Mixed Blood - Albert Russo 1-58345-050-5 hardcover 212 pp. $18.95; 1-58345-051-3 paper $12.95 (Literary Fiction)
Reviewed in Small Press Review
A moving novel set in the Belgian Congo on the eve of Independence.
Leopold, an orphan of ‘mixed blood,’ is adopted by a lonely American who tries to fit in with his adopted society. Leopold’s new mother is the indomitable Mama Malkia, who has a fascinating story of her own to tell.
PART ONE: YOUR SON LEOPOLD
INTRODUCTION
Léopold K. Wilson owned a drugstore on Main Street. It was at graduate school that he had met Isabel, a lithe, freckled redhead three years his senior. In spite of his brilliant results Léopold hadn't been eager to pursue a medical career, and the thought of remaining six more years in lecture-rooms and operating theaters exasperated him. He owed this tduty to his adoptive father, or thus he had believed until his path had crossed Isabel's.
Lissome, five foot eleven, with features modelled after those of a young pharaoh, Léo commanded respect. From his dark, almond-shaped eyes emanated a gentleness mixed at times with candor. That he was of mixed blood, a créole born in the Belgian Congo, didn't seem to affect his outlook on life. Yet beneath his polished appearance and good-humored nature a universe was concealed which nobody in his immediate surroundings, not even his beloved wife or his closest friends, could surmise.
Léopold K. Wilson is not a fictitious character. I grew up with him. But out of regard for Léo, I will not mention his real name and I shall refer to him only in the past tense. On this drizzly Fall day Léopold K. Wilson's customers found the drugstore closed. A piece of cardboard cut in the shape of a clover had the following inscription on it: "Absent till to-morrow morning due to exceptional circumstances. Thank you for your patience. The owner."
Léopold K.Wilson was pacing up and down the hallway in the maternity ward. His eyes shone with euphoric anticipation. He had spent a sleepless night. The event about to take place was for Léopold K. Wilson more overwhelming than that which swells the hearts of fathers-to-be, it was a miracle of sorts, a resurrection.
Whereas the three other young men in the waiting-room shuffled their feet and chain-smoked, Léopold K.Wilson kept striding along the full length of the corridor, eyes riveted to the ceiling, in a state of semi-trance. The nurse had to call his name several times and take him by the arm before he realized that the magic moment had occurred. She led him into Isabel's room. He cautiously walked over to the bed, caught a glimpse of the live bundle his wife was holding close to her breast and kneeled, burying his face in the pillow. A shudder coursed through his tall bent body and gave way to a convulsive sob. Isabel motioned toward the nurse to leave her alone with the baby and her husband. She stroked Léopold's frizzy hair and waited for him to look up. Then, very gently she lifted the infant so that his father could admire him.
* * *
Mama Malkia had been engaged in the service of Harry Wilson a week after the latter had settled in Elisabethville, Belgian Congo. Buxom and quite impressive, Mama Malkiawell deserved her name, which in Kiswahili meant Queen Mother. She had spent a good part of her life working in the city's few hotels where she had acquired a fair knowledge of colloquial French, a rarity for a Congolese woman back in the early fifties. In the midst of a conversation she would slip in a word or an expression taken straight out of a fashion magazine, deliciously unexpected. When something was not to her liking or when she deemed that M'sieur Harry became too fastidious she would admonish him in Kiswahili; if he went on nonetheless, she would rap out an oath with a gesture that said it all. She was a born organizer, and she cooked such succulent Belgian and local specialties that M'sieur Harry gave her a free hand in all matters dealing with the household.
Unlike most Europeans, rather than imparting orders to her, he would ask her advice.
She would scrutinize him for a second or two while working her jaws. Then, smacking her palms against her hips, she would say to him: "Don't rack your cudgel, Mama Malkia will do what's best. Time for you to go to the boutique. The boss should always show the good example."
Harry Wilson would stand on the threshold of the door somewhat perplexed, but Mama Malkia would briskly push him out of the house without further ado.
In the beginning Harry Wilson felt vexed that a servant should treat him so nonchalantly, and that she would not deign call him Bwana as was the custom in the Belgian Congo. He once passed her a remark but Mama Malkia didn't mince her words.
