IV

 

Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya.

    -Herman Melville, 1863 

The region called the Balak is the size of France, if Alsace-Lorraine had been permanently conceded to Germany and by the same treaty Belgium had been annexed. Arab traders as early as the year 400 a.h. noted a peculiarity of these barren heights which European adventurers of the nineteenth century a. d., such as Heinrich Barth and Gustav Nachtigal, confirmed: a local absence of color. The sky here is white, and the earth, in contrast to the vivid ochres, reds, and mauves of the northwest quadrant of Kush, shows in its rocks and dunes, its playas and wadis, its reg, erg, and hammada, only dreary varieties of gray. The valleys of molten glass have already been mentioned; the low xerophytic growth has, by the process of natural selection, subdued its natural green to a tint fainter than that of the palm leaves in a faded oleograph of the Holy Land. Here bloom, famously, the world's dullest flowers; here white scorpions and black snakes live off one another's eggs. Travellers have provoked skepticism by reporting how even the gaudiest goods and garb are gradually drained to monochrome in the slow climb through the Massif; dear Sheba, laden with gold and coral, copper and jasper, lapis lazuli and chrysoprase, her eyelids daubed with antimony and her fingernails with henna, her exquisite chocolat-sans-lait body wrapped in silver-embroidered indigo, scarlet, and turquoise, even her feet clad in sandals whose parrot green chimed with the parrot-belly pink of her toenails, day by day was overlaid with deeper and deeper layers of the dust of colorlessness.

    Her skin, glossy as coal, shed its purple highlights; the palms of her hands no longer lifted to release glimpses of lilac; even her tongue seemed no longer red, lolling in the velvet orifice her careless jaw revealed as she incessantly chewed kola nuts. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes in this atmosphere gleamed more brilliant than ever, and the flaring edges of her lips and nostrils were emphasized as by an ink-laden fine quill. The stem of her neck, the virtuoso arabesques of her sullen profile, and the perfect, burnished crimpings of her ears all looked limned and shaded by an artist whose effects the addition of color would have muddied. Sheba was petite, the only one of my wives smaller than I, and her beauty was sharpened to a blueprint precision, the immaculate mechanics of a butterfly husk, with this removal of the rainbow.

    Four hundred kilometers from Also-Abid the piste dwindled to an impassable trail between ashen rocks.

    We left the grayer-than-ever Mercedes to Opuku and Mtesa and joined, in the guise of a detribalized anzad player and her protector, a caravan carrying (we gathered) from Ouagadougou or Niamey to a contraband depot on the Zanj border a medley of sinister goods. The caravan leader was a hirsute, jittery brute of the Kel-ulli tribe; Sidi Mukhtar was his name and his person abundantly mixed what the intrepid Barth called the three traditional Arab qualities of rejela (valor), sirge (thievishness), and dhiyafa (hospitality). Sheba-who was kittenish at first-and I peeked whenever we could into the camel-bags, where we found such contraband as hallucinogenic khat, firearms of Czech and Mexican manufacture, plastic sandals from Japan, transistor radios assembled on such low-wage platforms as Singapore and Hong Kong, and boxes and boxes of Bic pens, Venus pencils, and Eberhard Faber typewriter erasers. There were also wooden crates of what Sheba thought would be bullets and grenades but when we pried a slat loose proved to be black ribbons on metal spools, white correction cartridges, and steely, spherical, UFO-ISH IBM type elements for not only the Arabic alphabet but for the 276 characters of Amharic and the antique squiggles of Geez. Had Sidi Mukhtar known of our prowlings he would have staked us to an anthill and left us to shrivel like banana skins cast aside. Or so he said. Actually, the caravan was a loose, good-natured federation of like-minded individual mercantile entrepreneurs, in the best traditions of African humanism; the sole severity came in the distribution of the water, which was done with an iron hand. Our days began at night. We were awakened beneath the stars-the stars! in the midnight absolute that arched above the Balak the constellations hung inflamed like chandeliers-and made our way, tinkling and sighing and snorting, toward the pearl dawn whose blush was as delicate as the pink tinge in nacre, to that point in mid-morning when the camels began to squat down simply of despair. The camel is an engaging creature spiritually: he proceeds steadily to the breaking-point beyond which he cannot go at all, and then, like as not, he is apt to squat down, blink, take one more breath through his rubbery nostrils, and die. We were supposed to sleep in our tents through the torrid mid-day, but in fact it was difficult, with the whistle of the wind in the peg-ropes, and a sense of restless activity outside (presences of sand that yet muttered and cast man-shaped shadows on the translucent tent-sides), and our thirsty anticipation of the water that would be dispensed at dusk. The water skins, the zemzimayas, were brought around by an evil-smelling henchman of Sidi Mukhtar's; he determined our quotas by counting the bobs of our Adam's apples, and never failed to jostle Sheba's succulent breasts in tearing the leather canteen from her hands.

    To pass the dazed, insomniac afternoons Sheba and I would attempt to make love, but grains of sand interposed and abraded our venereal membranes. The sand here was strange, black and white like salt and pepper, and at moments seemed an immense page of print too tiny to read. She would lie with her head on my belly, gently blowing me, or else play the anzad and sing, while I softly beat time on the hollows of my abdomen: "Do it to me, baby, do it if you can.

    If I can't have a drink of water, I'd as soon suck off a man."

    The sun beat upon the squares of camel hide above us so hard as to render them thin as oiled paper held up to candlelight; in our writhings we sought the shadow of each other's bodies. There would enter my mind these streams and shady gardens old, harried Mohamet conjured up in the after-hours babble of his mid-life crisis to lead the mulish Meccans away from their stony idols and female deities, and, more persistently still, of the soda fountain of the Franchise drugstore, named if I remembered correctly Oasis Pharmaceuticals and Sundries, where I had first met Candace, amid that frightful hectoring of brightly packaged newnesses, beside the baleful tree of sunglasses. And while Sheba's dear head, the lustrous hair of which she braided no two days with the same intricacy, rested stickily on my stomach and her ash-colored, thirst-swollen tongue loyally teased my absent-minded penis, my thoughts would swim through rivers of lemonade rickeys, lime phosphates that dripped their fizzing overflow into the chrome grate below the taps, Coca-Cola brewed out of syrup upon chips of ice, 7-Ups paler than water itself, and that mysterious dark challenger to the imperial Coke, the swarthy, enigmatic Pepsi, with whom I felt an underdog's empathy.

    Milkshakes were in those days of plenty so lavishly prepared that the counter-boy, ingloriously dubbed the "soda jerk," served them in two containers, one of cloudy, hefty glass and the other of the chill futuristic metal in which the sudsy marvel had been churned. These "soda jerks," I came to understand, were recruited from the adolescent ranks of the "townies"-that is, the permanent residents of Franchise, refugees from subsistence farming in the main, every last one of them white and Gentile, as opposed to those of us smuggled in academic gowns into the community as students at McCarthy College, whose brick pinnacles and massy treetops hovered above the gravelly flat roofs of the "towny" business section like the upper levels of a ziggurat, where only gods and priests feeding dead kings dare venture. Emerging, blinking, from Oasis Pharmaceuticals, my mind's eye confronted, between me and that ivy-shaggy campus corner opposite, the breadth of Commerce Street, with its dangling traffic light and surging traffic of opulent automobiles. Everything in America, through that middle bulge of the Fifties, seemed to this interloper fat, abundant, and bub-blelike, from the fenders of the cars to the cranium of the President.

    Franchise was a middle-sized city of 35,000.

    Its main street ran straight as an arrow, disused trolley tracks still embedded in its center. Its few factories, mostly devoted to paper manufacture, were out of sight down by the lake, whose breezes they tainted with the chemical overflow of the pulping process. The lake had been left, with that romantic douceur the Americans trail in the wake of their rapacities, its Indian name, Timmebago, though the bestowers of that name had been long since scourged from its shores by gunfire, firewater, and smallpox.

    In the summer, the brightness of which lasted into October, the merchants of Franchise lowered awnings above their storefronts, and the virtually continuous strip of scalloped shadow laid along the dazzling wide sidewalk now merged with the stifling shade of the tent as I lay there flooded in my thirst by remembrance; my mind's eye, hesitantly, fearfully, looking both ways twice, crossed the dangerous street and hustled into the deep green closures of the college.

    Beneath the stately arches of the elms and the more horizontal branches of the oaks and copper beeches the spaces appeared subaqueous and we students, elongated as by refraction, silent swimmers. In this aquarium light the academic buildings seemed plaster temples lowered into our element as ornaments, with solid insides and painted-on windows; the pillared Classics building looked especially fake. Then the wheel of North American weather turned and there came an elemental change: the roof of elm-leaves was golden, and falling, and letting in sky, and the leaves were burning in great piles tended by the college grounds crew, grizzled old townies who ogled our girls; the autumnal fragrance of leaf-smoke overpowered the caustic emissions of the paper mills and recalled to young Felix the patches of brush that were cleared for cassava and maize by the women of his village. They would sing, chopping, uprooting, bending from the waist in unison beneath that African sky whose vastness was so subtly distant a brother to the vastness of the farm-country sky the straight main street dissolved into, past the hedges, the lawns, the Victorian-Gothic faculty housing.

