might have brought trav¬ elers back from frightening journeys, we said nothing about love itself. I reached out a searching hand, but in the end I only held with my fingers a handful of fine, beautiful sand, and the beauty of the sand took my gaze away from the troubled beauty of the woman beside me there with Kofi Billy, and that one moment passed, I did not know then how irretrievably.
I know. It is the easy thing to do, to talk now with the sor¬ row of time past, as if with time I have grown better, and, given back all the moments that have gone to waste, I would find a way to be closer in goodness to those to whom my im¬ potence has brought pain. All this regret is vain, a way to hide from my own dead nature by pushing it into the past. I know.
86 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Yet I feel the regret, and that is why it will not leave me alone, least of all these days.
I could not help it as the moist sand dripped through my weakened fingers and joined the shore. Like an animal I knelt down and stretched out my hand to wash the sand away with the farthest coming water of the waves, and then suddenly I felt like taking the salt water into my mouth. It was not only salt I tasted, but a hundred other strong things in the water, and I cleansed my mouth with it and spat it out slowly and did it all again. Something that did not want to die made me touch Maanan softly on the side of her mouth. For a long time my hand rested there and I looked at her and I was lost in de¬ spair. She did not cry then. She only turned her head and fol¬ lowing her I saw Kofi Billy. He must have been staring out over the ocean all the time, and he did not turn to face us. He looked so far apart, watching the distances beyond in his uninvolved, silent way, and then after a very long time he raised his head, looked around him and finally rested his eyes, looking at the sand under him with eyes that were large and silent even in the little light there was.
"What do you see?"
I do not know why Maanan asked that question. Perhaps it was a habit she had; to make those she taught to smoke come out of their hiding places within themselves. And I do not know whether she meant the question for me, or for Kofi Billy alone, or for both of us, a vague question thrown in the wind. But Kofi Billy understood the question for himself and began to answer.
"I see a long, long way," he said, "and it is full of people, so many people going so far into the distance that I see them all like little bubbles joined together. They are going, just going, and I am going with them. I know I would like to be able to
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 87
come out and see where we are going, but in the very long lines of people I am only one. It is not at all possible to come out and see where we are going. I am just going."
The last was an exhausted statement. After it nothing came. Kofi Billy was again looking noiselessly past his wood-and- metal leg down to the sand beneath, his large eyes shining in the faint light.
Maanan lifted up her head and asked if the small moon was not strangedooking in its mist. Kofi Billy lay on his back on the moist sand, and when we had almost forgotten about the moon, in a calm voice he said, "Yes, the moon is very beautiful like that."
There was nothing either of us could say after that. We sat with Kofi Billy, knowing the accident that had broken him was pushing forward from the calm belowr, but knowing of nothing we could do, and unable to say anything in the hope of calming fears too deep for the outsider to feel. Then after some time Maanan got up.
"Shall we go?" she asked the two of us. I did not have time to say anything. It was Kofi Billy who answered her— an an¬ swer full of his own long bafflement.
"Can we go?"
Maanan held Kofi Billy's hand and very painfully he got up and we walked in the yielding sand up past the decayed rocks, sitting backward on the breakwater and swinging our legs over, then dropping the short fall to the other side. There was nothing around me then that was not joined to everything else. On the way back it seemed so natural that the electric poles should all have lines going between and joining them, and the only lonely, unexplainable thing about the place was the figure of a very young girl leaning against a pole, waiting for someone no one could see. As we moved up to her and left
88 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
her far behind, she looked more like some insect lost in all the vastness of the world around it than like a female learning the beginning pangs of love. And so we went back; the three of us, the broken man, myself, and the woman, and when we saw again the people we had left to go to the beach that eve¬ ning it was plain that after what had passed through our minds as we watched the sea we could no longer look at them and hide our knowledge of everyone's despair from them.
There was not much talk after that, not between the three of us, for Kofi Billy hid himself from the world and said noth¬ ing, in fact was not to be seen at all, and Maanan, Maanan was trying after happiness again, in those ways that were to destroy her so utterly in the end. And with the others there was not as much to say as there had been in the past, since more than ever now each man's troubles were just an echo of another man's trouble, another woman's pain.
