The sixth meeting, Wilida brought a friend, a girl named Fuwitha. Fuwitha would not come close the first meeting, or even speak to him. But, the second time, she lost her fear and joined in helping him learn the language.
It was three weeks before Ras met some of the other children. They came silently, except for Wilida and Fuwitha, who were very proud of their friendship with the white ghost-child. By then, Ras understood that he was supposed to be the spirit of a dead boy. This was why Wilida had fainted when she first saw him and why the others had been so apprehensive. But their curiosity, plus the assurances of the two girls, had brought them.
They squatted down to talk to him, to giggle nervously at his strange mouthings of their speech, and to reach out after many hesitations to touch him. He smiled and talked softly, saying that he would not harm them and that he was a good ghost.
This was the day he met Bigagi, who was supposed to be Wilida's husband when they came of age.
Later, he began to play their games with them, although he was hampered because he had to keep out of sight of the adults and older children in the fields. He became more proficient in Wantso. He wrestled with the boys, all of whom he bested easily. They did not seem humiliated. A living person could not expect to outwrestle a ghost.
He entertained them with his stories of the Ghost-Country and of his ape mother and ape foster father. His insistence that he was the son of Igziyabher, or Mutsungo, as the Wantso called the chief spirit, the Creater-Spider, awed them. At first.
Bigagi asked him why he wasn't dark-skinned and woolly-haired. Mutsungo had made the First People, from whom the Wantso were descended, out of spider webs and mud, and they had all been brown-skinned, thick-lipped, and kinky-haired. The Shaliku, who lived on the other side of the Swamp, were the offspring of Wantso and crocodiles. But if Mutsungo was indeed the father of Ras, why wasn't he like the Wantso? Or at least half spider?
Ras was a match for his mother when it came to making up stories on the spot. He replied that he wasn't the son of Mutsungo but of Igziyabher, who had kicked Mutsungo from the chair of godhood and seated himself thereon. And Ras was white because Igziyabher had washed the brown out of his skin as a sign that he was, indeed, Igziyabher's only son.
This upset the children, not so much that Ras was the son of God as his statement that Mutsungo had been kicked out as chief spirit. Ras added that Mutsungo now dwelt in the Many-Legged Swamp, where he was king of the spiders.
But when he saw that they were disturbed and that they might question their parents about it and so might reveal where they got this idea, he laughed and said that he had told all this merely to entertain them. He was the son of Mutsungo, but he did not look like a spider because Mutsungo had wanted him to look like his mother. She was an ape, and that was why his lips were thin and his hair was straight. And he was white because his mother had conceived by a lightning stroke sent by Mutsungo, and everything in her womb had turned white. The thin nose resulted from Mutsungo grabbing him too hard when he had pulled him out of the mother's womb by his nose.
The story of the lightning stroke was Mariyam's; the other details, Ras's.
Bigagi said that this could all be true, but Ras, whom he called Lazazi, to fit the sounds and structure of Wantso, was still a ghost-child.
Ras bristled and had to control himself to keep from violently arguing with Bigagi. Wilida smoothed out their tempers then by saying that perhaps this spirit-father of Ras's was chief spirit in the land to the north (she tactfully avoided saying Ghost-Land) while Mutsungo was chief spirit in this land. Just as Basama, the Crocodile-Spirit, was chief spirit of the Shaliku, and so on. The whole question could be settled when they grew up, and then they would be able, if they had the courage, to go south on the river, through the Swamp, through the land of Shaliku, and to the end of the river and the world, where the river plunged into the land beneath the earth. Here, on an islet just before the entrance to the land beneath the earth, lived Wizozu.
Wizozu was a very very very ancient man who knew everything and who would answer a question--for a price. He had lived forever and would live forever, and he was a terrible old man.
Ras was to hear more of Wizozu, and eventually he decided that when he became a man he would journey to the end of the river and the world and ask Wizozu several questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.
He was going to question his parents about him, but since neither had ever mentioned anything like Wizozu, he thought he would keep silent. They would suspect that he had been talking to the Wantso, and he did not want that. Although they no longer tried to keep him from wandering, they still warned him against the wicked and dangerous Wantso. Igziyabher would not like it if He knew that Ras went near them. When Ras became older, then he could approach them.
Sometimes, Ras would pack six of his rubber balls in his antelope-hide bag and take them to the meeting-place. The children were amazed. They knew nothing of rubber, and asked him where the balls came from. He said that they had appeared mysteriously in the tree house one morning. His foster father had said they were a gift from Igziyabher. Allah, rather, since that was the day scheduled for Arabic to be spoken.
Ras showed the children the juggling tricks with the balls that he had learned from Yusufu. He also performed backflips and somersaults. He showed them how he could hit a small target at forty feet with a knife.
Sometimes, Ras performed tricks on the tightrope three feet above the ground between two trees. He wanted to put the rope much higher to impress them, but he did not want to be exposed to the view of the women in the fields or the guards on the wall across the neck of the peninsula. He chose a place where the ground sloped down to the river. There, while the children squatted to watch, he walked back and forth from tree to tree and then stopped in the middle and backflipped, turning over once and landing on his feet on the rope.
