The Drifters by James A. Michener
You wouldn’t believe my grandfather. He’s a wonderful old geezer and I hope I have at fifty the vitality he has at seventy. He gets wildly excited over what General Motors has done during the last sales year, and he isn’t even with the company any more. You’d think he was president or general or something and the fact that GM sold more cars than Ford or Chrysler was a staggering victory, surpassing Waterloo and Zama combined. But that isn’t all. What gives him a real lift is that within GM it was Pontiac that accounted for the big success. He calls all the Pontiac men and says, ‘By God, Harry, you’re doing even better than we used to in the old days. I knew you had it in you when I picked you out of Replacement Parts.’
I report to Case next month, and from what I’ve been hearing, it must be a drag. They seem to teach science like we taught it in Israel six years ago, so you wonder where this great technology that America boasts about is coming from. Don’t be surprised if you see me on your doorstep one of these days. I’ve had Detroit and I doubt if Cleveland will be much better.
I’m not much impressed with the Negroes in Detroit, and if your boys don’t pull up their socks they’re going to be behind the eight-ball throughout eternity. I’ve concluded they need about a dozen guys like you, and sooner or later you ought to come back here and do some stirring up, because you had constructive ideas. The big idea at present among the Negroes is to eliminate Jews, which seems to be so screwy it doesn’t merit consideration, but grown men keep saying that if they can only eliminate Jews, everything will be all right. I’d like to talk to you about this some more, because I can’t believe the Negroes have swallowed the Goebbels pill so long after it was exposed.
Big news right now is a Swedish movie called I Am Curious (Yellow). I haven’t seen it, but some of the fellows told me it featured a Swedish bombshell who is crazy about sex, and sometimes I tell them that I knew a Norwegian bombshell. Give her my best and tell her to watch those GIs in the bar.
Yours,
Yigal
P.S. Christ, am I tired of being Bruce!
The finest thing that happened to them during their visit to Moçambique occurred, as was so often the case with this generation of young people, because of their love for music.
The opening of the school year in America had come and gone without creating apprehension among the drifters. The autumn season, when jobs ought to be pinned down in England and the States, was upon them, but they were in Moçambique, where spring was just beginning, and mentally they looked forward to an endless summer. No one had to bother about money so long as Monica’s father continued her allowance, Gretchen’s inheritance arrived on time, and Mister Wister sent Cato his regular checks. It was an age of pilgrimage, and they intended to enjoy it.
And Ilha de Moçambique exceeded their hopes. It was nepentheland, an enclave in history where days drifted by under a flawless sun, beside a controlled sea. The camping grew more interesting every day, for the people who stopped by to talk with them, or to bring fruit, seemed an evocation of all who had lived on this fortunate island since the beginning of history—not Vasco da Gama’s truncated history, which had begun only when the island was already two thousand years old, but the true history which ran back to aboriginal times.
For Cato this daily procession posed a dilemma, because among the blacks who came to stare at the pop-top and to wonder how four grown people slept inside, and in what arrangements, appeared a special group of Negro women. They were big, handsome black women, true African types, not intermixed with white blood, as was so often the case in America. Cato once calculated that he was at least three eights white, and in Philadelphia he knew almost no pure-blooded blacks, but on Moçambique Island he was seeing the unspoiled African. Unspoiled, that is, except for one thing! In woman’s eternal quest for beauty, these handsome blacks covered their faces with paste made from the chewed root of a leafy plant, which, when it dried, became a white mask. Throughout the community he would spot black women of unusual dignity and physical charm, dressed in lovely gold and yellow cloth, but when they turned, their faces would be a ghastly white.
‘They’re not dumb,’ Monica teased. ‘They know that to be really beautiful you’ve got to be white.’ It seemed that way. Once, seeking refuge from Monica’s goading, he left the pop-top to find Hajj’, and asked the tall Arab to serve as interpreter while he questioned a group of black women. Why did they smear the paste on their faces?… To be beautiful. Why did they use white?… Because it was beautiful. Could a black woman be beautiful without the paste?… She might be attractive, but to be beautiful she had to take pains. Did they think that this black woman coming down the street was beautiful?… She was attractive but it was a shame she hadn’t whitened her face. He tried repeatedly to find out why they had chosen white for their ghostly makeup, and the best they could tell him was that their tribe had always known that white made a woman beautiful, and as they said this, Cato pointed to a Portuguese woman who was fat, dumpy and ill-complexioned. Did they think she was beautiful?… Not like us, but she is white.
‘I don’t think Africa will make it,’ he grumbled to himself when Hajj’ and the women had gone. ‘Unless Islam saves the black race.’ He continued to feel that in this religion Africa would find its salvation, but again this assessment had its teeth pulled when Gretchen, in her usual straightforward way of searching for evidence on her own, pointed out that the Muslims of Moçambique maintained two cemeteries, one for white men on the island, another for blacks well hidden on the mainland.
