How Beautiful We Were
Page 23
After the meeting, people gathered around to ask him questions about this village. I waited my turn, my heart pounding—it was all too strange. My turn came. I greeted him, smiling. He smiled back but said nothing, perhaps waiting for me to ask him a question. Unsure of what to say, I blurted out that I was Bongo’s niece. His brow twisted; he seemed to be struggling to remember Bongo. Bongo, from Kosawa, I said. He remained confused. I repeated it, and whispered that I was there on the afternoon when the soldiers came. It was then that the look on his face changed to a blend of astonishment and something tender I can’t describe.
I can’t tell you how tightly he hugged me, or how much I’d longed for a hug like that since the day I left Kosawa. After we separated, I saw his face clearly—he was still prettier than any man I’ve ever seen. His hair was still as long as when we first saw him and some of the girls had giggled as they wished they could have hair as plentiful as his. Where he once had the residual softness of boyhood, though, he now had hard lines of manhood running around his face. It occurred to me that he had to be around the age my father was when he vanished.
We found two chairs at the back of the room. He asked me how I was settling in New York. He apologized for not having contacted me; the Sweet One had written to tell him that I would be arriving and ask if he could help me if I ever found myself in need of assistance. Austin said he told the Sweet One he would do whatever he could while I was here, but his newspaper job had him traveling all over the country; rarely was he in his apartment, in an area called Brooklyn. He’d actually forgotten that I was in the city; he didn’t mean to be rude when I came up to him, he was only trying to understand why a stranger was talking about Bongo.
I nodded, averting my eyes from his, which were aglow with gentleness.
I asked him if he’d left our country of his own volition or if he’d been forced to flee. He told me his uncle’s death and the massacre still haunted him, but he would have remained in our country given the chance—he loved its people. The decision to leave or stay, though, wasn’t his. Two weeks after pictures of the massacre appeared in his newspaper in America, soldiers arrived at his door to escort him to the airport. They told him that His Excellency did not want in his country any newspaperman who made up fake stories—doing so meant that Austin was His Excellency’s enemy, and thus the enemy of his people. Austin would have been glad to tell me more that night, I could see, but I knew I would meet him again, so I didn’t ask if that meant he could never return to our country again. Besides, he had to leave to meet someone for a story. So we had another hug, and he held my hand as we walked out of the building onto the street, letting go only at the last moment. Watching him walk away, I couldn’t decide whether he’d held my hand because he had a history with Bongo, or because the Sweet One had asked him to watch over me, or because he wanted to, for his sake, not for anyone else’s.
We’ve seen each other twice since that day—he’s come to visit me at school. We mostly talk about Kosawa and about how he wishes he could have done more for us. Not since my evenings on our veranda with my father have I sat down and spent so much time with someone else pondering life’s whys. He and I will be seeing each other next month. He’ll take me to this place called Brooklyn—I hear I can find food as good as ours there, I’m desperate for a tasty meal. But for now, what I’m eager to do is to return to the Village Meeting. I want to meet someone, a man who spoke at the previous meeting. This man, named Maxim, said something that opened my eyes, something I must tell you.
Maxim was the last person to speak at the meeting. He was an old man, around the age of our grandfathers—he’d needed a chair to sit on while onstage because his legs wouldn’t allow him to stand for long. There were over one hundred of us in that room, and none of us had made a sound as Maxim told the story of when he was a young man in a poor, cold country in Europe, how he and a group of his friends had burned down a government office building. He told us how they took oil and matches and just burned the whole thing down. His eyes lit up as he recounted the magnificence of the flame and smoke rising on that dark, frigid night. No one ever found out it was them. Months later, they went to another government office and ripped up documents and broke cabinets and sprayed paint all over. Afterward, they sat down on the floor of the office and drank alcohol. Then they urinated on the tables and chairs, laughing. Maxim laughed when he said this last part, and we all burst out laughing too, and clapping. We didn’t stop clapping until he told us that it wasn’t long before the government figured out who was responsible. The government arrested him and his friends; they spent a year in prison. That year was the proudest of his life, he said, because instead of sitting and talking and waiting for someone to do something, he’d done what he could. He’d done what he believed he had to. He’d shown those bastards that he could fight back, and that as long as he had breath in him, he would never stop fighting back.
You should have been there at that moment to see this man’s pride, his fearlessness, how in awe of it we all were. We stood up and clapped for so long the sound of it must have echoed all the way to the west end of the universe. My eyes welled up. Was Maxim’s message for me? For us? I remember all the times when I listened to you talking about it in the village square, saying we ought to hurt Pexton. I didn’t agree with you then. Burning a building seemed so futile. Even burning ten buildings seemed futile. Pexton could rebuild Gardens in a day. But perhaps the point isn’t for us to hurt them in a manner from which they’ll never recover. Perhaps the point is merely to let them know that we’re here. And we’re angry.
