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“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you was thinking.” His large eyes narrowed to a sly knowing slit.
Tawana hooked her finger into the handle of the mug. It was the vampires. Ever since she’d read the stuff in the church bulletin that she’d taken home she’d wanted to know more than just what was there in writing, most of it taken out of newspapers. She wanted the whole truth, the truth that didn’t get into newspapers.
“You actually saw then yourself, the vampires?”
Rev. Blount nodded. His eyes looked sad, the lids all droopy, with yellowish scuzz in the corners. From time to time he’d wipe the scuzz away with a fingertip, but it would be there again within a few blinks.
“What’d they look like?”
“Just the same as people you see on the street. Tall mostly, but then that’s so for most us Malawis. They always wear white. That’s how they get their name in Bantu. The White Man is what we call a vampire. It’s not the same as calling someone a white man over here, though most vampires do have white skin. Not all, but the overwhelming majority.”
Tawana pondered this. In the one movie she had ever seen about her own native country of Somalia she had noticed the same thing. All the American sold
iers who went into the city of Mogadishu to kill the people there were white with one exception. That one black soldier didn’t have a name that she could remember but she remembered him more clearly than all the white soldiers, because he behaved just the way they did, as though they’d turned him into one of them. If there could be black soldiers like him, why not black vampires?
“I saw the movie,” she said, by way of offering her own credentials. And added (thinking he might not know which movie), “The one in black and white.”
“Dracula!” said the Reverend Blount. “Yeah, that is one kind of vampire all right. With those teeth. Don’t mess with that mother. But the White Man is a different kind of vampire. He don’t bite into your neck and suck the blood out, which must be a trickier business than they let on in the old movie. No, the White Man uses modern technology. He’s got syringes. You know, like at the doctor’s office. Big ones. He jabs them in anywheres, sometimes in the neck, or in the arm, wherever. Then when the thing is filled up with blood he takes off the full test tube-thing and wiggles in an empty one. As many times as he needs to. Sometimes he’ll take all the blood they got, if he’s hungry. Other times, but not that often, he’ll only take a sip. Like you, with that cocoa. That’s how new vampires get created. Cause there is some vampire blood inside the syringe and it gets into the victim’s bloodstream and turns them into vampires themselves. AIDS works just the same. You know about AIDS?”
Tawana nodded. “We have to study it at school. And you can’t share needles.”
“True! Especially with the White Man.”
Tawana had a feeling she wasn’t being told the whole story, just the way grown-ups never tell you the whole story about sex. Usually you had to listen to them when they thought you weren’t there. Then you found out.
“The vampire you saw,” she said, shifting directions, “was it just one? And was it a man or a woman?”
“Good question!” Rev. Blount said approvingly. “Because there can be lady vampires. Not as many as the men but a lot. And to answer your question, the only ones I ever saw for sure was men. But I have met some ladies I thought might of been vampires—black ladies!—but I cleared out before I could find out for certain. If I hadn’t of I might not be here now.”
Tawana felt frustrated. Rev. Blount answered her questions honestly enough, but even so he seemed kind of…slippery. He wasn’t telling her the details.
“You want to know the exact details, don’t you?” he asked, reading her mind. “Okay, here’s what happened. This was back in 1997 and I was studying theology at the All-Faith Mission and Theological Seminary in Blantyre, which is the city in Malawi that has had the biggest vampire problem but which is also my middle name because I was born there. Well, one day Dr. Hopkins who runs the Mission assembled all the seminarians to the hall and told us we would be welcoming a guest from the United Nations health service, and he would be testing us for AIDS! Dr.Hopkins said how we should be cooperative and let the man from the UN do his job, because it was a humanitarian mission the same as ours, and there had to be someone to set an example. The health service, it seems, was having a problem with cooperation. People in Malawi don’t like a stranger coming and sticking needles into them.”
“I hate needles,” Tawana declared fervently.
“Well, we all hate needles, sister. And why us? we had to wonder. Of course, at that time, no one in Blantyre really believed in AIDS. People got sick, yes, and they died, some of them, but there can be other explanations for that. Most people in Malawi thought AIDS was witchcraft. A witch can put a spell on someone and that someone starts feeling bad and he can’t…do whatever he used to. And dies. Only this wasn’t any ordinary kind of witchcraft.”
“It was the White Man!”
Rev. Blount nodded gravely. “Exactly. Only we didn’t know that then. So we agreed to go along with what Dr. Hopkins was asking us to do, and this ‘guest’ came to the Seminary and we all lined up and let him take our blood. Only I refused to let him have any of mine, cause I had a funny feeling about the whole thing. Well, some time went by, and we more or less forgot about the visit we had. But then the guest returned, and talked to Dr. Hopkins, and then he talked with four of the seminarians. But I think there was more than talk that went on. It was like he’d drained the blood right out of them. They were dead before they died. And within a month’s time they was genuinely dead, all four of them. It was all hushed up, but I was one of the people Dr. Hopkins asked to clean up their rooms after. And you know what I found? Syringes. I showed them to Dr. Hopkins, but he said just get rid of them, that is nothing to do with the Seminary. Well, what was it then? I wondered. They wasn’t taking drugs in the Seminary. I don’t think so! It wasn’t AIDS, not them boys.”
“It was the White Man,” Tawana said.
Rev. Blount nodded. “It was the White Man. He tasted the different kinds of blood we sent him, and those boys had the taste the White Man liked best. So he kept coming back for more. And once a vampire has had his first taste, there’s nothing you can do to stop him coming back for more. That old movie had it right there. I don’t know how the vampires got to them, but those four boys sure as hell didn’t commit suicide, which was what some of them at the Seminary was insinuating. Their whole religion is against suicide. No. No. The White Man got them, plain and simple.”
“Tawana!” Ms. McLeod exclaimed with her customary excess of gusto. “Come in, come in!” The school’s principal placed her wire-framed reading glasses atop a stack of multiple-choice Personnel Evaluation forms that had occupied the same corner of her desk since the start of the spring quarter, an emblem of her supervisory status and a clear sign that her rank as principal set her apart from graders of papers and monitors of lunch rooms.
Tawana entered the Principal’s office holding up the yellow slip that had summoned her from Numerical Thinking, her last class before lunch.
“Is this your essay, Tawana?” Ms. McLeod asked, producing three pages of ruled paper. The title—OUR SOMALI BROTHERS AND SISTERS: A Minnesota Perspective—was written with orange magic marker in letters two inches high. Under it, on a more modest scale, was the author’s name, Tawana Makwinja.
“Yes, Ms. McLeod.”
“And the assignment was to write a letter about your family’s cultural heritage. Is that right?”
Tawana dipped her head in agreement.
