How Beautiful We Were(25)
We despised those laborers.
They’d been given what should have been ours, and yet they shot us glares reserved for vermin whenever we sat next to them in the bus that ran from Gardens to Lokunja; a bus meant for them which Pexton allowed us to use out of solidarity, yes, but still, a bus that took them from our land and brought them back to our land.
We hated how, whenever a pipeline spilled in our farms, it took them days to fix it, after which they told our parents that all they needed to do to reclaim their farmlands was to remove the topsoil and toss it aside. When our parents tried to explain that doing so wouldn’t work, since the poison went deep and the oil spread wide, and that perhaps the best solution would be for Pexton to get better pipelines, the laborers chuckled and asked if we expected Pexton to pack up and leave just because we didn’t like them.
After these exchanges, the laborers returned to their houses to breathe the same air as we did, but not to drink the same water, or eat the same food—they had enough money to buy all of their food from the big market, and Pexton made sure that their water came in through pipes, not from a well, which was why their children weren’t dying like us. When their children fell sick, there was a doctor from Bézam among them, someone Pexton paid to heal them so that their parents’ minds would not be disturbed and their fathers could focus on doing the work that had to be done. When one of our fathers had asked at a village meeting if he could take his sick child to the doctor there, in case that medicine man had herbs Sakani didn’t have, the Leader shook his head and said that it was best to keep the children separated—why confuse them about how the world works?
* * *
THE WEEKEND AFTER THE CAPTIVITY, while our fathers rested and our mothers did chore after chore, some of us loitered in front of Lusaka’s hut, hoping to hear the Pexton men and their driver crying and begging for their freedom, likely having realized that we would never let any soldiers find them. Our mothers repeatedly yelled at us to leave the area, even as they frequented the hut, to take meals to Lusaka’s wife so that she wouldn’t have to shoulder all the burden of feeding the hostages. We knew our mothers went to Lusaka’s hut not only to deliver the food—we usually ran such errands for them—but also to ask Lusaka’s wife if she could let them into the makeshift cell so they could spit in the Pexton men’s faces, tell them what despicable creatures they were, slap them, kick them, bang their heads against the ground for all the children Pexton had killed.
Lusaka’s wife never allowed our mothers into the room to do it. She said no even to the mothers whose departed children still appeared in their dreams nightly, clothed in white, with tears in their eyes, speaking no words but showing every desperation to understand why they were dead, longing for their mothers but unable to touch them, the space between them never narrowing no matter how hard the mothers ran toward them for a hug and an up-close look to ensure they were well-fed in the world beyond.
“I don’t think it right to mistreat the men on top of what they’re enduring,” Lusaka’s wife told our mothers. Her duty, she said, was to keep them alive by feeding them. Still, she confessed, she couldn’t stop herself from fantasizing about the best way to make them suffer a pain similar to the one she daily bore, the unbearable grief she would do anything to be free of for a moment. She’d thought about putting poison in the captives’ food, she told our mothers, but she didn’t want their deaths to be quick. She’d thought about letting them starve to death, but her husband and the village men would never allow it, and there really wasn’t much she could slyly do to harm the captives, since her husband and the elders had frequent meetings in the parlor to devise their next steps.
It was at one such meeting that the elders decided to forbid all the members of Woja Beki’s household from going past the village entrance or visiting another hut; keeping them at home was the only way to guarantee that they wouldn’t run to Gardens or the district office to report the ongoings. We were in support of the measure when we heard about it—we’d always despised the two children in that house who were our age-mates; we had been excluding them from our games long before the dictate. It grated us how they loved to talk about sitting on “couches” in their “living rooms,” and eating with “ferks.”
As for the rest of the family, the village’s abhorrence of them had so grown that even Woja Beki’s third wife, Jofi—who used to bounce from hut to hut spreading news about whose husband had looked at whose wife in an unsuitable manner, and which young woman would likely never find a husband if she didn’t change her snobbish attitude, and whose sick child would probably be spared, may the Spirit be thanked—even she, who used to visit grieving mothers to swear by her ancestors that her husband would not rest until he found a way to avenge their children’s deaths, speaking in that shrill voice of hers we so hated as she sat in our mothers’ kitchens with a plump body covered with clothes from Bézam, even she had been banished by the entire village, now that our hatred for her family had been laid bare. The days when she used to beam as she dragged her thick ankles around Kosawa, pretending she didn’t know our mothers rolled their eyes after she left their company, those days ended the night of the village meeting. Now she and her co-wives hid from our wrath behind their brick walls unless it was absolutely necessary to step out.