Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  Pa Foday: he brought my mother back. As soon he came back from the plantation and heard the news. Without even a lamp, he searched all night until he found her. I remember that night because of the dry thunder. The lightning lit up the sky as bright as day. I prayed it would help Pa Foday.

  And it did. He walked into the village leading her gently. And my mother walked behind him as though she had only just learned how, as though the soles of her feet were tender as a newborn’s and had never touched the ground.

  Pans of boiling water. Balls of soap. Comb. Clarified palm oil. Fresh clothes. Under the supervision of Ya Namina the two junior wives entered and left the chamber where they kept my mother. We waited outside like we had the time before. Later I heard them whispering to each other at the back of the house. But when they saw me hovering close by they stopped talking. They stood up and walked away, gathering their lappas around them, as if to cover their indiscretion. Little hurried steps. Shuffle, shuffle.

  I crept up to the back of the house. I took a stool and placed it beneath the window. I braced myself when it creaked under my weight. Half up. Half down. On one leg. In the room at the end of the house I heard Ya Namina and my father talking. I thought maybe I would creep along the wall to listen. But I wanted to see my mother. I pressed my sloping eye against the crack between the plaster and the window shutter.

  Still to this day I can picture her, so clearly I could keep her there for ever. They had shaved her head. What else to do? Hair so badly matted it shattered the teeth of the comb. They threw the locks on the fire. Days later I found a singed lock lying in the ashes. I stole it, hid it in a crevice in the rocks — at the place Bobbio and I once hung out eating green mangoes. A long time ago.

  Alone in her room, she was dancing. No faltering footsteps, no baby gait. Body curved like a palm tree yielding to the embrace of the wind. One foot crossing the other. Crossing the other. Arms extended. Chin lifted. Head tilted: naked, shaved head. Fingers fanned backwards. Turning a perfect arc. Round and around.

  Round and around.

  In the end Bobbio, the Boy with No Voice, was the only person who dared to break the silence.

  Early evening. The light, heavy with dust, hovered between day and night. I sat on the three-legged stool at the back of the house, filling oil lamps. I looked up to find Bobbio standing close by. Watching me in silence, unblinking. Like a house-child. Like he could see into my soul. That was a thing about Bobbio, I remember. He could hold anybody’s gaze. For him there was nothing to it. Even after they looked away, he just carried on gazing at the back of their head. People learned to avoid catching his eye for fear of inadvertently starting a staring match. In fact, people often pretended Bobbio wasn’t there at all. I knew what it was now to have eyes slide over you, like greasy eggs in a pan.

  Bobbio led me by the hand. Down to the river bank. Made me stand on the jagged rocks, pressing my shoulders down with balled fists. Then he stared at the ground, concentrating. He began to stamp and kick, like a cricket hopping about on smouldering grass, pick up stones and throw them over his shoulder. He flung a pebble at the water. It bounced once and sank.

  I had never seen Bobbio act this way. Flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. A shiver trickled down my back, a trail of goosebumps in its wake. People said a krifi called Tang Bra lived here. Boatmen told tales of an invisible weight in the back of their boats. The mud dragging at their poles. Nobody came to this place at night.

  Slowly the tension came alive, stirring in my belly like roiling eels. I got up to go. Bobbio grabbed my hand. It was nearly dark. Leaning over me Bobbio looked like his own shadow.

  Bobbio is standing very close to me. His breathing is loud. I don’t know what he wants. He lets go of my left hand and takes up my right. Turns it over. Palms slide across one another. Something warm, heavy, drops. I am confused, it feels familiar. I squeeze my eyes closed. Feel the weight in my hand. A surface smooth as skin. One, two, three four five. I open my eyes. Strain to see in the nearly-night. There it is. Rippled like the sand on the windward side of a desert dune. A white, five-sided stone.

  Now it is I who seizes Bobbio. ‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?’ I force him to look at me. I know he understands. He returns my hands to me, waves at me to sit down. Like a spectator at a masquerade I watch while Bobbio tells his story.

