The Lioness(11)

“Good.”

She turned to him. “Thank you, Benjamin,” she said.

Then the two of them left him alone to throw some sand on the mud and replace the bathtub. He was pleased that already this Katie Barstow knew both his and Kidogo’s names. Yes, he was staff, but he was still a man. There would be guests in some groups who wouldn’t bother to learn the names of anyone but Patton the entire time they were together with them in the Serengeti.

He liked most of these Americans, though he had a particular fondness for Katie because she was kind and for Terrance Dutton and Reggie Stout because they were competent. Dutton was one of only three Black men he’d ever had as a guest, the other two being London bankers. Stout was a movie publicist and, Benjamin had overheard, a war hero.

At one point he had seen Dutton alone at the end of the day, standing with a pair of binoculars at his eyes and a gin and tonic on the ground beside him. Benjamin had stood motionless because he didn’t want to frighten away whatever bird or animal the actor was watching. But the man had sensed the porter behind him.

“It’s okay,” the actor said, and he brought the binoculars down from his eyes and leaned over for his drink. “I think that’s a purple grenadier,” he continued, pointing at a tree thirty meters from the camp.

Even without the binoculars, Benjamin could see that he was correct. “It is,” he said.

“What a beautiful bird. That red beak. Red crown. The blue around the eyes.”

“It’s one of my favorites,” said Benjamin.

“May I ask you something?” the actor asked, turning toward him.

Benjamin nodded.

“Does this ever get tiresome for you?”

“The Serengeti? It hasn’t yet. It hasn’t for my father.”

“No. I don’t suppose lions and rhinos and purple grenadiers ever do.” He finished his drink. Quietly, his tone pensive, he continued, “But my mother cleaned bedrooms and bathrooms in a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel where she would never have been allowed to stay as a guest—or even eat. My father was a bartender in a restaurant two blocks away where he would have been fired on the spot if he had ever entered the establishment through the front door. I know there were days for them when the sheer indignity of it all exhausted them.”

When he said the words establishment and indignity, the pronunciation was so distinctive that Benjamin realized suddenly that his father had taken him to a movie with Terrance Dutton. Dutton had played a minister who had been wrongly charged with murdering his wife, and his white lawyer wasn’t much help in defending him. And so he had defended himself. He’d done a brilliant job with the evidence and clearly was innocent, but the court had nonetheless found him guilty and the poor guy had been sent to the electric chair.

“I’ve seen one of your movies,” Benjamin said, carefully formulating his response. One of Charlie Patton’s critical rules was that you never discussed African politics with a guest. You never discussed politics, period. “The one where you played the minister.”

The actor rolled his eyes amiably. “Well intentioned. But it was trying too hard to capitalize on To Kill a Mockingbird. And I’m not Gregory Peck—or Sidney Poitier, for that matter. Now those two have acting chops.”

“I liked it. My father liked it. I’m sure such things could happen here. Maybe they have. But we’re our own country now,” he said, still choosing his words with utmost care. “We’re in charge.”

“People, you mean, like you and me,” said Dutton.

Benjamin nodded. Just then the purple grenadier lifted off from the branch and flew past them against a sky as pink as a bougainvillea. Together they watched it. “No, bwana,” he told the actor definitively. “This could never grow tiresome.”

Dutton was a tall man and he put his free arm, the one without the empty highball glass, around Benjamin’s shoulders, and together they started back to the camp. “Fair enough,” he said. “One thing.”

Benjamin waited.

“Please, don’t call me bwana.”

“Would you prefer ‘Mr. Dutton’?”

“God, no. Just call me Terrance.”

Benjamin honestly wasn’t sure that he could—and he certainly wouldn’t in front of Charlie Patton. There were protocols. Just as you steered clear of politics with the guests, you never called them by their given names. Nevertheless, when the porter returned home, he knew that the very first thing he was going to do was tell his father that a Black Hollywood movie star had been on the safari and had asked Benjamin to call him by his first name.



* * *



.?.?.

Benjamin saw that the first person to emerge from the Land Rover with the shattered window and the flat tire was Juma, a guide from Arusha who was a decade older than Benjamin’s father. He was easily seventy and a grandfather. But his eyesight was still astonishing, whether he was spotting a secretary bird as it pecked its way along the ground in the distance or announcing with confidence that the tiny black dot in the bottom of the Ngorongoro Crater was a rhino. He was growing a little wide in the belly, and sometimes the food on safari no longer agreed with him, but he had no plans to retire anytime soon. He was revered by the porters and perhaps even by Patton.

He shut the door to the jeep. He put his hands up high, and it seemed as if he was about to say something. Benjamin would never know. Because it was right then that the white marksman with the elephant gun brought it back up to his shoulder, stared through the sight, aiming, and quite literally blew apart the entire right side of the old guide’s skull. Benjamin closed his eyes, horrified, but even with his eyes shut he kept seeing the older man’s death. He had seen too much. He had a sense that the shooter had only filled one of the barrels with a bullet, but it didn’t matter: Benjamin had witnessed a hunter take down a tree with a 1,600-grain bullet. The human head? It became porridge.