Homeless

There are some pretty big parts of my childhood that I can't simply go back and revisit.  Today, for instance, I couldn't walk to my elementary schoolhouse in Kananga, Zaire and hoist myself up to one of the locked library's high windows, work it open and hide out in the biographies; I couldn't push a rusty bicycle rim down a two track dirt road, barefoot and zigzagging the goats and guinea hens.  I have nostalgia, but it is often intangible and scattered.

Last night Rachel and I saw Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the Rialto in Atlanta.  In a word, the show was amazing, everyone should see them.  In more than a word, I was transported, and here's why:  

Sometimes I get a whiff of something, or hear a song that automatically associates me with a time in my life.  Fire and smoke tend to take me back to my kidhood in Africa, but only for seconds--brushfires in the sawgrass, palm nuts oozing oil onto hot coals.

But the show last night, for more than two hours, sustained me.  The voices of those men brought back days and nights, mangos crashing onto a tin roof, the babas, sometimes naked beating the eerie glunk-glunk water drums, sometimes carrying their full body weight in fruit or diesel balanced on their heads, the crack and thud of the mortar and pestle beating manioc, men burning the sawgrass to hunt the animals within.  Always singing.  Singing from behind the thatched huts, across the fields, the rolling airstrip.  Singing bouncing under the umbrella trees and across the Lulua.  Singing and occasionally swinging a lazy switch at a trailing goat.  Singing from the church down the block, the disco up the street.  At the corner bread seller's.  Singing in the markets as the sun cooked us all and the stink of slowly turning meat and woodsmoke crept around.  Singing alone or with friends. Everything was singing, and I thank my own good fortune that singing brought me again to that place in good company.