"Take it or leave it, M'sieur!"
One evening she told him point blank: " M'sieur Harry, you're not a ladies' man, hein? "
This time he got really exasperated. "Now you listen to me, la mama," he said in a trembling voice, "just take care of the house. The rest is my business. You people, of course, don't know anything aboutprivacy."
"Privacy," she muttered, pretending the word was indeed new to her. She had touched a sore spot, and for a whole week after the incident Harry Wilson tried to avoid speaking to her.
The following Saturday as he was squarely seated in his armchair, perusing the newspaper, Mama Malkia interrupted him. "Hé, M'sieur Harry," she chanted, "we won't stay at loggerheads with each other. Non, it's sooo ugly. You're the way you are. Doesn't bother me a wee bit."
A spark lighted up Harry Wilson's face. Then he began to cry softly.
Mama Malkia stroked his forehead as if he were a child who'd been scolded. He offered no resistance and felt like embracing her.
Instinctively Mama Malkia kissed him on the temple. She had to keep a certain distance from this man though, even if he was a foreigner, an Américain, and not a Belgian bwana. She also knew that he wasn't like the offer whites and that there were rumors in town about him. True, he was a bit awkward in his mannerisms, but he was nevertheless a kind person. More considerate anyway toward the indigínes than many Europeans she'd had to deal with. "
Ah, these whites," she would mutter under her breath, "they want to teach us their civilization, but what strange sicknesses they bring along."
The relationshipbetween Mama Malkia and Harry Wilson was quite uncommon. There grew between them a bond made of tenderness and connivance. In fact Mama Malkia had long since given up her living quarters at the cité indigíne located some ten kilometers away from Elisabethville's downtown area. She now occupied one of the guest-rooms at the end of the hallway, facing the kitchen. She could have used the servants' shack in the backyard, but it was Harry Wilson who insisted that she stay by him. Under no other circumstances would he have accepted to share his home with another person, be he or she white. But this was Mama Malkia: wholesome, frank, sometimes exaggeratedly so
and... spotlessly clean. In town the European bachelors usually hired male servants: a houseboy and a garden boy. No match however for that pearl of a Mama Malkia. Apana, ah! ah!
One day Harry Wilson said to her. " Mama, I shall soon turn forty, you know, and I wish to have a son."
The stout negress stared at him with a puzzled frown. What could he be cooking up this time? She had watched Europeans rave in very peculiar ways. And nothing they did really surprised her. But here she couldn't quite make out what went on in M'sieur Harry's head. Had he been a Congolese, she'd have sent him to a witchdoctor.
"Yes, Mama Malkia, and I want you to be the mother of my son."
"You've become mazimu or what?" exclaimed the African woman, turning her finger on her temple.
"No, no, not that," he reassured her, "it's a serious matter. But first sit on that pouf. You see, Mama Malkia," he pursued in a confiding tone, "I wish to adopt a mulatto child and I'd like you to go and choose him for me."
Her eyes as wide and roundas ever she asked: "You, with a café-au-lait?"
Then she regained her composure. "You're kweli serious, hein, M'sieur Harry!"
Harry Wilson moved his head in a slow-motioned nod. "We'll go together to the mission," he said, "and we shall take him home with us. But beforehand, I want you to see him for yourself and make sure he is healthy and very, very handsome."
Mama Malkia let along-drawn whistle escape her generous lips. "Muntu meupe has weird, weird laws," she muttered as though to herself, her thoughts trailing silently on.
One couldn't trust these white devils. They'd beget café-au-lait children by the dozen, abandon them, and all of a sudden other meupe, people with long beards and calling themselves missionaries in the service of Jesus Christ, would shelter and feed these very same watoto. Then you'd have an oddball like M'sieur Harry here to want to adopt a mtoto, with no wife, no family to send him to. Ayay ay, mazimu wingi.
Thus it was that, after a short lapse of time, chubby mtoto Léopold entered the Wilson home, lighting it up with his mischievous honey-colored eyes.
