by Fiona Zedde
She shouldered him aside to get to her place by the fire and to the bowl that was already waiting for her. “Cleaner than you at least.” She wrinkled her nose and the scent of the forest and the day’s hunt that still clung to him.
They ate their meal, laughing and sharing stories about the things they’d done that day. Ny, of course, said nothing about meeting Duni although her brothers gave her laughing looks over their food. The meal wound down into soft silences and sighs of contentment, bellies patted, and shared plans for the next day.
Ny’s lashes were fluttering low when her mother gently nudged her shoulder. “We have things to tend to before you fall asleep, my rain and sun.”
She stirred at the familiar love-name, the one her mother called her when she didn’t want to say Ny was her favorite, her only girl child who Yemaya had gifted her with. “Yes, Iya.”
Offering wishes for a good sleep, she and her mother left the others for the cooking hut to tend to the gazelle. The meat was still fresh, beautiful and glistening in the night. Her mother lit the torches and pulled the stools out for them to begin their work. She’d already prepared the brine for the meat while Ny and her brothers hunted so all they had to do was wash the meat again, cut it up, and settle the pieces in the large jugs of brine where they would lay for several days.
“Your brother tells me you were watching the married women today.”
Ny hissed. She could kill Nitu. He was always talking, especially about what everyone else was up to, when he should just shut his mouth. “Yes. We saw them heading to the river on our way to the hunt.”
“One day you will be married too, my daughter. You just have to decide if you want to be with a man or a woman. Once you decide, I’m sure it will be easy to make a good match for you.”
Ah. Aspirations to marriage. If Nitu had told their father the same story, Ny was sure Baba would’ve guessed correctly, not about her want for marriage but her desire to bed a married woman. She loved her mother’s soft and kind spirit. She would never even consider the idea that her daughter had impure motives.
“I already decided, Iya. When the time comes, I’ll marry a woman.”
“But that time is far away, Nyandoro. You’re still a child.”
This again. Why did everyone seem determined to see her as a child? “I’m not, Iya.” She lowered the piece of meat into the brine, careful not to let it touch her hands and begin to roughen the skin. “I’ll have twenty seasons very soon.”
Her mother flinched. The meat fell into the cask, splashing up and into her mother’s face. She cried out, hands flying up toward her eyes.
“Iya!” Ny grabbed her hands before they could make contact. “Don’t move.”
She grabbed a pot of clean water, tilted her mother’s head back and poured the water over her face, into her eyes. Her mother was never this careless. Never. Ny picked up a clean cloth from the stack on the table.
She gasped, eyes red and running with water. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.” Her mother put a hand out, blindly fumbling for something to wipe her face. Ny gave her the cloth.
She touched her mother’s hair. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, yes. I…I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing.” She patted her skin with the clean towel Ny gave her.
“You should go outside. I’ll finish here. It won’t take me long.” At her mother’s doubting look, she gave a rueful smile. “You can come back and check on the quality of my work tomorrow.” She took the now damp cloth from her mother. “Go and have a bath. Rest.”
Her mother looked as if she might protest, then she touched her cheek with the tears still rushing down its creased curve. “All right.” She stood up, seeming older in that moment, a hand pressed to her back as she rose from the low stool. “Thank you for doing this.”
“It is my duty to see to your comfort, honored one.” She bowed before her mother, a subject to her queen. She rose with a teasing grin.
Her mother pinched her hip, an effort at a smile twitching her mouth. When she stepped through the doorway of the cooking hut and disappeared into the night, Ny’s tentative smile disappeared altogether.
When her mother left, she finished the curing of the meat, carefully slicing the last of the batch how her mother preferred and sealing them in the barrels. She was exhausted, but it wasn’t the kind of exhaustion that wanted sleep. She wanted instead another chance at the river, another kiss from Duni, another everything. But she made do with a bath in the outdoor tub her father had installed for the family many seasons before, another eccentricity her mother insisted on.
