Initiation Rites: A West African Odyssey

By Ray C. Noll III

An inquisitive, all-American grad student abruptly ends his protracted adolescence when a graduate art program lands him in West Africa during the explosive summer of 1977. His traveling artist workshops in Ghana and Nigeria deteriorate from a summer of anticipated light-hearted cultural inquiry to a gauntlet of survival. He cavorts with fetish worshipers, challenges greedy, often stoned soldiers, and dances with death, all in the name of higher education and accelerated maturity. He quickly sheds his laissez-faire persona, realizing he is not in Maryland anymore.

Blending humor and history, original pen and ink drawings, and stories that leave the reader wanting more, Initiation Rites is a fictional memoir that touches an adventurous spirit in all of us, that few have ever followed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483674667

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Copyright © 2013 by Ray C. Noll III.

Drawings, photography, and book design by Ray C. Noll III.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2013913448

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4836-7465-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4836-7464-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4836-7466-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 08/19/2013

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Boast Not Thyself Of Tomorrow

Chapter Two: Travel And See

Chapter Three: Joker Boys

Chapter Four: Money Rules All

Chapter Five: Some They Know, But Do Not Say

Chapter Six: Experience Counts

Chapter Seven: Slow But Sure

Chapter Eight: Sweet, Not Always

Chapter Nine: All Days Are Not Equal

Chapter Ten: Open The Gate

Chapter Eleven: Still It Makes Me Laugh

Chapter Twelve: No Time To Die

Chapter Thirteen: No Woman, No Chop

Chapter Fourteen: Your Own Is Coming

Chapter Fifteen: The Hour Is Now

Chapter Sixteen: Cemetery Not For Play

Chapter Seventeen: Life Is War

Chapter Eighteen: No Situation Is Permanent

Chapter Nineteen: Never Despair

Final Exam

Dedication%20page.jpg

Dedication

To my parents, Eva and Ray Noll, who instilled in me

a love of travel and a fascination with foreign cultures.

and

To the memory of James Gross, an able captain

in the seas of West African chaos.

Acknowledgments

Different versions of these episodes have been around for over twenty years but never coalesced until I attended a writer’s workshop conducted by author Ralph Eubanks, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review and former Director of Publications at the Library of Congress. Ralph helped with the book’s structure and format which finally clicked into place after decades of my attempts to bring these stories to life. He also came up with the title and subtitle, convincing me that my working title, Buroni was too confusing for a general audience.

The idea to write this narrative from the last century in the present tense, first person belongs to my wife, colleague, and shock editor, Deb Marciano. Her unique perspective and loving support brought an old idea to fruition. Deb’s suggestion of using the present tense brought immediacy to the story, making it fresh and vital. While the idea of a mock memoir is not new, it works well in the service of tall tales based on an element of truth.

I also want to thank my aunt, Janet Noll Naumer, for her years of insightful support and encouragement on this and other projects. She is my ardent writing and publishing cheerleader and the antidote to Pennsylvania Silence.

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Chapter One: Boast Not Thyself of Tomorrow

All chapter titles are taken from the names of tro tros or mammy wagons, which served as public transportation in Ghana.

It had once been an amber glass wine bottle, imported, consumed, recycled, over and over, mostly for palm oil. Now, in its final incarnation, the bottle is filled with petrol, its neck stuffed with a dirty rag. Once lit, it becomes a Molotov cocktail, the standard poor man’s bomb of 20th Century revolutions. Kwesi watches the ebb and flow of the opposing crowds while rolling the smooth glass between his hands in nervous anticipation. Acheampong has sent more soldiers than he expected, even empty trucks for carrying away prisoners. They seem so invasive, like a blight of uniformed ignorance on his tranquil university campus. An indignant captain is blaring orders over the truck-mounted loudspeakers, telling the student protesters to disperse, that it is unlawful to oppose the government of the Supreme Military Council. His words are met with loud jeering and yells of defiance. Kwesi patiently waits for the right moment to light his Molotov while the students hurl insults and rocks at the soldiers who are fixing bayonets on their rifles. Organic missiles of rotting vegetables collected from the dining hall sail through the air, pelting the wincing soldiers and staining their starched green uniforms.