    Above silver silos and corn rows and rolling meadows studded with fat cows, the platinum clouds piled one on top of another in a triumphant, vaporous wealth. In Africa, the clouds ran like herds of wildebeest, strung-out and gray, hastening, always, to get somewhere else, in this savanna that had to be vast, for in any one place it was poor. Then, the carousel of seasons turning again, fire became air, the leaves blew all away; all was black and white, black twigs on white sky, black men on white earth, and Candy was waiting, waiting for her Happy, at the dark cave mouth of Livingstone Hall, her snow-bright bangs set off by a knitted scarf the red of Christmas ribbon. Her mother had knitted this scarf, and the matching red mittens with which Candy was hugging her mold-colored notebooks and big Ec text with its slick cover of smiling blue tighter to her chest as if for warmth. Snow was all about like a mirage, a liftingness in the bottom of Happy's vision that made the automobiles sing in chains and lowered windowsills to the level of the ground. This was truly another world, that had bred another race of men to make their way, barking joyously, through this illusory element, this starry mud. One handful of those tiny ice-feathers would bite into his face now, would dissolve his lips and open his throat again, so he could croak a word of love to Sheba. Kissed, Candy would hurry him into the cave, where the radiators were hurling heat recklessly against the cold that entered with them through the double doors, the linoleum floors dirty with melted footprints and tracked-in fragments-matches, gum wrappers, the little red strip that pulled open a cigarette pack comofthe culture of paper and radiant waste around them.

    I must have dozed. When I awoke, Sheba's head was heavy on my sandy belly or my Ec textbook was open in my lap to the dour visage of Adam Smith or a chart of the decline in the purchasing power of the guilder since 1450.

    A few more minutes, the lecture would end, and I could have my noon beer in the Badger Cafe. There were luncheonettes, ice-cream parlors, and bars in the city blocks around the campus; in these we would gather, these islands of warmth in the ocean of cold, and talk, Candy and I and her friends. A number of her friends were American Negroes, then beginning to be called Afro-Americans; she was one of those white women who cannot leave black men alone. No mark of Cain or Ham identifies such a female, but some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast to the tarbaby. Candy's parents in her childhood had had colored cooks and maids, and at the side of these corpulent, didactic, floury-handed mammies the child had felt a cherishing and security absent from the hysterically neat rooms of the house beyond the kitchen.

    This had been in Chicago; at about the time of what in Africa they call a woman's first uncleanness her father moved his insurance agency to Oshkosh.

    Chicago's black circumambience thinned to an off-center pocket of paperworkers, ex-slaves whose escape had stopped short of Canada. And in all-white Franchise any dark faces must belong to McCarthy students: flip, coffee-colored Barry Little from Kalamazoo; Muslimized, bitter-black Oscar X from Chicago's South Side; quiet, cin-namon-and-ginger Turnip Schwarz up the river from East St. Louis. Med Jhabvala, with his pointed beard and fluting, female voice, and myopic, beautiful Wendy Miyamoto, from San Francisco, who got 99's on all her exams and rarely said a word, completed our shadowy circle.

    There was even an Indian on campus, a Dakota called Charlie Crippled Steer, who stalked along in fur-lined earflaps and threw things at track meets; he sat at our table once in a while, but did not like us. He did not like anybody, striding the snowy diagonals of our walks with a frozen grimace, his mouth a sad slash, his eyes small as currants. These marginal Americans fascinated me. But amid the maddening slapping of the tent flaps in the mindless wind, the overheard snuffling of stoic camels and the clangorous harangues of desperately bored camel-drivers, my flickering memories of that exotic Wisconsin seemed bits of a Fifties movie, with its studiously recruited cross-section meant to emblemize the melting pot, the fertile and level moral prairie of American goodness. This prairie's harvest celebration came at McCarthy each November, in the Thanksgiving football game against our arch-rival, Pusey Baptist, an even more northerly academic village of virgins and bruisers that, for the four years of my undergraduate career, was four times narrowly defeated-in 1954 by an intercepted pass, in 1955 by a goal-line stand, in 1956 by a heroic, dodging, arhythmical, incredible end run by a sandy-haired instant legend who next year died uncomplainingly of leukemia, and in 1957, most thrillingly for us non-gringos, by a field goal kicked sideways, soccer style, from the forty-three-yard line by a Peruvian general's degenerate son, who had gone out for the team as a way of making homosexual contacts. Memory, enough!

    Never-to-be-entered-again spaces the mind has hollowed out! The pom-poms! The beer kegs! The single-throated roaring in the concrete bowl, named Kellogg Stadium for its benefactor corporation and irreverently nicknamed the Breakfast Dish. And seen from high above through the vapor of tens of thousands of breaths, those synchronized American cheerleaders, a row of M's ("Give me an M," they would implore), yelling in the zero weather for victory as nakedly as Zulus ("Give me a Cst"), their cheeks flaming ("Give me a C, A, Rf"), their breasts pouncing as in rapid succession each dropped to one knee and shot forth an arm.

    Rah!

    I licked my lips, remembering the beer in the frats afterward, where the Pusey Baptists were invited to drown their annual sorrow, and the rugs stank like swamps of hops, and the exceptional coed, liberated without a restraining philosophy of liberation, liquidly consigned herself, in a ratty upstairs chamber, with hip-hoisted skirt and discarded underpants, to a line-up of groggy, beefy ejaculators. Sheba shifted her head, and our skins where melted together threatened to tear. She lay her head beside my arm, her jaw ajar, andwitha gray tongue licked the sweat from my pores.

    Was I happy? They called me so, but in truth the studies were hard. I had been granted a scholarship from some nefarious reserve of laundered and retitled government money, and had to keep up my grades, and in addition worked as waiter and short-order cook in various eating establishments within a walk of the McCarthy campus, including a Howard Johnson's, with its dummy minaret, on the thru-traffic edge of Franchise. I did not work in any of the places where my circle of friends gathered. I did not want them embarrassed by having me serve them. I did not want them to hear the towny waitresses and kitchen goons call me, not entirely without affection, Grease, Sambo, or Flapjack.

    Where was I? The Off-Campus Luncheonette was foggy with cigarette smoke and thermal-interface steam, with the plinging of pinball and the twanging of Patti Page; the Pure Dairy Products Ice Cream Parlor had twirled-wire chairs and round marbletop tables whose butter-pecan-streaked-with-blueberry surfaces camouflaged the slopped excess of our gooey sundaes and viscid, frothy sodas; the Badger Cafe offered sawdust on the floor and high-backed booths of dark-stained plywood. Here we would badger Oscar X about his remarkable faith. "You mean to say," Turnip Schwarz would insist in that Southern accent of gently prolonged incredulity, "that this Mr. Yacub really persuaded exactly fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine black people to this Isle of Patmos in order to breed some obnoxious race of white devils that none of these participants would ever live to see and that none of them would want to be anyway?"

    Oscar X usually wore brown suits and a white shirt with tie, and spoke in a diction of acquired precision, neatly baring his teeth at the close of each rebuttal. "It did not happen all at once. It took, according to the Prophet Mr.

    Farrad Muhammad, two hundred years of regulated eugenics to create a brown race from the black, two hundred more to produce from that a red race, two hundred more to produce a race of yellow folk"-a crisp little nod here to Wendy, silent on her side of the booth-"and from this a final deuce of centuries to the ultimate generation and supreme insult to Allah, the blond, blue-eyed, hairy-assed devils, who went nude on all fours and lived in trees, as all the textbooks tell us."

    "Friend," Barry Little told Oscar X, "that is the pathetic sort of horseshit with which the common nigger has been scrambling his brains in this land all along. You can't breed a race in a couple generations, you need a million years; and what the textbooks tell us for that matter is that the black man isn't the oldest thing, he is the newest thing in Homo sapiens, the latest improved model. This here Muhammad Fraud of yours had read a little Reader's Digest anthropology and had the Bible shouted at him by his momma and that was all the information plus his misery that he had."

    Esmeralda Miller was the only black woman at McCarthy. Her father was a dentist in a small city in upstate New York and she claimed she was a Marxist, in these days when that was a deadly serious thing to do. She was flat-chested and ash-colored and spoke in a level lustreless way, inflexible and indifferent, bored by arguing, the possessor of the flat truth. "You're both talking about alienation, man's alienation from his species being, and you can't talk about that without talking about the selfestrangement induced by forced labor. These racial categories are archaic, they have nothing to do with the class struggle; the black bourgeoisie, where it exists, is as oppressive, and in the last analysis as inevitably self-destructive, as the white, and now we have to add the yellow. Look at Liberia."