  And here it is. Together with the little I knew for myself:

  The Shekunas forced people to forsake the old gods, learn Arabic and pray in the new way. There were bonfires in every town and village. People were afraid. They carried their prayer mats to the fields, dropped to their knees and touched their noses to the ground every time a stranger approached.

  In the first few months that followed the meeting my father became suddenly more devout. Yes, I remember that. I thought little of it. I thought little of anything in those days. Where before he left his wives to their own devotions, during that time he demanded their presence in the mosque every Friday. I wore a head veil and accompanied my mother. We sat at the back of the mosque among the other women. Ya Namina, she took to accompanying him there every day. So did the two youngest wives, keen to demonstrate their obedience.

  Any activity Haidera said was haram, our father forbade. No more drinking palm wine in the village. Haram. Instead the old men sat out near the fields late at night passing the gourd from one to the other and wandered back towards the houses on unsteady legs at dawn. All matters connected with the old religion: charms, even the beads mothers hung around the waists of little children. Haram. Offerings of cakes and kola nuts at the graves of the dead. Haram. Dancing, drumming. Haram. The secret gatherings of women. Haram! Haram!

  It was our usual habit, on those nights when it was our mother’s turn to be visited by our father, to sleep in the house of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay. For those three nights we shared mats with their children. It was during one of those times, while he wandered through the darkness, that Bobbio saw them.

  A man striding. A woman pleading. Please. Please. Bobbio marches with matchstick straight legs and arms. Begs with a sideways bent body and clasped fingers. Points at me. Cradles an invisible baby in his arms. Your mother. My mother and my father. In the night. Your father is very angry. Hooded eyes, a rigid mouth. Now a sorrowful face. Your mother is crying. Bobbio follows them. At a distance. Ducking in and out of shadows. Down to the river.

  I wish Bobbio could speak. I wonder what they are saying to each other. Bobbio stares at me silently. Your mother. Yes? My mother. Bobbio looks around. Points beyond the trees in the direction of the houses. Something about the village? Our house? No! No! Madam Bah’s shop! Now, I am certain. The snuff. Of course. My father found out about us making snuff. Not good, but not so very bad. I let the air out of my chest.

  Bobbio shakes his head. Shoulders droop. For several moments we are silent, gazing at each other. My friend drops to his knees, mimes a person praying. The mosque. Praying in the mosque. Your mother. My mother is a Muslim? Shakes his head vigorously and waves a finger. Not. My mother is not a Muslim? Shakes his head despondently. Shrugs. Your mother is not a good Muslim.

  That evening my father had interrupted my mother in her room, as she read her fortune in the stones. My mother never looked for trouble, perhaps that’s why she wasn’t more careful. She never believed trouble might look for her. But at that time my father was in the grip of a fever, determined to end all the superstitions that marked us out as half-hearted Muslims. He demanded her stones.

  My mother pleaded. Crawling towards him, trying to touch his feet. I watched Bobbio grovel on the ground, holding illusory garments around imaginary breasts. Reaching out to touch invisible feet. O mama! I felt my heart pounding. My father stepped smartly back, refused to allow her to abase herself. Now Bobbio was up, chest out. He pulled her up. Bobbio grabbed me and held me against him. I felt myself go limp, just as my mother had. He threw up his arm. Scattered the stones to the stars.

  Bobbio could see in the dark,
almost. He noted where the stones had fallen. When my mother and father had gone he went closer, inspected the stones lying on the ground. Saw they were different to the ordinary river pebbles. He slipped back into the shadows. Left them there. That was all.

  A dark rock the shape of a man’s cigar. A broken pebble, open like a split plum. A stone with a dimple that fitted my thumb. A twinkling crystal. A pale three-cornered stone. I won’t say I found them quickly. Not at all. Bobbio helped me. But even then, there were some I never found, whose faces I did not remember as well as I imagined.

