The sorcier is finishing a new drum today, Anatole said. Perhaps they would play it this evening, an initiation. The chief’s baby son would have enjoyed that. From the baby’s body, the sorcier had been able to salvage only enough skin to make this one small drum.
“What?” Danny said, looking down at the deep brown skin covering the top of the drum.
Anatole explained, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, that whenever one of the chief’s many sons died, the sorcier used his skin to make one of Kabas’s special drums. It had always been done.
Danny wrestled with that for a moment. On his first trip to Africa five years earlier, he had learned the wrenching truth of how different these cultures were.
“Why?” he finally asked. “Pourquoi?”
He had seen other drums made entirely of human skin taken from slain enemies, fashioned in the shape of stunted bodies with gaping mouths; when tapped a hollow sound came from the effigy’s mouths. He knew that trying to impose his Western moral framework on the inhabitants of an alien land was hopeless. I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to check your preconceptions at the door, he thought jokingly to himself.
“Magique.” Anatole’s eyes showed a flash of fear—fear born of respect for great power, rather than paranoia or panic. With the magic drums of Kabas, the chief could conquer any man, steal his heartbeat. It was old magic, a technique the village wizards had discovered long before the French had come to Cameroon, and before them the Germans. Kabas had been isolated, and at peace for longer than the memories of the oldest people in the village. Because of the drums. Anatole smiled, proud of his story, and Danny restrained an urge to pat him on the head.
Trying not to let his disbelief show, Danny nodded deeply to the sorcier. “Merci,” he said. As Anatole led him back out to the courtyard, the sorcier returned to his work on the small drum.
Danny wondered if he should have tried to buy one of the drums from the wrinkled man. Did he believe the story about using human skins? Probably. Why would Anatole lie?
As they left the sorcier’s homestead to begin the trek back to the village, he looked westward across the jagged landscape of inselbergs. At sunset, the air filled with hundreds of kites, their wings rigid, circling high on the last thermals. Like leaves before the wind, the birds came spiraling down to disappear into the trees, filling them with the invisible flapping of wings.
When they reached the main village again, Danny saw that the women had returned from their labor in the nearby fields. He was familiar with the African tradition of sending the women and children out for backbreaking labor while the men lounged in the shade and talked “business.”
The numerous sons of the chief and other adults gathered inside the courtyard near the fire, which the old sinewy woman had stoked into a larger blaze. Other men emerged, and Danny wondered where they had been hiding all afternoon. Out hunting? If so, they had nothing to show for their efforts. Anatole directed Danny to sit on a mat beside the chief, and everyone smiled vigorously at each other, the villagers exchanging the call-and-response litany of ritual greetings, which could go on for several minutes.
The old woman served the chief first, then the honored guest. She placed a brown yam like a baked potato on the mat in front of him, miming that it was hot. Danny took a cautious bite; the yam was pungent and turned to paste in his mouth. Then the woman reappeared with the promised chicken in peanut sauce. They ate quietly in a circle around the fire, ignoring each other, as red shadows flickered across their faces.
Listening to the sounds of eating, as well as the simmering evening hush of the West African hills, Danny felt the emptiness like a peaceful vacuum, draining away stress and loud noises and hectic schedules. After too many head-pounding tours and adrenaline-crazed performances, Danny was convinced he had forgotten how to sit quietly, how to slow down. After one rough segment of the last Blitzkrieg tour, he had taken a few days to go camping in the mountains; he recalled pacing in vigorous circles around the picnic table, muttering to himself that he was relaxing as fast as he could! Calming down was an acquired skill, he felt, and there was no better teacher than Africa.
After the meal, heads turned in the firelight, and Danny looked up to see the sorcier enter the chief’s compound. The wrinkled man cradled several of his mystical drums. He placed one of the drums in front of the chief, then set the others on an empty spot on the ground. He squatted behind one drum, thrusting his long, lean legs up and to the side like the wings of a vulture.
Danny perked up. “A concert?” He turned to Anatole, who spoke rapidly to the sorcier. The wrinkled man looked skeptically at Danny, then shrugged. He picked up one of the extra drums and ceremoniously extended it to Danny.
Danny couldn’t stop smiling. He took the drum and looked at it. The coffee-colored skin felt smooth and velvety as he touched it. A shiver went up his spine as he tapped the drumhead. Making music from human skin. He forced his instinctive revulsion back into the gray static of his mind, the place where he stored things “to think about later.” For now, he had the drum in his hands.
The chief thumped out a few beats, then stopped. The sorcier mimicked them and glanced toward Danny. “Jam session!” he muttered under his breath, then repeated the sequence easily and cleanly,
