“Yes.”
“And Po Tolo … Now, one last question—” I waited.
“Is your grandmother black?”
“What, Dr. Harris-Fulbright, does that have to do with anything?” I asked wearily.
She spoke even more carefully then. “It happens that in virtually all authentically regressed past lives, the remembered past life is of the same race as that of the living person being regressed.”
“I see.” Hackles quieting back into place. “The answer is yes, my grandmother is black.”
“Mr. March, may I ask what your field is?”
“I will receive a master’s in English in May.”
“And what do you plan to do then?”
“I plan to write.”
“I see.”
I suddenly felt that I may have been rashly naïve and lacking a safe course forward.
I
spent the afternoon and evening at the little desk in the library stacks. On the way in, I had passed the young woman who had brought me the two books on reincarnation.
“I found another book for you,” she said, and handed me the book while affording me a smile that, given my recent deportment, I didn’t deserve.
“Thank you,” I responded, and headed to the stacks where I planned to work on my thesis before opening the book that the young woman had given me. This would require a measure of discipline. The business of the dream and what I’d already begun to map out in the way of a literary piece based on it was claiming more and more of my time as my thesis deadline rushed toward me.
It was a thin volume, more a précis of sorts, as it turned out, than a book.
Two eminent French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, had written it eight years after my grandmother had her Dogon dream. The writers had traveled to Mali several times over a four-year period to study “the cosmological theories of the Dogon.” Among the Dogon authorities they spoke with were a seventy-year-old
ammayana
(priestess of the Amma religion), a sixty-five-yearold patriarch, and two forty-five to fifty-year-old priests.
I used a yellow highlighter to underscore sections of the brief report in which Griaule and Dieterlen took care to quote the Dogon authorities directly.
The star (Po Tolo) which is considered to be the smallest thing
in the sky is also the heaviest: “Digitaria (Po Tolo) is the
smallest thing there is. It is the heaviest star.” It consists of a
metal called sagala which is a little brighter than iron and so
heavy “that all earthly beings combined cannot lift it.”
The four Dogon authorities described to the French anthropologists a third star in what is now known to the West as the Sirius System. They told Griaule and Dieterlen that relative to Po Tolo, the third star, Emme Ya, was:
Four times as light (in weight) and travels along a greater trajectory
in the same direction and in the same time as it (fifty
years). Their respective positions are such that the angle of
their radii is at right angles.
Griaule and Dieterlen were shown a drawing by the Dogon of Jupiter and its moons:
This figure represents the planet—the circle—surrounded by
its four satellites in the collateral directions and called Dana
Tolo Unum, “Children of Dana Tolo” (Jupiter).
With respect to the planet Saturn, a Dogon drawing showed Saturn’s halo, or ring, which can only be seen from Earth through a telescope.
The paper went on to establish that the Dogon had a vast knowledge of the cosmos for thousands of years, and that this knowledge held for the Dogon a great religious significance.
Every sixty years, the Dogon hold a ceremony called the Sigui
(ceremony). Its purpose is the renovation of the world …
Since the beginning of this investigation, we were faced with
the question of determining the method used to calculate
the period separating two Sigui ceremonies. The common
notion, which dates to the myth of creation, is that a fault
in Yougo rock, situated at the center of the village of Yougo
Dogorou, lights up with a red glow in the year preceding the
ceremony …
I was tired and having difficulty concentrating on the section of the four-page writing that focused purely on the arcane religious beliefs of the Dogon for which I was equipped with no cultural frame of reference. The sections, however, that documented the Dogon’s long mastery of the science of the cosmos were clear enough to me; even in the sleep-deprived state from which I had fruitlessly sought relief weeks ago from a doctor at the Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center.
It was half past nine and growing late. I had promised Jeanne that I would call that day. Packing up my materials while reflecting upon what I had just read, I remembered a question that the author Robert K.G. Temple had raised in his new book from St. Martin’s Press,
The Sirius Mystery
: “How did the Dogon know such extraordinary things and did it mean that the Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials?” To Temple, even the far-fetched infinitesimal possibility of an extraterrestrial visit to the Dogon was more likely than any notion that the Dogon people, 700 years in residence beneath Mali’s Bandiagara escarpment, had developed a comprehensive knowledge of the existence and working of an interplanetary universe well in advance of the Western white world.
Then, of course, there was the further question of how my blind grandmother had come to know these things, again, well before the white scientists had made their “discoveries.”
I only hoped that Dr. Harris-Fulbright, who understood more than conventional scientists did about the existence of alternative realms of knowledge, would be more successful than Robert K.G. Temple had been in overcoming what I saw to be the convenient impediment of unconscious prejudice.
The telephone rang for the second time that evening, startling me. I sat up, rested my hand on the receiver, and took a deep breath.
It was Jeanne.
“You promised to call.” Said lightly. Sure of herself.
“I was just about to when my cousin called.” I considered saying more but elected not to.
“Caught you at a bad time?”
“No, not at all. I can’t tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”
“What’s your day like tomorrow?”
“Well, I have to listen to my poets in the morning. The deadline looms near.” I sounded glib and was not proud of myself. She seemed to intuit that I was hiding something.
“Then let’s spend the afternoon together. It’s supposed to be warm and sunny. How about it?”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard since last night, which, by the way, was the best evening I’ve had in a long time.”
“Tomorrow then. Pick me up?”
“Of course. Two o’clock?”
“Yes.
À bientôt
.” And she was gone.
It occurred to me later that Jeanne had guessed that I was a poor graduate student whose furthered education was made possible by loans, grants, and a small work-study wage. I don’t know how she came to know this, but I was sure she had learned, before our afternoon together, roughly what my financial circumstances were. This would have been easy enough for her to infer from the look of alarm on my face when I was presented with the check at the Poinciana. I suspected then that she had seen this and not known quite what to do, before finally deciding that it would only have made matters worse to try and help me.
