“Gospel, I’m sorry,” Ms. McLeod admonished, “we are going to have to leave. Right now. Children, put your coats on. The Reverend is getting into matters that we had agreed we wouldn’t discuss in the context of Brotherhood Month.”
“Vampires are real, kids,” Reverend Blount boomed out, sounding more like Verizon than ever. “They are real, and they are living here in Minneapolis! If you just look around you will see them in their white suits and their white dresses. And they are laughing at you cause you can’t see what’s there right under your nose.”
Before she got up from her folding chair to follow Ms. McLeod out of the tabernacle, Tawana took one of the bulletins from the stack on the window sill next to her. It was the first time in her life that she had taken up any kind of reading matter without being told to. Maybe she wasn’t a kid any more. Maybe the words of Gospel Blantyre Blount, D.D., had been the water of her baptism, just like they’d talked about at the Catholic school. They said if you were baptized and you died your flesh would be raised incorruptible. That’s how she felt leaving the All-Faith Tabernacle, incorruptible.
In April the Governor declared the ten counties of the Metro area a Disaster Area and called in the National Guard to help where the roads were washed away and in those areas that had security problems, especially East St. Paul and Duluth, where there had been massive demonstrations and looting. In Shakopee, six African-American teenagers were killed when their Dodge Ram pickup was swept off Route 19 by the reborn Brown Beaver River. An estimated twelve thousand acres of productive farmland were lost in that single inundation, and the President (who had vetoed the Emergency Land Reclamation Act) was widely blamed for the damage sustained throughout the state.
Despite all these tragedies there hadn’t been one school day canceled at Diversitas, though the bus service was now optional and rather expensive. Morning after soggy morning Tawana had trudged through the slush and the puddles in her leaky Nikes, which she had thrown such a scene to get when Aunt Bima had wanted to get her a cheaper alternative at the Mall of America. Now Tawana had no one but herself to blame for her misery, which made it a lot more of a misery than it would otherwise have been.
It was only the left Nike that leaked, so if she were careful where she stepped, her foot would stay dry for the whole thirty-four blocks she had to walk. Sometimes, if it wasn’t raining too hard, she’d take a slightly longer route that passed by the CVS and other stores that had awnings she could walk under, making an umbrella unnecessary. Tawana hated umbrellas.
That longer route also took her past the All-Faiths Tabernacle and the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Cooperative on the ground floor.
There, on the day after the Governor’s declaration, the “Well-Dressed People” display had been taken down and a new display mounted. The sign this time said:
ENTERTAINMENT IS FUN—
FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!
The same white-faced mannikins, in the same white clothes, were seated in front of an old-fashioned tv set with a dinky screen, and gazing at a tape loop that showed a part of a movie that they had all had to watch at school in the film appreciation class. You could hear the music over an invisible speaker: “I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. I’m singing and dancing in the rain!” The same snippet of the song over and over as the man on the tv whirled with his umbrella about a lamp post and splashed in the puddles on the street. Maybe it was supposed to be fun, like the sign in the window said, but it only made Tawana feel more miserably wet.
The next day it drizzled, and the same actor (Gene Kelly it said at one point in the loop) was still whirling around the same lamp pole to the same music. Then, to Tawana’s astonishment, a door opened behind the tv set and a real man (but dressed in a white suit like the mannikins) stepped into the imaginary room behind the window. Tawana knew him. It was Mr. Forbush who had been the music and dance teacher at Diversitas two years earlier. His hair was shorter now and dyed bright gold. When he saw Tawana staring at him, he tipped his head to the side, and smiled, and wiggled his fingers to say hello. Then he turned round to get hold of a gigantic, bright yellow baby chick, which he positioned next to the mannikins so it, too, would be looking at Singin’ in the Rain.
When Mr. Forbush was satisfied with the baby chick’s positioning he began to fluff up its fake feathers with a battery-powered hair dryer. From time to time, when he saw Tawana still standing there under the awning, wavering between amusement and suspicion, he would aim the blow dryer at his own mop of wispy golden curls.