The wide-eyed children would clap their hands over their mouths to keep from making so much noise they would attract the women or older children.
Ras would cap all his tricks by walking on his hands across the rope while he bounced a ball between his feet. The Wantso children wanted to try ropewalking, of course. Some were eventually able to get from one tree to the other. Many fell, and some hurt themselves, and then Ras was worried that they would run screaming to their parents.
No one ever told. Ras was their secret. Though they must have swelled almost to rupture with the desire to talk, they managed to keep silent for several years. Ras, not their own self-control, was mainly responsible for this. He told them that he would take any betrayer to Ghost-Land with him. Moreover, Igziyabher, his Father, would destroy the village and kill everyone in it with lightning.
The children turned gray and speechless at this threat. Wilida, however, managed to say, "But if we're all killed, we'll be ghosts anyway, and we'll all be with you in Ghost-Land."
"No, you won't," Ras said quickly. "I'll send the one who talks to the underworld, in the big cave into which the river empties, and he'll be tortured forever by demons and monsters and won't ever get to see his friends or parents again."
The children shrieked, but they must have half-enjoyed their terror, because they insisted that he describe what would happen to the betrayer. He enjoyed telling them, because he got very excited and exercised his imagination as if it were a muscle, making it grow and grow. He also told them about Wizozu, the All-Wise, All-Horrible Old Man on the islet at the gateway to the underworld. He knew less than they did about Wizozu, but this did not stop him, and after many descriptions and stories of Wizozu, punctuated by rollings of eyes and little shrieks from his audience, he had convinced them, and himself, that he was an authority on Wizozu.
He was vague on what Wizozu demanded in return for answering your questions. He hinted at things too terrible to even think about; even then he knew that hints were sometimes far more effective than the most grisly descriptions.
The children said that Wuwufa, the spirit-talker of the Wan
tso, had traveled through the Many-Legged Swamp, slipping by the Great Spider, and through the land of the terrible Shaliku and their even more terrible crocodile god, and had gone on down the river to the island of Wizozu. Nobody knew what Wizozu's price had been, although some said that it was Wuwufa's liver. According to the Wantso, the liver was the seat of thought. Whether this was true or not, all agreed it could be true. Wuwufa acted as if he had lost his mind, sometimes, and he often went into convulsions.
Ras told himself that he, too, would some day visit Wizozu. At the age of nine, he had had many questions to which he could get no answers that satisfied him. Three years later, he still wanted to visit Wizozu, but some of the questions had changed.
The group numbered five. There were two boys, Bigagi and Sutino, and three girls, Wilida, Fuwitha, and Golabi. After six months, they introduced him to some other games besides hide-and-seek, guess-which-finger, and puzzle stories. One afternoon, as they all squatted under a bush only four feet from the river, Wilida, giggling, referred to the whiteness and largeness of Ras's penis. Bigagi resented this. He said that his was every bit as big as Ras's and that the whiteness made Ras's look like a worm under a rock. A dead worm, at that. Wilida, still giggling, said that she did not think it was as dead as it looked at this moment. She had seen it become very much alive when Ras was wrestling with the boys or the girls. And she was certain that it was bigger than Bigagi's.
Bigagi stood up and began to play with his penis. He dared Ras to do the same. Ras stood up by Bigagi's side and began to slide his foreskin back and forth. He was no stranger to his genitals. Despite Yusufu and Mariyam's harsh warnings of idiocy and impotency if he played with himself, he had done so many times when he was out of their sight. And he had had a monkey pet which had loved to suck on his penis, although Ras had never been able to top the erection with orgasm.
Now he was determined to prove his superiority over his playmates in this as in all other things. Besides, he got a high excitement out of doing this before others.
Sutino, stimulated by watching them and urged by the girls' jibes, stood up alongside the two boys. The three girls, laughing, compared the results and then decided that Sutino was eliminated. Sutino was angry but he kept on masturbating. Bigagi and Ras seemed to be neck and neck in length, but Ras was undoubtedly winner in thickness. Bigagi said that he could be even thicker than Ras if he got some help. Golabi understood him. She got down on her knees and started to suck. Ras motioned to Wilida, who giggled as she let herself down on her knees in the mud before him. She looked down at the big white root disappearing and reappearing between her fat lips and then she looked up at Ras. He grabbed her kinky hair and then her ears and jabbed his hips back and forth.
The feeling was exquisite, but it always ended in a sharp ache in his testicles. He could not ejaculate. His only consolation was that the two boys were also unable.
Ras was declared the winner. Thereafter, in addition to other games, the boys and girls experimented with each other, and sometimes one boy sucked on another and a girl licked at another's clitoris. Wilida told them of her experiences with Tuguba, an older boy. Every once in a while, when he was able to get her away from the adults and other children, he tried to stick his penis in her vagina. She had tried it several times and then had refused because it hurt her too much. So he had stuck his penis in her mouth and had ejaculated in it. During this, she had felt a very warm rush of something deep inside her--she felt it difficult to describe it exactly--out she was sure that the feeling was similar, but not as ecstatic, as that described by the older women when they were comparing experiences. And, judging from the groans, sighs, moans, shrieks, and calls from her mother during intercourse, Wilida had not yet experienced orgasm. But she liked the excitement of sex and the sometimes "warm rush."
