Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  Maybe I acted like a fool — and you can call me that if you like. I don’t care because, you see, for one moment I was she, that girl again and I wanted to run to your moon-shadow man and beg him: ‘Tell me where Alusani is? Tell me which one of the birds flying in the sky is my brother?’

  3

  Mariama, 1931

  Stones

  I remember how it was when I danced with my mother. Sometimes I close my eyes and drift as though I am going to sleep. But I am not asleep. I am remembering a time when I was still a baby, before I knew how to talk or even walk.

  Whirling. Whirling. Round and around. Don’t feel dizzy. Eyes closed. Nose between shoulder blades. Lips against soft skin. Breathe the scent of her. We dance. Me on her back. We want to go on for ever. This is how we dance on nights we go together to the women’s place — the secret place where women meet.

  Supper eaten, mama binds me to her back. Holding me squashed against her breasts, bends over, twists my body round her own. On her back now. I know better than to fall off. Cling to her with my thighs, my fists. She drapes the cloth across my buttocks, holds it in her teeth. Ties two ends tight round her waist. Hitches the other corners up under her armpits — a knot above her breasts.

  I’m part of her. Feel her flesh, muscles, sinews — walking, working, out in the plantation pruning trees. Feel her heart quicken and slow. I know who scares her. I know whom she loves. When my father passes she stiffens, drawing air into her nostrils — like an oribi we saw drinking at the river — and quivering beneath the stillness of her skin. We carry food to the workers at the plantation. She unwraps the pots, ladles soup on rice. Men come forward. Pa Foday, he comes close. ‘Momo’, he says. Thank you. Feel the creak of the cloth against her ribs as she catches her breath.

  Evening time we slip away. Slip away to the secret bush. Walking quickly. Past houses, past gardens. Into the groves. She walks like a queen. Or like a woman on her way to meet a lover. Where the path from the rice fields meets the path from the stream, see the gap in the trees? See the cotton tree high above the rest? That’s where we’re headed. We follow an invisible path. No one can follow us.

  Women are already here. So many women. Talking. Talking women’s business, they call it. We don’t care to talk. Not so very much. We wait to dance. When the talk is finished the drums start, the singing. And the dancing. We dance for the elders and the younger women, too. Whirling, whirling. Round and around. Round and around we go.

  We dance until the light comes up and dances too, across a horizon flat and empty as a stage. And then we walk quickly back to the village, collecting sticks of firewood as we go.

  Then I learned to talk. She stopped taking me with her. I might repeat secrets told, women’s special secrets. Wait, she said, until your turn comes. That was one time.

  Then there was another time. The time when the dancing stopped. And when I said her name, a space opened up that I could fall into. Silence. Silence after her name. Silence where the music used to be. Once women bound their hands to drum all night. Afterwards they met in secret, real secret. Silent secret. Away from the eyes of men. Away from Haidera. But when they tried to dance, they couldn’t. The steps were gone. They had followed my mother when she went away.

  I used to read the things written about us. These weren’t the books the nuns approved of. One book was by a Very Famous Author. Oh, all the writing on the back said how good this book was. This famous man lived in our country for a short time and then he wrote a story that would make sure nobody ever wanted to come here. A story about a man who arrived on these shores and lost his faith. Many years later I read another book by the same writer, about a woman who has to choose between her god and the man she loves. When I read that book I felt a pain, like I had been stabbed in my side. I felt this woman’s terrible choice as if it was my own. Because I remembered my mother and how she was forced to deny her own faith.

  A woman has no religion. Have you heard people say that here? A woman has no religion. And maybe it’s true. We change our faith to marry and worship to please our husbands. But it was not always so.

  In those days they were always coming to convert us. The Muslims from the North, the Christians from the South. We deserted our gods. But nobody wrote stories about that. Instead they congratulated themselves on how many souls they had saved. My own soul was saved twice. But my mother. My mother would not yield. And to this day nobody has ever come to me and said she was noble and righteous to do so.

