James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

Through the walls came the picks’ muted blows. The brook bubbled, and the shaker boxes rattled. It was almost soothing. I wondered if they worked all night. Then, from far away, a thin shriek. I bolted upright, straining my ears. It came again, a weird, wavering, thready scream on a human throat’s raw edge.

Torchlight leaked between the room’s rough boards. I couldn’t see Seydou, but her eyes glistened. She turned her head, and I could see her in profile, a silhouette cut out across the wall. “Tomorrow is Dipri.” She said. “There will be panther men.”

Much later than I would have thought, I fell asleep, dreaming of a huge diamond in the ground, a bloody lump wallowing in bloody mud. Devoe said, “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it.” I reached to pick it up, then dogs began to howl. They were behind me, running closer. Their hard nails clicked against rock. In the dream I knew, they were coming to eat me.

As far as I could tell, Seydou did not move all night. Her chin rested on her chest, but she still leaned against the wall. When I got up, her eyes flickered open. We shared a thin porridge and cold coffee. Outside, someone shouted, and there was chanting. I cleaned my plate and walked from the building to the pit’s edge.

Beneath me, the workers sat in a large circle, talking. Unlike yesterday, many wore bright clothes. None had picks. How were they to find their diamond if they didn’t have the tools to dig? Devoe manned his table with batteries spread out like fat seeds, but no one lined up. “I won’t sell a thing on Dipri,” he said spitefully. “They’ll move no ore on the company’s behalf either. When you write your report, you be sure to include we allow them this luxury. You social activists are all of a type. Because the pay is low, or the children work, or we work on weekends, you assume we are brutes. This is not Europe or America. You ask them. They are glad to be here.”

He rolled batteries beneath his hands. “You’ll see when you go to the village. Be sure to show him, Seydou, and remember I warned you not to go.”

I’d slung a camera bag over my shoulder, strapped a canteen to my waist and packed some granola among my notebooks. Seydou led as we walked around the pit and headed toward the forest above the compound. Already the sun pounded with moist power. Wispy tendrils eddied off pools in rock hollows, and now that we were beyond the latrines, the air smelled of green vines and mossy undergrowth. Seydou took long strides, her dark legs eating distance.

I thought about African saints; most were martyrs in the north. St. Zoticus, St. Victurus, St. Ammon who died with forty-four other Christians in Membressa. The Romans slaughtered dozens in the early years. St. Theophilus and Helladius were killed by being thrown into a furnace. How did they do it? Did they think they saw God at the end? What would it take to face the furnace?

I argued with a man once who claimed Jesus couldn’t be in heaven because he committed suicide. He made an analogy: if a man stands in a highway, knowing a truck is bearing down on him, and he does nothing to save himself, then he killed himself. Jesus, he said, knew crucifixion was coming and did nothing to save himself.

I said there is no philosophic intent in suicide. A martyr dies for a cause. Suicide is self-serving. Martyrdom is selfless. Intent makes the martyr. But isn’t it at least a kind of death wish? he said. Why seek death? I don’t know. It could be a death wish. My friends at Greenpeace accused me of as much when I left. “Lone activists don’t come back,” someone told me. “They just disappear.”

But I didn’t feel on the way to my death walking behind Seydou. The sun was still the sun, though a little hotter than I liked, and the good ground felt solid beneath my feet. Nothing appeared any different here than it did in Abdijan or Sydney or Santiago or Chicago. It’s a part of Earth’s wonder: at the same time New York literati gather to toast some poet’s latest book, down the street cancer kills a young woman in the oncological ward, while a block away a seventeen-year-old basketball player passes an Algebra test for the first time, while across the globe a child who thinks she’s a witch doctor digs for diamonds in the day and is molested by the assistant to the assistant crew chief at night.

Same planet, different worlds.

Seydou led me on a trail through the brush. Higher on the hills, the ground was dry, dusty and porcelain hard. Animal musk, oxen or cattle I supposed, mixed with hot ground.

Seydou said “Where are you from?”

I’d been to so many places in the previous years, I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I’m from Abdijan, and I’m here to help.”

She nodded emphatically as if she knew what I was talking about. What would she take from that? I wanted to prevent the child labor? Surely not. Or I was investigating Devoe?

I asked her how many children worked in the pits. She shrugged her shoulders. “All of them. Have you seen Dipri before?”

“No.”

“Do not talk to anyone. They will ignore you.” She stopped on the trail, and I almost ran into her. “Are you a good man, like your saints? They say God used them. Would you be a tool for good?”

A sweat sheen glistened on her face. Sometime before we’d left, she had cleaned herself and changed. Where I thought she was skinny before, I saw wiry strength. “Yes, I would. That is why I’m here,” I said without hesitation.

“I thought so. I can tell. Devoe does not like you, you know? He mocks you when your back is turned. That speaks well for you.”

I mulled that over. It didn’t bother me Devoe didn’t like me. He was a part of the problem, the lower, brutish part that implemented policies formed in some distant, clean boardroom by men who never went to where their policies ruined lives, but a part just the same. It did make me think I should watch Devoe. After all, if my report did any good, he could lose his job, perhaps even be arrested.

“Thank you,” I said. Ahead I saw buildings, not the tin-roofed ones I’d seen everywhere between Abdijan and Seguela, but sturdy mud-walled houses with darkly thatched roofs. On the first house we passed, a humped thatch pile turned to watch as we went by, and I realized someone was in it.

Seydou noticed. “It is a panther man. He will come down soon and take part in the ceremonies.”

I walked backwards for a few steps, watching him, afraid he might leap from the roof. What, exactly, was panther-like in the panther men? His eyes peeked out beneath thick, dried leaves. Some strands had been braided into circles above his head. But other than his eyes, which I hadn’t seen at first, and his hands poking out from the costume, I wouldn’t have known he was human if he hadn’t moved.

“They are not civilized anymore,” she said. “They spend seven months in the bush, living as wild animals, to prepare for Dipri. They search for the animal spirits. They search for God too, Baily, like you.”

She baffled me. How could she come to that conclusion from a book and a short conversation?

The Wè village marked the boundary between Seydou’s universe and mine. Even the sun’s quality seemed altered. Colors sharpened. Nothing seemed fuzzy. A fly landed on a bucket twenty feet away, each leg distinct and individual. I felt I could identify that particular fly if I saw it again. In a swarm, I could pick it out. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I were an alien. The village operated in a different dimension. Only Seydou acknowledged my presence. Only Seydou knew I stood there, but I was invisible to the rest.

A woman staggered by us, bumping into a wall, stumbling for a moment, then going on.

“What is wrong with her?” I said, truly rattled.