How Beautiful We Were(111)
One day, when you wake up, he said, we’ll be back in Nubia. You’ll be a Nubian princess. You’ll live in a kingdom.
He was gone by the time she woke up, to work in the presidential palace. He was one of a dozen men tasked with guarding the life of His Excellency under the leadership of the Captain. It was from the Captain that he had learned about Nubia; it was for the Captain’s vision that he would lose his life. Did her father ever ponder how ridiculous that tale was? She doubts it. On the night when the Captain stormed the palace to kill His Excellency, take his place, and rename our country Nubia, her dad was there, a guard turned traitor. He killed two men as he searched for His Excellency alongside the Captain, a man who, having seen enough madness in the palace, had decided to rewrite our nation’s story and free us from our abductor. Nubia’s father and the other five guards wanted the same thing. For a new country named Nubia, they were willing to lay down their lives. Lay them down they did, all seven of them. They were captured and executed by the palace gates, their bodies left for crows to feast on, for His Excellency to smirk upon during his comings and goings. The bodies remained on display for days, so that every soul in the nation could see the folly of coups. Nubia saw her father’s body, though not with her eyes—her family shut themselves up in their house. She sees her father’s body still, in her mind. She hears his voice every time His Excellency appears on television to speak.
It all ended that day, their lives as America-bound children with skins glowing from wealth. Their lives as a family hanging in the highest circles of Bézam, lounging by swimming pools. Her dad’s relatives arrived from the village with a message: her mother had to leave the house, which now belonged to her father’s eldest brother, the head of the family. Her mom did not beg. She did not tell them that His Excellency had taken all of her husband’s money, so they had nothing, only the house. Her mom packed her children’s things, hiding her tears. She took them to a friend’s house and listened as the friend explained why she couldn’t let them stay. The friend said everything but the truth about why she could no longer associate with them, the family of an enemy of the republic; she couldn’t say she had privileges to safeguard, a husband’s job to protect, children whose bright futures she had to ensure. To the next friend they went, and the next, until they had no one, until Nubia learned that the world abounded in women who were afraid to be bitches. She promised herself she’d never be like them.
The only woman who offered her family a pot to lick was a woman her mother once met at a party. She saw them waiting at a bus stop as she was driving by and stopped. Since she was in need of a new servant, she offered them her servant’s room, a shed at the back of her house, one room for them to share, a mother and five children. Their food would be free, but her mother would have to cook for the household—husband, wife, a daughter Nubia’s age. Nubia’s mother would have to go to the market, clean the house, hand-wash clothes, serve meals, wash and dry dishes, do what servants once did for her. Her mom said yes. In the shed they lived. They slept on a single bed, lying horizontally to fit on it. That is what her father condemned them to the day he gave his life for a dream.
She told me, crying, of the night when she was seventeen and the wife and daughter of the house had traveled to visit relatives and the husband was alone at home. How she entered the husband’s bedroom and shut the door behind her, took off her clothing as the man’s eyes bulged. How she did to him things she’d read about in steamy novels. He grunted so loud she feared his wife would hear in the next district. She returned for three more nights. They did it again when he found a reason to send his wife and child away for two weeks, during which time she went to him after school, telling her mom she had to study. In his ecstasy, he promised to do anything and everything to help her and her mom and her siblings. He kept his promise and got her into the leadership school, where I was waiting for her to walk beside me on my climb to the top of the government.
When she was done telling me her story, she swore that when she had children she would burn down cities to give them everything and rip out the hearts of anyone who dared try to take anything that belonged to them. I knew then that she would one day become the rock upon which I would build the next generation of the Nangi family.
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Mama began telling me when I was a boy that the Nangi family name was mine to carry forward; she said I had to do all I could to extend our bloodline. Yaya reminded me often too that I would have to one day marry and have children, and that I would need to tell my children about those who came before me. For nodding at everything Yaya said, she blessed me with good fortune.
My new papa had his own dreams for me.
He believed I was destined to become a great man, which was why, though he wasn’t rich, he sent me to the finest schools. I never told him that I wanted to spend my life drawing—with Thula wedded to her mission, I was my parents’ only chance at a joyful and proud old age, and I longed to give it to them. Papa spent hours helping me with my homework, and when I passed my tests he gave me cash gifts. When the time came for me to get into a career training program, he went to the biggest men he knew in government, seeking help for his gifted son. He couldn’t do it alone, being that he was but one of thousands of small men sitting at the bottom and striving for their sons to get to the top. Mama cooked and assembled baskets of fruits, and Papa took them to these men in their homes, along with bottles of alcohol, goats from the open-air market, and stuffed envelopes. That was how I got into the sole government leadership school in the country.