Fat Charlie tried to remember the names of some gods. “Zeus?” he suggested.
Mrs. Higgler made a noise like a kettle suppressing the urge to boil. Fat Charlie was fairly sure that Zeus had been the wrong answer. “Cupid?”
She made another noise, which began as a sputter and ended in a giggle. “I can just picture your dad wearing nothin’ but one of them fluffy diapers, with a big bow and arrow.” She giggled some more. Then she swallowed some coffee.
“Back when he was a god,” she told him. “Back then, they called him Anansi.”
NOW, PROBABLY YOU KNOW SOME ANANSI STORIES. PROBABLY there’s no one in the whole wide world doesn’t know some Anansi stories.
Anansi was a spider, when the world was young, and all the stories were being told for the first time. He used to get himself into trouble, and he used to get himself out of trouble. The story of the Tar-Baby, the one they tell about Bre’r Rabbit? That was Anansi’s story first. Some people thinks he was a rabbit. But that’s their mistake. He wasn’t a rabbit. He was a spider.
Anansi stories go back as long as people been telling each other stories. Back in Africa, where everything began, even before people were painting cave lions and bears on rock walls, even then they were telling stories, about monkeys and lions and buffalo: big dream stories. People always had those proclivities. That was how they made sense of their worlds. Everything that ran or crawled or swung or snaked got to walk through those stories, and different tribes of people would venerate different creatures.
Lion was the king of beasts, even then, and Gazelle was the fleetest of foot, and Monkey was the most foolish, and Tiger was the most terrible, but it wasn’t stories about them people wanted to hear.
Anansi gave his name to stories. Every story is Anansi’s. Once, before the stories were Anansi’s, they all belonged to Tiger (which is the name the people of the islands call all the big cats), and the tales were dark and evil, and filled with pain, and none of them ended happily. But that was a long time ago. These days, the stories are Anansi’s.
Seeing we were just at a funeral, let me tell you a story about Anansi, the time his grandmother died. (It’s okay: she was a very old woman, and she went in her sleep. It happens.) She died a long way from home, so Anansi, he goes across the island with his handcart, and he gets his grandmother’s body, and puts it on the handcart, and he wheels it home. He’s going to bury her by the banyan tree out the back of his hut, you see.
Now, he’s passing through the town, after pushing his grandmother’s corpse in the cart all morning, and he thinks I need some whisky. So he goes into the shop, for there is a shop in that village, a store that sells everything, where the shopkeeper is a very hasty-tempered man. Anansi, he goes in and he drinks some whisky. He drinks a little more whisky, and he thinks, I shall play a trick on this fellow, so he says to the shopkeeper, go take some whisky to my grandmother, sleeping in the cart outside. You may have to wake her, for she’s a sound sleeper.
So the shopkeeper, he goes out to the cart with a bottle, and he says to the old lady in the cart, “Hey, here’s your whisky,” but the old lady she not say anything. And the shopkeeper, he’s just getting angrier and angrier, for he was such a hasty-tempered man, saying get up, old woman, get up and drink your whisky, but the old woman she says nothing. Then she does something that the dead sometimes do in the heat of the day: she flatulates loudly. Well, the shopkeeper, he’s so angry with this old woman for flatulating at him that he hits her, and then he hits her again, and now he hits her one more time and she tumbles down from the handcart onto the ground.
Anansi, he runs out and he starts a-crying and a-wailing and a-carrying on, and saying my grandmother, she’s a dead woman, look what you did! Murderer! Evildoer! Now the shopkeeper, he says to Anansi, don’t you tell anyone I done this, and he gives Anansi five whole bottles of whisky, and a bag of gold, and a sack of plantains and pineapples and mangos, to make him hush his carrying-on, and to go away.
(He thinks he killed Anansi’s grandmother, you see.)
So Anansi, he wheels his handcart home, and he buries his grandmother underneath the banyan tree.
Now the next day, Tiger, he’s passing by Anansi’s house, and he smells cooking smells. So he invites himself over, and there’s Anansi having a feast, and Anansi, having no other option, asks Tiger to sit and eat with them.
Tiger says, Brother Anansi, where did you get all that fine food from, and don’t you lie to me? And where did you get these bottles of whisky from, and that big bag filled with gold pieces? If you lie to me, I’ll tear out your throat.
So Anansi, he says, I cannot lie to you, Brother Tiger. I got them all for I take my dead grandmother to the village on a handcart. And the storekeeper gave me all these good things for bringing him my dead grandmother.
Now, Tiger, he didn’t have a living grandmother, but his wife had a mother, so he goes home and he calls his wife’s mother out to see him, saying, grandmother, you come out now, for you and I must have a talk. And she comes out and peers around, and says what is it? Well, Tiger, he kills her, even though his wife loves her, and he places her body on a handcart.
Then he wheels his handcart to the village, with his dead mother-in-law on it. Who want a dead body? he calls. Who want a dead grandmother? But all the people they just jeered at him, and they laughed at him, and they mocked him, and when they saw that he was serious and he wasn’t going anywhere, they pelted him with rotten fruit until he ran away.
It wasn’t the first time Tiger was made a fool of by Anansi, and it wouldn’t be the last time. Tiger’s wife never let him forget how he killed her mother. Some days it’s better for Tiger if he’s never been born.
That’s an Anansi story.
’Course, all stories are Anansi stories. Even this one.
Olden days, all the animals wanted to have stories named after them, back in the days when the songs that sung the world were still being sung, back when they were still singing the sky and the rainbow and the ocean. It was in those days when animals were people as well as animals that Anansi the spider tricked all of them, especially Tiger, because he wanted all the stories named after him.
Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.
What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man.
No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
CHAPTER
THREE
IN
WHICH
THERE IS
A
FAMILY
REUNION
FAT CHARLIE FLEW HOME TO ENGLAND; AS HOME AS HE WAS GOING to get, anyway.
Rosie was waiting for him as he came out of the customs hall carrying a small suitcase and a large, taped-up cardboard box. She gave him a huge hug. “How was it?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Could’ve been worse.”
“Well,” she said, “at least you don’t have to worry about him coming to the wedding and embarrassing you anymore.”