  We did not have a house of our own. No. We slept in a back room of my father’s house. Small, not so light, one window. It looked out on to the alleyway where old men came to smoke. The tobacco smelled like burning flowers. Not such a quiet room either. There was the women’s cooking circle behind us, too. Odours of simmering plasass, the scent of tobacco and talking, old men’s voices and women’s voices. Hush!

  A plain room. But mama tried to make it into something pretty: striped country cloths on the floor, cloth dyed red with camwood on the walls. Lattice shutters over the windows. In the corner the box with her things in it, the things she brought when she came here.

  1931. Yes, it was 1931. We didn’t count years in those days. That came later. Who was to say where to begin? What year was the first? So we began in many places: the Year the New Chief Came Out of Seclusion; the Year We Came to this Place; the Year the River Rose and Snatched Away Houses in Old Rofathane; the Year the First Coffee Beans Ripened. The Year of the Locust Disaster. That had been the year before. The villagers lit fires between the rows of trees and draped fishing nets over the branches to protect the beans. I was young. I thought a locust was some kind of fish that swam through the air. In the morning the trees were saved; there were crisp locusts scattered across the land and the air filled with their odour.

  Yes, we remembered years by the things that happened. Important things.

  So why do I say 1931? I’ll tell you. Because that was the year of Haidera. That much I know. I read it in a book by a professor of history. An English professor, but who wrote our history, if you understand me. And he said Haidera came in 1931. So I said to myself, well then that is the year of my mother’s story too. The man who wrote that book, he did not think much of Haidera. A fanatic. That’s what he wrote in his book. That Haidera was a fanatic. He said not so many people followed Haidera. But he was wrong. There were many people who loved Haidera Kontorfili.

  That year was also the Year My Teeth Fell Out. A warm evening in the dry season. My sisters were out, walking round the houses with their age mates. Arms encircling waists. Calling greetings to the people sitting at the front of their houses. ‘I pray good evening, aunty.’ ‘Good evening, uncle.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Thanto a Kuru.’ I thank God. ‘Remember me to your mother.’ ‘Yes, aunty.’ Or else they were sitting by the river, whispering into other girls’ ears. I was the youngest, too young to go with them. The one who called me, he returned. And the next one too who would have been another sister. Two children missing in between, like the space in my row of teeth.

  I lay at home licking my gums. That day I told my mother I was sick and she gave me mimosa tea to drink. I sipped air in with my tea, through the gap in my mouth. The tea blistered my gums, already rough from sucking green mangoes with Bobbio, the Boy with No Voice. Lying in the fields sucking green mangoes. That’s what I did the day before. But I don’t tell such things to mama. I let my eyes follow her. I like to watch my mother. To me she is beautiful.

  Today, as on other days, this is what she does:

  She goes to the box and feels among the layers of clothes. She takes a tin, a tin wrapped up in red poplin, stitched with cowrie shells and leather-bound sassa. Fearful amulets to protect what’s inside. There is writing on the side. It says: ‘Woodbines’. Just so you know. For myself, I only knew that later. On the floor she folds her legs beside her and empties the cigarette cup. Pebbles and stones tumble on to the floor, she spreads them out with a hand like a fan.

  There are seven
teen of them. This I know. Because sometimes when I am left alone I go to the chest and take them out for myself. I empty them into my palm, feel their weight, listen to the noise they make, like they are talking to each other. Or to me. A pinkish pebble, curved in one place, flat on the other and inside dark and glistening like a sliced plum. A big one, flat and grey with a dimple that fits my thumb, just so. A dark stone, shaped just like a cigar and veined too, like a tobacco leaf. I hold it to my lips and copy the men outside. A cream-coloured pebble, with pale lines intersecting across its length and width: paths and a crossroads. A translucent crystal. A triangular stone, dusty like chalk. A black moon-rock. There are others. Ah, my favourite: white, five-sided, smooth as my skin, but rippled as the sand on the windward side of a dune.

