Brother Lemon raised both arms. Silence. He began to speak, pausing from time to time in order that his two interpreters might translate into Ga and Twi. Although most of his listeners could not understand the words of Brother Lemon himself, they could scarcely fail to perceive his compulsive fire.
In the flickering flarelight of torches and tapers, the smoky light of the sweat-stinking dark, Brother Lemon seemed to stretch tall as a shadow, tall as the pale horseman at night when children cry in their sleep.
Beside me, Danso sat quietly, never stirring. His face was blank and his eyes were shuttered.
The sun would become black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon would become as blood. In Brother Lemon’s voice the seven trumpets sounded, and the fire and hail were cast upon earth. The bitter star fell upon the fountains of waters; the locusts of hell emerged with wings like the sound of chariots. And for the unbelieving and idolatrous–plague and flagellation and sorrow.
The women moaned and chanted. The evening was hot and dank, and the wind from the sea did not reach here.
“Do you think they really do believe, though?” I whispered to Danso.
“If you repeat something often enough, someone will believe you. The same people go to the fetish priest, this man’s brother.”
But I looked at Brother Lemon’s face. “He believes what he says.”
“A wizard always believes in his own powers,” Danso said.
Now Brother Lemon’s voice softened. The thunders and trumpets of impending doom died, and there was hope. He told them how they could join the ranks of saints and angels, how the serpent could be quelled for evermore. He told them of the New Jerusalem, with its walls of crysolyte and beryl and jacinth, with its twelve gates each of a single pearl. The women shouted and swayed. Tears like the rains of spring moistened their parched and praising faces. I felt uneasy, but I did not know why.
“My people,” Danso remarked, “drink dreams like palm wine.”
“What is the harm in that?”
“Oh, nothing. But if you dream too long, nothing else matters. Listen–he is telling them that life on earth doesn’t matter. So the guinea worm stays in the flesh. The children still fall into the pit latrines and die with excrement in their mouths. And women sit for all eternity, breaking building-stones with hammers for two shillings a day.”
Brother Lemon was calling them up to the front. Come up, come up, all ye who would be saved. In front of the golden candlesticks of brass the women jostled and shoved, hands outstretched. Half in a trance, a woman walked stiffly to the evangel’s throne, her voice keening and beseeching. She fell, forehead in the red dust.
“Look at that one,” I said with open curiosity. “See?”
Danso did not reply. I glanced at him. He sat with his head bowed, and his hands were slowly clenching and unclenching, as though cheated of some throat.
We walked back silently through the humming streets.
“My mother,” Danso said suddenly, “will not see a doctor. She has a lot of pain. So what can I do?”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“A malignant growth. She believes everything will be all right in a very short time. Everything will be solved. A few months, maybe, a year at most–”
“I don’t see–”
Danso looked at me.
“She was the woman who fell down,” he said, “who fell down there at his feet.”
Danso’s deep-set eyes were fathomless and dark as sea; life could drown there.
The next morning Brother Lemon phoned and asked me to accompany him to the African market-place. He seemed disturbed, so I agreed, although without enthusiasm.
“Where are the ju-ju stalls?” he enquired, when we arrived.
“Whatever for?”
“I’ve heard a very bad thing,” he said grimly, “and I want to see if it’s true.”
So I led him past the stalls piled with green peppers and tomatoes and groundnuts, past the tailors whirring on their treadle sewing machines, past trader women in wide hats of woven rushes, and babies creeping like lost toads through the centipede-legged crowd. In we went, into the recesses of a labyrinthian shelter, always shadowed and cool, where the stalls carried the fetish priests’ stock-in-trade, the raw materials of magic. Dried roots, parrot beak, snail shell, chunks of sulphur and bluestone, cowrie shells and strings of bells.
Brother Lemon’s face was strained, skin stretched luminous over sharp bones. I only realized then how thin he had grown. He searched and searched, and finally he found what he had hoped not to find. At a little stall in a corner, the sort of place you would never find again once you were outside the maze, a young girl sat. She was selling crudely carved wooden figures, male and female, of the type used to kill by sorcery. I liked the look of the girl. She wasn’t more than seventeen, and her eyes were almond and daylight. She was laughing, although she sold death. I half expected Brother Lemon to speak to her, but he did not. He turned away.
“All right,” he said. “We can go now.”
“You know her?”
“She joined my congregation,” he said heavily. “Last week, she came up to the front and was saved. Or so I thought.”
“This is her livelihood, after all,” I said inadequately. “Anyway, they can’t all be a complete success.”
“I wonder how many are,” Brother Lemon said. “I wonder if any are.”
I almost told him of one real success he had had. How could I? The night before I could see only Danso’s point of view, yet now, looking at the evangelist’s face, I came close to betraying Danso. But I stopped myself in time. And the thought of last night’s performance made me suddenly angry.
“What do you expect?” I burst out. “Even Paul nearly got torn to pieces by the Ephesians defending their goddess. And who knows–maybe Diana was better for them than Jehovah. She was theirs, anyway.”