Instead of soaking like she would at the river, she quickly washed any remnants of brine from her body, the sweat and stink of the meat. In her room, she smoothed jacaranda oil over her skin and quickly plaited her hair.
Her brothers were all gathered with their father in the sitting room when she arrived, seated on low stools and re-wrapping their spears while their father sat in his customary chair, smoking his pipe.
“Baba.” She sat on the animal furs near his feet.
“Nyandoro, your brothers tell me you have been into mischief today.” His eyes twinkled in the torch lights.
Never wanting to limit her life experiences (in his words), her father was always the first to encourage Ny in whatever foolishness she was doing.
“My brothers talk too much,” Ny said.
She’d brought her spear from the room to tighten the leather and sharpen the edge of the blade. But she’d also brought her kora in case she felt like playing. Her father was in a storytelling mood, she realized from the teasing start to his conversation.
“Do they only talk too much when they tell your secrets?” He chuckled.
He was a diplomat, the official who organized trade with nearby villages, often brokered difficult marriage contracts. But at heart he was as much of a gossip as Nitu.
“It’s only human to want something that doesn’t belong to you.” He pulled the pipe from his lips. “Did I tell you that when I met your iya, she wasn’t meant to be mine?”
Her brothers groaned.
“You’ve already told this story, Baba,” Kizo said. He was the only one who had the courage to say it.
Ny laughed but played her part. “No, Baba, I did not know that.” Since she was a child, he’d told that story, or at least various versions of how he’d met their mother. The story always seemed to change and reflect the point he was trying to make.
He looked at her with approval, smoke puffing from his pipe toward the open roof of their hut. Her brothers cut their eyes at her.
Her father pretended not to notice. “On the evening I met her, I was supposed to get engaged to a girl from another village. The arrangements had all been made. The girl’s family was a more powerful one than mine with closer connections to their chief, but my family had more money. It wanted to buy itself two more paces closer to the position of chief.”
He paused to blow smoke rings into the air, his eyes at a thoughtful droop. “My family badly wanted this match,” he said. “I was unattached and had no woman resting in my heart so the arrangement was fine with me. But while at the feast where my engagement was due to be announced, I had a sudden fever.” The smoke wound around his head like the heat that must have flowed from his body on that long ago day. “I left the circle to find water to splash on my face, but couldn’t find any nearby without asking some servant to break their enjoyment of the festivities—there was dancing and food, acrobatics, joke-telling—I left for the river only a small distance away.”
He told the story of walking through the unfamiliar village in a daze, his head swimming and heavy as if the sun Orisha, Obatalá, had clenched hands around his face to blind him to everything but the path to the river. At the riverbank, he dropped to his knees breathing heavily in a panic, his heart squeezing hard enough to burst. He dunked his head into the river, almost falling in. When his head came from the water, his mind was clear and thei
r mother was standing there.
Tall but delicate, with her long neck and pale kanga cloth, she looked like a true vision. He thought he was hallucinating, after all, all the women and girls of the village had gathered for the festivities and were nowhere near the river.
“Are you well?” she asked him and offered him a cloth for his face.
Their father paused. The pipe in his hand forgotten as he stared into the past with a smile. “She smelled like the rain.” His smile widened, and he put the pipe back between his teeth. “I knew then she was the wife for me, the only one. I could not marry the girl of that village even if it would cost my family their two paces closer to the chief.”
In another version he’d told before, he said how his younger brother stepped in to marry his original betrothed. But he only told this part of the story when he was trying to impress upon Ny’s brothers the importance of responsibility, especially to family.
“It was easy for me to leave that girl behind because I knew your iya and I were destined for each other, and that we would love each other until the end of our days.” Her father looked at Ny. “Can you say the same about you and that married woman?”
By the blood of Yemaya. Ny dropped her face into her hands, and Kizo laughed at her. “Baba…”
“I remember what it’s like to be young,” her father said. “Youth hurts blindly when in search of its own pleasures. And the pleasures of youth are often as fleeting as they are strong.”
