How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  * * *

  —

  “Give him the key,” one of our mothers cried out. The rest of our mothers joined in. Please, they said, we don’t want soldiers coming here. We’re begging you.

  “Are you going to sit there and watch a madman invite abominations to your homes?” the Leader said to our fathers and grandfathers sitting at the front of the gathering, looking from one face to the next. “You’re willing to die because of him?”

  The soldiers might very well be on their way to Kosawa that moment, he said repeatedly. We ought to consider his words a final warning to get his key from that madman this very minute, or prepare ourselves for a bloody encounter.

  The sound of our anguished murmurs rose. We could see clearly what lay ahead for us. We saw our village gone, poisoned and slaughtered. We saw in Konga our ruin.

  We wanted no part of his madness.

  The Leader pointed to our young men in the back and asked for volunteers to come up front, four strong young men to help him get the key from Konga.

  No one stepped forward—we wanted to avoid a slaughter, but who among us dared touch a madman? Woja Beki moved close to the Leader and whispered in his ear.

  “Is this some sort of a joke?” the Leader said, his expression a convergence of shock, pity, and disgust. Woja Beki shook his head. The Leader gazed at us as if we’d just been revealed to be from another realm, a realm in which the laws bore no likeness to the ones ordinary humans lived by. “How could you believe such a thing?” he cried, arms raised and flapping in exasperation. “No one dies from touching a madman. No one has ever died from touching a madman. Does anyone here understand that?”

  How could he appreciate laws that had not been imprinted on his heart?

  “Get me my key right now,” he said firmly, “or tomorrow you’ll all regret it.”

  Woja Beki took a deep breath. Speaking as if he was using a borrowed voice he needed to treat with care lest he return it in a subpar condition, he looked at our young men in the back and told them that the future of Kosawa now rested with them.

  “Your fathers cannot fight,” he said. “Your mothers are old, your wives are women, your children are weak. If you don’t do what is right, who will? I promise you, if you continue standing there and allow Konga to bring us harm, the wind will sing songs about a village that was laid to waste because its young men were cowards.”

  One of the young men stepped forward. Speaking in a voice no more steady than Woja Beki’s, he said he would do it. His wife cried out, imploring him not to. His mother, her voice brittle, pleaded with him too. His father turned his face away.

  Woja Beki nodded and half-smiled at him, a token of gratitude.

  Three more young men came forward. We’ll do it, they said.

  Don’t do it, voices cried from across the square. Do it, others shouted. Do you want to see them and their descendants cursed forever? the dissenters yelled, many rising to their feet. Do you want us all to be killed tomorrow morning? the encouragers responded, no less incensed. There has to be another way. There is no other way.

  The quarrels began. Loud and fierce and clamorous.

  We defy them tonight and we stand a chance of being free again, some said. We don’t need freedom, we need to stay alive, others argued. Let us show them that we’re people too. The soldiers are going to shoot us dead. The Spirit has sent Konga to tell us that we can and should fight. Fight with what? Fight with what we’ve got. What have we got but spears? We’ve got machetes and stones and pots of boiling water. How can you be so stupid as to think we have any chance? Konga has shown us we stand every chance. Konga is a madman. Perhaps madness is what we all need. How can you say such a thing? We were once a brave people, the blood of the leopard flows within us—when did we lose sight of that? We’ll be dead tomorrow—is that what you want?

  Everyone was standing, shouting; no one was listening. Konga and the Leader shook their fists at each other. The four young men stood between them, unsure of which side they were on. Most of us children began crying, our sad sounds lost in the chaos that had become our lives. Some of us cried for fear that death would arrive the next day, others for the illness that might lead to death the next month.

  We all knew the truth: death was at hand.

  * * *

  —

  When it had begun to appear the meeting would never end, Lusaka, the father of our departed age-mate and classmate Wambi, stood up and walked to the front of the gathering. He clapped to get everyone’s attention. He continued clapping as the murmurs ebbed, until everyone was seated again and quiet.

