Chapter I
From Part I, mid-Chapter 2
They made their way into Freetown proper—a sprawling shantytown of some 400,000 inhabitants. Gradually, the shack-like wooden dwellings gave way to an incongruous mish-mash of stone, fortress-like, multistory government buildings of a dirty, dark gray; rickety old wooden commercial establishments of a weathered dark brown; and the occasional two and three-story so-called Victorian-style structures, so dilapidated that Queen Victoria would have shuddered at the comparison. Entering another roundabout, they slowed to a crawl behind a line of cars, bicycles, hand-pulled wooden carts, and all manner of primitive animal- and man-powered vehicles.
“Dae di Cotton Tree,” said Johnny Conga. “Aand dae di weech birds flyin’ roun di top.”
And there it was, an enormous tree, standing in the center of the roundabout surrounded by a white-washed concrete fence. It wasn’t just the enormous size that stood out but the shape and girth of the trunk: massive yet gnarled, with sinewy, cylindrical bands running up, down and around like a boa constrictor in the act of squeezing its prey. Cut between the bands were deep crevices that evoked an image of flood-filled tributaries of a major river system—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, mysterious and foreboding. The giant tree’s branches spread out and up some fifty feet above the street, partially obscuring the buildings on both sides. At the very top, a swarm of what looked like large birds circled in a frenzy. The air was turgid with their sinister squealing.
“By the way, those are not birds up there,” said Peter Hanes, lowering his window and allowing in the hot, steamy mid-morning air. “They’re fruit bats and ugly as sin. They also hang out in the trees outside the Finance Ministry. You can see them up close from the terrace outside the Minister’s office.”
“Weech birds baad. Di man who look get di curse,” said Johnny.
“If we don’t get the hell out of here real fast,” said Porter irritatedly, “we’re goin’ to curse you cause we’ll miss the Board Meeting.” Just then the traffic began to move, Johnny hit the gas pedal in response to Porter’s urgings and the Chevrolet lunged ahead, nearly hitting the car in front.
“Easy, man, easy!” Hanes yelled. “I don’t want to wind up in the hospital.”
“No, you sure as hell don’t, not here in Freetown,” said Porter as he lowered his window and took out a fresh pack of cigarillos. “Richard, would you mind if I smoke? I can aim it out the window.” He apparently couldn’t do without them.
“No, I don’t mind. My stomach’s back to normal. Say, is that the harbor I see down there between those buildings?”
They entered what looked like a main drag lined with dilapidated buildings and huckster-like stalls. Suddenly, horns blew. Dogs barked. Street vendors loudly hawked their wares, and everywhere cold-black bodies scurried about frantically.
“This is the main commercial street,” said Peter Hanes. “The banks are here. The B’Cal and UTA offices are here. You can change your tickets...”
“Meestah, Maastah, Maastah, Meestah, you have small-small fo me?” chanted two shirtless little boys in sandals and rope-tied trousers. They stuck their heads into the open car window just as Porter was exhaling a billowy mouthful of cigar smoke. “Geeve me cigarette, Maastah. We help you truu di maarket place queek queek.” But Porter backed away from the window, closing it quickly, allowing some of the smoke to remain in the car. Richard and Peter Hanes both immediately opened their windows to avoid the smoke, and at that, the two little kids ran to the other side, skillfully dodging oncoming vehicles and eliciting a loud chorus of car horns. “White maan neeed guide fo maarket place...” But before the two of them could make their full pitch, Johnny Conga turned with an angry scowl, and in unrecognizable, rapid-fire speech, sent them scurrying off to some other cars following behind.
“Say, what language was that Johnny was speaking?” Richard asked, turning to Porter, who was tossing out his cigarillo.
“I thought you were a linguist,” said Porter with a wide grin.
“That was Krio,” said Hanes. “One of three different dialects. They’re determined by the level of education. The upper-class, educated professionals speak both English and Krio, but their Krio is made up mostly of English root words. Johnny’s Krio is a patois with Spanish, Portuguese, French and a large smattering of Mende and Temne, the two largest local tribes. Of course, the official language is English, as Sierra Leone was a British colony until 1961. And...”
“And now it’s a Lebanese colony,” Porter quipped as he looked at his watch. “We’ve got just fifteen minutes, and we haven’t even reached the market place.”
“Maybe we should have engaged those two little entrepreneurs back there,” Hanes said.
“You won’t find a better guide in Freetown than Johnny here,” said Porter.
“Yessah,” responded Johnny, grinning widely.
“That’s the market place up ahead, Richard. Tell me if that’s more like what you were expecting to see,” said Porter.
