Capped

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 35: FALL/WINTER 2025

March 18, 1916

The green fields began to assemble in the rain, a conjoining of water, grass, and maize. The puddles looked heavy, like anchors steadying the world, keeping it in place. And the tall white farmhouses, swaying ships. Out in the field Mbye saw somebody just barely there, a shirtless old man, as black as Mbye, with his trousers rolled up, who looked at him without curiosity. (A rarity. Most looked at him with shock at best, ridicule at worst.) The old man stood there gazing through umbrella spokes of rain, then began to make mysterious movements as if gathering the shafts of water from the air, which shot out like transparent arrows from both hands. Just as suddenly, he stopped and stood staring at Mbye again. His gaze was unreadable, absent of shyness, giving equal weight to everything while giving nothing away.

Mbye blinked to break the spell, almost commanding the old man to move. He turned his back to Mbye and went on with his work. The old man was putting up a fence. Knocking a late winter’s nail into a post. The seizure of yet another hour and another and another.

“In a dream, full of vigor, he rowed by breathing as if some power had entered him, sucking and blowing air at a steady pace, but another wave grew between each splash—the sea cannot be finished with—the water rising higher with each stroke of the paddle.”

Mbye returned to his loneliness, his entire body heavy with too much of the past. This was a body he knew, which is to say it was his. (The body’s survival is its forgetfulness.) Then the old man reached up and tugged on the air like the drawstring of a curtain, causing the sun to slide into the sky. Every day the sun came to set Mbye’s hands to work. He had ploughed these fields with his weighted palms. Held the pulse of the field in his hoe. And he saw his mother pounding maize. This was how he wanted to remember her: the care in the handle of the falling log; the sheer grip and push of it. What was his hand reaching for from this small corner of the world called Virginia? The light this morning touched everywhere. Glittered in the gaps between things. Whatever object it took shape as. Everything sunlight. Almost hurt to look at it. (Too green, the springing March grass.) He moved in slow motion, deeply ashamed because he’d already wasted so much time this morning. Went to bed last night thinking about—he won’t name it, say it. Long reflections of the moon in the window. Light on water moving across water. In a dream, full of vigor, he rowed by breathing as if some power had entered him, sucking and blowing air at a steady pace, but another wave grew between each splash—the sea cannot be finished with—the water rising higher with each stroke of the paddle. Before he knew it, he and his vessel had climbed a black wave to another world.

When Mbye awakened this morning, he was so agitated it was all he could do to get up and move around, shake and stomp feeling back into his limbs, though he could not begin to empty himself of all that he’d seen and felt during the dream, his mind circling back even as his feet walked away. Sea salt coated the inside of his mouth. Only by exiting the house could he restore his equilibrium. But the hard-won subjugation of his darkest thoughts was short-lived.

The shirtless old man passed like a scythe through the landscape. The idea of his own body traveling that fast simply didn’t cross Mbye’s field of thought. Of course, there were the usual chores that needed attending to, but he stood and listened to the air swaying, his eyes tracking the insects and his ears to the roots and grass. Life no longer moved at the same pace. Each day straggled its way from hour to hour. That lost, empty place across the ocean still breathed into him, dragged him, pulled him away.

Slow-moving remembrances. Peaches the color of sunrise. Plums the color of dusk. He watched a caravan fill the entire horizon, bodies close enough to feel each person’s breath. They moved silently, almost like silhouettes. (Each thing moves its own way.) Promenading with mangoes in their hands, palming them the way a pitcher prepares a fast ball in that triangulated game the people over here—Black and white alike—enjoy so much, love.

His fingers knotted together, and the hoe fell. The past was too slippery to hold on to. He stared down, lost and musing, but that didn’t help create a memory that he could easily look back on. He vanished through a loop of thoughts. Almost everything near or far that reached toward him wounded him. (The hurt this world gives.) Hard to bear. Dangers everywhere.

He did not have enough room in his head to keep the dead alongside the living. Nothing entered, and nothing came out. (To see in the looking-away. To hear in the listening-away.) Events appeared only in passing, masked, distorted, curtailed.