It was the Sunday after that that Kofi Billy's body was found. He was hanging from a sheet, down from the top bar of the finished door of a house not yet finished then. The leg of wood and metal that he had was covered with his blood, so that it seemed he had made some strenuous effort just before he died, perhaps while he was trying to kick over a large upended brick underneath him. He had not been a violent man ever in his life, though he was so big and we all knew how much he loved to work on something with his strength. But we never really know. It is possible that here was a lot of violence, too much of it, turned finally inward to destroy the man who could not bear it. I would not know how to live with the knowledge of what had happened to him, and the certainty that I would never have the power to do anything about it.
Every one of us was uneasy after this death, because we knew there was no reason he should go alone like that, killing his own self. Each one of us must have thought of it: he was surely
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 89
not the only one to go, only the first, surely. Voices, when people spoke now, were a little loud and jovial for no reason anyone could see, except perhaps the ridiculous hope that false happiness would reassure the desperate. Even the women were becoming mean. In the market there was nothing they wanted to give, and they were careful about money in a way that brought the sickness home to all of us. We blamed them, as we blamed ourselves and every other thing that was there to be blamed. What can people do when there remains only so much meaning in their lives and that little meaning is running so ir¬ retrievably away with every day that goes? What can people do? We were defending ourselves against our friends as if they were animals. Many things happened then which we ourselves had no way of understanding. Strangers, our own people who had gone as seamen to the West Indies, came back wearing only calico and their beards, talking openly of the white man's cruelty. We all said they were mad, of course, but if you stood with one of them long enough and listened to his words with¬ out too much fear, toward the end it would become very hard for you to tell on which point exactly the man was mad. And so people feared them, not only for the wild, unaccustomed gentleness of the way they looked, but also for the disturb¬ ing, violent truth of some of the things they were so often say¬ ing.
Someone else I knew, Tricky Mensah who lived near the harbor, also went on a voyage in a passing ship. He was not away so long, but when he came he had of a sudden turned painfully good, so sadly humble in what he did, singing low hymns and telling constantly of the coming of black Ameri¬ cans with love and power and goods, coming to free us. Does the name Egya Akon say anything to you now? He was a happy man, accepting everybody's jokes against himself, and at a time when money was something no one had, it was said
9° The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
that because he did not drink or smoke, and did not run after other people's women, he was sure to have a lot of money some¬ where. Fie was found dead, killed in his room by men for whom he seemed to have opened the door himself, and those who believe these things will tell you that at his wake his wounds bled clearly when certain of his friends came past; but Egya Akon was a solitary man, and there was no one to make anything but gossip out of what was so openly said. But that was not the end. It was whispered of Slim Tano that he was certainly the man who had got Egya Akon to open his door so early in the morning, because the man loved him and would do anything for him at whatever time it was he wanted that thing done. Egya Akon left no one to do anything to Slim Tano, but Slim Tano by his own self went mad, went com¬ pletely mad, and the only thing he said that made any sense to people was what he shouted out every ten minutes or so:
"I didn't do it ooooo. I swear upon my father's foot I didn't do it ooooo!"
It was not true that Egya Akon had ever had much money. Fie did not earn much, and he was a man of this country but he did not have the character to steal from his work. That was why people who could have liked him like a good brother al¬ ways ended up calling him a fool. A few pounds, maybe, and that was all his killers could have found. But a few pounds then were not things to disappoint men desperate with the dis¬ ease of the time. We were all discovering something that seemed hard only when it was new. Money was not pieces of paper the farmers burned to show their wealth. Money was life.
I know it is like a lie for me to talk like this, remembering only these things that were so hard. But the times were hard, and after all what we remember most strongly is what is true
The Beauty}id Ones Are Not Yet Born 91
for us. I know. There were calmer things, many of them when you think back and bring them up from down below, things that were sometimes good, sometimes beautiful. Wee, which we smoked many, many times more, whenever we could get our own, or whenever Maanan in her descent came up long enough to be really with us for a while and brought some with her. It was not always by the sea, but often enough it was, so that when the time came and we had nowhere to sleep it was nothing new for us to lie on the beach and watch the dawn sky change every morning, with the sweet after feeling of what we had been smoking in the night in us. There was also something in it, though it is hard to say it now, when we sat and passed the single stick from mouth to mouth and joked about the time it took to arrive from the last mouth and the amount of smoke drawn into waiting lungs. There was some¬ thing there which I know we have lost these days. There was no one there at the time who did not think of himself as something tough, and the times were pushing everyone to be¬ come something much like animals, and yet there was some¬ thing there which made people refuse to go just like that, and when they got something good, they remembered you in spite of everything. It was a desperate time, still, and it was not only Kofi Billy who thought of hiding forever from an alien world impossible to hold. We all, one day or the next, as we went with our hands in our pockets along the empty way from the harbor to the Employment Office knowing we would find noth¬ ing but others like us waiting for nothing, as we passed in the night by the water's edge under the faint yellow lights, we all must have thought of things far beyond this place and the time, far beyond life itself. I do not know why we did not all go.
