by Imbolo Mbue
* * *
It must have been the Sweet One who told Thula about the attacks and threats on the laborers, for we made no mention of it in our letters. Zealous as she was, she was still a woman incapable of inflicting bodily harm, and we’d worried that our going after the laborers would cause tension between us. And, as certain as sunrise, it did. Every time she heard about it, she wrote asking us to stop, saying that was not the plan, the plan was to get their attention, let them know that we mattered and we were angry, the plan was never to kill—what were we thinking? We assured her that we’d kill no one; we merely wanted to instill fear in the laborers, cause panic in Gardens, make them think we’d stop at nothing. She would not be convinced. What if we’d killed the laborer we’d badly beaten? she said. Blood on its hands was the last thing Kosawa needed. The laborers are not our enemies, she argued, Pexton is. In some letters she threatened to withdraw her financial support from us. And there were indeed months when the Sweet One brought us no envelopes from her. Then, just as we were about to start wondering if she had changed her mind and was no longer one of us, we received an envelope, along with pleas to remember that the laborers were fathers like us, men with families for whom they were making hard sacrifices.
* * *
—
In the third year of our attacks, Pexton informed the laborers that it would no longer allow them to bring their wives or children to Gardens. The directive was late and inconsequential: the women and children had begun leaving more than a decade before, after three children passed away around the time our friends started dying.
We had heard of the Gardens children’s deaths when they happened, but we never considered that they were for reasons similar to the death of our friends. For years, we’d believed that, between the clean water the children there drank, and the American medicine Pexton had for those living in the settlement it had created around its wells, no one at Gardens would ever suffer our fate. The Sweet One and the Cute One were the ones who told us the truth that no American medicine, no matter how potent, could cure a child of years of accumulated toxins.
There was no way for us to have known that in Kosawa.
No one from our village ever held a proper conversation with a laborer. In our childhood, we never spoke to the children in Gardens, not even when we sat next to them on the bus, full as we were of hatred for them, partaking in the scorn our parents had for theirs. They looked and acted like us, but they weren’t children like us—they were Pexton children. Only these years later did we learn that, though they hadn’t died as often as our friends, they had died still, and their parents had wept too.
The Cute One told us that, after the first half-dozen or so deaths in Gardens, mothers began packing their belongings and fleeing whenever any of their children started coughing. Following the mysterious disappearance of a child a year after we started our assaults, the women and children who remained were gone within days.
By the time we went to Bézam to welcome Thula home, Gardens contained only men, broken and longing for home, yet still holding on to visions of wealth for the sake of those they loved. The school sat empty, teachers gone alongside the children. The only teachers left there were the teachers for the Kosawa school, all of whom were freshly out of their training program. Even Teacher Penda had fled; he left with a goodbye neither for us nor for our nieces and nephews, whom he was teaching at the time. We couldn’t blame him for acting as if we were his enemies: given a chance to burn Gardens to ashes with him in its confines, we wouldn’t have held ourselves back to spare his life.
* * *
—
The laborers’ tribulations became increasingly evident to us after all their wives left. We heard them coughing on the bus, the exact cough Wambi used to have. We saw their eyes watering, like ours used to. We heard about rampant drilling accidents, which resulted in deaths so gruesome body parts had to be packed in plastic bags. Many were the men who survived accidents and returned to their villages with missing arms and legs. We heard reports of their nonaccidental deaths too, but if these deaths were because of the men’s proximity to the poison, we never knew—Pexton would never have wanted us to know. What we knew was that, for every dead laborer at Gardens, there were ten men in distant villages waiting to replace him, raring to partake in the riches from America. Gardens was always full of men dressed in oil-stained uniforms, covered in dust, dreaming on.
