Praise Song for the Butterflies

by Bernice L. McFadden

  “Father?”

  The priest swiped the back of his hand across his lips, gazed down at the partially eaten mango, and chuckled. “My son, why are you so worried?”

  Duma’s eyes bulged. “Have you not heard anything I’ve read?” He shook the paper at his father.

  “Yes, yes, I heard every word.”

  “And?”

  “Help me up.”

  When the priest was on his feet again, he planted his hands firmly on Duma’s shoulders. “Listen, my son, there is nothing to be concerned about. No man’s law can change the commandments that have been put in place by the gods.” He gave his son a squeeze. “The Ukemban government has no jurisdiction here.” And with that, he turned and started the long trek back through the groves.

  Duma was so relieved, he tore the newspaper into long shreds and tossed them high into the air.

  * * *

  Abeo was working in a nearby field when one of the girls spotted the swirling papers and nudged her. “Look,” she cried happily, “butterflies!”

  Abeo glanced up and for one fleeting moment her spirit soared. Indeed, at that distance, the bits of newspaper did appear to be a cluster of white butterflies. Abeo watched until the air went still and the false butterflies dropped out of sight.

  It was 1998 and Abeo was twenty-two years, eight months, and seventeen days old.

  * * *

  After that first time with Duma, Abeo had made an attempt to escape. One dark night, she shook Juba and the other girls awake.

  “I’m leaving here.”

  “To go where?”

  “Home.”

  “Home? Your family doesn’t want you. Our families don’t want any of us.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Abeo whispered. “Come with me.”

  “No, no, we can’t,” Juba cried. “We’ll be caught, or worse, killed by wild animals.”

  “I’d rather be dead than here,” Abeo scoffed.

  She stole out into the black night. Her heart roared in her ears as she streaked into the cornfields. There was no moon that night, so Abeo was forced to move blindly through the rows of corn. She felt something brush against her cheek, cried out, and took off in the opposite direction. She thought she heard feet pounding behind her, and dropped to the ground, pressing herself against the dry earth.

  Finally, confident that she wasn’t being pursued, Abeo rose to her feet and carefully trekked her way through the darkness.

  She had no idea that she was moving in circles.

  Weary, but thinking she had traveled a great distance from the shrine, Abeo laid down to rest and in a moment was fast asleep. When she opened her eyes, it was morning and Duma was looming over her with his belt coiled around his fist. He used the buckle end to whip Abeo all the way back to her hut.

  * * *

  By the time the government placed a ban on ritual servitude, Kenya had birthed two children and Nana was blind. The rumor that circulated among the trokosi was that Duma had flown into a rage, plucked out her eyes, and consumed them with his evening meal. Nana’s disability prevented her from working in the fields, so every day at dawn she was driven into town, given a bowl, and left to sit, begging for change beneath a neem tree.

  Juba was long dead. When her time had arrived, she’d fought like a wildcat—kicking Duma between his legs before fleeing to the river. There, Duma tackled her to the ground and stunned her with one hard blow to her nose. He mounted her right there on the wet soil. When Duma was done, he left her sprawled on the riverbank gazing at the stars.

  Juba eventually sat up, announced to the rising sun that she was eleven years old, and drew two long lines in the dirt. “Eleven,” she whispered. “See, I still remember my numbers.”

  After that, she walked over to a golden shower tree dripping with yellow blooms. She climbed up into the branches, removed her robe, and fashioned it into a noose.

  Juba’s dead body stayed hidden for days behind the veil of lush green leaves and broad yellow petals, and might have remained concealed forever if not for the buzzards.

  27

  At one hundred and four years, the old priest finally died, leaving his eldest son as his successor.

  Under Duma’s rule, the shrine became a brothel, with men from the surrounding villages paying Duma to have sex with the girls.

  Those men would slither into the huts, drunk with beer, calling through the darkness, “Sweet girl, sweet girl . . .”

  They’d force their fingers into the young mouths. “Start with this,” they’d murmur, “and work your way down.”

  Sometimes fathers brought their sons—schoolboys who barely understood the workings of their own bodies, never mind that of a woman’s.

  They were all the same to Abeo: fathers, sons, old men, young boys, Duma—all deplorable, all despicable.

  So no, Abeo didn’t know who had fathered her son, a son who looked a lot like her baby brother—but the not-knowing didn’t make her love the child any less.

  * * *

  With baby Pra secured safely to her back, Abeo hoisted the basket filled with roasted corn into the cab of the truck and climbed in. The vehicle belched smoke as it rumbled down the narrow rutted road that emptied into a wider artery pocked with craters.

  Their destination was the busy town of Aboão, which sat on the border between Ukemby and Togo. The streets of Aboão bustled with travelers, most of whom were young white foreigners armed with Bradt travel guides, strapped with colorful backpacks. Money hawkers stood on every corner bellowing the exchange rates for the day. They were often drowned out by the noise of the vans that inched through the streets blaring funeral announcements from loudspeakers.

  With the baskets atop their heads, the girls joined the bedlam of street hawkers. They moved fluidly between the automobiles. Ambivalent to the blistering sun, the burn of exhaust smoke against their calves, and the watching eyes of their overseers. They shouted out the day’s prices:

  “One cendi!”

