The gift of the Osuo.

(With apologies to Herman Hesse's "The Indian Life")

Guest Editors' Note: When we first proposed to include a work of fiction in this issue, Charles Johnson was more than willing to provide us with some previously unpublished work. However, we quickly ran aground on reefs of literary legal contracts. Johnson discovered that he could not offer us a selection from his new novel, Dreamer, with Martin Luther King, Jr., as the protagonist. But we would not yield. "Surely you. have an unpublished story in the back of a desk drawer that editors have foolishly rejected over the years. Every writer does. Let us publish that story." Johnson replied sheepishly, "I do have a story or two in the back of my file cabinet, but they're buried there because they were unworthy of publication." Again, we persisted, and finally Johnson agreed to let us print a story written many years ago, with the promise that we would provide the caveat that this story is juvenilia. You've been warned!

The Allmuseri, an ancient African people whose kingdom once lay between Cape Lopez and the mouth of the Congo River, required any villager who desired to lead them to feed them foofoo and malt-beer every third market, a custom which, according to our elders who never say the thing that is Not, limited Allmuseri rulers to a few generous and gentle men like the good Muslim king Shabaka Malik al Muhammad (1632-1688). This, after a fashion, is a fairy tale of their history.

A kind, large-bellied king, Shabaka scheduled few, if any, fireside chats with his people because he was shy, and spluttered and blew spittle when speaking, which embarrassed his wife (everything he did embarrassed Queen Melle, to hear him tell it). Having heard an argument as to whether, say, Yohimbe roots aided the digestion better than yams, and having made up his mind for yams, Shabaka forgot the spiraling steps of the argument, remembering only that he had a vague feeling of dislike for Yohimbe roots, though he couldn't precisely tell you why. In a word, he was a tired, middle-aged king who lived quietly, knowing he would never be a chief of any importance if he lived to the age of elephants. Still, he knew he had the good fortune to be a sensibly balanced man with simple feelings and, like any good African king, winged his prayers aloft to Allah for greater patience and wisdom.

One day King Shabaka heard the sound of Mahdi and Kangabar, two osuo - sorcerers - arguing hotly outside his hut, which sat amiddlemost a circle of rain-whitened mud houses on a hill overlooking a river. Him they asked to settle a head-breaking dispute.

Now King Shabaka's day had been sour. The Queen had shrieked at him, saying he cared not a whit for her because her womb was dry as bone. To do him justice, Shabaka did love his Queen (when he didn't think too much about it), although she was sharp-tongued and often snapped at him, as if he were not a king but instead a commoner of no consequence at all. His mind wandered, now and then, to memories of a younger girl named Noi, a griot's daughter, very beautiful. And very dead. Before his marriage, Shabaka ordered his advisors Nduku, Bompo, and Tempo (all incompetents, according to the King) to "Find me for my wife the loveliest woman in the village." They hunted, fell into a squabble because they had no common standard of beauty, and Noi was married to a blacksmith. He was coarse and crude; and besides being coarse and crude, he abused Noi until her kra went to that place no man has visited. In other words, King Shabaka married, like so many men, not the woman who most stormed his senses, but the simple woman who would have a man as plain as himself. So it was that, at age 60, King Shabaka, short-winded and feeling cheated, lived alongside but not exactly with his Queen, who - if the truth be told - often asked Allah to sneeze her into the afterworld where her faith and loving kindness would be better appreciated.

He granted his sorcerers' audience. "But speak quickly," sighed the King. "I am old, have no children, and verily I am married to a crone. Men such as me have little time for trifles."

Mahdi, brittle and serious in his leather cap and robe, was as bald as a stone, having around his head a few puffballs of gray hair like pothers of smoke. He said, "King, it seems to me that in disputes about the superiority of Mind and Matter, we must choose Matter because, as any clear-headed man will tell you, Matter is the only reality - hugely here, recalcitrant, resisting our desires, indifferent to what we think about it; here even, O King, when we cease to think and change our houses." He looked up from beneath a brow that beetled out over his tiny eyes. "What say you, King? Do I speak well?"

