The last word comes out as a loud sob, and Mother buries her face in her hands. Asu and Auntie stop yelling at each other and stare at Mother in silence. Asu reaches over and puts her arm around Mother’s shoulders. From where I stand, backed up against the wall, I can see her elbow jump up and down with the force of Mother’s crying. I don’t know what to do. There is a short, awful silence. Then Auntie huffs out a sigh.
“I won’t turn you out into the streets, Raziya.” Her gaze wanders over to me, then flinches away again. “But you don’t understand what you’re asking. Come. I’ll make some tea, and we’ll talk.”
Auntie puts a pot full of water on her gas stove and adds tea leaves and milk. Leaving it to boil together, she has us all sit down in the main room. Mother, Asu, Chui, and I untie our stools from our bundles and add them to the ones belonging to Auntie’s family. We sit there quietly while we wait for the tea to boil, but the quiet is full, aggressive, the way the empty space around a hive is filled with the knowledge of wasps. I feel a growing fear of the words that will soon swarm out.
To distract myself, I look around the room at my cousins. There are five of them: The three oldest are tall and wide like Auntie, but the two youngest are slight with delicate faces. It makes me wonder what my uncle Adin looks like. The five of them throw glances at me while we wait, but only the littlest one meets my eyes. I look down at the ground between my feet. Finally the tea is ready, and Auntie pours it into a row of cups lined up on the counter. Other than the splash of hot liquid hitting the bottom of each cup, there is no sound even though there are ten of us in the room.
Auntie’s oldest daughter hands everyone a cup. She puts mine on the floor in front of me. I bend forward, pick up the cup, and sip it slowly, blowing on the steam. The warm, deep feeling of tea with milk settles into my belly, and I tell myself to relax and enjoy it. Auntie lowers herself onto her stool with a sigh and finally starts talking.
“I don’t know what life was like for you and your zeruzeru in Arusha province,” Auntie begins, “but here in Mwanza, having an albino in your family is a dangerous thing.”
I hunch my shoulders.
“Why?” asks Asu, leaning forward.
“Well,” says Auntie, “times are difficult.” This comment is greeted by silent nods from my family. We know times are difficult. We had to leave our home because of how difficult the times are. Auntie doesn’t seem to notice. She is staring straight at Mother, talking as if the rest of us are not even in the room. “People are hungry and out of work. The drought is very bad.” She waves her hand around, as if trying to scoop more problems out of the air. “In difficult times, people will do almost anything to get better luck. They visit the waganga and ask them for spells and charms.”
Mother nods.
“How does all this relate to Habo?” Asu asks.
“Well,” Auntie says with a sigh, “here in Mwanza, people believe that albinos bring good luck.”
I look up at her, startled. Usually I’m underfoot or unable to help. The idea that people might see me as lucky is a pleasant change. The idea is so exciting that I speak up for the first time since we entered Auntie’s house.
“If I’m lucky, why did you say it’s bad to have an albino in your family?”
Auntie looks at me, surprised, I suppose, to hear me speak. She holds my gaze for a minute, but then drops it. She looks down at the floor as she continues.
“Perhaps I misspoke. It is not that people consider albino people to be lucky. People consider albino medicine to be lucky.”
There is a silence as we try to understand what she has just told us.
“Albino medicine?” prompts Asu finally. Auntie looks uncomfortable, and the silence stretches. Then she straightens her shoulders and looks Mother in the eye.
“The waganga here in Mwanza kill people like your son and use the parts from their dead bodies to make luck.” Auntie’s words run together. She spits them at us like rotten fruit, quickly, as if she cannot wait to get them out of her mouth.
“No.” A strangled gasp comes from Mother. If there were any other sound in the room, we would not have heard it. But there are no other sounds; it’s as quiet as if everyone in the world has stopped breathing. “No, that’s impossible!”
