Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  Sundays was the single day footwear was permitted on the school grounds. Between those times I practised walking until I was about the best in the school. At the end of that term my feet had already outgrown my shoes. Still I wore them for four more months before I was ready to give them up. I knew I’d never get another pair so soon. I simply learned to live with the pain.

  Now, how did it go? It went like this:

  Back to back,

  Belly to belly;

  I don’t give a damn

  ‘Cos I done dead already.

  After dark we used to sneak away from my grandmother’s house and gather outside the home of the half-Lebanese son of the garage owner, the only person in that place who owned a gramophone. It was he who used to play the Zombie Jamboree. Only certain kinds of women went to his house. Women who wore tight dresses and smoked cigarettes, who looked each other up and down and sideways beneath heavy lids and kept sullen faces, so they always looked like nothing around them was good enough. We called them High Life women.

  A floating population of us lived in my grandmother’s house. I really don’t have any idea who some of them were, but each child arrived with a claim of kinship, no matter how fragile. Parents who were short on funds sent their children to stay. And in return, my grandmother never sent their offspring back. She raised us well, though I don’t remember any active upbringing as such. No. Rather, we were like a collection of differently coloured and shaped bottles left out to collect rainwater, some half-filled, some almost empty. You learned from being around her what would earn a nod of approval or awaken a furious rage. I don’t remember her ever touching us, not even when we cried. And certainly we could not imagine her young, no matter how we tried. Yet somehow she left us all with the impression, like the afterglow of a radiant dream, of having been thoroughly loved.

  Still, we ran away from her when we could. First to watch the High Life women and strut to the Zombie Jamboree on our dance floor of dust, in the square of yellow light beneath the window of the garage owner’s son. Later, when the Lakindo clubs started to be held among the stalls of the empty marketplace, and before the elders banned them because so many men complained their youngest wives were disappearing at night to attend the dances, we used to hide and watch the couples dancing in the dark.

  We didn’t celebrate birthdays. We didn’t know when we had been born. Presents came occasionally, always unannounced, which made them all the sweeter. The year I turned approximately sixteen my grandmother returned from the market with a pair of red patent-leather shoes with real heels. The choice seemed so utterly unlike her in any way I wonder if later, when she looked with a different eye, she didn’t disapprove of her earlier self in buying those shoes. But I guess at the time she thought they were as smart as I did.

  I wore them to my graduation. And later to my first dance. In those days the dances began at four o’ clock in the afternoon. Yaya and I walked the three miles from home barefoot, we washed our feet at the standpipe and clumped into the dance in our shoes. The first time was a disaster. My feet sweated in the heat. Inside the plastic shoes they slipped and slid like eels in a bucket. Our dance routine collapsed, we stumbled over each other’s feet, bruises like purple and black pansies bloomed on our shins.

  From then on we wore our shoes to rehearse. At the next dance we rhumba’d like professionals. And for the first time I danced with somebody other than my brother.

  Janneh was five years older than me. A student at the university in the South. He had a voice the colour of deep water, tapered fingers, long legs with high calves and two scoops of muscle and flesh for his buttocks. He owned a motorbike. A motorbike! In those days few people even had bicycles, though you could hire one outside the petrol station. You couldn’t actually ride away on it, though. You sat on the back and they pedalled you to your destination.

  The Honda’s engine was as loud as the roar of a forest beast, it drowned out my screams. My skirt was bunched up between my legs, I pressed my knees together and held on to the padded seat between us. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, to actually put my arms around his waist. Going up a hill I felt myself sliding dangerously backwards. At the last moment I reached out and grabbed Janneh’s shirt, slid my arms around him. Down the other side my body was pushed against his. I felt my stomach flip. Just for a moment I pressed my nose against his shirt and breathed in. A warm, pungent smell, cloudy and pure at the same time. Like the smell of crumbled chocolate. Or new puppies.

  My legs were trembling as I let myself into the house. From gripping with my thighs on to the motorbike, I told myself. Only once I was in bed did I remember Yaya, who walked all the way home alone. My brother did not dance with me for days.