    Wendy unexpectedly spoke. "Yet didn't Lenin point out that Western capitalism has forestalled its doom by the exploitation, through colonial imperialism, of the natural resources and cheap labor of the non-white peoples?"

    "The white man is the devil," Oscar X broke back in. "He is a deliberately manufactured synthetic devil who is so disgusting the black man had to herd him across the Arabian desert and put him in those cold dark European Ice Age caves so he wouldn't destroy the world with his devilish mischief, and that is the proven historical truth, because that is where the white man came from; he was filling those caves full of gnawed-over bones while the black man down south was putting up those Pyramids easy as pie. These are facts."

    The door of the cafe opened, admitting cold air and Candy. "Here comes pinktoes," Barry Little muttered. She fetched her own chair and sat at a corner of the already crowded table. The faint flurry of greetings died to a silence until Hakim Felix al-Bini cleared his throat and continued the conversation.

    "It seems to me," he said, "the truth of a mythology should not be judged evidentially piece by piece but by its gestalt result. This Mr. Yacub, with his big head and his resemblance to Frankenstein, seems more than we need, from the standpoint of plausibility; but then so do Hitler, and Joan of Arc, and Jesus. They existed. Many things exist, and our dreams tell us many more exist, or exist elsewhere. What matters in a myth, a belief, is, Does it fit the facts, as it were, backwards? Does it enable us to live, to keep going? Yacub seems implausible but it does seem true, as we look around, that the white man is, as Oscar says, a devil."

    Candy blushed, right to the neck of her sweater. "I should resent this," she said, "except you're all so nice."

    "We are not nice," Barry Little said. "We are rapist apes."

    "White people don't mean to be devils."

    "No devil does," Hakim Felix told her.

    "But that is your tragedy, not ours." He took pity. "I was thinking less of lovely American coeds than of my French commanding officers. They wear stiff dark uniforms and boxes on their heads and they shriek and slap their African soldiers as if they are possessed. Even the way they move, in angry little jerks, suggests dead men animated by devils. What we call a zombi."?"'

    He was annoyed at her, for she had distracted him, with her complicated human situation of a white woman compelled to mingle with blacks, from some urgent general truth his mind had almost framed.

    Barry Little had turned to Oscar X again. "The U. s. Negro has peddled horseshit to OF Massah so long he can't stop peddling it to himself.

    Until he gets up off his shiny ass and starts playing the game he can keep squatting right at the bottom of the heap. The game is, grab.

    That's why we've come to school, to learn to grab.

    There's only one way up, and that's worm your way.

    Sister Esmeralda of the Communist Storefront Evangelical Association and I agree about one thing at least: forget your color, colored man.

    Your dollar's as green as the next."

    Turnip Schwarz said, "Willy Mays hit that ball over the fence, that's four bases for him too."

    "You are one thousand per cent off your greedy heads," replied Oscar X. "Without the Brotherhood of Islam or some such, the single black man in any Northern city is less than nobody. He is not there, he is a hole.

    When a brother of ours in Temple Two is pulled in by the devil police, we go show up at the station in our nice quiet suits and that brother gets legal attention. He is not bopped. Those devils tuck their clubs away and put on smiles, because they see power."

    "You can have power without superstition," Esmeralda said.

    "No," the future Ellellou said; the word "suits" had reminded him of what he had wanted to say.

    "It takes a mountain of myth to make even a grain of difference. It takes Mr. Yacub and the Isle of Patmos to make a man in the ghetto put on a suit. Oscar, you say Allah showed up in Detroit in 1930 in the person of a raincoat peddler called W. D. Fard and then disappeared in 1934; the Christians say He showed up in Jerusalem in the year 30 and then disappeared in the year 33. What is the result of these incredible rumors? Slaves lift their heads a fraction of an inch higher. Is this enough result? It is. Nothing less will produce any result at all. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the divinity of this or that itinerant-the crucial question isn't Can you prove it? but Does it give us a handle on the reality that otherwise would overwhelm us?" His voice sounded strained, reaching. But he discovered in the faces in the booth that his high-pitched oratory was not absurd, or not only absurd. Of course he had in his mind not the parochial concerns of these Americans-even the poorest of them rich by African standards-but the dim idea, stirring, of distant Kush. Candy placed her pale hand upon his and patted it, in consolation for an impossible future, or to recall him to this moment, these foreign accents, these abundant beverages, this cozy bar, this "bull session."

    Shots rang out beyond the tent, barking and then whining, spanking the sand in spurts. The rifles of the caravan guards, old M-i6's bought at discount, were not slow to answer, through a thatch of grunts and scuffling. Men raced by. Shadows flickered on the tent sides. The silent comedy of men fighting for their lives. Ellellou pressed Sheba beneath him, rolling her off the mat into a sandy corner where an assassin would not be likely to aim. His brain moved in the lazy logical notches that crisis activated in him, the synapses huge as lightning. He saw with microscopic clarity the glistening impasto of sweat and sand on Sheba's neck, noted that a necklace of fine lapis lazuli beads had been broken by the violence of his protective action. He calculated the odds that his identity had been detected, decided they were 50-50 (mtesa, who had told Ezana of the mysterious truck, was the negative binary pole), and, given a prevalent co-efficient of danger, decided to stay in the tent, in his opaque, bullet-permeable prism of anonymity, rather than make a break into the wind, the dust, the shouts, the colorlessness. He amused himself, in the space between volleys of bullets, with searching amid the sand granules for the tiny lapis lazuli beads Sheba had shed, which would have been easier to find had their sparkling blue not ebbed from them. He sifted in his inner ear the friendly gunshots from those of the raiders, and heard the latter describing an arc that was coming no closer, that indeed was receding, into the desert reaches of the level truth that nothing matters in our human scale, for Allah truly is great.

    Takbir!

    This phrase had dawned in its grandeur for Ellellou not in his animist village but far from home, where the clubby minority students of McCarthy College had in the cheerful, smoky, bibulous flush of youthful egoism and sexual undercurrent forged the personal armament that would hold off the white man's encircling, sniping world. Through Oscar X young Hakim rediscovered Islam, travelling with the black American to the mother shrine, Elijah Muhammad's Temple Two in Chicago, or to the nearer, less majestic Temple Three in Milwaukee. Amid these conservatively suited brothers and reserved, chastely gowned and turbanned sisters, the future Ellellou, welcomed and yet set apart as an African, found reminiscence of his deserted continent's dignity, its empty skies and savannas, its beautiful browns.

    Subsequent palavering in the stirred-up caravan failed to discover any purpose to the raid. Nothing was taken, not so much as a camel-bag. A number of empty bottles-Mockobckeh, they said, OcoSaHave BoflKa-dropped by the shouting, shooting camel-riders muffled in tagihnusts had the hollow glitter of a deliberate clue.

    "Either," the President confided to Sheba, "they were Tuareg drunk on CIA bribes, or CIA operatives wishing to seem to be disguised Russians, or Russians who with the clumsy effrontery of these telltale leavings wish to suggest that they are CIA operatives."

    Sidi Mukhtar had another thought. "You know," he said, "still slave-raiders in Balak."

    Ellellou scoffed. "That all died out with Tippu Tib."

    "Not all," the caravan leader said, some hidden cause for humor creasing the withered rascal's features. "More selective now.

    Quality market instead of quantity."

    "But who would they be after?" Ellellou asked, feigning innocence of the knowledge that he himself, the President, was the caravan's prize.

    Sidi Mukhtar winked toward the disguised dictator's tent. "Fine woman," he said simply.

    Shadows, angels, dangers, trucks on the road, radio waves in the air slip by us. The incident had the quality, an impalpable slithering-by, of those Wisconsin nights when, outside in the snow no whiter than Candy's hips and flanks as they gleamed within the erotic turmoil of bedsheets, a siren went by, bleating and beating blue upon the bricks, the ivy, the windowsills, the steeples and silos of sleeping Franchise. In their senior year Candy had received permission to rent a room off-campus, with another girl, who for erotic reasons of her own was much in Green Bay. The room, above a realtor's office, was until this intrusion of blue black and white. The black lover would lift himself on an arm, the white beloved would lift her head, to recall him to their act, their intimacy, which had nothing to do with the tumult of which a fragment had poured past, and of which other fragments-the pulsing red lights of fire engines or of an ambulance-would in a minute follow. In this minute the frames of the prints, the mirrors, the wallpaper pattern in this room showed gray, gray on gray, the brightest gray the rectangles of the window-panes that sealed them off from the world outside, whose murderous confusions swept by like the giant wings of a snowstorm. Their love, their mingled moistures, their breathing was suspended while the sirens passed. were the police coming for him? He was aware that in some of these States skins of different colors rubbing was a crime. For his penis in her vagina there could be a rope around his neck. Nor did the Black Muslims condone copulating out of the faith, let alone with a blue-eyed she-devil. It was a conflict-making delight of his years here, being driven by Oscar X through the white man's fat landscape in a battered but capacious and powerful "49 Oldsmobile, while the radio poured forth Dinah Washington and Kay Starr, heading toward a temple of Islam in the slums of some Midwestern metropolis, where they might be frisked by grim Irish police or held up at knifepoint by unconverted juvenile delinquents of their own color. Dangers everywhere, slipping and sliding by.

