Exile and Postman

IT used to make me homesick, in our little African clearing, to see the albino woman. She would move about among her brown companions like a flame — and her white body, that flickered in the sun and glimmered in the shade, used to knock at the door of nostalgia. Homesick people always long for a visit, and that albino was so white!

Once, to our neighborhood, where in those days white women did not come, there came a white woman. She did not lodge with us; she lodged with the white officer because she was an officer’s wife. We used to wonder if she would call upon us. One of us had a pair of field-glasses, and we used to watch her little figure coming and going about the clearing on the government hill. When one day she was seen to come down into our valley by the zigzag trail, we thought we had a Visit. I cannot tell you how anxious we were, in that little bark house, to make a good appearance — or what fresh disposals were made, with our eyes upon that descent, of our properties. I do not wish to make you too sad, but that white woman did not visit us. She went away. She did not know about us, or about exiles — that they are always dreaming of a Visit.

It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort, based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are perceived by the mind’s eye — which like a cat’s eyes sees them better for the dark — to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude.

Dusk is altogether the most illuminating hour for the exile; he then knows so exactly where he is; he has a perfectly visual sense of his surroundings. He sees where he is, but how came he to be there? The geography of his circumstance is plain, but not the logic. He who has no other companions than himself suspects this companion, in that hour of dusk, to be a fool. It must be a poor fool, he thinks, who has drifted into such a clearing by such a river!

The forest of the Cameroon is as good a place as any to be homesick; but I will not be saying that the members of my profession — and I am a missionary — are chronic sufferers. Missionaries are, in the main, gay, and for excellent reasons — some of them pagan reasons, for they are little brothers of Antæus; some of them Christian reasons, for they are of the company of successful fishermen. A fisherman with a good catch can defy even the dusk; his string of silver fish is a lantern to his feet.

No, if there were an altar and a service to placate nostalgia it would not be that fisherman who would most attend that service. The path to that altar would be worn brown by the feet of the trader. I think the trader is lonelier than the missionaries are; he is better versed in solitude. He goes into the forest with a backward look; he comes out of the forest sometimes with a secret and a stricken countenance. More than missionaries do, he does. More often than they, he builds out of his lonely horror and the license of solitude a perverse habitation for his soul. Sometimes — and this is very sad — he is afraid. He lingers and lingers on the margin of that green sea of forest.

‘The heart,’ say the Bulu, ‘has gone to hide in the dark.’ And this is a Bulu way of saying that the heart is not worn upon the sleeve. Well, upon the sleeve of the white-drill suits that beach-traders wear there is, I will agree, no device of hearts. But those lonely inland traders, — those that have traveled ten, twenty, thirty days from their kind, — what is that they sometimes seem to wear upon the sleeve of their singlets? And who cares where he wears his heart if there is never a white man’s eye to fall upon it! In those little bark huts on the trading posts, where young white men pale with the passing hours, there comes to be a careless fashion in wear, whether of hearts or of collars. In the warm dusk of those little houses, where there is an earthen floor, where there are tin trade-boxes as bright as jockeys’ jackets, where there are tradecloths printed with violent designs, where there is salt fish and cheap scent and tobacco, — where all these desirable things may be had for ivory and rubber, — there the trader may wear his heart upon his sleeve without shame. None of those brilliant eyes, set in those dark faces, know a white man’s heart when they see it. There in his hut is a monotony of brown bodies quick with vehement gestures; there is a tumult of controversy in a tongue he does not know. The sudden glitter of brass ornament is there and the glitter of brass spears. There are fantastic head-dresses studded with buttons and shells and beads, and scented with the odor of wood-fires. Between those brown bodies and the body of the white man lies the counter. More lies between them than this. There are between them such barriers that the white man is not more lonely when he is alone.

Yet how still it is of an idle day under the thatched leaves of that little house! The sun does its exaggerated violence to the yellow earth of the clearing; the forest hangs its arras over its secret. How far it is, in this place not named on the map, from Manchester! How, when the rain falls, it is other than rainfall on the Clyde! How the pale fruit that hangs high on the ajap tree is not like the apples that ripen in Wishaw!

Do not speak of apples! Nostalgia in her cruel equipment carries a scented phantom apple.