In the months after we escalated our attacks, we saw in these men’s eyes how acutely they feared us. They might not have recognized our faces, which we always masked during our incursions and ambushes, but they had to know it was us—no one else in the eight villages hated them as much as we did. If our eyes caught theirs—say, at the bus stop—we looked downward and pretended to examine our fingers. Yet they struggled to breathe around us. How could they not? Their woes were many: they had Pexton standing above them, barking at them to drill to the last drop or go home; we stood in front of them, hiding nothing of our detestation; toxins swam within them, preparing them for a death they could only hope wouldn’t soon arrive. Their wives and children were afar, waiting for money for sustenance, praying to their ancestors to make the men as prosperous as those who had worked at the oil field decades before and returned to build brick houses. Until then, though, their wives lived husbandless lives, their offspring grew up like fatherless children, their parents died without a farewell.
How often did the laborers question the value of their lives? Did they cry at night in regret? Whenever we saw one of them at the bus stop with a packed trunk, having decided that the prospect of riches was no match for a simple life of love and quiet, we knew not whether to admire the man or scoff at his weakness in fleeing.
* * *
A month before that first meeting with Mr. Fish, the men of Kosawa had an assembly. The Sweet One and the Cute One had called for it, telling us that there was an incredible development they wanted to inform us about, the breakthrough we’d been waiting for.
They told us that the Restoration Movement people in New York, having grown tired of Pexton’s broken promises, had filed papers with an American court to force Pexton to clean up our land and waters and start sharing its profits with us; the Restoration Movement intended to argue that because Pexton was profiting from our land, we were entitled to a portion of whatever the company earned from the oil it sold. But Pexton was under a new leadership that was determined to show the world that fairness was at the core of their business. The new leadership had decided it wanted no court case—they were ready to work with the Restoration Movement to finalize an agreement. Under the agreement, we would not be receiving an envelope of cash, as had years ago been given to our mothers and fathers. We would receive, instead, a percentage of all the money Pexton made from our land from that day forward. We’d get a percentage every single year.
At that first meeting with Mr. Fish, his interpreter confirmed all of this.
He said that, though the two sides had not yet agreed on what the percentage would be, there was no doubt that everyone would agree on the right percentage.
“Approximately how much would it be?” someone shouted.
The interpreter whispered something into Mr. Fish’s ear. Mr. Fish nodded and whispered back into the interpreter’s ear.
“Mr. Fish says it’s hard to know what the percentage will be,” the interpreter said. “You have to remember, Pexton has a lot of people who want its money. The government in America wants some of it. The government here wants their share. All the people who work for Pexton, they need their monthly salaries. But your share is also very important, because together we inhabit this valley, and we must do so peacefully.”
Questions came from every direction: Did the people in Bézam know of this pending agreement? What did they have to say about it? Were they going to tax our percentages? Why weren’t they present at the meeting?
“Pexton wants to do wh
at’s right by you,” the interpreter responded. “Sharing profits with communities is not something corporations do, but we’re going to do it, because that’s who we are. We don’t care if the government of this country supports or does not support our plan. Governments do whatever governments want to do, that’s just life. At Pexton we believe our duty should be to people first, not to governments.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” one of us asked. “Isn’t it the government who gave you our land?”
“Yes, of course, in a way,” the interpreter said. “But Pexton is Pexton, and His Excellency’s government is His Excellency’s government. We operate by our own principles. As a company, our mission is to do what’s best for the world—that’s why we’re here today. After this deal is final, if you need help from us on how to use your money to improve your lives, we’ll gladly send people to help you. If you’d like to move to Lokunja, or buy land in one of the other seven villages—”
“Move to Lokunja?” several shouted in unison.
“Buy land?”
We did not need to hear any more.
We stood up and lifted our stools. We signaled to our wives that it was time to leave. Some of them appeared reluctant to obey; one look and they knew it wasn’t the right time to attempt to defy us. The interpreter called out to us as we walked away, saying we didn’t need to sell our lands and move to another village unless we wanted to. We heard Sonni calling too, saying we should give Mr. Fish a chance to explain.
