by Imbolo Mbue
We passed the umbilical-cord bundles to the next person in our families after we’d said our oath, and we closed our eyes and listened as the next person took the oath.
Everyone in our hut took the oath, even our yayas and big papas, who feared little because the grave was too close for them to care; even our toddler siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to bear witness to lives ruined by curses—lives like that of a Kosawa man named Gombe who became paralyzed three days after his mother cursed him for stealing from her and slapping her when she confronted him. Our little ones made their proclamations slowly, repeating after our fathers. They needed to make the promise even at their age because someday they would learn about the potency of words spoken with conviction, their power to bless and exalt, their authority to uproot and destroy.
But it wasn’t only the curses we strove to avoid; it was also the blessings we yearned for. We knew what a blessed life looked like, and though our parents were not living it with Pexton’s claws deep in their throats, we knew it was possible when times were good, and that it involved a loving family foremost, good health, an abundance of food, laughter, and sunshine. We made our oaths trusting that keeping them would cause blessings to overflow in our lives. We went to bed that night believing the promise of the Spirit that we would soon be free, and we would flourish, and soar on wings like eagles.
We do not know if Woja Beki passed around his family’s umbilical-cord bundle to his wife and children. It is possible he did, because when one of our aunts noticed Woja Beki’s third wife, Jofi, a couple of days after Woja Beki was released, whispering and gesticulating near the path into the forest with her visiting sisters, our aunt told one of our grandfathers and our grandfather relayed it to Lusaka, who went to Woja Beki and demanded to know what his third wife was saying to her sisters. Woja Beki had called for Jofi, who swore to the men, upon the grave of her father, that she and her sisters had only been discussing the upcoming death celebration for their grandmother. Woja Beki assured Lusaka that his wife was telling the truth, and that he and his family would never tell the village’s secret, not on that day or on a day in the future when people started breaking promises with no concern for consequences. He was still one of us, he said to Lusaka.
* * *
—
The Sick One remained in Woja Beki’s house, and every night we prayed for him, and for Lusaka and his group to hurry back from Bézam with the medicine that would put us all at ease. One of us had a dream in which the Sick One was a fat man, smiling as he informed us that he was back at Pexton and preparing for the next village meeting. Hearing about such a dream did not make the rest of us happy—we did not want the Sick One healthy, so he could be free just yet; we wanted him returned to Lusaka’s back room, so our fathers could proceed with whatever plans they had. We were desperate for relief from our fear of death, which had been exacerbated when one of our younger sisters died the day Lusaka and his team left for the capital. This younger sister’s death had been sudden—neither her rash nor her cough was severe—and from this we inferred that death had grown more ruthless lately. The Sick One needed to live for it to be tamed.
We promised ourselves that we would find a new name for the Sick One, as an act of atonement, after Kosawa regained its freedom. It would be a great name, a name we might even be proud to share with him if we were to happen upon him at a place and time when he no longer had any power over us.
We never did get the opportunity to come up with this new name, for he died on Woja Beki’s bed while we were at school. He died in our collective arms.
* * *
Our fathers’ time in our huts that evening was brief—after returning from the forest, they hurriedly ate and bathed and left for Woja Beki’s house, to spend the night with him in his parlor; they couldn’t leave him alone with the remains of a stranger. Even if Woja Beki was no longer fully one of us, he still was our blood, and our fathers could never punish him and his family by leaving them to sit by themselves beside a withering corpse.
Our mothers gave our fathers fruit bowls so they would have something cool to eat during the long, hot night ahead of them. As they bade us good night and stepped outside with stools and their bags of nourishment to walk over to Woja Beki’s house, our fathers appeared older and sadder than we could recall. We’d never seen them look so lost, so confused. Only when we became older, only when we got close to the ages they were during that period, did we realize that what they bore on their faces that night wasn’t grief at the Sick One’s death but the deepest sort of dread, not for themselves, not for what would befall them now that a man had died by their doing, but for us, their children, for the ways in which we would suffer for what they’d tried to do for us. Only when we became parents did we realize how we could harm our children in an attempt to clean out for them the smothering decay of this world.
* * *
—
We imagined that our fathers sat in silence around the body all night.
Not knowing the custom of the dead man’s ancestral village, not knowing the best way to handle his remains, meant nothing could be said to it all night—our fathers wouldn’t dare wrong the corpse of a stranger. If the Sick One were from Kosawa, there would have been singing around him all night, every able-bodied adult present. Jakani and Sakani would have cut off all his hair, and his nails too, which they would burn, the ashes of which they would take to do something we would never know. For this stranger, none of this could be done—his spirit could obey the laws of his land and no other laws. So, in silence, sitting on their stools, our fathers must have waited for the hours to pass, allowing the dead man’s spirit to leave his body fully and go where it needed to. When a touch confirmed that his body had lost all its warmth, evidence that his spirit was gone, Woja Beki and the men must have started the conversation on what to do with the body.
