Soon the others had gotten so far ahead that I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I couldn’t hear their chatter and ululating calls to one another. I was alone and damned near lost in the middle of the jungle, and I was growing angry. Furious.
I felt like Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and almost laughed out loud at the thought. Woodrow in his pith helmet and eyeglasses as Bogie? But I slipped and skidded and stumbled on, and after a while, a half-hour or so, the path brought me face to face with a palisade nearly eight feet high, made of thick poles roughly cut and peeled and lashed together with vines. The path split right and left alongside the wall, with no indication of which way led to the entrance to the village. I could see on the farther side of the wall thatched roofs like conical hats and the green leafy tops of fruit trees and caught the aroma of wood smoke and roasting meat.
I chose to go left and, like a princess locked out of her castle, made my way along the wall, looking for the drawbridge or gate, a doorway, a hole in the wall, a tunnel — any way in. I heard drumming, high, thin, rapid-fire patters at first, then a heavy bass drum joined in, and the click of sticks on a log, and singing — those high-pitched female ululations orchestrated cleanly into a chorus now. The sun shone aslant in the sky, behind the trees, but it was still very hot and humid, and I was sweating and muddy. The mud had a cold, metallic stink to it. I took off my shoes, and carrying them like pathetic gifts, one in each hand, walked along the path barefoot, whimpering with frustration and anger and confusion. Where was the damned gate? Where had everyone gone? What was going on in there? Why hadn’t Woodrow or someone, anyone, stayed back to lead me into the village? It was turning into one of those awful dreams of rejection and repressed rage that you think will never end. When, after walking for what seemed like hours but could not have been more than twenty minutes, I realized that I had actually walked full circle around the village without having come to a door or a gate and had arrived back where I had started, and I was suddenly afraid.
There must have been something important said or done back at the car that I utterly missed, I thought. I’d been distracted, confused, when we came to the river, not paying attention. Back there, when we crossed the river, a gesture, some sort of instruction or lead, must have been given to me by Woodrow or Satterthwaite or by one of the people who greeted us, something that would have told me what to say and do when we arrived and thus, as a result of my not having said or done it, would explain what was happening to me now. I must have unintentionally insulted Woodrow or his people. Perhaps I offended one of their ancestors or broke one of their taboos. Good Lord, I thought, this is Alice’s Wonderland — the rules are different here, and I haven’t a clue as to what they are, and everything I do is wrong!
Barefoot and muddy, sweating and scared, my shoes in my hands, my hair damp and in stringy tangles, I grimaced and began half to laugh over my plight and half to cry. I felt like a traveler from another planet whose compatriots had left for home too soon. A shadow crossed mine, and when I turned there was a slender boy of fourteen or fifteen standing beside me. He was silent and motionless, as if he’d been transported there by magic. Shirtless and barefoot, wearing little more than a loincloth, he was a pretty, almost girlish-looking boy who smiled slightly and gestured for me to follow him. Turning, he walked gracefully downhill a short ways, looked back once to be sure that I was coming along behind, then stepped into the bushes and disappeared into the bright greenery, and when I arrived at the place where he’d become invisible, I saw a narrow footpath and took it.
In seconds, the path had joined a wider path, a trail, actually, that soon broadened and swept beneath a head-high, earthen trestle overgrown with ferns and tall grasses. As I passed beneath the bridgelike structure, I glanced up and saw the high palisade above it and realized that in my search for an entrance to the village I had simply walked across the top of it and had missed the gate entirely. I followed my lissome guide under the bridge and entered the village of Fuama.
It was a large, circular compound of ten or twelve daub-and-wattle, whitewashed, windowless huts, each with a single, low doorway facing a packed dirt yard the size of a basketball court. A crowd of people, which I recognized as the same crowd that had greeted us when we first stepped from the car, was loosely gathered around a fire pit. Two large, skinned, piglike carcasses, headless and without hoofs, were slung across the red coals alongside a fifty-gallon drum whose steaming contents I could not see but assumed was a soup or stew, made no doubt from the heads, hoofs, and innards of the beasts roasting on the fire. While the children mostly held hands and watched in silence from the edge of the crowd, men and women of all ages drank from gourds and soda pop bottles, laughing and talking excitedly with one another and every few seconds breaking into scraps of song. It was a party, a drunken celebration. Off to one side were the drummers — four sweating, muscular, young men — eyes closed, heads thrown back, as if each were chained to a private, throbbing world of sound. And there, behind the drummers, rising above the crowd on a dais at the entrance to a hut significantly larger than the others, stood a very tall, elderly man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and trousers, four older women in colorful wraps, and Woodrow.
Standing next to Woodrow and slightly behind him, yet making herself visible to the crowd, was a young woman with a thick, pouty upper lip. A naked baby was perched on her wide, outslung hip. The woman was very dark, almost plum colored, with glistening hair that was braided and coiled like a nest of black snakes and wore a bright yellow-and-white sash across her bare breasts. She stared at me unblinking. Everyone else seemed not even to notice my presence. Woodrow, too, ignored me. Or perhaps he just hasn’t noticed my arrival yet, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t notice my absence in the first place.
I flipped a small, discreet wave in his direction. Over here, Woodrow! He saw me. I know he saw the tall white woman standing at the edge of the crowd. How could he have missed me, for heaven’s sake? But he seemed to look right through my body, as if it were transparent, a pane of glass between him and his people.
I didn’t know what to do. I turned to my guide, the boy who had brought me here, and said, “What should I do?”
He smiled sweetly and shrugged.
“Do you speak English?”
He nodded yes and said, as if reciting from a textbook, “I learn it at missionary school. I go to missionary school.”
“Like Woodrow. Mr. Sundiata.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Albert,” he said. “I am Sundiata, too. Same like Woodrow. My father and Woodrow’s brother the same-same.”
“Should I go over there?” I asked. When I pointed towards Woodrow and the others on the dais, they were stepping down from the low platform and entering the hut, one by one.
Albert shrugged again. Smoke from the fire bit at my eyes, and my nostrils filled with the smell of roasting meat. The women in the crowd had resumed their high-pitched singing, and the drumming rose in volume with them. A wizened, toothless old man shoved a gourd in front of my face, and the vinegary smell of palm wine momentarily displaced the smoke and the aroma of the meat. I grabbed the gourd and took a sip from it and shivered from the sudden effect, felt my heart race, and found the courage to make my way quickly through the lively crowd towards the hut.
I passed through the low doorway and stood inside. It was dark, and I thought I was alone in the room. Tricked. A prisoner. The hut was stifling hot, the air heavy with the sour smell of human sweat. I stepped away from the entrance, let in a band of sunlight, and saw Woodrow seated on a low stool against the far wall. On either side of him, also on low stools, sat the tall, elderly man and the eldest of the four women. The others, including the young woman with the baby, lay on mats on the floor nearby, watching me.