nearly fell into a hole dug so deep you heard the old devils, big as trees, rustle in their sleep at the bottom. The moonlight boy told me that it was soon time to gather the durra harvest, for the women to come to the fields with baskets to take the crop away.
One day I saw nine men who came back to the village, tall and shining from new paint on some, red ochre and shea butter on others, men who looked like they were just born as warriors.
At nighttime they sang and danced and fought, and sang again, and put on Hemba masks that looked like the chimpanzee but Kava said was in the image of all the elders gone, to speak to them in the spirit trees. They sang in Hemba masks to break the curse of many moons of bad hunting. The drum beat a kekeke. Bambambam, lakalakalakalaka under the wind.
The village woke up to a new smell and it was everywhere. New men and new women ripe to burst. I watched them from the man who would be my uncle’s house, as he watched his wives and scratched his belly.
“A boy told me he would take me to the rites of manhood,” I said.
“A boy promise you the Zareba? Under whose command?”
“By his own hand,” I said.
“Is that what he tell you now?” he said.
“Yes. That I will be his new partner as the old one died by snakebite. I speak your tongue now. I know your ways, beloved uncle. I am your blood. I am ready.”
“Which boy is this?” my uncle said.
But I did not know where lived this boy. My uncle rubbed his chin and looked at me. “You were born when you were found, and that is not even a moon. Do not rush to die so soon,” he said.
I did not tell him that I was a man already.
“You have seen them. Boys running around, smaller than the men who came back to the village.”
“What boys?”
“Boys with red tips, the female cut off from the male.”
I did not know what he was talking about so he took me outside. The sky was gray and fat with waiting rain. Two boys ran past and he called at the taller one, his face red, white, and yellow, the yellow a line in the middle of his head going all the way down. Remember, my uncle is a very important man, with more cows than the chief, and even some gold. The boy came over, shining from sweat.
“I was chasing a fox,” he said to my uncle.
My uncle waved him closer. He laughed, saying the boy knows he has the mark of the end of youth, and wants the village to know. The boy flinched when my uncle grabbed his balls and cock as if to weigh them. Look, he said. The paint almost hid that the skin was gone, cut away, leaving the bold blossom tip. In the beginning we are all born of two, he said. You are man and you are woman, just as girl is woman and she is man. This boy will be a man, now that the fetish priest has cut the woman away, he said.
So stiff was this boy, but he tried to stand proud. My uncle kept talking. “And the girl must have the man deep inside her cut out of her neha for her to be a woman. Just as the first beings was of two.” He rubbed the boy’s head, sent him away, and went back inside.
Off on a rock men gathered. Tall, strong, black, and shining with spears. I watched them stand still until the sunset made them shadow. My uncle turned to me, almost whispering as if telling me horrible news around strangers.
“Every sixty times the earth flies around the sun, we celebrate death and rebirth. The very firstborn were twins, but only when the divine male loosed his seed in the earth was there life. This is why the man who is also a woman, and the woman who is also a man, is a danger. It is too late. You have grown too old and will be both man and woman.”
He watched me until his words spoke to my mind.
“I will never be a man?”
“You will be a man. But this other is in you and will make you other. Like the men who roam the lands and teach our wives woman secrets. You will know as they know. By the