“Like William?” Fanny laughs.
“So selfish of him!”
Pero/William, the barber, bought on an auction block aged twelve, alongside her mother Igbo Polly, also twelve, and countless other frightened children.
The Old Slave Spirit draws on his pipe.
“Maybe, just maybe, William didn’t mean to . . .”
“Drink and kill himself?” Fanny says. “Just wanted to be rendered useless?
“Who would ever believe that of Pero?
“Pero the tooth extractor, Pero the trader, Pero the money lender, Pero the loyal valet who served Mr Pinney nigh on thirty-two years, now ungratefully and wantonly gives up. Why?”
“. . . Maybe, just maybe, he wished to be returned to Nevis, to comfort, to raise his motherless daughter, be reunited with his beloved sisters.”
“Only, how would that ever happen?” retorts Fanny.
“Your mother?”
“Don’t.”
Igbo Polly the seamstress, the trader, a midwife, in possession of a shingle and board house on Mountravers sugar plantation . . .
“Quite remarkable that!” says the Old Slave, “to retain one’s African identity in one’s name.”
“Yet she’ll go nowhere,” Fanny says bitterly. “Igbo Polly who survives the transatlantic passage, a motherless girl child herself, separated from loved ones, can’t even purchase her own freedom, or prevent her younger daughter and son, from cutting sugar cane grass!”
“What is it?”
“My mother, my brothers, my sisters, will I . . . ever . . . see them again?”
Fanny knows what the silence means.
“How will she or I bear it?”
“With all that your mother has experienced, do you not think she sees, she knows and worries for you; how her fifteen-year-oldest daughter could leave all behind, make that tumultuous journey, traversing an ocean full of ghosts and unrested spirits, to a land full of strangers, praying the while, that you may yet meet kindly people.”
“There is no one. Nothing comforts me but my Baptist church where I am known as Frances.”
“O Frances! Motherless child of a motherless child, is your mother not doing the same as you, choking back tears, finding good cheer to lift you and keep you going, in three-monthly exchange of letters and gifts; keeping under wraps, all the heaviness in her heart?”
“I miss them so much, and here, my life is one of madness!”
“Let the madness stay where it belongs. For when you push people down to elevate yourself and are dependent on those you despise, what can this yield for posterity but more lies and deceit? So pity them, they who cannot love another like themselves, they who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
“They are my family. How I hate them! I’m supposed to pretend everything is fine. I am favoured.” Fanny laughs.
“Be a witness to your own truths, have faith in humanity. There are those who strive and are seeking truth here, find them. Let go of hate. The moon, the stars, the skies and trees see everything and are there to watch over you; wherever you are, take heart.”
The bell for the breakfast room rings.
“Go forward, daughter of Igbo woman.”
Fanny picks up the feather from the floor. She straightens her back.
“William didn’t mean to kill himself. I am in captivity but will my spirit to be free. I will provide for my family as long as I breathe.”
“That’s right, Fanny Coker.”
Gone is the Old Slave Spirit.
Gone in 1820 is Fanny/Frances Coker, aged fifty-two.
Survived by her sisters, and ninety-five-year-old mother, who survives the end of slavery; to witness her own emancipation.
Pipes
A Baptist memorial stone,
The Georgian House, Bristol
Greenbank cemetery . . .
Bones
Like the wind on the ocean, violent, then eerily absent,
Gone.
Karen McCarthy Woolf
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents she writes poetry and drama. Her collection An Aviary of Small Birds (2014) was described as “extraordinarily moving and technically flawless” (Poetry Review), a “pitch perfect debut” (The Guardian) and was shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Fenton Aldeburgh prizes. She makes radio features and drama for BBC Radios 3 and 4, and has presented her work across the world, from the Americas and Europe to South East Asia.
Of Trees & Other Fragments
—they all have names, Willow, Cedar, Oak, Elm . . .
mine is down a darker track
red pine shaved to skin-thick tiles
Waterfall, by the waterfall, where spirits of the stream
race and dive from rocks, hold a small
child under—
one evening at dusk we mistake
a charred tree stump
—for a giant Man, with legs
hidden in the brush
On Widbey Island
startled by a hummingbird
I’m jumpy as a rabbit
the paths are tunnels and there’s an axe
struck deep
Mornings, at the retreat
it’s picking punnets
of sharp red strawberries, feeding rare-breed ducks
rows of peas and chard
Victoria, dark-skinned and gamine, among candyfloss roses
and poppies, with her scarlet jumper
and wicker basket—
she skips, almost
back to her angular, Swiss-style chalet
in a clearing, after dinner: Victoria in her little red . . .
* * *
you need to know that I don’t
like
shadows and
unidentified—
always being one step behind, behind . . .
* * *
Jack’s text says our cat
was sheltering under the mosaic table
from two jays
I’m in Pike Place and witness
a crow attack, a blonde is dive bombed, then one more
—Is there any other language we understand?
