White

A Novel

Deni Ellis Béchard

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781571311252
• eBook ISBN: 9781571319470
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The award-winning author blends fiction and memoir in this "captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical" novel of neocolonial corruption in the Congo ( Foreword Reviews, starred review).
 
Assigned to write an exposé on the elusive conservationist Richmond Hew, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But then he meets Sola, a woman looking for a white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon. And he begins to uncover a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making.
 
A harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—from an anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects to a community of charismatic Congolese preachers and a revered conservationist who vanishes. Then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by memories of his father.
 
These disparate elements coalesce into a map of Richmond Hew's enigmatic movements in Deni Ellis Bechard's "self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction" with fascinating echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

1

SOLA

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

I read this line on the phone she held between us as she spoke it, slowly, and then said, “It sounds contrived to me, not at all the words of a child …”

This is how I met Sola, high above the Atlantic. When I’d boarded, she’d had an eye mask on, its elastic holding her dark, loosely curled hair in place, and during the flight’s first hours, she’d slept by the window, an empty seat between us. Her mouth and the tip of her nose were visible, her lips slightly full and her skin a shade lighter than gold, almost flaxen.

As passengers lapsed into sleep, I remained restless. A hostess passed through the unlit cabin, balancing a tray of plastic cups, and I took one to wash down my malaria pill, and then I read. Sometime after midnight, I unbuckled myself and made my way back through the half-reclined bodies whose postures of disturbed repose gave me the impression that I was in the sickbay of a ship.

On my return, I paused to take stock of who was there. The sleepers’ jaws conveyed unease—heaviness, futility, even sadness—or were disconnected, dropped like a burden. I felt grateful to return to hers, her mouth that, resting, retained its dignity, if somewhat severe. And yet this impulse gave me pause: how even on the half-covered face of a stranger, the mind begins to compose.

I was considering a nap when she reached up to her mask and looked at me from beyond the domain of my reading light, her eyes too reflective to disclose the nuance of their color.

“You don’t sleep well on planes?” she asked, and I wondered if her question was a way of telling me that I had awakened her.

“I can’t blame air transportation for my sleep problems,” I said.

“Is Belgium your final destination?”

“No. The Congo.”

“Congo–Kinshasa?” Her voice was pleasingly neutral, its accent American but faintly bookish—more considered than automatic, so possibly an acquisition and not a birthright.

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

“Oh, what for?” I asked, resisting the temptation to articulate a synchronicity. We were flying from DC to Brussels, the Congo’s old colonial warden, so obviously many of the passengers shared our route.

“It’s a strange story,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt your reading.”

“My reading can wait. I’m all ears,” I told her, though I normally shunned conversation in flight, for fear of losing anonymity, of having to be attentive to a stranger.

“Well,” she said and appeared to gather her thoughts. “Someone I know—an anthropologist—he works with street children in Kinshasa and has found a white child, not an albino, but a blond, blue-eyed girl who speaks Lingala and the usual bits of street French.”

“How old is she?” I asked.

“Maybe twelve, possibly thirteen.”

“So you’re going to help repatriate her to wherever she’s from?”

“There’s more to it. The girl believes she’s black—that she’s Congolese by birth—but that a demon—a white demon, according to her—has possessed her and turned her white.”

That was when Sola reached up, adjusted her reading lamp in its orbit, and turned it on. She opened her bag and took out her phone. Then she lifted her armrest, shifted partially into the empty seat, and positioned the screen so that we could both read.

I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife, the e-mail began without salutation, clearly one of many messages in a thread. Each time we take a break from talking and start again, the girl repeats this line. I ask why, whether she believes she came to Kinshasa on a knife, and she says no, that she was born here, that her family are Congolese. The line, she says, is the demon’s memory. The white demon rode on a knife to Kin and used it to cut open her heart so that he could live inside her.

I paused from reading to meet her gaze—her irises were nearly sepia, with a thin bright rim of black—to confirm it was okay that I continue, and she nodded.

The girl’s way of speaking is nonlinear and dualistic. The demon inhabits her and she embodies its power, and yet she is also its victim, fleeing it as she tries to find ways to kill it and win her freedom. She claims that she has no parents and yet that she was born in Congo. She doesn’t verbally respond to English, but when I tell her in English that I have hidden a treat for her in the room, she gets it as soon as I leave. This doesn’t work with other languages, except French, but her French bears no European inflections. It was clearly learned in the streets of Kin. Since her arrival in my care, I have dropped my other projects. I must confess that I have developed a possibly unhealthy fascination with her story.

“He’s somewhat dramatic,” I said before I could catch myself.

“Yes, he is. It’s why this appeals to him. It’s also why I’m going to help out.”

I read the final paragraphs—a maudlin edge in his words about how long he’d searched and how much he deserved this breakthrough.

“And situations like these,” I asked, “they’re related to your work?”

“I’ve done time in many fields, but I sell myself as a cross-cultural consultant.”

“That’s why he contacted you?”

“No. He’s a personal connection—one that,” she took a moment to renew the air in her lungs, “I have been doing my best to manage from a distance. But a friend is a friend. Besides, I have other work in the Congo.”

Maybe it was the dark plane cabin and the droning fuselage, or the collective lull of so many sleeping bodies, but in the overlapping halos of our reading lights, I felt as if we were alone.

