Ancestor Stones

by Aminatta Forna

  But sometimes a child learns best by finding their own answers.

  Look at this lappa. You see a piece of cloth, isn’t it? Me? I see a head-tie. I see a skirt. I see a sling for a baby. I see a cloth to dry myself. I see a sheet to lay upon my bed. I see a covering for a door or a window. Or this empty tomato puree tin? You would just throw it into the rubbish, eh? But to the girl selling groundnuts here — it’s a cup to measure her sales. To that woman sitting behind her stall, it’s an oil lamp. To our way of thinking there are many ways of looking at the same thing.

  Sometimes you think you are trapped. Either you walk one way down the road or the other. A road to the left. A road to the right. Choose, it doesn’t matter which. Neither one is what you want. But sometimes, if you look very closely, you can see the path curling through the trees. Hard to see. But only because nobody has yet trodden it.

  Does any of this make sense to you? You think so? That means you don’t understand at all. Maybe I just have to tell you how it happened.

  ‘No married woman ever bore a bastard.’ Those words of my mother came back to me twenty years after she uttered them, soon after we buried my father.

  The year was 1985. I was watching those of his wives who had outlived him still sitting on the mat. Some had even come back from their families to sit there. Not cooking. Not fetching water. Doing no work at all. Spending their days idle while the rest of us waited on them hand and foot. These women would not bear a bastard, it would be a miracle if any of them bore a child at all. Most of them were older than me. But still, we must all pretend to wait and see. They would sit there for a whole other month, while everybody else looked after them. Because this was our custom and it was a very old one. Nobody would challenge it, for fear of being called disrespectful.

  Our father lived to be over a hundred years old. He had married eleven women and he was the father of some three dozen children, most of whom were believed to be his. But in the end he died alone. Out in a worker’s hut, surrounded by the forest and close to the fields he had gone out to inspect. He must have felt unwell and lain there to rest. The creatures of the forest found him first. My mother, Ya Namina was away. Ya Isatta should have been in charge, but she was a weak woman and least favoured of all the wives. And since nobody bothered to tell her anything, she thought he had gone to be with one of the others.

  The corpse was in an appalling state, the silence surrounding it confirming every suspicion. Still, the elders insisted my father had been dead no more than twelve hours, so like a good Muslim he could be buried the day he died.

  Cloths were hung in front of the windows. Photographs of my father displayed on every surface. Two bolts of black calico purchased and transformed into mourning robes. My mother instructed the tailor on the style in order to avert disagreement. She waved away all help, for she had already buried one husband, and by that time so had I.

  The day my mother made that remark about married women came soon after the birth of Alpha, my second child. I was still wearing black for my second husband, whom I mourned an entire year because I had loved him a great deal but also because it gave me more time alone. She had watched my belly with narrowed eyes, counting off the months in her head. An afternoon as I sat playing with my new son, she urged me to make myself respectable. In case there were other children waiting to come.

  My mother always thought I should have become a head wife like her, to have other wives to do as you say. She could not imagine how a woman could want anything else. But I was not married to my second husband for long enough to go looking for younger wives, even if I had wanted to. My husband was a good man, but too much given to discussing politics. Mostly he argued with his friend Pa Brima, and always both men ended up standing and shouting at each other across the table. Pa Brima was always the first one to sit down. One day, though, he stayed on his feet. My husband was greatly vexed. So much so that he came home still full of anger and sometime during the night choked to death on his own opinion.

  That night they had argued over whether everybody deserved a vote. One man, one vote. This was in the days before those sorts of elections. Pa Brima thought it was the most foolish thing he had ever heard. ‘You take some useless youth and you give his opinion the same weight as one of the elders?’ he demanded. Later he blamed himself, wept that he had killed his best friend. I remembered that argument of theirs years later, when we had elections but everybody already knew who would win. All of us with a vote, but nobody to vote for.

  After a respectable period, suitors began to appear. Don’t forget, this was a long time ago. I was still a woman many people considered to be attractive. I knew how to dress, how to carry myself. I knew how to keep house. I was still capable of bearing children, that much had been evidenced.

  The first man told me all about his many possessions. How many pairs of shoes he possessed, how many shirts. He even owned two Western-style suits as well as many dozens of robes and embroidered tunics. Oh, and so many other things! On his fingers he ticked them off one by one. Leather-bound copy of the Koran: one. Camel hair carpets: three. Electric fans: two. Transistor radio: one. Refrigerator: one. He handed me a picture of himself standing next to the fridge. Only in the photograph the fridge was a painted one, because it had been impossible to carry the real fridge all the way to the photographer’s studio. In my head I saw him one day counting me as one of his possessions. The two of us posing together for a photograph. Me, with flawless matt skin, gazing up at my husband: unblinking eyes, lips parted in a frozen smile, gleaming teeth. A perfect, painted wife.

  An old man stared at me through watery eyes, squeezed my breast with trembling fingers and told me to be at his house in the morning.

  The sabu who was representing the next suitor gave me one week to make up my mind. She had another prospective bride in mind. After three days she returned and told me to hurry up. Their number two choice was now in receipt of a rival offer.

