How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  Manga told me that Sonni said the overseer’s house was as cold as well water in the rainy season. It had white carpet all over, and more chairs than any one house could possibly need. Three men from the district office were there. When everyone had been seated in the parlor, Sonni was given one task only—to make sure that the vandals from his village stopped what they were doing; otherwise, Kosawa would have a lot to regret. But did the young men listen when Sonni brought back the message? No. They insisted that they didn’t know what Sonni was talking about, that they’d never done anything at Gardens, that Pexton had enemies all over the world, it could be anyone.

  Nobody believed these children—their intentions were evident in the ashes. Two of them had recently gotten married; their wives went to their new fathers and cried and pleaded for them to ask their sons to stop getting out of bed in the middle of the night to look for trouble. What could the fathers do? Their sons were grown men, with ownership of their own lives. My husband liked to say a man’s feet can never stand on his head, but these children, they reminded the elders that, though that might be so, the feet could go wherever they wanted, and there was nothing the head could do except come along.

  * * *

  —

  Pexton recently hired armed watchmen, but that only seems to serve as an enticement of sorts to these children. Today it’s a pipeline break. Tomorrow it’s a fire. Two months ago, they waylaid and beat a laborer walking along the big river in the darkness; a supervisor came to speak to Sonni, because the laborer had been so pulped he needed to be taken to Bézam for treatment. The laborer hadn’t seen any faces: his attackers were wearing masks. When questioned, the young men swore they had been in their huts.

  Sonni has held meeting after meeting to beg for an end to the destruction. Sometimes these young men don’t even attend village meetings; Sonni’s pleas mean nothing to them. Their mothers have implored them to stop; they’ve threatened to walk around the village naked so everyone can shame their sons for caring nothing for their mothers’ dignity. Some fathers have said they’ll bring out the umbilical-cord bundle. No parents have yet carried out their threats—aren’t we all suffering enough from our collective curse?

  In one of the village meetings, the Sweet One and the Cute One begged the young men to find other ways of expressing their anger; they encouraged them to write a letter to the government, tell the government how afraid they are for their futures.

  The young men laughed in their faces; they don’t care what anyone who does not share their zeal has to say. They say Sonni is an old man, and that neither the Sweet One nor the Cute One is one of us. They believe Kosawa is theirs, their heritage. They say it’s their duty to fight for its restoration any way they want. But where has all the burning and breaking gotten them? Has Pexton picked up and left? Will they ever?

  * * *

  Everything got worse last month, when a child in Gardens disappeared. The soldiers were here before dawn. They went from hut to hut and dragged out every male from the age of ten, barking at them to sit on their verandas and not dare take a step. I heard mothers and wives crying out for mercy, saying their men were innocent. Before I could scream for Juba to run, the soldiers were banging at our door. Sahel opened it. They shoved her aside and pulled out Juba as he screamed. From my bed, my hands stretched out. I cried, “Juba, Juba, please don’t hurt him, he’s only a child, he’s a good boy.” Did anyone hear me? Stand up, and run to the square, the soldiers shouted. The boys and men began running. Women ran alongside their sons and husbands. I could single out Sahel’s voice, pleading for her only son’s sake.

  In the square, Sahel later told me, the soldiers made all of the boys and men kneel down and clasp their hands on their heads. The soldiers pointed guns at the backs of their skulls and asked for the whereabouts of the missing child. No one said a word. They asked again. No response. If the males remained quiet, the soldiers said, they would start shooting. Sonni, made to kneel alongside all the others, finally spoke. In his trembling voice, he told the soldiers that no one in Kosawa knew anything about this child, that he was telling the truth. He swore on his mother’s grave. A soldier walked over to him and put a gun to his temple. Sonni closed his eyes, his hands still clasped on his head. His lips quivered as he struggled to prevent the entire village from seeing him cry. He swore to the soldiers that if he got any information about the child’s whereabouts he would come to Lokunja. The soldiers asked him to swear again, on the graves of all of his ancestors. His father, my brother, old as he was, he was kneeling too, beside his son—the soldiers had deemed him strong enough to commit a crime, even though he walked with a cane. Sonni swore three times, louder every time. His own son was kneeling not too far from him—the son who was one of the young men heaping this new tribulation upon Kosawa.

  The soldiers, guns still pointed, told everyone in the square to consider their ways. They said that if they deemed it necessary they would gun down every living thing in the village, babies and animals included, and no one would lay a hand on them.

  They got into their cars and left.

  Sonni pulled himself up. He was shaking.

  “Why?” he shouted, looking at the young men beside him, his arms flung wide in frustration. “Why are you doing this to your own people? Haven’t we suffered enough? We’re so close to putting an end to all this and having the peace we’ve long been waiting for. Why ruin our chances when we have good people in America fighting for us?”

  “Where are the results of their efforts?” one of the young men shouted.

  “Let the soldiers kill us if they want to,” another young man added. “Is it death you’re afraid of? If we’re not afraid of death at our age, why should you be at yours?”

  “But why entice death when there’s still a chance at life?” Sonni cried.