Shabaka squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, a sign that he was thinking. These arrogant wizards, these vain grammarians often seemed as mad to him as the full moon. They studied the bezoar stones in the numbles of oxen and preached cracked doctrines which, unchecked, might unleash mischief in the world. The King thought slowly, and said, "Mahdi, you are right."

"That's not it at all," said Kangabar, who was bearded and stared straight ahead at Shabaka, unblinking, like a fish. "Mind is primary, O King," puffing breath scented with porridgy millet-beer at Shabaka. "For what can we know that is not, first and foremost, filtered - do you follow me? - through the sieve of the Mind." So he spoke.

Shabaka listened, pulling at his fingers. His thoughts lazed in the room, alighting on a huge jug of zythum. "That, too, sounds pretty good."

"King," objected Mahdi, a little miffed. He was staring at the bulbous knot of Shabaka's navel. "You must choose between these antinomies!"

Kangabar added, "Yes, a world view is at stake. These things can't be - you're not listening again - taken lightly. If I am right, then all I see has a smattering of me in it. But if Mahdi is right," he shot the other a slow, sideways look, "then all is lost, King - we sojourn in a soulless world of pure mechanics: click, click, click!"

"Horrible!" The King rubbed his chin. "Give me a second to think."

Because Shabaka was a good king, which merely means that he sought the glue that from olden times had held things together among the Allmuseri, he took both their hands and said, "You are both right. Without Matter, my dear friend Mahdi, surely there is no Mind; the I would be an empty mirror. But you, Kangabar, are also right, for without Mind, there is no sensible world. We see our human reflection, flawed as it is, echoed back in every spear of grass and baobob tree. We are informed and given form at the same time." King Shabaka found his speech, one of the longest he'd given, so sweet when he'd finished (he had, it's true, been groping for an answer, afraid he'd fail or waffle the issue, when - revelation! - the sounds strung themselves together nicely on their own natural rhythms, creating sense where he'd expected none) that he smiled and said, "So I conclude that thought and things originally are of the same species."

The sorcerers were delighted with this democratic solution. So delighted, in fact, that from the folds of his fusty robe Mahdi's fingers withdrew a length of charcoal as thick as three fingers. This he handed to the King. "To show our appreciation," he said, "we offer you this gift to please your nieces and nephews. This chalk is ten years older than Allah himself. Whatever you sketch with this shall leap hugely to life."

"Inshallah!" Shabaka took the chalk tentatively, as though it might sting him. "Anything, I heard you say?"

Mahdi and Kangabar smiled exactly like twin chimpanzees. They bowed, promised to remember Shabaka in their prayers and, arguing again, scuffed back outside. As for King Shabaka, he stared and stared at the strip of charcoal, sputtered, "Ridiculous! Am I a child to believe in enchanted chalk?" Then he chortled and made answer, "Perhaps . . ." With torturously slow motion, for King Shabaka was no artist, he squatted on his hams, stuck his tongue between his brown teeth, and traced on the southern wall of his hut an eleven-cubit-long, golden-shafted spear with a head of silver - a spear such as only lives in legends and old hero myths, and, lo, his crude ideogram thickened, filled out like a blowfish, and fell clattering from the wall to his dirt floor, leaving where it had been a slight burn that smelled of sulphur mingled with cork. "There is no Majesty and there is no Might," bellowed the King, trembling, "save in Allah, the Great, the Glorious!" He shut his eyes. He looked again. It was still there. King Shabaka weighed the spear in his hand, shouldered it, then squeezed the charcoal in his pudgy fist, laughing nervously now, for he was not perfectly sober at the sight of such wizardry. "Truly," he thought, "this is no toy for my nieces and nephews."

At once the unhappy King shut himself away in his hut, where no women and only a few advisors were admitted, and spent his whole day drawing the impala and zebra skins prized by his people; he sketched smooth-muscled horses with frothy sweat on their withers and finely dight in heavy saddles, blood-dromedaries, and trumpeting she-elephants, herds of blorting cattle, cows with full udders splashing milk to the ground, ya-honking birds, and other creatures of the animal and spirit worlds elementals and ifrits - which queued boldly out behind the King like beasts fleeing a flood when he left his hut that evening. All these Shabaka gave to his people. But, mind you, there was no mimesis here: Shabaka's animals resembled, not the Real, but the Real transfigured (which is the origin of all beauty, all art).