92 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
There is something powerful that has burned him. The na¬ ked body is a covering for a soul once almost destroyed, now full of fear for itself, and full of a killing anguish at what this fear makes impossible. But the man has never really known the thing that turned his friend into a human being hiding from other human beings. Intimations of beliefs held with too great passion and sincerity in the past, of many heavy things seen with a clarity that destroys a person's peace, and that is all. This naked body has an outward calmness about it, but inside it how much power is lying hidden from the watching eye, how much of the terrible energy of a human being fired with strong belief? Something comes out at times, and then it is quickly drawn in again. The man remembers times when his friend has been drawn to speak of something outside himself, and the things he believed were no longer so well hidden, and he had talked in the way he had, that parted everything so clearly into the light and the shadow, the greatly beautiful things that could be and the starkly ugly things that are, so many true pictures given to the listening mind with words, bringing un¬ derstanding where none had been before. But what a painful kind of understanding, so that he wastes it all in the end with other words that destroy the pictures, words that mix the beauty with the ugliness, words making the darkness twin with the light, and in the end he says what he now believes, that in the end that is the one remaining truth. The man wonders, sitting there, whether this resignation does not make his naked friend infinitely smaller than he could be. Why should there be such a need for shrinking the hoping self, and why must so much despair be so calmly embraced? Is so much protection neces¬ sary from life itself ? Once the man had asked his friend about this his calmness and his despair, wondering why Teacher should remain so unwilling to move closer to those of his old
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 93
friends who were now in power. Surely, something could still be done by a good man.
First, Teacher had asked the man, "Something for which people?" But he had not waited for an answer. "The things people want, I do not have to give. And no one wants what I happen to have. It's only words, after all."
The man had said something earnest about the connectedness of words and the freedom of enslaved men, but then Teacher had said one of the harshest things he had ever said. With a shrug he had said that men were all free to do what they chose to do, and would laugh with hate at the bringer of unwanted light if what they knew they needed was the dark. He had told a story he said had meant more to him in his unhappiness than any other story, something he called the myth of Plato's cave. It was not the last time the man was to hear it from his friend, for it possessed a special power over the teller's mind: a story of impenetrable darknesses and chains within a deep and cavernous hole, holding people who for ages had seen nothing outside the darkness of their own shadowy forms and had no way of believing there could be anything else. And out of these,' one unfortunate human being is able at last to break from the chains and to wander outward from the eternal circle of the lightless cave, and to see the blinding beauty of all the lights and the colors of the world outside. With the eagerness of the first bringer the wanderer returns into the cave and into its eternal darkness, and in there he shares what he has, the ideas and the words and the images of the light and the colors of the world outside, knowing surely that those he had left behind would certainly want the snapping of the ancient chains and the incredible first seeing of the light and the colors of the world beyond the eternal cave. But to those inside the eternal cave he came as someone driven ill with the breaking of eter-
94 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
nal boundaries, and the truth he sought to tell was nothing but the proof of his long delusion, and the words he had to give were the pitiful cries of a madman lost in the mazes of a mind pushed too far out and away from the everlasting way of dark¬ ness and reassuring chains.
After each telling of the story the teller would ask, as if he had been speaking to the air, why men should stand apart and disappoint themselves when people free to choose, choose what they want?
