Hunting Midnight

Now we are fried for sure! I thought. I did not expect, however, for her to burst into hot tears, perhaps owing to Midnight’s near-perfect Portuguese, which left her completely nonplussed. Her sobbing served to draw a crowd, since the people of my homeland — like the English — gather around misfortune like vultures to a dying lamb. Soon, Midnight and I found ourselves surrounded by gawking faces.

“I’ve seen that monkey before,” one man said, pointing at the Bushman. “He belongs to Stewart the Scotsman.”

“He ought to be caged!” another shouted.

This latter judgment brought out the Highlander in me, and I let loose a flurry of epithets that Daniel had taught me, the choicest of which was that the woman in question plainly had the mind of a camel, since even a simpleton knew that monkeys had hands and not paws. I elaborated on this by stating that it was obvious that she had crashed headlong into my friend like a driverless carriage and caused him to stain his waistcoat, as anyone who was not blinded by stupidity could see, since her offending forearm — the size of a stuffed capon — was smeared with telling yellow stains.

Comparing the sobbing woman to either a camel or a carriage or a capon might have been acceptable, but saying all three so forthrightly in one sentence served not to win me admiration as a child of advanced vocabulary, as it might have, but rather condemnation as a rude and impudent cur. A man wearing a shearer’s apron stained black with grease even dared to grab my arm and shake me. “You little sod,” he said. “I ought to beat your bottom here in the street!”

This affront roused Midnight from his anxious confusion. Advancing toward the man, he said, “Please, sir, let the lad go.”

Blood shone in the moon-whiteness of the African’s eyes. It was lucky for our shearer that the Bushman carried no knife; he might have killed the man that day as quickly as he would have a jackal coveting his child.

Midnight’s few words quieted the crowd, probably because he spoke them in English, which tends to intimidate the Portuguese. Or possibly it was because no one expected him to be able to speak any language at all — or to dare to defy a Portuguese man.

The shearer let me go, but only so he might confront Midnight. Yet as he strode forward, the African — to my great surprise — hoisted me over his shoulder. I do not know if he intended this as the brilliant coup it was. Likely, he simply wished to protect me. Whatever the case, the shearer was not about to fight a man carrying a young lad.

Midnight walked with me through the parting crowd without saying a word. After he turned the corner, he put me down. “The gemsbok is not bothered by ants, tortoises, and hedgehogs,” he told me.

“What’s a gemsbok?”

“A noble animal, a kind of deer. He has a crescent horn on his head.” He held my chin in his hand. “John, this may come as a surprise to you, but you are not a crocodile.”

“Sorry?”

“You must not let yourself be provoked so very, very easily.”

Midnight spread his hands like a fan atop his head and crouched into a posture of expectancy, as though he were an animal listening for a far-off call. His nostrils flared and his fingers wiggled. He sniffed at the air, scenting something upwind.

This, then, was a gemsbok. He was imitating it. Or, as he would tell me later, inhabiting it.

“This is how you must act,” he said. “No more shouting at strangers.”

His criticism shamed me. “But that woman was rude to you! She said horrible things.”

He made no effort to answer or comfort me, which struck me as heartless. Frustration cast tears down my cheek. Still he would not move. Finally, I gave in and imitated him, placing my own fanned hands atop my head and making believe that I, too, was a gemsbok.

“Good,” he said, smiling. He took my hand and held it to his heart. “No more crying. It is much more important that you teach me a song. I’ve been meaning to ask you for one.”

Children’s moods change so quickly. “Which?” I asked eagerly.

“One of your father’s songs. Any of them. I should very, very much like to learn one.”

Right there on the street, I sang the first verse of “The Foggy, Foggy Dew”: Oh, I am a bachelor, I live by myself, and I work at the weaver trade….

That was to be the first of many tunes that I would teach Midnight. In exchange, he helped me learn several songs belonging to his people. I even mastered a secret one about rain bringing life to a barren desert. I am still able to sing it. And I believe I am the only European who can.

*

I discovered my project with Midnight while reading aloud to my parents, a practice in which they both took great delight and which was intended to perfect my diction. In addition to Robert Burns and certain minor Scottish poets whom no one south of Hadrian’s Wall had ever heard of, Papa was a great aficionado of Latin and Greek classics. He read English translations, however, since he was not a scholar, borrowing them from the library at the British club near the riverside. One particular night, I began to read from Xenophon’s “On Hunting,” which Papa had brought home that evening, believing it would entertain our guest. I found it mostly tedious myself, and Mama thought it appalling. She held that “chasing God’s poor little creatures through a forest and killing them most cruelly” was depraved.

“ The first pursuit that a lad just emerging from boyhood ought to take up is hunting,”I read. “And afterward he maygo on to the other branches of education,provided he has the means.”

“Rubbish!” Mama scoffed.

“Continue,” Papa prompted sternly.

As a piece of writing it was one extended yawn, but when I glanced at Midnight I discovered his head tilted in eager expectancy, as though this essay were the answer to a riddle over which he’d long puzzled, so I invited him to read from the book himself.

“I cannot,” he replied. When I inquired as to why, he said, “Because … because I cannot read or write.”

“Just try,” I said, holding the leather-bound text out to him. “John, please do not nettle Midnight,” said Mama quickly, laying her embroidery down in her lap. “You were doing splendidly and we should all be pleased to hear more. Is that not right, dear?”

“Aye, your voice has improved greatly of late,” Papa agreed, moving the candlesticks on our tea table nearer to me so I might have more light.

“No, let Midnight,” I replied sulkily.

“But it is impossible,” the Bushman repeated. When he smiled apologetically, my heart tumbled, for I realized it was true; no one had ever taken the time to help him to learn to read and write, which seemed a monstrous injustice. I continued to read aloud, but my thoughts were already searching out where I had left my Greenwood’s English Grammar. That night, I found it at the bottom of my chest.

In the morning I discovered Midnight standing naked in our Lookout Tower, staring at the rooftops of the city. “I shall teach you to read and write,” I told him, showing him my primer.

He laughed at my forthright statement and then, realizing that I meant it, pressed his fingertips to his temples as though his head were throbbing at the very thought.

“No, it will be easy,” I said. “You’ll see.”

After he’d dressed, I took his hand and brought him to our garden, so that he might learn to design letters in the sunshine.

Progress was slow. During this first lesson, I only got him to draw the letters A, B, C, D, and E, and even those rather poorly. He preferred turning his letters into animals, the A becoming the legs of a giraffe, for instance, and the B the eyes of a crocodile viewed from above.

Over the next few weeks I worked with Midnight every day after breakfast. Soon he was able to sketch each of the twenty-six letters without addition of muzzle, horns, hooves, or tail. I thereafter settled upon a process that guaranteed us slow but steady progress. Standing as though spotlit in a theater, gesticulating wildly, I would read aloud a paragraph to Midnight from a classical volume, which always pleased him greatly and sometimes provoked him to giggles. Then we would sit next to each other and read over this same excerpt, the Bushman pointing with