“You’re also an anthropologist?” I asked as she put away her phone.

“Among the many things I’ve been, yes, that’s one of them.”

Her words made me realize that society had trained me to expect statements of career change and exploration from men. I wanted to ask if and where she’d studied anthropology, but I sensed her reticence, possibly a desire not to be pigeonholed, and this further lit up my brain.

“What are you doing in the Congo?” she asked.

I smiled, suddenly uneasy, trying to hear my answer before I spoke it.

“I’m a journalist. I’m working on a story about, well, an American who has been living in the rainforest for three decades, who’s basically gone rogue.”

“A Kurtz?” she said and laughed.

“Yes,” I admitted, feeling less self-conscious. “I wish it were otherwise.”

“Well, if you don’t find him, I’m sure you’ll stumble across some other ones.”

“That’s the backup plan.”

“Are you independent?”

“I am. It leaves time for personal writing. Years ago, when I began doing this, I’d buy a one-way ticket to strand myself overseas and then write to make enough money to pay my way back. It taught me to find stories everywhere.”

“It sounds as if you could have become a Kurtz yourself.”

“It wasn’t inconceivable.”

Coming down the aisle sideways, an old white man in khaki clutched the seats. He encroached on our circle of light like a night creature testing a boundary—and then loomed over us, before lurching on.

She reached up to the reading lights and turned one off.

I considered what to say next, refraining from asking a question that would tie her coloring to Africa or mark her interest there as part of her heritage. But she spoke first, the absence of any strong regional inflection in her voice again making me wonder if English wasn’t her native language.

“I suppose you might like to write about our little white witch.”

“I would of course credit the anthropologist’s work and interview him.”

“That should do the job.” She laughed. “He is no enemy to recognition.”

The story of a black girl possessed by a white demon and turned white was already lacerating the edges of my imagination, and I was glad for her response.

She talked more about the girl, about how the anthropologist had been interviewing her with the help of a Congolese interpreter before transcribing and then translating her responses.

“His project is fraught. He asks questions in French that the interpreter translates to Lingala, since the girl doesn’t respond to French, despite her rudimentary grasp. The translator then renders her answers into French, from which my friend translates them into English, since he is doing post-doctoral work at Dartmouth. We must assume that a lot is lost.”

I liked how she spoke—the fluency of her pauses, as if she were simply emphasizing, and how, sometimes, she turned her palms up to stress a point, loosely knitting her fingers.

Past her shoulder, the night topography began to shift, and she followed my gaze. She tapped the button on the window, clearing the dark tint from the glass, and we were suddenly staring down at an alien horizon of bottom-lit clouds, as if flying over a gas giant. The alienating distance from our planet registered in my body, a pulse of uncertainty in the nerves along the bones of my chest.

“So how did you get into writing?” she asked, suddenly sounding tired.

“I grew up poor, and we didn’t have much in the house other than used books my mom picked up. She had artistic ambitions for me, to say the least, and there wasn’t much else to do but read or go to the library.”

I suddenly felt divided. I wanted to say, “Stories saved my life.” It was a line I often found myself thinking, during moments when I considered what a truly narrative species we are—measured, constrained, or liberated by story. I sometimes said it when giving talks, since it jolted the audience into presence, into a connection with me. It was exaggerated in a way that obliged people to listen closely, to judge whether I was being authentic, and in that moment I could offer the best I had.

I glanced past her, to where the moon peered at us from above the plunging curve of the earth, beneath the cavernous hood of space. I hesitated, afraid of being manipulative, but that we were among the few passengers not overcome by torpor gave me a sense of being separate, even special—or at least of intimacy and trust.

“Stories,” I said, “novels, actually—they saved my life.”

She turned a little more toward me and looked into my eyes, waiting.

“My father had a fifth-grade education,” I told her. “When he saw me reading, he would hunch and glare at me. I guess my reading must have made him feel smaller, like a failure. He’d never read a novel, and I often read one a day.

“Anyway, he told me how the future should look, but I knew there were other futures. I’d read them in books.”

The sunrise emanated from the clouds, shining on the wingtip like a star and creeping red along the metal. The hum of the fuselage had become faintly shrill, and our fatigue was suddenly apparent. The air felt staticky as she yawned. There were circles under her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said and touched my wrist. “Thank you for sharing that.”

“The fatigue comes on hard, doesn’t it?”

“It’s as if we see the sun and realize we haven’t really slept.”

I wanted to finish the story, but i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Sola
• 2 Pastor Thomas Oméga
• 3 Literature Connects us to the Earth
• 4 Room 22(2) & The Wildlife of Aspen
• 5 Memoirs of the Little Witch
• 6 The Church of the Albino Prophet
• 7 A Night with Sola
• 8 The King of the Smugglers
• 9 The True Name of Pastor Oméga
• 10 Vladimir Doesn’t Like to Wait (Enter Alton Hooke)
• 11 The Narrative Genealogy of a Demon
• 12 The Murder of a Child
• 13 The Ballad of the Big Hotel
• 14 The Importance of Genres & The Storm
• 15 An Oral Tale: Death of a Conservationist
• 16 A Dole of Doves
• 17 Glint, by Alton Hooke
• 18 Glint: Notes for the Screenplay
• 19 The River
• 20 White
• 21 Richmond Hew
• 22 Back in Room 22(2)
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments