Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  We transferred her out of Highland Terrace and she has continued to excel marvelously. Of course, we talked to her that evening about the allegations. She cried. We cried. There were hugs. And for the first time in the four years she had lived with us, instead of “Mama Saliki” and “Papa Saliki,” she called us Mom and Dad. Our family was made flesh. Knit together in adversity.

  How could it be otherwise?

  III

  We did our best by Our Girl. There are those, perhaps some of the very neighbors who open-arm welcomed us with casseroles and plates heaped high with homemade brownies, who now tut-tut and give quotes to reporters skulking behind our rose bushes. But let us take you to the beginning of the end.

  It all started when they took the Whirlpool. Burly men in overalls daintily rang our doorbell, asked permission to come in please like they were popping over for afternoon tea. Something innocuous and neighborly like Earl Grey. The ones that took the Tesla were far less courteous; they disappeared it in the nighttime while we lay fitfully in our beds dreaming of canceled credit cards and bills come due.

  We were having a few financial woes.

  Spare us your condemnation, your condescension. Let’s have a little look-see at the red-stamped envelopes of Mastercard/Visa/American Express statements in your study drawer. No worries, we’ll wait. Look, we did our best in the face of career setbacks. Who knew a senior R&D chemist for General Mills could be downsized after twenty-two loyal years? People were still eating their Wheaties. Someone was always after those Lucky Charms. And the demand for artfully arranged florals had never been particularly high in our corner of this nominally Garden State. So, things were tight, yet we were hopeful. We weren’t keeping up with the jet-setter Joneses. But we were keeping our obligations. People think Bono and Bill Gates are supporting the continent; they have no idea that it’s us. Families like ours sending millions in remittances so cousin Manfred can have that corrective eye operation or paying the school fees for little Arabella in the village. That was us, our burden to bear.

  You have to understand how preoccupied we were back then. How desperate. Our Girl was seventeen years old, her sights set on an Ivy whose price tag we could no longer afford. So, we were slightly relieved when she said she wanted a gap year, a timeout to live life for a bit. We were proud of this young woman (when had she become such a woman, all hips and height?). She was better even than we had raised her to be, helping out around the house on weekends after we had to let the maid go. When had she learned about rinse cycles and presoaks or how to use all those special vacuum attachments? We had never even made her make her own bed.

  She got a job. And two weeks later gave us an envelope thick with cash, just a little something to help out around the house. We didn’t know where the money came from. Maybe, we didn’t want to know where the money came from. She was smart, she was enterprising, she was Our Girl.

  This went on for months. Till two weeks ago, Aunty Gladys was arrested. There are allegations of human trafficking and slavery and forced labor. A special prosecutor. Horrific testimonies from children she had placed with Cameroonian families all over the United States. One girl in Houston was forced to sleep on a pallet in the family’s garage from the age of eight, tasked with whipping up all the meals and caring for three preschool tots and keeping the house spick-and-span. A boy in Chicago was being sexually abused by the man of the house. Allegedly, Aunty Gladys would make her rounds among illiterate and desperate villagers, have them sign ad hoc employment contracts, filling their heads with pipe dreams and promises of their child’s educational advancement and monetary support for them too. The courts contend that none of the children were actually sent to school. That they were little more than indentured servants at their employers’ beck and call day in and day out. The nominal pay they received (a pittance really at thirty dollars a week) was funneled back to their parents only after Aunty Gladys received her 50 percent processing fee. It was all coming to light.

  Another light flashes beyond the gilded confines of our home.

  We have been closeted here since the scandal broke. Blackout curtains drawn tight against the flash of camera bulbs.

  The article on our family was in the Post today.

  We are Page Six fodder, an exposé chockful of doggerel and grainy, long-lens shots.

  In the paper there are pictures of “the house that whoring built,” our rather unflattering driver’s license photos, and screen captures from Our Girl’s website, Comely Cleaners, where she offers maid services—topless, they gleefully report. A service allegedly offered to half the neighborhood, at a discounted “friends and family” rate, no less.

  She had the “decency” to call on us last night. To warn us in person.

  “Why would you say those things, honey?” we cried. Broken. Gawping at her from the lumpy remove of our Chesterfield sofa.