  The fourth man had dead eyes and a shadow that seemed to follow him, hovering behind his shoulder. When he sat down he was entirely still, all except for his leg, which jigged up and down as though it had a life of its own.

  I turned them all down, but it seemed as though every time I answered the door another one fell over the threshold.

  * * *

  Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay did not sit on the mat. They stayed only a few days and returned to the house they had continued to share in Rofathane, coming back to help with the preparations for the forty-day ceremony.

  I watched how alike the two sisters had grown over the years. Throwing their heads back and clapping their hands when they laughed and they laughed easily, the same phrases, in the same lilting voice, the same gesture, wiping sweat from their foreheads with the insides of their wrists.

  Their father had been counsellor to the chief of a neighbouring chieftaincy. Jeneba and Sallay were the daughters of the same wife, belly sisters. Jeneba the eldest by about thirteen years. Their mother died before Sallay was old enough to remember her. And though she was wet-nursed by another of the wives, it was Jeneba who cared for her sister. Carried her everywhere, played with her, plaited her hair, bathed her and slept with her at night — like a favourite doll. Nobody called Sallay by her name, instead they called her Baby Jeneba. Jeneba’s marriage to my father was a dynastic one, agreed by the families. When the time came for Jeneba to leave for her new home, Sallay ran after the hammock bearing her sister away. She ran and ran until somebody picked her up and carried her back. She would not stay, so they tethered her to a tree by one leg like a goat. The child sat down and refused to eat or drink, or speak. Nobody had ever witnessed such stubbornness in one so young. Some wondered if she wasn’t one of those children who could exist on nothing but air. Whatever, if she took no food or water she would become a spirit one way or the other. The trouble was that every time they untied her, she ran away down the path and into the trees to find her sister.

  So they sent her to live with Jeneba. Such arrangements
were not uncommon. When Sallay reached marriage age, the two sisters wept anew at the thought of being separated. So another solution was found. Sallay became my father’s wife.

  While I searched for ways to forestall my fate, my daughter seized her own destiny. She had chosen her husband: a young man from a family of bakers, softly spoken as a result of a cleft in his palate. Towards me he kept his eyes lowered, but when he looked at Kadie his gaze burned with such intensity I half expected to see my daughter swallowed up in flames. He brought her sculptures made from dough. One was fashioned as a pair of doves, another a cat curled up asleep. As his wooing grew more determined so the sculptures became more elaborate: a deer standing between the trees, a man and a woman sitting side by side, a nest of baby birds.

  Kadie showed no interest in the wedding plans, was heedless of the negotiations over her bride gift. Whenever I showed her swatches of cloth she yawned and kissed me. ‘Whatever you think, mother,’ she said, before changing the subject back to her beloved.

  One evening as I looked at my daughter, I thought for the first time how much the nature of love had changed, so much so it was almost unrecognisable.

  And then I shook the thought out of my head, because I was her mother and, after all, one of us had to be practical.

  The stores in the city sold cloth far superior to any in our town. I stared at the towering piles of folded cloth behind the shop owner. So many to choose from! She was wearing a heavy woven cotton of dark red, shot with gold thread and the highest headdress I had ever seen. I decided to ask her advice.

  ‘What is the occasion?’ she asked me.

  I told her: my daughters wedding ashobi.

  ‘Come.’ She moved out from behind the counter, beckoning me over. From a glass-fronted cabinet on the other side of the room she pulled out bolts of the finest fabric I had ever seen.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, fingering an edge. Printed on two sides, too.

  ‘Sheku lappa,’ she said, ‘from Nigeria.’

  It was a hot day, she clapped her hands for two glasses of water while we settled down to make a deal. Many dozens of yards of fabric were required to make ashobi outfits for everybody. In the time it took to agree a price we talked of many things. I learned how she travelled to Lagos and brought back the cloth herself. How her shop was the first of three stores she planned. Another in the North and then the South. In time, outlets in the East and West as well. Hours passed before we concluded our business, both of us delaying the time when we would arrive at an agreement and our conversation would come to an end. I decided I liked this woman. I liked her broad, flat face, which was honest — especially for a shop owner. We exchanged names and parted company, but I thought about our conversation for a long time. After the wedding I left Alpha with my mother and travelled back to the city. I was a widow. My daughter had just married. I had negotiated her bride gift well and since my husband was no longer alive, all of it came to me. Well, not exactly all of it. There was family to consider, but even once those obligations were met, a good sum remained. Enough to go into business.

  Madam Turay shook her head at me: ‘Pack one good dress, but wear something not so good for the journey,’ she told me. I was wearing my best dress for the trip, I did not want to be shamed in the streets of Lagos.