“I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her marriage,” Ny said. “I have nothing to offer her if he decides to divorce her. Besides, I’m not certain she desires women the way I do.”
Ndewele looked up from sorting his bags of cowrie shells. “If you already talked with her, and she looked at you with your big, mooning eyes and did not run away, then she is interested in you.”
“We are beautiful, however,” Kizo said. “Maybe that has blinded her to the fact that you have no spear between your legs.”
“I have many spears,” Ny said with a smirk. “In as many sizes as she could want.”
“What are you talking about?” Adli chortled and nudged his twin. “You’ve never even had a woman.”
Her brothers laughed, knowing it was the truth.
Ny flushed with embarrassment and wished it was easier to keep a secret in her family, or even in the village.
Or maybe she should’ve been more sexually adventurous. By her age, all of her brothers had already experienced at least one lover. The twins alone, only four seasons older than she was, already had over two dozen lovers between them. Sometimes literally.
“I don’t need to have done it to know that I can,” she said.
“Practice makes the spear fly true, sister,” Hakim said. “You didn’t wake up one morning knowing how to bring down a gazelle from twenty paces. It’s the same with making love to a woman. Or a man.” He looked at their father. “Right, Baba?”
Their father broke in. “This is not a conversation I wish to have with my children.” But he chuckled, his pipe waggling between his teeth.
Serious Ndewele joined in on the teasing, asking their father just how true his spear had flown before he found their mother on that riverbank.
As they talked, their mother walked past, a strange visual aid to their conversation, although she did not stop aside from sharing a quick smile with her husband. Her hair was coiled on top of her head, skin glistening with oil, and her sandaled feet still damp from her walk through the wet grass.
She slipped through the beaded curtain separating the sitting room from the rest of the home. It wasn’t long before Ny smelled smoke from her incense, the one she burned at the altar to her Orisha, Yemaya, who held power over the seas, lakes, and motherhood. Her father she knew, was joined to Obatalá, the Orisha of wisdom and compassion, and had his own altar in a separate part of the house.
When she was younger, Ny’s mother tried to teach her about Yemaya and the other Orishas. But unlike most of the village that faithfully practiced Ifa and were faithful to the religion of their people, Ny turned her back on it all. Seasons before, she’d watched her favorite aunt, her father’s youngest sister, a faithful priestess of Ifa and village healer, get eaten up from the inside out by a mysterious sickness that kept her in constant pain the last few seasons of her life.
Ny frowned at the beaded curtains still swaying in the wake of her mother’s passage. It was strange for her mother to pray so late at night. Ny thought again of earlier when her mother had accidentally splashed brine in her face, the flinching terror in her eyes.
Even now, she didn’t know what she’d said to make her mother drop the meat so quickly. Despite her concern, she turned her eyes away from the curtains. Maybe her mother would tell her what was on her mind tomorrow. Maybe by then, whatever it was would be better. Ny picked up her kora and strummed a few notes, willing the instrument to soothe her thoughts.
“Will you play something for us, Nyandoro?” Her father stopped her brothers’ raunchy story seeking with a wave of his hand.
“Of course, Baba.” She grinned and looked over at Kizo. “I actually heard this song today.”
She strummed the kora again and began to sing the ridiculous ditty Kizo taught her that morning.
Her brothers laughed, even Ndewele. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, daughter.” Her father’s voice was firm, but the seriousness did not reach his eyes. They were like merry stars in the torch lights.
“But wait,” Ny laughed. “There’s more.”
*
Despite her easy dismissal of her father’s words, Ny couldn’t ignore them so easily. It was true. She wanted Duni with a sharpness that kept her aching and wet deep into the night. But she didn’t know what that meant for the future. If anything.