  No one was listening. Angry voices, including his own son’s, were drowning his, shouting back at him that the Sweet One and the Cute One were saying useless things, they were weak talkers. Wait, wait, patience, patience—that’s all they’ve ever said. How long should Kosawa wait?

  It was clear that morning that, even though few in Kosawa would have left their beds at night to burn and break, many got satisfaction from what the young men were doing. Anger that should have been levied upon these young men was directed at Sonni, for whatever choices Sonni had made that had forced the young men to take matters into their own hands.

  When Sahel recounted this story to me, I wished Manga had said a word in support of his son instead of keeping his head bowed throughout the lambasting, but Sahel told me that Sonni was not without his supporters—men of his father’s generation and some from his own had also rebuked their sons, telling them that they were idiots to believe that Kosawa could singlehandedly defeat Pexton, that they must have forgotten what happened where they were standing, on that afternoon a decade ago.

  * * *

  —

  Last week Sonni and the Sweet One came to see Sahel.

  They took a seat in my room, on the bench across from my bed. For a few minutes we tried not to talk about anything heavy, but few topics in Kosawa are soft in nature these days. During one pause, the Sweet One asked Sonni if the child who had disappeared from Gardens had yet to be found. Sonni shook his head. The Sweet One asked no more questions on the matter. We were silent again, until Sahel came to join us.

  The Sweet One cleared his throat.

  He said he wanted to tell Sahel something but he needed to say it in front of Sonni, so that Sonni could be his witness that he had told Sahel the whole truth. What he’d traveled from Bézam to talk about, he said, was very important: the young newspaperman from America, Bongo’s friend, had written a letter about Thula.

  I still remember the young man from America and his pretty face—he was good to Bongo, he was good to all of us. The Sweet One said the young man wanted us to know that he liked Thula. I looked a
t Sahel. We were both trying to suppress our laughter. This was confirmation of what we’d talked about after the last letter from Thula that the Cute One had read to us. In it, Thula had mentioned this young man several times, talking about how he made America feel like home to her. We did not want Thula to marry a foreigner, but if this man did not marry her, who else would? We knew her marriage to him would be fraught with misunderstandings, considering the different traditions that had shaped them, but we’d still thank him for saving Thula from the life we oftentimes feared might be hers. Thula, with a husband. Imagine such a thing.

  But the Sweet One hadn’t come to tell us that Thula might be getting married.

  After clearing his throat, he told us that the young man had written to say that he was worried about Thula—she wasn’t eating well, she wasn’t sleeping well, she was spending too much time helping organize fights against governments and corporations and not enough time thinking about her own well-being.

  The young man said Thula had recently traveled with some friends to another area of the country to be part of a human wall meant to prevent government workers from throwing poor people out of their homes and taking their land; the poor people and their supporters believed the money the government was offering for the land wasn’t enough. Some days, he said, Thula did not go to class, instead spending long hours in one of the city’s squares, chanting words of outrage. The young man said he admired Thula for what she was doing, there was nothing wrong with it, he had done some of it himself at Thula’s age; he was actually the one had who introduced Thula to the organizers of some protests. The problem was that Thula did not seem to have a sense of balance. She appeared to have forgotten that she came to America to go to school, not to involve herself in matters that might undermine her well-being. There were nights when she and her friends stayed out in the cold protesting. She’d gotten sick once; right after she got well, she went back to doing it, to show her anger about the fact that a small group of people in the country had too much money while millions of families barely had enough food to eat and it just wasn’t right. Once, the newspaperman said, Thula had spent a night in jail for her actions; he was the one who went to the jail and paid for her release.

  Sahel and I were drying our eyes by the time the Sweet One was done talking. We wished we hadn’t heard what we’d heard, that Thula was going around America tempting death. Is that why she wanted to go there? To bring upon herself the same fate that had befallen her father and uncle? Did she care nothing for what we had already endured?

  The Sweet One wanted Sahel to dictate a letter to Thula to beg her to stop doing what she was doing, implore her to focus on her schooling and return to us safely. Sahel had to touch Thula’s heart in a way only a mother could.

  And could Sahel also ask Thula to stop writing letters to her friends encouraging them to break and burn Pexton’s property? Sonni added.

  Before Sonni was done saying this, Sahel had jumped off her stool.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  Sonni seemed taken aback, as if he’d only made the simplest of requests.

  “How dare you suggest Thula has anything to do with that?” Sahel said.

  “Everyone in this village knows it, Sahel,” Sonni replied.

  “Shut up.”

  If someone had told me Sahel had such rage in her I would never have believed it, but I saw it that evening. It was as if she was finally ready to scream out her pain for the world to hear. Her eyes alone could have sliced open Sonni from the top of his head to the part where his thighs join. She was pointing, pumping her fist, yelling, telling Sonni to get out of her hut, never come back into it if his intention was to accuse her daughter instead of recognizing his own uselessness as a village head. Sonni was too stupid and blind to see what his son was doing, too weak to do anything about it, and he thought it easier to blame Thula. Thula was not the problem. Sonni was the problem.

