Or the gun bearers and the skinners, if they were able （and willing） to cook, would be along to prepare for the guests their grilled meats and vegetables and rice. But this work was too demeaning for some of the men. They already felt invisible among these white people from Europe and America. To be reduced from gun bearers to cooks? That sort of degradation made it feel even worse.
This was only the second time that Benjamin had joined Patton without his father, and when he was waiting outside the hotel that first morning and discovered that the woman leading the safari—and it was a woman leading the party, that was evident—was a movie star, he was disappointed that his father wasn’t with him. His father would have loved to have been a part of this group. Moreover, one of the American actors with her was Black, another surprise that was at once a gift and a validation. Benjamin’s father used to take his brothers and sisters and him to the cinema, one child at a time, on their birthdays once they turned eight, mature enough in his opinion to appreciate the experience. And now his father was missing precisely the sort of people who he might once have seen on the screen. Benjamin thought he had even heard of Katie Barstow, though he couldn’t name one of her pictures off the top of his head and the odds that he had seen one were slim. Altogether, he had had six brothers and three sisters, four of whom were alive even now. They were a small, tightly knit band that had managed to survive the litany of illnesses that cratered so many families: the sleeping sickness carried by the tsetse flies and the malaria brought on by the mosquitoes and the malnutrition gifted East Africa by the endless cycles of drought and flood, and the way Europeans had wrested control long ago of the food chain. Each sibling saw exactly one movie a year.
The movie theater that he and his father would visit had about fifty folding chairs, and the ceiling was four meters above the floor. Originally it had been a brick factory on the outskirts of town, but it hadn’t been one in years, and so an entrepreneur had painted a wall white and brought in a projector. One day Benjamin had peered inside the movie palace in the center of the city: the real theater. The Embassy. That cinema had a screen that had seemed, when he’d been a boy, as wide as the sky, and it boasted pillowed seats—easily two hundred of them—and red velvet drapes. Colonials attended the Embassy. White people. Unlike at the old brick factory, the floor at the Embassy was sloped so that the audience there wasn’t constantly craning their necks to see around the heads in the rows ahead of them, the way that Benjamin and his father had to. When a movie had finished its run at the Embassy, the print would be brought to the old brick factory for a couple of days.
The movie theater where Benjamin and his father would go lacked a name. It simply had a wooden sign with the word movies painted in garish red and yellow paint. It was a five-minute walk from the Catholic church, which had soaring windows, one of which was a stained-glass image of Jesus Christ being crucified, and a high, dark wooden ceiling. But it was the painting behind the altar that had fascinated Benjamin as a child. In it, Jesus was a little boy, and he was standing with Mary and a white man in full safari regalia: wide-brimmed hat, a jacket with bullet loops, pants with plenty of zippered pockets. The three of them were standing in a clearing in the jungle, and all around them African men and women and children were kneeling, their faces either adoring or awed. And in the distance, behind Jesus, Mary, and the hunter, there was an African witch doctor, complete with a feathered crown, running away, looking absolutely terrified as he gazed back over his shoulder.
After seeing the movie Barabbas a couple of years ago, Benjamin had gone directly from the movie theater to the church to compare the crucifixion he had just seen on film with its portrayal in the stained-glass window. He wanted to see how different artists, ones who made films versus ones who worked with glass, approached the death of his savior. He decided he preferred the Hollywood version. That eclipse had mesmerized him.
Now that he had spent a few days in the Serengeti with the actress’s group, he’d concluded that Katie Barstow was not what he expected from a movie star. She was neither troublesome nor demanding, and he appreciated that. She was actually rather undemanding. This was the term his father and Patton used for the easiest clients. It was Patton’s supreme compliment. Their first night at their first camp, she had requested that her bath be ready at six fifteen. He had been with the advance lorry and among the group that had unfurled the waterproof canvas bathtubs and set them on their stanchions, including the one that would be in the tent for the movie star and her husband. He’d been among the group boiling the water for the guests who wanted their baths before cocktails and had carried the great drums of scalding-hot water into Katie Barstow’s tent for her bath. But the canvas had had a small tear （or tears）， imperceptible to the naked eye unless you followed the leak, and so the water had seeped from the tub, both preventing the guest from having her bath and turning that section of her tent into a swamp.