The gift of the Osuo

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Charles Johnson

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to include a work of fiction in this issue, Charles Johnson was more than willing to provide us with some previously unpublished work.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 have an unpublished story in the back of a desk drawer that editors have foolishly rejected over the years.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."