  “Because I needed to,” she said simply, her voice dry and crisp as fresh bills. She was standing by the credenza, shoogling a glass of blue-label whiskey that she had poured herself with an ease of manner that bespoke habit. She drank. She savored.

  We sat dry-mouthed, dumb for moments, before we remembered ourselves and spoke, said, “But we love you, we’ve treated you like our own. Haven’t we always been good to you? Given you everything you deserved?” Our arms swept through the air, wands waving over the home we had magicked together, the shimmery mirage of gold-framed family photos glimmering from atop the baby grand: Our Girl in chaps, blue-ribboned and gleaming, the glitzy lot of us—in sequined gowns, tuxedoed, at a charity gala with His Honor, the mayor.

  Our Girl looked about her, taking in all of it, scanning past her own packed bags by the door before her gaze landed on us once more. Her eyes narrowed. Ours opened. We looked at a woman who seemed to see right through us.

  “Yes. You took me from my loving family so you could make my life better, right?” she said. “You bought the best and taught me to want the best. To need and breathe it like air. You should be thrilled: the money they gave me for the story will pay for college and then some. Maybe I can parlay this into a book. Maybe a movie. Wish me well.”

  She departed then and we clung to each other. Shivering and pondering in the waning hours of the evening. Had we made mistakes? Perhaps. Maybe we’d spoiled her with feasts, unaware there’d be famine. There were lofty expectations for her. But nothing untoward. Our parental sins replicated in cul-de-sacs cross the country. But what had we done to deserve this? Deep in thought, we withdrew to our master suite, waiting there for us a cream linen envelope on the night-stand. Tucked therein: a diamond clasp with an eagle insignia, a ruby-studded tie clip, and a note in Our Girl’s meticulous handwriting that read simply:

  To Mom and Dad,

  For your troubles.

  Your perfect daughter,

  Winsome

  Volume II: Their Girl

  I

  I give good read. Mais je suis rien commes des autres. Nothing like them. Those poor, poor telethon kids you scribble letters to and force-feed poto-poto rice “for just ten cents a day.” Fly-haloed. Swollen tum-tums begging for your pretax dollars. You give and you give and you give again. #SaveOurKids. #BecauseYouCare. No, I am nothing like them, but I made your heartstrings twang with tabloid tales of my liberation from the Salikis, who took me when I was just a small titi and made me Their Girl.

  I was thirteen years old when she came for me, Mrs. Fontep aka Ngando aka Ndukong. First choice had been my follow-back, Arabella. Last cocoa in our family—age eight but could pass for the type of cuddly five-year-old you and your madame know from commercials where Happy Children™ eat Cheerios™ and Lucky Charms™ and all the world is shine-shine. Bella was très mignon—a doll-baby with long, silky Hausa hair and a sweet as bonbon manner so unlike me, my maman’s “wahala pickin.”

  “Perfect, perfect,” said Mrs. Ndukong, eyes squinted and calculating.

  At the center of our parqueted front parlor, Bella was twirling slowly for inspecti
on in a dress Maman had fashioned from the remnants of an old okrika dress, its tattered lace made fine again by her hand. Maman just sat there next to Mrs. Ndukong, quiet as a muet-muet, head hanging low as overripe paw-paw. I was setting the table for our guest’s meal. My ever-watchful grande sœur, Frieda, monitored from the kitchen doorway—neither in nor out.

  “Does she speak proper English?” asked Mrs. Ndukong, suddenly sniffing her nose as if illiteracy had a pit toilet stench and we reeked.

  Do we speak proper English? Swine-beef! I wanted to tell that fatty bobolo, “Nous sommes bilingues.” My family had lived in Douala for ten years now since Maman had come to make market—so we spoke “proper” English and “proper” French and pidgin and Franglais. Not like Mrs. Ndukong, with her pili-pili bush pronunciation grinding up “proper” into “pro-paah.”

  I looked to Frieda, who looked at me, and shook her head no. So I folded my arms and sucked my teeth.

  Mrs. Ndukong gave me some kind of eye.

  “Do you have something to say, Zo … what is this one’s name again?” she turned and asked Maman, who, without lifting her gaze from the ground, said, “Don’t mind her, Madame. That one is always talking.”

  “I only wanted to say that food is ready, Tantine.” I capped the lie with my best imitation Bella curtsy.

  “No, no,” Mrs. Ndukong replied. “I get plenty appointments dem. I no get time for chop.”