“It’s not impossible!” Auntie snaps. “It happens all the time. Just last week, Charlie Ngeleja, an albino man who lives—lived—just on the outskirts of town, was having dinner with his wife when three men came out from the bushes with machetes. Charlie asked them to sit down and join in the meal, but the men said, ‘We are here for something else.’ And they killed him, Raziya, killed him just like that. His wife ran for help, but by the time she got back, it was over. They took Charlie’s legs and his hands and his hair. They left the rest of him there like garbage.” Auntie’s voice is still strong, but there are tears making tracks to her chin. She goes on, softly: “The police did nothing, even though people knew who had killed Charlie. It is a terrible, terrible thing, Raziya. But it is not impossible.”
She finishes to silence. I no longer know where to look. My gaze roves slowly around the circle of my cousins, looking for a single smile to tell me this is a joke. There are none. Instead, my cousins stare at me with wide eyes.
“They take body parts?” asks Asu with a note of hysteria in her voice. She is looking at me with wide eyes, too.
Auntie’s smallest boy twists a length of fishing net in his hands. “They say if you tie an albino’s hair into your nets, you’ll always catch fish.”
“The hands and the skin are for luck in business,” adds the girl who gave me the tea.
“And if you put albino legs on either side of the entrance to a gold mine, you’ll get rich very fast,” the tall boy with the start of a mustache says.
“Even the children have heard of it,” says Auntie, as if this means something special.
I put my cup of tea on the floor, no longer able to drink it. I hug my knees to my chest and put my head down onto them so I don’t have to see anyone looking at me anymore.
“People will try to kill him?” Chui’s whisper of disbelief fills the silence.
“Now you see, Raziya,” Auntie continues, “why we didn’t want you to stay. Charlie was a man who had grown up here. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew his parents, his wife, his children. And still they killed him. Nobody knows your boy. He will be too easy to take.”
I look around. Mother is breathing in short, shallow breaths, and her eyes are unfocused. Beside me Asu is sitting very still. Chui is looking at me as if he’s never seen me before.
Would it be worth it to kill me if it’s enough money to save the family, Chui? I turn away, sickened.
“Really, Raziya,” Auntie says, “how could you not have heard of it? More than twenty albinos were attacked just this past year. There are speeches on the radio telling the whole country how it must stop.”
“We had to sell our radio five years ago,” Asu says, her voice hollow.
“Well,” says Auntie, “now you know.”
Asu jerks to her feet. “We have to leave! Mama, we have to leave now and go somewhere else. We can’t stay here. We can’t let them kill Habo!”
“No,” says Mother softly. “No, we can’t.”
But I don’t know if she is saying no, we cannot let them kill me, or no, we cannot leave. I feel like someone has tied a rope around my chest and is pulling it tighter, tighter. The sweat on my neck and palms feels cold even though I know the room is warm.
“Where will we go?” asks Chui, the exhaustion plain in his voice. I’m surprised that he’s so sure that we will all move to ensure my safety, and I feel bad for what I thought earlier. He’s trying to protect me even when he’s so tired. We’ve been traveling for days, sleeping on roads and under trees and bushes. I’m tired, too. Tiredness has sifted into all my joints, making them feel like they are filled with hot s
and. For those few minutes before Auntie saw me, it felt like we had found a good place to stay. But, as usual, I’ve messed everything up, and now we have to move on again.
“Will we go home?” Chui asks.
Home, I think, remembering.
It’s early evening, the sun just sinking behind the hills, and we are all sitting together outside, waiting to eat dinner. Enzi is leaning against the wall, talking with Mother as she cooks. They’re both smiling. I’m too young yet to think about going to the little village school, and Chui and Asu chat away about their day and what they learned. I sit quietly and let the others’ talk swirl around me like smoke, watching as Mother pounds the ugali around and around in the battered pot, spreading it up the sides to cook, and then pushing it into a ball so it doesn’t burn. A last ray of sun slices through the air around us and it looks like all the dust of the world has turned into gold. When this happens, Asu scoops me up into a hug and kisses my head before settling me in her lap and finishing her conversation with Chui. I know then that the long-shadowed light of the setting sun has reminded her of me, her golden brother. I sit there, safe in her lap, and watch the gold dust settle over us all.
