you know the Kongori they view everything through the eye of what is beautiful. Not ugly, for that has no value, especially ugliness of character. And not too beautiful, for that is a skeleton in disguise. Bingingun is made from the best of fabrics, red, and pink, and gold, and blue, and silver, all trimmed in cowries and coins, for there is power in the beauty. In patterns, braids, sequins, tassels, and amulets with medicine. Bingingun in dance, Bingingun in march, make for transformation into the ancestors. All this I learned on my travels, for Juba has masquerade, but they are not Bingingun.
I said all this to the Ogo because we followed a procession on the way to the house so that a man as tall as he would not look strange in the torchlight. He still looked strange. Five drummers in front setting the dance—three beating barrel drums, a fourth beating a double-skin bata, and the fifth beating four small bata tied together to make a sound pitched high like a crow call. Following the drummers came the Bingingun, among them the Ancestor King in royal robes and a cowrie veil, and the Trickster, whose robes turned inside out to another robe, and yet another robe, as the Bingingun all swirled and stomped to the drum, boom-boom-bakalak-bakalaka, bakalakalakalaka-boom-boom-boom. Ten and five of this clan shuffled to the left then stomped, then shuffled to the right and hopped. I said all this to the Ogo so that he would not start talking again of whom he had killed with his hands and how there is nothing in this world or the next like the sound of the crushing of skull. Sadogo’s face was lost to me in the dark, and as he stood taller than the torches, he waved his hands in the air with the Bingingun, marched when they marched, and stopped when they stopped.
Here is truth. I did not know which house was Fumanguru’s, other than that it was in the Tarobe quarter, north of the Nimbe boundary, and that it would be almost hidden by massive growths of thornbush. I said, “Good Ogo, let us look. Let us walk street to street, and stop by which house burns no light and hides in branches that will prick and cut us.”
Outside the fourth house Sadogo grabbed a torch from the wall. At the ninth house I smelled it, the fire stink of sulfur, still fresh in its scent after so many years. Most of the houses on this street stacked themselves tight beside each other, but this stood apart, now an island of thornbush. Larger than the other houses, from how it looked in the dark, the bush had grown wide and tall, reaching all the way up the front door.
We went around the back. The Ogo was still quiet. He wore his gloves, not listening when I said they were no use against the dead. Look at how they failed to save you from Ogudu, I thought, but did not say. He tore away the branches until it was safe to climb. We jumped the back wall and landed in a thick blanket of grass. Wild grass left to grow tall, some of it to my waist. Omoluzu had without a doubt been here. Only plants that grew off the dead grew here.
We stood in the courtyard, right beside the grain keep, with millet and sorghum gone sour from getting wet from many rains, caked with rat shit and fresh with rat pups. The house, a cluster of dwellings, five points like a star, was not what I expected in Kongor. Fumanguru was no Kongori. Sadogo placed the torch in the dirt and lit up the whole courtyard.
“Spoiled meat, fresh shit, dead dog? I can’t tell,” the Ogo said.
“All three, perhaps,” I said.
I pointed to the first dwelling on the right. Sadogo nodded and followed. This first dwelling told me how I would find the rest. Everything left the way Omoluzu left it. Stools broken, jars crushed, tapestry ripped down, rugs and clothes torn and thrown about. I grabbed a blanket. Hidden in the smell of dirt and rain two boys, the youngest, perhaps, but the smell went as far as the wall and died. All the dead smell the same, but sometimes their living smell can take you to the point where they died.
“Sadogo, how do the Kongori bury their dead?”
“Not in the earth. In urns, too big for this room.”