  A saltwater wind whipped our faces as the ship gathered steam. The deck tilted first to one side and then to the other, making it impossible to stand and so we stayed huddled on the floor. I stared at the sea, which from a distance had seemed so inviting but now writhed and roared like a beast. The wind sculpted the water into great white crested waves. I felt certain we would soon all be dead. I could not understand how a boat made of iron could possibly float, but I saw no creases mar the features of Madam Turay’s flat face, so I told myself perhaps we would be all right. Madam Turay found us a place near the middle of the ship, close to the great chimneys where we were sheltered from the worst of it. I pitied the poor souls out there on the open deck in front of us, and I envied the paying passengers in their bunks down below. With each movement of the ship my stomach lurched, as though it had broken free and was rolling around my insides. Madam Turay lit a small stove and set about brewing us some tea. She told me to fix my eyes on the horizon. I did as she bid me and gradually I began to feel better. The horizon looked so close, I assured myself we would be there in no time at all.

  Three days and nights the ship sailed. The first night I watched the sun set behind the mountains. In the morning the coast had disappeared from view. Sometimes the sun was in one place and sometimes in another, but the horizon always stayed in the same place. When night-time came the sky burned with a million stars. But the sight of them was nothing compared to the sea. Hali! If I tell you how the sea glowed with sparkling green lights that came from the deepest parts and lit up the sides of the ship. To see it made my hair stand on end. A woman next to me — we were almost all women there — began to weep and pray. Another burst into song. A deckhand tried to calm them, telling us these were not supernatural beings but living creatures so tiny as to be invisible, but whose tiny bodies gave off a certain electricity. He took a pebble from his pocket and cast it into the sea, and where the pebble landed a flash of lights lit up the water. She did not believe him, and I only pretended to because I appreciated his good intentions.

  The next day I saw a black heron flying overhead. And then a praying mantis, weighed down by sodden wings, clinging to the railing. I put her in an empty cup until her wings dried out again. I saw the flags of a line of herring boats on the horizon. We were close to land.

  All morning it took for the ship to dock, my stomach flipping like a beached fish every moment. Despite the tea, my lips were parched and flaking. The salt glistened on my skin like powdered diamonds. My clothes, which had been soaked and dried several times, were now stiff as paper. Still, my discomfort was soon forgotten as I followed Madam Turay through the streets of the city.

  Lagos! It smelled quite like our city, and it looked and sounded a bit like it, too. But, oh, in every other way the difference between them was immense. Our city was a simple melody, whistled by a solitary man. Lagos was one hundred pipes, horns and drummers. There was so much to see, I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is the thing I remember most. The women! So tall and proud (and frequently hard faced), who wore their headdresses as high as the roofs of the houses.

  Madam Turay worked fast and I followed at her heels, my ears, eyes and brain absorbing everything. Shop owners pulled out bolt after bolt of fabric at the wave of her hand: Dutch Wax, batiks, prints. And other fabrics, delicate to the touch: cambric, georgette, crêpe de Chine, organza, brocade. Still others I had never heard of: shantung, duchesse, bombazine. The shopkeepers who were sometimes Indians and sometimes Syrians indicated which cloths were currently in fashion among the women of Lagos. Prices were agreed with a barely perceptible nod of the head. At night we returned to the house where we stayed with four other women. Two from Ghana. One from Guinea. Another from Upper Volta. All doing the same thing we were doing. All traders. Some buying. Some selling. The Ghanaian woman showed us some samples of cloth, heavy machine-loomed cotton in green, yellow and gold. She told us we could order in any colours we desired, for she was the owner of the factory where the cloth was made.

  Within two months of our return all the cloth we had bought was sold. Madam Turay was delighted. She had given me thirty lappas, each measuring two yards, to sell initially. She offered me a ten per cent commission, we agreed twelve. One evening I cooked and invited a number of women round to my house. After we had eaten I opened my chest, the big one my mother had once owned, and I displayed the lappas. For those who bought three I discounted the last. I encouraged the women to return the next week and bring a friend. Whenever a woman introduced me to a new customer she was rewarded with a discount on her next purchase.

  I followed Madam Turay to Lagos and then to Accra. Four months later we went into partnership and I began to make the trips alone
. The following year we opened a store right in the centre of town, close to the Agip petrol station and the place the long-distance buses arrived and departed. On the morning we raised the sign ‘Kholifa Turay Cloth Merchants’ there was already a sizeable crowd outside, we could only allow six inside at a time while the others waited outside, some under the shade of the awning, the ones at the back sweating in the sun.

  To my house I added a two-room extension for Ansuman and Kadie, who by now were expecting their first child. And one Friday, after prayers, we moved them in together with their small amount of furniture. Ansuman brought me a gift, a dough sculpture. It was a house, with a roof and a door and windows that opened to reveal children peeping from within.

  Later the same evening, long after the two had gone to bed, I sat outside on my stool at the back of the house fingering the keys on the belt around my waist, watching the patterns in the darkness, thinking about my dreams. Along time ago I learned how to read my dreams. Not in the way you’re imagining, with some kind of magic, but to look at them in such a way as allowed me to read what was in my own heart.

  In my dreams I lived in a house. A small house, not too big. Sometimes a round house, like the kind I was brought up in when my grandmother still lived. Whitewashed with painted shutters and a place to grow vegetables at the back. Other times a square townhouse with a new wing, like this one. In my dreams I lived in this house with my children, everybody fat and smiling.