How Beautiful We Were(81)

“Where are the results of their efforts?” one of the young men shouted.

“Let the soldiers kill us if they want to,” another young man added. “Is it death you’re afraid of? If we’re not afraid of death at our age, why should you be at yours?”

“But why entice death when there’s still a chance at life?” Sonni cried.

No one was listening. Angry voices, including his own son’s, were drowning his, shouting back at him that the Sweet One and the Cute One were saying useless things, they were weak talkers. Wait, wait, patience, patience—that’s all they’ve ever said. How long should Kosawa wait?

It was clear that morning that, even though few in Kosawa would have left their beds at night to burn and break, many got satisfaction from what the young men were doing. Anger that should have been levied upon these young men was directed at Sonni, for whatever choices Sonni had made that had forced the young men to take matters into their own hands.

When Sahel recounted this story to me, I wished Manga had said a word in support of his son instead of keeping his head bowed throughout the lambasting, but Sahel told me that Sonni was not without his supporters—men of his father’s generation and some from his own had also rebuked their sons, telling them that they were idiots to believe that Kosawa could singlehandedly defeat Pexton, that they must have forgotten what happened where they were standing, on that afternoon a decade ago.



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Last week Sonni and the Sweet One came to see Sahel.

They took a seat in my room, on the bench across from my bed. For a few minutes we tried not to talk about anything heavy, but few topics in Kosawa are soft in nature these days. During one pause, the Sweet One asked Sonni if the child who had disappeared from Gardens had yet to be found. Sonni shook his head. The Sweet One asked no more questions on the matter. We were silent again, until Sahel came to join us.

The Sweet One cleared his throat.

He said he wanted to tell Sahel something but he needed to say it in front of Sonni, so that Sonni could be his witness that he had told Sahel the whole truth. What he’d traveled from Bézam to talk about, he said, was very important: the young newspaperman from America, Bongo’s friend, had written a letter about Thula.

I still remember the young man from America and his pretty face—he was good to Bongo, he was good to all of us. The Sweet One said the young man wanted us to know that he liked Thula. I looked at Sahel. We were both trying to suppress our laughter. This was confirmation of what we’d talked about after the last letter from Thula that the Cute One had read to us. In it, Thula had mentioned this young man several times, talking about how he made America feel like home to her. We did not want Thula to marry a foreigner, but if this man did not marry her, who else would? We knew her marriage to him would be fraught with misunderstandings, considering the different traditions that had shaped them, but we’d still thank him for saving Thula from the life we oftentimes feared might be hers. Thula, with a husband. Imagine such a thing.

But the Sweet One hadn’t come to tell us that Thula might be getting married.

After clearing his throat, he told us that the young man had written to say that he was worried about Thula—she wasn’t eating well, she wasn’t sleeping well, she was spending too much time helping organize fights against governments and corporations and not enough time thinking about her own well-being.



The young man said Thula had recently traveled with some friends to another area of the country to be part of a human wall meant to prevent government workers from throwing poor people out of their homes and taking their land; the poor people and their supporters believed the money the government was offering for the land wasn’t enough. Some days, he said, Thula did not go to class, instead spending long hours in one of the city’s squares, chanting words of outrage. The young man said he admired Thula for what she was doing, there was nothing wrong with it, he had done some of it himself at Thula’s age; he was actually the one had who introduced Thula to the organizers of some protests. The problem was that Thula did not seem to have a sense of balance. She appeared to have forgotten that she came to America to go to school, not to involve herself in matters that might undermine her well-being. There were nights when she and her friends stayed out in the cold protesting. She’d gotten sick once; right after she got well, she went back to doing it, to show her anger about the fact that a small group of people in the country had too much money while millions of families barely had enough food to eat and it just wasn’t right. Once, the newspaperman said, Thula had spent a night in jail for her actions; he was the one who went to the jail and paid for her release.

Sahel and I were drying our eyes by the time the Sweet One was done talking. We wished we hadn’t heard what we’d heard, that Thula was going around America tempting death. Is that why she wanted to go there? To bring upon herself the same fate that had befallen her father and uncle? Did she care nothing for what we had already endured?

The Sweet One wanted Sahel to dictate a letter to Thula to beg her to stop doing what she was doing, implore her to focus on her schooling and return to us safely. Sahel had to touch Thula’s heart in a way only a mother could.

And could Sahel also ask Thula to stop writing letters to her friends encouraging them to break and burn Pexton’s property? Sonni added.