At night there is about that young trader a trouble of drums that never rest. There is the sharp concerted cry of the dancers. There is the concerted wail for the dead. There is about him all the rhythmic beating of the mysterious life of his neighborhood, tormenting him where he lies under his mosquito net. For this he will rise and walk about, the ember of his pipe drifting back and forth in the dark, and his gramophone, roused by himself, making its limited obedient effort.
There is this about a gramophone: it is a thing that speaks the home tongue. I have seen him sitting under the eaves of his little hut, by his little table spread with a checkered cloth, his gramophone beside him, trying, with its tale of the old grouse gunroom, to divert that lonely meal. Now that I think of it, the gramophone is a kind of hero of my little piece—a kind of David with five tunes to do battle with nostalgia. Back in the tent broods Saul, and this poor patient David plays the endless round of five tunes. Until some day there is a javelin in the wall, and a proud black man goes away with a gramophone into the wilderness.
The night sky does more permanent ministry to the homesick, and of all the bright ministers the moon is the most effectual. It is the great reflector of lights; there it comes, swinging up its old path in the sky, and the fires of home are mirrored on its disk. You who read have spread your hands, in your hour of homesickness, to those phantom fires—and other hands are always spread. Some of us were sitting on our heels about a little flame in a new clearing; all of us were alien in that clearing; one of us was white. And the black woman said to the white woman when the moonlight fell upon all those women faces,—
'The moon looks upon the villages and upon the home village. We black people, when we sit in the towns of strangers and the moon shines, we say, "Now by the light of this same moon the people at home dance to the drums!" However far we walk, we look upon the moon and we remember our friends at home.'
Upon another moonlight night, sitting in a forest camp with young black girls for companions, these sang for me a little set of songs—the songs, they told me, of the moon:—
'Ah, moné zip, alu a danéya! Ah moné zip'[B]
[B] 'Ah, little gazelle, the night has deepened! Ah, little gazelle!'
This little refrain they sang, clapping their hands ever so lightly, and the meaning of the singing was a warning.
It was a song of the moon, a song for wanderers. And the moon on that remembered night, dragging its net of broken silver cords in among the trees of the forest, caught everywhere the wandering hearts and drew them back on the little rough trails to the home fires. Every night that is a moonlight night there is the casting of that silver net upon far rivers and forests deeper than rivers—wherever aliens make a bed of leaves or sleep on a canvas cot.
On such a night, and caught in such a net, I have met the postman. Yes, on just such a night, when the world appeared as it hangs in space, a crystal globe, and when so observed from a little clearing in an African forest, it was seen to be charted for voyagers, and all its little paths ran readily about the globe to that gilt side which is home. On such a night, and upon such a path, I met the postman.