As the night drew on, King Shabaka doodled by the flimmer of a palm-oil lamp the elder gods and goddesses worshipped by his people before Islam swept across the African continent; he drew shades not seen on earth since the beginning of time. They talked with Shabaka, chided him for falling short of the greatness of his grandfathers and, at last bored with the King's goggling at them, went visibly into the world. (Shabaka, to speak truly, was relieved to see them go.) He drew battalions of men with bark shields, which all came to life and saluted him. "Hail! Hail to the King!" Shabaka cackled like a child. He drew three musicians with neginoths and marimbas who played for him, but as they made music the melancholy strains suggested to the unhappy King - as well you might imagine - the dead girl Noi, whose memory grew like a knot at the front of Shabaka's brow, where the humours for imagination lie. Glum, chewing his gums, the King sniffled and, as his musicians played, sketched her likeness on his plastered wall.

Miraculously, Noi stepped naked as a Shami apple from the wall, emerging like a figure entering the world through a magic mirror.

"Oh, my goodness!" cried the King. He came to his feet clapping his hands and blowing spittle. Noi stood with her hands shielding her breasts. King Shabaka knuckled his eyes. "Surely," he said, "I am dead or dreaming!"

"I am Noi," said this vision. She bowed, then added, "To hear is to obey."

The musicians stopped playing. One of them said - a sigh - "Inshallah!"

"Get out! Get out!" Shabaka dismissed his musicians, blew out the light, and looked at the smooth molding of Noi's back and shoulders. She had been carried, long ago, sheathed in an animal skin on a wooden stretcher to a beehive behind the village, where the dead were eaten - King Shabaka remembered that clearly. Even so, she stood here now. And in all the world, there was not a more beautiful woman than Noi. She had eyes black as obsidian, and features like those of an Ur-figure poised at the misty, mythical beginnings of the race before the earth and sea were separated. The King clamped shut his eyes. He would have given her a goodly stroke right then if, from outside, he had not heard the Queen's rattling voice call his name.

"Shabaka? Sha-ba-kaaa!" (Her voice made air around his head jump.) "Shabaka Malik al Muhammad, is that you in there?" (The King sat hunched in the corner as though waiting for a tree to fall.) "Shabaka, who's talking to you?"

Now it ill-befits a King to curse, but Shabaka did so. Then he scrawled an ugly cartoon of the Queen, all nose and kneecaps, and after that one of Noi's husband, then he X-ed them out, which snapped off Queen Melle's shrill warbling as though she'd been strangled. He dusted off his hands. His head was light. Placing the chalk aside, he took Noi by the hand, drew her to him, gave her as good a stroke as possible for a man of advanced middle age, then, dismounting from her bosom, slept and snored and snarked. Noi's head pillowed on his arm as he lay tangled in nightmares that he had killed the Queen, the village blacksmith, conjured the dead, and slept with a corpse.

Came hazy daylight and King Shabaka, sore and ashy, muzzy with sleep, saw Noi sitting cross-legged, finger-feeding herself stewed roots covered with sauce from a smooth-grained bowl. By her side lay his chalk.

"Good morning, King Shabaka."

"What's good about it?" He was a crocodile awakening, was the King.

"It's this," asked Noi, "that brings things to life?"

King Shabaka scratched the side of his neck. He stretched his legs to start blood circulating again, and nodded. "A gift from the wizards."

"It makes you the most powerful man in all Africa, King, if you can turn the fruits of Mind into Matter like that!" She snapped her fingers. "And though I'm no one to tell a mighty king his business, I think you should put this in the service of the Allmuseri - heal the sick, feed the poor. That sort of thing."

"You speak obscurely," said the King, although the truth was that he had earth wax clogging the cartilage in his ears this morning. "Explain what you mean."

"The Allmuseri are, will always be, a poor village." She became formal, like a wizard leaning on his wand, lecturing. "Our fields where the old women and small boys work are stingy. Our hunters return home empty-handed. There is never enough meat, or - or - or anything, O King."

"I shall draw it," Shabaka said. "Mountains of meat. No one shall go hungry."

"And when the chalk is gone?"

