Kwame's uncle had played the talking drum at every gathering for as long as anyone could remember, and yet Kwame had never once heard him explain what, exactly, he was praying for when he played.
"Why don't you ever say the words out loud?" Kwame asked him, after a particularly long evening of drumming that had left the whole gathering strangely moved, some openly crying, though nothing had been spoken at all.
"Because the drum says it better than I could," his uncle said, resting his hands on the worn skin of the instrument. "Some prayers are too large or too true for ordinary words. The moment I tried to say them out loud, they would shrink down to fit inside language, and something essential would be lost in the shrinking."
"So what were you praying for tonight?"
His uncle thought about it. "Tonight, I was asking for your cousin's recovery. I was thanking the ancestors for the harvest. I was grieving, quietly, for an old friend I lost this year. All three, at once, in the same rhythm. Words would have made me choose one. The drum let me hold all three together, the way a real prayer often needs to."
Kwame listened differently after that, no longer waiting for the drumming to mean one single thing, but letting it hold whatever it needed to hold — grief and gratitude and longing all moving together under his uncle's hands, translated into something the body understood even when the mind couldn't have named it.
"Will you teach me?" Kwame finally asked.
"I'll teach you the rhythms," his uncle said. "I can't teach you what to pray. That part, you'll find yourself, the first time you really need the drum instead of just wanting to play it."
Some devotion is too large for words. The body finds its own language for it — in rhythm, in motion, in percussion that needs no translation to reach whatever it's reaching for.
