by Ishmael Beah
Later he returned with fried-fish soup, rice, and a bucket of water. He put the food before us and motioned for us to eat. Again he disappeared, returning a few minutes later, this time smiling widely. He had a fishing net on his shoulder and held a pair of oars and a big flash-light.
“You peekin dem dae feel betteh, right?” Without waiting to hear whether we were feeling better or not, he went on to tell us where the sleeping mats were and that he was going fishing and would be back in the morning. He didn’t even bother to ask our names. I guess he didn’t think it was necessary or important at that moment. Before he left, he gave us ointment to rub on our feet and stressed that we do it before going to sleep. We were very quiet that night. No one said a word.
The following morning our nameless host came again with food and a smile on his face that said he was glad that we were doing fine. We couldn’t walk well, so we just hobbled around the hut and made fun of each other to avoid boredom.
Kanei boasted about being an excellent soccer player. Musa threw him a groundnut shell; Kanei moved his foot to kick it, but then realized that it would hurt and abruptly swung his foot back, dragging it against a stone. He began to blow on his sole, in pain.
“What kind of soccer player are you going to be if you are afraid to kick an empty groundnut shell?” Musa laughed. We all gradually began to laugh.
Musa had a round face, and he was short and bulky, with tiny round ears that matched his face. His eyes were big and looked as if they wanted to leave his face. Whenever he wanted to convince us of something, they would brighten.
Kanei had a long and calm face, and unlike Musa he was skinny and had short, really dark hair that he took great care of every morning, or whenever we stopped at a river or a stream. He would rub water on his head and take his time to carefully arrange his hair. “Are you meeting a girl somewhere?” Alhaji would ask, giggling. Kanei, with his soft yet authoritative voice, always seemed to know what to say and how to handle certain situations better than the rest of us.
Whenever Alhaji spoke, he used elaborate gestures. It was as if he wanted his already long hands to extend toward whomever he was talking to. He and Jumah were friends. They walked next to each other. Jumah was always nodding his head, agreeing to whatever the lanky Alhaji said to him as we walked. Jumah used his head to gesture, rather than his hands. Whenever he spoke, he waved his head left to right. He kept his hands crossed behind his back most of the time, like an old man.
Saidu and Moriba were almost as quiet as I. They always sat next to each other, away from the group. Saidu breathed hard as we walked. His ears were large, and when he was listening, they stood up like a deer’s. Moriba always told him that he must have extra hearing ability. Moriba mostly played with his hands, examining the lines on his palm and rubbing his fingers as he whispered to himself.
I barely spoke.
I knew Alhaji, Kanei, and Musa from my former secondary school. We never talked much about our past, especially our families. The few conversations we had that weren’t related to our journey were mostly about soccer and school before we resumed our silence.
The pains we felt from our feet subsided on the fourth night. We went for a walk around the hut, and during our stroll I found out that the hut was only about half a mile from the main village; at night we could see smoke rising from the tiny village’s cooking huts.
We stayed in the hut for a week. Our host brought us water and food every morning and night. He had the whitest teeth that I had ever seen, and he was shirtless all the time. Sometimes when he came to check on us in the morning, he had chewing sap in his mouth. I asked him one morning for his name. He laughed softly. “It is not necessary. This way we will all be safe.”
The following night, our host decided to take us to a part of the Atlantic Ocean that was nearby. As we walked, he engaged us in conversation. We learned that he was Sherbro, one of the many tribes in Sierra Leone. When he heard the stories of how we had walked from Mattru Jong, he couldn’t believe us. He said he had heard about the war but still had difficulty believing that people could do the things that he had heard they did. Our host had been born in the main village and never left. Traders came to his village with clothing items, rice, and other cooking ingredients to exchange for salt and fish, so he didn’t need to go anywhere. If I had to guess, I would say he was in his early twenties. He said he was going to get married the next month and was looking forward to it. I asked why his hut was removed from the village. He explained that it was his fishing hut, where he kept his nets and other fishing items and where he dried fish during the rainy season.
When we got to the ocean, we walked to an inlet where the sea wasn’t rough. We sat on the banks. “Put you foot nah de wahter, make de salt wahter soakam.” He also said the salt water was good for healing the pain and preventing tetanus. Our host sat aside, looking at us, and each time I looked at him he was smiling and his white teeth stood out against his dark face. The dry breeze from inland coupled with the cool ocean air was perfectly soothing. I wanted to know his name so badly, but I restrained myself.
“You boys must come here every night to put your feet in the ocean. This way you will be healed in less than a week,” he said.
He looked in the sky, where the stars were beginning to be covered by fast-moving clouds. “I have to go take care of my canoe. It will rain soon, so you must go back to the hut.” He started running in the sand toward the main village.
“I wish I could be that man. He is just so happy and content with his life,” Alhaji said.
“He is a very nice man, too. I really want to know his name,” Kanei said softly.
“Yes, yes.” We all agreed with Kanei and went wandering into our own thoughts, which were interrupted by a sudden burst of rain. We hadn’t listened to our host and left when he’d told us to. We hastened to the hut. There, we sat around the fire to dry ourselves and eat dried fish.