Yesterday my friends and I were discussing Maxim’s story in my bedroom. There were six of us, and only one person agreed with me that destroying our enemy’s property could lead to anything good. It’s just not effective, was the consensus. I argued that we can’t decide based on the notion of effectiveness—how can we know that a strategy won’t prove itself worthwhile generations after being deemed a failure? Our duty is to do what we can now. That is what Sonni and the elders are too blinded by fear to see. Waiting for the Restoration Movement to free us is safe but cowardly. I admit that the more I think about it, the more the idea of damaging someone else’s property leaves me uneasy. But my father used to say we can’t do only what we’re at ease with, we must do what we ought to do.
Forgive me the length of this letter. What I most want you to know right now is that I’m open to listening to your ideas about making it clear to Pexton that it’s not over.
I’ll always be one of us,
Thula
* * *
—
In our response, we reminded her of the story about the ants that killed the growling dog, bite by bite. We could do such a thing too. There was no better time to start biting Pexton than now. Kosawa was in danger of becoming uninhabitable. We were about to start getting married, after which children would follow—how could we allow our children to suffer like we once did? If we tried something and failed, wouldn’t it be better to one day tell the children that we’d done everything within our capacity? Thula agreed, writing:
Yes, if we are to be conquered, let it not be because we never fought. Our fathers, brothers, uncles, friends—what did they die for? They died so that we could live peacefully in Kosawa, and if not us, then at least the next generation. No one has the right to make us prisoners on our land. No one has the right to take from us that which the Spirit gave our ancestors. Across America today are pockets of people who were made prisoners on their land. The land of their ancestors was taken from them, and now they live at the edge of society, a plight worse than ours. At least we still walk the paths our ancestors walked, but who’s to say that one day all of our land won’t be taken from us like it happened here? The ancestors of these trampled people in America fought hard and they lost, but what’s most important is that they fought. Much as the story of their defeat saddens me, it heartens me also, because I realize t
hat, like them, we’re not weak, a ferocious creature gave us its blood. The government and Pexton have left us with no choice but to do what we must in order to be heard. They speak to us in the language of destruction—let’s speak it to them too, since it’s what they understand.
Do it, knowing you have my blessings. I only ask that you harm no humans; we’ll never become killers like them, because the blood of noble men flows in our veins. I’ll send you what money I can to help, and I’ll pray the Spirit to watch over you.
I’ll always be one of us,
Thula
Yaya
If there is one regret I have about my marriage, it’s how little I laughed. So much to laugh about in life, and yet I deprived myself. Why? Because my love for my husband demanded that I not bask in bliss while he tottered in sorrow? Because, what really is there to laugh about in this world? But there’s so much to laugh about. Only now, as I lie on this dying-bed, do I realize it: life is funny. People fighting over a piece of land that none of them can take along when death comes—how is that not funny? Everyone wanting something to make them happy, only to realize once they get it that they want something else to make them happy—how is that not funny? Life is a chase after the wind, meaningless, ridiculous. How could that have eluded me? Why did this world become amusing only when I realized I was about to leave it? Perhaps it’s because I now have nothing but time to spend thinking about how sad it is that I didn’t long ago realize it and laugh more. Alas, it’s too late for me to start doing so—the closer death gets, the less I care about the present. My thoughts are mostly of the past, the things I’ve seen. On sleepless nights, as I await a new day exactly like the old one, I think of the events that laid the setting for what would happen to my family, to my village. I think of stories my husband used to tell me on his better days, like how he once spent two weeks on a beach.
* * *
—
He was young back then, several years before we met. Three men from Europe were passing through Lokunja, on their way from Bézam, heading to the coast, where they would get on their boat to sail back home. They had lost one of their guides and were looking for a hard worker to serve as replacement; my husband heard about the opportunity from someone who knew about his discipline and thought he’d be good at it. This was long before he moved to Kosawa to work for Woja Bewa, taking care of his farm. He knew a guide job had its benefits but, like the rest of us, he was wary of men from Europe, these men who had come to make themselves masters over us. Soon, though, he found out that the men were going to pay him well and that his duties would take him to the ocean. He’d never been near the ocean; no one from our area had ever seen it. We knew it existed a great distance away, but not many of us wondered about it—we had streams and rivers, they were sufficient. But my husband wanted to experience more than was sufficient. So, fearful though he was of what unstated dangers might be involved in the guide job, he agreed to do it for a chance to see the ocean.
The day he set out with the men was the first time he’d ever been in a car.
He and the other guide traveled in the open space in the back of the car. In those days our country was mostly a landscape of densely packed trees, an odd village here and there, not much to see. My husband made a fire and cooked for the European men whenever their group stopped to spend the night in villages along the way or, if there were no villages in sight as darkness approached, in whatever seemingly safe spot the group settled in along the forest paths. His co-guide was from the Bézam area and had a sharp ear; the man had learned English and served as the Europeans’ interpreter throughout the trip. The co-guide instructed my husband on how warm to make the men’s bathing water, how long to roast whatever creature he’d spotted and killed for them, how to prepare and serve the dried fruits and sweet things the Europeans had brought from their country. The guide told my husband that the Europeans and their friends, stationed in towns around the country, were people of great curiosity. He said that the Europeans had traveled here to understand what kind of people we were, why we behaved the way we did, how they could help us so we could live better lives.