* * *
In Warsaw E Annie Proulx
writes me a note, To Karen, poet of trees, and climate change
and music, What are trees?
* * *
Last night Ed and I went for a walk in the dark with the moon,
round
to the clearing. Last night Ed and I went for a walk,
it was dark, there was moonlight. He knew his way, in the dark,
along and off the path
—When we get there, I slip my arm
around the rough-barked, slender waist of a young oak,
so companionable, and surprisingly warm
my fingers trace
adolescent names scarred into the trunk, a wonky
heart
* * *
At the reading I tell everyone that horse chestnut was my friend
* * *
a tree is a complex being
that has relationships
with soil, and air, and Jack reminds me,
mycelium
as well as other trees’
roots and branches
and insects, with teeth
when thirsty a tree emits a
noise, high and fast
audible to humankind when slowed down a thousand times
a tree must
deal with many teeth
a tree is a mass
of tentacles in a sea of leaves
* * *
In the meeting we discuss a moment in Chapter 3, after
Orlando marries
when she can’t physically write:
we don’t need to hear the poem, it doesn’t exist, the poem
is called The Oak Tree.
It’s a constant,
a companion, each era an annual, concentric ring cycle.
We know
&n
bsp; we musn’t write The Oak Tree. Not the poem. The tree
will find other ways to speak.
Surely we will welcome
the oak?
* * *
Are you wearing Eau d’Lancôme? the woman
with the long-haired
Alsation asks. Everyone has a dog. There are no women walking
in the woods without a dog. All the walkers are women.
Don’t you have a dog?
* * *
This is how you learn to stay alive—
sunlight streaming
through branches—
all young girls must remain
alert. In the holly thicket, the Princess
from Frozen is deflated on a punctured balloon
other debris includes a red and white remnant
of crime scene tape
* * *
And then a breeze at last
prompting leaf fall
loud as fire
my youth flickering on and
off like
spiders’ silk spinning in the sun
among collapsed
fences, rotting stumps more than two
centuries wide
a tiny, two-leaved seedling
pushing up
O little seedling
you leave a deep and buried sorrow
even dancing can’t derail
* * *
driftwood: great lobster claws
of rootlessness,
whole palms, adrift and smoothed
what’s wrong with roots? the wood asks
if trees were fully animate, surely they’d reach
down and squeeze
until we gushed like Sicilian oranges?
* * *
Yoga, under the ash and weeping willow
staring up into the canopy
ash an unlikely synonym for green, verdant
against rare uninterrupted blue
no sign of die back
or other climactic disasters, two fat-breasted wood pigeons
roosting and quiet
and I tell the story of how
I wasn’t called Willow in the end, how
willow’s chandelier teardrop drama
is overshadowed by its capacity for vigour
however hard you cut back
* * *
Jamaica, finally:
at Devon House
a whole class
gathers, chitter-chattering, under a fruiting mango
that reminds me of a tree at the hub
of a village I passed through in Mozambique
on the way to catch a ferry, its voluminous shade
encompassing
at least four generations, three motorbikes
and a Vodacom vendor
* * *
The article describes
the currently inexplicable
and multiple deaths of a dozen ancient baobabs
some older than Christ
Thirst is a possible factor
* * *
Trees don’t need to move
to exact revenge, leave that to the crows
trees are now you see me, now you . . .
a long drawn-out, involuntary retreat
that ends in our asphyxiation
Meanwhile, give thanks for Sandalwood and Frankincense!
* * *
Can a fragment ever be complete—?
Love shook my heart,
Like the wind on the mountain
Troubling the oak-trees
* * *
04.44
and I think of the bamboo in the hills
by Glengloffe
how the grove is many-stranded yet moves as one
and I think of Moxy
bamboo carver on the beach
outside the orthodoxies of the all-inclusive
who carves cups from the stems
with a Stanley knife, as well as
bongs and an instrument similar to a didgeridoo
there’s something hypnotic as curls of
green fall down onto white
sand, his hands worn, weathered
still steady—no he answers, I never left Jamaica
* * *
driftwood a horizon of
stars and stripes, flagpole after flagpole
one flagless, where a bald eagle perches
Useless Bay shallow and
private, the water clear, the shoreline
littered with natural debris: for once a lack of plastic
(so many billionaires own here)
whole trees uprooted, bark stripped and polished
to a grey sheen, smoother than pebbles, squid-like
suckers groping cool air
driftwood/
floating out to the ocean/ driftwood,
bleached by the sun, whittled—
Wame Molefhe
A writer from Botswana, she has had her fiction published in local and international journals, anthologies and online. She has written a column for New Internationalist (UK), as well as travel articles, and for television and radio. Her first book, Just Once (2009), is a collection of short stories for children. Her second short story collection is Go Tell the Sun (2011).