"I'll draw more chalk." He cackled. But when he tried to draw more chalk, nothing happened. "Always a catch to these things." Shabaka scowled and pursed his lips. "Poo!"

Noi continued, her nose twitching. "With the magic that remains, the Allmuseri could control lands and forests and rivers from the sea to the desert. They could increase in size, add colonies, King - are you listening? You could conquer the outlying cannibal Wazimba, who from old have held a grudge against us - as fierce as the Hutu have for the Tutsi - and carve from a handful of scattered, starving villages a single empire."

She stopped, her flat stomach pumping in, out, and gently blew a bad poem in his ear:

Chiefs and kings all bend to age, Sneezed kicking to the afterworld; But those chieftains truly sage, Leave their tribes great treasure.

"Terrible!" The King frowned. "You didn't rhyme. Only once! And then poorly!"

"I know," Noi said sadly. "We are all frail, King. All systems collapse."

Still piqued, for truly he liked poems that rhymed, the King reached into the hindmost comer of his mind and found his boyhood of futile hoeing, his time of scouring forests where he hunted for food and brought home - after tramping all day in fumets aged to dry ash - only a handful of speckled bird eggs. His people farmed maize and millet, watoto and viazi, storing it in the walls of their huts before they were plastered over, the way a swallow builds her nest; but lately the stores were slight and from the hole at each hut's bottom, there trickled only gray powder. The King considered his chalk. Then the girl. Then his own ashy foot. "Yes," he said, "one must will goodness and prosperity for others."

In the seventeenth century, owing to the furious sketching of King Shabaka, through three days and nights, the villages of the Allmuseri ballooned until. they covered the area between Setti-Carnuna in the north and Benguella in the south. His pen pushed his people inland as far as the upper Zambezi, and he relocated the capital at Banya. And never have you seen such a palisaded capital as this - there were, not mud huts, but suspended gardens, high white walls, storied palaces shaped from orichalc and bdellium, pools inlaid with gold, arenas for sport, paved streets down which merchant caravans clattered from all the Four Corners and, for King Shabaka and Queen Noi, lodgings heavily upholstered with luxury. True, all this looked - well, a little weird, like the sketch of a child who places two eyes on one side of a head, for the capital was filtered through King Shabaka's flagging imagination. It was like living inside the canvas of a Chagall. Painters do not put every hair on a goatskin, nor every vein in a leaf, so King Shabaka's capital had large pieces missing (the main road ended, along with Shabaka's wit, halfway through the city; decorative trees in the plaza appeared without bark, dogs without tails, trees without perspective). Yet and still, the capital was dreamlike, reality transmogrified; even if it was physically wrong, it was poetically right.

He drew Noi quick with child, and from her issued a boy as beautiful as his Queen. Flowing out onto the ground, steaming like a boiled egg, for it was in the coolness of the night when Noi gave birth, the baby's legs were entangled in his stringy umbilicus. The midwife - Shabaka's sister - ululated twice (meaning, "It's a boy!"), and the King hurried into the room, scooped up his child, and roared in his loudest voice, "All praise to Allah!"

Shabaka buried the placenta in the Descendent's Nest, a hole in the floor by his child's bed, to keep the newborn baby in the house. This child, Shabaka knew, was enchanted. "See his eyes?" said the King to Noi. "Mine! See his mouth? Also mine! See his brow? Hah! That is his grandfather's ponderous brow!" The Queen wondered, "Nothing from me?" Shabaka reconsidered, "He has your - eh - grace." Above all else, King Shabaka loved his son, whom he named Asoka, after his own father. Long hours he spent tickling his ribs and asking - before Asoka could speak and only splashed playfully in language - "Will you be a credit to your ancestors?" Chirping, Asoka rolled his eyes and squeezed Shabaka's fingers. He clapped his hands when Shabaka drew for his pleasure miniature armies and camels, and a tiny court that came to life shouting, "Long live the prince!"

