Freshwater(12)

We felt just like she did, the most alone we could remember, torn from the place of our first and second births: taken on a plane across an ocean, given no return date. Let us tell you, our mother’s children began to cherish another great anger against us then. This was a side effect of being in a body, the fact that the humans had a human life. It was inevitable that the Ada would go to university, that her life would continue moving in a way that had nothing to do with us. She was majoring in biology; she wanted to be a veterinarian because she loved animals. We did not care. We were hungry inside her, raging against this useless mortality, as if we could rage right back to the world we came from. We raged at the displacement of a new country.

After all, were we not ?gbanje? It was an insult to be subject to the decisions made around what was just a vessel. To be carried away like cargo, to be deposited in the land of the corrupters, inside this child simmering with emotions, searching for us because she was uprooted and alone, and we, always we, having to fix it, well, you miss your father—why we don’t know, the man was just a man, and you miss the amen and that yellow girl you used to run around with, and you have work to do, work to do, and no time to shatter any further, and you hide in a lecture hall and cry and cry as if you have something to cry about? Very well, we will do you this one thing, because it was always you and us together, and you named us the shadow that eats things and the smoke that hides the mother color from our teeth, and you have granted us dominion over this marble room that you call your mind, so here is the place where you miss that man and the girls and the road you used to run down, it is soft and fleshy, a bulb of feeling, and here we are like a useful edge and here is the cut, here is the fall, here is the empty that follows it all.

Here is the empty that follows it all.



After that, it was simple; the Ada stopped missing Saul and the amen and Lisa. We were still angry; gods are not appeased that easily, so we bubbled violently through her arms. She threw lamps and cafeteria cups across the small room she shared with a white girl on the honors floor, shattered glass following her like a lost dog. She met the American girls who had come from Miami and Atlanta and Chicago, Black girls with slick, straight hair. They fluttered at the state of hers, which was a confused mix of textures and lengths, thick and awkward. When the Ada was a child, it had been a beast leaping from her scalp and gnawing at her small shoulders. Saachi bought relaxers to subdue it, to stop it from rising into the sky; not to make it straight but to calm it down so at least a comb could be teased through. It was washed every Sunday in its full greatness, combed through every morning before school, tugged into two plaits while the Ada ate Nasco cornflakes and winced.

Saachi was in Saudi the day that they cut it, but she spoke of that day as if she was there, telling everyone how the Ada cried. In the months before leaving for America, the Ada had let her hair grow back out, braided it into synthetic twists for her secondary school graduation, then taken those out before flying to Virginia. The American girls sat her down firmly in front of a television and relaxed her hair, blow-drying and flatironing it until it was decided and bone-straight. The girl holding the flatiron sang along to the advertisements on TV and the Ada laughed, looking up at her sideways.

“How do you know all the songs?” she asked.

The girl laughed back at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “By the time you’re here for a while, you’ll be singing all the commercials too.” She ran a wide-tooth comb through the Ada’s hair, admiring how all the curls had gone. The other girls came to check it out, to give their approval, and then they took her around to meet the other Black kids on campus, because the Ada was now one of them, welcome to America. We watched, fascinated. Humans are so ritualistic. When they met her, the Black boys sidled up, grinning. Most of them were track runners, tight and almost feline in how they moved.

“Hey girl,” they drawled. “Where you from?”

It wasn’t a question we were used to, not yet. “Nigeria,” the Ada replied, smiling politely, wondering if it sounded strange. We never had to say that when we lived there.

“Oh, word? That’s cool.”

The girls who were showing her around leaned against the walls and flipped their silked-up hair. “Watch out now,” they said, smirking. “She’s only sixteen.”

The Ada watched as the boys visibly recoiled.

“Oh, hell no!” they said, drawing out the hell. “We gon’ have to wait till you eighteen, shit.”

Everyone laughed and the Ada smiled vaguely, but she didn’t get the joke, not then. After a few weeks with that crew, it became clear that the Ada didn’t quite fit. They disliked the white equestrians who lived on the honors floor with her, and the Ada didn’t know why, not yet. America would teach her that later. When the Black kids found out that she listened to Linkin Park, they looked at her like she was a stranger thing than they’d bargained for. The Ada drifted away from them and found the other international students instead: the long jumper from Jamaica, the soccer players from Saint Lucia and Uganda and Kenya, the Dominican cigar-smoking girl, all the others who didn’t quite fit either. They became her circle for the rest of her stay in the mountains.

Then it was two years later and she was eighteen and her hair was long and decided and bone-straight, falling past her shoulders in heavy dark brown. We were still inside her, but she was much the same as she’d been when Saachi brought her there and handed her over to the kindly white faculty, except she now knew what everyone meant by the jokes about her age, she knew what they were waiting for. The Ada still wore a gold crucifix around her neck, a gift from Saachi’s mother, a reminder that she had kept her childhood crush on the christ. She never questioned his decision not to hold her; instead she constantly asked him for forgiveness as she tried to be worthy of his love. There had been the Panamanian boy when she was sixteen (sixteen and a half, she’d corrected, and he looked at her like she was a child), the dark muscled boy from Canarsie who ate no meat and taught her how to twist his dreadlocks and braid them, the assistant track coach from Colombia, the embarrassing crushes (the man from admissions, the skinny Trini boy who ran like wind on the pitch)—all just kisses, no one had touched her lower than the indent of her navel.