  “Fifty pese!”

  “Two cendi!”

  “Eighty-five pese!”

  Money and product exchanged hands until the baskets were empty.

  * * *

  Taylor Adams sat at a roadside café sipping a Coke. Her eyes ping-ponged between the girls and the men who watched them.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” said her friend Allen.

  Taylor barely glanced at his nutmeg-colored face. A wisp of a smile bloomed and died on her lips.

  Allen followed her eyes with his own. “Yes, I know.”

  “It’s disgusting,” she spat. “They haven’t had a drink of water in . . .” she looked down at her wristwatch, “at all!”

  Allen eyed the glass jug of water on the table between them.

  “It’s ninety degrees in the blasted shade, for goodness sakes,” Taylor continued angrily.

  Taylor had first traveled to Ukemby in 1994 with her then-boyfriend and his church and had become instantly smitten with the people and the culture. It was during that trip that she first learned of the practice of ritual servitude in Ukemby. These innocent children, almost always female, were known by a variety of names, but the most common term was trokosi. As far as Taylor was concerned, this practice was just slavery by another name.

  During that trip, Taylor had attended a church service where the minister spoke passionately against the practice. He and his family had taken into their home a young woman who had been trokosi but had fled the shrine to live in the streets, begging for food. Taylor had listened with tears in her eyes as the young girl, Abenda, shared her story with the congregation.

  “I was taken to the shrine at the age of five. While there, I was fed little food and was forced to work in the fields twelve hours a day. When I stole food, I was beaten with a stick. I had my first child at the age of eleven, my second at thirteen. I ran away even though I was told that if I did so, my family would die. I ran away to my family and my mother and father shunned me. They said I had brought shame on the
m. They threw stones at me and ordered me to go back to the shrine, but I refused. I preferred to live in the street like a dog than go back to that hell.”

  Taylor returned to New York a changed woman. The plight of the trokosi hovered over her like a rain cloud. She could not get Abenda’s story out of her mind.

  She tried to research the practice but found that there was little information available. This frustrated and angered Taylor, so she began to send letters to major newspapers and television stations. Won’t someone please do a story about this? she wrote.

  But no one responded. Apparently, little black girls being enslaved, raped, and tortured a continent away wasn’t newsworthy.

  Taylor Adams was the only child of a black mother and a white army officer who had abandoned the family just one year after she was born. That desertion formed Taylor’s negative opinion of white people and so she despised them and everything about them that she saw in herself, including her hazel eyes, light skin, and silken curls.

  For a while, in order to combat the part of her she hated, she overamplified her blackness; for years she only wore her hair in cornrows, and when those cheap gold door-knocker earrings fell out of style, Taylor continued to sport them with pride, because to her they felt unequivocally Black with a capital B.

  She attended Howard University even though she had also been accepted to Yale. As a college student, Taylor was active in several Black Power organizations, and she graduated as a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

  It took decades, but eventually Taylor made peace with her European DNA, so much so that after years of rejecting Caucasian suitors she finally stopped saying: Hell to the no! and dated a few white men.

  But the revelation that her African brothers and sisters were practicing the same atrocities that white men had engaged in centuries earlier placed Taylor between a rock and a hard place. If she revived her hate and turned it on the Africans, on the very roots of who she claimed to be, then wouldn’t she once again be hating one-half of herself?

  She was old enough to know that hate didn’t fix problems—it only made things worse.

  Taylor began with sending hefty donations to church groups that helped the young women who had escaped the shrines. For a while, that sated her need to help, but soon she was worried that her dollars were not actually being spent efficiently. She’d read one article after the next about so-called charitable organizations hoarding donations for their own personal gain. One article alleged that only ten cents of every dollar donated made it to the intended recipients. That little slice of knowledge had come as a shock to her, and while Taylor didn’t completely cut her purse strings with the church groups, she did reduce the amounts she donated.

  Her epiphany came while watching a documentary on Mahatma Gandhi. The next day, his words still pulsing in her mind, Taylor walked into her office at IBM, sat down at her desk, and stared at the blank screen of her computer monitor until her secretary brought her a cup of coffee and asked if she was feeling okay.

  “Yes, yes, I’m just fine. I’m better than fine,” Taylor said, and then stood up, gathered her things, and left.

  A day later she put her Midtown apartment on the market, sold her car, emptied her savings account, cashed in her stocks, and closed her 401(k). It was only then that she called Allen and told him what she had done.

  Allen was flabbergasted. “What? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Nope!”

  “Are you having a mental breakdown?”

  “No, I’m having a breakthrough.”

  Taylor was forty-seven years old and childless, with no prospects of marriage. Her mother was deceased. She did have several cousins in the Midwest with whom she exchanged Christmas cards, but otherwise there was little communication.

  She had made a lot of money in her position as a director at IBM, but money was overrated, and it hadn’t bought her love or fulfillment. So what was she really doing with herself besides working toward an early grave? She always knew there was more to life than what met the eye, but she never in a million years thought that more would be thousands of miles away in Ukemby.