It came to pass that the home of the Allmuseri became known as the "Empire of the Congo." It bordered on the south what is now known as the City of Massammedes, and its population mushroomed, taking in Hottentots, Damara, Bechuana, Bastudo, and Zulu peoples. The capital buzzed with commerce, the cant of merchants, the whine of beggars pleading for leftovers from sacrificial offerings at the cemeteries. And it also fortuned that Shabaka, as the years passed, prospered; he was in a paradise of pleasure - Asoka grew up gentle, pious, and scholarly, the sort of boy who cried when he saw a dead bird, or covered his eyes when clan cattle were butchered; but he was gifted, too, with a quicksilver wit that outdid Shabaka's fey wizards. He would be a hafiz and osuo both, that Asoka, because at 15 he was already acquainted with the arcane charms of the Ekpe cults in the Cameroons and the curious arts of the Konkombe tribes of the Oti Plain. Yes, the boy pleased Shabaka who, with the growth of his villages into a kingdom, found his days taken up more and more by meetings, hollow ceremonies, disputes with the impossible Wazimba (as he called them) who were buying rifles and rum from ghostlike mariners who prowled the west coast of Africa. Added to that, there was now not enough of his omni fix chalk left to draw your attention. Shabaka never quite got over his astonishment that it was gone. But, all in all, he was the wealthiest, the happiest, the most loved man in this, a Golden Age, of ancient Africa.

Well might we leave our King here, for these were happy times, at least until the morning Nduku appeared at his door.

"King," said Nduku, "I have hard news."

Shabaka braced himself, balling his fists. "Tell of it."

"You must stop the Wazimba. They buy goods from the colorless men who come in great ships, paying them in slaves - debtors from their tribe at first, but now we have reports that the Wazimba have raided other villages. If they are not stopped, they will come here."

Asoka, now 18, sat nearby studying a scroll. He looked up and, before his father could speak, said, "Let me meet them in counsel."

"No!" said Shabaka. "I will go -"

Nduku raised one hand, lowering his eyes at the same time. "King, I think the prince speaks well. You have angered the Wazimba more than once. But Asoka's manner is pleasing, his words persuasive. I would trust him to lead a delegation, and if he is successful, he will return home a hero."

Not because he wanted to did Shabaka agree, but because he knew that some day his son would have to assume the duties of the throne. When Nduku left, he gave his son the silver-headed spear. He kissed his forehead, and said, "I would shield you forever from pain and suffering. I would keep you innocent, but if I did so, you would never grow strong enough to be a king."

The next morning Shabaka watched Asoka, two of his advisors, and twenty warriors leave the capital to convince the Wazimba to cease their trade in human flesh. Remembering his old hut, kept under constant guard inside his palace because he had a fetish feeling about the place, King Shabaka went thitherward, then sat alone in this dream-theatre amidst the malodorous images of all he had wished for and willed in his lifetime. These drawings, he reasoned, were his deeds - the ikons of palaces, of prosperity, of pleasure - and they were now like crustaceans that he could not brush away; they were his children and his father simultaneously, more his father than the late Asoka, as if his every word, gesture, idea had been recorded on an enormous tablet, objectified, and unfurled before him like a merchant's tacky cloth, so that Shabaka, breathing unsteadily, fingers snarled in his linty beard, could hear (click!) an inexorable machinery (click!) grinding away between all his earlier cravings (click!) and this awful awareness of Asoka's absence. Whoever is wise and will observe these things will see that it was too late for King Shabaka to have such thoughts. That night he slept, keeled over against the wall in his old plastered hut.

And he never awoke properly again.

Late in the afternoon of the next day he learned his son's entourage had not reached its destination. Tribes living in the Congo Valley, sympathetic to the Wazimba, and eager for European weapons and whiskey, took Asoka's party prisoners, then delivered them to the Wazimba for sale. This news cut off Shabaka's wind. To sell a prince into bondage - it was the deepest of humiliations. The Wazimba knew that; it was their way of settling old scores. Shabaka plucked out his beard in handfuls and threw dust on his head. Then, meeting with his counsel, he declared war on the Wazimba and their allies. "Destroy them all," he ordered when reviewing his troops. "Leave not one Wazimba alive!"

