This young girl, she is Africa, my friend, Africa. All of the lush area that travels from the broad but barren shoulders of the Sahara down to the closed thighs of South Africa, that still mourns an abusive husband, Apartheid. This girl is the Queen of Sheba, though none today will show her scepter its due. Soon, though, they might. They might bow their heads before her throne and prostrate themselves on her marble floor and count themselves very fortunate to leave the balance of her scales alive.
What will the Queen do today? Let me tell you. She will get up in her little cement rented room. It will still be dark enough that she must light a dingy tin kerosene lamp imported from China to see. It will be cold enough that the cocks have been crowing for over an hour to keep warm. The muezzin in the town mosque will be calling the Muslims in the quartiers to come to morning prayers in le grand matin, the hour before dawn, his wailing voice rising and falling over the roosters and the otherwise silent town.
The Queen of Sheba does not sell her body to bring men to her scales; she has something else to sell: diamonds.
It is a mystery, is it not, how no one ever robs the Queen of her diamonds? It's because she never tells them and no one notices what she does not tell them about.
She will put on her lion-print blouse and her parrot red-and-green pagne skirt. She will push her feet into rubber-soled flipflops that cost 200 CFA. Then, she will dip out water from the tub in the corner of the room, to wash her face and for breakfast. She will cook on a small fire in the courtyard in front of her room—a little morning Matinal hot chocolate, an omelette with some long, hard bread to soak up the golden palm oil on which the omelette floats, and hot red ground piment to kill the off taste of the eggs, which are over a month old. Eggs are scarce this month because so many hens have died off from a flu (and yet, there are always cocks to crow three hours before dawn). Someone will buy more hens and sell more eggs. But not this week.
She will tie a scarf that matches her pagne over her head, around and under her hair in back. She will put a metal chain with a plastic-gold fish around her neck. Her earrings will be semiprecious stones set in cheap silver that would stain her skin if her skin were not as slate black as midnight, as the bottom of a trap, sucking in all light yet shining in the sun.
Before she leaves her room, she will take out a leather pouch that thieves never seem to find and she will shake out its contents. Diamonds will spill out, each one unique, but each different in cast of light and color, for there are three hundred of the kind that men hunt. Some of them will be blood-red as rubies and others will be rainforest-green as emeralds and some will be as sandy-brown as the Sahara, and some will have no color at all. You won't be able to tell how many. Sometimes, they will seem less than a hundred, other times a thousand or more, and sometimes millions. You will only know one thing for sure if you see those diamonds and that is that by the end of each day, the Queen of Sheba will have acquired at least one more.
It's bad juju, my friend, bad juju, which only means voodoo before there was voodoo, and there is nothing you can do about it.
She will scoop those diamonds off her shabby pallet on a bunk kept off the floor by a meter. This protects the sleeper from snakes and scorpions. But you can't keep off the rats and the spiders because they come down from above. She will shake her gems back into her pouch, smiling to herself. It won't be a pleasant smile.
She will tie the pouch up inside her pagne under her blouse and go outside, locking the door with a padlock because there are thieves everywhere. Then, she will go down the red-dirt courtyard past the palm and banana trees and the little mango tree waiting patiently for the coming rainy season to come into fruit for just one month.
She will push open a ribbed tolle gate, the rusting tin bleeding onto the wood, and step out into a dirt alleyway. She will skip down it to another gate and onto a street frenetic with early morning activity. Lorries and bush taxis loaded with goods and people will roar past, belching noxious fumes. Goats and sheep will run in between the vehicles and feet, bleating to distraction. Everyone knows that they have until nine in the morning to get anything done before the sun becomes their enemy, sapping their strength more than any disease, killing their will. By noon, everyone will have retreated behind closed doors into the cool houses, drinking soda or beer, depending on their religion, talking and laughing. The women will beat manioc or cook (for cooking takes all day in Africa) or sew or feed a baby. Women have no real rest between four in the morning and eight at night.
Then the Queen of Sheba will stroll down the street toward the marché, smiling in anticipation of the day's riches.
In the marché are many women. This is a big city, en ville, and such have permanent marchés with ramshackle wooden buildings for the cloth and gold merchants and big outdoor wooden racks containing musty, maggot-ridden fish. Narrow, treacherous lanes boast everything from bicycle tires to brassieres and are full of fetid mud and stinking thieves. It's a dangerous place, the marché, and it could all burn down in an hour. Sometimes, it does.
