How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  We were often overcome with doubt that Thula’s movement would someday defeat His Excellency and Pexton, but that did not stop us from marching in Lokunja, or occupying Gardens, or attending planning meetings that she called for. Thula believed, the Five were resolute, and though our spirits were far more willing than our flesh to rise on some days and raise fists and chant, year after year, we did it because Thula believed.

  * * *

  The soldiers brought the bodies of the Five to Lokunja. They laid them at the entrance to the big market so that passersby could take pictures in their minds, spread the story far and wide. Our friends’ eyes were still open, their bodies covered in dust and blood. We wrapped them in sheets to carry them away on our shoulders.

  We asked for Thula’s body.

  They did not have Thula’s body.

  We mourned for our Thula without a body.

  Some say she jumped into the big river, and, with her body bullet-ridden, sank to the bottom. Others say she ran into the forest, wanting to die alone. We went into the forest to search for her. From morning till night we called out, Thula, Thula. We never found a body. Thula, Thula. Thula never answered. Thula was gone.

  The twins, Bamako and Cotonou, they went to their father, in the hut of the uncle to which their family had fled. They told their father about the child they’d put in Thula’s womb. They were a medicine man and a medium, but they were also children who’d lost homes—could they have wondered, as children are wont to do, if they were responsible for what had happened to us? Their father, he was one of us, he told us what his children and the Five had done. We did not blame them; they had done what the Spirit had commanded them to do. We cried for Thula, for her baby. Would he have grown up to be our savior? A man conceived of the Spirit—who would have dared to stand against him? Sometimes we imagine that Thula ran deep into the forest and there the Spirit caused her belly to swell, and birds and leopards tended to her, wiped her brow, and watered her lips as she pushed forth the child, and in unison, all the living things sang: For unto us a child is born. Could this child someday return to us, reclaim for us what was stolen?

  * * *

  —

  Sahel, Juba, Nubia, and Thula’s new papa came from Bézam. We had no body for them. We buried the Five, but for Thula we only cried. We held Sahel, begged her to be strong. She fainted, again and again. She asked for a cup of poison; we refused to give it to her. Nubia told us she’d hidden all knives from Sahel when they got the news. The Spirit will restore, we told Sahel. We didn’t believe it that day, but we told it to her, in desperation. Three times in one life. Three vanishes for one woman. Juba tried to be strong for his mother, but his own heartbreak wouldn’t allow him. Nubia kept one arm around her husband, their son, Malabo Bongo, in her other arm.

  Our fathers told us that Malabo Bongo was a replica of his father’s big papa—the same small, sad eyes. We cried for the child too, as we did for our own children, the burden he would have to bear for the things done and undone to those before him. His life, like the lives of our descendants, in good ways and bad ways, would be only a continuation of our story—nothing could save him from that.

  * * *

  —

  We were refused one last chance to enter Kosawa and empty our huts. The government decided the land had become too contaminated for human presence. His Excellency ordered Kosawa burned. What once were our huts became ashes. Our mothers’ kitchens, ashes. Our barns and outhouses, ashes. Our ancestors’ pride, ashes. Nothing remained of Kosawa, except for what we kept in our hearts. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, winds of every kind came and blew away the ashes of what used to be our home.

  * * *

  —

  Pexton took the bodies of the overseer and his wife back to America, to their sons. It was only months later that we learned their full names: Augustine and Evelyn Fish. In stories printed in our country, there were pictures of them, smiling, with their sons. A couple that loved life: executed. Their sons: orphaned. A tragedy in every sense. No one called Thula’s death tragic. There were no pictures of her in most newspapers. Or of the Five. She was the Fire Lady. The Five, her disciples. Fire Lady, Fire Lady: how many readers of those stories cared for her real name, her full story?

  The story told about her was mostly about her time in America, how she’d spent days in jail there for one misdeed or another. Some wrote of how His Excellency’s freedom-loving government had allowed her and her followers to speak out and march. She was given privileges accorded to every citizen of the republic—why did she have to turn to violence? In America the newspapers wrote that New York was where she had learned violence; she wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to travel to New York and leave as a radical. They wrote of how she had attended meetings in a place called the Village, a gathering of people who hadn’t learned how to channel their anger positively. Others argued that violence had been in her blood long before she traveled to America: our government confirmed for those who inquired that, indeed, Thula’s uncle Bongo had been one of the men responsible for the kidnapping of Pexton workers decades before. Thula had taken it further by acquiring guns and orchestrating killings. A violent family—how sad.

  * * *

  Her former students and busloads of devotees came from across the country for her one-year death celebration, which we held in her big papa’s village. We’d stopped crying by then, but Sahel hadn’t, though she now cried for her new husband too—he’d died months after Thula, leaving Sahel alone in a big house. She yearned to return to her birth village now that she was entering her final years, she wanted to sit on verandas and laugh old-woman laughs with Lulu and Cocody. But Juba and Nubia wanted her in Bézam so they could do everything to make her happy, visit her often, and spend nights at her house, so Sahel could feed and bathe and sing to Malabo Bongo and his little sister, Victoria.

