A Dancer In the Dust Read Online Free Page A

own considerable expense, she’d had one built.
    It was small by Western standards, but it housed a collection of deer, goats, a few lions and other big cats, two elephants, and four or five giraffes, along with a small aviary and a pool of snoozing crocodiles.
    A few days after President Dasai’s death, Mafumi had declared a “White-Out”—twenty-four hours of celebratory destruction that included the ripping down of “white” advertisements and the looting and torching of “white” buildings and residences. Its culminating act was to be the demolition of Charlotte Hastings’ “white zoo.”
    A mob of about two hundred had carried it out, mostly with pangas, but also with knobkerries, which had proven particularly effective on the birds of the zoo’s tightly enclosed aviary. In the films, these airborne clubs could be seen hurtling toward the panicked birds, knocking them from the limbs to which they’d fled. As for the crocs, they’d been roped and cut to ribbons, mostly by teenagers using box cutters. A few of the larger and more dangerous animals had simply been riddled with automatic weapons fire, but the smaller ones had suffered a far more painful and protracted death, their legs hacked off, after which, mere groaning torsos, they’d been slashed and clubbed to death while the zoo’s liberators danced the toyi-toyi around them, the women ululating in a strange, bloodcurdling ecstasy as the pangas rose and fell, sending droplets of blood raining down upon the crowd.
    These were horrid images of the madness that had befallen Lubanda in the years following my brief stay there. Bill had once said that the road that led from loving Lubanda to hating it was short and straight, and in a sense, I realized as I thought of Seso and opened myself to a dark cavalcade of memories, it was a road I’d taken to its cold dead end.
    At precisely that moment, I also came to understand that Bill’s call had sounded in me like a fire bell in the night. Something of that distant, tragic year still floated inside me, insistent, accusatory, reminding me that a grave error is like a rogue star, eternally polluting the vastness with its smoldering trail of miasmic wrong, crashing into this or drawing that into its unforgiving gravity, but always moving, on and on into the vulnerable and unsuspecting expanse.
    As if fixed in a mental circuit I could not escape, I went back to that first day, when I’d gotten off the plane and been whisked to an orientation meeting where I was treated to a brief history of Lubanda under French, German, and at last British rule, then directed to a room whose door had been fitted with a neatly hand-lettered sign that said “Tumasi,” surrounded by a circle of paper sunflowers.
    I waited in that room for almost ten minutes before a slightly overweight, curly-headed young man entered, thrust out his hand, and introduced himself as Bill Hammond. He’d worked in the Peace Corps before coming to Lubanda, he told me, and had expected to be in the country for only a couple of years. But to his surprise, he’d “developed a crush” on the place, and so had signed on with an NGO called Hope for Lubanda.
    “And you?” he asked. “What’s your story?”
    “There’s not much to tell,” I admitted. “I’m from a small town in the Midwest. I went to the University of Wisconsin. After that, I moved to New York and got a job teaching.”
    “Let me guess, a ghetto school?”
    I nodded.
    “So you’re the type who, in the sixties, would have been down South working in voter registration drives, that sort of thing.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “English major?”
    “With a concentration in the classics,” I said. “Mostly Greek theater and the Greek myths.”
    Bill handed me a large envelope. “You’ll find a few orientation pamphlets in there. Most of it is routine stuff, but you should make yourself very familiar with the Lubandan Constitution, because when you meet government officials, it