^5r
It is not true at all that when men are desperate they will raise their arms and welcome just anybody who comes talking of their salvation. If it had been so, we would have been fol¬ lowing the first men who came offering words and hidden plans to heal our souls. But we did not run out eager to follow anyone. In our boredom we went out to the open public places to see what it was people wTere talking about, whether it was a thing we could go to with our hopes, or just another passing show like so many we had seen and so many we are seeing now. How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders ? There were men dying from the loss of hope, and others were finding gaudy ways to enjoy power they did not have. We were ready here for big and beautiful things, but what we had was our own black men hugging new paunches scrambling to ask the white man to welcome them onto) our backs. These men who were to lead us out of our despair, they came like men already grown fat and cynical with the eating of centuries of power they had never struggled for, old before they had even been born into power, and ready only for the grave. They were lawyers be¬ fore, something growing greasy on the troubles of people who
The Beautyjid Ones Are Not Yet Born 95
worked the land, but now they were out to be our saviors. Their brothers and their friends were merchants eating what was left in the teeth of the white men with their companies. They too came to speak to us of salvation. Our masters were the white men and we were coming to know this, and the knowledge was filling us with fear first and then with anger. And they who would be our leaders, they also had the white men for their masters, and they also feared the masters, but after the fear what was at the bottom of their beings was not the hate and the anger we knew in our despair. What they felt was love. What they felt for their white masters and our white masters was gratitude and faith. And they had come to us at last, to lead us and to guide us to promised tomorrows.
There is something so terrible in watching a black man try¬ ing at all points to be the dark ghost of a European, and that was what we were seeing in those days. Men who had risen to lead the hungry came in clothes they might have been hoping to use at Governors' Balls on the birthday of the white people's queen, carrying cuff links that shone insultingly in the faces of men who had stolen pennies from their friends. They came late and spoke to their servants in the legal English they had spent their lives struggling to imitate, talking of constitutions and offering us unseen ghosts of words and paper held holy by Europeans, and they asked us to be faithful and to trust in them. They spoke to us in the knowledge that they were our magicians, people with some secret power behind them. They were not able in the end to understand the people's un¬ belief. How could they understand that even those who have not been anywhere know that the black man who has spent his life fleeing from himself into whiteness has no power if the white master gives him none? How were these leaders to know that while they were climbing up to shit in their people's
96 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
faces, their people had seen their arseholes and drawn away in disgusted laughter? We knew then, and we know now, that the only real power a black man can have will come from black people. We knew also that we were the people to whom these oily men were looking for their support. Only they did not know this. In their minds it was some great favor they were doing us, coming to speak to us in words designed not to tell us anything about ourselves, but to press into our minds the weight of things coming from above. They came hours late when we had been standing in the sun waiting to hear what they had to say, and they came with nothing but borrowed words they themselves had not finished understanding, and men felt like sleepers awakened only to hear an idiot's drooling tale.
"Ah, contrey, so these fat yessir-men in jokers' suits, they are the people going to lead us ?"
"Aaah, contrey bro\e oo, contrey no bro\e oo, we dey in¬ side."
A few of the most desperate tried to see what they could do, thinking they would break if nothing was done. The yessir- men gave them gallons of the killing a\peteshie and the usual corned beef and gave them things to do to frighten white men. When the desperate men were caught, the lawyers did not even care to look their way. How could they, when all they wanted to do was to show the white master how reasonable, how faith¬ ful, how unlike the a\peteshie drinkers they were, and how de¬ serving to have power over their people shared with them ? So there were the meetings at which people were promised the un¬ folding of mysterious plans to bring the sorrows of a people to an end. And to the waiters in the rain the end of the expected message was always this, "Have faith in us. We know the white man and his ways. Have faith in us. Plan R. Plan X. Plan Z."
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 97
Better to go home and not go standing in the sun ever again. Better to let the clowns talk to each other and the white men they love with so much fire. All curiosity about the old men who wanted to be new leaders died, and men thought once again of new ways to make despair bearable, and those who could enjoyed it.
The old lawyers and their rallies gave us one good thing to make our days less heavy, something we could laugh at. Af¬ terward it became our habit to sit, anywhere, and watch some¬ one imitate the speech and the English gestures of the men who wanted to lead us. There was one young man who could make every stomach ache with laughter. You do not know him. He had to run away after the last strike at Takoradi. You see, he had seen too many things that were becoming funny about the new Party people. In those days he used to tell us with a very serious expression that he had heard some important news. Then he would act out what he had to say. First, he was the governor getting ready to see his servants, taking up a helmet with feathers taller than himself and marching under it. Then, when the governor sat down, this joker Etse would pause to play another part. Like a penitent thief he would come smil¬ ing up to the governor's seat and stammer, "Massa, I have some news for you, sah." (African leader's smile.) Turning quickly and sitting down as the governor, Etse would ask, "Yes, what is it, boy?"
