How Beautiful We Were(79)

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I worry for Sahel, her loneliness. We are now two women without husbands, singing songs of mourning on moonless nights. But me, when I turn around to go to sleep, the empty space beside me does not despair me as much as it does her. How can she, in her prime years, have no one to warm her? Did Malabo worry about her future, or just his children’s? Now she has to spend her nights alone, never to be held by a man again.

But why?

Who made this law? Did our forefathers allow our foremothers a say when they designed our tradition? Why must Sahel’s destiny be of selflessness and sacrifice? Because she has me. Because she has Juba. Because she has Malabo’s memory. Because she’s allowed one man per lifetime. She accepts it. She says she has to. But I don’t have to. I won’t accept it. Let other women do as tradition dictates; I won’t let her join them.

I won’t stop asking her to move to Bézam. Thula is far away. I’m dying. What is she staying here for? Her friend Cocody has moved to the second of the five sister-villages; Cocody’s brother came and took her and her children away after her youngest child got so sick he almost died. Before she left, Cocody came to tell us goodbye, crying. She wanted to leave but she didn’t want to leave. Sahel cried only after Cocody left. They’d been each other’s everything after their husbands died: bringing each other food, taking care of each other’s children, wiping each other’s tears. But Sahel has other friends here. Lulu came over last night and made us laugh with a story about how her son came home from school in Lokunja and said that his teacher told them that our ancestors used to be monkeys—what other crazy things do those overseas books have to say about us?



Sahel has her cousin Tunis too. He comes often to split her firewood and help her dig holes to plant yams and plantains in her small backyard farm (she won’t leave me to go to her farm in the forest). She also has her aunts and younger cousins, but her sisters—we never see them. Ever since her second sister was caught in bed with the husband of her oldest sister, her family has not known harmony or the joy of togetherness. Sahel was only a little girl when all this happened, but that didn’t stop her from getting caught in it, since she was living with their mother. Their mother had refused to take sides with either of her feuding children, and it wasn’t long before they all stopped speaking to each other for a jumble of reasons no one outside their family could untangle.

My husband was still alive when Sahel’s mother died. He told her, while she wept, that she shouldn’t fear, his family would always be her family, she would never be in need of people with whom she could have a total sense of belonging. But her mother was her strongest link to her village, and Sahel knew that, with her mother’s death, the life she once had would exist only as fragments in her memory. If she were to wonder whether something had truly happened, there’d be no one to answer her questions, no one to talk to about the way things were. These days she sees her sisters only when she goes to a celebration in another village. None of them came here after what happened to Malabo and Bongo. She heard that two of them have reconciled but neither they, nor the others, to mourn or to rejoice, come to visit. Who will she have left here after her aunts are gone and her female cousins have settled into their own lives?



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I NEVER IMAGINED THAT THE situation in Kosawa would get worse in my final days, but it has. This past year, soldiers have arrived in the village more times than I can count. They go from hut to hut asking questions, searching for those responsible for the destruction of Pexton’s property. When they come here, Sahel lets them check under my bed to make sure no one is hiding there. They don’t believe that no one capable of sneaking around at night to burn and destroy lives in our hut.

The first time it happened, we had woken up to hear that a building at Gardens had been burned to the ground. We were not sad to hear the news, and it never occurred to us that the fire might have something to do with Kosawa. Weeks later, a pipeline exploded over the big river. I heard people rushing to see it for themselves. Sonni went to Gardens and begged the supervisor to send men to fix it before the riverbanks overflowed. The laborers closed it, but not because of us—we later learned that they had a new overseer who did not want a drop of Pexton’s oil to go to waste.

A few days after this happened, a supervisor came to talk to Sonni. My brother, Manga, came to visit me after the supervisor met with his son. Manga said the supervisor believed our children were behind the recent fire and explosion. I shook my head. No, I told my brother. Not the children of Kosawa—they’re not those kinds of children. Not long after that evening, a friend came to visit me. She had lost her remaining two teeth since I last saw her, but she could still speak a hundred words to my one. She told me that the gossip going around the village was that Sonni’s wife had seen their son leaving their hut late one night, and that the next morning there had been another fire at Gardens. Someone from Gardens reported seeing Sonni’s son there, though the boy denied it and said he was in bed all night. That is how we began to suspect that these children, born the same year as Thula, were the ones burning and breaking at Gardens.



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The American overseer sent word that he wanted Sonni to come see him.

Sonni went to Gardens with the two men who have been helping us, our Bézam friends, the Sweet One and the Cute One. They went to the overseer’s house, which stands a far distance from the houses of the laborers and the supervisors.