The Queen of Sheba will take her place not far from the women crying their wares of street food, of hard-roasted corn and leaf-wrapped manioc paste. On her other side will stand the meat-sellers, hawking offal, bloody meat and cooked beef brochettes on wooden tables. No one will take note of her in any way. She will hunker down in between the buildings and lay out her treasures in piles called "tas" on a round tin tray, each according to his color. She will pick up two and roll them, snake eyes. "Diamants!" she will cry. "Un tas, deux tas, trois tas, quatre! Come see my diamonds!"
No one will pay her any heed, for they will only hear her if they want, need, ought to, must hear her. She doesn't care about the rest.
Then, along will come a man.
Some days, he will be French and some days, he will come from North Africa and some days, his ancestors will have come, generations ago, from India. But today, he will come from the rainforest below the savannah line. He will swagger, tall and burly, and he will think he owns the world.
He will come down the narrow track, shoving everyone who does not scramble to get out of his way fast enough. He will hear the Queen of Sheba's call and his head will lift. Diamonds! He will follow that call down the narrow lanes of mud and wood until he turns a corner and there, between the meat and the corn, will she crouch against a wall, her tin tray of treasures in front of her.
There is always a man, you know. She never has to go looking for them.
He will approach her and tower over her. The sun won't have risen quite high enough yet to shine into the wood-sheathed alleyways, but his shadow will make them even darker. He will look down at the diamonds, marveling at how they gleam even in the dim morning light. Could it be that they sense profit, like their mistress?
The Queen of Sheba will stop shouting her wares and stand up. This will be her first customer for the day. "Bonjour, Monsieur. How may I help you?"
"You have some fine wares for a street urchin, ma petite," he will say. His voice will be boisterous and, on the surface, good-natured. But it will be the kind of good nature based on contempt. He will literally talk down to her. "Where did you get them?"
"I dug them up and traded them, and some have given them to me," she will reply, her dark eyes not lowered or narrowed by his bulk.
The man will frown. He will be dressed well, in a black suit, for he will be a government functionnaire, a patron who works in a high office downtown, and he won't be used to being addressed so openly and boldly by a woman, let alone a street urchin or whore, for this is all the Queen of Sheba will be to him. "Don't be sassy with your elders. I know you stole them. There's no other way someone like you could have 'found' them."
She will shrug. "Call the gendarmes, then." She will put one hand on her hip and her blouse will slide just so on her shoulder. Suddenly, the man will realize that she is not quite as young as all that—or should we say, that she is just as young as he likes young girls to be. Which is not very old at all.
His smile will turn more predatory. "Oh, I don't think that will be necessary. I'm sure we can come to some kind of arrangement."
She will nod, as if he has just proposed a different kind of business transaction. "I'm sure that we can, too." She will point down at the tray. "Which tas would you like to choose, Monsieur?"
He will lean further in, as if to press her into the wall with her back to it. "I think I will take them all, if you want to stay out of prison." But as he moves forward, he will find himself with his ample belly pressing against the wall, his black suit snagged by the wood. Embarrassed, he will pull back, smoothing down his jacket. She will still be standing against the wall, but somehow, she will have moved a meter to the left, out of his reach.
"I ask you again, Monsieur, which tas would you like to choose?" she will say. She will point down at the tray again. "Red, I think, but it is always your choice."
His eyes narrowed, he will decide to play along with her game for a little while. He will smile again, to show amusement that he doesn't feel. "All right, then, show me that tas."
She will crouch down to pick up the tray. Lifting it, she will show the tas to him. "As you can see, it is a very big pile," she will say, her tone neither proud nor wheedling, despite the clear value and high quality of the stones. They will need no sales pitch. They will shine even without the benefit of direct sunlight, casting light shadows all around her and into the man's face, making him wince.
"Yes, a very big pile," he will agree. He will reach out to pick up one particularly large stone. It will gleam as if on fire, a flame lit on a pool of blood. "Where did you get these?"
"From the earth, of course," she will say. He will glance down, only half-interested in the earth, but she will be right. The earth everywhere around them is red as blood under the roots of the trees and the grassland. The man will have simply never thought of it before.