Brother Lemon gazed at me as though he could hardly believe I had spoken the words. A thought of the design contract flitted through my mind, but when you’ve gone so far, you can’t go back.
“How do you think they interpret your golden candlesticks and gates of pearl?” I went on. “The ones who go because they’ve tried everywhere else? As ju-ju, Mr. Lemon, just a new kind of ju-ju. That’s all.”
All at once I was sorrier than I could possibly say. Why the devil had I spoken? He couldn’t comprehend, and if he ever did, he would be finished and done for.
“That’s–not true–” he stammered. “That’s–why, that’s an awful thing to say.”
And it was. It was.
This city had assimilated many gods. A priest of whatever faith would not have had to stay here very long in order to realize that the competition was stiff. I heard indirectly that Brother Lemon’s conversions, after the initial success of novelty, were tailing off. The Homowo festival was absorbing the energies of the Ga people as they paid homage to the ancient gods of the coast. A touring faith-healer from Rhodesia was drawing large crowds. The Baptists staged a parade. The Roman Catholics celebrated a saint’s day, and the Methodists parried with a picnic. A new god arrived from the northern deserts and its priests were claiming for it marvellous powers in overcoming sterility. The oratory of a visiting imam from Nigeria was boosting the local strength of Islam. Allah has ninety-nine names, say the Muslims. But in this city, He must have had nine hundred and ninety-nine, at the very least. I remembered Brother Lemon’s brave estimate–a thousand souls within six months. He was really having to scrabble for them now.
I drove over to the meeting place one evening to take some building plans. The service was over, and I found Brother Lemon, still in his blue and starred robe, frantically looking for one of his pseudo-golden candlesticks which had disappeared. He was enraged, positive that someone had stolen it.
“Those candlesticks were specially made for my mission, and each member of the home congregation contributed towards them. It’s certainly going to look bad if I have to write back and tell the
m one’s missing–”
But the candlestick had not been stolen. Brother Lemon came into my office the following day to tell me. He stumbled over the words as though they were a matter of personal shame to him.
“It was one of my converts. He–borrowed it. He told me his wife was barren. He said he wanted the candlestick so he could touch her belly with it. He said he’d tried plenty of other–fetishes, but none had worked. So he thought this one might work.”
He avoided my eyes.
“I guess you were right,” he said.
“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” I said awkwardly. “After all, you can’t expect miracles.”
He looked at me, bewildered.
His discoveries were by no means at an end. The most notable of all occurred the night I went over to his bungalow for dinner and found him standing bleak and fearful under the flame tree, surrounded by half a dozen shouting and gesticulating ancients who shivered with years and anger. Gaunt as pariah dogs, bleached tatters fluttering like wind-worn prayer flags, a delegation of mendicants–come to wring from the next world the certain mercy they had not found in this?
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Brother Lemon looked unaccountably relieved to see me.
“There seems to have been some misunderstanding,” he said. “Maybe you can make sense of what they say.”
The old men turned milky eyes to me, and I realized with a start that every last one of them was blind. Their leader spoke pidgin.
“Dis man”–waving in Brother Lemon’s direction–“he say, meka we come heah, he go find we some shade place, he go dash me plenty plenty chop, he mek all t’ing fine too much, he mek we eye come strong. We wait long time, den he say ‘go, you’. We no savvy dis palavah. I beg you, mastah, you tell him we wait long time.”
“I never promised anything,” Brother Lemon said helplessly. “They must be crazy.”
Screeched protestations from the throng. They pressed around him, groping and grotesque beside his ivory height and his eyes. The tale emerged, bit by bit. Somehow, they had received the impression that the evangelist intended to throw a feast for them, at which, in the traditional African manner, a sheep would be throat-slit and sacrificed, then roasted and eaten. Palm wine would flow freely. Brother Lemon, furthermore, would restore the use of their eyes.
Brother Lemon’s voice was unsteady.
“How could they? How could they think–”
“Who’s your Ga interpreter?” I asked.
Brother Lemon looked startled.
“Oh no. He wouldn’t say things I hadn’t said. He’s young, but he’s a good boy. It’s not just a job to him, you know. He’s really interested. He’d never–”
“All the same, I think it would be wise to send for him.”
The interpreter seemed all right, although perhaps not in quite the way Brother Lemon meant. This was his first job, and he was performing it with all possible enthusiasm. But his English vocabulary and his knowledge of fundamentalist doctrine were both strictly limited. He had not put words into Brother Lemon’s mouth. He had only translated them in his own way, and the listening beggars had completed the transformation of text by hearing what they wanted to hear.
In a welter of words in two tongues, the interpreter and Brother Lemon sorted out the mess. The ancients still clung to him, though, claw hands plucking at his suit. He pulled away from them, almost in desperation, and finally they left. They did not know why they were being sent away, but they were not really surprised, for hope to them must always have been suspect. Brother Lemon did not see old men trailing eyeless out of his compound and back to the begging streets. I think he saw something quite different–a procession of souls, all of whom would have to be saved again.