  Sonni stood up and quietly walked out of the hut.

  The Sweet One followed him.

  It was then that Sahel sat down and wept.

  Watching her, I knew I could never tell her that I agree with Sonni; that, like everyone else, I believe Thula has a hand in Kosawa’s new wave of woes. The entire village knows that Thula sometimes sends money to her friends through the Sweet One. She sends us money too, whatever little she saves from working at school, which isn’t a lot in America but a great deal to us. Sahel never keeps all of the money—there are too many people in Kosawa who need it. That may be why nobody ever talks about Thula’s role in the destructions around her mother. But Sahel has to know it. A mother knows her child, even an enigmatic one. If Sahel refuses to believe the whispers, it’s only because certain truths are too bitter to swallow.

  Sonni hasn’t come to visit me since that day, but Manga, having recovered from a recent fall, came two days ago to see how I was feeling. He didn’t ask me if it’s true that Sahel swore she would never speak to Sonni again. If he’d asked, I would have told him that Sahel’s anger wasn’t at Sonni, or at anyone among us. I would have told him that Sahel is angry because there’s nothing else a woman in her position can feel besides fury. Which was why, that evening, I begged her once more to move to Bézam.

  * * *

  The man in Bézam, he’s not a young man, but he’s younger than my husband was when he died. He is the uncle of the Cute One, who is the same age as Sahel.

  It was the Cute One who said to Sahel—and I don’t know how it came up—that his uncle was searching for a new wife. The Cute One said his uncle was not a man who liked being alone; his wife had died eighteen months before. The man and his wife never had children—his wife had been unable to keep her pregnancies—but this man had never considered replacing her with a fertile wife. Now she was gone, and the man was alone in his brick house in Bézam, working at a government job.

  The Cute One said that his uncle was a good man, and that when they had spoken about his loneliness and his getting a new wife, the first person the Cute One thought of was Sahel, not one of the young women in Bézam. The Cute One told Sahel, in my presence, that he’d seen how well Sahel took care of me, and he knew Sahel would take good care of his uncle too, and his uncle would take good care of her and Juba in return.

  Sahel looked angry when the Cute One made the proposal, as if she deserved something better. I didn’t like the way the Cute One said it either: it sounded to me as if he wanted Sahel to move to Bézam to spend a few good years with an old man, followed by many years of cleaning him and feeding him and helping him die. But then I thought about how wonderful those few good years might be for her. Besides, who’s to say the man doesn’t have a decade of vigor left in him? My husband’s hands were strong till the afternoon he felt pain in his chest, and was gone in hours. Even if this Bézam man is gone within a year, Sahel and Juba moving there will keep them safe from what’s surely coming to Kosawa.

  * * *

  —

  Last night, I called Sahel into my bedroom. I asked her for the seventy-seventh time to say yes to the man in Bézam.

  “I can’t, Yaya,” she said to me.

  “Why?”

  “You know I can’t….”

  I told her to do it for my sake, and for Juba’s sake, but mostly for her own sake. She sighed. I could see she had been thinking about it.

  “At least go with the Cute One to Bézam for one night and see the man for yourself,” I said. “If he’s too old, you can pass him on to me.”

  I’d intended for her to laugh at my joke, but she didn’t. “How could the Cute One suggest such a thing to me, knowing I can’t leave you?” she said.

  I told her not to blame the Cute One. Men, thinking too highly of their intelligence, sometimes come up with ideas without considering the different sides of what they’re talking about, but there’s no use in our pointing that out to them. Besides, it didn�
��t matter if the Cute One ought to have been more sensitive in making the suggestion, I said; it was a great proposal.

  “If I go—not that I want to—but if I go, will Malabo forgive me?”

  “That’s not for you to worry about,” I said. “Leave it to me. I’ll handle him when I see him again. He’ll be older than me in death years, but I’ll still be his mother.”

  She chuckled. It was the first time we’d laughed about death. The lightness wouldn’t last, I knew; our tears are still too close by.

  “I promised him in my grief,” she said. “I said that if he never returned from Bézam I’d never unite my spirit with another man’s.”

  “When Malabo was alive, he told you what to do, what not to do. You obeyed him, because you loved him,” I said. “I sat here and watched you do as he wished, and you were never unhappy about any of it.”

  “Making him happy made me happy.”

  “Yes, but now he’s gone and you’re still making decisions based on what you think will make him happy in the next world. I’m old and dying, so I can say things now that I would never have said when I was your age. I don’t care if anyone calls me crazy, so I’m going to ask you to tell me, Sahel: When will it end for us women, this doing what we have to do for the sake of husbands alive, husbands dead—when will it end?”

  She shrugged, as if to suggest my question was irrelevant.

  “Why are you punishing yourself? Because it’s what you’re expected to do?”

  “But, Yaya, if Big Papa had left at a younger age, would you have remarried?”

  “No,” I said. “And I would have regretted it.”

  She was quiet. I knew she believed me; why would I lie, standing at death’s door?

  “I hate Bézam, I hate government people, but this man sounds like a good man,” she said. “And I think Juba would be happy to have a new father.”