The sex games were delightful, although Ras balked, at first, at inserting his penis in an anus. His parents' never-ceasing admonitions to be clean, and their disgust of anything connected with feces, had affected him. But he could not turn down a dare, so he, too, buggered the girls and, later, the boys. He always washed off afterward and insisted that they do the same.
Then there were the pissing contests, which Ras usually won. He could send his arc higher and farther than Bigagi by several inches.
3
THE WOMEN AT NIGHT
As time went on, Ras came close to being caught by the older children. He always managed to run out of sight and behind a bush. After the twelfth near escape, he decided that it would be safer if he stayed on the other side of the river--at least during the daytime.
There was one place where the children could swim across without being observed from the fields or from the sentinel post above the fence across the peninsula neck. They began to meet Ras in the bushes on the opposite bank, where they then retreated far enough into the jungle so that their voices would not be heard. Venturing into forbidden territory was thrilling, but they were never quite at ease. Besides the leopards to worry about, they were not quite sure that Ras was not trying to entice them to the Land of the Ghosts.
Ras did not spend as much time with them as he wished. Five days a week, his daylight hours were taken up with schooling. He was put through weight-lifting, running, acrobatics, juggling, spearwork, knife-throwing, and archery. He was taught all the tricks Yusufu knew about offense and defense with only the weapons of the body, and Yusufu seemed to know a hundred. Then there was learning to read and write English, Arabic, Swahili, and Amharic, with emphasis on English.
The books in the old cabin by the lake had been English books. They were mostly picture books with words underneath the illustrations, such as a is FOR ARCHER and B IS FOR BOY. Some of the picture books had stories with simple sentences under each, such as "Jim and Jane see the dog run." Perhaps Jim and Jane saw a dog, but Ras had never seen one. The dog looked like a jackal.
Yusufu had been forced to help him learn to connect the words beneath the pictures with the pictures themselves. Yusufu had been exasperated when he had asked Ras if he had learned to read yet. Ras had replied by asking what reading was. Yusufu said that Ras was supposed to learn by himself.
"Why?" Ras said.
"Because it is written."
Finally, Yusufu had told Ras that he would give him some lessons to get him started. However, he would not do it in the cabin, where the books were. Ras must bring the picture book to him in the forest for his lessons. He must promise never to say a word about this while he was in the cabin or in the tree house.
"Why?"
"Because it is written."
So Ras had learned the rudiments of English writing and speech while sitting by a big baobab a half mile inland from the tree house. The time came when he and Yusufu could carry on a conversation in English, although Yusufu continued to insist that under no circumstances was he to talk it, except when Yusufu said he could.
As Ras and his playmates got older, they had less time to get together. The girls were working more in the fields or at home, and the boys were being taught to hunt by their fathers. Ras was glad it was not the other way around, because he enjoyed the games with the girls more, and especially with Wilida. She was more daring than the other two in slipping off from work or often creeping out at night to meet him.
They talked and laughed, she telling him interesting events of the village or asking him to figure out the latest puzzle story, and he would tell her what he had been doing. They loved to caress and finger and kiss each other and do all the things they knew to stimulate each other. It was while Ras was showing her, one night, how the gorillas mated, the female on all fours, the male inserting from behind, that Wilida had her first orgasm. Ras was glad for her but disappointed because he did not have one. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if the pleasure was worth the painful aching in his testicles afterward.
Then he was not able to meet Wilida or any of the girls for weeks. Wilida had told him that soon she would be kept inside the village stockade and allowed out
into the fields only when closely watched. The time for initiation into womanhood was near. After that, she would not be permitted sexual play. She would not be allowed to touch an adult male, not even her father. This would last for a year, after which she would be married. To Bigagi, of course. Nor would she have much opportunity after that to meet Ras. Adultery was forbidden. For the first offense, a woman had to run the gauntlet of whips and thornsticks wielded by every man and woman in the village. A second-time offender was thrown to the crocodiles.
The guilty man paid for his first offense with a beating from his wife and the husband he had cuckolded. The second time, the guilty man went to the crocodiles, too.
Ras was distressed. He did not see any sense to the punishments.
"It's the custom," Wilida said.
"And what happens to the children of parents who are thrown to the crocodiles?"
"They go into the uncle's house."
Ras did not argue with her. He had heard the phrase "It's the custom" too many times. What was, was. It was as unarguable as Yusufu's "It is written."
"I don't want to be left alone," he said. "I want to be with you, to play with you, talk with you, make love to you."
"I can't. It is the custom," Wilida said. She was very sad.
"But you'll see me when you get the chance?"
Wilida was silent for a while. Then she said, "Would you want me to be eaten by crocodiles?"
"No! But I'll be hiding, watching you, waiting for the chance to meet you. If I'm caught, I might be killed. So if I'll take a chance, why won't you?"
She did not answer.
Then he said, "Come with me to my home. Now!"
She shrank back, eyes wide, and said, "Not to the Land of the Ghosts! I'd be afraid!"