The arrival of mtoto Léopold set tongues wagging all about town. Guesses sprang up in people's minds like wild flowers overnight. There were those who attributed it to a deep crisis of conscience in Harry Wilson. Others claimed that mtoto Léopold was the illegitimate child of Mama Malkia. Some even maintained that the boy was the fruit, heretofore concealed, of a brief affair between the negress and her employer, that she had bewitched him.
Infuriated by such gossip, and to shut them up once and for all, Harry Wilson decided to hang the certificate of adoption over the counter of his boutique. The gossip abated somewhat, though there were still those who questioned the authenticity of the certificate.
Kitoko Léo, beautiful Léo, as Mama Malkia soon nicknamed the child, must have been about three, so lively and precocious was he.
According to the birth registry, the boy had just turned two.
"Two my foot, they don't know what they're talking about."
Mama Malkia shrugged. "It's just to write something on the paper. He's well over thirty months' old. Trust an experienced Mama, M'sieur Harry."
When the schools reopened after the July/August recess, Harry Wilson registered Kitoko Léo at theMontessori section of the Institut Marie-José held by the Catholic Sisters. There, he believed Kitoko Léo would be somewhat tamed, for the boy was quite turbulent. But above all, the Sisters would teach him proper French and good manners.
Both Mama Malkia and the novice father adored the child, lavishing on him care and affection. However, their views on how to bring up the boy did not always coincide.
"I don't want to see Kitoko Léo eat with his fingers anymore." Harry Wilson told the negress in a reproachful tone, "nor will you blow his nose between your thumb and your index finger. Handkerchiefs have been invented for that purpose.
"And from now on," he added, "I shall be the only person in this house to address the child in French."
"How do you mean?" frowned the negress. There was a moment of embarrassing silence on Harry Wilson's part. He mustered up his courage and said, "It's just that your French...hum...well, it leaves something to be desired... sometimes. And that would be to the boy's detriment. But don't take me wrong..."
He didn't have to wait for Mama Malkia to retort. "Detriment, detriment, you're the detriment. What about your funny accent américain, mon dear M'sieur Harry!"
"True," Harry Wilson conceded," but my grammar is correct."
"And how will I show the child those civilized manners, hein?"
"In Kiswahili. It's his mother tongue after all, non?"
Mama Malkia stood non-plussed for a while. She then heaved a groan, leaving the matter to be debated.
Mixed Blood Albert Russo
ISBNS: 1-58345-050-5 Hardcover buy!
1-58345-051-3 Paperback buy!
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Albert RUSSO. MIXED BLOOD. Domhan Books, 2000 (USA/UK) " Whoever reads 'Mixed Blood' will be thankful to Albert Russo for having spared his readers a politically correct version of colonial Africa. Mr Russo's novel, set in the Belgian Congo in the fifties, evokes a very subtle balance between communities and between individuals. There are no noble savages, no brutal or inept Europeans, no racial or racist caricatures in the book, just people of different origins, outlooks or cultures, who quite simply do their utmost to come to terms with themselves and their lives in a specific context which is described as neither natural nor unnatural. The central character of the novel is Léopold, a young man of mixed blood christened by his adoptive father after the King of Belgium. But Léopold is more a pivot than a hero: he is constantly referred to and cared for, most of the banal or rash actions of the novel are performed in his name, but very little is revealed about him, his feelings or his ambitions.
Like the African décor of the novel the protagonist is taken for granted, and his omnipresence is what enables the reader to look about him and explore the world around, secure in the existence of a base in the story that can always be gone back to. Around this double pivot, several couples are at work, but never in an antagonistic fashion: black and white, man and women, heterosexual and homosexual, hunour and tragedy, science and literature, tradition and progress, freedom and exploitation, to quote but a few. Some of those couples create terrible tensions, animal confrontations, but they never come close to endangering the stable core of the pseudo family built around Léopold by his "father" and his "mother".
What makes Albert Russo's treatment of these two characters fascinating is that the family unit they create around the child is perfectly harmonious and profoundly happy- Their very difference (Harry is a white American homosexual and Mama Malkia, his servant, a black Congolese) makes them the perfect "couple" to fashion the nest in which Léopold, himself a metis, will grow, develop and become the fine young man he is at the end of the story. Their harmony is of course a metaphor for a country at peace with itself and a natural multiracial paradise, the proof positive that different peoples can live together.