  * * *

  —

  Juba said Austin had written him a condolence letter in which he said Thula often talked about wishing everyone would wear yellow at her death celebration. So we all wore yellow. Flowing yellow dresses for the women, newly sewn for the occasion, along with yellow head-scarves and yellow earrings. Yellow trousers and yellow linen shirts for the men.

  In the square where her big papa once sat in a corner, we beat the drums around a framed photo of Thula, taken by Austin, in which she’s wearing a white dress, walking the streets of New York. Her hair is at the top of her head in a bun; she’s smiling.

  We felt her spirit around us as we sang and danced till the sun left us for a while. Before we dispersed, Juba thanked us for loving his sister. He told us that he would like to close the celebration by reading a poem Austin had written in honor of his princess.

  We had learned from Thula that Austin had become a monk and was living in a neighboring country. He left America the year after Thula returned home, months after he buried his father. Thula told us he had described his new life as the most joyous form of existence he had ever known—having no possessions, living in stillness, daily tending to a garden to help feed children at a nearby orphanage. Even with no chance of a life together, the two of them shared love letters in which they professed that their spirits will be forever united, and that living their callings had freed them to love each other without conditions.

  Holding a pregnant Nubia’s hand, his voice trembling, Juba read Austin’s poem:

  farewell to the revolution, weep not, silence lasts for a night

  rise children, get in formation, madness ignited, fists clench up

  burn, burn, burn; lift every voice; alive and proud—or give us death

  ten thousand systems, sipping on our souls, onward yet we fight, until when

  long may we live to see that glorious morning, when the light shall emerge

  when we’ll gather, at the river, in the village pure and clean

&nb
sp; there’ll be no more crying, no more bleeding, no more sickness, only bliss

  oh boundless love, we are weary, won’t you come forth, guide us home?

  * * *

  —

  Pexton created a scholarship in honor of the overseer and his wife, the Augustine and Evelyn Fish Memorial Peace and Prosperity Scholarship. The scholarship was for our children only. It would allow them to go to the best schools and someday become learned, like Thula. There was no land left to fight for, so Pexton had no fear that our children might grow up to wage a war against them. They’d already begun digging a new well in what used to be our village square when they announced the scholarship. They’d already uprooted what was left of the mango tree under which we’d played—whatever hadn’t turned to ashes.

  Most of our children got the scholarships.

  We paid nothing for their education; Pexton made sure of that. After finishing at the school in Lokunja, they moved to bigger towns or to Bézam, where they went to schools of higher learning, living and eating where they studied. Some of them got into the government leadership school, others into lesser places of advanced learning. Many traveled to Europe and America, to study on other scholarships, or to start new lives.

  Today, in the year 2020, forty years since the night Konga told us to rise, our children have good jobs with our government, with corporations in Europe and America. They live in lovely houses. They drive new cars. They’ve given us grandchildren. Several of us have been to America. Our children buy us nice things to show their gratitude.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes we ask our children about the cars they drive. The cars seem to be bigger than they’ve ever been, needing more oil. Do they think about it, about the children who will suffer as we once did just so they can have all the oil they want? Do they worry whether a day will come when there’ll be no more oil left under the earth? They chuckle at our questions. They tell us that oil is still a thousand years away from depletion, by then no one would need it. We nod; we agree that a thousand years is too far away for anyone to worry.

  * * *

  We have now begun our entrance into the last decades of our lives.

  It marvels us how much suffering we bore, our parents bore, our ancestors bore, so our children could own cars and forget Kosawa. They do not speak our language to their children. They speak to them only in English. They do not recognize our Spirit, a rejection that surely makes our ancestors weep. They go to churches, if they have any awareness of a Spirit at all. They believe in a Spirit in the sky when ours lives within them. Some of us had taken our families’ umbilical-cord bundles before we fled Kosawa, hoping to pass them on to our children, but they have no use for them. For births and deaths and marriages, they celebrate in the ways of our former masters. They dance to their music, as if ours was merely a relic to be admired. They have village meetings, occasionally, but it isn’t to talk about how to keep alive their ancestors’ spirits, or how to revive Kosawa in any form. No, their meetings are to plan dinner parties where they laugh about things we don’t understand. One day, we know, our world and our ways will vanish in totality.

  All the seven villages now have electricity. Most of us live in brick houses. Many of us have cellphones and flat-screen televisions. In Lokunja you can use the thing called the Internet to read about our story, or see huts like the ones in which we were born.