  The first elections were held four years before we were supposed to become independent. So the people could practise voting, I suppose. We were allowed to choose our own Prime Minister and some members of the cabinet, although the British would still tell them what to do. That way the Prime Minister could practise his new job without the burden of actually having to make any real decisions. They gave us the cow but kept hold of the tether.

  The second time, though, it was for real. Janneh told me he had written a paper about the ways our constitution needed to be changed; it had been published in a newspaper. The motorbike belonged to the People’s Progress Party. Janneh travelled with a cardboard box of fliers and posters strapped to the pillion seat. The posters bore a picture of the PPP’s candidate, a man with a parting cut like a railway track into his hair and small, pursed lips. A week after I met Janneh, I stopped to look at one of the posters on a pillar box at the post office.

  ‘Mouth like a goat’s anus,’ said the man behind me to the albino boy shining his shoes. ‘Doesn’t stand a chance. Tell me why they even bother coming to stand here, eh?’

  The albino was silent. He flexed the shoeshine cloth and pulled it back and forward across the toe of the man’s right foot. When he spoke his voice was high and light as the sound of a bamboo flute: ‘They say they have candidates all over the country. Every constituency. One people. One country.’

  ‘Parah!’ replied the first man. ‘Let them take this one back to where he came from. Give us our own sons first.’

  The wind whipped our faces like a damp cloth, we flew through clouds of dust. At the sides of roads upon which no other vehicle travelled, we stopped to picnic. From high on an escarpment we watched a tornado spin across the plain below, watched people trying to outrun the gathering storm as it rumbled across the landscape, bearing down upon them like a snorting bull. Behind it the sky shone blue. And on the horizon a rainbow arced across the sky. On our way back down the dirt track crumbled and slid away under our wheels. In the next town we pasted the goat man’s image over the face of the candidate for the opposing party. We handed out fliers to passers-by. At the kiosk where we stopped and Janneh treated me to my first taste of popcorn the vendor took a flier from a stack on his counter, folded it into a funnel shape and poured popcorn into it. Then he sprinkled greyish salt all over the popcorn and the goat man’s crumpled features.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Janneh. ‘Actually, it’s a fine thing. Helps spread the word. More people than ever get to hear our name.’

  I asked Janneh why people said his candidate, whose name was in fact Sulaiman Bio, would not win.

  ‘Says who?’ he asked, pushing his eyebrows together.

  I told him about the man at the post office.

  ‘The decision is in the hands of the people. They know what they want. They know what is right for them. And they know their rights.’ It was something I had heard him say before. When Janneh spoke he always sounded impressive. And yet, it seemed to me, talking to him felt like chasing butterflies. The words were beautiful, but their meaning was sometimes hard to catch.

  Another day Janneh asked me if I wanted to be a returning officer. I was so flattered I said yes straight away, with no idea what I was being asked to do.

  My post was a
rice-weighing station in a town I had never been to before. I was given a seat behind a desk upon which were heaped piles of voting papers and a long list of names. At my feet, a metal ballot box. Two more boxes, wooden this time, were placed at one end of the room next to each other. A thin curtain suspended on a wire hung between them. The officer in charge gave me the key to the metal box and said he would be back to collect it at the end of the day.

  Polling started at seven-thirty sharp! I pushed at the door of the station, which was really a shed, and the sunlight streamed in, lighting up the rice dust suspended in the air. I picked up a pile of papers and stood there in readiness.

  An hour later I went back to the desk and sat down on the chair. I straightened the papers, arranging them into two neat stacks. The list of names and the pen I placed in front of me. I strolled back to the door and looked out. Two men were coming down the lane. I turned and hurried back to the desk. I watched them as they strolled past the open door without turning once. I got up and stared down the road after them.

  Outside the station posters fluttered faintly in the breeze. It had rained in the night. Damp patches of ground steamed gently in the sun. The leaves on the trees shone bright as jewels. Tiny black midges danced across the puddles. A man with a rolled umbrella appeared before me. I stepped aside.