Like Shabaka, the Allmuseri warriors had loved Asoka. They carried their anger - and the King's own - to the western tribes, and there they lost control, slaughtering 320 of the Damara, hunting down women and children and hacking them to pieces. They looted, they raped. In one Damara village, they started to kill the elders, then asked for treasure. After they received all the Damara had, Shabaka's troops put them to death, singing and dancing while beating the elders with clubs. And as they continued this carnage, spreading from one tribe to the next, the rage among the outlying tribes redoubled, and the fighting drew closer to Shabaka's dream-capital. "We have fallen too far now," he thought. His son was in shackles, nothing would change that. His people were propelled toward a disastrous end. Then the enemy - all gleaming teeth and spears - swept thunderously like a harmattan wind inside the high, white walls.

Their strategy, Shakaba learned later when he was chained and waiting to be sold, was to form a semi-circle in the shape of a bull's horn, with sixty warriors at each tip, all armed with assegai - short spears, and strong oxhide shields half a man's height. They harried the streets of the city, butchering men and cattle both, and pushed on toward the palace. Along the side streets women huddled, knives raised above the heads of their children to save them from slavery among the Wazimba - or the foul-smelling sailors who waited at the barracoons on the coast. Toward the end, Shabaka was no longer a reluctant king but a warrior himself, beheading and skewering men when the Wazimba and Darama swarmed like an army of ants up the palace steps until he collapsed, slicing the air with his spear and carrying away the arm of a man who'd struck him on his temple.

Conscious hours later, he found himself in a coffle, bound at his neck to thirty others, his Queen among them, her flesh scarred and bloodied. Night and day, night and day, night and day they were marched to the factory-town on the coast. When darkness fell, his captors had their way with Noi until she went mad, suddenly leaping to her feet, broken, blathering insanely, and threw herself upon a spear. For a moment the King went mad too. Then something in him flimmered out; he felt nothing when they threw Noi's body into the brush. Nothing when the rifle-bearing Wazimba pushed him and the others on toward the fort. And nothing when the coffle reached the barracoon.

The King slept a sleep like drugged stupor. When he awoke, a Wazimba guard said, "Soon it will be over, Shabaka. You are alone now like a grain of maize in an empty gourd. In a little while, you will be sold. But if the white men do not want one as old as you, then you will die. Best to make yourself ready for the earth to receive you."

He had, it's true, given no thought to this; he was not ready. Shabaka sat, his dark hands dangling between his legs. Hours melted away. Where, he wondered, had he erred? He had acted to end hunger, need, want, and - behold - each act of the ego engendered suffering. But too late these reflections, too late even his grief. He could hear them. They were coming for him. He struggled for breath. It was time. Shabaka, for whom life and death now had no difference, watched the Wazimba forcing his people outside the barracoon into the sunlight; then he looked up as strange men from across the sea beckoned him to rise - men with faces like metal, and no lips, as far as he could tell - who suddenly burst into honey-white needles of fire and light.

He was squatting in his hut, staring stupidly at the unmarked wall. Outside he heard Mahdi and Kangabar arguing. Rubbing his grainy eyes, the King whispered, "Inshallah!" He pinched himself experimentally - there were no scars; he had never married Noi, raised a kingdom or a son. There were no slavers, no war, just the afterglow of these appearances in his mind. And this hut in the hot afternoon? - he reserved judgment for just now on this hut. Shabaka called in his sorcerers.

"It is well?" they asked together.

"No!" He pegged his chalk-stick at Mahdi, bouncing it off the hard bone of his forehead. "You wizards," he asked, "why is it you have never used this fabulous toy to advance yourselves?"

"You joke." Mahdi rubbed his forehead. "Why, it ill-befits a sober man to swell the world's agony by adding his own desires to it, King. He fares best if he has maximum concern for life, but minimum attachment." The sorcerer studied the chalk, and asked, "You did not like our gift, King?"

Shabaka said, "It has made a perfect fool out of me. It's on your lips, Mahdi, to say I do a fine job of that myself, but I shall never know for sure whether all I do is substance or shadow, or whether history is naught but the nightmarish dream of a sleeping god who hasn't digested his dinner." Shabaka shambled to the large jar in his hut and poured three bowls of zythum. By evening these three crinkly heads were heated, for zythum, a beer of Egyptian brew, is ninety percent alcohol; and they soon were sleeping - after pouring a little beer on the floor for Allah and ancestors - slumped together on the floor.

Charles Johnson is the subject of this special issue of African American Review. His novels include Middle Passage (1990), which won a National Book Award.