Do the Blind Dream?: New Novellas and Stories by Barry Gifford

Author:Barry Gifford [Gifford, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781583226704
Google: kJY1XUuFmT8C
Amazon: 1583226702
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2004-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

African Adventure Story

Samaki’s mother, father, three brothers, both grandmothers, one grandfather and several aunts, uncles and cousins had been murdered by rebel boys, children, really, fourteen and fifteen year old soldiers called Clouds of Mercy in Field Marshal Omar Fawali’s Invincible Army of the All-Seeing Blind Seekers of Final Truth. Samaki, whose name in Swahili means fish, justified his baptism by swimming for his life, having run to the river at his mother’s urging when she heard that the rebels had arrived on the outskirts of their village, and then swum through the crocodile-infested water, listening to shouts and rifle fire as he paddled to the opposing shore. Samaki climbed up on the eastern bank of the Ngobo, looked across and saw flames rising above what remained of the blue-green morning mist. A large crocodile that had been buried in brown mud suddenly lurched toward him, and Samaki, who was one day short of his ninth birthday, turned and bolted into the forest. He never saw his village or any member of his family again.

After weeks of wandering, stealing food to stay alive, sleeping in the bush, Samaki was taken in by an order of Polish nuns, the Sisters of Immaculate Apparel, all of whom wore only pure white robes. Three months later, relatives of one of the nuns who lived in Chicago agreed to sponsor the boy and paid for his passage to the United States. Samaki grew up in Chicago, a true African-American. He was adopted by the nun’s cousin, who called him Sam Fish.

Sam later matriculated to Harvard Law School, graduated, passed the Massachusetts bar, and joined a law firm in Boston, where he worked for six years before moving to New York City. Four years later Sam ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress and won. He remained in Washington, D.C., for the rest of his life, serving two terms as a congressman, after which he was appointed to a federal judgeship, a position Sam held until his retirement at the age of seventy-eight.

He married while in Congress, fathered four children, and eventually became the grandfather of fourteen and great-grandfather of three. One day before his eighty-ninth birthday, Sam told his youngest grandson, named after him and called by the family Little Sam, that exactly eighty years before he had been forced to flee his home in Africa after his mother, father, brothers and most of his relatives had been or were about to be killed. Sam told Little Sam, who was then nine years old, about being frightened by an enormous crocodile and how he had run into a forest and wandered all alone for a very long time before he was taken in by the Sisters of Immaculate Apparel. Little Sam said to his grandfather, “You were the same age as I am now.” “Almost,” Sam answered. The next day, he died.

In his will, Sam bequeathed one-fourth of his estate to the African Order of the Polish Sisters of Immaculate Apparel. As it

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