My husband let the other guide talk for most of the trip; it made the hours spent bobbing in the back of the car more bearable. Besides, the man couldn’t have been silenced—he seemed incapable of keeping to himself the wonderful changes these European men had brought to the country. In his estimation, the Europeans’ arrival had carried the brightness of dawn. Despite there being much he didn’t like about his masters—how they spoke to him as if he were a dog, for example—he loved that they were giving him a chance to separate himself from his age-mates. His eyes shone when he talked about strolling around his village wearing clothes his masters had given him, the looks of envy his friends gave him, close as he was to becoming a European man himself. Though he missed his wife’s cooking when he traveled, he enjoyed eating his masters’ leftover food and drinking whatever alcohol they couldn’t finish, even if the drink was nowhere as good as palm wine. He hoped the masters’ mission would be successful. If everything went according to their plans, he said, people in every village in our country would soon be speaking English and wearing fine clothes and reading books and eating sweet things and owning cars, and maybe, he added wistfully, a child of his would one day own a car too, and he would get to sit in the front, no longer in the back.
* * *
—
My husband couldn’t recall how many days it took to arrive at the coast; he had stopped counting after Day Two, deciding it best to be mindless of how far he was from the only world he knew. When he finally entered the coastal village of the European men’s departure, everything about it was like his birth village except for one thing: the smell of its air. It was distinct, a scent he couldn’t describe to me because, he said, it wasn’t sweet, not exactly, it wasn’t delicious in the way a pot of stewed chicken smells, but he could taste it and swallow it. It was an entirely new sort of pleasure for his tongue, this air the ocean was directing his way. He’d inhaled it, savored it, eyes closed, over and over.
He ran to the beach as soon as he was done helping the masters get settled in the village head’s hut. The horizon was the first thing he noticed, its curve and expanse. “How can I describe it?” he asked me. “How can I help you conjure such an enormity?” Looking at it, he was suddenly aware that he was a mere speck in life’s infinite wonders. He realized he was everything and nothing. He sat down on the sand, open-mouthed, slack-armed. He remained on that beach for hours, while the village’s children swam in front of him, splashing water against each other. He was still there when fishermen began returning with their catch. Some of the fishermen looked at him on the sand with his mouth agape and laughed—they’d seen the likes of him before, one of those from the hinterland who had never seen blueness without end. That evening, he saw the sun enthroned at the horizon. He watched it bow before the earth. When he touched his cheek, there was water on it; that was the only time he ever cried as a man.
He slept on that beach for two weeks, while the other guide slid into the bed of a husbandless woman with whom he had an arrangement (the masters left on the third day; the boat that took them brought new masters, four Europeans who wanted to stay in the village for a while). Some of the men from the village offered my husband space in their huts, but he thanked them and said no—he’d soon be returning to sleep in huts for the rest of his life, but he would never again sleep on a beach once he left. In the evenings, he took beach strolls and bought dinner from women selling freshly caught grilled fish marinated in salt, pepper, ginger, and garlic; covered with sliced red onions; served with fried ripe plantains and a peppery dipping sauce. After the descent of darkness on full-moon nights, when the villagers came out to the beach to sing and dance, he helped the men beat their drums. For the first time in over twenty years of life, he was happy. But he knew that he couldn’t remain in that village: a man belongs with his people, a
mong those who share his ancestors, not with strangers, no matter how beautiful their land.
* * *
I remember still, when I was a little girl, a day when two Europeans and their interpreter came to Kosawa. They came to tell us about their Spirit. They said their Spirit would bring us out of the darkness we didn’t know we were living in. We would see the light.
The men were covered in mosquito bites and sweating, though it was a cool day, no sun in sight. One of them was old enough to be a grandfather, and yet there he was in our midst, saying he couldn’t die until he’d told us the truth. We later found out that this man had been traveling across villages since he was young, convinced he’d someday meet fertile hearts on which the seeds of his words would germinate and grow. He hoped that the fruits born of those seeds would in turn travel far in our part of the world, causing all spirits to bow in surrender to his Spirit.
We gathered in the village square to hear them talk, not because we cared to but because our woja at the time believed all European men had guns—why risk being killed if we could simply lend them our ears for an hour? Their interpreter, a young man from the third of the five sister-villages, began the meeting with a song. Clapping his hands, he sang with his eyes lifted to the sky about someone who once walked on water, a man who had twelve friends who followed him everywhere—the song made no sense. When he was done singing, the European men delivered a message of how we would live a better life after we died if we turned our backs on our Spirit and chose their Spirit. “You have no ancestors waiting for you in the next world,” they said to us. “Your ancestors are burning in a fire—do you want to join them there?” They did not tell us why their Spirit would throw us in a fire when we hadn’t done anything to offend it. We wondered, as we listened to them, why their Spirit was so bitter and irrational. If we closed our eyes and said some words in prayer, the men said, their Spirit would become our Spirit. After we died, instead of joining our ancestors in the fire and burning with them for an everlasting night, we would spend our afterlives in a place where there was no night, just one glorious morning, a place where the roads were straight and shiny, and the gardens had the most beautiful flowers. Everyone loved each other there, and a choir in shiny white robes never stopped singing.