"These are almost as fine a quality as they have in the Congo or Zaire," he will say, though if he were honest, he would admit that he has never seen as fine a quality as her stones anywhere, let alone finer. He will let fall the gem with a rattle on the tray, like a rattle of bones, shivering for a moment. Though it will be warming up fast this morning, still, he will feel chill in the shadow of the marché. "Where on the earth did you get them?"
"How much will you pay for them?" she will say. "What will you pay for them?"
To mask his unease, he will settle into the age-old game of haggling. "How much are you asking?" he will say.
She will shake her head. "Everyone pays a different price; everyone gives something different. How much will you pay?"
"All right. One thousand CFA," he will say, laughing. It's a ridiculous price for even one of her blood-red rubies, let alone the entire tas. Yes, you can pay a villageoise next to nothing for very valuable things, but even "next to nothing" would be 10,000 CFA here.
She will shake her head. "Money means nothing. What is a thousand-CFA note but a piece of paper that you use to bribe a drunken gendarme at the contrôle point leading into town? What are you willing to pay? Your position? Your family? Your home? Your tribe? Your life?"
Now, he will laugh outright, but it will not be a sound of amusement, more of anger. "We are talking about diamonds here!"
She will shift the tray to one shoulder, balancing it as if it were a scale and the tas on it the weights keeping it fair. "We stopped talking about diamonds when you tried to push me into the wall, Monsieur. I ask you again—what are you willing to pay?"
"I'm not going to pay anything so ridiculous for dead stones." He will start to move away.
"Of course you will." Her chill voice will stop him dead. "Because you want them badly, my stones. You all do. You want their magic, their juju. You want their luck."
He will turn back. "What kind of luck?"
"How many kinds of luck can there be?"
"Many kinds." He will look again at the stones. "My wife has left me, gone back to her parents. Her aunt was ill and she took the two children with her when she left. She said she would come back after the funeral, but the funeral was six months ago. Do you have any kind of luck for that?"
Her eyes will turn as cold and fiery as the stones on the tray, as black as obsidian, as black as coal. "You want your wife back, do you? Then, why did you take a village woman in as your 'domestique' only five days after she left?"
His anger will grow. "That is none of your business. We are talking about diamonds."
She will lift her chin. "Diamonds, yes. Diamonds as blue as the bruise on your wife's face when you beat her. Diamonds as red as the blood of your children when you hit them." She will look him straight in the eye, which will astonish him, since he is so much taller than she. "I wonder what kind of diamond you will make."
He will not really hear the last part. He will still be focused on what she has said. "My wife had no right to take my children away. No right! I don't need your juju. I'll go up and fetch her myself and if not her, my children. She can't stop me and neither can her pathetic family! If she tries, I'll kill her!"
He will move toward the Queen, menacing. "I don't like you, ma petite. You know too much."
She won't flinch. "I know why your wife left you. She knows about the young girls that you killed, the ones that disappeared into the forest, under that red, red earth, and never came back. The ones that look just like me." He will back away, his face draining of blood. "No one else missed those girls; there are so many in a village." She will take a step forward. "But I missed them." She will raise her right hand; in her left hand, she will raise the tray, balanced on her fingers like a set of scales. "I think that you will make a very decent ruby."
He will take one step further back. He could crush this girl, or so he would have thought five minutes ago. But now, as he steps back in the mud in his nice leather shoes and fine suit, he will feel like the one being crushed, a pain beginning in the base of his spine and rising, vertebra by crushed vertebra, up to the base of his skull. She will smile and close her right hand. He will gasp at a pain in his head that will grow and grow, as his very limbs crumple and shrink into his torso, and his torso up into his skull. He will scream as his skull collapses in on itself, but the shriek will sound like breaking crystal. For the first time in his life, no one in the marché will notice him at all.
The Queen of Sheba will open her hand. Inside will be a ruby as red as blood, with a dark, dark heart, a flaw that will only increase its beauty. Of the man whose wife fled him for his sins, there will be no sign at all.
She will drop the ruby onto the tray into the tas of blood-red gems. It is a large pile. She will smile and hunker down behind the tray, against the wall, waiting for the next one. There is always a next one.
* * *
She is Africa, my friend, did I not tell you? She is the Queen of Sheba. Like Solomon, her distant consort of a few months so long ago, she oversees her people and uses her scales to divide up forgotten justice. She judges the quick and the dead, those above and below ground.
God help you if you are one and she thinks you should be the other, because no one else but God can aid you once she brings out her scales.
* * *