  Alone in her room, except for me, my mother talks to the stones. Yes, she does, and often. But first she gathers them up in her hands and throws them in the air like a celebration. She holds out her right hand and catches some, leaving others to fall. She counts them two by two. One, two. One, two. This is how she goes. And sometimes: one. She puts the single stone at the end of the line. She casts and counts and casts and counts. Two rows of stones. The road to life and the road to death. All the time she murmurs soft sounds. I know these sounds by heart. The cadence of her voice, the rhythm and sequence of the vowels, the placing of the consonants. Though not the words they make.

  On Green Mango Day mama beckons me over. ‘See this here, Mariama,’ she says. ‘Here again on the road to life,’ I push my face in close. A small, plain stone the colour of sand. ‘Maybe a brother for you. What do you say?’ She lets her hand rest on my hair. I like it. I stay. But I have nothing to say. I don’t care for the look of the stone so much. She takes her hand away, folds it up in her lap with the other one. Now she’s talking to the stones. Telling them this week’s news. The important things that have happened to us.

  Oh, she saw her clothes float away down the river. It was in a dream: a rainbow-coloured river of clothes. The brown hen hatched a deformed chick. It had no eyes. It died. A burial two houses away. My bellyache.

  I’m happy. A little guilty. But the pleasure of hearing her tell the stones about me is sweeter.

  Searching the stones for patterns and combinations, the answers to questions. What does she want? I don’t know, cannot imagine. Because I have everything I want right here. Right here. My sisters will be back soon. Now I’m sleeping with my head resting on her thigh. The sound of her chanting, like a lullaby.

  In our room late at night she made snuff. Good snuff, they said. She ground the tobacco leaves, mixed the brown dust with cloves and lubi from palm nuts. The cloves were what made it special. One time I stole some of her snuff. Took a pinch in my fingers, and then swallowed it quickly when she walked back into the room. My head spun. Not like when we used to dance. I felt sick and nearly fainted. Oh, so this is what snuff is, I thought. What person would want that?

  But people did. Every week or so we carried a jar of snuff to Madam Bah who sold it to the customers who visited her shop. She sat there, arm resting on the window frame of her front room, merchandise piled up behind her, outlined against the darkness. Matches, cigarettes. She opened up the tins and sold them one by one. ‘One stick or two? Tuppence each.’ Baking soda. Balls of black soap. Imported needles. On the table next to her, a wooden cabinet with a dented fly-screen. Inside, squares of deep-fried dough under muslin and sugar cane and snuff. Not a real shop. But the closest we had.

  Madam Bah was an only wife but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. And she was the only woman who didn’t have a vegetable garden where she had to go weeding and watering garden eggs and yams all day. Madam Bah bought all her food in the market or from other women. Also she was the only person we called madam. Sometimes I thought this was because she was a shopkeeper. So she deserved to be called madam. Then I thought it was maybe because Ma Bah sounded funny. She travelled and brought Dutch Wax prints, Brillian, shirting, beads and ‘shine shine’ trinkets from far off places. Whenever word was that Madam Bah had come back from a trip my father’s wives stood in line to see what she had brought.

  So here we come. With our snuff to sell. I stand with my nose over the window-sill shop counter. But first my mother wants to see a piece of Dutch Wax. And Madam Bah does not get up, but rocks back on her stool and stretches her arm out to reach the cloth. My mother slides her palm over the slippery surface of the cloth. She asks questions. The width? Yes, and the length? Good quality? Top quality, nods Madam Bah. She bats at a fly with her fan and it falls on to the counter, upside down, spinning. Madam Bah does not hold the cloth up so my mother can compliment the pattern. Always the conversations end the same way. My mother says: ‘Maybe next time.’ And Madam Bah says: ‘Yes, next time. Next time there will be more choice. You’ll see.’

  Mama’s mother died of a swelling sickness back in the days of the old. Long before I was born. My mother had no brothers. When my father saw her she was visiting an aunt in the old place. She left her own people a long way behind when she married him. All the money she had of her own came from the sale of our snuff, which Madam Bah kept in her big jar and dispensed directly into the open palms of her customers or poured into the little glass phials and silver snuff-boxes they brought with them. From our room my mother sold snuff to the younger women, who slipped in between chores and smeared the dark dust above their back teeth. My sisters pinched me and told me not to tell. Nobody, especially Ya Namina. The younger wives were among our best customers.