Among the citizens of Ilha de Moçambique who developed the habit of stopping by the pop-top to watch the young visitors and to talk with them occasionally was the rotund Portuguese businessman in the white suit who had welcomed them that first night and introduced them to Hajj’. In idle conversation one evening he discovered that they had been to Silves, and he cried joyously, ‘I come from Portimão!’ and they spent some time just reciting the well-remembered names of Algarve: Albufeira, Lagos, Faro and, with a certain reverence, Alte; and Gretchen, nostalgic for that village in the mountains with its plaza watched over by the stone poet, brought out her guitar. And the plaza quickly filled with Negro women, their white faces glowing in the sunset.
Gretchen sang for nearly an hour to an audience which appreciated every note she offered, and when she put down the guitar, the Portuguese businessman said, in his fearful patois, ‘How good it is to have music at the end of the day,’ and he insisted that they accompany him to Bar Africa for drinks, and as they were chatting idly, he said, ‘Of course, you plan to visit our great game sanctuary at Zambela.’ When they replied that they hadn’t considered it, he summoned a man who could speak English and together they told of the extraordinary game refuge that lay about three days’ travel to the west.
‘You must see it,’ the two Portuguese agreed, the fat man adding, ‘We know you’ve heard of Kruger Park in South Africa and Serengeti in Tanzania, but Zambela is something quite special, because there you have a concentration of wildlife that is unbelievable. I don’t mean that you’ll see some Cape buffalo. I mean that you’ll see five thousand of them, perhaps at one time. Can you imagine five hundred hippopotamuses crowding one small island?’
The two men were so persuasive that the travelers decided that night to make a detour to Zambela, and next day they reluctantly packed the pop-top and said their goodbyes to some of the kindest people they had encountered in their travels. When the white-faced Negro women realized that the campers were about to leave, they wept, and several came to kiss Monica and Gretchen farewell. The fat businessman in his white suit reported, ‘Zambela will be my gift to you for the music you made.’ When old Hajj’ came to give them his final blessing, as if they were pilgrims departing for Mecca, they felt a sense of sorrow, for it was apparent that he and they would not meet again. He took Cato aside for some last-minute instructions on Islam, but the others were impatient to depart, so he had to be content with placing his hands on Cato’s shoulders and saying, ‘Remember,
The vast, unfenced park to which the pop-top headed lay along the western border of Moçambique on the shores of Lake Nyasa, and the road they now chose took them along no curving beaches, but inland through bush country, where for whole days they saw only the dusty kraals and Stone Age blacks. For these near-savages there was no Portugal, no United Nations, not even an Africa.
At evening on the third day, while Joe was driving, they came to a pair of wooden pillars that marked the entrance to Zambela, and as soon as they had crossed into the sanctuary they felt that they had exchanged the world of reality for a dream. On the side of the road stood the painted sign: Beware of Elephants, and in the middle of the road lay an even more pragmatic sign: an enormous ball of brownish-black manure dropped a few minutes earlier by one of the elephants, whose tread they could hear not far off.
At the camp, which lay ten miles inside the gates, they saw something which caused them to shout with pleasure: a set of rondavels, well constructed and located amidst flowers; and they had barely checked into the two assigned them—one for the girls, one for the boys, an arrangement that would be honored only in the official register—when a lean, ruggedly handsome man, in his mid-sixties and dressed in khaki, knocked on one of the doors and said, ‘I understand that Sir Charles Braham’s daughter is here.’ When Monica appeared, he introduced himself, ‘John Gridley, Salisbury. I used to work with Sir Charles in Vwarda, and now I’m here on loan from the Rhodesian government.’ He was punctilious in acknowledging each of the young people, even though Cato’s blackness and Joe’s scraggly beard must have disconcerted him.
He said, ‘Government in Lourenço Marques sent us a signal that you’d be coming and to look you out. They also forwarded this letter to you, sir,’ and he handed Joe an official envelope from the American consul in the capital.
‘Final draft notice,’ Joe said, handling the envelope as if it were a time bomb, which it was.
‘Then you’ll be joining up at the end of this visit?’
‘No, sir. I’ll be running.’
This confession brought an uneasy silence, broken by Monica, who asked, ‘Couldn’t you take the letter back and make believe it hadn’t been delivered?’ She said it so sweetly that the ranger assumed she was joking, and the pending unpleasantness passed.
Mr. Gridley was the kind of capable man you hope you will meet on your travels but rarely do. He had worked in all of the parks in Rhodesia and knew more about big game than most of the men now operating, for he had learned from the old hunters who had penetrated the jungle at the end of the last century, in addition to which he had an innate sense of what the animal reaction to most situations would be. He enjoyed instructing young people and appreciated his good fortune in being able to work in Africa.
He spoke with stately charm, derived from his education in England, but although his name and his manner were British, and although as an English partisan he found the extreme ideas of Dr. Vorlanger in South Africa rather comical, he was a convinced supporter of the present Rhodesian government.
‘At seven tomorrow morning the gates to the inner park will open and I’ll have a bush car to show you what we have hiding out there. In the meantime, Mrs. Gridley would be honored if you’d stop by our house after dinner.’