"Sah," our leader would say, "mah contrey people no happy, sah."
"What! After everything we've done for them?"
"Yessah."
"The ungrateful devils!"
"Yessah."
"Now, boy, tell me. What is it they want?"
98 The Beautyjul Ones Are Not Yet Born
The leadership smile expands. "Massa, if you make me head man, mah contrey people go happy again." Wider. Bow. Look of affection and gratitude.
It would be wrong if I talked of those days as days full of un¬ happiness and nothing else. I wonder in what strange coun¬ tries Etse is roaming now, driven away by something he loved at first.
We were laughing at some impersonation of his, one empty afternoon, when after a long absence Maanan came dressed to make a man faint and telling us nothing about where she had been. All she would say was that she had come to be at the rally. We knew there was to be a rally at Asamansudo, but we had stopped going long before, and Maanan surprised us all. Etse stopped and looked at her the way a teacher looks at a child.
"Now could you tell us, Maanan, why you should come and insult us like this, leaving full men here to go and listen to the eunuch lawyers?" But Maanan only laughed, so I also spoke.
"Stay here. Those old baboons can never give you the things we can give you right here. They have lost all theirs, trying to be white."
Maanan laughed like a happy woman, and when she calmed down she said, "You people are late. You haven't seen him yet."
"Who?"
"The new one."
"A new old lawyer, wanting to be white." Etse was not often angry.
"No. He is new, and he is young." I asked Maanan where he had come from. "I don't know yet."
"Is he a stranger then?"
"He is one of us all right. Only nobody knows much about him. They say he does not go talking about himself. Only the work we have to do."
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 99
"He is another fool, then," Etse said, "just like the others, talking to men without jobs about the work we have to do."
Maanan did not even answer him. She looked at us with this strange look of happiness in her and said, "Come and hear him. Four sharp." And she went out with the happy light dancing in her eyes, leaving us all wondering what had hap¬ pened to her at last. And since we had nothing really to do, our reluctance went away bit by bit, and we roamed around the market area as if we had no desire to go anywhere, but at four we also were in the crowd at Asamansudo, and we were quite amazed to see how many people had come. News had been traveling over our heads and beneath our feet, and only now had it come to us.
The man has long known of the pain of disappointment in¬ side his friend. In his own way he too had felt it, and it was pathetic that in the past and even now all he had to soothe out the injury would be Teacher's remembered words. But now his friend himself was in need of soothing words. He who had so often helped with his patient talk of the cycle of life and death, youth and age, newness and decay, of the good food we eat and the smelly shit it turns into with time: in spite of all the outer calm, he too was in pain. How often had he not said it—that this was the way with all of life, that there was nothing anywhere that could keep the promise and the fra¬ grance of its youth forever, that everything grows old, that the teeth that once were white would certainly grow to be en¬ crusted with green and yellow muck, and then drop off leav¬ ing a mouth wholly impotent, strong only with rot, decay, pu¬ trescence, with the smell of approaching death. Yet out of the
100 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
decay and the dung there is always a new flowering. Perhaps it helps to know that. Perhaps it clears the suffering brain, though down in the heart and within the guts below, the ache and the sinking fear are never soothed. The promise was so beautiful. Even those who were too young to understand it all knew that at last something good was being born. It was there. We were not deceived about that. How could such a thing turn so completely into this other thing ? Could there have been no other way? The beauty was in the waking of the powerless. Is it always to be true that it is impossible to have things strong and at the same time beautiful ? The famished men need not stay famished. But to gorge themselves in this heartbreaking way, consuming, utterly destroying the common promise in their greed, was that ever necessary? How often had Teacher tried to help by saying it was only life, that every little while it was good to bury the hopes of days impossible to call back, to say that nothing in life has changed, nothing save your own hopes and the pattern of your own disappointments; to say that people are the same, children, young people, old people; to go out and look at them, and wake from dreams with which you torment yourself. To look, to accept, to free yourself to see clearly what can be done and what you most surely cannot do. The listener has heard. He is not so far in the cave that he cannot hear what is said. But what can a person do with things that continue unsatisfied inside ? Is their stifled cry not also life?