We had been with our host for two weeks and were feeling better when very early one morning, an older woman came to the hut. She woke us and told us to leave immediately. She said she was the mother of our host and that the people in the village had found out about us and were on their way to capture us. From the way she spoke, I could tell that she had known about us all along. She brought with her dried fish and fresh water for us to take on our journey. We didn’t have enough time to thank her and tell her to thank her son for his hospitality. But from what she said, it was clear that she knew we were thankful and she cared about our safety more than anything else.
“My children, you must hurry now, and my blessings are with you.” Her voice was trembling with sadness, and she wiped her disconsolate face as she disappeared behind the hut and headed back to the main village.
We were not fast enough to escape the men who came for us. Twelve of them ran after the seven of us, wrestling us to the sand. They tied our hands.
In truth, realizing that I would eventually be caught, I had stopped running and offered my hands to be tied. The man chasing me was a little taken aback. He approached me with caution and motioned another man walking behind me with a stick and machete to pay attention. As the man tied my hands, we exchanged a glance that lasted a few seconds. I opened my eyes wide, trying to tell him that I was just a twelve-year-old boy. But something in his eyes told me that he didn’t care for my safety but only for his and his village’s.
The men walked us to their village and made us sit outside in the sand in front of their chief. I had been through this before, and wondered if it was a new experience for my present traveling companions. They were all heaving as they tried to hold back their cries. I began to worry, because last time I had found someone in the village who had gone to school with us and saved us. This time we were a long way from Mattru Jong. A long way gone.
Most of the men were shirtless, but the chief was elegantly dressed. He wore traditional cotton clothes with intricate designs on the collar made of yellow and brown thread, zigzagged vertically across his ch
est. His brown leather sandals looked new and he carried a staff with carvings of birds, canoes, all sorts of animals, and a lion’s head on the handle. The chief examined us for a while, and when he caught my eye, I gave him half a smile, which he dismissed by spitting on the ground from the kola nut he chewed. His voice was hoarse.
“You children have become little devils, but you came to the wrong village.” He used his staff to gesture instead of his hands. “Well, this is the end of the road for devils like you. Out there in the ocean, even you rascals cannot survive.”
“Undress them,” he commanded the men who had caught us. I was trembling with fear but unable to cry. Alhaji, who stammered with terror, tried to say something, but the chief kicked the side of the stool that he sat on and proclaimed, “I do not want to hear any word from a devil.”
Our nameless host and his mother stood in the crowd. His mother squeezed his hand each time the chief called us devils or screamed at us. As I was being undressed, the rap cassettes fell out of my pockets and the man who undressed me picked them up and handed them to the chief. The chief looked closely at the faces on the covers of the cassette cases. He carefully examined the Naughty by Nature cassette cover over and over, looking at the militant stance and tough expression on the faces of the three guys standing on broken rocks with a lamppost in the background, puzzled by their poses. He demanded that a cassette player be brought. One of the men told the chief that the only way we could possess such foreign cassettes was either by having looted them or if we were mercenaries. The chief may have bought the man’s first point, but he disregarded his second point, as it was utterly stupid.
“These boys are no mercenaries, look at them.” The chief went back to inspecting the cassettes. I was a little glad that he had called us boys and refrained from the word “devil.” But I was extremely uncomfortable sitting naked in the sand. It was not a pleasant experience. Just the thought of what was happening was enough to get me agitated. I fought hard mentally to let my face show the opposite of what I felt. The flesh on my face twitched as we waited for the chief to grant us life or death.
When the cassette player was brought, the chief put the cassette in and pressed “play.”
OPP how can I explain it
I’ll take you frame by frame it
To have y’all jumpin’ shall we singin’ it
O is for Other P is for People scratchin’ temple…
Everyone listened attentively, raising their eyebrows and cocking their heads as they tried to understand what kind of music this was. The chief abruptly stopped the song. Some of the villagers leaned against their round mud huts and others sat on the ground or on mortars. The men rolled the legs of their taffeta pants, women adjusted their wrappers, and the children stared at us, their hands inside their pockets or in their runny noses.
“Stand him up and bring him here,” the chief commanded.
When I was brought closer, he asked me where I had gotten this type of music and what was the point of having it. I explained to him that it was called rap music and that myself, my brother, and my friends—not the ones I was with—used to listen to it and perform the songs at talent shows. I could tell that he found this interesting, as his face was beginning to relax. He asked the men to untie me and give me my pants.
“Now you show me how you, your brother, and friends did it,” the chief said.
I rewound the tape, mimed, and danced to “OPP” barefoot in the sand. I didn’t enjoy it, and for the first time I found myself thinking about the words of the song, closely listening to the subtle instruments in the beat. I had never done such a thing before, because I knew the words by heart and felt the beat. I didn’t feel it this time. As I hopped up and down, hunched and raising my arms and feet to the music, I thought about being thrown in the ocean, about how difficult it would be to know that death was inevitable. The wrinkles on the chief’s forehead began to ease. He still didn’t smile, but he gave a sigh that said I was just a child. At the end of the song, he rubbed his beard and said that he was impressed with my dancing and found the singing “interesting.” He asked for the next cassette to be played. It was LL Cool J. I mimed the song “I Need Love.”