There is a warning gunshot creating a moment of silence, followed by the loudspeaker’s final demand to disperse. The retort by the students is deafening as they fling more rocks and vegetables at the military line. The soldiers’ restraint is at an end. Bayonets level, they slowly move forward in a single wall of splattered green uniforms, three lines deep. This is the moment he has been waiting for. Kwesi judges from where he is standing to the nearest troop carrier to be about 30 yards. He sets his bottle on the ground and nervously fumbles with his wooden Togo matches until the rag flares into flame. Standing up, he takes aim raising his right arm back over his head. A visiting American exchange student had shown him how to throw an American style football last semester and his words suddenly come back to him, Let your fingertips spin off the laces just as you let go. The burning bottle leaves his hand spinning like a football, arching high over the students and soldiers. It sails over the troop transport as well, exploding on the roof of Professor Twum’s parked Saab, flooding it in flames. The sudden surprise ignites the soldiers into a furious stampede, breaking rank and charging into the angry students. Hurling rocks is no defense against the angry soldiers, no matter how well aimed and the students steadily fall back. A deep, resounding explosion is heard behind the troop carriers as the gas tank of Professor Twum’s Saab blows up, shattering the windows of the Bursar’s Office near where the car is parked. The students begin to run in a furious footrace to escape capture. Some elude the soldiers, however many do not.

Kwesi glimpses a rifle stock streaming toward his face, a steel meteor bringing blackness. He is unconscious as he hits the ground. His body is tossed like a corpse onto the back of a troop carrier with the other student prisoners, battered, deflated, and scared. They are taken to a filthy prison in Accra for interrogations, beatings, and denial of food and water until their release is secured by extorting sums of money from their families. Kwesi’s eye is still discolored, four weeks later, when he petitions me to join their revolution for democracy. But on this day of illegal protest in Ghana, I am having problems of my own, working on the far side of the Atlantic.

Intuitively I know death is omnipresent. It may arrive at any time. When we are reminded of this, we tend to cut the bullshit and live more intently. Some people, myself included, need to revisit this fact on a regular basis, like surprise sticky notes forewarning of eternity.

On a hot April afternoon in 1977, my body completes an electrical circuit with the current charging down one arm, across my chest, and back up the other arm locking me onto the spotlight I am attempting to move. The job foreman responds to my screams for help by yelling, Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! My last thought before losing consciousness is, I am going to die in the bottom of Pete Seeger’s boat.

There is a minor craze in the mid 1970s for making things out of frerrocement, houses, canoes, and ocean-going sailboats. Instead of sand, frerrocement is mixed with fly-ash, a by-product of steel manufacturing, making it lightweight and durable when sealed with multiple coats of epoxy. Folk music icon, Pete Seeger, is interested in creating a smaller, frerrocement version of his Hudson River sloop, The Clearwater, to serve as an environmental education boat. He contracts Ferro Sails, a frerrocement boat building company, and my temporary employer, for his project. Ferro Sails is located seven miles from the Chesapeake Bay, in Calvert County, Maryland. Their modest factory is a functional two-story steel structure with massive garage doors at each end, chains and hoists dangling from a central beam, overlooked by a cramped office and a drafting room cluttered with boat drawings and whiskey bottles. It is large enough to construct the hulls of two forty-five foot sailboats at once indoors.

As an artist, I find the process akin to some forms of sculpture, simple and straightforward. We build a forty-five foot replica of The Clearwater hull upside down, out of plywood and long strips of cheap pine spaced an inch apart. This skeleton is the armature, the form we are to capture in cement. The hull is tightly wrapped in clear plastic sheeting with four layers of bright blue plastic mesh stapled into the wood on top of it. It will then be coated with a two-inch layer of frerrocement. Once the cement hardens, the wood is ripped out, thrown away, and the interior surface is ground to a uniform smoothness. The exact recipe for mixing the cement is kept under lock and key by the bosses, who believe they have the Holy Grail for manufacturing virtually any form imaginable. They talk of building bubble-like houses out of frerrocement, but then again they drink a lot, fueling an alcohol-inflated sense of self.

Pouring Day is considered a festive occasion, similar to a barn-raising with a cookout and beer party afterwards. Masons are hired to do the fine trowel work on the hull. My job is to take a sixteen-inch electric steel vibrator and vibrate the wooden surface inside the hull to help move the cement through the layers of plastic mesh until it comes in contact with the plastic sheeting. The Rods of Zeus, as we call them, become so hot they will sear mortal flesh, forcing us to wear asbestos gloves, frequently cooling them off in buckets of water.

