The Message

The bus from Kitgum to Gulu is full. Babies squeal, half-naked in the heat, chubby ebony limbs flailing in the air, grimy colored beads tight around their wrists, tummies, and ankles, shiny big white eyes. Everything they see is new, a miracle, and they squeal out in delight and fright. They wrap themselves tightly around their mothers’ necks like scarves, as the mothers flap hankies in their faces to swat away flies sucking at the babies’ sweet saliva and tears. Acheing sees herself in every baby’s face, with all this newness bubbling in her head. Even though she has taken hundreds of suffocating bus rides like this, full of the smells of chicken shit and overripe bananas, raw meat wrapped in banana leaves, powdery sacks of millet, maize, and cassava flour, and the acrid smell of cloistered humanity, even so, she is like a baby, wide-eyed and wondering. What put all these things together, here, right now? Who arranged this chaos? It can’t be random that she and these babies all happen to be here, can it? They are all her babies, it is now clear. How selfish she had been to desperately want her own children, when she could mother the whole world.

The journey back home isn’t long, only three hours, and sleep soon possesses her. Her head lolls and swings with each bump of the bus, accompanied by an angry shift of gears and the slamming of breaks. Her eyes burst open, hardly seeing, then close again, as back down into sleep she sinks, though her body remains stiff, in readiness for the next bump, and the next, and the next. God bless these rough roads. God bless the dusty way home. God prepare her father for her and her message. God let her sleep, and not dwell too much on what is to come: the old man’s disapproving face, as thick and expressionless as a large hammer. No—better to think of the babies’ wide-open eyes instead. Better to disappear into sleep.

They arrive with a rough, rude swerve into the Gulu bus park, and the late afternoon clamor enters right into her head, kicking her out of sleep. Bus conductors call for customers, throats cut with dust, and sellers shout the specialness of their chewing gum, condoms, and sugar water, newspapers, cough sweets, and cigarettes, and fling black buveera to carry anything, everything, in everybody’s faces. The cacophony of noises clogs the air, already thick with humid heat. A bald-headed boy swerves his boda boda right into her path, and stops right there, placing a slippered foot on the [End Page B-106] ground like a dancer, and grins up at her, his teeth so sharp it’s as if they have been intentionally filed to points.

The Dance between Truth and Lies. Gesso, oil, encaustic on canvas, 72 × 54 inches. © 2007 Noah Jemisin. Courtesy of Skoto Gallery. www.skotogallery.com

“Madam, we go?” His eyes squint in the sun as he looks up at her, and the effort turns his solicitous grin into an open-mouthed grimace.

“You know the Church of the Ancestors in Christ?” she asks.

“Who doesn’t?”

Noisily, with quick jerks, he turns his bike around towards the road, covering their feet with a fine layer of dust. She clambers on, her wide hips and long-boned body almost tipping the bike over. It is almost too big for [End Page B-107] the boy to steady, but he does; his ashy limbs are stronger than they look. They ride off the main tarmacked road, turning onto another one hard-packed with smooth red soil, with a long, thin mohawk of grass running down the middle, where car tires can’t mow it down. Trees line the roadside, bringing such welcome cool.

“Aren’t you the Reverend’s daughter?”

“How would you know?”

“You have been away a long time.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been working on this road for a year and I haven’t taken you.” She kept silent. Did this boy think he was police?

“You know...