    Felix had perceived through the shadows a stain of blood on the bedsheet. Indeed, she had felt different tonight, not her usual just-tight-enough lubricity, but her wetness somehow rougher than usual, clotted.

    Unclean. Involuntarily he had grimaced, and had been told, "You should thank God. Up to this morning I was afraid I was pregnant."

    "Wow," he said, Americanized.

    She wanted to squeeze even more intimacy out of the revelation, to win more praise, for a fear endured.

    "Is that all you can say? You know, it's a rotten thing, to be a woman. You can't run away from your body. And the worst thing-was "The worst thing, dear Candy?"

    "Never mind."

    "The worst thing was, you didn't want to be carrying a black baby?"

    "No, I'd rather like that, as a matter of fact."

    "Then what was this worst thing?"

    "I won't tell you." She left the bed to get a cigarette. In the room whose dimness seemed a cubic volume of smoke, her body, crossing to the bureau, was pale, loose, lithe. She struck a match. A red glow formed the center of her voice. "I wasn't sure who the father was."

    A police car bleated in the white night, more distantly. It did not take very many minutes of verbal struggle, as he remembered the incident, for him to elicit from her that the other possible father had been Craven.

    Sheba had been too stoned to feel much alarm during the raid. As the spanking, whining sound of rifle fire receded, and violent silhouettes ceased to be projected through the dim prism-shaped volume of the tent, she bit my shoulder to suggest that I could withdraw the protective mass of my body from on top of hers. She shook some of the sand from her elaborate coiffure of tiny braids pinned into parabolas, and to revive herself for the night's trek popped a kola nut. With slack-jawed rapture she chewed, dying the inside of her mouth a deeper shade of gray. Along with her supply of Liberian kola nuts she had a bundle of Ethiopian khat and, for back-up, some Iranian bhang. Her gentle spirit rarely descended to earth.

    Her robes hanging loose, her squat showed me between the parted roundnesses of the thighs her exquisite genitals, underparts profiled in two bulges, the cleft barely masked by the gauze of a thousand perfect circlets. Seeing me stare, Sheba laughed and, without abandoning the rapture of kola-chewing, urinated on the desert sand. In my madness of thirst, of love, I reached forward with cupped hands to rescue some of the liquid, though I knew from tales of other travellers that urine was as acid as lemon juice. It haunted my mouth for a burning hour. I went outside to discuss the raid.

    Sidi Mukhtar showed me the vodka bottles in the sun, their highlights hot as laser beams. I returned to the tent, where sweet Sheba, mellower, sang to the melancholy creak of her anzad: "Do it to me, baby, do it, do it.

    Take that cold knife from its sheath, stick it in me underneath, backwards, frontwards, down my throat, this trip has gone on too long."

    My responsive song, to which I kept time by tapping the pummel of my camel-saddle, concerned oranges, an orange imagined this time as shrivelled, and so infested by insects it hums like a spherical transistor radio, until its substance is consumed and the shell, brittle and stippled, shatters, like a clay myrrh-holder from ancient Meroe. Our fellows in the caravan, wearying of cursing the raiders and vowing highly anatomical revenge, gathered at the tent-flap, and tossed in to us fistfuls of obsolete coinage, cowrie shells and tiny mirrors, and pre-devaluation lu with its Swiss-tooled profile of King Edumu, his head as bodiless on these coins as it was in reality.

    The caravan drivers, porters, guards, navigators, blacksmiths, leather-workers, translators, accountants, and quality-controllers all lusted growlingly after my Sheba, who contrived while laying double- and triple-stopped fingerings upon the neck of the anzad simultaneously to expose one bare foot and brace-leted ankle. These men, their faces mere slivers of baked skin and decayed teeth showing through the folds of their galabiehs and keffiyehs, crowded too close, and, feeling challenged, I pushed one. He fell like a stick lightly stuck in the sand, and fainted; so weakened were we all by the hardships of the Balak. Then came at last the water bag, the swallowed streams of paradise, the rogue's lascivious nudge of my wife's pendulous breasts, the sunset prayers, the saddling up, the by now automatically deft repacking of our armful of effects into capacious khoorgs, the tying fast of the rolled tent-hides. Our camels suffered their cinched burdens with a thirupping of their lips and a batting of their Disneyesque eyelashes.

    From afar Sidi Mukhtar hallooed. The moon showed its silver crescent. The night's advance had begun.

    These details are not easy to reconstruct, as I write where I do, with its distractions of traffic, its ombrelles and promenading proteges, its tall drinks of orange Fanta and seltzer water braced with a squid-squirt of anisette. But in the listening half of my brain a certain jointed, clanking rhythm of our days remains, a succession of ordained small concussions, refastenings, bucklings, and halloos as they passed down the line, avowing our readiness to march, with certain death the penalty for falling out of our musical chain of snorting, swaying camels and cajoling, whirling guides.

    But O the desert stars! What propinquous glories! Tremulous globes overseeing our shadowy progress with their utter silence. More than chandeliers, chandeliers of chandeliers.

    Urn al-Nujum, the Mother of Stars, ran as a central vein, a luminous rift, within a sky, black as a jeweller's display velvet, that everywhere yielded, to the patient, astounded eye, more stars, so that the smallest interval between two luminaries was subdivided, and subdivided again, by the appearance of new points, leading awed scrutiny inward to a scale by which the blur in Andromeda became an oval immensity whose particle suns could be numbered. Under such a filigree our papery line of silhouettes passed, camel-bells softly chuckling, through the nocturnal escarpments and craters, wearily disturbing the undisturbed sand.

    Sheets of lava rose around us like apparitions, eruptions through a crystalline mantle whose splinters had lain for aeons where they fell.

    Abundant sandstone testified to a Paleozoic ocean; deeply cut dry canyons proved that once in some ghostly humid time great rivers had watered the Massif. Scaley defiles, of shale a-gleam as if wet, suddenly gave way to giddying views, immense gray bowls of emptiness sweeping to the next jagged, starlit range. What meant so much inhuman splendor?

    But when the earth is crushed to fine dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels in their ranks, and Hell is brought near-on that day man will remember his deeds.

    My life by those lunar perspectives became a focus of terror, an infinitely small point nevertheless enormously hollow, a precipitous intrusion of some substance totally alien and unwelcome, into these rocks, these fantastic orbs of fire, this treacherous ground of sand. I could not have withstood the solitude, the monotony, the huge idiocy of this barren earth, had not Sheba been by my side, sullen and warm. I loved in her what the others, the cruel illiterates of the desert, scented-her vacancy. Where another woman had an interior, a political space that sent its emissaries out to bargain for her body and her honor, Sheba had a space that asked no tending, that supported a nomadic traffic of music and drugs. Such a woman is an orphan of Allah, a sacred object. Sheba never questioned, never reflected. I said to her, "The stars. Are they not terrible?"

    "No. Why?"

    "So vast, so distant. Each is a sun, so distant that its light, travelling faster than the fastest jinni, takes years to reach our eyes."

    "Even if such a lie were true, how would it affect us?"

    "It means we are less than dust in the scheme of things."

    She shrugged. "What can be done, then?"

    "Nothing, but to pray that it not be so."

    "So that is why you pray."

    "For that, and to reassure the people of Kush."

    "But you do not believe?"

    "For a Muslim, unbelief is like a third eye.

    Impossible."

    We swayed in silence. Our fatigue was a tower to which each night added another tier. I said, "And do you know, there are laws all about us? Laws of energy and light, laws that set these rocks here, and determined their shape, and their slant. Once an ocean lay down many grains of sand; once the bodies of more small creatures than there are stars above us laid down their skeletons to form islands, great shoals, which volcanoes lifted up, and then the wind wore down again, and water that rained, and flowed, and vanished. Once all this was green, and men hunted elephants and antelope, and drew pictures of themselves on the rocks."

    "Show me such a picture."

    "They are hard to find. I have seen them in books."

    "Things can be made up and put into books. I want to see a picture on a rock."

    "I will hope to show you one. But what I am saying is more than that once men hunted and even fished here.