Inside the stifling darkness of the hull, the afternoon air hangs damp and oppressive. It is both a crypt and an oven. I am being stewed in my own juices, my asbestos gloves soaked through with sweat, and after eight hours, no longer pleasant. Outside I can hear the voices of both male and female masons in casual conversation, as they smooth the frerrocement into uniform evenness across the hull’s surface. Their arms swing in radial wiper movements, clinging to giant steel trowels wielded in wide arcs. They are inches above my head as I lie on boards approximately where the upper deck will be. I move all the way forward into the nose of the bow, vibrating the oozing frerrocement down to the plastic sheeting. The end is in sight, only in the gloom I can’t see what I am doing and reach to move the clamp-on spotlight. I make the tired mistake of grasping the spotlight with two soaking wet gloved hands. It seizes me instead, zapping me with 110 volts continuously, welding my hands onto the lamp. I am powerless to let go. The other workers hear my screams and duck into the hull, but when they see me writhing and yelling they stand and stare not knowing what to do. The foreman tells them, correctly, not to touch me. I am literally a live wire. It doesn’t matter, I can no longer scream. Everything is fading away. The hull really is a crypt. What a ridiculous way to go, dying in the hull of Pete Seeger’s unfinished boat. Maybe he will sing at my funeral, rewrite the words to John Henry, . . . And he died with a spotlight in his hand. Lawd, Lawd. Died with a spotlight in his hand… The work crew seems very far away now, although they could touch me easily. Why do they only watch and do nothing? Maybe they have never seen anyone die while on the job before.

At the last flicker of consciousness, the electric current stops. I lie there and convulse for a while, my mind freely roaming in some altered state. Ronnie, the biggest pot smoker of the crew, is the only one to have had the common sense to pull the electric plug on the spotlight. I manage to slither out of the hull and sit dazed on the cool cement floor, voices jabbering all around me.

The bosses nervously laugh about my shocking personality, hand me a beer and offer to take me to the hospital. Embarrassed and trying to appear macho, I decline. But the truth is, I am shaken to my core.

The hull is fully realized, sleek, and smooth. I am sure it will eventually become a beautiful boat. I have no interest in partying with my co-workers afterwards. All I see is their faces frozen in panic. I thank Ronnie for saving my life, he shrugs, and invites me to smoke a joint with him. I say no and go home.

Home at this point in time is the Victorian farmhouse of my great Aunt Ringgold and Grandmother, Vivian, in Owings, Maryland. This side of the family is decidedly Southern in terms of attitude and history. The Civil War was a great tragedy in which they lost their slave labor and antebellum lifestyle as the old tobacco plantation transitioned into a working farm based on wages. Nana and Aunt Ringgold maintain a noble melancholy about the distant past that echoes in their voices when they talk about down home. But they also reflect a pull-yourself-up-by the-bootstraps feeling of accomplishment, initiated by successive generations too successful in their own right to ever wallow in the victims of Northern aggression headset. One benefit of this underlying attitude is I am able to relate to the weary Southern sadness that haunts the novels of William Faulkner as being manifest in my own family. It is this perceived compost of generations past, thick with the humid, dreamy scent of magnolias that lures me to Calvert County after graduating from college. The tidewater region is a place at once familiar and comfortable but so very different from my Philadelphia suburban upbringing in Devon. I have been visiting my aunt and grandmother’s tobacco farm my entire life, although the 1960s imposition of Maryland Route 2 thundering through the middle of the farm destroyed any chance of real country quiet.

As Ringgold and Vivian’s first cousin, Clayton, told me when I arrived from Penn State one August to help with the tobacco harvest, Ree, nuthin’ has chainged down heah in five hunert yeahs, and we lack it that way. It sure felt like it. Everybody belongs in their place. The crowded tenant farmhouse, two-hundred yards from our sprawling Victorian farmhouse, had no plumbing or running water and a cast iron woodstove for heat in winter. When I asked Clay about bringing the building into the 20th Century he replied, flustered, Ah jest built them a bran new two seater latrine! Besides, the coloreds are used to livin’ thet way. Of course they are.

Clay and I have had our differences over the years, starting with an impromptu jungle march to find the remains of the old Henry Owings plantation in the next county. Clay’s Marine Corps buzz cut is sweating bullets in the summer sun as he aggressively chops through the dense vegetation of southern Anne Arundel County. It is easy to picture him in the war, back on Iwo Jima, smokin’ lil Jap bastards outta their caves, with the same kind of gung-ho moxie. His weapon of choice had been the flame-thrower, his nickname, Mr. Barbecue. My intrepid mother and grandmother come along on the search, high stepping through the weeds as Clay wields a tobacco hatchet, hacking through the kudzu, sumac, and wild grape until we discover the ruins and locate the fabled door of family legend.

