The Child’s Faith is as Its Thirst
A narrative nonfiction piece about the author’s first encounter with the talibés children of Senegal — from John Edward Ellis
The boy presents his palm to my passenger window. I follow the dusted, sleeveless bone to the shoulder and into the threads of his face. His eyes leak tributaries of tears and pus. I stare. He blinks hysterically, and for a time, all is him and me. “Pardon. Je n’ai pas de money,¹” I say.
Seated next to me in the taxi, my wife pulls our daughter against her and draws the seatbelt to bind them, a makeshift indemnity in lieu of a toddler’s seat. Our daughter closes her eyes, her mouth drooping in the sweat of her face and hair. My wife nods toward the boy. “He may not understand. You say ‘money’ when referring to change. Say ‘l’argent’.”
I shrug. “Je n’ai pas de l’argent.²” The palm sits immobile. “Je n’ai pas de l’argent.” I turn to my wife. “You don’t have anything?”
From the sidewalk across the road, other boys merge into the halted traffic and skirt my window, their dusted limbs outstretched. All are preadolescent, barefoot, and carry small plastic tubs, a signature of their status as West Africa’s mendicant children.
In the front seat of the taxi, the driver slaps the steering wheel and motions into the queue of cabs ahead, toward the mouth of the Pont Faidherbe, over the river Sénégal. Today, construction vehicles occupy one wing of the bridge, so we watch the one-way torrent of cars and wait for the last to cross. When the driver turns to reach for something in the passenger seat, he sees the boys. He rattles something I can’t understand, in Wolof, and the pus-eyed boy mutters. The driver’s hands animate further, a rolling fist. The boy’s eyes widen, but he remains, inert against the cab’s wheel well.
Above us, the sun swells over an abyss of indigo film. The half-open windows of our taxi transfer little of the river’s wind, and the windows’ controls have been torn from the interior. My wife reaches for her bag on the floor of the cab, deciphering its insides, drawing on a disposable water bottle. It sloshes as she brushes her index finger across the exterior condensation and spreads it over our daughter’s forehead. The boy’s eyes search the inside of the cab. I follow his gaze: the bottle. His palm turns into an index finger. The other boys mumble. My wife looks at me. “I’m not sure which…”
I reach for the bottle. “He wants the water.”
At once, my daughter whimpers and stretches her arms out. My wife sighs. “Hang on. We have no idea how long we’ll sit here. Let her have one more sip.” She opens the bottle and passes it to our daughter, who wraps her mouth around the top and raises the bottle above her head — so begins her gradual and dilated suckling, the plastic condensing, drawn in, crackling. Simultaneously, the noontime call to prayer lilts over the cityscape, melodic and baffling. A throng of uniformed high school students surface from a side street and amble toward the bridge. All is haste and languor at once — all is in and out of time:
A horse cart clops by, deaccelerating to half-speed.
A policeman slinks the quay, then halts.
Street merchants arrange their model fishing pirogues on the sidewalk, then recline on the concrete.
The plastic pops as the prayer’s melody plunges and my daughter draws further. The boy’s eyes lock onto the congealed girl-bottle, breaking only once to follow the seatbelt from my daughter’s shoulder to my wife’s waist and across, locked in, my wife’s arms blanketed around her. The boy blinks out another tributary. I glance at the bottle, the boy, the bottle. The water retreats. The other boys stand agape. As my daughter closes her eyes, I hold my breath, pleading for her twenty-month-old brain to apprehend the boys’ plight, the nation’s, Dickensian want — and just get on with it.
Seconds, minutes, hours later, another pop ricochets inside the cab: my daughter plucks the bottle from her mouth, smacks her lips, and presents her urn to no one in particular, a trinket no longer of need nor value. My wife shakes it to reveal what water remains and the cap tumbles into the garbage-strewn crevice of floor.
The bridge traffic ends. The policeman’s whistle shouts. The driver mutters. As the taxi’s engine ignites in a gasp of exhaust fumes, I take the bottle and present it from the mouth of the window and into the boy’s fingers. He jolts it above his head where all can see the contents glisten in a tapestry of split light, a prismatic radiance of water and Sahelian sun engulfing the world in its final flood and fire.
- Je n’ai pas de money: Sorry. I don’t have any change.
2. Je n’ai pas de l’argent: I don’t have any money.
John Edward Ellis is an American who grew up in West Africa, Europe, and the Northeastern United States. His work has been published in African Writer Magazine, Relief Journal, Able Muse Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and Embodied Effigies Magazine, among other journals. Ellis is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Senegal and a graduate fellowship from Saint Mary’s College of California, where he earned an M.F.A. He serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Veterans Studies. You can connect with him at johnedwardellis.com.