“Well, hello there,” said a man’s voice that seemed strangely familiar. “I believe we’ve met before.”
Tawana looked to the side, where the Reverend Gospel Blantyre Blount, D.D. was standing in a black dashiki in the shadows of the entrance to the Tabernacle.
“You’re Tawana, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Would you like something to eat, Tawana?”
She nodded again and followed the minister up the dark stairway, leaving Gene Kelly singing and spinning around in the endless rain.
Rev. Blount poured some milk powder into a big mug and stirred it up with water from a plastic bottle, added a spoonful of Swiss Miss Diet Cocoa, and put the mug into a microwave to cook. After the bell dinged, he took it out and set it front of Tawana on what would have been the kitchen table if this were a kitchen. It was more like an office or a library, with piles of paper on the table, and two desks, lots of bookcases. There was also a sink in one corner with a bathroom cabinet over it and a pile of firewood though nowhere to burn any of it. A pair of windows let in some light from the back alley, but not a lot, since they were covered by pink plastic shower curtains, which were drawn almost closed so you could only get a peek at the back alley and the rain coming down.
“Nothing like a hot cup of cocoa on a rainy day,” Rev. Blount declared in his booming voice. Tawana concurred with a wary nod, and lifted the brim of the cup to her lips. It was more lukewarm than hot, but even so she did not take a sip.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering why I called you here.”
“You didn’t call me here,” Tawana said matter-of-factly. “I was looking at the crazy stuff inside that window downstairs.”
“Well, I was calling, sending out a mental signal, and you are here, so figure that out. But you’re right about that window. It’s crazy, or something worse. Aren’t you going to drink that cocoa?”
Tawana took a sip and then an actual swallow. Before she set the mug back down she’d drunk down half the cocoa in it. All the while Rev. Gospel Blantyre Blount kept his eyes fixed on her like a teacher expecting an answer to a question.
Finally he said, “It’s the vampires, isn’t it? You want to know about the vampires.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you was thinking.” His large eyes narrowed to a sly knowing slit.
Tawana hooked her finger into the handle of the mug. It was the vampires. Ever since she’d read the stuff in the church bulletin that she’d taken home she’d wanted to know more than just what was there in writing, most of it taken out of newspapers. She wanted the whole truth, the truth that didn’t get into newspapers.
“You actually saw then yourself, the vampires?”
Rev. Blount nodded. His eyes looked sad, the lids all droopy, with yellowish scuzz in the corners. From time to time he’d wipe the scuzz away with a fingertip, but it would be there again within a few blinks.
“What’d they look like?”
“Just the same as people you see on the street. Tall mostly, but then that’s so for most us Malawis. They always wear white. That’s how they get their name in Bantu. The White Man is what we call a vampire. It’s not the same as calling someone a white man over here, though most vampires do have white skin. Not all, but the overwhelming majority.”
Tawana pondered this. In the one movie she had ever seen about her own native country of Somalia she had noticed the same thing. All the American sold
iers who went into the city of Mogadishu to kill the people there were white with one exception. That one black soldier didn’t have a name that she could remember but she remembered him more clearly than all the white soldiers, because he behaved just the way they did, as though they’d turned him into one of them. If there could be black soldiers like him, why not black vampires?
“I saw the movie,” she said, by way of offering her own credentials. And added (thinking he might not know which movie), “The one in black and white.”
“Dracula!” said the Reverend Blount. “Yeah, that is one kind of vampire all right. With those teeth. Don’t mess with that mother. But the White Man is a different kind of vampire. He don’t bite into your neck and suck the blood out, which must be a trickier business than they let on in the old movie. No, the White Man uses modern technology. He’s got syringes. You know, like at the doctor’s office. Big ones. He jabs them in anywheres, sometimes in the neck, or in the arm, wherever. Then when the thing is filled up with blood he takes off the full test tube-thing and wiggles in an empty one. As many times as he needs to. Sometimes he’ll take all the blood they got, if he’s hungry. Other times, but not that often, he’ll only take a sip. Like you, with that cocoa. That’s how new vampires get created. Cause there is some vampire blood inside the syringe and it gets into the victim’s bloodstream and turns them into vampires themselves. AIDS works just the same. You know about AIDS?”
