As the blue-green of your veins rushed restlessly along the full length of your arms.
Your beauty,
The beauty of your soul and the experience gathered,
Though to be sure not one tooth had resisted time;
Your high cheekbones hollowed by the veritable trenches of your cheeks,
While your pure golden eyes threw lightning flashes of every rainbow color,
Depending on the facets and the intensity of your emotions,
Depending on environment and its vibrations,
And they’d light up those trenches like cozy little nests;
Your ears flamed red when you were angry,
Grand Pa Helly, you, my rainbow man . . .
And the beauty of your art made you the very center
Of creation in Massébè, and of what was raged for me, too,
The closest-to-perfection man.
• • •
Grand Pa Helly is a planter, as are all the other men in Massébè. Every head of household here has to be a planter. More than anything else, it is the size of his plantation that decides his importance. A head of household is anyone who has a sizeable number of descendants—grown children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, all of whom live together and work the same piece of land. The men do the planting and take care of the cocoa, coffee, or palm oil groves, while the women and children cultivate the food crops that feed the family. Living together, they form what is known as a compact family, which does not strain kinship. The combined fields of every man and woman of a single compact family form the “plantation” that makes the head of the household into either a great or a small planter.
Massébè, at that time, is a minuscule village consisting of about thirty compact families. The largest of these comprises a hundred people, sometimes more. Our own family has no more than thirty-five members, yet Grand Pa Helly is considered the most important head of household, and he would be the chief of Massébè had he not categorically refused. All he feels is disdain for the role of chief, which the colonists imposed on a profoundly democratic people whom they contemptuously saw as lawless. The present chief has become a lackey in the service of a government the colonists put in place. His only task is collecting taxes and identifying and informing on any independent spirit among his own people. Grand Pa says that if that role were his he would not be able to eat or sleep, or look at himself in the mirror.
Even though he is not the chief of Massébè, he is by far the most respected of all family leaders. First of all, he is the oldest and the best informed in his social world: He followed the ultimate initiation known as the Curved Cane. He is also the best informed on the culture of the colonists because he studied at the Roman Catholic boys’ school in Bibia and was supposed to be ordained as a pastor when he resigned, figuring he already was a pastor in his own tradition and seeing no real reason to hold a double office. What’s more, his plantation is the largest of all those in Massébè. My father sometimes arrives with hordes of servants that he brings back from deals he has made with other tribes, no one knows how. For about one to three months these people work with him at a hellish pace to push back the virgin forest and enlarge our plantation. Then they leave again without worrying about the upkeep, to the great exasperation of the whole family, now doomed to doubling its efforts.
There is another reason why everyone respects Grand Pa Helly: The village square belongs to him. It was he who gave all the grounds needed to build the public places: chapel, school, and market. And it was our family that conceived of, proposed, and realized their construction, and that also graciously provided the community with its catechist and schoolteacher.
Every family in Massébè lives on its own land, at a distance of one to five kilometers from each other, depending on the property’s size. However, lured by the location, each also asked for and was granted a dwelling on the square, which had become the center of the village. They baptized the square Bondè, which means “to begin,” in recognition of Grand Pa Helly’s initiative.
Bondè Square looks like a rectangular garden, evenly divided into multicolored, flowering patches that are the dwellings with their Bantu-style four-sided roofs, whitewashed with kaolin, and made of brick-red clay or the black clay of the swamp. Here and there, encircled by small enclosures of shrubs blooming like a demure pagne, a colorful skirt, they charmingly line the main road that links Massébè to the other villages. During the week the square is populated only with nursery-school children and members of those families who are responsible for looking after them and feeding them. But on Saturdays and Sundays, on holidays or market days, you would think you were in a swarming anthill—even the oldest woman of the nearby village of Pan will abandon her fields to come and have a good time in Bondè Square.
Our family is the only one that does not own a dwelling on Bondè Square. My father gets all worked up about that, for Grand Pa decided that this is the way it will be as long as he’s alive. He dreads that the human congestion would make my father’s escapades too easy. And every man in Massébè is grateful to Grand Pa Helly for his good sense, generosity, and tact, since most of them have already been cuckolded by my father.
Still, if Grand Pa Helly is the most respected of the heads of household in Massébè, it is above all because of his talents as a cabinet and basket maker. He makes remarkable furniture that everyone wants for his home, all the more so because it is displayed in the marvelous mail-order catalogue La Redoute à Roubaix. Depending on his needs, he barters some of the pieces for merchandise to be selected from the same catalogue. Often the regional commander sends prisoners, well-guarded by armed men, to transport Grand Pa Helly’s furniture to the station. It is first shipped to the harbor of Wouri and then sent to France by boat. The pieces can be seen in the following year’s catalogue: armchairs, stools, chaise lounges, and beds made of wood, rattan, or a combination of the two.
Our bit of forest contains a few hectares of semi-marshland where Chinese bamboo grows, as well as rattan creepers, raffia palm trees, and a red wood that is perfect for making sculptures, furniture, and utensils such as spoons, plates, mortars, and pestles. When my father is there, he always makes sure to cut as many creepers and as much bamboo as he possibly can, so that the stock doesn’t diminish, and Grand Pa Helly won’t be forced to get the supplies himself and thereby interrupt his creative work.
To show his gratitude, Grand Pa chooses from the La Redoute catalogue—in addition to the tools he needs, such as planes, saws, knives, and chisels—some objects that my father covets: an organ, an accordion, a guitar, or a Telefunken radio.
Grand Pa Helly also barters in Massébè and neighboring villages—his furniture and utensils in exchange for cattle, poultry, fancy pagne fabric, and so on. As a result, he has a large pig pen on the edge of the swamp, and there are always at least a hundred sheep grazing in the fields. Sometimes our hen house cannot even hold all the fowl, and the surplus of chickens, guinea hens, and ducks sleeps in the cocoa and coffee trees. Clearly, Grand Pa Helly is thought of as a very wealthy man. Yet he never has money. For reasons unknown to me, he always refuses to keep any or even to touch it. All the money he makes from the sale of what he produces serves to feed and look after the family.
It is Aunt Roz’s responsibility to divide the money among the different households, and she always goes about it in the same way. First she gives what comes to Grand Pa Helly as head of the family to Grand Madja, who manages it. Then the share allocated to my parents, my brother, my younger sister, and me, is given to my mother if she is there. If she is not there, Aunt Roz holds on to what is ours and gives only a fifth of it to my father despite his protests, which she always ignores, for everyone knows that my father always has holes in his pockets. No matter how large the sums of money he earns, he can never keep from squandering them