How Beautiful We Were(86)

We seethed, but we could say nothing.

At our friends’ trial, no one who’d seen the tax receipts being ripped had been willing to step forward in their defense, so the judge levied a sentence of one year in prison and six months of taxes. We told our friends, as they were being led away by the prison guards while their wives and mothers and daughters cried out for them, that days might be long, but years were seldom slow. Once more, from what little she had, Thula sent us the funds to pay the fines.



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During the year our friends were in prison, monthly, sometimes weekly, as often as we could, the rest of us burned a parked car here, dislodged machinery there, sent a letter threatening to kill everyone at Gardens if Pexton did not leave. Twice, we accosted a bus full of laborers on the road between Lokunja and Gardens. Our machetes pointed at them, we demanded all the money they had. We showed them no compassion, though they pleaded, saying Pexton paid them too little, they needed every bit of money for their families—could we find it in our hearts to be merciful to them for the sake of their children? How could we respond to such drivel except with slaps? Pexton’s whores talking about children—nothing disgusted us more.



We made the bus drivers give us the oil from the engine, so we could use it to burn something else owned by Pexton. With raffia bags covering our faces—soiled and oily bills in another bag—we asked the laborers to listen up. We told them that it was time they thought about returning to their villages. We let them know, in case they’d never considered it, that they were our enemies by virtue of eating the scraps off the plates of our enemies. None of them would survive the reckoning coming for Pexton, we warned.



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IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE Sweet One who told Thula about the attacks and threats on the laborers, for we made no mention of it in our letters. Zealous as she was, she was still a woman incapable of inflicting bodily harm, and we’d worried that our going after the laborers would cause tension between us. And, as certain as sunrise, it did. Every time she heard about it, she wrote asking us to stop, saying that was not the plan, the plan was to get their attention, let them know that we mattered and we were angry, the plan was never to kill—what were we thinking? We assured her that we’d kill no one; we merely wanted to instill fear in the laborers, cause panic in Gardens, make them think we’d stop at nothing. She would not be convinced. What if we’d killed the laborer we’d badly beaten? she said. Blood on its hands was the last thing Kosawa needed. The laborers are not our enemies, she argued, Pexton is. In some letters she threatened to withdraw her financial support from us. And there were indeed months when the Sweet One brought us no envelopes from her. Then, just as we were about to start wondering if she had changed her mind and was no longer one of us, we received an envelope, along with pleas to remember that the laborers were fathers like us, men with families for whom they were making hard sacrifices.



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In the third year of our attacks, Pexton informed the laborers that it would no longer allow them to bring their wives or children to Gardens. The directive was late and inconsequential: the women and children had begun leaving more than a decade before, after three children passed away around the time our friends started dying.

We had heard of the Gardens children’s deaths when they happened, but we never considered that they were for reasons similar to the death of our friends. For years, we’d believed that, between the clean water the children there drank, and the American medicine Pexton had for those living in the settlement it had created around its wells, no one at Gardens would ever suffer our fate. The Sweet One and the Cute One were the ones who told us the truth that no American medicine, no matter how potent, could cure a child of years of accumulated toxins.

There was no way for us to have known that in Kosawa.

No one from our village ever held a proper conversation with a laborer. In our childhood, we never spoke to the children in Gardens, not even when we sat next to them on the bus, full as we were of hatred for them, partaking in the scorn our parents had for theirs. They looked and acted like us, but they weren’t children like us—they were Pexton children. Only these years later did we learn that, though they hadn’t died as often as our friends, they had died still, and their parents had wept too.

The Cute One told us that, after the first half-dozen or so deaths in Gardens, mothers began packing their belongings and fleeing whenever any of their children started coughing. Following the mysterious disappearance of a child a year after we started our assaults, the women and children who remained were gone within days.

By the time we went to Bézam to welcome Thula home, Gardens contained only men, broken and longing for home, yet still holding on to visions of wealth for the sake of those they loved. The school sat empty, teachers gone alongside the children. The only teachers left there were the teachers for the Kosawa school, all of whom were freshly out of their training program. Even Teacher Penda had fled; he left with a goodbye neither for us nor for our nieces and nephews, whom he was teaching at the time. We couldn’t blame him for acting as if we were his enemies: given a chance to burn Gardens to ashes with him in its confines, we wouldn’t have held ourselves back to spare his life.



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