  He was one of the most peaceful men in Kosawa and rarely spoke, so whenever he stood before us everyone listened. The loss of his sons had diminished his frame, made him smaller than he used to be, but he seemed to have grown in wisdom.

  “We won’t come to an agreement tonight,” he said, eliciting hums of agreement from all but a few of our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. “I’d like to propose a solution so we can at least put an end to this squabbling for now. Let me take these men home with me, and let Konga do what he wants to do with their driver and their key. I’ll give them beds, and tomorrow morning my wife will give them breakfast. After they’ve eaten, I’ll take them to see the graves of my sons who died from their poison. I’ll show them the grave of every child we’ve buried, and they’ll count the graves so that they’ll know the number and never forget it. Then we’ll keep them prisoner and I’ll guard them until their employer stops killing us.”

  “Prisoner?” the Leader said. “Who do you think you are to—”

  “What makes you think Pexton is going to leave us alone because we take its men prisoner?” one of our fathers shouted at Lusaka.

  “And exactly how long do you suggest we keep them prisoner?” another added.

  “You’re crazier than Konga if you believe we can maneuver people in Bézam.”

  The commotion returned—everyone speaking, no one listening. The Pexton men and Woja Beki watched us, as if we’d lost all senses. Several of our grandfathers stood up to upbraid Lusaka: How could he be so naïve as to think Pexton would bow to our threats and demands? What made him think they cared? What would happen when the soldiers arrived the next day with enough bullets for every living thing in Kosawa?

  “When the soldiers arrive,” Lusaka said, “we’ll tell them that if they kill one of us, we’ll kill these men.”

  “And what if they don’t care?” a mother cried. “What if they let us kill the men and then kill us after? Does Pexton care if these men live or die?”

  “It does,” Konga replied, silencing everyone with the boom of his voice. “Pexton would never let anything bad happen to its men, because Pexton loves its men.”

  Most of our grandfathers nodded in approval, as if they’d seen evidence of this.

  We believed it too, because it was now obvious that the Spirit had possessed Konga. Having gone mad and lost all knowledge of the near and far past, he had no way of knowing how Pexton felt about its men, so it had to be the Spirit speaking through him. Of this we had no doubt—the Spirit was in our midst and it was telling us to dare. Those of us who had been crying dried the remnants of the tears on our cheeks. Our mothers and fathers whispered to one another as they nodded and sighed deeply in relief.

  Lusaka clapped again to quiet everyone. “It’s simple,” he said softly. “If Pexton doesn’t stop killing our children, I’ll kill these three of its children with my bare hands.”

  No one in the village square made a sound.

  Lusaka wished everyone a good night and began walking to his hut.

  Konga ordered the four young men to seize the Pexton men and Woja Beki and follow Lusaka. “Don’t you dare touch me,” the Leader said. The young men dared.

  They grabbed one man apiece, each man resisting in his own way�
��the Leader flailing his arms, his subordinates kicking and punching the air, Woja Beki wagging his finger and speaking with clenched teeth, ordering the young men to stop, reminding them that he was their leader, the blood of the leopard flowed thickest within him, he gave the orders here, they’d better not forget that. Konga asked for four more young men to come help. Eight rushed to the front, our friend Thula’s uncle among them—a young man named Bongo, whose zeal to put an end to our woes awed everyone, being that he didn’t yet have a child. Now reckoning with twelve men, the captives fought less, cursed more. Their voices receded. Woja Beki’s wives’ and children’s whimpers became apparent. Two of his children were in our class. We did not attempt to console them; we’d long since stopped liking them.

  Konga thanked us for coming and told us that the meeting was now officially over. He wished us a good night. “Tomorrow,” he said, “everything is going to change.”