    I am saying that perhaps again this will be true, and we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten, of less account than the camels whose hides make up our tents. Past and future are immense around us, they are part of the laws I speak of, that are more exact than anything you know, they are like those rocks that when you split them come away exactly flat.

    Everything obeys these laws. Things grow by these laws, and things die by them. They are what make us die. We are caught inside them, like birds in a cage-no, like insects in a cage that is all bars, that has no space inside, like a piece of rotten wood, only not rotten but hard, harder than the hardest rock. And the rock, one single rock, stretches out to those stars, and beyond, for in truth they seem very close, and there is a blackness beyond, where those same laws continue, and continue to crush us, finer than the finest dust, finer than the antimony you use to make your eyelids gray. Help me, Sheba.

    I am sinking."

    "I do what I can. But you make what I do seem very little."

    "No, it is much."

    After a pause, while the feet of our steeds slithered on the cold sand, she asked me, "When do you think we will reach our destination?"

    "We will reach it," I told her, "when there is no farther to go."

    "And how will we know when that is?"

    "The drought," I told her, "will have ended."

    In the home of Candace's parents, where she took me late in our freshman year, the white woodwork was like a cage also. I marvelled at the tightness, the finish. Her father came toward me from rooms away, a big man with Candy's beryl eyes and gray hair so thin and light it wandered across his skull as he gestured. I had the impression that his bigness was composed of many soft places, bubbles in his flesh where alcohol had fermented and expanded; he shook my hand with too much force, overcarrying. "So you're the young man my daughter has been raving about," he said.

    Raving? I looked at Candy's pointed polite face, whose straight fine nose had come from her mother; I had just met the lady, who seemed afraid.

    Maybe the something bloated and patchy about the Dad was fear too. We were all afraid.

    I was alarmed, as the house opened to me-its woodwork interlocked like the lattice of an elaborate trap; its pale, splashy, furtively scintillating wallpaper; its deep, fruit-colored, step-squelching carpets; its astonishing living-room, long and white, two white sofas flanking a white marble coffee table bearing porcelain ashtrays and a set of brass scales holding white lilies whose never-wilt lustre was too good to be true. And what were these little saucers, with tiny straight sides and bottoms of cork, scattered everywhere, on broad sofa arms and circular end tables, as if some giant had bestowed on the room the largesse of his intricate, oversize coinage?

    "Daddy, I wouldn't say "raving," was Candy corrected, embarrassed, her face, that I now perceived as a clash of genes, blushing.

    "Rave is what she does, Mr.- I don't want to mispronounce."

    "Call me Felix," I said, Anglicizing the every.

    I wondered if I should sit, and would the sofa swallow me like some clothy crocodile? Often in America, in drugstores and traffic jams, I had the sensation of being within a bright, voracious, many-toothed maw. The Cunninghams' living-room had puddles of cosmetic odor here and there. As in the old cinema palace on Commerce Street, a heroic stagnation had overtaken decor. Seating myself on the edge of the bottomlessly spongy sofa, I touched the brass scales and, sure enough, discovered a refusal to tip. Once an honest artifact, it had been polished, welded, and loaded with plastic lilies. Fixed forever, like that strange Christian heaven, where nothing happened, not even the courtship of houris.

    "Asseyez-vous"

    Mrs. Cunningham had suggested, with a smile touchingly like her daughter's, only somehow uneven, as if Candy's quick smile had been crumpled up and then retrieved and smoothed and pasted over a basic frown.

    But when I responded, in textbook French, complimenting my hostess on the beauty of her room and its florid and cinematic appointments, her visage went as blank as that of the enamelled shepherdess on the mantel, frozen in a pose of alert unheeding vis-a-vis the fluting shepherd in the exactly corresponding mantel position. Between them stood an impressive clock with a pendulum of mercury rods, and its action may have been interfering, on their chilly elfin plane, with the call of the shepherd's piping. The fireplace itself, the hearth whose symbolic domestic centrality was so primitive that even I might have found here a familiar resonance, was swept as clean as a shower stall and ornamented with unscathed brass andirons supporting three perfect birch logs that would never be burned.

    Mr. Cunningham restored the conversation to solid English. "Feelicks, if I'm not being too personal, what's your major going to be at McCarthy?"

    "Freshman are not required to declare, but I had thought Government, with a minor in French Literature."

    "French Literature, what the hell use would that be to your people? Government, I can see. Good luck with it."

    "In the strange climate of my native land, Mr. Cunningham, the literature the French brought us may transplant better than the political institutions. There is a dryness in Racine, a harshness in Villon, that suits our case. In French Indochina, not many years ago, I had the experience of trading memorized sonnets by Ronsard with a prisoner of war, a terrorist who was later executed. In the less developed quarters of the world, the power politics of the West can be brushed aside, but its culture is pernicious."

    "Candy,"

    Mrs. Cunningham began with the overemphasis of the shy, having seated herself in a wing chair patterned in cabbage-sized roses, her lean shins laid gracefully, diagonally together with a dainty self-conscious "sexiness" that reminded me of her daughter... who had vanished!

    Horreur!

    Where?

    I could hear her voice dimly giggling in some far reach of the house. She had gone upstairs, it later transpired, to talk with her "kid" brother; or was it into the kitchen, to renew acquaintance with the Cunninghams' colored cook? At any rate, she had left me alone with her terrifying pale parents, the female of whom was posed in mid-sentence, and who now settled on the verb she had paused to locate among her treasury of "nice" things- "alluded to your romantic adventures."

    "Not romantic, Madame; dreary, truly. The French in exchange for their poems asked that we fight in other poor countries. I obliged them in Indochina, for it took me out of my native village; when it came to Algeria, where the rebels were fellow Africans, I became a rebel myself, and deserted."

    "Oh dear," Mrs. Cunningham said. "Can you ever go back?"

    "Not until the colonial power departs. But this may happen within the decade. All it needs is a politician in Paris who is willing to act as a mortician. In the meantime, I enjoy your amazing country as a dream from which I will some day wake miraculously refreshed."

    "There's a question I'm rarin' to ask you," Mr.

    Cunningham said, rising ominously, but not to throttle me, as his growling tone for a second implied to my alert nerves, but to move to a tall cabinet and get himself another drink, from a square bottle whose first name was Jack, or was it Jim? The riddle of my own name he informally solved with, "How about you, fella?"

    My mouth was indeed dry, from unease. "A glass of water, if it's no trouble."

    He threatened to balk. "Plain water?" Then his mind embraced my response, as something he might have expected, from an underprivileged delegate from the childlike underworld. "Wouldn't you rather have a 7-Up?

    Or a Schlitz?"

    I would have, and brushed from my own mind the mirage of a beer sitting golden on a dark table of the Badger Cafe; but I felt the family dinner ahead of me stretch like a long trek through a bristling wilderness of glass and silver and brittle remarks, and had resolved upon sobriety as my safeguard. Also there was some silent satisfaction in impeding this big white devil's determination to be hospitable. "Just water, if you please," I insisted.

    "Your religion, I suppose?"

    "Several of them."

    "Some ice in it?" he asked.

    "No ice," I said, again against my desires, but in conformity with an ideal austerity I had grown like a carapace, in which to weather this occasion.

    "Alice," he said, with unexpected euphony; his obedient wife arose-the shepherdess did hear the shepherd-and went into the kitchen, which seemed to be, by one of those inscrutable jurisdictions whereby American couples order the apparent anarchy of their marriages, her province. Mr. Cunningham, freshly reinforced by his bottled cohort, pursued his interesting question, which was, "What do you make of our American colored people?"

    I had already enough converse with the disciples of Elijah Muhammad to hear the word "colored" as strange, but this strangeness was swallowed by the expanding strangeness of the preceding "our." I looked at my feet, for I was travelling in treacherous territory.

    My search for an answer was needless, for Mr.

    Cunningham was providing it.

    "What can we do," he was asking me, "to help these people? They move into a nice neighborhood and turn it into a jungle. You pour millions of state money in and it goes up in smoke. Our American cities are being absolutely destroyed.

    Detroit used to be a great town. They've turned it into a hellhole, you get mugged by these kids right in Hudson's, the downtown is a wasteland. Chicago's going the same way.

    Hyde Park, all around the university, these lovely homes, a white girl can't walk her dog after supper without a knife in her stocking. The Near North Side's a little better, but two blocks in from the Lake you're taking your life in your hands. Why do you think I moved the family up to Oshkosh? I lost forty grand a year by leaving the city. But hell, the rates on real estate were going out of sight, the only way to get your money out of some of those neighborhoods was burn "em down. Cars, anybody who keeps a car on the street should have his head examined. They wouldn't just steal 'em, they'd smash 'em up compure spite. What's eating the bastards? You'd love to know."

    Mrs. Cunningham returned with the water, in a glass with a silver rim, and I thought of desert water holes, the brackish-ness, the camel prints in the mud, the bacterial slime that somehow even across the burning sands manages to find its live way.