They turned off the main street and headed into the market place, with its pandemonium of sensory images: lower-octave rumblings of the crowd in the background accented by the dissonant, high-pitched shouts of scores of individuals, louder and more frenzied than the trading pits of the Chicago Commodities Exchange, a bombardment of visual stimuli—fat Mammies carrying aluminum pans of unrecognizable foods on their heads, shouting, gesturing animatedly, hawking their wares; human chains of muscular young men pulling trains of overloaded carts filled with rice, beans, tomatoes, chickens and golfball-sized stones; toothless old men on gnarled canes lurking in the shadows of the shack-like stalls smoking clay pipes; a panoply of Old Macdonalds’ farm animals led along on leashes or butchered, hanging from the zinc pan corrugated roofs; smiling, pigtailed school girls dressed in dark-blue uniforms and white blouses chasing each other and their chickens, goats and pigs. All manner of goods were displayed and raucously hawked: sunglasses, toothbrushes, pencils, sandals made of old tires, pots, peppers, stuffed panda bears, braziers, compact discs, chewing gum, shoe laces, lamp shades; and everywhere hordes of blacker than black beings, writhing, surging, pushing, buzzing, like a colony of army ants suddenly disturbed by an intruder. Richard had felt it the night before at the airport and on the ferry, but it was much stronger in the light of day. He stared at them, aware that his facial muscles had tightened. He glanced at his hands, asking himself how it was that back in the States he was considered to be a “black man.”He felt suddenly sorry for them, felt fortunate that he, himself, was light-skinned. These were the hapless human beings whose ancestors had been mentioned in that brochure, the ones who were sold into slavery at the Cotton Tree centuries before. The flood of conflicting emotions must have been reflected in his expression. Porter glanced at him.
“This is the real Freetown, Richard, not the one you saw at the Mammy Yoko...”
Soon the Chevrolet was encased within that seething mass of cold black humanity, so tightly packed that they were actually nudging the Chevrolet forward. Johnny Conga opened his window, and the cacophony invaded the vehicle with a deafening roar. Johnny then leaned on the horn and shouted staccato-like commands that eventually resulted in a little opening. But before he could take advantage of it, another car began inching toward them from the opposite direction. Johnny was forced to stop as the oncoming vehicle slowly approached, pushing bodies in its wake and clearing the Chevrolet by no more than an inch or two. The Chevrolet rocked back and forth at its passage, and Richard’s stomach began to churn. He’d never before suffered from claustrophobia, but soon the symptoms appeared. He felt nauseous. His hands became soaked with sweat, and he felt an approaching panic. His chest began to rumble with extra-systolic heartbeats. Scenes from childhood Mau Mau movies flashed before him; visions of being suffocated, pummeled, torn apart by hordes of angry, black savages. He stared down at the floorboard and started counting backwards from a thousand. To no avail. The cold black beings crossed from side to side, crawling over the fenders, the hood, the trunk, rocking the car from side to side, seemingly oblivious to its presence.
Peter Hanes must have noticed Richard’s obvious distress and asked if he was all right, adding, “Don’t be alarmed, Richard. There’s really no danger. It’s just an extremely narrow passage, and there’s just no way to avoid it.”
At that, Porter burst out laughing, breaking the tension. “Peter’s a master of understatement, but actually he’s right. We’ve never had any safety problems here. It’s just very difficult to get through here any quicker, and we’ve got just six minutes till the Board meeting.”
Richard remained silent, continuing to experience the extra heartbeats.
“They know we have to drive through this,” said Peter Hanes. “If we’re late it’s perfectly understandable. Oh, now there’s a sight for you. Just look at the load on that woman’s head. Incredible and in this mob!”
“Hey, Johnny, how ‘bout you tryin’ your policeman friend like the last time?” Porter persisted, taking a wad of leones out of an envelope.
“Yessah.” Johnny took the bills, opened the door and disappeared into the sprawling mob, amidst a loud blast of car horns. The horns continued for a good thirty seconds, in spite of the fact that the cars in front of them hadn’t moved an inch. A few minutes later Johnny returned, greeted by another angry blast of car horns as he struggled to get in the car.
“Aah geeve him small-small, aand he say he goin ta help.”
“That was more than just small-small. I gave you fifty Leones. That’s ten bucks, American,” said Porter.
“Yessah.”
“And a very small price to pay, if it works,” said Peter Hanes, shaking his plastic bottle of sunscreen and then applying more to his face and neck.
A minute later, the blockage in front opened up. It wasn’t exactly like the parting of the Red Sea, but enough to get them moving slowly, continuously, as the hordes of blacker than black Africans stepped aside in slow, gradual waves, the line of cars led by a smiling policeman in a red beret. |