  * * *

  —

  Some of us walked home scared. Some of us floated, jubilant and light. Our friend Thula, thinking of her missing and likely dead father, walked head down, holding the hand of her little brother, Juba, a child who had died from Pexton’s poison and come back to life through the mercy of the Spirit. Behind them, their mother and their father’s mother walked slowly, hoping, we imagined, that they would soon have answers about the fate of their husband and son. Like every family in Kosawa, the Nangi family wanted liberation from their pain. We were all hopeful that night—we hoped even as we feared.

  Tomorrow the soldiers will arrive, and we might be dead by sunset.

  Tomorrow Pexton will surrender, and we might live to see our old age.

  We tried not to think about our future. We wanted to hold on to that night for as long as we could, savor this optimism that had descended upon us, the faint promise of triumph. We wanted to be overcome with madness like Konga and relish the fleeting ecstasy wrought of fearlessness, anticipating our new lives as conquerors.

  They’d proclaimed victory over us prematurely. That night, we declared war on them, and the next morning we awaited their arrival.

  They should have known we’re not easily defeated.

  Thula

  The hut is warm, but my teeth chatter. My mind thrashes around, compelling me to imagine the spill of my blood after a bullet tears open my belly. I wonder how many bullets it would take to kill me—what would my corpse look like? I’ve spent my entire life around death, and yet I fear it. The mystery of it confounds me. How someone could be here and not here, in our world but also gone from it, with a nose closed off to air, eyes that won’t open, a sealed mouth, a human but just a thing. I hate this world, but I don’t yearn to leave it. I want to live long and see what life after a twisted childhood looks like, but I know death is eager to claim me—my journey to reunite with Papa might begin tomorrow. Once, after the funeral for one of my friends, I asked Papa about the crossing from this world to the next, how lonely and treacherous it would be, and he told me that it was different for everyone, it all depended on what kind of life a person had led, words that offered me no comfort. “You’re not going to die for a long time, Thula,” Papa said. A lie, we both knew it—what human can guarantee another long life?

  * * *

  —

  Mama fastens the rope that keeps our front door closed. Her hands tremble as she makes knot after knot; she seems convinced a tightly locked bamboo door will prevent soldiers from getting to us. She hurries to do the same to the back door. Juba and I are in the parlor, sitting with our grandmother, Yaya—Juba is on Yaya’s lap, I’m on a stool next to hers. Yaya strokes Juba’s head with one hand, places the other around my shoulders. Besides the sound of Mama’s efforts, our hut is quiet. Kosawa is quiet.

  “My dear children,” Yaya says, softly, “let’s go to sleep. We need a good rest so we’ll be ready to face whatever tomorrow brings.” She is wrapped by a peace I haven’t seen since the day Papa left. “If anyone comes to take something from us, we’ll give it to them, even if it’s our lives they want.”

  “Bongo and all the men are together right now, sharpening their machetes,” Mama says as she re-enters the parlor. Her voice is quivering. “If those soldiers think they can just come here and…”

  “But, Mama, the soldiers have guns,” I say, struggling not to cry. Papa told me, before he left, never to cry unless I must. “How will machetes help us?”

  “Jakani and Sakani will take care of that,” Mama replies.

  I ask no more questions. The twins—our village medium and medicine man—are capable of incredible deeds. They’re beyond human, but they’re mortals; they too can die.

  “We’ll all sleep in my bedroom tonight,” Yaya says, staring afar. “We’ll dream the same dream, maybe a dream in which we see your papa and your big papa.”

  Everyone is silent again, listening to the quietness outside. Yaya rises first, leaning against her cane. Juba and I follow her to her bedroom. Without rinsing our mouths or changing into our sleeping clothes, we go to lie on either side of her. Mama sleeps on the floor, no one beside her for comfort now that Papa is gone and tradition forbids her from ever sharing a bed with another man. I hear Juba and Yaya falling asleep—their breaths turning into light snores—but I know that, like me and most of Kosawa, Mama will stay up all night; life gifts easy peace only to the very young and very old. Nothing can hinder my thoughts from rushing to the moment when Mama and Yaya and Juba are slaughtered in my presence. I wonder how long I’ll spend dangling between this world and the next before finding myself among my ancestors, who I hope will welcome me and teach me how to be at home in their world. I pray they’ll help me forget the few good things of this world. Perhaps it won’t be hard for me to get used to this unimaginable land—Papa and Big Papa are already there, Mama and Yaya and Juba and Bongo will accompany me there. We’ll be together again, but first we must die.