I have been told by people close to me that my face remains impassive when I am feeling emotions like fear and anger. (I am not sure, however, how I look when merely alarmed, as opposed to being mortally frightened.) Thus, it may have been that she read nothing from my face when I learned that the check exceeded fifty dollars. All I know is that she knew I was all but penniless. After all, I had told her during dinner what my father, the sole March family breadwinner, did for a living.
I am certain it was for these reasons that she suggested we spend the afternoon “taking advantage of the glorious sunshine.”
We drove downtown and walked to the water and along the quay. Afterward, we spent two hours in a public park, biding the afternoon hours, walking, sitting, talking—talking easily about a range of things, serious and frivolous.
I often found myself looking long at her when she could not see me doing so. I remember doing this as she was talking very smartly, I thought, about the relative merits of communism and capitalism for common people. “You know, Gray, no economic system, created by humans, can effectively rein in greed.”
We talked about this for a while (as if it mattered what we talked about) before meandering into art, followed by the music of James Brown, the various foods we liked (Chinese, Indian, Caribbean, soul), religion (ritual Christians, but spiritual in the main), table games (we agreed they were crutches for the socially challenged), cross-cultural relationships (which we self-servingly thought could be made to work), sports (she pretended interest, I disinterest, both done feebly), smoking (the most repellent of personal habits), and, as it grew dark, Lorraine Hansberry (whose play-based movie
A Raisin in the Sun
we would see later that night at a small downtown art cinema).
She moved across subjects, large and piddling, with intelligent ease and without the hard leaden judgments usually born nonbiodegradable of incurious minds, sharp only to decide the inherently undecidable. I thought as I regarded her that her parents must have kissed her spirit often and unconditionally when she was very young; formed her, loved her to walk effortlessly in the smooth cocoabrown skin she wore like the confidence that seemed for her an innate gift.
Whatever it was that she exuded was to a degree transferable. I felt better when I was around her. It was as if the war of negative mutually destructive reflex behaviors that had doomed the only serious relationship I’d had would not visit this one. Jeanne was
whole
with no need to reduce or excavate those who happened into her magnetic field.
I was wary, however, owing to a painful relationship I had endured with a decent respectable girl from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, named Derma Innis. Derma, a classmate at Morgan, was a big, gorgeous athletic type who did not relish a life in the world of ideas, and only viewed her disinterest in such as
incompleteness
upon coming into sustained contact with me, whom she claimed to love, but actually resented greatly for reminding her by example of what she was not. She required being rock certain about any number of things and people. To stay on top of this formidable responsibility, she dispensed with large groups of things and people with wild categorical verdicts, starting most of her sentences with
They are, Men are, Women are, Blacks are, Whites
are
, and, finally, inevitably,
You are
.
She had once told me: “I bet you think you’re smart enough to be the president of the United States,” which was true enough, and a self-assessment I had counted as an important personal asset. She hated this sort of thing in me for reasons that made us, as a couple, a good deal less than the sum of our two quite different and fundamentally incompatible parts.
I was, for her, the funhouse mirror that I had not wished to be, and that which she hated, because its reflection of her distorted large her failings. Over time her affections became more and more extractive, demanding. But I had no expendable part of me available for sacrifice to her needs. I was in trouble all by myself and had been for years.
For me, there is nothing in the world more beautiful in a woman than an insatiably curious intellect accompanied by an elegant self-possession. Not only is the possessor of such traits worthy of admiration, but the gifted soul is also more fully free to return affection without compromising important interior defenses.
This is how I saw Jeanne. She was
free
. And without so much as trying. She was pretty, of course, and this, I confess, counted for something—well, a great deal in fact. But her physical appearance would have meant little to me had she not had the other qualities that were essential to sustaining one’s interest.
By the time we reached the park in the mid-afternoon of April 3, 1970, the temperature had soared to an unseasonable eighty-two degrees. The buds on the giant oak trees had cracked but not yet opened. The sun, finding its strength, bore down with no relief to be found beneath the trees’ naked boughs. We sat on a bench atop a knoll overlooking a small placid pond of gliding ducks quacking lazily as if they too had registered the dramatic change in weather. I wore a cotton windbreaker, and Jeanne a fashionable mauve sweatshirt that she took off and draped over the shoulders and back of her short-sleeved sport blouse. I threw my windbreaker across the back of the bench. We were quiet, watching the park’s peace. Our upper arms came close to touching, and then slowly, searchingly drew themselves very lightly together in a way that stoked my nervous system and evacuated a thought I could not thereafter reconstruct. Our arms stayed together like that, unremarked, as if they had achieved safe docking from a perilous sea voyage.
I experienced then an emotion that was almost entirely foreign to me. It brought with it a surge of euphoria so intense that I became mildly dizzy, and may have been dumbstruck as well, had I, at the sensation’s apex, attempted to speak. I knew, in that extrasensory way that one knows such things that Jeanne was feeling much the same. The outward indications of this were such that neither of us uttered so much as a word, or moved, even slightly, or looked away from the little pond that now held for us some great and enormous sentimental significance because it was what we were watching when our unclad arms touched for the first time.
In a nervously awkward motion, I moved the arm that had touched hers across the top of the slated bench. Looking still toward the lake, she nestled back into the cup of my shoulder. I rested my cheek against the soft, sculpted crown of her natural, unspoiled hair.
We stayed like this for an indeterminate time, speaking finally as if we had been transiting the same thought, however improbable that may have been.