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Double Men
Namwali Serpell
Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Foreword © Tracy Chevalier 2016
Double Men © Namwali Serpell 2016
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket photograph © Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the authors’ imaginations.
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Source ISBN: 9780008150594
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008173500
Version: 2016-03-16
Contents
Why is Charlotte Brontë’s “Reader, I married him” one of the most famous lines in literature? Why do we remember it and quote it so much?
Jane Eyre is “poor, obscure, plain, and little”, with no family and no prospects; the embodiment of the underdog who ultimately triumphs. And “Reader, I married him” is Jane’s defiant conclusion to her rollercoaster story. It is not, “Reader, he married me” – as you would expect in a Victorian society where women were supposed to be passive; or even, “Reader, we married.” Instead Jane asserts herself; she is the driving force of her narrative, and it is she who chooses to be with Rochester. Her self-determination is not only very appealing; it also serves to undercut the potential over-sweetness of a classic happy ending where the heroine gets her man. The mouse roars, and we pump our fist with her.
Twenty-one writers, then, have taken up this line and written what it has urged them to write. I liken it to a stone thrown into a pond, with its resulting ripples. Always, always in these stories there is love – whether it is the first spark or the last dying embers – in its many heart-breaking, life-affirming forms.
All of these stories have their own memorable lines, their own truths, their own happy or wry or devastating endings, but each is one of the ripples that finds its centre in Jane and Charlotte’s decisive clarion call: Reader, I married him.
Tracy Chevalier
A FRIENDSHIP THAT FAILS to negotiate dogs and chickens is doomed to wither, even a friendship that has weathered decades of hardship and tedium. Mama Lota and Nanjela had raised children together; performed birth and death rites in tandem; carried loads, light and heavy, as one. Now that there were no men left in their households, they depended on each other, hooked their everydays, the tasks of tending to body and home. In a small field, they grew enough greens, beans, potatoes, cassava, yams, groundnuts and maize to feed themselves, and kept the surplus in Mama Lota’s storehouse. They gave the damaged but edible leftovers to widows even less fortunate than they.
Mama Lota bought the dogs because the storehouse had been robbed again. This time, she’d caught them in the act. She’d burst through the door with furious shouts, her chitenge haphazard, her barely-there hair uncovered, light spoking erratically from the lantern she held aloft. The boys fled, crawling from her hailstorm, except for one boy who, Mama Lota speculated later to Nanjela, must have been raised by a bitter woman who beat him too hard and too often. His lackeys scurried pitiably around him but this boy alone stood, lengthening up like a thread of smoke, his fist wrapped around a stone Mama Lota had thrown. He spat and threw it back. It struck her above her left eye, knocked her over, knocked her out and turned her eyebrow into a red smear that healed later into a purple cross, which everyone said made sense since her husband, long deceased, had been a pastor.
Those thieving boys had broken in through the one small window in the storehouse across from the locked entrance. When Mama Lota toppled across the threshold, they ran away through the door she’d burst through, ran right over her body, their pockets and hands full of all they planned to sell. And just for the sake of it, they stole the lantern that had tumbled from her hand.
This was why Mama Lota had sent her nephew to purchase the Doberman Pinschers. Not because of the stolen food, nor the requited stone, nor even the wound it had opened. It was this pettiness of taking her lamp, which her husband had received as a boy from a muzungu hunter he’d fetched game for, and which he had polished every night of their marriage, whistling pleasantly through the gap in his front teeth. Mama Lota liked to remember him this way: nearby, his mouth and hands occupied. And now the glass and metal thing that reminded her of a lost person – it, too,