  ‘Are you here to vote?’

  ‘How much for a bushel?’

  I smiled. I explained who I was. I was the returning officer for the elections. The rice station would be operating again tomorrow. In the meantime he could come in and vote.

  ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘Today. The elections are being held today, to decide who should head the Government.’ I gestured with my hand towards the polling booths. The man hesitated and then stepped inside. I continued: ‘What’s your name? I have to mark it on the list to say you’ve voted.’

  The man told me his name: ‘Abu.’

  ‘Abu?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Abu what? What is your father’s name?’

  ‘Abu Kamara.’

  I traced my finger down the list. There were a lot of Kamaras. Dozens, in fact. Oddly no Abu. I checked. ‘Abu, yes?’ Yes. ‘Do you have another name that you use? A middle name?’ He said he did not. Alfred Kamara. Alhaji Kamara. Maybe this man had been to Mecca. ‘Are you a Muslim?’

  ‘I am a Muslim.’

  That seemed to me to be good enough. He had a vote, I just couldn’t find it. I did not want to disappoint him or lose my first client. I placed a tick next to the name Alhaji Kamara and handed him a voting form. I told him to go into the booth and select his candidate, and then to press his thumb into the purple ink pad to sign and again on to the bottom of the form, unless, that is, he knew how to write his name.

  He had one question. ‘Who is it I am voting for?’

  ‘You vote for the candidate of your choice.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘Your choice is your own. I can’t tell you that.’ The man stood and gazed at the paper in his hand. He moved neither forward nor back.

  ‘So who did you vote for?’ he asked. I hadn’t voted. I hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘Sulaiman Bio. The people’s choice.’ I cited the campaign literature. ‘People’s Progress Party.’

  ‘The people’s choice?’

  I smiled, nodding. Said it again. The people’s choice. The choice of the people. That way round it sounded like a foregone conclusion. The man moved towards the booth. ‘Third one down,’ I added, to be helpful.

  Minutes later he departed with a purple thumb and a purple stamp on the back of his hand to stop him from trying to vote again.

  Later in the afternoon I kicked off my red shoes and rubbed the soles of my feet. From time to time I went to the door to try to encourage passers-by, such as there were, to come inside. Still no one came. I went back to the desk and gazed idly at the list of names. I felt like a hostess who had been snubbed by her guests.

  I let my eyes run down the list. Name upon name.

  Like ladder rungs.

  Railway track sleepers.

  Or a row of sleeping children.

  Players waiting to be picked for a team.

  First I stole Jeneba Turay’s vote. I took it as my own. I reckoned by now she wasn’t coming, whoever she was. Since I hadn’t voted anywhere else I didn’t see how it could possibly matter. I pressed my right thumb into the ink pad and then on to the bottom left of the voting slip.

  With an hour to go before the election was over, two votes lay in the cavern of the ballot box, like visitors in an empty church. So I spent the remainder of the time filling it up: creating signatures and using up the fingers of one hand and then the other and finally each of my toes to create fictional thumb prints. At six o’ clock I closed the door and waited for the box to be collected. I kept my inky hands folded behind my back while the men heaved it into the back of a van along with the others.

  On the Honda I clung tight to Janneh as we raced through the towns and villages. The votes were being counted. People were dancing in the streets. We were still travelling when the moon joined the sun in the sky. On the road raindrops thudded like silver bullets into the dust. We left the bike at the side of the road and ran across the fields to shelter in a kabanka. And there, for the first time, we made love. Tracing trails of shivers across each other’s skin with the tips of our fingers. Moving to the rhythm of the rain as the storm gathered force above us. Drowning in a smell like crumbled chocolate and newborn puppies.

