How Beautiful We Were(16)

I sit against the wall with my brother on my lap, watching my mother cry, her hand on her belly. I yearn to dry her tears, but I yearn even more never to see her tears again. Mama’s crying has known no pause since the ten-day mark—so much does she cry that Yaya warns her that the baby will be born withered up if she doesn’t do a better job of holding on to her liquids. But then, when Mama stops crying, Yaya begins, singing a woeful, discordant solo about the fate of a child born to a dead father, and then Mama is back to crying, and it’s then I walk out of the room, because none of that is of any use to me; I’m better off spending my time thinking about the chances that Papa is alive, the odds that he’ll stay alive until I’m old enough to go to Bézam and rescue him, bring him home, hear him laugh, watch him make Mama happy and teach Juba how to be a man.

“My dear sisters and children, are these tears necessary?” Woja Beki says, rising from his sofa. “Are there any corpses in front of us? What are we crying for? We don’t know the full story yet, but Gono and I will get to the bottom of all this, I assure you.”



Looking at Woja Beki’s face, I wonder why he was ever born, considering there’s an infinite host of unborn begging to be born, considering most of the unborn would be decent people if given a chance at life. Why does the Spirit keep on cursing the world with the existence of the likes of Woja Beki? I hate him for how he lied to Papa, and how he has no shame about lying to us, how he can look at us in our despair and fling untruths at us, rubbing pepper and scorching embers into the very wounds he inflicted.

I hate how, because of him, two days after the meeting in his house, Mama’s grief pushes out our unborn before it is ready for this world. Mama screams when she sees the baby—its body is so small it fits in her palms—and her friends implore her to be strong, to let go, to bear her burdens like a woman. No one tells Mama that there’ll soon be another baby—without Papa sleeping next to her, Mama will never have another baby.

Yaya barely has a voice left to cry with as we walk to the burial ground to bury the baby on top of my grandfather Big Papa. It doesn’t seem that long ago when we walked this same path and crossed the small river to bury Big Papa. I still remember his casket at the front of the processional, balanced on the shoulders of Papa and Bongo and four other men, behind them Mama pregnant with Juba and holding my hand, three women holding Yaya, reminding her of how blessed she was to have shared decades with her husband, the rest of the village behind us, singing: All lives must end, may your life never end.

No one sings for the baby; our baby never had a life. There is no processional to the burial ground. Just a dozen of us. Our baby’s body is not worth making a coffin for—one of our relatives holds it in her arms, wrapped in a blue sheet.

I promise myself that afternoon that someday I will make Woja Beki and his friends in Bézam pay for what they’ve done to my family. I know nothing about how a girl makes men pay for their crimes, but I have the rest of my life to figure it out.



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Later that week, Bongo leaves with three men to search for Papa and the others in Bézam. Before he goes, Yaya falls to her knees. She begs him not to leave her childless, the worse curse that could befall any woman who’s ever carried a child. Bongo promises her that not only will he return, he’ll return with Papa’s body, with or without life in it.

In Bézam, Bongo and the others sit on the steps of government buildings and promise parcels of land and goats to anyone who can offer them useful information. They sleep in an abandoned roadside shack, and from first light to dusk they walk up to anyone with a semblance of friendliness and ask questions, and give descriptions, but they only get headshakes. They roam a city so massive and frenzied it threatens to rip apart and swallow them at every turn. Eight days after their departure, they return empty-handed.

Still, night after night, Mama and Yaya sit on the veranda waiting for Papa, losing more flesh to despair. They take turns being the weaker woman—some nights Yaya feeds Mama with my help; other nights Mama and I feed Yaya. Many nights I feed them both, with Bongo’s help if he’s home. I force myself to eat a banana whenever I can—one of us needs to have a basic level of strength at all times. Only late at night do I consider my own pain, when I hope everyone is sleeping; it is then that I cry, imagining how different our lives would be if our ancestors had picked any other piece of the earth but this one. Images of my dead friends enter and exit my dreams. I think about what our unborn would have looked like if it had been allowed to be a fully formed child entering a kind world, a world where Papa wasn’t gone and my surviving friends and I weren’t spending precious minutes contemplating the day our turn would come to die.



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Three months after Papa’s disappearance, the Pexton men arrive for their first meeting with the village. Before their arrival, Woja Beki tells us that we should be thankful to Papa and his group: something they did or said in Bézam must be why Pexton has decided to come speak to us. That makes no sense to me—why would people in Bézam cause Papa to vanish if they wanted to help him?—but I hope the meeting will be fruitful.

Yaya and Mama take a break from their seats on the veranda to attend the meeting, carrying along what shred of faith they have left that, despite Bongo’s futile search, Papa might return alive, even if broken. Ours is the worst kind of mourning—not knowing if the men are dead, how they died, when they died; not knowing if there’s still a chance we can save them. Yaya says this when she cries, that if she could only take her son’s corpse and put it in the ground, then she could at least begin the journey to acceptance. But the men from Pexton offer us no information at the meeting. When one of the missing men’s fathers stands up and implores the Leader to at least confirm to us that the Six are dead, so we can offer sacrifices to the Spirit on their behalf, help hasten their voyage to be with our ancestors, the Leader says that he cannot do that, he’s not allowed to do that, Pexton cannot involve itself with superstitious matters.