Black Leopard, Red Wolf

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 gods, you might lay as they lay.”

“Beloved uncle, you cause me great sadness.”

I did not tell him that the woman was already raging inside me and I desired her desires, but otherwise did not feel like a woman for I wanted to hunt deer, and run and sport.

“I wish to be cut now,” I said.

“Your father should have cut you. Now it is too late. Too late. You will be one always on the line between the two. You will always walk two roads at the same time. You will always feel the strength of one and the pain of the other.”

That night the moon did not come, but when he appeared outside the hut, the boy still glowed.

“Come see what new men and women do,” he said.

“You must tell me your name,” I said.

He said nothing.

We went through the bush to the place where drummers were sending messages to gods of sky, and ancestors in the ground. The moonlight boy walked fast and did not wait. I was still afraid of stepping on a viper. He vanished through a wall of thick leaves and I stopped, not knowing where to go until a white hand pushed through the thick leaves, grabbed mine, and pulled me in.

We came upon a clearing where the drummers drummed, while others beat sticks and others whistled. Two men approached to start the ceremony, and we hid in the bush.

“The bumbangi, the official and provider of food. Also stealer. See him in his mweelu mask of sprouting feathers and a giant hornbill beak. Look beside him, the makala, master of charms and spells,” Kava said.

The new men lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. All wore skirts of fine cloths, which I had only seen on my uncle, and all now wore clay buns with ostrich feathers and flowers. Then they jumped, up and down, higher and higher, so high that they stayed in the air before stomping the ground. Stomping the ground so hard the earth shook. And they kept jumping to bodom, bodom, bodom, bodom. There were no children. Maybe they were like the moonlight boy and me, hiding in the bush. Then the new women came to the clearing. Two women walked right up to the men and started to jump with them, bodom, bodom

, bodom. Man and woman jumping closer and closer, moving in until skin touched skin, chest touched chest, nose touched nose. The moonlight boy was still holding my hand. I let him hold it. The people joined in and the clearing was a cloud of dust from jumping and stomping and older women now doing a dance in and out of the crowd, possessed by divine smoke.

The bumbangi sang again and again:

Men with a penis

Women with a vagina

You do not know each other

So build no house yet