He sank his hands into the earth, and the blank spaces of his memory gradually filled with names that arranged and composed themselves in relation to each other. The land left behind expanded and its inhabitants multiplied in the long green lungs of that air. He saw people covered with pink blossoms lorded over by a pink devil in a mushroom-shaped helmet who led a pack of a dozen or more devils also under mushroom helmets. The white men, their undercharges speaking a fire language, crackling the mouth. Even their shadows were hostile. Angles of sunlight slid together to make a puzzle of their leader’s face under his mushroom helmet. His skyward glance showed no regard for the killing going on around him. He brought a square handkerchief to his round mouth, then spoke something that Mbye had now forgotten. (Should the words return, to become or unbecome what was. No shape of anything without this simple utterance.) The waxing and waning light, the wandering clouds, the dizzying wind had a disembodying effect on him. Time rained down. Mbye found that he was looking at flies walking along the folds of wrinkled gray rock. It moved, the flies buzzing up and away. Then the elephant turned to face him, twisting its head with the effort it took to balance its tusks, movements so heavy that they caused the earth to slip. The animal took to its feet, and there it was, a four-legged two-tusked beast with the face of a man. Before the abomination could gore him, Mbye rushed to spear it in the stomach, then darted back out of striking distance. Violence brought on the expected: the intestines hissed gas, then exploded blood and tissue onto his body, warm slick substances he ignored.

He let the faded light of afternoon carry him off until the world gradually disappeared. Grew afraid at what he couldn’t see. (Nothingness severed him from emotion and time.) Thick-skinned listening. Sounds that hung on his ear as a warning. The rush and flutter of wings, then stars ascended into the sky, the space between one light and another emphasizing the distance between these moments of his life.

He had had his share of setbacks. So many impossible things had already happened. Nothing added up. Everything added up.

I thought I heard Abe Lincoln shout,

“Rebels, close down them

plantations and let all them niggers out.”

The shot upstairs

The shot downstairs

And the shot in the room.

He listens to his own breath to verify that he is still alive. Something voices mournfully inside him, that feeling of loss that gripped him in the white wake of his wife’s going more than a decade ago. How can he communicate what he feels about any of this? And to whom?

Sometimes the night is generous and he doesn’t think about it too much, no wandering through the past. Content to exist as a guest in this strange land, Virginia, until something hums him to sleep. In many ways he loves this place. Loves the people. Black like him, and yet not like him at all. The lengths he’s gone, suffering himself to belong to these people. Still, home has him around the heart, even if it let him go. He has to tell himself that this is what matters, not the other place. Because when he looks back he brings himself closer to what will be, his own demise. 

“What he’s trampled on to stay alive—his childhood in the forest, his wife’s death—how many more years will he have to wait to go where she is?—his captivity and his being put on display. ”

A moment ago, he could hardly move. Struck by the turbulent comings and goings in his mind. All the things he hoped would go away this night. What he’s trampled on to stay alive—his childhood in the forest, his wife’s death—how many more years will he have to wait to go where she is?—his captivity and his being put on display. (He pictures himself trapped behind glass, crouching over a prop campfire, pretending to feed meat to a limp and lifeless child. Nearby, a caption: WHIPPING AN ELEPHANT DOES NOT HURT HIM, BUT HE THINKS THAT IT DOES.) He wills himself to see what he is seeing and nothing else. Overhead, stars brighter than stars ever were in his life. The mountain range blue on the horizon. The March moon driving a few dark clouds over the valley. The dark riverbank heavy with branches.

Now he is walking downhill toward the river, thinking, until he reaches the stream, walking along the bank on the kind of night that brings men and rivers close. The ways of the crocodile are dark and deep; their thoughts are few and far between. Feels the clash of himself against this place. An older, fiercer order of things. Like the rocks beneath his bare feet that possess the power of living language. He is hunting those extraordinary small shapes that retain sounds, and he is hunting the sounds themselves, the words and the pathways between them. Words are time. Rocks are time. He feels drunk with this small perception. Full of uncertain senses. His head balanced on his neck but severed by moonlight. Ideas like these. All that is wrong with him is weariness, yes? He needs rest and clarity, to know why he is here like this. He wades, deepening into the dark water. The push and swirl of the river as it closes around his legs. Holds on. He draws breath, happy to be on the water, in the water. Never mind that his thoughts are elsewhere. He feels them under the deep current, the river eroding them with time.

