“All right, I’ll do that.”
We then drew between us a silence which may have seemed, to an uninitiated observer, long and odd, but to my grandmother and me only the usual fashion in which we had sat and spoken together since I was a boy of five.
By now the sun had lifted from the floor the straight edge of brilliant light that had scored the little room minutes before into matching triangles of past and future. I no longer looked across at her from light to shadow. We sat silent in one and the same small space of diffused latemorning light. I recall noticing the absence of bird sounds, as well as the new unbroken swooshing machine sound of flying motor traffic coming from the interstate bypass which had opened blocks away little more than a year before. The doilies had yellowed with age. The vase was empty. Bric-a-brac huddled about in dusty conflict. The brown pictures of long-dead kin seemed less than ever to have had anything to do with anything. Far and away, the most bothering of the gray room’s forlorn relics was the picture of the spotted pony and the happy boy bestride it who was to become my father.
I looked up at the wall hanging with the strange symbol stamped on its coarse open weave. It lent a counterpoint of life to the gray little room in a way that was incomprehensible to me.
“Grandma, do you know what that is on the wall hanging?”
“Yes.”
“Someone told you?”
“No.”
“But you can’t see it, Grandma.”
“No.”
“Then how could you—”
“I know, son.”
“What is it, Grandma?”
“Adinkra.”
“What is …”
“Please …” Leaving now. She was drifting away from me with us sitting there physically little more than a foot apart.
“Are you all right?”
She cast her face upward, as if to pray. The sunlight shining high through the window’s upper sash relieved the deep darkness in which she endured the long waking hours. Her fingers played rhythmically back and forth across the book I had given her. I did not know whether this was a recently acquired habit born of her blindness, or an assignment by her of talismanic properties to the book in which kindred souls had been documented and called back to life.
As had always been the case with us, I would know from the language of her body when she was ready to speak of important matters, or to speak at all.
She said the word “Yes” quietly and won my undivided attention. Pronouncing the name properly, “Gray, have you heard of a city called Córdoba?”
“Yes. I think it’s in either Spain or Portugal.”
“It’s in Spain. It was where I was living as a thirty-five-year-old woman in the year 953.” The pauses lengthened. The breathing slowed and became difficult to detect. The body became utterly still. Her eyelids slowly dropped as she began to describe what she saw. “My name is Ez-ZahrÐ. My family is wealthy. The people are dark like me and control the whole of Spain. We are Berbers from North Africa. We are called Moors. Córdoba is the capital of a region called Andalusia. One of our generals named Tarik captured it with 7,000 soldiers in the year 711 from Roderick, the king of Spain. By the time I was born, Córdoba had been built by my people into the most beautiful city in Europe, rivaled only by Byzantium.”
I took from my overnight bag a pen and a small notebook. I began to write.
She spoke with the diction of universal humanity’s cultured upper crust, and with an accent that was musically foreign to me.
“While the Saxons live far away to the north and west in wooden huts with only a few monks who can read and write, the buildings of Córdoba are fashioned from jasper and marble, and stand on splendid streets behind stone walls. The water for our public gardens is supplied via leaden pipes to lakes, reservoirs, fountains of marble, and basins of gold and silver. We are, of course, Mohammedans and our Great Mosque is the most astonishing structure of its kind in all the world.
“My husband is a doctor and our large marble house stands on the banks of the Guadalquivir near a bridge that spans it beside a lush public garden of delightful flowers which are irrigated. I have two children, a girl whom we have arranged to marry into a ruling-class family and a boy who will soon begin preparation to become an officer in the army. Today, I am reading in my flower garden behind the tall stone walls that surround our compound. It is July and warm still in the late afternoon. I have not felt well today and plan to speak to my husband about this when he returns to our compound this evening. My husband has three other wives that live in other sections of the compound. I am the first, the oldest, and the most revered.”