A few of our fathers lingered to talk to the interpreter, to find out what it was that Pexton truly wanted, but we knew there was no need to ask—they wanted the entire valley. They wanted whatever oil was below the ground on which our children played. They wanted to search for oil beneath our huts. They wanted whatever oil sat idly under the kitchens in which our wives cooked. We would die before we let them have it.
* * *
—
The next day, Sonni made a round of our huts to extend an invitation from Mr. Fish: the oilman wanted to sit down with us in his house. It was certain to be another waste of time—what more could he have to say?—but we went anyway, a week later, along with the Sweet One and the Cute One, who insisted we owed it to our friends in prison.
In a room full of books and pictures of a long-haired woman and three boys with leaf-green eyes, Mr. Fish’s interpreter told us that Pexton absolutely did not expect us to sell them our lands. The only thing Pexton wanted, the reason they’d sent the previous overseer back to New York and brought Mr. Fish to us, was that they truly wanted peace. If we wanted the same thing, why didn’t we all shake hands and start anew? Pexton was ready to make a deal with us, a preliminary deal to set the basis for the bigger deal: if we stopped breaking and burning and instilling fear in their laborers, they’d continue working on the agreement regarding our percentage with the Restoration Movement. But first our friends in prison would be set free, as soon as we all shook hands as men.
The three of us in attendance excused ourselves and went outside.
On Mr. Fish’s porch, looking at the expanse lying before us—the laborers’ conjoined houses and the empty school; the oil fields with structures jutting into the air delivering black smoke; pipelines running in all directions; our huts in the distance, undignified and slumped on their knees—we deliberated on whether we should accept Mr. Fish’s terms. We wished Thula were there, but we couldn’t write to her and await her counsel: our friends in prison longed to sleep on their beds, eat warm meals, wrap their legs around their wives, and watch their children do homework by the bush lamp. It was for their sake that we agreed to walk back into the house and shake Mr. Fish’s hand, and lay down our matches and machetes. We would give Pexton three months to start giving us our percentages, in cash, delivered on the same day of the month, every month. We would give them a year to start cleaning the river and the air and the land, and if they couldn’t fully clean them, at least stop poisoning them so they might recover by themselves.
The overseer agreed to everything. Of course, he said, smiling. We smiled back. One of us laughed. Was it truly happening? Were we really making a deal with Pexton?
* * *
—
The interpreter took a photo of us shaking hands with Mr. Fish as the oilman beamed, grabbing our hands with both of his. We looked at each other, flattered and amused at his excitement. The fact that we had the power to make an important man from America so happy surprised us. After the handshakes we took a group photo, Sonni and Mr. Fish in the center, shaking hands, the three of us and the Sweet One and the Cute One on either side of them. The interpreter, as he took the photo, said it would be sent to newspapers in New York to serve as a testament to the power of dialogues.
Mr. Fish rang a bell, and a servant, dressed in black and white, appeared.
He nodded as Mr. Fish spoke. In less than a minute he returned with a tray of glasses, all filled halfway. We each took a glass. Mr. Fish held his glass up in his hand and said something in his American-accented English that sounded nothing like the English we’d spoken with our teachers at the Lokunja school. His interpreter laughed at whatever he’d just said and we all laughed too. We lifted our glasses high, to imitate the American, grinning like giddy goats. Mr. Fish clinked his glass against Sonni’s, and we began clinking our glasses against each other’s. Mr. Fish drank whatever was in his glass in one gulp. We looked around at each other and did the same. The taste made us crunch our faces, which made Mr. Fish burst out laughing, and soon we were all laughing hard, forgetting we were in the house of an American oilman. We walked out of the house that evening with three bottles of the drink, his gift to us. That night we shared it with all the men of Kosawa as we recounted the story of the meeting, enjoying this moment of unity that had long eluded us. We told ourselves not to celebrate quite yet, but we were prepared, finally, to exhale.