At night there is about that young trader a trouble of drums that never rest. There is the sharp concerted cry of the dancers. There is the concerted wail for the dead. There is about him all the rhythmic beating of the mysterious life of his neighborhood, tormenting him where he lies under his mosquito net. For this he will rise and walk about, the ember of his pipe drifting back and forth in the dark, and his gramophone, roused by himself, making its limited obedient effort.

There is this about a gramophone: it is a thing that speaks the home tongue. I have seen him sitting under the eaves of his little hut, by his little table spread with a checkered cloth, his gramophone beside him, trying, with its tale of the old grouse gunroom, to divert that lonely meal. Now that I think of it, the gramophone is a kind of hero of my little piece — a kind of David with five tunes to do battle with nostalgia. Back in the tent broods Saul, and this poor patient David plays the endless round of five tunes. Until some day there is a javelin in the wall, and a proud black man goes away with a gramophone into the wilderness.

The night sky does more permanent ministry to the homesick, and of all the bright ministers the moon is the most effectual. It is the great reflector of lights; there it comes, swinging up its old path in the sky, and the fires of home are mirrored on its disk. You who read have spread your hands, in your hour of homesickness, to those phantom fires — and other hands are always spread. Some of us were sitting on our heels about a little flame in a new clearing; all of us were alien in that clearing; one of us was white. And the black women said to the white woman when the moonlight fell upon all those women faces, —

‘The moon looks upon the villages and upon the home village. We black people, when we sit in the towns of strangers and the moon shines, we say, “Now by the light of this same moon the people at home dance to the drums!” However far we walk, we look upon the moon and we remember our friends at home.’

Upon another moonlight night, sitting in a forest camp with young black girls for companions, these sang for me a little set of songs — the songs, they told me, of the moon: —

This little refrain they sang, clapping their hands ever so lightly, and the meaning of the singing was a warning:

It was a song of the moon, a song for wanderers. And the moon on that remembered night, dragging its net of broken silver cords in among the trees of the forest, caught everywhere the wandering hearts and drew them back on the little rough trails to the home fires. Every night that is a moonlight night there is the casting of that silver net upon far rivers and forests deeper than rivers — wherever aliens make a bed of leaves or sleep on a canvas cot.

On such a night, and caught in such a net, I have met the postman. Yes, on just such a night, when the world appeared as it hangs in space, a crystal globe, and when so observed from a little clearing in an African forest, it was seen to be charted for voyagers, and all its little paths ran readily about the globe to that gilt side which is home. On such a night, and upon such a path, I met the postman.

To hang upon a little wicket gate under the moon at the end of a moonfilled clearing in a breach of the forest, — to see the black body of the postman suddenly darken the checkered light upon the path from the west, — how to speak of this adventure with moderation! How to speak of postmen at all with moderation! And of those postmen who thread the lonely forests of the world, their loads upon their backs, their rations of salt fish on top of their loads; how to recall their aspects, their monthly or bi-monthly or semi-annual arrivals, the priceless treasures they carry! how speak of these things to men and women who have never followed the little gazelle into those forests where the night has deepened; who have never felt the divinity in postmen!

Imagine that there is a people in this world who let a postman walk up the path unattended, and who wait until he knocks on the door! Who do not shout to their neighbors when they receive a letter, and who receive one every day! These items alone prove the truth of the Bulu proverb that there are tribes and tribes, and customs and customs.

And I will agree that there are, even on the trails of the wilderness, postmen and postmen. There are even, though I hate to dwell upon it, postmen whom I do not trust. Not all postmen have wings upon their heels. The ideal postman does of course fly. He is like

He avoids idle wanderers. But they do not all do so. I remember to have been wakened one night in a village by the gossip of two old headmen. They had met before my tent; there in the moonlight they chatted together. All the little life of the village was sleeping; the two old men alone were abroad. They were about the business of the post. It is a pioneer custom in Africa, east and west, that the white man’s local letter is franked from town to town. The black man to whom the white man gives his letter carries it to the headman of the next settlement, who carries it in turn to his brother headman down the trail; and so from hand to hand, by day and by night, with a glance from any passing white man, the letter goes forward. Such a letter — carried as the custom is, in a split rod from which there hung, like a flag, a bit of turkey red — changed hands that night before my tent. And now I write it in a white man’s book that the postmen loitered.

