Sheba's Child

Until 1935 there was little to trouble a knobbly-kneed schoolgirl, Tsahai, about her father's rambling stone house or his loose-woven kingdom in Ethiopia. Going back home from school in Switzerland or France, she noticed unhappily the filth and disease which flourished on the ignorance of her father's people. And there was her father's household law, confining her to hidden rooms of the palace. But there were compensations.

There were the Lion of Judah's lions to admire, fearfully. Once the house was full of fine new furniture from London, which she helped to arrange around the rooms. She could peep in solemn satisfaction at court ceremonies under the yellow umbrellas, and at banquets when her father's guests dined from gold plates. Her Shamma (Ethiopian drapery) was a lot more comfortable than European clothes. In private crises there was the haven of her mother's great brown bosom. And, when she was 14, her father winked at tradition and allowed her to head the Ethiopian Red Cross and the Women's Work Association, even to receive their members at his house.

Deepest of Tsahai's home contentments was the escape from the rigid isolation of the pink-skinned world: from teachers who taught her Christian precepts, but professed no sisterly love; from girls who smiled at her with their thin buttonhole lips, as across a chasm; from visitors whose English, French or German phrases she understood, but whose meanings she could only ponder. Because her skin was brown and because she was royalty, there had never been any expansion in the invisible walls which closed around her in the pink-skinned world.

In 1935, when she was 15 and the Italians came with bombs and gas, Tsahai forgot tradition and went to work in the first field ambulance unit of her father's army, binding the wounds of her father's soldiers. Without introductions, but with her father's dignity, she talked to her patients. She posed for photographers. She made a speech to the pink-skinned war correspondents. Earnestly she told them: "We will fight to the last breath and to the last inch; but, if we fail, civilization will be destroyed." Next year, with her parents, vanguard of the world's refugees, she fled to England.

The English climate and the English countenances were cool. They called her father "The Emperor," but there was no conviction in their tones. The family seldom left the brownstone walls of their house in Bath, or the garden, tight-screened by cedar trees.

When bombs came to England, and other refugees came, the English warmed.

Upholstered in Western clothes, Tsahai and her mother went out sometimes to tea, chatted politely, accepted as polite the thin-lipped smiles of Bath. Tsahai learned to accept her isolation with the dignity her father so frequently recommended. She enrolled in a London hospital for a nurse's training course, earned a diploma and was ready, when her father regained his kingdom, to return with him.

For 22-year-old Tsahai no year was so free, so filled with hope as this one. Back with her parents in Ethiopia, she worked to teach her father's people to avoid filth and disease. She could appear among the tribal chiefs under the yellow umbrellas, talk to them of sanitation and of germs, devising Amharic words to fit her needs. She married Colonel Abiy Abbaba of her father's victorious army.

They had need of her, she heard, in the village of Lekamti. Traveling with few formalities, Princess Tsahai, daughter of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, daughter of the Lion of Judah and the most modern of women in one of the last black kingdoms, went to Lekamti. There among the sick she fell ill, and there last week she died.

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