How Beautiful We Were(66)
SONNI WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO be our new village head. Woja Beki’s firstborn son, Gono, had been next in line. If Gono did not want the role, any of his brothers could have taken it, but none of them wanted it—after learning about what our fathers had done to their father, none of Woja Beki’s sons wanted to ever breathe Kosawa’s air again, or concern themselves with whatever might befall us. After the hanging, Gono made a final trip to Kosawa to pack up his family’s things and take his two youngest full siblings. Exactly how he was going to fend for them and his own family in Bézam, being that he no longer had a job at Pexton, we would never know, but we had better things to do than occupy ourselves with that. The women of Kosawa, however, made it their concern. They analyzed the family’s situation from every angle and decided that Woja Beki must have given Gono some of his money to hide, which meant that the family was never going to lack, thanks to the government’s and Pexton’s money.
Gono moved everything from inside his father’s brick house into the truck he had arrived in, everything from his father’s bed and rug and clock, to his mother’s mortar and pestle. All he left for his father’s second wife was the house itself, nearly bare but still grand. Woja Beki’s second wife, in her inherited house, had shed no tears—her co-wives and their children were gone; her children would now all have their own bedrooms in a brick house. We suspected that the woman knew—she had to know—that the day was bound to come when one of Woja Beki’s older sons would return to take back the house; that family had never been known to be givers. Still, as we watched Gono leave in the loaded truck, we knew that the family would be gone from our lives for a long time. Indeed, it was so. None of them returned to Kosawa for the death celebration of the Four.
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Though we did not know the date of the Four’s deaths, we celebrated it at a three-month mark, and also a year after, using the date on which the courthouse guard had delivered the letter. We celebrated with the hope that the Spirit would not frown upon us for picking a date that, though not arbitrary, was far from precise, and nowhere in line with the exactness we needed to apply to ensure that the departed arrived safely in the next world. As we offered prayers to the ancestors on their behalf on the three mornings leading to the celebration—at the sound of the rooster’s crow, kneeling in the parlor with our families if any of the men were our immediate kin, otherwise sitting alone on our beds or mats; eyes closed, our palms on our chests—we tried not to imagine how arduous their journeys would be, after having been tied by their necks and left to choke and dangle, then tossed into a pit, one body atop another, all still in prison garb, none of the bodies washed, their spirits forced to travel to the new world with the filth of the old.
For the first celebration we killed four goats and four pigs and sixteen chickens, as per the Spirit’s dictate. We dressed in white, and wore no shoes. A medium from one of the sibling-villages poured libations and we softly played the drums, wishing the men the peace this world couldn’t give them, a peace we would find when we joined them.
After this three-month celebration was when we made Sonni our new head.
One of our grandfathers, Pondo, had wanted to become village head. He said that, having been a counselor to Bongo and Lusaka, and also being a relative by marriage of Woja Beki, he knew what the slain men would have done if others had been hanged and they’d been left to create something out of our loss. Pondo said he could imagine the ways in which Lusaka and Bongo would have worked with the Restoration Movement to keep aflame the anger of the American people so our story would not be forgotten there. Manga, another one of our grandfathers, had stood up and reminded everyone gathered that he too had been a counselor, and that on the day of the massacre he had coordinated the carrying of the dead to their huts and made sure every corpse had a coffin. Manga argued that his son Sonni had no less wisdom and calmness than he did, and thus should be our new leader. Even more, he added, Sonni had the right to the position, given that he was first cousins with Bongo. With Bongo dead and having left no son or brother, and with Sonni the oldest male of all Bongo’s cousins, the inheritance of Bongo’s position should be his; Bongo wouldn’t disagree if he were present, considering how much he admired Sonni.
We hadn’t been allowed at the meeting where Bongo was anointed leader, but our fathers allowed us to attend the deliberations on who would be Bongo’s successor, even though we were only a year older. They agreed that we were old enough, not in years, certainly, but in what we’d seen, for we had seen far more than our lifetimes were capable of digesting. Still, on that late evening, when the men gathered under the mango tree to talk about the way forward, we only listened, for we weren’t deemed wise enough to contribute—we still had at least two more years before we would begin our entrance into the age of wisdom.
We watched as Pondo and Manga argued, and then as our fathers began taking sides because they shared a stronger blood relation with one man or the other. In the end, all the men agreed that arguments and side-takings would never give us a new village head. They resolved to come back three evenings later to declare whom they each wanted—whoever the most men wanted would be our new woja.
Such a thing had never happened since our ancestors arrived here—blood was the only means by which power was transferred—but we also knew that many things had not come to pass for us the way our ancestors had imagined, so, when the evening for the declarations came, the men who wanted Pondo to be their leader arrived with twigs, and the men who wanted Sonni arrived with stones. When they’d put it all down and counted it in the sight of the assembly, the number of stones was found to be more than the number of twigs, and so Sonni became our new head.