A Feast Unknown Read Free

November 21, 1888, at 11:45 P.M .
    My mother’s mind was never thereafter quite in Africa. She spent most of her time in a dream England, a country muchbetter than the one she knew in reality, I’m sure. Despite this, she was very competent in taking care of me, if I am to believe my uncle’s diary. James could not make love to her then because it would have been too much like taking advantage of an idiot. So my poor uncle suffered, and I think he may have been glad when death came at the hands of the chief of a tribe of The Folk. Any horror he felt would have been for his nephew, a twelve-month-old baby crying for food and for his mother’s milk.
    I was to get no more of that because she had died in her sleep a few hours before my uncle was killed. I did get a mother’s milk, though it was not quite human milk.

1
    The morning of March 21, 1968, was a fine morning. I was seventy-nine years old and felt, and looked, thirty. The sun woke me up that morning. Or so I thought. Sometimes the African sun sneaks over the horizon like an old lion on the prowl, the mists diffracting its rays into a mane. I awoke as if I had been tickled on the nose with a hair from that mane.
    The silence was like a breath on my face. It was the silence that had quietly awakened me.
    The whinnying of horses, the bellowing of cattle, the squawking of chickens, the chittering of the monkeys were compressed within lungs and sealed by mouths afraid to open.
    The voices of the cooks, house servants, and yard men were there, but noiseless. They hung in the sky, turned to cold blue air. I could sense them fluttering the windpipe.
    Fear?
    Or stealth by some and fear of others?
    Treachery.
    Perhaps.
    Jomo Kenyatta had said that I was the only white man he had ever respected. What he meant was: feared.
    During the so-called Mau-Mau revolution, he told his men to stay away from me. My own tribe, the blacks who had initiated me with blood-letting and buggering into their tribe and who had selected me as their chief, hated the Agikuyu. And they loved me. Not as a brother but as a demigod. They would have died to a man to defend me.
    Besides, Kenyatta knew that though I was white, I was even more African than he. After all, I was adopted and raised by The Folk.
    My blood-brothers and warriors, the original tribesmen, had almost all died off. The survivors were creaking-boned whitehairs. I had been given the choice of becoming a citizen of this African state and declaring the source of my wealth or getting out. Old Kenyatta felt strong enough now to send me that ultimatum. Even though he was no longer the titular head of state, his voice was behind the order.
    I had refused to do either. And so I had waited. But I had waited so long for action to be taken that I had become a little careless.
    The sun was no longer an old lion. It was the red eye of Death, the drunken always-dry sot who had thirsted for me for almost eighty years.
    Now the red eye was bisected by my penis, which reared with a piss hard-on. I was lying on my back, naked, and the scarlet ball climbed up the shaft and was on its way to being balanced atop it.
    From some distance, there was a click.
    The sky was ripped as if it were rotten old cloth.
    The sun was on top of the head of my penis, seeming almost to spurt out.
    I knew what the ripping sound was the moment I heard it, and I knew what the click had been.
    As if it were red seed, the sun burst open from my penis. It disappeared in smoke. The walls flew apart as if they had become a flock of cranes disturbed by an eagle. The smoke poured into me and filled me to the backs of my eyeballs. The noise was squeezed out of me.
    I was turned inside out like a glove. I was a tuning fork trying to find the correct resonance.
    The first shell may have struck just outside the bedroom window. The second shell may have exploded at the end of my bed. By one of those freaks and coincidences that have caused many to mock my biographer, but have actually