That all happened about six years before Thula returned home.
In that time, we did nothing to hurt Pexton. Oil spilled on our land and we did nothing. Our children coughed and we did nothing. We sat on the bus to Lokunja with the laborers and we did nothing to them. We’d given Pexton our word. We kept it.
We waited for them to keep theirs.
* * *
It was while we were waiting that one of us was awakened one night by the groans of his pregnant wife. She did not respond when he asked her what was wrong. Her eyes were wide open, though her mouth was tightly shut. Our friend hurried to his mother’s room and roused her. When his mother also failed in imploring his wife to open her mouth, our friend ran to get the womb doctor, who, with one touch of the belly, said that the baby was coming. The womb doctor touched the belly again, and corrected herself: the babies were coming. His mother began boiling water. Our friend pulled his spear from under his bed and started sharpening it on the veranda, eager to go hunting when the sun rose, grateful for the chance to be far from his hut when his wife finally opened her mouth.
He thought about his babies throughout the day in the forest, and we ridiculed his sudden inability to engage in conversation. On our way home, he imagined, as we all did, that when he returned the babies would be there and it would be a long night of drinking in his hut. But the babies hadn’t arrived when we returned. By dusk, his wife’s silence had turned to groans, grunts by the next morning, shrieks by the time he returned from the forest the next evening. It was then we realized, even before a medium arrived from the first of the five sister-villages to confirm it, that Jakani and Sakani were returning.
* * *
—
We don’t know why the twins chose the womb of our friend’s wife over the wombs of all the other fertile young women of Kosawa, though we imagined it had something to do with the fact that she was copiously busted and extra wide of hips. Those hips were not of much help, however, as the babies elbowed and kicked and pressed in an attempt to clear a path through her
to re-enter our world. The volume of her cries was evidence that the discomfort she was in was not one a body made of flesh was meant to sustain. Just as one of our grandfathers had told us was the case when Jakani and Sakani last arrived, the woman stayed in labor for seven days and nights, her pain rising daily, so that by the fourth night no one in Kosawa could sleep, not the crickets or the birds or the beasts of Kosawa, not any creature with a singing voice, most of whom joined the laboring woman after every sunset, a whimpering chorus around her anguished cries, which came accompanied with her blood spilling, dripping off the mattress and forming the shape of a face as it touched the earth, the shape of Jakani’s and Sakani’s faces in the days when they went around healing and interceding for us.
Come out the twins finally did, holding hands.
* * *
—
We’d never doubted that they would return to us—extraordinary humans never stay dead, not as long as the world continues to need the likes of them—but we were awed nonetheless that they’d indeed returned, and that our years of living without a channel to the ancestors were over. At last, we could return to experiencing the fullness of the Spirit in our midst. It would take them some time to start healing and interceding for us, we knew, but as we filed through the hut to see them, all the men, women, and children in Kosawa awaiting their turns, we felt healed by their mere presence; a sense of wholeness descending upon us, courtesy of the hope they’d brought to grant us.
A week after their birth, their father told us that he wouldn’t be able to join us if we decided to revive our battle against Pexton; that was how our numbers decreased to five. Our friend said that he needed to dedicate himself to guiding the twins to becoming the men they were born to be. We did not try to convince him otherwise, though we knew that the twins, whom he had renamed Bamako and Cotonou, wouldn’t need guidance from their human father, for they were born ready to be what they’d been created to be; they could grow up to be nothing else. Still, we gave our friend our blessings to be one of us no more, knowing that his burden as the father of children living in two worlds would be one he would need all of his strength for. Someday, a descendant of ours might have to shoulder the duty, for it was certain that the twins would keep on returning as long as men lived on earth, and that, no matter how they died, they would return together. Generations before our time, they’d lived in another place, but now they were in our midst, because a woman whose womb they’d chosen to be carried in on one of their returns had married a man from Kosawa. Here they were now, ours, we hoped, forever.