A hot shower and fresh clothes converted the travelers into social beings again, and after a good meal at the mess hall, featuring fresh fruit they wandered across the well-kept grounds till they reached the set of cottages in which the staff lived. Mrs. Gridley was waiting for them, a steel-gray Scottish woman in her early fifties, well known throughout Africa for her habit of bringing to her fenced-in garden all baby animals who had been afflicted or abandoned, so that it was possible to look from her back door, no matter in what park her husband was serving, and see a small Cape buffalo, a baby elephant, some zebras, and even a small hippo soaking himself in the pond she maintained. She felt no discomfort in entertaining Cato, but the girls were her chief pleasure. ‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked them solicitously. ‘I’ve all sorts of medicines and things that one requires in this sort of life.’ She noticed a small abscess on Monica’s left arm and said, ‘I’ve just the thing for that. You shouldn’t let it go, you know, not in this climate,’ and when she applied her salve she noticed, without commenting upon it, the cluster of marks against the fair skin and knew immediately what had caused them.
Joe told me later, ‘I was watching he face, to see what she’d do when she saw the hypodermic marks, and she knew I was watching. What do you suppose she did? After satisfying herself that Monica’s sore was an ulcer which came from popping heroin, she looked carefully at my arm, and I left it extended so that she could see it, and then she looked at Gretchen’s and at Cato’s. Only then did she serve tea.’
The Gridleys were a surprising pair, Rhodesians who were totally loyal to their government yet willing to discuss its policies with anyone, even an American Negro, whom they told, ‘We believe the white man can hold on without much trouble for at least thirty more years. We possess all the ammunition, all the power. There might be pressures moving down from the north, but we think we can control them. Of course, after these thirty years great changes will probably take place throughout the entire world. Who knows what the relationship between nations and races will be then?’
‘You don’t fear an uprising?’ Cato asked, astonished at their willingness to talk, because these were not young marijuana-experiment people such as he had met in Lourenço Marques. These two were close to the heart of Rhodesia, and what they had to say was significant.
‘Yes, there’s always a fear of insurrection,’ Mrs. Gridley confessed. ‘Just as you face insurrection in the United States. But does anyone doubt that when the crunch comes in America, the white man will be able to hold on … at least for the duration of this century?’
‘Is there any doubt of that?’ Mr. Gridley repeated.
Cato said, ‘Four years ago people like you in America were asking, “Is there any doubt that the great United States can defeat little Vietnam?” A lot of us doubted. We didn’t know how it would happen or what dreadful thing would go wrong, but we honestly doubted that America could win. And do you know why? Because the war was historically wrong, and things which are historically wrong tend to be righted … how, no one can predict.’
Normally, at this point the discussion should have become heated, but it didn’t. With scientific precision the Gridleys considered the views that Cato had presented and countered with arguments of their own. ‘I agree with you,’ Gridley said with real enthusiasm. ‘Things that are historically wrong do not persist. But in this case, Mr. Jackson, I’m afraid you’ve misinterpreted what it is in Africa that is historically wrong. I’m a technologist—an ecologist to be exact—and we look at man as an animal. He has precisely the same problems of survival that the elephant has … or the sable antelope.’ He paused to ask if any of them had ever seen a sable antelope. ‘Ah, it will be my pleasure to show you one of the superb sights of creation. But to get back to my point. It seems to me, as an ecologist, that man’s supreme problem today is finding a way by which he can live with technical advances. Really, if he doesn’t, he’s lost. And it is the white man who is grappling with this problem. I don’t mean that it was white scientists and a white nation that put a man on the moon. I mean that it is the white man who is struggling with the matter of automation, of air pollution, of urban control, of whatever is significant in the world today.’
‘What about Japan?’ Cato asked.
‘They are allied with us. The blacks are not. And there’s the terrifying difference.’
‘How about India?’
Historically they’re whites. Actually they’re blacks.’ He then spoke with the deep distrust that Rhodesians seemed to hold for the Indians: it was as if the Rhodesian reserved his harshest feelings not for the black, whom he understood, but for the Indian
‘That’s a fairly large dismissal,’ Gretchen said. Like most girls who have gone to good colleges in the United States, she had been indoctrinated with the idea that India owned a culture that was at least equal to America’s and probably superior, and now she was astonished to hear a man of wide knowledge dismissing the whole subcontinent as not worthy of serious discussion where the ultimates of contemporary life were concerned.
‘I don’t dismiss it because of spite,’ Gridley said. ‘It’s just that the nation is incapable of organizing itself and therefore of making any serious contribution.’
‘But what about her moral leadership?’ Gretchen persisted.
Gridley smiled indulgently. ‘Ask the Portuguese about that. Ask them about the rape of Goa.’
‘The important point,’ Mrs. Gridley said, addressing herself to Cato, “is that the white nations are concerned with the future. The black nations are absorbed in arranging the present, and until they catch up, the drift of history has to be with us.’
Cato laughed. ‘On the long drive north to Moçambique Island, I came to the same conclusion. I told my white friends that Rhodesia could hold out for the rest of this century. History was on your side. So then the problem becomes—how can we change history?’ The room grew quiet, and he said, ‘Tanzania is doing it by throwing in her lot with China. Suppose that Russia occupies the Middle East countries like Jordan and Israel …’