* * *
—
We stayed up late that night with the rest of our households. Together with our siblings, we asked our mothers and grandmothers question after question. We wanted them to assure us that our village had done nothing wrong, that our fathers hadn’t done to Pexton what Pexton hadn’t already done to us, that the Sick One could have died in his own bed, that Woja Beki had done everything he could to heal the Sick One. Perhaps the Sick One’s disease was incurable. Besides, was the death of one Pexton man more tragic than the deaths of all our friends and siblings combined? We wanted our mothers to convince us that all was well, that such things happened, and that the Sick One’s family would one day stop mourning for him when they realized that they’d never get answers to why he vanished. They’d have to stop crying just as we’d stopped crying for our fathers and uncles who vanished, and even if they cried forever, would their tears ever flow hotter than ours? We wanted our mothers to reassure us, again and again, and they did so, but we couldn’t be sufficiently put at ease, for we could see the doubt in their eyes.
* * *
—
Our sleep that night was only slightly less disturbed than it was the night this all began.
The next morning, while we were struggling to cast aside our fears and do our morning chores, we learned that Lusaka and Bongo and Tunis had just returned from Bézam with a young man with light skin and stringy hair. We could barely eat our breakfasts, fatigued as we were and concerned about what the arrival of this young man meant.
By the time we left for school, our fathers had gone to meet and welcome the visitor from Bézam and hear from Lusaka and his group what had happened on their trip, and, later, to make a coffin for the Sick One.
Walking to school, we discussed what some of us had heard our parents whispering: that the Sick One was the young man’s uncle. The news befuddled us. Had the young man come here to save his uncle, or did he learn we had his uncle only when he got here? During recess, few of us went home to eat. We sat on the grassy field and told ourselves that the youn
g man’s being the Sick One’s nephew did not mean he would kill us in revenge.
* * *
—
After school, we followed the procession to the burial ground to bury the Sick One. There was no singing, only an omen in the form of a coffin. The entire village gathered around the grave, dug in a corner of Woja Beki’s section. It was then, as we surveyed the faces, that we saw the stranger with stringy hair for the first time. He was the only one who wept as the Sick One’s body was lowered into the ground.
Kindly as he looked, we couldn’t understand why this young man, who lived in Bézam and therefore worked for Pexton or the government, hadn’t run to Gardens to tell the overseer—a friend of his, most likely, since they were both American people—that we’d killed his uncle. Why was he allowing the men to bury his uncle in Kosawa? Why wasn’t he taking his uncle’s body back to Bézam? He seemed unhappy to be in our village, his eyes bloodshot and often downcast and avoiding ours, but at no point did he look at us angrily, or in disgust. He was merely alone in our midst.
As one of our grandfathers offered last words over the lowered coffin, telling the Sick One to travel safely to his ancestors and find it in his heart to forgive us for failing to restore his health, we looked at our mothers, our eyes full of tears, our bodies split into equal portions of fright and grief and shame. We could tell from our mothers’ faces, and their trembling hands, and how tightly they held our youngest siblings to their bosoms, that they too were in fragments. Had we asked them to explain what was happening, they wouldn’t have been able to answer. All they knew was what our fathers had told them, that the Sick One’s nephew was on our side, he’d come to see our suffering so he could tell the world about it and by so doing bring us the changes his uncle couldn’t. It made no sense to us why the Sick One’s relative was on our side, but, then again, simplicity fled Kosawa the night we obeyed a madman and took three representatives captive.
The young man, whose name we gathered was Us-things, smiled at us as we were departing the burial ground. We wished we could hug him and tell him that all would be well, but Bongo took his attention away from us, because he wanted to whisper something into Us-things’s ear. We hoped Us-things would stay with Bongo in the back room of the Nangi family’s hut, and we hoped that our friend Thula would eavesdrop, put aside her taciturnness for a bit, and tell us all there was to know about the American.
We would have no such chance.
Of all the ways we’d imagined on those nights when we’d lain in bed stiff with trepidation, why did we never consider that we’d be away when the soldiers arrived and we’d return to find them waiting for us in the square, nine guns loaded and pointed at us? Where was the Spirit on that afternoon? Where were the blessings we’d been promised?
How fast those bullets came.
How we stumbled, how we staggered, how we cried, fleeing into the forest.
How heavy the blood flowed—the blood of our families, the blood of our friends. Why do we hope on when life has revealed itself to be meaningless?
Sahel
The week before she left for America, she said to me on the veranda, Mama, you know I’m going to come back, right, and when I didn’t respond, she said, I’ll never abandon you, and when I still didn’t respond, she started to cry the kind of tears I hadn’t seen her cry since she was a baby. She became my baby again, for one last time.
They told me about her new home. They said she would be living at school. When I asked how this was possible, they said the school compound was many times the size of Kosawa, and that at the school there would be houses with books and houses with beds and houses with food, and that once she got there she would simply walk from one house to another, she would no longer need to take a bus to school every morning, like she’s been doing the past five years. They promised me that this school was worth her crossing the ocean for, that this was one of the few schools in the world where all knowledge available to man could be found, and that by the time she returned she would have more understanding of everything-worth-understanding than she would need for the rest of her life, which meant that we would all have more understanding too—what could be more important than that? Our people were dying for lack of knowledge, they said, and if a child of ours could go to America and bring knowledge back to us, someday no government or corporation would be able to do to us the things they’ve been doing to us.