I wrote furiously, trying to capture everything that she said. I did not own a tape recorder, but had reasoned, in any case, that she would have been unsettled by the caging of her voice. The drab little parlor contrasted so starkly with the opulence of her remembered past life that I saw her blindness for the first time as a benefit.
“I am hoping that I will feel better by the time my husband arrives. He has been invited to visit the Hall of the Khalifs this evening and has promised to take me with him. A few miles outside Córdoba stands the palace, which is the most magnificent building in a world in which Córdoba is all but unanimously recognized to be the cultural center.
“Thinking about seeing the great palace for the first time from the inside, I can no longer concentrate on the book that I am reading. I also no longer feel ill.
“I suspect that the deep malaise that has plagued me today stems from the exception my husband took so strongly this morning to what he calls my increasingly ‘difficult temperament.’ I am a woman, I know, and not expected to have such outbursts of opinion. I told him that it was my view that our people could not continue conquering and conquering from Carthage to Spain to Gaul and England. I told him that the people of the lands we have conquered do not like their low estate and will not tolerate forever existing in our thrall. I told him that despite the civilization we believe to be superior to all others, change will come as surely as the seasons follow one behind the other. I told him that while I know we are all-powerful and that we have the power to change even the vanquished’s perception of reality, we have not the power to change reality itself. For only God can do such. He said that women should not talk of matters they cannot understand, and became angry. But I did not stop there and irritated him further on the prickly subject of our people’s wealth by speaking of the term ‘greed,’ the evidence of which I will see in the palace tonight, the palace, I, like my husband, am quite proud of.”
My grandmother’s eyelids rose slowly. She shivered in a way that suggested that the shiver had bridged her back into the present. She took a deep breath and expelled the air slowly while allowing her shoulders to fall with the mannerism of a small sigh that I interpreted as a peace of sorts. Knowing nothing fitting to say, I remained silent. Her visage wore a mark of wonder her sightless eyes shone wide to complement.
She said with disbelief, “The people in the dream all looked like
us
. I was told, or somehow knew, that they were called Moors and ruled most of Europe.” She laughed, it seemed, at the absurdity of the idea. “My mother was the only person I’d ever heard say the word
Moor
about a group of people. Have you ever heard tell of it, Gray?”
“I’ve heard it, Grandma. I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard it. I heard it from you once long ago. In English literature, Shakespeare wrote a play, or was credited with writing a play, about a Venetian general who was a Moor. His name was Othello. He was black in the play, but it was just a play.”
“Well, isn’t that something? What do you s’pose this all means, dreamin’ things I never heard about, but happened?”
“I don’t know, Grandma. I know I asked you this once before, but I really don’t know. Do the dreams scare you?”
“Lawd no, son. What scares me is wakin’ up.” She smiled to herself, savoring the dream she had only just recalled to me. “My, were the people rich, rich like you never seen before. Gray, will you read up on these Moors for me and tell me about them when next you come? Will you do that, son, for your grandmother?”
I had never tried to discover from her whether or not she believed that she had actually lived the lives she dreamed about, although she had said to me many times that the dreams were very real, very different. It then occurred to me just how profoundly the dreams had affected her, and that what had inspired the transcendent contentment that set her apart from her surroundings was not the mere knowledge of past lives she had lived, but rather the more renovating knowledge of the better worlds the dreams recalled. She lived, because of this, not with mortals in the rough contemporary moment, but in the long ages where the broad experience of events averaged down all suffering.
When I was ten, I had asked her in the parlor one late Saturday afternoon, “Why, Grandma, do you call yourself African, when everybody you know or ever hear talk on the radio calls us Negroes and colored people?”
With no trace of argument or prepossession, she had answered from shadow matter-of-factly and softly, “Well, son, it’s that I’ve been African much longer than I’ve been anything else.” She’d stopped there and remained silent for a time—as if she were mulling memories of far-off discrepant existences. “You like sardines, Gray?” Asked lightly.
With no idea where she was going with this, “Love ’em. You know that, Grandma,” both of us smiling.