    Mr. Cunningham's tone tightened a little, with his wife's return. There was this flattering about his tirade: that he was addressing me as a fellow sufferer, that the heat of his grievance had burned away my visible color. He went on, "I've had my knocks up here, trying to make a name coming in cold in the middle of life; but at least I'm not afraid my daughter's going to be raped and don't have to lock the car every time I stop to take a piss at a gas station."

    "Frank," Alice said.

    "Sorry, there, but I guess even over in the Sahara you know what a piss is."

    "Nous buvons le pissat,"

    I said, smiling.

    "Exactly," he said, slipping a glance of small triumph into his wife. "Anyway, where was I?

    Yeah, my question: What's the solution for these people?"

    "Provide them useful work?"

    Made in all timidity, this suggestion seemed to tip him toward fury. His patchy look intensified, his hair fluffed straight up.

    "Christ, they won't take the jobs there are, they'd rather rake in welfare. Your average Chicago jigaboo, he's too smart to dirty his paws; if he can't pimp or hustle drugs, or land some desk job with dingbat Daley, he'll just get his woman pregnant and watch the cash roll in."

    "That is-what do you call it?-American individualism, is it not? And enterprise, of an unforeseen sort."

    He stared at me. He was beginning to see me.

    "Christ, if that's enterprise, let's give it all over to the Russians. They've got the answer. Concentration camps."

    "Daddy, you promised you wouldn't," Candy cried; for she had come down the stairs, freshly brushed, her face alight with the happiness of "home," her crimson lips renewed, her rounded slim body bouncy as a cheerleader's, in a cashmere sweater and a pleated wool skirt, which swirled as she swung herself around the newel post whose carpentered pirouette I had admired upon entering.

    "Wouldn't what, dear?" her mother asked, as if straining to hear, in this room of silent clocks and chiming resemblances.

    "Wouldn't bother Happy about the Chicago blacks."

    "Not just Chicago," her father protested, "it's lousy everywhere. Even L. a., they're pulling it under.

    Hell, Chicago at least has a political machine, to make payoffs and keep some kind of lid on. In a city like Newark, they've just taken over.

    They've done to Newark what we did to Hiroshima. Grass doesn't even grow where they are. They are the curse of this country, I tell you, no offense to our friend here."

    "Daddy, you are so ignorant and prejudiced I just can't even cry about it anymore. I didn't want to bring Happy here but Mother said I must. You make me very ashamed in front of him."

    "Happy, hell, he's out of it. He's an African, at least they got some pride over there.

    As he says, they have their own culture. The poor colored in this country, they got nothing but what they steal." And he not quite drunkenly winked at me. It crossed my mind that I, as an African, was being thanked because I had not come over here to stay and raise the automotive insurance rates with my thievery; more, he saw me as the embodiment of the mother continent that yearned, he hoped, to take the Afro-Americans back into a friendly, oozy chaos.

    "Exactly," I said, and stood. "Nothing but what they steal." In the rebellious act of standing I changed my perspective on the room, and was freshly overwhelmed by its exotisnte, its fantasy, the false flowers and fires, the melting-iceberg shapes of its furniture, its whiteness and coldness and magnificent sterility; the emptiness, in short, of its lavish fullness, besprinkled with those inexplicable cork coins.

    [I express this badly. The wet ring from a glass of Fanta has blurred my manuscript.

    I long to get back to the Bad Quarter of Kush, and the spaces of my dear doomed Sheba.]

    The "kid" brother had followed Candy downstairs.

    Frank Jr. was a furtive, semi-obese child of fourteen-old enough, in my village, for the long house-whose complexion showed the ravages of sleeping alone, night after night, in an overheated room with teddy bears, felt pennants, and dotted Swiss curtains. The smile he grudged me displayed a barbarous, no doubt painful tooth-armor of silver and steel. His limp dank handshake savored of masturbatory rites. His eyes were fishy with boredom, and he tried to talk to me about basketball, of which I knew, despite my color, nothing. For this family occasion the child had put on a shirt and tie; the collar and knot cut cruelly into the doughy flesh of his neck. I thought, Here is the inheritor of capitalism and imperialism, of the Crusades and the spinning jenny. Yet he did not so much seem Mr. Cunningham in embryo as Mr.

    Cunningham, with his quirky bravado, desperate wish to be liked, and somehow innocently thinned and scattered hair, seemed a decaying, jerry-built expansion of his son. I perceived that a man, in America, is a failed boy.

    Then a black woman came into the alabaster archway of the living-room. For all the frills of her uniform, she looked familiar, with her heavy lower lip and fattening charms. Her uncanny resemblance to Kadongolimi was reinforced by her manner, which implied that she had had many opportunities in life and might well, with equal contentment, be elsewhere. "Dinner, ma'am."

    We all stood, in obedience to our queenly servant.

    But before we went in, Mrs. Cunningham, with a predatory deftness that showed a whole new piece of her equipment for survival, had silently as a pickpocket knifed behind me and placed my empty water glass, which I had set down in the center of an end table beside a sofa arm, securely within one of the little cork-and-silver saucers. Of course. They were "coasters," which in the friendly bars of Franchise took the form of simple discs of advertisement-imprinted blotting paper. By such sudden darts into the henceforth obvious, anthropology proceeds.

    Oscar X took the future Ellellou to meetings of the Nation of Islam; they disliked the term Black Muslims, though both "black" and "Muslim" seemed canonical. Temple Three, in Milwaukee, was two hours to the south, but another rushing, radio-flooded hour, in that many-knobbed, much-rusted, lavishly chromate guzzler of essence called, I thought oddly in a nation obsessed with the new, an Olds, took us to Temple Two, in Chicago, where the Messenger of Allah himself could be heard. He spoke in a murmur, a small delicate man with some resemblance, I was to notice when I awoke in Noire, to Edumu IV, Lord of Wanjiji. The Messenger wore an embroidered gold fez. He was a frail little filament who burned with a pure hatred when he thought of white men and lit up our hearts. He spoke of the white man's "tricknology." He told us that the black man in America had been so brainwashed by the blue-eyed devils he was mentally, morally, and spiritually dead. He spoke of a nation of black men, carved from the side of America like a blood-warm steak from the side of an Ethiopian steer, that would exist on a par with the other nations of the world. He rehearsed the services the black man had performed for his slavemasters in the United States, from cooking their meals and suckling their babies (yes) to building their levees and fighting their wars (yes indeed). He mocked the civil-rights movements, the "sitting-in,"

    "lying-in,"

    "sliding-in,"

    "begging-in," to unite with a slave-master who on the one hand demands separate schools, beaches, and toilets and on the other hand through the agency of rape had so mongrelized the American black man that not a member of this audience was the true ebony color of his African fathers. "Little Lamb!" souls in our crowd would cry out, and "Teach, Messenger!" The litany of wrongs never wearied him, this shambling gold-fezzed foreshadow of my king.

    At his mention of rape, I would find myself crying.

    At his mention of the tribe of Shabazz, for which the word "Negro" was a false and malicious label, I would find myself exultant. At his amazed soft recounting of some newly arisen marvel of devilish hypocrisy, such as the then recent Supreme Court decision which told black men they were integrated and thus opened them up to the sheriff's dogs when they were such fools as to take their little scrubbed and pigtailed daughters to school, or such ancient marvels of Christian tricknology as the mixing of slaves in the lots as they were sold so that no two spoke the same language or remembered the same gods, so that no idol remained to these slaves but the white devil's blue-eyed, yellow-haired, historically grotesque Jesus, I would find myself wild with visions of what must be done, of sleeping millions to be awakened from their brainwashing, of new nations founded on the rock of vengeance and led by such quiet brown hate-inspired men as this, our Messenger.

    And on Tuesday nights (unity Nights) or Friday nights (civilization Nights) it was pleasant to mingle, and even to be cossetted as an African with a smattering of Arabic, among the beige-gowned women and dark-suited men who had redeemed themselves from the flash and ruin of the ghetto.

    Ex-criminals, many of them, they moved with the severity of sous-officiers, and I realized that, in this era when the magic wand is hollow and all wizards, chiefs, and Pharaohs went tumbling under the gun's miraculous bark, the army is the sole serious institution left-all others are low comedy and vacuous costumery. The army must rule. The United States takes noisy pride in its sack-suited government of lawyers and fixers, but the bulky blue army of police is what the citizen confronts. Their patrol cars bleat past every lulled couple's fornication nest. Their baby-faced officers waddle across Commerce Street with waistfuls of leather-swaddled armaments.

    Beyond these blue men, for my black friends, the government was a gossamer of headlines spun like fresh cobwebs each morning, and brushed away by noon. I perceived this then: government is mythological in nature. These stepchildren of Islam were seeking to concoct a counter-myth.