Tawana nodded. “We have to study it at school. And you can’t share needles.”
“True! Especially with the White Man.”
Tawana had a feeling she wasn’t being told the whole story, just the way grown-ups never tell you the whole story about sex. Usually you had to listen to them when they thought you weren’t there. Then you found out.
“The vampire you saw,” she said, shifting directions, “was it just one? And was it a man or a woman?”
“Good question!” Rev. Blount said approvingly. “Because there can be lady vampires. Not as many as the men but a lot. And to answer your question, the only ones I ever saw for sure was men. But I have met some ladies I thought might of been vampires—black ladies!—but I cleared out before I could find out for certain. If I hadn’t of I might not be here now.”
Tawana felt frustrated. Rev. Blount answered her questions honestly enough, but even so he seemed kind of…slippery. He wasn’t telling her the details.
“You want to know the exact details, don’t you?” he asked, reading her mind. “Okay, here’s what happened. This was back in 1997 and I was studying theology at the All-Faith Mission and Theological Seminary in Blantyre, which is the city in Malawi that has had the biggest vampire problem but which is also my middle name because I was born there. Well, one day Dr. Hopkins who runs the Mission assembled all the seminarians to the hall and told us we would be welcoming a guest from the United Nations health service, and he would be testing us for AIDS! Dr.Hopkins said how we should be cooperative and let the man from the UN do his job, because it was a humanitarian mission the same as ours, and there had to be someone to set an example. The health service, it seems, was having a problem with cooperation. People in Malawi don’t like a stranger coming and sticking needles into them.”
“I hate needles,” Tawana declared fervently.
“Well, we all hate needles, sister. And why us? we had to wonder. Of course, at that time, no one in Blantyre really believed in AIDS. People got sick, yes, and they died, some of them, but there can be other explanations for that. Most people in Malawi thought AIDS was witchcraft. A witch can put a spell on someone and that someone starts feeling bad and he can’t…do whatever he used to. And dies. Only this wasn’t any ordinary kind of witchcraft.”
“It was the White Man!”
Rev. Blount nodded gravely. “Exactly. Only we didn’t know that then. So we agreed to go along with what Dr. Hopkins was asking us to do, and this ‘guest’ came to the Seminary and we all lined up and let him take our blood. Only I refused to let him have any of mine, cause I had a funny feeling about the whole thing. Well, some time went by, and we more or less forgot about the visit we had. But then the guest returned, and talked to Dr. Hopkins, and then he talked with four of the seminarians. But I think there was more than talk that went on. It was like he’d drained the blood right out of them. They were dead before they died. And within a month’s time they was genuinely dead, all four of them. It was all hushed up, but I was one of the people Dr. Hopkins asked to clean up their rooms after. And you know what I found? Syringes. I showed them to Dr. Hopkins, but he said just get rid of them, that is nothing to do with the Seminary. Well, what was it then? I wondered. They wasn’t taking drugs in the Seminary. I don’t think so! It wasn’t AIDS, not them boys.”
“It was the White Man,” Tawana said.
Rev. Blount nodded. “It was the White Man. He tasted the different kinds of blood we sent him, and those boys had the taste the White Man liked best. So he kept coming back for more. And once a vampire has had his first taste, there’s nothing you can do to stop him coming back for more. That old movie had it right there. I don’t know how the vampires got to them, but those four boys sure as hell didn’t commit suicide, which was what some of them at the Seminary was insinuating. Their whole religion is against suicide. No. No. The White Man got them, plain and simple.”
“Tawana!” Ms. McLeod exclaimed with her customary excess of gusto. “Come in, come in!” The school’s principal placed her wire-framed reading glasses atop a stack of multiple-choice Personnel Evaluation forms that had occupied the same corner of her desk since the start of the spring quarter, an emblem of her supervisory status and a clear sign that her rank as principal set her apart from graders of papers and monitors of lunch rooms.
