DEVIL-BLACKSMITH
By GRAHAM GREENE old chief was dead in Tailahun, a tiny Liberian' Tvillage perched above the forest on an uneven thimble of rock. The grave was in the centre of the village among the flat stones of the previous chlei‘s. A mat was spread on it, and a noddle-aged woman sat there day after day, shielded from the sun by a roof of palm leaves, the youngest mother among the chief's wives. Christianity, and paganismshared the . dead man, for a rough wood cross was stuck at the grave's foot to propitiate the God whoin the old Chief had accepted on his deathbed. In a pit nearby sat his eight other wives, naked except for. their loin cloths. Women were pasting them over with pale clay ; it Was even rubbed into their hair. They were old and hideous anyway, but now, the colour of the pit in which they sat, they loOked as if they had been torn from the ground at the beginning of decomposition.. There was pathos in the bareness of these symbols, the cross, the clay, the youngest mother. to religions were appealing on the siinplest terms not to the self-interest but to the imagination. There must have been scenes very like this during the last days of pagan England, when religion_ was fought out in terms of a fable about a bird flying through a lighted hall into the dark.
It was the third day after the burial. The next day the women would wash off their clay and oil their bodies, there would be dancing' for three days on end, and again at the end of a week and at the end of forty days. The girls were getting their hair frizzed out for the dances instead of wearing it in the usual way, gummed down in a neat pattern of ridge and parting, and the local devil had . entered the village for the funeral.
This word devil is commonly used by the English- speaking natives in the republic. A masked devil of this kind is a headmaster with more supernatural authority than Arnold of Rugby ever claimed. Even in Sierra Leone, where there arc many Christian missions, most natives, if they are not Mahomedan, have attended the secret bush schools, of which the masked devil is the head. All the way through the great forest which covers Liberia to within sight of the sea one comes on signs of these schools : a row of curiously cropped trees before a narrow path into the thickest bush : a stockade, of plaited palms ; the warning that no stranger can penetrate there. The school and the devil who rules over it lie as grimly as an English public school between childhood and manhood. The child has seen the masked devil and. has learnt of his supernatural power ; no human portion of the devil is ever visible, no one outside the bush school has known the devil unmasked. Even though the initiates know him to be, say, the local blacksMith, as this devil was, some super- natural feeling continues to surround him. It is not the mask which is sacred, nor the blacksmith ; it is the two in conjunction, though a faint aura of the supernatural continues to dwell in either part when they are separate : so the blacksmith will have more power in his village than the chief, and the mask may continue to be reverenced, even when it has been discarded. It was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun then who now swayed forward between the huts in a headdress of feathers, a heavy blanket robe, and a long raffia mane and raffia skirts. A big drum beat, the heels stamped and gourds rattled, and the devil sank to the ground, his long faded yellow hair billowing in the dust. His eyes were two painted rings and he had a flat black wooden snout a yard long fringed with fur ; when it opened one saw great scarlet wooden tusks. His black polished nose stuck up at right angles between his eye's, which were almost flat on his snout. His mouth opened and closed like a clapper and he muttered in a low monotonous way. He was like a portmanteau word : an animal, a bird and a man had all run together to form his image. All the women had gone to their huts and watched him from a distance. His interpreter (for a devil speaks his own strange language) squatted beside him carrying a brush of twigs with which, when the devil at last moved, he kept his skirts carefully smoothed down.
Vitality was about the only quality one could allow the devil's dance ; he lashed a small whip, twirled like a top, ran up and down between the huts with long sliding steps, his skirts raising the dust and giving his progress an appearance of immense speed, turning his great bulk with flashing agility. The spirit was definitely carnival ; no one except the children was really scared Of the devil ; all the men had passed through his school, and one suspected that the blacksmith of Mosambolahun had not maintained his authority very carefully. He was a " good fellow," one felt, and, like so many good fellows, he went on much tco long. He would sit on the ground and mutter, then run up and down a bit and sit down again. He was a bore as he played on and on in the blistering afternoon sun. One woman ran up and flung down two strips of iron, the small change of West Africa, and ran away again, and he cracked his whip and raced and turned and spun.
I remembered a Jack in the Green I had seen when I was four years old, quite covered except for his face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving suit of leaves and twirling round and round at a country cross-roads far from any village with only a little knot of attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That dance, as late as the ninth century, had religious significance ; it was part of the death of winter and the return of spring, and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints: of what it was we had developed from. It wasn't alien to us, any more than the cross and the pagan emblems side by side on the grave were alien. They brought a screaming child and thrust him under the devil's muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane ; he stiffened and screamed and the devil mouthed him. The older generation were playing the same old game they had played for centuries, frightening the child with what had frightened them. I went away, but looking back from the . edge of the dried-up, impoverished little plateau, I saw a young girl dancing before the devil, dancing with the sad, erotic, infinite appeal of projecting -buttocks and moving belly ; she didn't know it was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, as she danced like Europa before the bull, and the old black wooden muzzle rested on the earth and the eyes of the blacksmith watched her through the flat painted rims.
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