The driver translated, and the big guy asked another question. “Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“New Yawk!” the big guy said to make me laugh. “Eh, fuggedaboutit.”
I did laugh; I appreciated the gesture.
“I filled your tank,” the driver said as he handed me the bottle.
“Thank you. You saved my life.”
He shrugged it off, but it was true and I was very grateful. I took my damp passport from my back pocket, removed a few of the francs I’d tucked inside, and pressed the money on both men.
“The sun is going to set soon,” he said. “You should stay here and leave in the morning. There are bandits on the roads at night.”
“Have you ever been robbed?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Have you ever seen any bandits?”
“No.”
“I’ll risk it.” Although I was exhausted, with my temperature a bit lower, and some water in me, I was ready to get to the closest city with a hotel room as soon as I could.
The truck driver glanced over my shoulder. Behind me, Kamal’s father was helping his wife toward the vehicle as Kamal’s sister and several other children orbited the pair. The truck driver went over to help the woman up into the cab. I handed a few bills to Kamal’s father, and thanked him for his hospitality; he absently tucked the money into his pocket, then climbed up into the cab, still too occupied by his own life’s affairs to give mine much thought. I sat in the shade of the school roof and drank more water and rested for a few more hours.
Years later, while reading some book or criticism having to do with the African diaspora, I suddenly burst out laughing at what was a fairly dry piece of writing. Completely unexpectedly, I’d learned the truck driver’s joke: he’d been pretending to have mistaken me for Oya, the Yoruba deity of wind. His job had made him worldly—they weren’t myths that he would’ve heard in the small village where he’d grown up. And although the tradition has been transported to the Americas, through descendants of slaves, I grew up ignorant of it.
My mother named me Marie Madeleine, Mary Magdalene, even though I could never internalize her French Catholicism, her blue-eyed Jesus. I like Oya better. She makes more sense to me—presented as an Orisha with her own business to attend to, which is precisely what bonds her to Shango, her husband. What compels him to her.
People always used to ask me why I was a Fed, because it seemed to them that what I did for a living didn’t line up with what they expected of me. In that way, it was shorthand for asking what I believe in, the question was a way of asking who I really was. The answer is here, in the way I feel stuck between these two legacies. And simultaneously like I should claim both and neither.
I was still fatigued when I went to my bike, kick-started it, and continued south. Being back on the bike was rejuvenating, and the farther I went, the greener the landscape around me got. After I passed through Pô, it took another hour to get to the Burkina-Ghana border, and by that time, the sun had already set. In the beam of my headlight, I saw that the road on the other side of the border was paved and in much better condition than the dirt road I was on. A white arch spanned the border crossing, and on it was the hand-painted declaration: Welcome to Ghana, but the gate beneath it was incongruously locked. All of the commercial buildings crowded near the border were shuttered too. I’d arrived too late in the day to cross legally. Still, I was lucky to have made it at all.
I got off the bike, took out my flashlight, and pulled my gun from my holster, then went on foot into the forest behind the buildings. The air there was fresh and pleasant. I found that the trees weren’t particularly dense—I could easily cross into Ghana on the motorcycle.
As I was turning back toward my bike, I heard one voice call to another and froze, picturing a group of bandits, or worse, soldiers. But as I kept listening, I realized how young the voices sounded. They belonged to children. I quickly put the gun away, feeling ill about even having it out in the first place.
I moved slowly back out of the forest. There were three boys in flip-flops, all of them pushing bicycles. Each had a wheeled red Coke crate tied to his bike. The glass bottles in the crates were filled with what I assumed was gas. They must’ve been smuggling it into Burkina from Ghana, where it was much cheaper. For all I knew they were the suppliers for the boys at the gas station where I’d stopped with Thomas. Thinking about him made tears well up in my eyes that I chased away.
“Hello,” I said. “Bonsoir.”
Two of the boys just stared at me, while the third broke into an instinctive run, and I called after him: “Gaz! Can I buy some gas?”
The boys looked at each other, and I realized then that the silence I was being confronted with wasn’t one of incomprehension but astonishment. A strange foreign woman had suddenly appeared in the woods. “D’accord,” the tallest boy finally said. He reached down, took a couple of Coke bottles from his red crate, and followed me in the direction of my motorcycle, where he poured the gas into my tank. I paid him much more than he’d asked for, and he disappeared back into the woods with his empty bottles. I put the motorcycle in neutral and pushed it through the trees in his wake. The forest spit me out on the road on the other side of the border. I was relieved, believing that Compaoré’s guards wouldn’t bother with trying to find me in Ghana. I continued toward the safety of Tamale.
26
I’M SURE YOU’LL LOOK UP your father. You’ll find that, officially speaking, there’s a lot of mystery surrounding his death.
Blaise Compaoré didn’t make a public appearance until the third day after the coup. During a press conference, which I listened to on the radio at a hotel in Tamale, he denied the rumor that he’d issued the order for Thomas’s assassination, claiming that he’d been home sick, but added that Thomas was becoming an authoritarian.
