Kampala
Uganda, East Africa.
“Here.” Ms. McLeod placed a fat fountain pen on top of the Holy Angels stationery. “A real pen always makes a better impression than ballpoint.”
Tawana began to copy the letter, neatly and accurately, including all its mistakes.
Dear friend in Christ’s Name,
I send you warm greeting hoping you are in a good-sounding health. I am so happy to write to you and I cry for your spiritual kindness to rescue me from this distressed moment.
I am Elesi Kuseliwa, a girl of 18 years old, and a first born in a family of 4 children. We are orphans.
I completed Ordinary level in 2003 and in 2004 I joined the above-mentioned school and took a course in midwifery. Unfortunately in October both our parents perished in a car accident on their way from church. We were left helpless in agony without any one to console or to take care of us. Life is difficult and unbearable.
This is my last and final year to complete my course of study. We study three terms a year and each term I am supposed to pay 450 UK pounds. The total fee for the year is 1350 pounds. I humbly request you to sympathize and become my sponsor so I may complete my course and to take my family responsibities, most importantly, paying school fees for my younger sisters.
Enclosed is a photocopy of my end of third term school report. I pray and await your kind and caring response.
Yours faithfully,
Elisi Kuseliwa
“Very good,” said Ms. McLeod, when she had looked over the finished copy. “That took you just a little over fifteen minutes, which means that in an hour you should be able to make four copies just like this. Now I understand that girls your age can earn as much as two-fifty at babysitting. I’ll do better than that. I’ll pay four dollars an hour. Or one dollar for each letter you copy. Do we have a deal?”
What could Tawana say but yes.
Tawana still had one friend left from when she’d gone to Our Lady of Mercy, Patricia Brown. That was not her Somali name, of course. She’d become Patricia Brown when her mother died and she was adopted into the Brown family. She was a quiet, plodding bully of a girl, already two hundred pounds when Tawana had met her in fourth grade, and now lighting up the screen on the scale at 253. Tawana had won her friendship by patiently listening to Patricia’s ceaseless complainings about her foster parents, her siblings, her teachers, and her classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, a skill she had learned from having sat still for Lucy’s long whines and Grandpa’s rants. In exchange for her nods and murmers Tawana was able to see shows on the Browns’ tv that Tawana couldn’t get at home. That is how Tawana (and Patricia as well) came to be a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
At first the later afternoon reruns had been as hard to understand as if you arrived at a stranger’s house in the middle of a complicated family quarrel that had been going on for years. You couldn’t tell who was right and who was wrong. Or in this case who was the vampire and who wasn’t. Buffy herself definitely wasn’t, but she had her own superhuman powers. When she wanted to she could zap one of the vampires to the other side of the room with just a tap of her finger. Sometimes she would walk up to a vampire and start talking to him and then without a word of warning whack him through the heart with a wooden stake. But other times, confusingly, she would fall in love with some guy who would turn out to be a vampire, but that didn’t stop their being in love.
Patricia said there was a simple explanation. The vampires were able to confuse people by their good looks, and Buffy would eventually realize the mistake she was making with Spike and whack him just like the others. Tawana was not so sure. Spike might be a vampire but he seemed to really love Buffy. Also, he looked a lot like Mr. Forbush, with the same bleached hair and thin face and sarcastic smile. Though, as Patricia had pointed out, what did that have to do with anything! It was all just a story like Days of Our Lives, only more so since it was about vampires and vampires are only make-believe. Tawana did not tell Patricia about the real vampires in Malawi. Everything that she had learned about the White Man was between her and Rev. Gospel Blount.
But in the course of watching many episodes of Buffy and thinking them over and discussing them with other kids at Diversitas. Tawana developed a much broader understanding of the nature of vampires and the powers they possessed than you could get from an out-of-date movie like Dracula. Or even from reading books, though Tawana had never actually tried to do that. She was not much interested in books. Even their smell could get her feeling queasy.
The main thing to be learned was that here in America just the same as in Rev. Blount’s native land of Malawi there were vampires everywhere. Most people had no idea who the vampires were, but a few special individuals like Buffy, or Tawana, could recognize a vampire from the kind of fire that would flash from their eyes, or by other subtle signs.
The vampires in Minneapolis were usually white, and tended to be on the thin side, and older, especially the men. And they would watch you when they thought you weren’t looking. If you caught them at it, they would tilt their head backwards and pretend to be staring at the ceiling.
A lot of what people thought of as the drug problem was actually vampires. That was how they kept themselves out of the news. All the people who died from a so-called drug overdose? It was usually vampires.
Then one day in May toward the end of seventh grade Tawana developed a major insight into vampires that was all her own. She was in the Browns’ living room with Patricia and her younger brother Michael watching a rerun of Buffy that they all had seen before. Patricia and Michael were sitting side by side in the glider, spaced out on Michael’s medication, and Tawana was sitting behind them, keeping the glider rocking real slow with her toe, the same as if they were the twins in their stroller. Instead of looking at the story on the tv Tawana’s attention was fixed on the big statue of Jesus on the wall. There were silver spikes through his hands and feet, and his naked body was twisting around and his neck stretched up, trying to escape the crucifix. Tawana realized that Jesus looked exactly like one of the vampires when Buffy had pounded a wooden stake into him. Their skin was the same clouded white, the same expression on their faces, a kind of holy pain. Not only that but with Jesus, the same as with vampires, you might think you had killed him but then a day or two later he wasn’t in the coffin where you thought. He was out on the street again, alive.
Jesus had been the first White Man!
Tawana kept rocking the two Brown children, and
sneaking sideways glances at the crucifix, and wondering who in the world she could ever tell about her incredible insight, which kept making more and more sense.
The priests, the nuns, the missionaries! Hospitals and health clincs. The crucifixes in everybody’s homes, just like the story of Moses when the Jews in Egypt marked their doors with blood to keep out the Angel of Death!
Everything was starting to connect. Here in America and there in Africa, for centuries and centuries, it was all the same ancient never-ending struggle of good against evil, human against vampire, Black against White.
On July 3, in preparation for the holidays, the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Cooperative once again changed its window display in the store that was never open underneath the All-Faiths Tabernacle. The old ENTERTAINMENT IS FUN—FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! sign wasn’t taken down. Instead WAR was pasted over ENTERTAINMENT, and the mannikins who had been sitting around the imaginary living room watching Gene Kelly on tv had been dismembered, their detached limbs and white clothes scattered around a cemetery made of cardboard tombstones and spray-on cobwebs. A big flag rippled in a breeze supplied by a standing fan at the side of the window, while the hidden sound system played the Jimi Hendrix version of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Tawana’s first reaction, as for the earlier displays, was a perplexed indignation, a sense of having been personally violated without knowing exactly how. But now that she had become more adept at unriddling such conundrums the basic meaning of the display in the window slowly became clear like a face on tv emerging from the green and grey sprinkles of static. This was the cemetery that the vampires lived in, only they weren’t home. The White Man was hunting for more victims. The limbs beside the gravestones were the remnants of some earlier feast.
It actually helped to know what the real situation was. When there is a definite danger it is possible to act. Tawana went round to the back of the building. The Arts Cooperative people always used their back door and kept their front door locked, and Rev. Blount did just the opposite. There was no doorbell, so Tawana knocked.