How Beautiful We Were(94)
Austin won’t stop begging me to stay in America. He says I could make money and send it to you. He thinks it might actually be better if we sold Kosawa to Pexton. How can he understand? Money will do what it can, but what we want isn’t just to be left alone. What we want is to own our lives and strut like the sons and daughters of leopards that we are.
* * *
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After we received that letter, whenever we thought of her words and her belief that we had every right to dignity and respect, our chests puffed out and our shoulders went high. Later that month, the entire village echoed her when we all gathered to celebrate the rite of passage of a generation of boys entering manhood.
The manhood passage was always one of our favorite celebrations, because it reminded us of who we were as a people and the kind of life we were created to live. We laughed whenever we reminisced about the night before our passage, when we were taken deep into the forest by male relatives and left there. Some of our age-mates had tried to follow their relatives back home, and the relatives had whipped them and threatened to tie them to a tree. None of us were allowed to return home till the sun rose. We spent all night calling each other’s names amid inexplicable noises and smells, struggling to find one another in the darkness, scared we’d step on a snake or a scorpion. Those of us who found friends huddled with them against a tree, shivering; we weren’t allowed to take a blanket, though the rituals always took place in the rainy season. If we couldn’t find a friend, we climbed on trees for safety, or sat up all night hugging ourselves, too scared to lie down alone. By morning, we were covered with mosquito bites but proud that we’d proved ourselves fearless. Walking to the village, laughing, we interrupted each other and shouted to be heard, eager to share our tales of survival.
We returned to the village to the sounds of our mothers’ cheering, though they had no reason to fear that we wouldn’t return—no Kosawa boy had ever failed to return to the village the night before the celebration. Still, the drums beat hard, and aunts and older sisters sweated in the kitchen as they cooked. But we couldn’t eat yet. We couldn’t hug our mothers. We weren’t even allowed to go to our huts. We were ushered directly to the square by our fathers and the elders. There, we sat on mats under the mango tree. We were not allowed to move or to speak, because manhood would require us to practice stillness. Only hand gestures were allowed if we needed to go use the toilet, after which we returned to our sitting position, hungry and cold. We sat there all morning and afternoon, until the hour the village was ready to commence the celebration.
Our last test began after all of Kosawa, plus friends and relatives from the sibling-villages, had gathered around us, a crowd of hundreds.
Every eye on us, we stripped down naked to walk on hot coals.
We had to take forty steps across the coals, displaying no shame or agony, because as men we would need to hold our heads high despite the world’s gaze, and channel our pain wisely. Our fathers had advised us to walk fast on the coal, but when the time came, few of us could; most of us ground our teeth with every step, and at least a couple of us leaked urine. At the completion of this test, our mothers and other female relatives wrapped loincloths around us, and our fathers and other male relatives carried us home, where our burnt soles were cleaned and bandaged after we took a bath.
When we returned to the square, dressed in red, it was to the sound of the village anthem, everyone dancing and singing: Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.
Before the eating and drinking began—the part we’d been dreaming of all night in the forest and all day sitting in silence—we knelt before the elders. They laid their hands on our heads, poured libations, and anointed us the next generation of leopards. When we arose after the anointing was when we entered manhood. We knew, though, because our fathers had told us, that the rite of passage alone did not make us men. We knew we would only become men the day we became responsible for other lives, when we acquired wives and had children and looked at them and realized we were worth nothing if we couldn’t give them everything. Now that we were men, we repeated this often to the younger generation, that the rite of passage was merely the door being opened for them to enter manhood—they would need to remind the world over and over of the blood of the leopard within them; otherwise, they’d be forever boys.
When we told Thula about the latest ceremony’s success, she was stupefied that babies she’d carried around the village had now entered manhood. “I’m glad I’m coming back soon,” she said. “I don’t want to return and discover my friends are grandparents.” In that letter, which was her final correspondence from America, she told us of an impromptu farewell party her friends had thrown for her, how her friends had made her cry as they spoke about all the adventures they’d had together, the places they’d traveled across America. For most of the letter, though, she told us about her own recent passage:
Two days ago I went to Austin’s apartment to have dinner with him. We had decided that it would be best if we stopped talking about the fact that I’m leaving in three months, better we just enjoy ourselves as if we’d always be together. Sometimes we succeeded, but I could tell from his sullen demeanor the moment I entered his apartment that it wouldn’t be so that day. While we were eating the fried ripe plantains with beans and mushroom stew he’d learned how to make in Bézam, he took my right hand and told me that he had to tell me something.