  At this, Maman finally lifted her head. We all stared. For weeks she had been preparing. Chey! Frieda have you dry-cleaned this floor? See me this girl. You want Madame to think we have no manners? Wahala pickin carry that new serving dish and go tchuk am high for shelf where Arabella no fih reach. She had been bartering her skills for weeks to make this dinner perfect. To buy gari that was a fine gold dust. Miraculously weevil-free sef-sef! For goat meat to put in the egusi stew, the butcher’s wife received three Vlisco Dutch wax attires sewn gratuit. Hmph. What made her too good for the bongo fish we usually ate it with? And why did we have to make show-show for people who were begging us for a child? People who were thiefing my sister.

  “You’ll not sit and eat, small-small?” Maman asked. “I made the food special, secret family ingredients.”

  “No, no. I cannot,” Mrs. Ndukong repeated.

  Maman frowned.

  We smiled.

  Savoring the thought.

  Licking our lips.

  Our bellies biting.

  “Very well, Madelaine,” Mrs. Ndukong finally said, sighing. “I can see you went to some trouble. Pack the food. I will taste it and dash the rest to my night-watch.”

  She smiled at her generosity.

  I was vexed sootay. This woman with all her juro-juro chins wobbling. Had she ever missed a meal in her whole life? Making me a langa dog sniffing for scraps in my own home!

  I took the plate to the kitchen as instructed, but scraped half into a bowl for my sisters and me to eat behind the house. The rest I put in Maman’s best new dish. Mixed in some tap water to puff it up again. Placed it on the floor between my legs, squatting to add in some of my own secret family ingredient. Hehehe.

  I was humming when I returned to the parlor to find Mrs. Ndukong up on her feet, pacing and shouting. I thought of her “special” soup and squared my shoulders, ready to deny or to fight. But I saw Arabella hiding behind Maman’s skirt, crying until catarrh was bubbling from her nose.

  “You tried to give me an eboah!” said Mrs. Ndukong, stomping toward Maman, prompting Frieda to come stand by her side with the stick we used for killing rats clutched in one hand. Mrs. Ndukong glared at my mother, then my sister, said, “Che, che, che! See me these tricksters! A whole eboah. How manage?”

  I forgot to mention that perfect Bella had a slight defect—a tiny limp, no worse than any other kids we knew in the quartier—with their bend-bend legs and rocking-pony gaits—all thanks to poorly dosed polio vaccinations at the free government clinic. Mrs. Ndukong yelled some more but Maman, who knew how to make market if she knew anything at all, began her best buyam-sellam spiel. She pulled me forward. Sold Mrs. Ndukong on how strong and hardworking I was.

  “Madelaine, I don’t need a housegirl—”

  “She’s top of her class—”

  I had been. Before I was kicked out of school for lack of school fees.

  “She looks a bit old—”

  “She’s only ten, Madame.”

  Mrs. Ndukong lifted an eyebrow.

  “Sorry, I meant eleven, her birthday just passed.”

  “Hmph. She will do.”

  A month later I was shivering by a fireplace that looked like it could roast me whole like a goat. I was tired. I was hungry. And a little angry. I was what the Salikis wanted. And maybe a bit more than they bargained for.

  Wasn’t I worth it?

  II

  “How now, petite sœur? How you d—”

  My sister Frieda’s face was stuck midquestion—all googly-eyed, hanging mop showing her gap teeth. Our shaky WhatsApp vid connection kept sputtering like a beat-up clando taxi at the motor park. We had been talking for an hour and usually got cut off by now because Frieda always forgot to top up her phone minutes. In the hush, I heard the Mother coming. Or rather the swish of the high blond ponytail that forever swung behind her, agitating the air. She was in the open door to my bedroom, the one I wasn’t allowed to lock until I officially turned sixteen. Two years from now by the Salikis’ count. Two years ago by mine.

  “Oh, no. The screen froze again?” she said. “Do they need another cell phone, sweetie? I told your dad we should’ve shelled out for the upgrade. He can be such a cheapskate sometimes. I think it’s from growing up with little to nothing.”

  “It’s fine, Madame,” said Frieda, sharing a look with me since the man in question was the son of an exiled minister, alleged embezzler of millions of francs from the government till. The whereabouts of that loot are still a mystery, but the Salikis had enough to be generous; just last week they air-mailed my family laptops and an iPhone with all types of social media apps preloaded so we could keep in touch.