Yes, she wanted to undress her and taste the firm fruit of her breasts. But she also wanted her to be happy. Her husband, old and selfish Ibada, didn’t treat her well. At least that’s what the town gossips said. Because of his great wealth, he was allowed up to six wives. He took younger and younger wives each year, and didn’t lay with the older wives except in an attempt to have more sons. He already had two girls and one boy, and three of his six wives were pregnant, but not Duni. Ny prayed never Duni.
As long as Duni was only someone’s wife and not someone’s mother, Ny held out hope that something could happen between them. Slim hope, but hope nonetheless.
Ny shifted on her sleeping mat, the covers, soft and smelling of the lavender and limes her mother used in the wash, slid over her bare skin. Her fingers fluttered low on her stomach, but she forced them not to go any lower as thoughts of Duni melted her from the inside out.
The first time Ny noticed Duni was on her wedding day.
Other than that, it was a day like any other. Kizo chattered at her side, anxious to get to Sky Village because he’d heard they petitioned the Rain Queen and, after being dry for nearly three seasons, had been granted their wish. The rains came in the morning, the drums announced, and Kizo said he missed the feel of mud under his feet. So they were on their way to play in the mud and celebrate with the people of Sky Village.
But on their way, they had to pass a wedding, a bride making her slow way down the stone path with her two closest female relatives by her side, ceremonially holding her up as she walked the short distance to the house that was obviously the home of her new husband.
Ny wasn’t sure why she stopped. She’d seen plenty of weddings before and had never been impressed. But something about the way the two older women held up the bride seemed more than ceremonial, as if the bride would topple over or run away without them.
The women, dressed in wedding whites, were a stark canvas to the bride in her black kanga, swathed in the ceremonial manner from head to toe. She could only see through the strip left uncovered over her eyes.
“Who is that?” she asked Kizo, gesturing to the bride.
“Some unlucky woman.” Her brother shrugged. “Ibada isn’t good
enough for a good fuck, much less marriage.” Apparently, he knew the husband-to-be well enough.
Ny shrugged too and began to walk away from the small wedding procession.
Kizo tugged her arm to hurry her along. “If you walk any slower, the mud will turn into rock-stone before we get there.”
Ny didn’t bother to argue about how unlikely that was. They’d heard the drummers late in the morning and the sun was still in the middle of the sky. The mud wasn’t going anywhere. But to please him, she began to walk faster.
Then the women began to unwind the cloth from around the bride. Ny’s feet stopped. This was the part of weddings she always enjoyed, the slow unwrapping of the black shroud to reveal whatever color the bride chose to wore underneath as she presented herself to her new husband. Like a slowly spinning top with black threads attached to the white-clad women, the bride began to turn and walk forward at the same time.
Her bare feet were deliberate on the stone path, while the women, each pulling an end of the black cloth, unwound her and slowly bared her to the gaze of the sun and her new husband. The two pieces of cloth parted first at the waist, revealing the bride’s deep brown skin, a double drape of waist beads, and her flat stomach. Her steps were measured. She did not stumble as she walked toward the man in white, her husband, who stood at the open door of the stone house, the top of the doorway hung with streams of red and white flowers. Two of his male relatives fanned him with giant palm fronds, stirring the folds of his white robes.
The bride kept her eyes on the man, even as she turned to help peel away the black cloth and reveal more of her skin. Then the cloth parted over a strip of yellow, a bright kanga in two pieces, a skirt worn low on her hips then a mere strip of color covering her ribs and breasts. The black cloth unwound to show more of her. Bare shoulders hunched protectively forward and glistening under a sheen of honey oil and sunlight, a long neck, and then her face. Ny stopped breathing.
It wasn’t just the bride’s beauty, even though she was beautiful. No, the reason Ny stopped so suddenly was the expression in the bride’s eyes. Terror and determination both. A fearsome look as if she stared into the abyss of her future with this man and was determined to face it. It was a steely resolve that would’ve been inspiring if it didn’t make Ny want to rescue the bride from the man she was steadfastly walking toward. But since that felt too foolish to say out loud, she turned to her brother.