The new man must have begun to speak only moments be¬ fore we arrived at Asamansudo, because his voice was still low. He was not making any attempt to shout, and the quietness of his sound compelled us all to listen more attentively.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born IOI
. . serving our own selves . . The murmur of the crowd had not died down yet. . . not waiting till the white man tells us what jobs to do. . . ." Phrases floating in the breeze, calmly, and the crowd listening. "Can we ourselves think of nothing that needs to be done ? Why idle then ... ?" Words about eyes needing to be opened and the world to be looked at. "Then we can think. . . . Then we will act." There was power in the voice that time, a power quickly retracted, and replaced by the low, calm voice.
"We do not serve ourselves if we remain like insects, fasci¬ nated by the white people's power. Let us look inward. What are we? What have we? Can we work for ourselves? To strengthen ourselves ?"
I stood there staring like a believer at the man, and when he stopped I was ashamed and looked around to see if anybody had been watching me. They were all listening. The one up there was rather helpless-looking, with a slight, famished body. So from where had he got this strength that enabled him to speak with such confidence to us, and we waiting patiently for more to come? Here was something more potent than mere words. These dipped inside the listener, making him go with the one who spoke.
". . . in the end, we are our own enslavers first. Only we can free ourselves. Today, when we say it, it is a promise, not yet a fact. . . . Freedom! . . ." The whole crowd shouted. I shouted, and this time I was not ashamed.
Near the end, he spoke about himself. If he could have re¬ mained that way! But now he is up there, above the world, a savior with his own worshipers, not a man with equals in life. Then, when he spoke, his words made him look even smaller, even weaker than he had looked at first.
"I have come to you. And you can see that I have nothing in my hands. A few here know where I live. Not much is there.
102 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
And even what is there is not my own. It is the kindness of a woman, one of you now here. Before she saw me I did what we all do, and I slept on other people's verandas. It is the truth, so why should I feel ashamed when proud men look down and say Veranda boy'? I am not ashamed of poverty. There is nothing shameful in it. But slavery. . . . How long. . . .
"Alone, I am nothing. I have nothing. We have power. But we will never know it; we will never see it work. Unless we choose to come together to make it work. Let us come together. . . . Let us. . . . We. . . . We. . . . We. . . . Freedom. . . . Freeeeeeeedom!"
I was not the only silent one when we met again that eve¬ ning. Even Etse could find nothing to joke about, though the threat that everything was turning serious was killing him in¬ side. Maanan came much later, and found us all so quiet. We could see her happiness in the movement of her body itself, and it was beautiful. She was a woman in love then.
"Maanan is wetting her womanhood over this new man." It was Etse.
"Ah, man, let me wet it." It was surprising that Maanan could be so very happy and yet continue to speak so calmly. "Let it soak itself in love. Today things have gone inside me, and they have brought out what I have hidden in me. He brought them up. They were not new to me. Only I have never seen anyone to go and fish them up like that. He was reading me. I know he was speaking to me. To you too. But did you hear him ? How can a man born of a woman tell me my thoughts even before I myself know them ? I ask you, how can he?"
"Another wife gone," said Etse. "Poor me!"
Maanan was laughing softly. "And so helpless he looks. He needs a woman to look after him."
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 103
"Preferably Maanan," said Etse with a sharp quickness.
"Preferably Maanan," said Maanan slowly, tasting the words. "Preferably Maanan."
How could this have grown rotten with such obscene haste ? Sometimes I think I will understand it, when I see it as one frightened man's flight from his own death. For he was not afraid of the old ones, the jokers. They could not have come and buried him. It was his own youth that destroyed him with the powerful ghost of its promise. Had he followed the path traced out by his youth and kept to it, what would have pre¬ vented a younger man, one more like himself in the purity of his youth, from coming before him as more fit to keep to the path? A youth who could have lived the way he himself had lived at first, the way he never could have lived again when he became the old man and shiny things began to pull the tired body toward rest and toward decay. But that would have meant another kind of death for him, this death of which he had begun to walk in daily fear. And so his own end had also to be the end of all that he had begun, and if another promise comes it cannot be the continuation of the promise he held out but which he himself consumed, utterly destroyed. Perhaps it is too cruel of us to ask that those approaching the end of the cycle should accept without fear the going and the coming of life and death.