  In the morning we stepped out to shower ourselves clean in the rain. And lay sparkling on a bed of stones while the sun dried our skin. Though neither of us knew it, this was the last time we would be alone together. Soon after, Janneh headed back south where he became Information Officer of the National Students’ Union. I graduated with honours in my West African School Certificate and won a scholarship to study in England. We tried to stay in touch, but you know how these things go. I missed him, of course. But so many things were happening in my life I could not carry on minding for too long.

  After much counting and recounting the results of the first election ever to be held in our soon-to-be republic were announced. On the radio the BBC World Service described it as a mixed verdict. An opportunity missed, they said. An African election marred once again by the blight of the tribal vote. In almost every ward people had voted for members of their own ethnic group regardless, it seemed, of the qualities of other candidates.

  One or two of the local newspapers, however, noted one small exception: the successful candidacy and surprise win of one Sulaiman Bio, representative of the People’s Progress Party. A southerner, who had succeeded in defeating his rival candidates in an otherwise totally northern stronghold.

  SECRETS

  10

  Hawa, 1965

  The Music of Flutes

  Well I suppose. Better I tell you than you hear it from one of the others.

  Remember once you had some boyfriend you broke up with, and how you came home and refused to leave your room? You stayed inside moping, weeping, wouldn’t eat. All this for a man you didn’t even want. You told me you loved him, and yet it was you who refused to be with him. ‘It won’t work,’ you cried. ‘We are too different!’ What does this mean? I thought to myself, this girl can have whatever she wants and still she’s unhappy. Ever since then I have wondered at the world, how everything has changed and yet nothing has changed.

  For me it was the other way. I had a husband, but he was not the man I loved. Everybody told me I could not have the man I wanted. Too different, they said, it won’t work. And they kept repeating these words, as if they were praying for it to come true.

  For weeks I couldn’t get the stink of burned coffee out of my nostrils. The odour clung to my clothes, my hair, my skin; coating everything like an invisible film of shame. I didn’t shed myself of it until I left the village and went to live in the town. I had been betrothed, but of course my marriage plans went up
in smoke along with the plantation. The groom’s family began to argue about the bride gift. Some time later another man was found for me who worked in the slaughterhouses. By then my choices were few. This man was so poor I became his only wife. I started my married life working like a servant.

  Now instead of the smell of burned coffee I suffered the stench of dead animals. At night my new husband came to me. His skin smelled like an animal hide, his hands of blood, his breath of viscera. I pushed him away and told him to wash himself before he touched me. Then I would lie and listen to him out in the yard throwing water from the bucket over himself with a ladle. In the first year of our marriage he liked to whistle as he washed himself. Then he would come back to me, still whistling. But that kind of smell doesn’t wash off. So I pretended to be asleep, knowing he would never dare bother me.

  I can’t say I either liked him or disliked him. I was prepared to live with him. To accept my fate for what it was. But always he wanted something more. My fate was no longer in my own hands. A marriage cannot be pulled apart easily as a dam in a river. When he caught me wrinkling my nose, he would tell me at least his was honest work, good work. And it was true we ate meat every day. Sometimes twice. Evenings he would arrive home with a parcel under his arm: maybe a rack of ribs, a sheep heart, a skirt of beef. If he was trying especially to please me he brought a cow foot. I’d put it in a pot with thyme, tomatoes and hot peppers. Boiled for four hours, it was tasty and tender as chicken.

  There was so much meat; we had meat to spare. I wrapped up what was leftover and gave it to my other mothers, my father’s wives who clasped my hands to their hearts as they thanked me. At those times I would give a small smile, incline my head slightly. Shrugging off their thanks. As if it cost me nothing to do.

  And though I didn’t encourage my husband I fulfilled my duties. I bore him three children. All boys. I lost two more. They were girls, and might have grown up to help me around the house. But there it is. Nothing to be done. What more could any man ask for? Each time my belly swelled, he would kneel, press his cheek against it and close his eyes. He stopped speaking for days after each of the two babies returned. Really, he was as tender and sentimental as a woman! Of course I regretted it, too. But deep down in my heart I saw it was for the best. I knew I could not stay this man’s wife for long.