To stand and chat there in the moonlight with the exile’s letter in your hands — how could you do that, you two old heartless headmen? I watched you from my little green tent. It is remembered of you that you so delayed, while in some lonely hamlet under that same moon a white man sickened for a letter. And when one gave the forked stick to the other, it was then too late. If indeed, as you would say, you spoke no more than five words of gossip one to the other, those words were five too many. It is remembered of you, and a thousand nights since when I have waited for the mail, if it were a moonlight night, I have told myself with an extreme self-pity and a bitterness, ‘The carrier is gossiping in some clearing.’ I have seen in my heart that man with the load of mail upon his back, standing for hours by a friend of his, laughing and asking news one of the other. This conjured vision of two black men holding up the mail is the sad issue of an imagination infected beyond cleansing. You see, I saw them do it.

Some postmen have come in late because their feet were sore. And some, in passing through their home town, have permitted themselves an illness or a marriage. Some have waited, with the mail in their loads, to bury the dead. Such a postman, so given to misadventures and clumsy ill-timed tragedies, was once late to the tune of eleven days. Who remembers what delayed him or what exquisite reasons he gave? And who of us in that little clearing forgets the long hours of that year of days?

Another postman, of an extreme beauty and an extreme speed, arrived before his time. There was a shouting when he came. All the inhabitants of that little settlement of white men called to each other; the four or five of them filled a room of a bark house — those white faces that were growing daily like the face of the Asra, ‘ bleich und bleicher,’ were all lit by the flame of the mail. In all that little commonwealth, with its pioneer trades and its pioneer gardens and its pioneer hospital and school and church — in all that settlement all the busy crude wheels of industry slackened and stood still while the white men opened the load of the mail.

‘Now they will be reading the books from home!’

And of Ebengé, that young carrier, it is still remembered that he arrived before he was due. ‘Ah, Ebengé,’ you still say to him from time to time, ‘ that was a fine walking you walked that walk so long ago when you slept but three nights with the mail!’

Another postman, never to be forgotten by those exiles whom he served, never came at all. This was a boy, too young, you would think, for his great office. The letters in his little pack were from husbands to wives, and they must travel a hundred miles of foresttrail in time of war. Not twenty miles they traveled when the postman, surrounded by black soldiers, was called to deliver. He did not deliver. He could not give the white man’s letters to another hand. He said, No, he could not. And for this they killed him. That young body tarried forever upon the trail, witnessing in that interminable delay — as Ebengé had witnessed in his swift coming — to the sacred element in the mail.

Here is the king’s touch for the king’s evil — the hand of the postman dropping a letter. For this the victims of nostalgia do long service. For this they scribble, in their lonely and various dwellings, their letters. There is a night, in those alien settlements all about the world, that is unlike other nights. It is the night before the mail is closed. The lamp is full of oil that night, and the cup of coffee is at the elbow. On and on, while the stars march, the white man’s hand runs upon the page. In villages where there are no street lamps, the white man’s window is a lamp all night of the night before the mail. From steamers that are tied to trees among the rushes, in rivers that you do not know, the officer on watch may look all night through such a window at such a man writing, writing a long, long letter — the beating heart of man, articulate in all that heartless darkness.

How quick a seed, you would say, the seed in such a letter! How such a letter must bear, some sixty-, some an hundred-fold! Yet myself I saw this: I saw the harbor-master of Kabinda, a settlement of white men on the west coast of Africa, come aboard the monthly steamer to get the mail. He was an old Portuguese, coffee-colored in his gray linen suit. A long time he had been harbor-master, and many times he had taken the brown bag of mail ashore. This day, when he lifted his bag, he ‘hefted’ it: the lightness of it in his hand made him smile. Some irony that was the fruit of his long experience of exiles and their letters made that old indifferent man curl the lip. I think that in Kabinda that night there went white men hungry to bed. I would not like to live in Kabinda, where the postman is so old and so wise. These white postmen know too much; they can count more than ten. And other things they know: they know a thing too sad to tell. Better Ebengé, who ran so swiftly with his load, or little Esam, who thought that for a load of letters some would even dare to die.