In 1864, Union foraging patrols targeted the farms of Southern sympathizers in Maryland in a regional effort to eliminate the Confederacy’s base of supply. Nana explains to me that this was the door the marauding Yankee foragers smashed in with their rifle butts when the ladies had barred the entrance while their men-folk were off fighting for the noble cause. That would be the noble cause of slavery? I question. My mother shoots me a glance. Clay says, You best take this boy back Nawth where he belongs. He doesn’t seem to unda-stan the sit-choo-ation down heah.

Sure enough, a hundred years later, the rifle butt dents are plainly visible in the old oak door, slowly rotting in the weeds. Nana goes on about how the Yankees took all their food supplies, pigs, chickens, cows, mules, and anything else of use, leaving the Owings women and their loyal servants to nearly starve to death in the winter of 1865. Nana dearly loves a loyal servant story, as their resolute characters fit into her staple of Southern mythology. Her own personal chapter of Gone with the Wind, proving the family was kind to their slaves. But at age twelve, I am thinking slavery is just plain wrong and these people got what they deserved.

Years later, cutting tobacco for Clay before returning to college, I receive some valuable insight on traditional labor practices. This is Clay’s modern day plantation and he drives the boys like he drives the men. He rolls his own cigarettes with wheat straw paper and always has one dangling off his lower lip as he barks out his orders.

In the feeeld, the men will address you as ‘Mistah Noll.’ They don’t address me at all, chuckling to each other as they cut three rows to my one, wondering why this soft white boy is pretending to be a field hand. Clay becomes infuriated when they talk among themselves in the field.

Stop that chitta-chatta an git some work done, he bellows at the crew. I won’t stan fo any lolly-gagging on my wage-clock! You wanna talk, come draw your pay!

The black southern Maryland dialect is a foreign language to my ears. I have no idea what they are saying. By the end of the day, my soft little artist hands are so bloody with blisters that make it impossible for me to grasp the long handled hatchet. Tobacco knives, Clay calls them. I retire to the barn to unload spears of tobacco as they come in, piled on the tractor drawn wagons. I hand these up to a relay of men straddling a series of pole tiers high inside the barn. Once they have the ceiling crowned they work downward, the stalks of heavy green leaves impaled five to a spear, hanging limp, tier upon tier with just enough air between them so they will dry without molding. It is a labor-intensive process to produce deadly tars and nicotine for a receding industry. Except for tractors replacing horses and mules, nothing has changed in the basic methods of cultivating and harvesting tobacco since colonial times. Clay says to me, Ree, there awr two things I have bin foolin’ with all mah life ’n still don’t know anythin’ about: womin ’n tobacco.

The Owings homestead grew from a two-story farmhouse into drafty, rambling Victorian boarding house with a wide, wraparound porch complete with rocking chairs. It was situated on the remaining ninety acres of what once had been a five-hundred acre tobacco plantation, stretching nearly to the Chesapeake Bay and keeping forty-two slaves busy year round. Nana maintains the legend that the Owings were so good to their slaves that after Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation, not one slave left the plantation but stayed on working for wages. Their children, however, split as soon as they could.

As young women, visiting Owings from their homes in Norfolk and Philadelphia, Nana and Aunt Ringgold would always bring presents to Aunt Bessy and Aunt Sarah, two wizened, former slaves who lived in cabins on the property. The importance placed on visiting these women shows to me an extended family that was never mentioned to my generation. I can’t help but wonder if it was because these women were the daughters of Henry Owings and a slave woman. After the South lost the war, tobacco was still king in southern Maryland, but with less profit. It took decades to regain the family’s financial losses.

Joint ownership among siblings sometimes winds up a losing proposition. Living in different cities, the two sisters had opposing viewpoints on every subject. It is not surprising then that Aunt Ringgold and Nana clash on the farm as well. As result, the declining tobacco profits are sunk into minimal maintenance and the farm slowly deteriorates from charming to care worn with each passing year. The physical house itself becomes divided between the sisters with Aunt Ringgold leasing out her larger section to renters while I stay in my grandmother’s back rooms upstairs. One of these rooms overlooks a marshy lowland where a few of the slave cabins had been. It faces due west and on the evening of getting zapped at work, I watch the sun, a brilliant orange ball, silhouette the trees like black lace, questioning everything in my life.

