How Beautiful We Were(18)

I like Teacher Penda, even if he’s a government man. Like the other six teachers at our school, he lives with Pexton’s laborers at Gardens, in a brick house covered with an aluminum roof, one of many benefits to being a government man. Unlike every other government man we’ve ever met or heard our parents talk about, though, Teacher Penda is kind to us. He gives us only knowledge, which isn’t a poisonous thing. But we know that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t betray Kosawa for the sake of money. He’s not one of us—he’s from a village on the other side of the country, a place where, he loves to tell us, a woman can marry three husbands if her beauty is too great for one man to bear. We’ve never asked him if he has a wife and children in his village—such questions are not for one to ask another—but we like him enough that we invite him to our family weddings and birth celebrations, which he attends only if we’re good students.



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I return home from school that afternoon to learn from Mama that the soldiers did not arrive as expected, but the adults are not concerned, they know the soldiers will come, they’re prepared for them whenever they do arrive. The gleeful manner in which Mama says that makes me lose my skepticism; I become convinced that all will be well.



Mama tells me that she has prepared my favorite meal—fried ripe plantains and beans with smoked pig feet. Across Kosawa, mothers have prepared special meals for their families, as if the simple day deserved celebration. They’ve cooked rice and smoked-goat stew; leafy greens steamed with palm oil and mushrooms; boiled yams to go with okra sauce and bushmeat. The meals are made from ingredients both pure and adulterated, some from our dying farms and emptying barns, most bought at the big market, paid for with a portion of whatever the women earn from selling the animals their men kill in the forest. Some dishes are made possible by the benevolence of relatives with fertile lands who live in other villages, aunts and grandmothers and cousins many times removed who occasionally visit and offer us foods they still have in abundance. So delicious are the meals that we think little of sickness and death as we eat on our parlor floors. I give Juba some of my food when he starts eyeing my plate after licking his with his tongue. Some of my friends have bigger stomachs than I do, and their parents have many mouths to feed, so they and their siblings fight over the right to lick the sauce at the bottom of the cooking pot; oftentimes they quarrel so much their mothers intervene and draw a line in the pot with their fingers, giving each child a section to lick.

After we’re done eating, my friends and I wash our families’ plates and pots—a quick chore for many, considering there’s not much left to clean after all the licking. The rest of our chores that evening are more enjoyable than they’ve ever been: chickens and goats meekly take their sleeping spots in barns; the leaves and twigs we sweep in our front yards gather in perfect piles, which we transport to our backyards so they can crumble over time and merge with worms to serve as nourishment for our sickly soil.

With chores finished, and approaching twilight turning the air blue, we hurry out to play. Across compounds, friends and siblings start hiding and seeking, kicking balls of plantain leaves and rubber, everyone enjoying a hopefulness we’d feared we’d lost.



I’m happier than I’ve been since Papa vanished over a year ago. I don’t know if a dialogue between the adults and the soldiers will bring Papa home, but I trust our men will take a stand that will force Pexton to do more than send us useless representatives.

Sitting with three friends on one of their verandas and watching a couple other friends jumping rope, I laugh as one of them keeps tripping on herself. When my friends stop playing and start arguing about one thing or another, I smile and listen. I’ve never found the need to use words unless I must. Papa says it’s because I was born with four eyes and four ears and a quarter of a mouth better suited for smiling than for talking. On this evening, I have even less need for words, and I can’t stop grinning, overwhelmed as I am with love for my village and its people. I listen to the laughter of my friends, and watch young men heading to the square to laze and linger and smoke mushrooms—the breeze is perfect for such an activity—and I can think of no better place to have been born in than Kosawa.



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The next morning, while eating breakfast, I ask Mama if there’s a plan for what the village will do with the captives, and Mama tells me that Bongo and Lusaka and the rest of the men are going to have a meeting later in the day to map a strategy, what to do if the soldiers don’t soon arrive. My friends and I wonder, on our walk to school, and during recess, what the strategy might be. Would our men kill the captives? I hope they kill Woja Beki first, give him the worst possible death for betraying his own.

After my afternoon chores, I go to the square to meet my friends, and we take turns doing each other’s hair under the mango tree. Again, I let them do the talking. Sometimes they yell at each other, because one friend wants to be heard above another, what they have to say is just too important, which confuses me because listening is far more enjoyable than fighting to be heard. Papa is the only one I ever truly yearned to talk to, because our conversations were like the rustling of leaves, slow and gentle, followed by silence. Now that he’s gone, I prefer to spend more time alone in my head, pondering why the world is the way it is, wondering if the Spirit will one day decide to redesign it.