  “So you’re just going to move to Africa? Just like that?” Allen asked.

  “People do it every day.”

  “It’s all so sudden. What brought this on?”

  “Mahatma Gandhi said something like, Be the change that you wish to see in the world, and I’m going to do just that!”

  Of course she convinced him to come along—after Allen weighed the pros and cons, the pros won out. After all, he was between relationships and his dream of becoming a world-renowned artist was a long time coming. And while he loved teaching art to middle-school children in the San Francisco public school system, as of late he was finding it less inspiring and more and more stifling.

  But still . . . Africa was so far away and so foreign.

  Taylor had pressed: “You don’t have to stay forever, just come and experience it. I think it might change your life. It certainly changed mine.”

  * * *

  They spent the winter traveling around the country, communing with the people, and absorbing the culture.

  Allen became especially fascinated with the names of the shops and the colorful adornments displayed on the buses, taxis, and tro-tros.

  Only God Knows Provisions and Cosmetics

  All for the Lord Hamburgers and Franks

  No Jesus, No Life. Know Jesus, Know Life!

  Chastity Is a Lifestyle

  When the time came for Allen to return to the States, he looked at Taylor and stated, “Maybe I’ll extend my visa for another month and spend the spring here with you.” That extension had led to another, and then a letter to the board of education explaining that he would not be returning in the fall, but hoped to see them the following winter. Then a new Ukemban summer arrived and Allen was still there.

  * * *

  Taylor never imagined herself the type of person to live in the country. She fancied herself a city girl, but when she and Allen decided that they would spend a week in the eastern part of Ukemby known as the Zolta region, Taylor found herself seduced by the lush countryside and fell head over heels in love with a ten-acre plot of land located just outside of Ketak.

  The property was forested with acacia and baobab trees. The grass was a stunning emerald green sprinkled with wildflowers. There was a dilapidated mud hut and a well that provided fresh drinking water.

  “It looks like an oasis,” Allen swooned.

  She purchased it for a little over fifteen thousand cendi, approximately ten thousand US dollars. To celebrate, the friends splurged on an overpriced bottle of South African champagne, took it back to the property, and drank it beneath the evening sun.

  “So what are you going to call it?” Allen asked.

  Taylor thought for a moment. The only name that fit was the word that came to mind when she’d first laid eyes on the land: “Eden.”

  Allen nodded. “Good name. What are you going to build on it?”

  Taylor rested her head on his shoulder. “A life.”

  * * *

  That was nearly three years ago and now Allen was calling her name and waving his hand in her face: “Taylor? Earth to Taylor!”

  She jerked back to reality, abruptly stood up, snatched the glass jug of water from the table, and marched from the shade of the eatery directly toward Abeo.

  “Here you go,” Taylor offered, thrusting the jug at her.

  Abeo took a step back. Her eyes dropped briefly to the jug before she shook her head and inched bashfully away.

  Taylor followed her. “Please, take it. I know you are thirsty. At least give some water to your baby.”

  Abeo’s frightened eyes drifted over to the driver who was already charging toward them.

  “Hey you!” the man called out.

  Taylor whirled around. “What?”

  The young man was taken aback by the fearlessness on Taylor’s face. “You, miss, you want to buy somethin
g or what?”

  “No.”

  “Then go away.” He waved his hand in her face as if she were a mosquito.

  Taylor pulled her shoulders back and stood her ground. “I will not.” She turned to Abeo again. “Please, please at least give the baby a few sips.”

  Abeo stood frozen, her eyes locked on the angry face of the driver.

  “Hey lady,” the driver stepped between them, “you are harassing my worker. Either buy something or piss off!”

  “Worker? You mean slave, don’t you?”

  The driver took a menacing step toward Taylor. Her grip tightened around the jug. She so badly wanted to smash it into his face, but Allen was on her by then, pulling her backward by the shoulders.

  “Come on, Taylor.”

  “Yeah, lady, listen to your boyfriend before you get hurt.”

  Taylor was quiet on the ride back to Eden. When Allen turned the car onto the road that led to the property, her mood seemed to lift and her eyes brightened. No matter how bad she felt, the beauty of the place never failed to astound and amaze her. The majestic baobab trees that lined either side of the road were in flower.

  Allen steered the car with great caution, his eyes watchful for the resident pets—two cats and three ragtag mutts. Are you trying to build a women’s shelter or a zoo? Allen had joked when she brought the last dog home.

  The first dormitory of Taylor’s shelter was completed, a simple cinder-block building comprising eight bedrooms. The second building, which would house the classrooms, was currently under construction.

  Allen pulled the car to a stop and he and Taylor climbed out.

  Abdula, a tall, sinewy Muslim, appeared from behind the completed building. He was carrying a machete; his dark skin shimmered with perspiration.

  Allen raised his hand in greeting.

  “Hello, Abdula,” Taylor cried. “How goes it today?”

  Abdula responded in his broken English, “Everything is good. You come and see.”

  There were three other men working at clearing the field behind the buildings. They were using nothing but their machetes, and the land looked as clean as if it had been cleared with machines.