    "Also-salamu 'alaykumf"

    The Messenger's greeting rolled back: "Wa-'alaykum al-salamst"

    I had never heard Arabic, which in Africa stings like a whip wielded by slavers and schoolteachers, spoken so sweetly as here, in America, in the flat rote accents of children of janitors and sharecroppers, who had memorized their few phrases as the passwords into self-reliance and dignity.

    Takbir!

    God is great!

    Ma sha" allah: it is as God wills.

    If our non-alcoholic fruit punches, and the porkless delicacies prepared by the ankle-weary work-day kitchen slaves of white homes, all had a flavor of charade, it was a purposeful earnest charade, and with altogether another taste too, a sacred spicy something that prickled in my nostrils and made me, enacting my own charade as an authentic Child of the Book, feel more exalted, more serenely myself, than I did, in this treacherous land of kafirs, anywhere else.

    Although Oscar X, I years later learned, gave up the Faith in disgust at the Messenger's well-authenticated sexual lapses, and some of my chaste sisters have put on again the white robes of the Christian choir, and my earnest lean-faced brothers (their eyes glittering above their cheekbones like snipers levelling their sights, their dangerous nervousness sheathed in the quiet devil-garb of corporation lawyers and FBI men) have re-enlisted in the guerrilla war of the streets-though the Nation of Islam took a mortal wound when it became Malcolm's killer, and the Afro-American's misery moved on in its search for the revolutionary instrument, those ghetto temples were for me a birthplace. The Messenger disclosed to me riches that were, unbeknownst, mine. He taught me that the evils I had witnessed were not accidental but intrinsic. He showed me that the world is our enslaver, and that the path to freedom is the path of abnegation. He taught me nationhood, purity, and hatred: for hatred is the source of all strengths, and its fruit is change, as love is the source of debility, and its fruit is passive replication of what already too numerously exists.

    At temple meetings, on vacation from Candy Cunningham and McCarthy College with their noble schemes for my transformation into a white-headed, lily-livered black man, I was free to imagine myself in an absolutist form. Crystals of dreaming erected within me, and the nation of Kush as it exists is the residue of those crystals.

    The terrain became more mountainous; the patches of thornbush, the scant tufts of the world's dullest flowers, no longer could draw the least excuse for life from the gray rocks, the black air. At night the sound of dry ice shattering rocks gave staccato echo to the scrabble of the camels trying to keep their footing on millennial accumulations of scree. We rattled as we went, and Sheba's anzad (varied now and then by an end-blown flute that doubled as a dildo in the face of my impotence) eerily harmonized with the stony music our passage struck from the resonant minerals and crystals jutting around us. Haematite, magnetite, kassiterite, wolframite, muscovite, mispickel, and feldspars cast their glints by moonlight. I recalled Ezana's dark geological allusions, and wondered how my old Minister of the Interior was faring in captivity. We had shared the same caserne, heard together the call, "Aux armes! Aux armes! Les diables jeunesPeople Sentimental reflections of all sorts coursed through my weary soul. The moons waxed and waned; Dhu '1-Hijja became Muharram, Muharram became Safar, or else I had lost count. The water-hole scouts ranged away from the caravan for days, and some never returned. The moment was approaching when Sheba and I must leave the caravan and seek out the cave where the head of Edumu IV reportedly babbled oracles.

    In the vicinity of the cave, Sidi Mukhtar told us, European rock doves had gathered, and now one or two of these birds, gray, but with points of lustre on the head and throat that bubbled up, in this monochromatic climate, to the verge of iridescence, could be seen at dusk and dawn, dotting a distant slope of speckled asphalt-colored shale like pigeons in the lee of chimneys on city roofs. Up and down we wound our way through alleylike passes so narrow the sky was reduced to the width of a river above our heads. The ordeal was aging Sheba: the baby fat of trust had fallen from her cheeks; some of the looks she darted at me sideways, through the asynchronous heaving of our camels' humps, were positively dubious.

    "Do you love me?" Candy would ask.

    "Tell me what you mean by love," young Hakim would counter, his emotional defenses well fortified by the years of arid book-learning: from Plato to Einstein, a steady explosion, the sheltering gods all shattered.

    "What do you mean, what do I mean?"

    Follow-up emergency vehicles wailed by on the street below. Their spinning red lights dyed the icicles at the window a bloody red: fangs of a deep-throated growl. "To what extent," he pursued, "is your so-called love for me love of yourself, yourself in the Promethean stance of doing the forbidden, that is, of loving me?"

    "To what extent, I could ask in turn, is your fucking me revenging yourself on the white world?"

    "Is that what your parents suggest?"

    "They don't know. They don't ask. After a certain age it's easier for them to forget you have a body. Marriage would be the only crunch."

    "Indeed."

    "What do you mean, "Indeed"?"

    "I mean, indeed, marriage would be a crunch."

    He changed the subject, so firmly she would know it was being changed. "This fucking to avenge oneself, I think that is an American style. I do not have, that I can detect, the sexual sense of outrage that our friends Oscar and Turnip and Barry bear toward the white man, whom they call, simply, the Man. The brown-faced Arabs were butchering and carrying off my people while the French were innocently constructing Chartres. The Tuareg have been more ruthless still. They are white, beneath their blue robes. In my land the black man is the Man, who performs generation after generation the super stunt of continuing to exist, to multiply among the pain and the heat. Noire is a river where others come to fish, but they do not swim with us."

    "Touch me while you talk. Please, Happy."

    He touched her white flank, from which the reflected red pulsing had ebbed. "In the village," he said, in his weariness surrendering to the first words that came, "we were always touching one another, uncles and sisters and friends, and then at thirteen the boys earn the right to sleep as an age-set, in the long house. I often think of your brother, the sadness of him sleeping alone, in a room all his. To emerge from such solitude into sexuality must be a great arrival, greater than in other nations, too poor to have so many rooms. And then the middle-aged of America do not touch either. At the end, the nurses and doctors handle you. It is a sign the darkness of the womb is being approached again."

    She turned her back and her skin felt cold as a snake's. She had wanted to talk about marriage.

    Pyrolusite, goethite, antimonite, quartz: Sidi Mukhtar named the crystals, winking. "Much treasure." He tapped the cliff. He had once fallen in with Rommel's armies and been trained in geology, in Erdivissenschaft.

    He had grown fond of the anzad player and her little protector. He was sorry to see them leave the caravan. But the dread time had come.

    At the same moment, Ellellou later learned from reliable sources, Michaelis Ezana was making his way through the midnight corridors of the Palais d'Administration des Noires. He had persuaded his guards, two Golo simpletons who had been shifted from the rat-killing detail at one of the surplus-peanut mounds on the plains near Also-Abid, that a six o'clock martini was a kind of internal ablution which should, for ultimate purity, be taken with the saldt al-maghrib.

    Day by day he increased the proportion of gin to vermouth to the point where the stout fellows, hardened imbibers of honey beer, toppled. His way was clear. As once before in these pages, as perceived from this same window, the muezzins' twanging call echoed under the cloudless sky as under a darkening dome of tile. Rather than risk confrontation with the soldiers and their doxies quartered in the fourth-floor corridor, who, if not fully alerted to the nuance shifts of inner-circle leadership in Kush, certainly had caught the smoky whiff of tabu that now attached to Ezana, he, by a series of ripping, knotting, and measuring actions that like certain of these sentences were maddeningly distended by seemingly imperative refinements and elaborations in the middle, constructed a rope of caftans and agals and descended, through the silver kiss of the last moon of Safar, down the wall, in his terrified descent accompanied by his indifferent shadow, a faint large bat-shape whose feet touched his abrasively.

    Ezana attained, without the makeshift rope's breaking, a window of the third floor, which housed the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities.

    As he had in descending prayed, the window was unfastened; or, rather, the catch had long since come loose from the wood, baked by the daily heat to the friability of clay. He pushed it open with a crackle and, trembling, dropped to the floor inside.

    Few visited the Museum but nostalgic reactionaries. The leather trappings on the French parade harness had been nibbled and consumed by the starving. The little model, meant to scandalize with its penury, of the typical servants' hut circa 1910 had been carefully dismantled and smuggled outside to serve as shelter for a family of Istiqlal's urban homeless. The torturing apparatus, dominated by a gaunt dental drill, and the guillotine, Gothic pinnacle of Gallic justice, cast the longest shadows as the Minister of the Interior stole barefoot among the dusty museum cases. The cases contained lumps of rubber and gypsum and other raw materials gouged from Noire by naked workers (shown in a miniature tableau, balsa-wood bodies expiring of exhaustion at the mouth of a papier-mache mine) paid a few centimes a day. An entire case was filled with centimes.