“It’s unfortunate, but Thomas’s presidency suffered severely from his penchant for adventurism and spontaneity when it came to economic, political, social, and cultural policies. He—”
“But where’s his body, Blaise?” an unmiked reporter demanded loudly. “The president deserves to rest in dignity and peace!”
A few moments of overlapping voices and general commotion followed before Compaoré regained control and continued the press conference, further slandering Thomas as a leader, then ending with a general promise of improvement under his new regime.
Despite the press conference, I couldn’t yet let myself believe that Thomas was dead. There’d been a report that he was being held in the military prison at the installation in Pô. I spent three days alone in my hotel room, alternating between dreading and hoping for more news about him.
The radio news did finally confirm that Thomas’s body had been found buried in the cemetery in Dagnoën, a neighborhood not very far from Zone du Bois. After I heard, I switched the radio to music and turned it up as loud as it would go and let myself cry. I granted myself the freedom to suffer. I’m reluctant to describe those days in more than broad strokes. I will limit myself to saying that I have a capacity for profound anger and sadness and shame. Had anyone who knows me been there to witness the intensity of my sorrow, they would’ve thought I’d lost my mind.
You’ve likely never seen me like that. Almost no one has. It has never earned me anything to share my darker self with other people. The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I’m on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman’s strength looks like when it’s palatable: like she is containing herself.
In my mind’s eye, I can picture those thirteen mounds of soil. Thomas and his twelve colleagues had been buried unceremoniously—I’d read in the paper that to distinguish each grave there were only simple wood markers with a name painted on each. Rumor had it that it was only thanks to the initiative of the military pri
soners who’d buried the bodies that the graves were marked at all.
I hated Ed Ross for forcing me to be complicit in Thomas’s murder. He’d bound me to a ghost. Thinking about it now still causes a whirlwind of heartbreak and anger to crash through me. I have to stop here.
* * *
—
THOMAS WAS ASSASSINATED DURING a special cabinet meeting at the Council of Entente grounds in downtown Ouaga. My interpretation is that when Compaoré learned that SSI wouldn’t be able to do what they’d promised, he gave the order for his fallback plan to seize power—an old-fashioned coup.
The council, a government office that employed a half-dozen people, was conceived as a meeting place to promote political alliance and understanding. On the afternoon of his death, Thomas and Sam were driven to the council in a black Peugeot. The two men waited briefly in the courtyard for a second car with three bodyguards and a driver to arrive, and when it did, Thomas, Sam, and a second bodyguard went into the council villa. The drivers and the other guards—all of them uniformed soldiers—waited with the cars in the courtyard.
Thomas and Sam went to a room at the back of the building where the six members of his special cabinet were already assembled and had been waiting for him for a half hour. The bodyguards took their posts in the hall. All of the cabinet members, including Thomas, were dressed in athletic clothes; they planned to attend a public exercise event after the meeting. Thomas was wearing red track pants and a T-shirt. He sat at the head of the U-shaped table and called the meeting to order.
As one of the members of the cabinet was talking about his recent trip to Cotonou, where he’d participated in a conference with the People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin, he was interrupted by the sound of a car with a broken muffler outside. Then a volley of Kalashnikov fire exploded in the courtyard.
The gunfire brought faces to the first-floor windows. There were commandos in the courtyard. Terrified employees fled into the hall and up to the roof to hide.
The cabinet members took cover, all but Thomas, who stood. He was the only one in the meeting who was armed, his automatic pistol lying on the table in front of him. A second burst of gunfire sounded and a voice called, “Come out!”
“Restez-la, c’est moi qu’ils veulent,” Thomas said calmly. Stay here, it’s me they want. He told Sam and the second bodyguard not to follow him as he went down the hall. Thomas Sankara had his hands up as he walked out into the courtyard.
“I’m coming,” he called to them as he approached the car.
Seven commandos—all of them under Blaise Compaoré’s direction—were clumped together in the courtyard near the white Peugeot 504 they’d arrived in. Thomas knew these men, recognized all of them. Some had once been members of his presidential guard.
The two drivers had been shot to death and were lying in the shade of the neem trees planted along the border of the courtyard. A third soldier’s body was crumpled near a moped. He had been shot in the chest and propelled off the vehicle. Letters and packages had spilled from the leather carrier bag slung from his chest and were blanketing the ground around him. The soldier had only been at the council grounds that day to deliver mail.
Thomas must’ve noticed the carnage in the courtyard too late. He was shot twice in the chest and died instantly. The commandos dedicated a few minutes to arguing about the best way to storm the building before heading inside. Sam and the bodyguard with him shot at the commandos when they entered into the hall; the commandos returned fire, hitting both men. Stepping over their bodies, the commandos went into the meeting room and ordered the cabinet members to stand. They did as they were told. They were marched down the hall and out into the courtyard, where they were summarily executed as the witnesses on the roof looked on in terror.
There was an eerie moment of performance after the assassinations for the witnesses who were close enough to hear the events unfolding. The commandos shot their guns in the air, pretending that the siege was an intense one, that they were justified in their slaughter. After the show they began to argue, again unable to agree about what to do with the bodies, and as they piled back into the Peugeot, they were still arguing. Finally, the engine started and the witnesses on the roof watched the car depart.