* * *
—
I stood up from my seat and told her that I needed to go check on the meat I was smoking in the kitchen, but I really just wanted to go cry alone. I had no comfort to offer her. I only had my own tears. What use are a mother’s tears to her child?
When they came to tell me that she’d been selected to attend this school, I had stared at the news bearer as he spoke—at his huge, chapped lips, made even bigger by his small head. He has a name, but the children call him the Sweet One, since he can’t seem to wipe off cheerfulness from his face. He has been the representative from the Restoration Movement to Kosawa since our story reached America and people who share no blood with us arrived, determined to save us.
I’d listened to him speak in the village square on countless occasions, I’d sat down with him to talk abut Malabo’s disappearance, I’d watched him help Thula with her homework, but I’d never looked at him like I did that day when he entered my hut, beaming. I said nothing for minutes, gazing at his lips as they moved, incapable of finding comfort in the glow of his eyes. He repeated the news, louder. Maybe he thought I’d detect in the volume what he couldn’t say for the sake of respect: How wonderful for you, Sahel; how utterly marvelous that your child will get to travel to America.
When I still didn’t respond, he looked at his companion, a man the children aptly call the Cute One. The Cute One asked me how I felt about the news, and if I wanted to share what was going through my mind. I shook my head, avoiding his eyes—being around him and his fine face filled me with longing for things I had no right to long for.
In one of the first meetings these Restoration Movement men had with our village, the Sweet One told us that he was one of us. His grandfather was from one of our sister-villages, he’d said; his father grew up like one of our boys, playing with rubber balls and dreaming of marrying and fathering children and growing old in his own hut. But his father’s father wanted a different life for his only son—a life among those who allotted the fortunes of the country, not among those who waited for their portions to be allotted. So the man had found a way to get his son out of his village and into the nation’s capital. It was there the Sweet One’s father finished his schooling before returning home to get a wife from among his people, and it was there the Sweet One was born. “Still,” the Sweet One said, “my father taught me to never forget where I’m from.” On the day he came with the news, as I listened to him detail the reasons why Thula’s going to America would be good for her, for me, for all of Kosawa, I wanted to ask him how his grandfather had done it, how he’d gotten his child not only to leave his village but also to find a place in Bézam and climb so high that his grandchild now had a job speaking on behalf of kind American people. I wanted to know what all this had cost his grandfather, and if he was asking me to pay the same price too, but I couldn’t find the words to ask.
“It’s okay, you don’t need to say anything today,” the Sweet One finally said, as he and the Cute One stood up to leave.
“Sometimes sleep can help you to come up with the right questions,” the Cute One added. They wished me a good afternoon and left, promising to return the next day.
* * *
—
That evening, after Thula returned from school, I told her nothing about where they wanted to send her, but in the morning—as the Cute One had suggested—my questions were fully formed. When the men returned after midday, at a time when Kosawa was quiet except for the faint rumble of gas flaring in Gardens, I sat with them
again in the parlor and started talking.
I asked them who would take care of my child in America, who would cook her favorite meals, wash her clothes, make sure she wakes up on time for school. They told me there would be people to cook for her, and that the meals there, though nowhere near as delicious as ours, were edible, evident in the fact that most of the children who attended the school got fat in their first year. They said the school had machines that would wash her clothes, and machines that would wake her up in the mornings, and if she got sick, every kind of medicine to cure every kind of sickness was available in America.
I wanted to know what the city she was going to live in looked like. They told me that it was a marvel of a place, a city more wondrous than any other that has ever existed or will ever exist. They said that these were not their words, they said men and women of vast knowledge, many of whom had traveled around the world and seen other cities, had said this—they were only repeating what was known.
They told me the name of this great city, but I lost it right after it hit my ears, and on their next visit, a week later, they told me again, but my tongue couldn’t hold on to it well. Every time I tried to say it, it plopped off my lips, so when people started asking me to tell them the name, I decided it was better not to struggle, better to tell them that she was going to a place called Great City. When I told the Sweet One and the Cute One of this name, they laughed and said that it was a more fitting name than the city’s real name.
We told her the news together.
I let the Sweet One talk. He told her that the Restoration Movement had spoken to schools in America and asked them to help our village by educating our children, and one of the schools had said yes, they would be glad to educate one of our children. The school and the Restoration Movement had looked at the report cards of all the children, and no one had needed to be convinced that she was the one the school should bring to America. Her countenance did not change as the Sweet One spoke. When he was done, she thanked him and the Cute One, but said no, she couldn’t go, she did not want to leave me and Juba and Yaya, not at a time when we needed to be together. Then she turned to me and said that if I wanted her to go she would go, but I should think about what I wanted for myself, not what I wanted for her, she only wanted my happiness. She walked out of the parlor when she was done speaking. I knew she needed to cry—it was clear in the way she’d spoken, in how she’d kept her eyes down, that she wanted to go. She yearned, desperately, to better understand the world, but she didn’t want to leave us.