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In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

In that darkness,

Speakers rose like

Housing projects,

Moonlight diamonded

Mesh-wire panes.

What was it that bloomed

Around his curled

Body when the lights

Came up, fluorescent,

Vacant, garish?

The gym throbbed

With beats & rage

And his eyes darted

Like a man nailed

To a burning crucifix.

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.

When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.