Article 16: A wild animal has no more inherent right to live a life of lazy and luxurious ease, and freedom from all care, than a man or woman has a right to live without work or family cares.

He has enough saved up to make passage to Liverpool, but no farther. Even if he could pay for a steamer to the Continent, he could not cross the ocean. The gateway to the world has now opened out to other wars and other places of exile. The war has come and all travel across the Atlantic has ceased. His homeland now in their hands. His people prey to devils. But Mbye is still close to everything—the hills, the forest, the trees (the ribs of his childhood), the first gunshots, the first amputations. Leaving was not a negation of his birth and upbringing, his place in the world. Because longing is passive, he tried to reproduce home here in the wilds of Virginia—hunting, fishing, collecting medicine in the forest, smoking bangi—not unlike the way the white men try to reproduce the world in their fairs and museums. (He’d lounged inside the skeletal frame of a mastodon. Swung from brontosaur bone to brontosaur bone. He’d climbed atop a meteor. Cat-cradled fishing nets. Stood inside the jaws of a massive shark.) All the days are reserved for wars and massacres and victories and defeats.

The moon hangs on until morning—the wished-for thing—side by side with the sun in the sky. Light descends upon him. Warmth and color drive the moisture from his skin, as it did when he came out of the hold of the ship. He stands still in a field that devours him. Gnats. Flies. Mosquitoes. In turn, he devours his rage and defeat. Everything is held. Nothing is happening. Everything is happening. Birds flood the empty sky/air. Cows graze hornless and still. He can feel in the distance the bigger mountains hidden by the smaller. The colors maintain their independence. How can blue and green and yellow and red come together without mixing? Even the sun and the moon, uniform quantities, square off in the sky, as if asking him to make a choice. (Two minds to leave. One to stay.) These planetary bodies—when did he see them being born for the first time?

Not able to attach himself to things that are far from his skin, he sets the air moving with a song, although the days have taught him not to trust happiness, because it hurts when it deceives. Be just, and live securely and sleep peacefully. The devils who robbed you of everything will not give you anything back. Just claims will not grant you return or allow you to keep the little you possess.

He busies himself with looking after chores and small needs. Breakfast (a tin of sardines). Feeding the chickens. Milking the cows. Mending the fences. Then his morning pipe. He sees his breath hanging overhead. His skin blowing slowly about without him.

“Although the devil could mouth his language, in that moment they spoke in sweat, blood, and fire.”

Within the compass of a daydream, he sees himself sitting before a campfire with his captor, devil and fire shielding him from forced labor, slavery. (The enemy had already built forts and rubber plantations. Nothing diverted their attention.) Although the devil could mouth his language, in that moment they spoke in sweat, blood, and fire. How to go toward an unfamiliar life in an unfamiliar place. This state of affairs remained a contest. By the time he came around to feeling pain, he was already across the ocean in the devil’s country.

The devil gave him a new name and he accepted it, his surprise undiminished each time he heard himself called Ota Benga, pygmy, on their travels from New Orleans to Atlanta to St. Louis to New York. (The yearning for voyage makes the earth round.) On ship and train, the devil spoke in an odious fashion, plotting against those who had wronged him or underestimated him. (This creature’s ferocious hatreds, devoted affections.) One afternoon in a park near the museum, the devil put a baseball in his hand and ordered him to throw it as far as he could. He did. Threw it across the ocean, a missive mailed home, even if unanswered, never received. The ball struck ground, then bounced and rolled into the realm of the ancestors. (The calling. The pleading.)