“What would we go home to?” Mother’s voice snaps me into reality. She’s right, of course. “Home” is our little village outside of Arusha. But we didn’t have enough money to stay there in the first place, and now there’s nothing to go home to. No house, no farm, no father.
“How much money do you have?” asks Auntie.
Mother tells her. It’s a pitiful amount. Auntie crunches her forehead into her head scarf again and plants her hand on her hip. Her other hand swishes the tea around and around in her cup.
“You won’t get two streets over with so little. And with three children? How did you even stay alive on your way here?” It’s not a question that she expects to get an answer for, and none of us gives one. Auntie gets up and begins to pace. “I don’t have any money to give you,” she says, answering a question we haven’t asked. “We saved for two years to pay for Adin to go to university so that he can become a manager at the VicFish factory. If you had arrived a week ago, I could have given you that money. But it’s already paid; he has already started classes. We only have enough for the food we need to eat now.”
“What will we do?” Mother asks in a whisper. She is rocking slowly where she sits. “What do we do?”
I am beginning to think that we will have an entire conversation made up of questions that don’t get answered, but, surprisingly, Auntie answers this one.
“You should go to Dar es Salaam.”
My family’s faces are almost funny in their disbelief. Chui’s mouth has dropped open, and he looks like a fish. I close my own mouth.
She must be joking. Dar es Salaam is hundreds of kilometers away from here, halfway across the country, on the ocean. It’s twice as far as the journey we just took, days and days of travel. There’s no way we can go there. We don’t know anyone there. Who would we stay with? How would we live?
Auntie continues on, as if it wasn’t like talking about going to the moon.
“Nowhere in the Lake District is safe, and you cannot farm without a man to help you. Yes, Dar es Salaam is the only place for you to go. It’s an enormous city, filled with people of every kind. You can get jobs there in cleaning or something. There have been no albino killings there. They even have albino members of parliament. One is a lady albino MP, at that.”
“Killings,” Mothers whispers, as if she didn’t hear anything else Auntie said.
“Hmph,” says Auntie. She clatters over to the stove to boil more water for tea. The others must have been able to finish their cups. Mine sits, cold and still, at my feet. I can see small hairs and dust have settled on it, pinching the surface like water bugs’ feet. I want to vomit. Auntie bustles into the room again with the tea.
“So,” she says, “you must leave as soon as possible, but you can’t leave until you have more money than you do now.” She runs her eyes over us again. “You’ll need train fare and enough to get started in the city. At least two hundred and fifty or three hundred thousand shillings.” She pauses, considering. “More would be better.”
It’s a number so high that it’s lodged in the cracks between the stars. Mother starts to cry again. “We will never be that rich,” she sobs.
“Well,” says Auntie, “you’ll have to try to get that rich as fast as you can. You must work hard at whatever jobs I can find you until you have the money you need.” Then she turns and levels a finger straight at me.
“All except you,” she says. “You will hide.”
7.
I crouch behind the tall sacks of corn in the pantry, listening to the voices in the next room rise and fall. Auntie and the older cousins have arranged the sacks so that it looks as if they’re thrown in a pile in the corner, but really there’s a narrow space underneath. I can crawl in near the wall and pull a light sack of millet over the opening and then I’m hidden from view.
The first time I went into this space I was afraid.
“What if he dies in there?” asked Kito, Auntie’s youngest son.
“He won’t,” replied Chui, with a confidence I only wished I shared. It was cramped under the sacks; I had to lie on my belly with my arms curled under my head.
“What if he can’t breathe?” asked Kito.
“He can breathe,” said Chui. “You can breathe, can’t you, Habo?”