“Well, son, when they were fish swimmin’ in the ocean, they weren’t called sardines. Did you know that? They weren’t called sardines until they were put in cans. And we weren’t called
Negroes
until we were put in chains. Slavery’s the reason why we’re the only people in the world to be called by so many different names—and now, some not-sonice ones we’re calling each other. I’ve even heard you say the word, playing with your friends outside on the street, Gray. I’m just who I always was. Simple as that.”
Recalling the talk I’d had with my grandmother all those many years before, I thought about what Dr. Harris-Fulbright had said, that
the remembered past life is of the same
race as that of the living person being regressed.
My grandmother saw herself as the same person belonging to the same race of people. She was and had always remained African and black.
“Yes, Grandma,” I now said lightly, “I will do the research and bring you a full report on the Moors sometime between my commencement in May and my departure for Mali in July.”
“Good. Wonderful,” enjoying herself, “I hope I’m not keepin’ you too busy.”
“There is one other thing, Grandma. The woman who wrote the book I gave you. Her name is Joyce Harris-Fulbright.” I felt, as I spoke, a small inchoate twinge of guilt. “She would like to come and talk to you about your dreams.”
She asked a flat uncolored, “Why?”
“As part of her research.”
“I already know what I know. I know what I dreamed. I told you. You told her. Now she knows what I dreamed. Why would she come all the way here to hear me tell her what I told you?”
“Well … she thinks you might actually have lived before, you know …” I was floundering, “and that she could prove this if she could get from you more details about those past lives. I, I …” I stumbled, “She would like to hypnotize you.”
Her sightless eyes seemed to lock onto mine. Her open countenance sagged in broad disappointment. “What has gotten into your head, Graylon March? Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t need to prove a thing. Why would I have some stranger come here and hypnotize me?”
I did not know what to say. I felt oddly soiled, as if I had been caught in a bath of molten light priming to trade my soul for small public notice. A smarmy novice thief, called out and scorned.
“My God, son. I don’t want to be in nobody’s book. I don’t want people readin’ what some stranger has to say about me.” She sounded more grieved than angry. She stopped and swung her head in a woeful arc that took the place of the words she could not find to say. All she managed was, “Why? Why would you? Why would you betray my trust in you?”
“I—I thought—”
“You thought what, Gray?” Her voice had hardened.
“I told you that I wanted to write the story of your life and dreams. I told you a long time ago and you encouraged me, Grandma.” Cold sweat trickled crookedly from my armpits down across my ribs. My voice floated high and plaintive. Broken thoughts strained to dance away in flight.
“Gray, I have loved you as much as any mother has ever loved a child. I never wanted to be in a book. But I was willin’ to allow it because I thought it would help you to become what you wanted to become—a writer.”
“Grandma, no one will believe it if I write it, no one will publish it either.”
“Then let it not be published.”
“Then no one will ever know about the dreams, Grandma.”
“Do you think that has anything to do with my worth as a human being—or yours?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t
need
nobody to know me.
I
know me. That’s more than enough knowin’ for one person.”
“Grandma, what has happened to you is a miracle the world should know about, our people should know about.
You could expand the body of knowledge.”
“College make you talk like that? Let me tell you somethin’, son. Ambition is a good thing, but only if you really know yourself before ambition gets ahold of you and blows you about like wind in a kite. Let me make myself plain. I will not meet with your professor and I certainly will not let her or anybody else hypnotize me. You got that?
Knowledge—or what is it you said,
the body of knowledge?
— will do well enough without me, I’m sure. Okay?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
She made a dramatic gesture with her arm, punctuating her remonstrance. “You write it, son. Whether it gets published or not,
you
write it. But not to get you famous. And Lord knows, not me. Write it because you call yourself a writer, and that’s reason enough. And maybe buy yourself a hat, and check from time to time to see that you can still fit your head under it.” She winked a blind eye and made us both laugh.