The text that caused the confusion was from chapter seven of Revelation. “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
I thought I would not see Brother Lemon for a while, but a few days later he was at my office once more. Danso was in the back, working out some colour schemes for a new school I was doing, and I hoped he would not come into the main office. Brother Lemon came right to the point.
“The municipal authorities have given me my building site, Mr. Kettridge.”
“Good. That’s fine.”
“No, it’s not fine,” Brother Lemon said. “That’s just what it’s not.”
“What’s the matter? Where is it?”
“Right in the middle of shantytown.”
“Well?”
“It’s all right for the mission, perhaps, but they won’t give me a separate site for my house.”
“I wasn’t aware that you wanted a separate site.”
“I didn’t think there would be any need for one,” he said. “I certainly didn’t imagine they’d put me there. You know what that place is like.”
He made a gesture of appeal.
“It isn’t that I mind Africans, Mr. Kettridge. Honest to goodness, it isn’t that at all. But shantytown–the people live so close together, and it smells so bad, and at night the drums and that lewd dancing they do, and the idolatry. I can’t–I don’t want to be reminded every minute–”
He broke off and we were silent. Then he sighed.
“They’d always be asking,” he said, “for things I can’t give. It’s not my business, anyway. It’s not up to me. I won’t be kept from my work.”
I made no comment. The turquoise eyes once more glowed with proselytizing zeal. He towered; his voice cymballed forth.
“Maybe you think I was discouraged recently. Well, I was. But I’m not going to let it get me down. I tell you straight, Mr. Kettridge, I intend to salvage those souls, as many as I can, if I have to give my very life to do it.”
And seeing his resilient radiance, I could well believe it. But I drew him back to the matter at hand.
“It would be a lot easier if you accepted this site, Mr. Lemon. Do you think, perhaps, a wall–”
“I can’t,” he said. “I–I’m sorry, but I just can’t. I thought if you’d speak to the authorities. You’re an Englishman–”
I told him I had no influence in high places. I explained gently that this country was no longer a colony. But Brother Lemon only regarded me mournfully, as though he thought I had betrayed him.
When he had gone, I turned and there was Danso, lean as a leopard, draped in the doorway.
“Yes,” he said, “I heard. At least he’s a step further than the slavers. They didn’t admit we had souls.”
“It’s not that simple, Danso–”
“I didn’t say it was simple,” Danso corrected. “It must be quite a procedure–to tear the soul out of a living body, and throw the inconvenient flesh away like fruit rind.”
“He doesn’t want to live in that area,” I tried ineffectually to explain, “because in some way the people there are a threat to him, to everything he is–”
“Good,” Danso said. “That makes it even.”
I saw neither Danso nor Brother Lemon for several weeks. The plans for the mission were still in abeyance, and for the moment I almost forgot about them. Then one evening Danso ambled in, carrying a large wrapped canvas.
“What’s this?” I asked.
He grinned. “My church picture. The one I have done for Brother Lemon.”
I reached out, but Danso pulled it away.
“No, Will. I want Brother Lemon to be here. You ask him to come over.”
“Not without seeing the picture,” I said. “How do I know what monstrosity you’ve painted?”
“No–I swear it–you don’t need to worry.”
I was not entirely convinced, but I phoned Brother Lemon. Somewhat reluctantly he agreed, and within twenty minutes we heard the Buick scrunching on the gravel drive.
He looked worn
out. His unsuccessful haggling with the municipal authorities seemed to have exhausted him. He had been briefly ill with malaria despite his up-to-date preventive drugs. I couldn’t help remembering how he had looked that first morning at the airport, confidently stepping onto the alien soil of his chosen Thessalonica, to take up his ordained role.
“Here you are, Mr. Lemon,” Danso said. “I painted a whole lot of stars and candlesticks and other junk in the first version, then I threw it away and did this one instead.”
He unwrapped the painting and set it up against a wall. It was a picture of the Nazarene. Danso had not portrayed any emaciated mauve-veined ever sorrowful Jesus. This man had the body of a fisherman or a carpenter. He was well built. He had strong wrists and arms. His eyes were capable of laughter. Danso had shown Him with a group of beggars, sore-fouled, their mouths twisted in perpetual leers of pain.
Danso was looking at me questioningly.
“It’s the best you’ve done yet,” I said.
He nodded and turned to Brother Lemon. The evangelist’s eyes were fixed on the picture. He did not seem able to look away. For a moment I thought he had caught the essential feeling of the thing, but then he blinked and withdrew his gaze. His tall frame sagged as though he had been struck and–yes–hurt. The old gods he could fight. He could grapple with and overcome every obstacle, even his own pity. But this was a threat he had never anticipated. He spoke in a low voice.
“Do many–do all of you–see Him like that?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He did not look at Danso or myself as he left the house. We heard the orchid Buick pull away.
Danso and I did not talk much. We drank beer and looked at the picture.