“I can breathe, and I can hear you, too, Chui,” I muttered through tight teeth. “There’s no need to shout.”
“How was I supposed to know that? I can’t see you.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” snapped Asu from the doorway. She had initially refused to be a part of the construction of my corn cave, as the younger cousins were calling it, but all the talk of me suffocating had brought her into the room after all. Through a tiny crack I saw Asu surveying my hiding spot, standing with her arms crossed so tightly that her khanga pinched in at the elbows.
It was hot, and I could feel the moisture from my breath beading on my forearms. Mwanza is warmer than Arusha is, because it’s not in the mountains. Even though Auntie and her family bundle up in the evenings, my family and I don’t need to. Of course this means that during the day, it’s uncomfortably humid and warm for the dry season. I began to wonder whether maybe Kito was right after all about suffocating.
“Can I come out now?” I asked.
“You should try to stay in there longer.” Auntie’s voice came from somewhere beyond what I could see. “You can stay in the back room when it’s just us, but whenever anyone comes by, you’ll have to be in there. If they visit for a while, you need to be able to stay there without making any noise.”
That’s easy for you to say, I thought, but it turned out that Auntie had been right. People dropped by all the time and, every time they did, I had to hide.
The first day it felt like I was diving in and out, dragging my little millet sack behind me, all day long. I’ve gotten used to it over the past three weeks, but I also asked my cousins to help me rearrange the corn bags so there was a bigger space in the middle with more vents to breathe through. They were happy enough to help, even talking to me a little, but they still had trouble looking me in the face when they did it.
Now when I’m in my corn cave I still have to be lying down, but I can stretch out a bit and I don’t have to be frozen in the same position for twenty or forty minutes while some stupid neighbor lady tells Auntie all about the latest goings-on in fish town.
Today the rumble of voices in the background belongs to Mother, Auntie, and the local schoolteacher. Every now and again I hear the younger tones of Chui or one of the cousins. I’m still having trouble keeping the cousins straight in my head, because I mostly have to memorize who’s who just by listening. I don’t get out much when everyone’s home, because visitors are so
much more likely. Most of my time out is during the day when they’re at work and school. Even if I’m out with the family, when everyone’s home they all talk at the same time, and figuring out names is really hard.
When I ask Mother or Asu or Chui, they give me useless advice, like, “Pili’s the tall handsome one” or “oh, Kondo is easy to tell apart, he has a mustache.”
“And just what does a mustache sound like?” I asked Chui once, losing my patience. “And how does handsome sound, hmm?” Chui told me not to be so cranky—I had asked him, after all, and if I wasn’t interested in what he had to tell me, I could just figure it out on my own. I’ve tried to keep my temper since then.
The only cousin I can tell apart from the others right away is little Kito. It helps that he has the highest voice and still sometimes uses baby words, but it’s more than that, too. Out of all the children, Kito is the most fascinated by my secret cave. Because of this he got over his shyness around me more quickly than anyone else. When the people in the house aren’t paying attention to him, he often sneaks away and whispers to me. I’m a little worried this will draw attention to my hiding place, but it’s so nice to have someone to talk to when I’m buried under the sacks that I haven’t said anything to him about it.
Kito can’t reach his opposite ear yet, so he doesn’t go to school. Which means that, instead of being invited into the main room to talk with the schoolteacher, he’s sitting on top of my hiding place, telling me what’s going on.
“They’re talking about school,” he hisses through a crack, as if this was a major announcement.
“I figured they would, since he’s the schoolteacher, Kito,” I whisper back.
“Oh,” says Kito. He’s silent for a while, thinking that through. Then, “They’re talking about Chui going to school.”
I sigh. Sometimes a five-year-old’s grasp of what’s news is a little hard to take. Especially when it’s so hot. I feel like I’m roasting in an oven, and the smell of the dry, hot corn all around makes me hungry and nauseous at the same time. I hear the schoolteacher ask Mother how many school-age children she has, and I strain to hear her answer.
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