  * * *

  —

  It may be long dead, Kosawa, but we never forget it, the splendid piece of the earth it was. We can never forget it, for there our spirits were whole. Amid oil spills and gas flares, we looked behind us and saw green hills where twin mambas hissed in gaiety, where robust moles and porcupines zigzagged before falling prey to the hunter’s precision. We lived in a place where caterpillars took twice as long to renovate into heavy butterflies. Ours was a village where the sky sang thunderous songs in the dry season, songs that made us wrap our legs around our siblings in fright and in delight. There were dire rainy days, when the rivers threatened to take our possessions to their resting place, and parched days, when the ground in the hills cracked from thirst and the palm trees rejoiced. Through it all, Kosawa remained a singular place—if not for the beauty of our surroundings, then for the people who called it home. How could we not want to return to those full-moon nights when we danced in the square? Even as we began leaving childhood and started realizing how determined death was to never let us see our old age, we still laughed on verandas, and skipped over pipelines. We sat under the mango tree, lazed and gossiped as if tomorrow would always be ours, a luminous tomorrow. We hoped, we believed, that we would die where we were born.

  Often, while visiting our children in Bézam, or America, or Europe, we sit on the couch, looking at the television but not seeing it. We’re there, but we’re not there. We’re somewhere else, thinking of Kosawa, thinking of Thula. We’re wondering if Thula would still be fighting if she were alive. It’s at such moments that the children of our children come to us and say, please, Yaya, please, Big Papa, tell us a story.

  For my beautiful, beautiful children

  Acknowledgments

  My editor, the incomparable Andy Ward, and my late publisher, Susan Kamil (I miss you so much), both believed I could tell this story; they nurtured me and nudged me, never once allowing me to indulge in self-doubt. I also thank Andy’s assistants, Chayenne Skeete and Marie Pantojan, and the brilliant team of Rachel Rokicki, Melissa Sanford, Katie Tull, Taylor Noel, Avideh Bashirrad, and Barbara Fillon for their hard work and dedication. Profound gratitude to my literary agent, Susan Golomb, and my speaking agent, Christie Hinrichs, both of whom represent me with utmost passion and vigor. My former editor, David Ebershoff, is the greatest mentor any writer could ask for, and I thank him for his kindness. Much gratitude to my production editor, Steve Messina, and my copyeditor, Terry Zaroff-Evans, who both did an outstanding job. Jaya Miceli designed another superb book cover and I thank her.

  My friends Howard Shaw, Lloyd Cheu and Douglas Mintz, Mark Salzman, Warren Goldstein, Zadie Smith, and Christina Baker Kline all read full or partial drafts of my manuscript—this story wouldn’t be what it is without their dazzling critiques and I am indebted to them. The same goes for my countryman and fellow Anglophone Cameroonian writer Dibussi Tande, who, along with Joyce Ashuntantang, has been an incredible champion of my work. Many thanks also to Fiammetta Rocco for giving me advice when I needed it. For two summers, Mary Haft gave my family and me a lovely cottage in Nantucket where I could work near the ocean and I thank her for her generosity. I also thank Greyson Bryan and Bob Kohn for helping me understand elements of American corporate law. And huge thanks to my German team (Mona Lang, Eva Betzwieser, Maria Hummitzsch) et mon équipe française (Caroline Ast, Diane Du Perier, tout le monde à Belfond).

  Finishing this novel was grueling and I am eternally grateful to my spiritual counselor and confidant, Rick Weaver, for his wisdom and wit, and for reminding me of the truth about who I am. My thanks also to Donna Schaper of Judson Memorial Church, Justin Epstein of the Unity Center of New York City, and Father Frank Desiderio of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle for the safe spaces they gave me to worship in.

  Year after year, my wonderful friends have never asked me to be anything but what I am—what greater gift can one human give another? I thank them for making me laugh, for traveling to be with me because I needed them, for distracting me from my writing with endless text messages.

  When I was a child, my mother sent me to live with my aunt, a decision I was not thrilled about, but one that set me on this path, for it was in my aunt’s house that I discovered literature. I thank my mother for her love and bravery, and I thank my aunt for welcoming me, and for making me go to Bethel Baptist Church, Kumba—it was the teachings I received there that pushed me to start questioning the world, and it was those same teachings that led me to become the person of faith I am today
. I am deeply grateful, also, to all my relatives, by blood and by marriage, who have played roles big and small in my life and who have shown me many kindnesses. I am especially thankful to my cousins who, on my last visit to my hometown, reminded me with their affection that no matter how far I travel, my umbilical cord will remain buried in Limbe, in Cameroon, in Africa.

  And my marvel of a husband. And my breathtaking children. To you, I say: thank you, thank you, thank you. For your love and a home that overflows with joy. For dance parties and countless other reasons to take a break from writing. For coming with me on this journey and cheering me on to stay the course, so that at the end of each day, when I lie down to sleep, I may do so to the words: Well done, good and faithful servant.

  By Imbolo Mbue

  Behold the Dreamers

  How Beautiful We Were

  About the Author

  Imbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue lives in New York.

  imbolombue.com

  Facebook.com/imbolombue

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next