When I’m alone in my room sometimes I stare at the wall
and in the back of my mind I hear my conscience call
The chief turned his head from side to side as if trying to understand what I was saying. I watched him to see if his face was going to change for the worse, but a look of amusement flickered on his face. He ordered that all my friends be untied and given back their clothes. The chief explained to everyone that there had been a misunderstanding and that we were only children looking for safety. He wanted to know if we had stayed in the hut of our own accord or if the owner knew about us. I told him that we had stayed there on our own and that we hadn’t come in contact with anyone until that morning. The chief told us that he was letting us go, but that we had to leave the area immediately. He gave me back my cassettes and we were on our way. As we walked, we examined the rope marks on our wrists and laughed about what had happened to avoid crying.
10
ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I felt that I was starting over and over again. I was always on the move, always going somewhere. While we walked, I sometimes lagged behind, thinking about these things. To survive each passing day was my goal in life. At villages where we managed to find some happiness by being treated to food or fresh water, I knew that it was temporary and that we were only passing through. So I couldn’t bring myself to be completely happy. It was much easier to be sad than to go back and forth between emotions, and this gave me the determination I needed to keep moving. I was never disappointed, since I always expected the worst to happen. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep but stared into the darkest night until my eyes could see clearly through it. I thought about where my family was and whether they were alive.
One night while I sat outside in a village square thinking about how far I had come and what might lie ahead, I looked into the sky and saw how the thick clouds kept trying to cover the moon, yet it would reappear again and again to shine all night long. In some way my journey was like that of the moon—although I had even more thick clouds coming my way to make my spirit dull. I remembered something that Saidu had said one evening after we had survived another attack by men with spears and axes. Jumah, Moriba, and Musa were asleep on the verandah we occupied. Alhaji, Kanei, Saidu, and I were awake and quietly listening to the night. Saidu’s heavy breathing made our silence less unbearable. After a few hours had gone by, Saidu spoke in a very deep voice, as if someone were speaking through him. “How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?” he asked.
He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn’t say anything. He continued: “Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.” Saidu blew on the palms of his hands to warm them and lay on the floor. His heavy breathing intensified and I knew he had fallen asleep. Gradually, Kanei and then Alhaji fell asleep. I sat on a wooden bench against the wall and thought about Saidu’s words. Tears formed in my eyes and my forehead became warm, thinking about what Saidu had said. I tried not to believe that I too was dying, slowly, on my way to find safety. The only time I was able to fall asleep that night was when the last morning breeze, the one containing the irresistible urge to sleep, saved me from my wandering mind.
Even though our journey was difficult, every once in a while we were able to do something that was normal and made us happy for a brief moment. One morning we arrived at a village where the men were getting ready to go hunting. They invited u
s to join them. At the end of the hunt, one of the older men shouted, pointing at us, “We are going to feast tonight, and the strangers are welcome to stay.” The other men clapped and began walking on the path back to the village. We walked behind them. They sang, carrying their nets and the animals—mostly porcupines and deer—that had been caught on their shoulders.
Upon our arrival at the village, the women and children clapped to welcome us. It was past midday. The sky was blue and the wind was beginning to pick up. Some of the men shared the meat among several households, and the rest was given to the women to be cooked for the feast. We hung about in the village and fetched water for the women who were preparing the food. Most of the men had returned to work the farms.
I walked around the village by myself and found a hammock on one of the verandahs. I lay in it, swinging slowly to get my thoughts in motion. I began to think about the times when I visited my grandmother and I would sleep in the hammock at the farm. I would wake up staring into her eyes as she played with my hair. She would tickle me and then hand me a cucumber to eat. Junior and I would sometimes fight for the hammock, and if he got it, I would trick him by loosening its ropes so that he would fall once he sat in it. This would discourage him, and he would go about the farm doing something else. My grandmother knew about my tricks and made fun of me, calling me carseloi, which means spider. In many Mende stories the spider is the character that tricks other animals to get what he wants, but his tricks always backfire on him.
As I was thinking about these things, I fell out of the hammock. I was too lazy to get up, so I sat on the ground and thought about my two brothers, my father, mother, and grandmother. I wished to be with them.
I put my hands behind my head and lay on my back, trying to hold on to the memories of my family. Their faces seemed to be far off somewhere in my mind, and to get to them I had to bring up painful memories. I longed for the gentle, dark, and shiny old hands of my grandmother; my mother’s tight enclosed embrace, during the times I visited her, as if hiding and protecting me from something; my father’s laughter when we played soccer together and when he sometimes chased me in the evening with a bowl of cold water to get me to take a shower; my older brother’s arms around me when we walked to school and when he sometimes elbowed me to stop me from saying things I would regret; and my little brother, who looked exactly like me and would sometimes tell people that his name was Ishmael when he did something wrong. I had trouble conjuring up these thoughts, and when I finally ventured into these memories, I became so sad that the bones in my body started to ache. I went to the river, dove into the water, and sat at the bottom, but my thoughts followed me.