What I doing here? Why boats? What about art? What about romance? Ronnie’s action has spared me an early death, but for what purpose? What am I supposed to be doing? My head begins to throb. I understand why introspection is not part of the American character. But I need to brood. I take my corncob pipe and walk up to the largest of the three iron red tobacco barns above the house. Inside, the sharecroppers always stash a few bundles of brights, top leaves, in a basket on top of a hogshead for their own smokes. I pack my pipe and sit on a farm wagon overlooking the sienna fields at dusk, listening to the birds call goodnight, while the local boys test their engines on the highway. My cares and questions waft skyward on the tobacco smoke.

The next day is Sunday. I feel drained and depressed, despite the perfection of a sunny spring morning. Coffee is not enough of a stimulant and I am a lump planted at the kitchen table, listlessly thumbing through the March issue of Nature magazine. Nothing in it is interesting, except for an ad in the back, "Study with African Artists in West Africa this Summer! Deadline April 1st." Well, another missed opportunity and I go back to moping about in the peeling paint of my boarding house rooms, snarling at the sunlight, praying for sullen, gray cloud cover to complement my mood.

Off and on I think about that ad. It sets off a very old and naïve fantasy inside me, a fantasy rooted in old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies and Ramar of the Jungle TV shows, the sum total of my knowledge of Africa. My concept of Mythic Africa is part giant game park, part jungle, part savannah, populated by magnificent animals and colorful natives. Africa the unknown, the perfect place to test myself against all the dangerous things lurking out there, where I could liberate my inner Tarzan, buried under a lifetime of soft suburban living and college partying. I could evolve into a new man, strong, fearless and loaded with jungle savvy. I could leave my boatyard persona and post college malaise in one fell swoop, waving adios to bucolic southern Maryland.

The more I think, the more I become convinced the study trip to West Africa could make the dream happen. My stomach is in a knot the next day as I call the phone number in New York City and talk to the program director who works at the Museum of Natural History. No, it is not too late to register, but I will have to move fast to complete the application, visa, and medical forms.

I call my parents and spill the Africa plan. It is met with the Disapproving Pennsylvania Silence, an effective means of shooting one down without saying a word, a tactic inherited from the Pennsylvania German side of the family. But this is something I am long familiar with and tend to ignore. They have their own issues. Better to turn the burner on low and they might warm up to it.

Next I call my sometimes girlfriend, Margaret, in Philadelphia. Her response drives the nails into the casket of our dying relationship. What? Are you nuts? You are going to end up in some cannibal’s stew! Why would anyone in his right mind want to go to Africa? Well, I’m not going to wait for you! she spits out over the phone. Thank God, I am free, no strings attached, no girl to leave behind and nothing to come home to. Therefore, no lingering guilt over possible foreign affairs, is enticing. My expectations soar.

Cousin Clay echoes Margaret’s reservations, Lemme git this straight, you are goin’ to Afrikaw to studeee Afrikin art with Afrikins? What in Gawd’s name fo? Ain’t Kawcasian art confuzin enuff? Lawd boy you need your haid x-zamined! Your place is heah, ’mong your kin, settl’n down, find’n a girl, work’n a trade. Not running off play’n Stanley ’n Livingston in the damn Afrikin jungle! I knew he would understand.

Everything is suddenly in gear, moving toward a specific goal, getting out, leaving the country, going into the unknown. It seems very appealing, mysterious, and a solid plan for postponing the workplace drudgery that awaits me in order to support the desires and demands of the American Dream, buying time from future obligations of wife, children, cars, and houses. To travel fast and to travel light is a twenty-three year old’s dream. Maybe I can outrun the trap, for a little while, at least. I am not ready to settle down. To prolong my late adolescence under the guise of international education is perfect. How absurd, my family has already labeled me an international playboy.

I work at the boatyard three more weeks and for my father’s air compressor business on the weekends to scrape together all possible finances for the trip, draining my entire bank account. Nobody is surprised when I bid adieu at the boatyard. I am not sure if most of my co-workers put the electrical shock and going to Africa together as a normal response to a near-death experience, but Ronnie does. He thinks it is far out. He is the only one I will miss. His easy going stoner personality made the drudgery of boat construction bearable. I will send him postcards from Ghana and Nigeria, but we eventually lose contact. I later hear he went home to Louisiana after his divorce to his Maryland wife was finalized.

My biceps feel like pin cushions after eleven inoculations at the doctor’s office as he fills in the international health form which folds out like a road map stapled into my passport. Where am I going that I need all of these injections? Obviously it won’t be like Florida, the closest I have been to the equator. I decide to find Ghana on the world map at the first available opportunity. Mom says West Africa is very crowded and has lots of people while East Africa is where all the animals are, inferring maybe I have picked the wrong