I’m sure
You’re sure in the way people from these parts mean when they say “Ahm sho”. A grown-ass person will sniff the air and declare, “Ahm sho it’s going to rain today.” But it doesn’t rain. Not this day nor the next nor the next. The drought slurps the land dry, exposing the dregs of dams: rocks, carcasses, broken bottles, cracked riverbeds, emaciated cows grazing on straw-coloured clumps of grass. The nation gathers at the dam wall to pray collectively for rain. Still, the liar doesn’t apologise for leading people astray. Bearing no shame because his nose does not grow long; you feel the shame; you wear it. You resort to singing “liar liar pants on fire”, but only in your heart.
That kind of “Ahm sho”.
You’re sure that if your Mama had called private parts by their name and not used a code decipherable by only you and your siblings, if she’d been able to make her tongue pronounce penis, and anus and vagina instead of calling them lavatory words, you’d have known to shout NO when you didn’t want your most private parts touched. Instead you muttered eh-eh behind clamped teeth, or shrugged—even acquiesced, sometimes.
You’re sure that if Mama hadn’t averted her eyes when the aunty lifted the little girl’s skirt, touched the little girl’s front, making sneezing sounds, playing that “Hey-tia Motsoko!” game, you wouldn’t have looked away either when you witnessed it. You would’ve slapped that witch’s veined fingers away.
And perhaps if there was a word, in Setswana, a word other than “tshameka”, to mean the act of sexual intercourse, maybe this act of intimacy wouldn’t be treated as if it were a game to be played, a game in which there were winners and losers.
You’re sure that if Mama hadn’t instructed you to call all the men who visited your home “uncle”, to always respect your elders or be clawed by vultures, you’d have slapped that uncle’s yellow-nailed paw away when he brushed it against your breasts.
You’d have told Mama why you walked the winding car route to school. Maybe then she’d have understood why you arrived after the bell rang, instead of layering her whipping on the caning you’d already been given by the headmaster. You might’ve told your mama that you feared walking past the ogling men who sat by the roadside, zipping, unzipping their flies, cat calling you. You might’ve told her about the time one of them yelled, “ke itse yo o mo kgweding,” and how you’d wondered how he’d known you were having your monthly. You’d tugged your uniform longer and pressed your thighs together, feeling them chafe like they did when you were pressed. That day you spent the Setswana, biology and domestic science periods silent, although you knew all the answers to the teachers’ questions. You were just too afraid to ask to go to the toilet in case the boys heard and laughed, and said you were bleeding because y
ou’d played too much, and that made you squirm with shame.
You’d have told Mama that one uncle—Papa’s friend, actually—whispered that you were ripening as lusciously as the mangoes that he grew, and were almost ready to be plucked and sucked. He’d run his tongue over his lips like he could taste the sweet in his words, in you.
And you’d have told Mama that one uncle’s son once showed you how he was going to play with you when there was no one home. You opened the outside tap on full blast like he told you to, then watched as the water drilled a hole in the earth and he plunged the hose deeper and deeper into the ground. He laughed with his lavatory mouth wide open, exposing his rusted teeth.
You never told Mama why you offered the kissing uncle with the prickly chin your hand in place of your lips and how he scratched your palm with his index finger when you did. And how when he thought no one could see, he clenched his fist and squeezed his thumb between his index and third fingers—thrust it in and out. But one day, your Papa was watching him through slitted eyes. And on that day, Papa leapt to his feet, like he’d been bitten by a snake and he marched that uncle out of our lives forever.
Then a day arrived when you met someone whose caresses warmed you in places with names you struggled to put your tongue around, you wondered again: what if your Mama had called private parts by their name and not used a code that only you and your siblings could decipher, perhaps you would be able to say I’m sure.
Marie NDiaye
translated by John Fletcher
Born in Pithiviers, France, to a French mother and Senegalese father, she published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, at 17. Her other works include: Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Strong Women, 2009), Ladivine: A Novel (2013), Self-Portrait in Green (2006), En Famille (2007), La Sorcière (2003), All My Friends (2004), Rosie Carpe (2001), Coração Apertado (2009), and Hilda (1999). My Heart Hemmed In—the translated version of her 2007 novel Mon cœur à l’étroit—was released in 2017 to international acclaim. She was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina literary prize for her novel Rosie Carpe in 2001 and won the Prix-Goncourt for Three Strong Women in 2009, She is the only living female playwright to have a play (Papa doit manger) included in the Comédie-Française repertoire. She now lives in Berlin, Germany.
From Three Strong Women
When her husband’s parents and sisters told her, Khady knew already.
She had not known what form their wish to get rid of her would take, but that the day would come when she would be ordered to leave, that she had known or gathered or felt (that is to say, silent understanding and feelings never revealed had gradually melted into knowledge and certainty) from the earliest months of her settling in with her husband’s family following his death.
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