Fiction: The Lion Hunting Mamadous

"The Lion-Hunting Mamadous"


Omar dresses conservatively these days-- collared shirt, khaki pants and one of three ties which he alternates. His American friends say he’s trying to look white. He tells them he just wants to make money.

“I want to get rich and buy a mansion-- that’s why I’m working” he would tell them.

“You don’t need to dress like a faggot to get rich, and fuck,... there're faster ways to make money,” they'd say.

But Omar would neither quit his job nor loosen his tie. He was the only son of a lion hunter, the father who had died while Omar was still young. His mother had told Omar stories about his father, about unfaltering work ethic and noble pursuits and lone wanderings on the sublime sea of the savanna and how proud her husband would be of him now. She said her husband had been a lion hunter by profession and had been the bravest man in their village. There were no pictures, but Omar had been told his father was big and strong (like his son) and that his greatest dream was for his son to move to the United States and become a businessman. Omar wanted this more than anything.

Fifteen years after the death of Omar's father, his mother’s grandparents had miraculously been able to provide the money to send seventeen-year-old Omar and his mother across an ocean to begin life in a big city in the United States. There his mother had to work long hours at a night job in the city-- Omar’s work paid very little. She said it was a sacrifice she was willing to make in order to give her son time and freedom to pursue his dream of becoming a businessman.

During his first year in the United States, upon turning eighteen, Omar was given a very special present from his mother-- a letter from his father addressed only to him. “Be brave Son, grow strong, protect your mother and have many children,” was scribbled on a postcard in broken English.

Omar waits every morning now at the bus stop to become a businessman. He works in the mailroom but the building he works in is big and clean and Omar is confident he will have an office at the top of it someday with a window and a desk on which he can keep his father’s letter in an expensive frame. Here at the bus stop Omar’s work clothes cling awkwardly to his tall and athletic frame; he constantly sweats in them throughout the day but especially while waiting here for the bus at sunrise.

He had learned not to talk too much about his father’s profession around his new friends:

“No one hunts lions anymore—Omar, that’s retarded.” Omar had had to defend himself and his family repeatedly since moving to his new home.

Today Mrs. Mamadou returns home unusually late, at 4:00 AM, from her night job just as Omar is securing his blue tie around his neck. He has an hour and a half to get to the bus stop, but likes to have an early start in order to read the newspaper, improving his English every day before work. Omar looks up from the paper to watch his mother stumble through the door, two large bruises on her face and one on each arm. She cries at the table as he holds her. She is delirious, injured-- she talks about money, men, a car, a corner, her night job. Omar cries himself. In her vulnerable state she tells Omar that she invented the story about his father’s work: she did it to inspire him. It had worked.

“But the letter is real, I swear my son.” The lion hunter story was invented, but the letter is real. She says to him that someone from her night job has hurt her.

“Who?”… “I know him.

Where?”… “I know where it is. Stay here and lock the door. Don’t leave today.”

His father’s words echo in Omar’s head.

“Be brave son, grow strong, protect your mother…”

But she said you hunted lions. You are a lie. How am I to be strong now?

“…protect your mother.”

The door opens and closes, Mrs. Mamadou remains at the table, head in hands, drying tears. The bus arrives in an hour.

At 5:00 AM, grinding his teeth, Omar watches the sun climb up through far away black blocks of buildings. His back is wetter than usual with sweat. His hands are held firmly in fists as warm knuckle blood falls from his fingertips and paints the concrete red here at the bus stop. He tries to think of his father, but must admit that the image, which he had depended upon for so long, is lost. His collar is still tight but the tie has ripped, and at the bus stop eyes shift and widen at Omar’s appearance. Here at the bus stop Omar cries like his mother did. He has done what was necessary to protect her, and she must now find new work. He cries from 5:00 to 5:03. And then in a moment the shifting, widening eyes and fearful murmurs and cars carrying businessmen and the whole throbbing city hushes sheepishly at the thunder of a footprint upon the first step of the bus. The footprint echoes angrily off fears and shame and wrongness and lies, good and bad, and across an ocean it stirs kingly lions from their slumber to raise and shake their heavy golden heads and watch carefully the movement of the grass.





(I fear now that this may just be one more installment in the long line of silly stories written by white people glorifying the imagined lives of underprivileged immigrants and/or members of minorities, of whose real lives such authors probably know very little.)