The Spider
NORMAN CALLED OVER, his voice heavy and strangely conspiratorial. "Hey, Mu. Ya bizzy, man?"
"Naw, Norm. I wuz jus doin' a little readin.' But wussup, man?"
"I been lookin' at this mama spider in my cell. She beautiful, man!"
"Yeah?"
"She tiny, but she so strong, man!"
"Uh huh ... "
"An' ya know what's amazin'?"
"Whut's dat, Norm?"
"Think 'bout how she make her own home -- her web -- out of her own body!"
"That's amazin', man."
And indeed it was amazing, especially to Norman, a man encaged in utter isolation. Here he sat -- would sit for the remainder of his days -- in the antiseptic stillness of a supermaximum-security prison block, yet he was not entirely alone. With a quiet, unwitting bravado that defied the State's most stringent efforts to quarantine him, spiders had moved in and built webs in the dark corner under his sink. Now they shared his cell, and he spent hours watching them spin their miraculous silken thread.
Norman watched them give birth. He watched them stalk those few rare flies who entered his cell, only to be trapped. He watched them suck the life sap from their prey until nothing remained but dry husks. He watched them in a deep and reverent wonder, and his cell became a study.
Norman watched, and whenever something truly remarkable occurred, he quietly tapped on the wall. He'd begin in a deep stage-whisper: "Mu -- Yo, Mu! Ya bizzy, man?"
I was rarely too busy to listen for fifteen or twenty minutes, and it wasn't long before I found myself sharing his fascination and enthusiasm. And in time, lo and behold, a web scaffold appeared in my own sink-corner.
IN ANCIENT AFRICAN and West Indian folklore, the mother spider -- Anansi --looms large. She is a wise and protective being who knows proverbs and possesses the gift of prophecy.
A famous Ghanian tale tells of a fire raging in a forest. As the beasts scamper for safety, an antelope feels a tickling sensation. A small dark spider has alighted on her ear. Before she can toss her head to flick it off, however, the spider whispers, "It is I, Anansi. Take me with you -- I will repay you." The antelope, more concerned with its own survival than the minor inconvenience of a spider, agrees and runs on to safety, her path directed by Anansi.
Once she reaches safety, Anansi climbs off, thanking the antelope and promising her she won't be forgotten. Several seasons later, the antelope finds herself and her offspring threatened again, this time by hunters. Her little one is too young to run, so she instructs it to drop to the ground and hide itself in the shrubbery. Then, leaping from the undergrowth, she distracts the hunters and leads them away from her baby. Arrows whiz through the air, but the antelope is too swift. Finally the hunters give up the chase and leave the forest.
Cautiously, she returns to find her young one, whose faint cry she hears but cannot place. Where is her baby? Try as she might, she can't find her.
Just then, Anansi lets herself down from a tree limb on her slim silken cord, and announces her presence. Whispering to the mother antelope, she directs her to a clump of shrubs where, hidden under a tightly-woven protective net, lies her baby. "I told you I wouldn't forget you," Anansi reminds her.
FOR NORMAN, the target of a hunt no less deadly than that of an antelope in the jungle, Anansi was vital company. In a cell constructed to maximize human loneliness -- a site designed to kill the mind -- Anansi was a source of friendship and wonder. In a concrete tomb erected to smother men to death, she was a tiny, marvelous reflection of life. She brightened a man's day, and made it meaningful. Nature amid the unnatural.