Tawana entered the Principal’s office holding up the yellow slip that had summoned her from Numerical Thinking, her last class before lunch.
“Is this your essay, Tawana?” Ms. McLeod asked, producing three pages of ruled paper. The title—OUR SOMALI BROTHERS AND SISTERS: A Minnesota Perspective—was written with orange magic marker in letters two inches high. Under it, on a more modest scale, was the author’s name, Tawana Makwinja.
“Yes, Ms. McLeod.”
“And the assignment was to write a letter about your family’s cultural heritage. Is that right?”
Tawana dipped her head in agreement.
“Would you,” purred Ms. McLeod, handing the paper to Tawana “read it aloud—so I can hear it in the author’s own voice?”
Tawana looked down at the paper, then up at Ms. McLeod, whose thin, plucked eyebrows were lifted high to pantomime attentiveness and curiosity. “Just begin at the beginning.”
Tawana began to read from her essay:
It is difficult to determine exactly the number of Somalis living in the Twin Cities. Minnesota Department of Human Services has estimated as many as 15,000, but the Somalia Council of Minnesota maintains that these figures are greatly inflated. Over 95% of Somali people in Minnesota are refugees. Many Somalis in Minnesota are single women with five or more children, because so many men were killed in the war.
According to Mohammed Essa, director of the Somali Community in Minnesota, the role of women as authority figures in U.S. society is different from Somalia where few women work outside the home and men do not take instruction from women. For instance, the two sexes do not shake hands. Somalis practice corporal punishment, and many complain that the child protection workers are too quick to take away their children.
Somali religious tradition requires female circumcision at the youngest possible age, in order in ensure a woman’s virginity, to increase a man’s sexual pleasure, and promote marital fidelity. However, this practice is outlawed in Minnesota. Before the circumcision of an infant daughter there is a 40-day period called the “afartanbah,” followed by important celebrations attended by friends and family members that involve the killing of a goat.
Somalis are proud of their heritage and lineage. Children a
nd family are deeply valued by Somalis, who favor large families. Seven or more children are common. Due to resettlement and the inability to keep families together in refugee situations, few Somali children in Minnesota live with both parents. The availability of culturally appropriate childcare is a major issue in Minnesota.
Tawana looked up cautiously, as after a sustained punishment. Ms. McLeod had made her read the whole thing out loud. She would rather have been whipped with a belt.
“Thank you, Tawana,” said Ms. McLeod, reaching out to take back the essay. “There were a few pronunciation problems along the way, but that often happens when we read words we know only from books. I’m sure you know what all the words mean, don’t you?”
Tawana nodded, glowering.
“This one, for instance—‘corporal’? What kind of punishment might that be? Hmm? Or ‘lineage’? Why exactly is that a source of pride, Tawana?”
Ms. McLeod went on with word after word. It really was not fair. Tawana wasn’t stupid, but Ms. McLeod was trying to make her look stupid. Making her read her essay aloud had been a trap.
“Have you ever attended an ‘afartanbah,’ Tawana?”
Tawana raised her eyes in despair. What kind of question was that! “What is a… the word you said?”
“You answered that question in your own essay, Tawana. It is a celebration forty days after the birth of a baby sister. Have you had such a celebration at your home, where there was goat?”
“Who eats goats in Minnesota?” Tawana protested. “You can’t get goats with food stamps. I don’t even like goat!”
With a thin smile Ms. McLeod conceded defeat in that line of interrogation and shifted back to pedagogic mode. “I want you to understand, Tawana, that there is nothing wrong with quoting from legitimate sources. All scholars do that. But note that I said ‘sources,’ plural. To copy out someone else’s work word for word is not scholarship, it is plagiarism, and that is simply against all the rules. Students are expelled from university classes for doing what you have done. So you will have to write your essay over, from scratch, and not just copy out …this!” She produced a print-out of the same study from the Center for Cross-Cultural Health, “Somali Culture in Minnesota,” that the school librarian had called up on the Internet for Tawana’s use.