Or maybe even this is searching too far away. It is possible that it is only power itself, any kind of power, that cannot speak to the powerless. It is so simple. He was good when he had to speak to us, and liked to be with us. When that ended, ev¬ erything was gone. Now all we do is sit and wait, like before he came. It must be power. I say this because he is not the only one whom power has lost. It has happened to those around him, those who were not always there for the simple
104 Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
sake of the power they could find. Consider your friend Koom¬ son, who will make you rich. Remember me.
Koomson we all have known for a long time here. A rail¬ wayman, then a docker at the harbor. Pulling ropes. Blistered hands, toughened, callused hands. A seaman's voice. Big, rough man, a man of the docks well liked by men of the docks. Doing well, the only way we do well here. Not spitting at any contreyman, only the fat merchants and their lawyer brothers and Lebanese gangster friends, and that is quite all right here. I still do not know how Koomson got to Accra. Everybody says with a wave of the hand, "Oh, you know, the ideological thing. Winneba." True. That is where the shit of the country is go¬ ing nowadays, believing nothing, but saying they believe every¬ thing that needs to be believed, so long as the big jobs and the big money follows. Men who know nothing about politics have grown hot with ideology, thinking of the money that will come. The civil servant who hates socialism is there, singing hosanna. The poet is there, serving power and waiting to fill his coming paunch with crumbs. He will no doubt jump to go and fit his tongue into new arses when new men spring up to shit on us. Everybody who wants speed goes there, and the only thing demanded of them is that they be good at fawn¬ ing. Is that the place that changed the dock worker Koom¬ son ? Or did he go there after he had changed ? Because he had changed? I have seen the place, and I have seen him there, and in Accra. He lives in a way that is far more painful to see than the way the white men have always lived here. Is it true then, that after all the talk that is possible, this is the only thing men are looking for? There is no difference then. No difference at all between the white men and their apes, the law¬ yers and the merchants, and now the apes of the apes, our Party men. And after their reign is over, there will be no differ-
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 105
ence ever. All new men will be like the old. Is that then the whole truth? Bungalows, white with a wounding whiteness. Cars, long and heavy, with drivers in white men's uniforms waiting ages in the sun. Women, so horribly young, fucked and changed like pants, asking only for blouses and perfume from diplomatic bags and wigs of human hair scraped from which decayed white woman's corpse? Whiskey smuggled in spe¬ cially for the men who make the laws. Cigarettes to make those who have never traveled cry with shame. How can Koomson return to us ? What has he got to say to those he used to work with? Will he come down to see the bodies he left be¬ hind and not say a word? Can he sit down with men and smoke wee and curse stupid magistrates for jailing men who have harmed no one? He has come here often, but only like a white man or a lawyer now. Swinging time at the Atlantic- Caprice. Young juicy vaginas waiting for him in some hired place paid for by the government. Important people must re¬ lax on weekends. The week is filled with so much killing work. Speeches to prepare. On moral uplift. Socialism. Rev¬ olution. Dedication. Interviews to give. The role of the old man in the emancipation of everybody else. So why should he not speak only to the fat lawyers and the fatter politicians? What would we have to say to him ? Or he to us ? It may be terrible to think that this was what all the speeches, all the hope, all the love of the first days was for. It is terrible, but it is not a lie. Who can blame them when in this society there is no way of knowing whether anything else is possible ? If they found the only way they could escape from us, mount far above us, was by first talking to us like brothers, who are the fools? There was something so good about the destroyed peo¬ ple waking up and wanting to make themselves whole again. There was so much that was heart-filling about the friendships
io6 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
and the hopes of the first days. So it should be easy to take the rot of the promise. It should be easy now to see there have never been people to save anybody but themselves, never in the past, never now, and there will never be any saviors if each will not save himself. No saviors. Only the hungry and the fed. Deceivers all. Only for that is life the perfect length. Every¬ one will tell you, pointing, that only the impotent refuse. Only those who are too weak to possess see anything wrong with the possessing fashion. Condemnation, coming from those who have never had, comes with a pathetic sound. Better get it all first, then if you still want to condemn, go ahead. But re¬ member, getting takes the whole of life.