How Beautiful We Were(57)

I worry for her every day and night. What if she needs me and I’m not there to help her? What did I think I was doing, letting a child of seventeen go alone to America? Will I ever see her again? When will I see her again? The Sweet One said how long she stays in America will depend on her, on how much schooling she wants to get before she returns home. I dream of her homecoming. I tell myself not to worry, and then I worry even more. I can’t stop worrying for my children. But if I were to spend ten thousand years worrying about all that could happen to them, what difference would it make?



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Aisha got married not long before Thula left for America. How I danced that day. I couldn’t remember the last time I so enjoyed myself. I was up before the rooster’s crow to make breakfast for Yaya and the children, after which I hurried to Aisha’s family’s hut to join the women of Kosawa in cooking. We sang as we sliced vegetables, swapped stories as we diced and fried. At some point, one of Aisha’s uncles brought his drum, and the preliminary dancing began, women twirling buttocks and mincing spices to the right, grating cocoyams and stamping feet to the left. From the corner of my eye I saw Thula, peeling plantains in a circle of friends—even she who didn’t love to dance was swinging her tiny hips in delight. By the time we returned home to take our baths and dress up I was tired, but my fatigue disappeared when Aisha was led out of her hut, veiled and clothed in white.

In front of all of Kosawa and her relatives from the sibling-villages, her father asked her if he should accept the bride price that had been offered for her hand. “Remember,” he said, “once I eat these animals and drink these bottles of wine, I cannot return them. That means you cannot come to me and say you no longer want to be married to this man. Once you go with him, there’s no coming back. Do still you want to go?” When Aisha, in a soft voice, said, “Yes, Papa,” her husband stood up and pulled off her veil, and we all shouted for joy. We danced till the dust rose to the sky. We ate and we sang and we danced some more, till the moon appeared and Aisha left Kosawa, never to return.



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By then, I’d spent close to a year waiting for the Cute One to do more than smile at me. I’d moved from dressing up for him to offering him and the Sweet One food, meals I made with the Cute One’s enjoyment in mind. For my efforts, all I got was words of profound gratitude. Still, I persisted. Only after a random conversation, during which he mentioned his wife’s name three times, did I decide to pour water on the fires of my yearning. I decided it was time to stop flirting with the Cute One and all the men I laughed too loudly with whenever their wives’ backs were turned. I decided I could no longer be a part of the shameless competition—I would live with my plight for the rest of my days. I asked Malabo to forgive me for the infidelity of my thoughts and promised him I would be only his until we meet again.



I told Aisha this a few days before her marriage celebration, while we were lounging on my bed on a rainy evening. I told her to cherish these days when she had a man to herself, her own man, not another woman’s she’d stolen. I told her to protect her man, because potential man-stealers like me abounded. She laughed, and sighed, before saying that it really was about time women started marrying each other. When I tried to laugh, she told me she wasn’t joking. She asked me to think about it, think about what bliss would envelop Kosawa if all the husbandless women like me met in barns at night and paired off and did to each other what we no longer had husbands to do to us.

And why shouldn’t we do it? she went on. We’d lost husbands and children and our youth. We spent all day caring for family members who couldn’t reciprocate. We were powerless against forces that considered us unworthy of being caressed again—what evil would we commit by indulging in one of the last avenues of rapture at our disposal? Why not celebrate our battered bodies, massage and stroke and tenderly release whatever desire was left in them? If we wanted men and there were none available for us, why shouldn’t we do it for ourselves? Because we had no right to? Because the women who came before us and the men who lived among us said we dared not? Don’t you think, she said to me, that the time has come for you to start living by your own rules?



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THE PEOPLE FROM THE RESTORATION Movement promised me that they wouldn’t stop asking questions till they found out the truth about what happened to Malabo, and where Bongo is buried. The Sweet One and the Cute One said it the first time they sat down with me, the same way they sat with everyone who had lost a child or a husband in Kosawa, going from hut to hut in those first months to compile the names and ages of those who’d been killed for the sake of oil. In a letter sent to us from America, which the Cute One read aloud, the Restoration Movement people told us that when they saw the pictures of the massacre they knew that ours had to become one of the villages around the world whose dignity they fought every day to restore. They would be the spear of Kosawa, they said.

Their full name, we learned, was the Movement for the Restoration of the Dignity of Subjugated Peoples. According to the Cute One, after Austin’s first story appeared in the newspaper in Great City, the Restoration Movement people had held a meeting in their office to talk about the report; they’d long harbored suspicions about Pexton and its deeds in places where no outside eyes were upon them and no laws existed to compel them to do what was just. Austin’s story had proved them right.