    Another case held only imperialist mustaches and monocles; these latter winked as Ezana's shadow soundlessly passed. The next case held emptied bottles of the colons' ungodly poisons-absinthe, cognac, champagne, Per-rier water; their glimmer was doused and rekindled again as Ezana, his heart thumping, slid by. In other cases, more darkly, lurked Bibles and missals in their pernicious range of sizes and languages; displayed with them, wittily, were the ledgers of the army of the profiteers, the plantation managers, the concessionnaires, the export-import agencies, the factors of European cloth and cutlery in the remote villages, the shipping lines that creakily plied the Grionde. Ezana had once made a study of these ledgers, and after some consultation with Ellellou had suppressed this curious finding: none showed a profit. On paper, colonialism was a distinctly losing venture. The cost of the armies, the administrators, the flags, the forts, the bullets, the roads, the quinine, the imported knives, forks, and spoons, quite outweighed the grudging haul of raw materials and taxes elicited from the unprincipled, evasive chiefs and stubbornly inefficient populace. The most rapacious ex- ploiter of them all, King Leopold, who permitted appalling atrocities in an attempt to balance his books, had to be rescued from bankruptcy. As the colonies were jettisoned into independence, the ledgers of the metropolitan capitals registered distinct relief. The most outre region of France Outre-mer, Noire, had been, in Paris, a minor statistical nuisance.

    Why, then, had the oppressors come? As Ezana moved barefoot through the deserted museum, the nagging question merged with the discomfort in his feet, their soles, for too many years cradled in Italian leather, made tender by the daring descent down the rough inner face of the Palais. The Europeans had come, it seemed, out of simple jealousy; the Portuguese had a fort or two, so the Danes and Dutch had to have forts.

    Egypt fell to the British, so the French had to have the Sahara; because the British had Nigeria, ihe Germans had to have Tanganyika. But what, then, was there to do with these vast tracts? Drain swamps, shoot elephants, plant cocoa, clear the way for missionaries. In Noire these activities had been carried forward in the most attenuated way: there were few swamps, and fewer elephants. Nevertheless the Gauls had gone through the motions, and a handful of Frenchmen who at home would have been outcasts here established, on the backs of blacks little more aware of their presence than of flies on their skins, a precarious, shrill self-importance. A case in the museum held whips, ranging from the brutal cicotte, a length of hippo hide for flogging plantation workers into line, to the dainty silken fouet with which a regional administrator's wife could chastise one of her maidservants, knots having been artfully braided into the ends of the threads. The next case contained obscene accessories of a brothel in Hurriyah maintained for white militia and laborers by the dusky autochtones.

    Contact, of a sort, had been made. Civilization like an avalanche of sludge had collapsed into the blank clean places of the maps. Skins rubbed as among sleepers with shut lids, thrashing and tugging at the covers. Along one dark wall there were great maps of the sub-Saharan empires, Songhai and Mali and Kanem-Bornu; these too had been imposed from beyond and their rise and fall punctuated by the severing of many an ear, hand, and head. On this same wall hung daguerreotypes gone coppery and quaint, of frilly picnics in the bush, of military parades aligning multitudinous buttons, of a painter in the goatee and slack white shirt of the fin de siecle scrupulously loading his easel with an Impressionist rendering of a beehive hut and a baobab tree. Stealthily past these images of an out-of-date intermingling Ezana crept, pondering the meaning of colonialism, the impossibility that a nation with the sublime literature and cuisine of France would subdue a scruffy sixth of an ungrateful continent in order to create flattering jobs for a few adventurous dregs, and the concomitant possibility that now this great land of Kush existed solely to give employment to a few revolutionary elitists like himself. The memorials of imperial atrocities stretched out their shadows as if not to let him go as he eased back the massive hexagonal bolt on a door beneath an oil portrait of Governor Faidherbe, action shots of the Hourst expedition, and photostats of especially atrocious pages from Colonel Toutee's famous diary. Ezana let himself stealthily into the corridor. It was empty. The flaking white ceiling, the green molding at the level of his hand, diminished toward infinity. Ghostly in his dirty prisoner's robe, his eyes bugging in his curvilinear face, his wristwatch holding the exact time to the second behind its own black face, Ezana moved close to the wall, pondering Ellellou, his leader's far journey, the unlikelihood that he would reach his destination. He pondered his own survival, weighed the odds against a Palais coup.

    But Ezana had no wish to lead. To advise, to raise quiet objections while chocolate quietly cooled, to train typists, sign directives, pull rafts of allied statistics from the consoles of filing cabinets, to see a nation and all its nebulous load of baffled human consciousness reduced to rigorous alignments of nouns and numbers, and furthermore to dress like a dignitary, to appear on an odd denomination of postage stamp, and to have an embezzled fortune banked against the Day of Disaster in a numbered Swiss account-all this he liked, but not to lead. A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish; hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. Ezana furthermore didn't see that leadership was very productive or progressive; the results that truly changed the condition of mankind were achieved by anonymous men, accumulators of correct facts and minute improvements, men of unspectacular gifts who add the culminating touch and arrive at the nearly obvious conclusion while the charismatic sloganeers and lightning rods of the media go through their symbolic motions-paper gods consumed by the primeval conflagration of human curiosity. They could be scrapped in a minute, but there would always be a place for a man like him.

    He crept along the corridor, and came at last to a stairway. Day-Glo-orange arrows pointed down and signs in six languages said down only.

    Ezana had reason to ask himself if indeed he did have a place. In his cheap robe of old merikani, its folds tapping his shaking knees and spherical buttocks, he felt transposed into that spatially vague afterlife so monotonously guaranteed by the rambling Mohamet. Did the stairway go down to the girls' high school or to the prison where dissident rural chiefs and adolescents addicted to contraband comic books underwent laborious courses of political reeducation, with seminars on the Thousand Uses of the Peanut and the Thought of Josef Stalin thrown in for second offenders? Ezana had no business in either of these places; his education felt complete. Against all official indications he took the stairway up, to the floor where his old offices were. The image of his old suite-the shag carpet, the glass-topped desk, the In basket, the Out basket, and the little tree of rubber stamps beside the postage scales-burned in his mind like an oasis in the imagination of a desert traveller. Once seated in that place, he could regrasp the levers of government. Ellellou, however far away, would feel the nation rumble under his feet, the gears of progress re-engaged. The contretemps concerning Gibbs and Klipspringer would pass like a woman's petulance.

    He and Ellellou needed one another as the earth needs the sky, as the traveller needs the camel.

    One determines, the other implements. Already Ezana was beginning to feel snug, nestled back into place and reconnected to the power terminals.

    The first thing he must implement, he saw with sudden executive clarity, was the cooling of Klipspringer.

    These Americans, they talk in billions, but turn out to have been "brainstorming." No matter: the quick winds of Washington would blow him away, and another bargainer would take his place. As for the Russians, he would work to rid Kush of their boisterous mischief. Obstructionists and familiars of confusion, profiteers of all disarray, they were behind this melancholy distraction of the President, Ezana had no doubt. The superparanoids, he had once amusingly called the world's present subdividers. He found them both gross, compared to the old imperialist powers, who in their chilly country houses and baroque chancelleries at least had partitioned the outgunned continents while being served delicacies beside which borscht and hamburger were so much dogfood. He was hungry, Ezana realized.

    He wound his way through three echoing turns of the cast-iron spiral stairs and came to a door of riveted plates, each stamped with Art Nouveau efflorations. These noodly motifs the French had brought, along with military science, the metric system, and punctilio. This door swung open at a touch. Why? Ezana wondered if his guards might have awoken from their comas and alerted the authorities. But what authorities? The carpeted corridors, with their water-coolers and framed citations for bureaucratic excellence, their cork bulletin boards shingled with yellowing, curling inter-office memos and facetiously annotated clippings from Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, were empty at this hour, like a valley whose inhabitants have fled before the rumored invader could materialize. The narrow door of Ellellou's ascetic office was shut, its frosted glass inscrutable, intact, dark.

    But behind the larger glass of Ezana's own office door, two dozen steps along the corridor, past a circular table holding copies of Cuban and Bulgarian magazines whose covers featured tawny beauties beaded with water on the beaches of the Black and Caribbean seas, a light burned. A guttural laugh, as from a ditch, arose within. He put his ear-abnormally small and infolded, even for a black man-against the glass. He heard beneath Kutunda's laugh another voice, male, loudly at ease.

    They were waiting for him, a party was in progress.

    Delicately Ezana opened the door and moved through his old anteroom to the inner office. There he was greeted by the dazzling sight of Kutunda in lacy red underwear, her hair bleached platinum and teased to a bouffant mass, bringing a wire basket of papers, like a cocktail waitress bringing hors d'oeuvres, to the man behind the desk. This was the oval-faced young man who had once read the Koran to the king; he still wore his plum-colored fez and his expression of dense ebony calm, though in his hand was held, black and white and faintly blue, a gun.

    "We need each other," he told Michaelis Ezana.