How Beautiful We Were(47)

After they’d done all that, they said, they would ask Pexton to clean up our land so Kosawa could return to the state it was in when our ancestors first arrived here. But that would all take years, they cautioned; some of us might not be alive to see a restored Kosawa and a new envelope of money, in which case it would go to our children.

They gave us the money from Pexton in large straw bags.

A straw bag for each of the ninety or so huts of Kosawa, handed to the head of the family. I was the head of my family. What woman dreams of becoming the head of her family? I never wanted such a burden—I’d seen what it had done to Malabo’s relationship with Bongo—but there I was, extending my hand and receiving the money, more cash than my husband made in the last three years of his life combined.

Someone started a story that the money we received couldn’t have been all the money Pexton had given, that the people at the Restoration Movement office in Bézam must have kept some of it for themselves, and that the Sweet One and the Cute One must have taken their cuts. The rumors flew from hut to hut, some saying that the Restoration Movement was giving us only what they thought would make us happy; perhaps we should go to Gardens and ask a supervisor to tell us exactly how much their people in America had sent us. Tunis is the one who told me about the rumor. He said Malabo’s cousin Sonni—who had become our new village head after the massacre—had asked him to help put an end to the rumor. I’d never liked Sonni and his manner of taking too long to think before speaking, and I doubt Malabo would be happy to see that someone whose presentation reeked of weakness had become leader of Kosawa, but I agreed with Sonni on this: If we learned that the Restoration Movement and the Sweet One and the Cute One had kept some of the money for themselves, what would our recourse be? Would we start a fight against the very people fighting for us?



* * *



—



The straw bag sits in a black box under my bed, the same one Malabo used to store the money he brought back from selling his game in the big market. He never brought back much money. Mostly coins, just enough for food and clothes and medicine, things we needed. The only money he left for me before his departure was money his father had left for him—several bills Big Papa had put in an envelope the day Thula was born, which he told Yaya to give Malabo after he died so that Thula would never want for anything.

Big Papa wasn’t a man who demonstrated his love in the words he spoke or the looks he gave, but he was a man who, as often as he could, did what love ought to do. Few people recognized that. His own sons struggled to—they couldn’t see beyond his inability to be the kind of father they wanted. They did not share my admiration for how he moved to Kosawa as a young man, and how he worked for years on the farm of Woja Beki’s father, who gifted him the land on which our hut now stands, in gratitude for Big Papa’s hard work. They dismissed the fact that, bamboo by bamboo, Big Papa built our hut and outhouse by himself, every evening, after working all day on the farm. I reminded Malabo of this whenever he came to me grumbling about something or another his father had done or not done because of his mood. I said to him: Your father can do only what he has the capacity to do; surely, it must pain him to fail you. But Malabo couldn’t look past his disappointments and the many sad evenings of his childhood. Though Big Papa had stopped his yellings and beratings by the time I married Malabo—he was mostly just melancholic—memories of his transgressions were still fresh within his children. I never spoke about any of this with Yaya. She was Big Papa’s wife—I couldn’t put her in a position to speak ill of her husband—but I imagine it hurt her more than it did me, how people looked at him as if he were just a level above Konga.



Even children laughed at Big Papa behind his back, calling him Bitter Face and Fire Eyes; they never got to know what more lay behind that countenance the way I did. Yes, it wasn’t a pleasure to look at the face, but I rarely thought that the anger on it was directed at me—something in his eyes told me that he yearned to be happy, but he was too consumed with despair and knew of no way to free himself from it. People wanted me to say that living in the same hut with him was akin to eating sour leaves for dinner every night, but I could never say that, because Big Papa was good to me despite himself. No, he never uttered a good morning to me, and when I placed his food before him his gratitude came out as a grumble—many were the times when I found myself alone in the parlor with him and had to find a reason to escape lest that glare of his scorch me—but he went to the forest to hunt food that I would eat. If his mood allowed, he split wood for me to cook with. When my daughter was born, he held her and rocked her to sleep.



* * *





ON MOST NIGHTS NOW, WHEN all is quiet, I think of Big Papa sitting on the veranda in silence. I think of Bongo singing during his baths, his songs more melodious than ever after he met Elali. Mostly, though, I think of Malabo, my husband, my heartbreaker. I think of how perfectly flawed life was the day he walked up to me at my friend’s hut.



That was back before Cocody and I were friends, when she was just my friend Uwe’s friend. Uwe and I were in Kosawa so she could see Cocody and I could visit my aunts who live here. I had just turned nineteen. I remember I wore a layer of anxiety that day—I’d reached marriage age with no one handsome in sight. A man in my village named Neba was my only option, but I couldn’t look past his nostrils, which flared like a windswept skirt. “How could you turn down a man because you hate his nose?” my mother had sighed. “How could I not, when I would have to look into the thing every day,” I’d replied. When my mother cautioned me to lower my standards, I laughed. Neba would be good to me, I knew, but would that suffice for a marriage?