  Madam Bah gives me a piece of fried dough to eat. She leans out of her window and strokes my cheek. And smiles a small smile, with her head on one side. And she looks at me like this. ‘Such a shame,’ she says to my mother. ‘If she had been a boy … Then she takes a pinch of snuff. Sneezes. Clears her throat. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

  Mama says: ‘It’s a fine one,’ in a voice that expects to be corrected.

  There is Bobbio. Sitting by a pillar in the shade of the awning. Wearing his grimy duster coat. Ashy legs. From a distance he looks like an old man. Bobbio is always somewhere, hanging around the meeting house, sitting on the edge of somebody’s verandah watching them talk or eat, a forgotten guest. Sometimes, when I go outside to pee in the night, I see him. Standing silent in the shadows of a house not his own. Nobody knew what was the matter with Bobbio. Why he had No Voice. He lived with his grandmother, the birth attendant, who said he was born in Daruth. The way she said it made it sound like everybody in that town was the same way. I imagined a town of silent people, moving noiselessly about.

  But other people whispered that Bobbio was slow because his mother conceived him while she was still breastfeeding her last child.

  I liked Bobbio. Though he sometimes did things that made children chase him and grown-ups shoo him away. He banged his chest with his fist. Then he’d slap you with the back of his hand. Whap! Hard like that. Bobbio was strong. People became annoyed. But I understood. Me, me, he was saying when he hit himself. You, you. Trying to start a conversation. They thought he was stupid. Bobbio couldn’t speak. But he wasn’t deaf and dumb. Bobbio could hear. And he understood what we were saying.

  In his hands Bobbio holds a string of raffia. He loops it round the little finger and thumb of each hand. And again around his index fingers so it looks like a pair of crosses. He loops the string again around his third finger, once more over his little fingers. And in a trice he slips his two index fingers through the web, turns his hands inside out and holds them up. The string had transformed into an angular crane in mid-flight. I run and reach for it. Bobbio is older than me and taller than me.

  ‘Show me, show me!’

  Madam Bah laughs at this. Her laugh is loud and empty. Just a bigger version of her smile. ‘Maybe they’ll marry,’ I hear her say. A crease appears on my mother’s brow. And she opens her mouth and takes a breath and presses her lips together. Madam Bah doesn’t see. She’s counting money on her lap, below the counter.
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br />   We sit on the stoop, Bobbio and I. Sitting on the stoop watching the world. We do this a lot, on different stoops. Sometimes here. Sometimes my father’s house. Sometimes the house where Ya Namina’s mother sits all day and doesn’t mind us. What I like about Bobbio is his silence. Everybody else talks too much. We sit a while. I tie the string in knots and Bobbio takes it from me and begins again. This time slowly.

  Against the glare of the sky the outlines of the houses begin to wobble. At this time of day the village is empty. Pools of rice spread out to dry in the sun. Rows of raffia stiffening and bleaching. But no people, for they are down in the fields and in the coffee grove. Only the elders are here, sitting in a row on the bamboo bench on the other side of the square from the meeting house. The old women sit on their porches. Everybody sits and waits for the day to end and the people to come back.

  Behind me Madam Bah is talking. Still. While she counts out the money.

  A man with woman trouble: ‘Don’t ask me. I mind my own business. But they say now he’s gone. Gone to fetch her back.’

  Sucking her teeth, a new stranger in the village: ‘I hear he plans to stay. Well, we’ll see.’

  The prayer meeting. Madam Bah’s husband the Fula carried news of this one from the town. He goes there on business. I try to imagine it. Imagine the town. And the Fula in it doing business. Running around in his white djellaba and baggy trousers. I cannot. I have never been to the town. I don’t know what business is. Though sometimes he does it with my father. My father says Fulas are honest because they believe that one penny of profit dishonestly made means they will lose the whole fortune. Me, I don’t think Madam Bah believes that. But then she’s not a real Fula. Just married to one.