The other devils sought him out—a rumor, a scandal, a paradox (the missing link), freak, monstrosity—with their own demands, a pageant of scenes and faces that dominated his days. The forest at the zoo exerted a pull on him, and he would escape into the trees when he could, only for disembodied words to fly up into the branches where he hid, seeking him out.

A sudden gust of wind shakes the trees, scattering a swirl of leaves that circle his feet, then rise upward the length of his body, and continue skyward toward the sun and the moon. He can feel them, both massive and full, melding powerful forces, drawing out every memory of those days in St. Louis and New York. He shrinks away inside the house, every door and window thrown open. Starts in on the housework, plenty to do, unfettered by any desire or expectation. Taking long, measured breaths, slowing down his blood, the beating of his heart. Watering can in hand, he moves from room to room, dipping the spout into one potted plant after another. Inspecting the woodwork of floors and furniture, the carpentry of the table and chairs. Other preoccupations, activities. The bits of routine are a salve until they aren’t. Until he can no longer dust the thought away. Until there is only this.

He slips out of his clothes and slips into a bark loincloth, then retrieves his revolver from the bureau drawer where he keeps it. Flees the house for a rendezvous he has postponed more than once. Mountains stretch before him, blue flowing from the distance, tinting the color of the light, the trees, and the grass. Blue light, blue clouds, blue air. (Particulars are particulars.) A sky like the sea. No clearer guide for his departure. Is there no view in the world looking out on a different end?

He feels the weather build in his body—rain soon come—on this quiet afternoon when things will keep or fall away. A horizontal gravity holds him thickly in place. He knows what to do.

He secures the pistol in his loincloth at an angle, then starts out gathering wood. Takes a seat in the middle of the field. Arranges the wood and sets it smoking, low flames longing for fullness. Tenses his lungs against the smoke and lets the fire build in the four corners around him. Seated thus, he rubs each part of his body with extreme care. The heat revives him. He pants out warmth, his skin littered in variations of light. He is not thinking of anything, not waiting for anyone, feels no emptiness, sickness, or boredom. Sees himself carrying on with what remains of his life.

Using the barrel of the pistol, he pries loose the caps on his teeth. (Settling into Virginia demanded mastery over manners. A friendly, unpointed smile. A key inserted into a door. Table settings. Plate, fork, spoon, knife, napkin, each in its proper place. And a new name: Otto Bang.) Lets them fall into the dirt at his feet where they belong, adding what did not exist to what does. (Everything has an instant in which it is.) 

That score settled, he returns the pistol to his loincloth and watches the smoke rising from the fire, a shadow stepping free to do as it pleases, to stream, curve, spiral, as if seeking shape. Rhythm raises his body in imitation, his limbs driving the smoke away from him into the trees, darkness gathering in the branches. New light takes over the sky, evening-slow and orange, veined in lightning. (Rain soon come.) Leaves soaking up light.

Tiny memories visit him in a flock of birds that settle on the branches, upsetting them. The leaves bidding farewell to the trees, falling to the ground in red particles of light. Everything here is proof that what was once for him is now against him. (He does not blame the ancestors. How unthinkable.)

He frees the pistol from his loincloth, but before he can aim it and pull the trigger the fire sizzles out, leaving darkness bigger than his own head. He takes his bearings. What is it that he feels? Exhausted rain. (Yes.) Can’t see the downpour, can only hear it and smell it and register its impact against his body, spears penetrating him from all directions.

He stands in the field holding the pistol, patient—not yet, not yet—ready to go on with his plans. (Water has a right.) Lungs, bones, hands. The rise and fall of breathing lifting his wet skin. (Half breath, half skin.) All that lies hidden and taken for granted in the audible struggle with the air. Alone and not alone.

He does not know why the rain falls so long, a buildup. Drenched, the ground moves fast underfoot, but he is not troubled. A latecomer to this land, it pleases him that the water drains his memories back into the soil, more in his hopes than he could have imagined. Whether a map, a massacre, an idea, or a place now called the Congo breaking apart in someone’s hands, the homeland is at its most beautiful when it cannot be reached.