Free Makeda by Randall Robinson

do you mean?”
    “I don’t think I knew it for sure before the second dream—the Dogon dream.”
    “Knew what, Grandma?”
    “You asked if the dreams frightened me—because they were so real.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s why I told you how unhappy I was when I was young. I hated being blind, but not anymore. The dreams have changed that. They have allowed me to see things I could never have seen if my eyes worked. Regular folks see only the physical things that are right in front of them, Gray. I can’t see the physical things that are right in front of me, but I can see beyond those things. Worlds beyond. I have seen my soul when it was young. For old souls who are blind, the worlds of the living and the dead are not so far apart.”
    She paused and then said, with heightened intensity, “I was an African, Gray. In every life, I was an African. For an African, the worlds of the living and the dead are one.”
    I was silent.
    “Am I scaring you, son?”
    “No, Grandma. I’m just trying to think hard about what you’re saying.”
    “I believe now that this is why I was born blind. I have been blessed, because of it, to know my soul before it was forced to borrow a faith that was not originally mine.”
    I did not know what to say. I felt rudderless, queasy.
    The specter and prospect of death had always provoked in me considerable discomfiture. I simply could not comprehend the bat-of-an-eye transition from a state of riotously bubbling organic life to the plasticized facsimiles of it that reposed like boards in coffins.
    When I was eleven, my mother and father had required Gordon and me to go with them to attend the funeral in North Carolina of a distant cousin on my mother’s side named Bill, who’d died of a sudden illness in New York City when he was nineteen. Bill hadn’t visited his home in rural North Carolina for years before his death and the local folk wanted to see him one last time for as long as they could. So Bill’s coffin remained open during the funeral.
    Because I was a member of Bill’s family, I sat in the center of the church, second row, with my face level with Bill’s.
    I was eleven and couldn’t understand why we were being made, for the duration of the service, to look at Bill in his coffin. In any case, I didn’t believe that it was really Bill in the coffin. The pastor said that Bill had gone home to be with Jesus. I didn’t know where he’d gone. But I did not believe he had gone home to be with Jesus. I did not believe that the pastor or anyone else in the church who was gawking at Bill in the coffin actually believed that or else they would not, themselves, have been so afraid of dying. They all seemed to prove this by holding death at bay for as long as they possibly could.
    It was through my grandmother that I learned, over time, not to fear death so much, but to see it as a portal to a spirit world of old ancestors and new lives.
    Toward the end of that last visit I had with her before leaving for college, she told me about the two dreams that had followed the Dogon dream.
    One of the lives she had lived, apparently, had been as an Akân woman during the 1600s in what is now called Ghana. The other life had been lived in the eighteenth century as a Benin girl of twelve, living in what is now the modern country of Nigeria.
    Grandma said that her people, the Benin people, or Binis, believed that God, whom they called Osanobua, granted each person fourteen journeys through life from birth to death, leaving each person’s status in the ultimate afterlife to be determined by the moral plane taken over the course of the fourteen journeys which were trials of a sort. Binis’ dead were not made inaccessible to the living who were, as was the case with my grandmother, visited by the dead, revealing themselves to the living in dreams. For Africans, my grandmother told me, death does not separate the dead from the living.
    Two years before Grandma had the first of these two dreams,