  “Please, call me Jessica,” the Mother said.

  “Thank you, Madame Jessica,” my sister replied. Frieda would never call her by her given name. Back home, we respected our elders. No matter how silly they were. Besides, Frieda didn’t believe half the things I told her about the Mother because real parents never teetered on your bedspread to practice putting on lip gloss with you, or asked you about your period and your feelings, or sashayed around in your Acne jeans humming because they’ve still “got it.” Never. Ever.

  Just the day before, she was blasting Kamer hip-hop, telling me, “This new Jovi track na die!”

  Seriously?

  Frieda doesn’t understand. The Salikis had plenty. In the beginning, they would always be hovering around me. Showing off their fine-fine clothing and their fine-fine jewelry like I had never seen such things in my life. Like I was from the bush! The Mother always swishing her hair in my face like I couldn’t buy my own horse tail at the mall! But Frieda would stare at screen caps of my perfect pink bedroom and curse me fine-fine for complaining. Tell me if I had stayed in Cameroon, I would have ended up like Maman with three kids, three different fathers, none of them her husband.

  Frieda doesn’t have a clue. It’s a grind. Na hard work being one of the Happy Children™. Constant extracurrics: ballet on Tuesdays, riding lessons on Thursdays, daily violin, and an English tutor to help me speak better “American.” Then there’s the school palava—from Highland Terrace to Carmichael Prep—always palava. The run-hide-fight active-shooter drills in halls full of strapping blond boys who’d sooner bang-bang shoot you down than date you. Their love on reserve for roving packs of perky girls: Amber (all twelve of her), Tiffani/y (the two with a y and six with i that she is), all looking right through you till you got the perfect Gucci knockoff and hair extensions like Kims K through Z. Everything air-kiss fake and phony. But at least, some things come naturally. I was
great at maths, excuse me, mathematics, or more accurately AP algebra came easy. Like my maman, I had a head for figures.

  Soon as they knew, the Salikis signed me up for Future Entrepreneurs Club. And Mathletics for good measure.

  • • •

  My sister and Madame Jessica chatted for a few more minutes. Mainly, Frieda’s “thank you, thank yous” for the new clothes sent to her and the rest of my “six” siblings. Mrs. Ndukong was masterful at supplying official-looking documents from various boarding schools, at extracting ever-mounting school fees. Unlike me, Frieda had problems lying about make-believe kin. She made show-and-tell for the Mother, gathering Arabella and some small yam-heads from the quartier together for Skype sessions. Called me a lie-lie pickin. Though it didn’t keep her from selling all that extra clothing to help fill Maman’s new stall in the market—a side business selling American goods. Maman got a mean markup. We got something just for us. But sometimes Frieda’s boyfriend Boniface helped manage the store when Maman was busy sewing. I didn’t trust him with a register full of our hard-earned nkap. And I didn’t bite my tongue about saying so. Ey-ey! The yam-head was a cutpurse—okay, okay—that’s “pickpocket” in American. Former cutpurse, Frieda said. Then she said I was a hypocrite. My hands were way down deep in the Salikis’ pockets, no be so?

  “Hypocritical? Mais non, grande sœur,” I said. “Entrepreneurial. That’s me.”

  Wasn’t I worth it?

  III

  I did what I had to. For myself. For my real family’s future. Mrs. Ndukong discovered Maman’s kiosk and demanded her cut. Grubby hands in every sauce pot. And the well was running dry. The Salikis were struggling. So I got entrepreneurial.

  It began with heartbreak. One of those strapping blond boys finally took a liking. Imagine! An American boyfriend of my very own! But for months his gaze kited over me in school corridors. I went dateless at three dances. After a time, it dawned on me. I was too dark for daylight hours. I was low, felt invisible. But I yam what I yam so I rallied. And soon another came along—big, brawny—people hailing from somewhere in the country’s big-belted waistband. I looked at him and saw plenty: fattened calves, amber waves of grain. He looked at me and saw exotica: spears, teats—everything jutting. He would screw me for novelty, his wifey-to-be a corn-fed sweetie. But this time round I would get something. Treasured. A keepsake. My own little piece of America.