  The Ancestors, she called them. Her murmured chant, once engraved upon my brain, now suddenly was gone. The effort of remembering turned into a great rock. Then, when I finally abandoned the effort, the words appeared, like a sculpture carved out of sandstone. And now I recognise them for what they are.

  Names.

  The name of my mother’s mother. Of my grandmother. Of my great-grandmother and her mother. The women who went before. The women who made me. Each stone chosen and given in memory of a woman to her daughter. So that their spirits would be recalled each time the stone was held, warmed by a human hand, and cast on the ground to ask for help. And as the names emerged from the shadows, I saw how my father had destroyed my mother.

  Mama returned. She stayed for a while. Then one day she left again. Danced on the outskirts of villages where superstitious villagers, thinking she was possessed by the spirit of some siren, left food out for her. Nearer the town they chased her away with sticks and stones. Once, twice, maybe three times, she returned, but the restlessness was too great. She could not stay. Each time Pa Foday brought her back. Eventually the time came when she went away for good.

  As for Haidera Kontorfili, the authority of the Shekunas grew ever greater. He began to tell the world that the rule of the pothos was at an end. So the Europeans sent soldiers to arrest Haidera. The preacher swore he would never surrender. The Shekunas lay in wait on the opposite side of a bridge and killed the first man who tried to cross: a white man. Soon after, reinforcements arrived armed with guns.

  Haidera was killed in battle, they said. The hyenas feasted on his body. The order went out: taxes to be collected and defaulters punished. But Haidera’s followers claimed their leader had used his magic powers to evade his captors. He had transformed himself into a deer and galloped away.

  4

  Hawa, 1939

  Fish

  My life wasn’t supposed to be like this. But a lot of things happened to me that weren’t my fault. If things had been different, I could have been like you. Listen to what I am trying to tell you. The truth. The way it really was.

  I never had luck. Not like other people. Yet I stand by and watch other people win all the time. Two days ago my neighbour came back with banknotes flapping out of his pocket, the new ones, not even the old ones. He had bought a lotto ticket and won. Later he came with soft drinks and beer for everybody in the compound. By the time I arrived there the others had already helped themselves. My own one was flat, but I drank it just to show willing.

  People with bad thoughts were always taking my luck away. I was still a girl, I was gutting fish — slitting open the bellies with a sharp knife, pulling the gleaming dark mass from within. The fish were fresh, some still alive. Under the table cats darted in and out of our legs, snatching at the pieces that fell. One moment I was concentrating on my work, the next I felt a sharp pain in my foot that made me cry out loud. A dirty white cat stared up at me with cold blue eyes. Somebody tried to shoo it away. The cat clung to the ground with its claws. We waved our arms. It hissed back at us. One of the women, braver than the rest, threw a knife which clattered on to the ground. The cat jumped up on to the wall of the house and away. Later the same women would not look me in the face. They all knew it, you see. When a cat bites you, it’s a sure sign somebody out there is trying to change your luck for the worse.

  When I was a child I was always being blamed, blamed for everything. It was easy to make me the scapegoat because I had nobody to defend me. So in time I found ways to make my own luck.

  I remember a time of happiness.

  On the first day of fishing the women gathered with their nets at dawn on the edge of the village. Then there was not one among them who dared to begin without her. Yet she took her time, always. Dressed with great care. Oiled her scalp between the partings of her hair. A bracelet dangled from her wrists, around her throat a necklace of red and white beads. And when she was ready she would call for me to fetch her fishing net down from the hook on the wall. Then she walked, with deliberate steps, down past the houses towards the stream. Never breaking her stride. When they saw her they ceased their chatter and followed her.

  In those days she was my father’s favourite wife. She alone. If anyone tells you any different, they’re lying. This was the reason they waited for her. They knew she had my father’s ear. Whatever medicine the Tuntun had placed around the river would have been lifted. The day she collected her net and walked to the river — for all the women in the village that was the most assured sign.