Then it was quiet. Bodies lay where they’d fallen in the courtyard. Minutes ticked by. The sound of scraping footsteps on the stairs up to the roof reached the witnesses, and the frightened group waited anxiously for whoever it was to appear.
It was Sam Kinda, miraculously resurrected. He’d been shot in the thigh. A tall man in a striped shirt ripped up Sam’s jersey for a tourniquet and wrapped it around his thigh to slow the blood oozing from the bullet hole there.
The sun sank in the sky. Two trucks rumbled onto the grounds. Doors opened and slammed. The man in the striped shirt went to the edge of the roof to look out and reported back to the others that it looked like the men who’d arrived were convicts from the military prison—he thought that because of their uniforms. The convicts quickly loaded the bodies into one of the trucks, then sprayed down the bloody courtyard. Both trucks left the grounds, and it was once more quiet.
Quietly, bravely, the group of witnesses started down the stairs with Sam Kinda at the back, his arms slung around a pair of men. The employees scattered across the courtyard, heading to their cars and mopeds and into the night.
27
MARTINIQUE, 1987
I WAS AFRAID TO RETURN TO NEW York, where it would be too easy for Ross to find me if he cared to go looking. I spent a few weeks in Accra, then flew to London, mostly because there was an inexpensive direct flight there, and from London went to Paris. I wandered all three cities aimlessly, but always looking over my shoulder. It was a mild fall, and I liked to walk along Canal Saint-Martin or to sit at one of the cafés. It was there that I decided to resign from the bureau. The events of the previous few months had made it impossible to stay in denial: I couldn’t enforce their laws anymore without questioning who they’d been designed to serve.
When I got sick in Paris, my first thought was that I’d contracted malaria in Ouagadougou. I went to a doctor there and learned I was six weeks pregnant. What was surprising was how much I suddenly wanted to be with my mother. I made the decision to fly to Martinique in an instant, before I’d even returned to my hotel from the doctor’s office, and only began to second-guess the choice after I’d touched down.
I took my suitcase toward the weathered white farmhouse, a mirror of the approach the four of us would make five years later. On the porch I could hear the distant crash of the ocean, could see the sky and the road unspooling below me. It was empty of cars.
I called into the house, and although there was no answer, stepped inside. Through the slats of the plantation shutters in the living room I could see Agathe approaching; she came through the open back door and put a bowl of lemons down on the dining room table.
“Marie.” She smiled and gently rested her hand on my shoulder in greeting. That was the extent of the affection we shared after years of separation. Luckily we’ve gotten a little better at being around each other since then.
“Are you hungry? I made lunch.”
“No, thanks.” It’s terrible to have morning sickness on a plane; I was still reeling from it. The hum of an engine and the sound of tires on the rocky pavement came through the open doorway. I tensed and sped out onto the front porch, where I saw a car pulling into the space beside my own. A man in a white shirt stepped out, and I called to my mother. I pointed to the man who was walking in the direction of the barn and asked who he was.
“Nicolas. He’s a farmhand.”
“The road I came up is the only one that leads to the house, right?”
Mystified by the question, she hesitated for a moment before saying it was. I asked her to show me around, wanting to familiarize myself with the property so I wouldn’t be taken by surprise by any u
nwelcome visitors.
She led me in the direction of the barn. She showed me a pair of small white buildings. One turned out to be a chicken coop, and the other was what had once been a detached kitchen. There was still an old icebox inside on the dirt floor. Chickens scooted across the brown grass around us as we went to the barn. She’d already stepped through the doorway, but I had to hang back because of a sudden surge of nausea.
“You’re sick,” she said.
“No.” I took a paper napkin from my pocket and wiped my mouth. “Pregnant.”
She beamed at me. “Can I hug you?” I hesitated before saying she could.
“Congratulations,” she said as she put her arms around me. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be out of your way in a few days. I just…” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
“Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Who’s the father?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Is he going to help?”
“No. But I’ll be fine.”
She smiled and shook her head gently at what I recognize now was my naïveté. “You should stay here.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“That you wouldn’t want a kid around.” She let out a long, slow breath.
“That you don’t like kids.”
“I’m sure I’ll like yours,” she said.
“So I can stay?”
“I want you to.”
I nodded. Although I couldn’t admit it, I’d been hoping she would ask.
“I bet you’re tired,” she said. “I can show you the rest of the property some other time.”
She was right; I was exhausted. I followed her back to the house, where she showed me to a bedroom, the one you’ve been sleeping in since we got here. It wasn’t what I’d expected. The giant four-poster bed had ornately carved feet and was far too big for both the room and the rest of the furniture, its surreal effect akin to Bedroom in Arles. There was a photo on the bedside table of a woman in a stiff wig, who was smiling without showing her teeth. I asked my mother who she was and felt embarrassed when she told me that this was my grandmother. The second photo was of Helene—in it, she was milking a cow. I laughed and picked it up.
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