Obviously, Albert Russo is not naive enough to believe such fine balance could last very long. MIXED BLOOD ends in death and turmoil, but his point is made. Ethnic groups can live together and leam from one another, and become beautifully balanced in the process. Two of the most interesting characters in the novel are two young boys Léopold meets and silently appraises, fully fascinated. Léopold's school friend, Ishaya, is an Italian Jew who looks like an Arab, speaks a version of Spanish at home, French at school and Kiswahili in the street.
The other boy, Piet, is more intriguing still: although nominally a Belgian, he only speaks Kiswahili with his parents and friends, one with the beautiful land he lives in. One of the most constant references in MIXED BLOOD is the comparison of Africa with a paradise, "at once lush and gentle", a land of plenty and of human kindness, whose natural development has been impaired by those Harry, who should know, calls "foreign devils":
"The Tshikapas and Mama Malkias of this country could give us, foreign devils, many a lesson. For they see us as peculiar animals behaving in the most outlandish fashion. I need only to watch Mama Malkia's reactions to realize how inept I sometimes must look. She doesn't bother with what we call politeness, often a disguise of hypocrisy really. The day they will have mastered our ways, we will have to be on our guard and start heeding them. Right now it's a sort of monologue we're indulging in, giving orders and being served."
Mr Russo's novel does not show us the way to re-establish a dialogue, it just clinically demonstrates what happens when one monologue accidentally confronts another. The set-up of MIXED BLOOD is the Belgian Congo because Albert Russo was born and brought up there, but what he describes is very close to what Chinua Achebe does in his short stories of post-colonial Nigeria, usually divided between a British or American-educated black bourgeoisie with positive ideas, and the common people whose roots are, as Mama Malkia's, linked with their ancestral land and beliefs.
In order not to overemphasize the clash of those different monologues, Russo has built his novel on the vety efficient device which Faulkner used with such genius in The Sound and the Fury: different parts of the story are entrusted to different narrators, shifting from one point of view on one trait or incident to another. Thus, the novel unfolds as an efficient and harmonious symphony of monologues, masterfully orchestrated." WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
James Baldwin's words to the author, penned the year of his death, after reading the first part of MIXED BLOOD: "I like your work very much indeed. It has a very gentle surface and a savage under-tow. With your permission, I will send the excerpts to a friend of mine, the wonderful novelist, Toni Morrison. She knows what you are talking about."
Edmund White, the acclaimed biographer of Jean Genet and author of 'The Farewell Symphony': "Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boy's joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first ... all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial African adopted by a gay American. And MIXED BLOOD is a non-stop, gripping read!"
Preface to Mixed Blood by Martin Tucker, editor-in-chief of Confrontation magazine (LIU, New York), poet and biographer of Joseph Conrad and Sam Shepard: "Albert Russo's work has many distinctive qualities. Mixed Blood is especially distinguished by Russo's startingly precise grasp of the historic period of mid-twentieth-century Central Africa. In this sense, his work bears twinship to V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River. Such a time no longer exists because one history has changed and another has happened, and still another is happening under our ticking hours. Like his predecessor Naipaul, Russo has captured the attitudes of his white colonialists, his black politicians of various hues of moderation and extremity, and painted a seemingless timeless portrait of a naive American Peace Corps volunteer. (Perhaps naivity is the one constant in the history of change.) Again, like Naipaul, Russo is compassionate and satiric, but unlike his British counterpart, Russo holds out hope that messages of goodness and idealism and decency remain within hearing, that they remain to be recorded in a different and deeper key in another time. Rooted in a past time, Mixed Blood has an undeniable relevance to contemporary time."
Mixed Blood Albert Russo
ISBNS: 1-58345-050-5 Hardcover buy!
1-58345-051-3 Paperback buy!
1-58345-022-X Rocket buy!
Also by the author
Beyond the Great Water Collected Works, Volume I
Unmasking Hearts Collected Works, Volume II
The Age of the Pearl Collected Works, Volume III
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