  At the waterside she tucked the trailing cloth of her lappa into the waist and shook out her net. I ran forward and picked up the end — so it didn’t drag across the ground. I walked behind her as she waded in. When the water reached her waist she gripped the bamboo hoop firmly in both hands. I let go of the tail, and watched it swim after her.

  The way she walked — no concession to the rising water. The cloth around her waist swelled with air, and for a moment dragged behind her like a giant snail shell. Her breasts bobbed on the surface and her movements were as fluid as the water itself. Below the surface the outline of her body shifted into thousands of shapes. For a brief moment the sun caught her profile. She didn’t turn once. It was as though she were entirely alone.

  The shallows turned to churning mud in the rush that followed. The women slipped and scrambled down the bank into the water like buffalo on a collapsing cliff. They jostled for the prize spots close to the bank or else midstream, where the weed grew densely along a sand spit and the fish liked to conceal themselves in the shadows. The slow ones were left to drag the bottom of the river, scooping water and fish into the open mouths of their nets.

  Almost out of sight my mother walked on, between the banks of mangrove, heedless of the presence of water snakes and crabs. The boughs of the trees growing on opposite banks formed a bower over her head.

  She kept flowers in her house. My father teased her for it, but she loved them, even the yellow blooms from the coco yams and the pale orange okra blossom that grew in everybody’s garden. She picked them and put them in water. He built her a house opposite his own; he only had to look across to see her every day. That was where I lived as a small child with my two elder brothers. When he visited he insisted that she shared his food with him. Sat down next to him, like an equal, and ate from the same dish.

  I remember the sound of my father clapping his hands loudly and me running quickly to stand in front of them both. I bowed my head. ‘Eh bo! Will you look at this child. Taller with every day. How about a song for us? What songs do you know?’ My father was sitting with his legs crossed, wearing a loose-fitting green gown with a trail of embroidery down the front.

  I was nervous and I felt my face growing big and hot. I thrust out my chest and pushed my shoulders so far back I felt my shoulder blades touch each other behind my back. I began a song we children sang down at the fields when we were scaring birds from the crops. We would sing across to each other, high up on our platforms above the fields. It was a song known to anyone who had ever been a child.

  My father clapped, picking up the rhythm, and joined in with the reply. I remember how surprised I was at that. It was strange to think of my own father as a child and that once there were people who could tell him what to do.

  And yet I noticed things about my father. Outside he had a stern face, which did not care to smile. He built the mosque and was inside it five times every day.
He walked quickly. And people hurried around him, offering greetings, showing respect. A sober man. Yet I saw my mother do things nobody else did. He used to lie with his feet in her lap while she massaged them, pulling at his toes gently one by one. And I saw her hit him with a fan! Across his face, as though she were slapping him with the back of her hand, but using her fan instead. She touched him only lightly. Still, I had never seen anybody touch my father. For a long time I couldn’t remember what happened next. Maybe I had made myself forget. And then I realised the reason I couldn’t remember was that nothing happened. She hit him with her fan. Laughter. The conversation between them carried on.

  That evening my mother sang the next part. Where my father’s voice was heavy and rich, like the smell of the best coffee beans, my mother’s was high and clear as an empty sky.

  Then it was over. My father laughed and clapped again. He called me to sit by his side while he ate. I never could cross my legs properly, I don’t know why. My thighs ached and I was unable to take my eyes off his plate. Guineafowl stewed with honey and whole lemons. It was not a dish the other wives cooked. I hadn’t eaten. My stomach groaned loudly. My father laughed and his body shook. He held out a morsel of guineafowl in his fingers, and I reached up to take it from him. Then I remembered my mother. I hesitated. Hunger had prevented me thinking properly. Perhaps my father would consider me greedy. I glanced up at my mother, saw her slight smile, the way she inclined her head towards me. And I knew I had done well.

  That day, or maybe it was another time, my mother fetched the small seven-stringed guitar she owned. Lately, since I have been thinking about her, I have wondered where she learned to play such a thing. I have never seen a woman play one before or since, only the travelling players on market days.