  * * *

  Mama and Papa cautioning me never to go near the big river is my first memory of life. Without their warning, how would I have known that rivers were not ordinarily covered with oil and toxic waste? Without our parents’ stories about their childhoods in a clean Kosawa, their days spent swimming in rivers that ran clear, how would my friends and I have known that the sporadic smokiness that enveloped the village and left our eyes watery and noses runny wasn’t an ordinary occurrence in the lives of other children our age?

  The year my age-mates and I were born, while some of us were on our mothers’ breasts and the rest of us were spending our final days in the land of the unborn, an oil well exploded in Gardens. Our parents and grandparents told us that the explosion sent crude and smoke higher than the trees. It filled the air with soot, a sight everyone thought was an omen, never having seen the likes of it before. By our sixth year of life, though, after our parents had come to know the fullness of the curse that came from living on land beneath which oil sat, they’d realized that what they saw that day was no omen—it was merely a broken oil-well head, long overdue for replacement, but why should Pexton replace it when the cost of its negligence would be borne largely by us?

  * * *

  —

  One evening, when I am five, while sitting on the veranda with Papa, I ask him why the oil fields and surrounding dwellings for Pexton’s laborers are called Gardens though there’s not a single flower there. Papa thinks for a while, chuckles, and says, Well, Gardens is a different sort of garden, Pexton is a different sort of gardener; the oil is their flower. I ask Papa if the pipelines that begin in Gardens have an end—they seem to run on forever, wrapping around our village and passing over the big river, through our farms, and deep into the forest, the end nowhere in sight. Papa tells me that everything that has a beginning also has an end. In the case of the pipelines, they start at the oil wells and end in a faraway town many hours away by bus, a town near the ocean. There, Papa says, the oil is put into containers and sent overseas
, to that place called America.

  I ask Papa about America, if it has as many people as Kosawa, and he tells me that, from what he remembers in school, America has about seven thousand people, most of whom are tall men; the overseer at Gardens was from America. He and his friends came to Kosawa to get oil so that their other friends in America would have oil for their cars. Everyone in America has cars, Papa says, because the hours over there go by so fast that people need cars to get to places quickly and do everything before the sun goes down. I ask him if I can someday own a car and use some of our oil. Papa smiles at my question and says, Of course you can own a car, why not? Just make sure you buy a big one so you can use it to take me hunting; that way, I don’t tire my legs trekking to the forest every time. Being that I hate Pexton, I say, I wouldn’t want their oil in my car, so I’ll need to buy a car that does not use oil. Papa tells me that cars must use oil, but I insist mine will be different. Papa chuckles at my fantasy. Then he starts laughing. He laughs so hard that I start laughing too, because the delight in his eyes tickles my heart.

  * * *

  —

  Where is Papa? What did they do to him in Bézam? Could he still be alive?

  In the early days after he did not return from his mission, I pictured myself sitting on the veranda, middle-aged and gray and weary, still waiting for my papa, waiting for an old man to show up and say, “Thula, it’s me: your father, Malabo Nangi. I came back so we could continue chatting and laughing on the veranda.” What will I say to that old man? What could ever make up for the loss of my dearest friend, my sweet papa, unlike all other papas in Kosawa, a papa who sat with his daughter at night and counted stars, who wondered with me if stalks of grass live in fear of the day they’d be trampled upon, who reminded me to never forget what it felt like to be a child when I grow up, never forget how it felt to be small and in need of protection, much of the suffering in the world was because of those who had forgotten that they too were once children.