How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  Half an hour before Carlos was to call her at her office, she was already settled behind her desk, going through her list of prepared questions and consulting notebooks in which she had jotted down thoughts and ideas over the years. The container of food I’d brought to her for lunch was unopened. It was possible she hadn’t eaten all day.

  “Have a few bites, at least,” I said.

  “I’m not hungry,” she replied without looking up.

  “There are other lawyers in America,” I said. “If he says no, you’ll find—”

  “I don’t want another lawyer. There’s no way we can put up a real fight against them unless we bring one of the big New York guys. Carlos is our best chance.”

  The phone was in her hand even before it finished its first ring. For most of the conversation, she listened. When she hung up, the look on her face was of neither relief nor excitement. Carlos had merely given her more to worry about.

  Kosawa’s case against Pexton was weak, the lawyer had told her; based on his preliminary research, Pexton’s agreement with our government was that Pexton would extract the crude and our government would be responsible for all negative externalities. What this meant, he explained, was that if the case ended up in a trial, Pexton wasn’t going to deny that its practices led to spills that famished Kosawa’s soil. Its lawyers wouldn’t try to dispute that the waste on the big river was from their oil field. They wouldn’t even need to argue that the children’s deaths had nothing to do with them. All they would need to show was evidence that our government had relieved them of any responsibility to the land and people in exchange for splitting the oil profits.

  “Does that mean he won’t take the case?” I asked her.

  “He needs time to think about it.”

  “What about his fees?”

  “That’s another thing. He doesn’t do contingency fees, and he knows we can’t afford him. He’s going to talk to his partners and see whether someone can do it pro bono. We’ll have to find a way to pay whatever expenses come up.”

  A few weeks later, she received a phone call from Carlos saying that he had decided to take the case on a contingency-fee basis. First, though, Kosawa would have to drop the case brought on by the Restoration Movement; Thula would need to talk to the Restoration Movement and inform them of the village’s decision to hire Carlos and start a new lawsuit. Once the old suit was dropped, Carlos would file a new one, accusing Pexton of conspiracy under something called the Alien Tort Statute. His argument would be that Pexton knew, going into a partnership with His Excellency’s government, that it was a government that cared nothing for the welfare of its people. Pexton took advantage of this and violated international laws, causing untold damages to property and lives in Kosawa.

  Pexton was certainly going to ask the judge to dismiss a case they’d label frivolous, Carlos said, but he would request that the judge subpoena their internal documents related to Kosawa as far back as when its workers first appeared in the valley. At trial, Carlos would ask the court to impose substantial compensatory and punitive damages. None of this was to suggest that the battle was going to be easy or pretty, the lawyer cautioned—it’d likely take years, suits against powerful corporations were nearly impossible, Kosawa’s chance of victory in an American court was infinitesimal. He didn’t want the village to rest all their hope on it, though he was going to fight hard for them.

  * * *

  —

  My sister had never been someone who jumped for joy at many things, but as she updated me in my living room, she couldn’t stop skipping around and saying, I can’t believe it’s happening, it’s finally happening. She’d lived in America, she knew what its courts were like, yet she put Kosawa’s fate entirely in its hands, because where else could she put it?

  When she gathered the village in the square to tell them about their new lawyer, they cheered, and hugged each other, some even shedding jubilant tears, amazed that a mere four years after her return from America, Thula was already on the verge of saving Kosawa. She did not attempt to curb their celebration—their joy was her strength—but she nonetheless told them that the odds were against them, Pexton had armies of lawyers, but Carlos was fearsome too; he’d never lost a big case, and he was in this to win. One of the Five stood up and gave a stirring speech about how Pexton had been cornered at last, by the time this was over they would wish they had never stepped foot on our land.

  After the village meeting, Thula informed the elders in a closed-door meeting in Sonni’s hut that, though Carlos would be working on a contingency-fee basis, he’d still need money for expenses, including payment for the experts who would be coming for a reconnaissance trip. Carlos couldn’t file any papers without a large amount of money up-front, so he had referred Thula to someone who could lend the village the money, someone at a place called a hedge fund. The hedge fund would give Carlos the money he needed, and if Kosawa won the lawsuit, they would give the hedge-fund people a percentage of what they got from Pexton. After giving Carlos and the hedge-fund people their percentages, Kosawa would get to keep less than a third of the awarded damages.

  “How much money will we get, then?” one of the elders asked.

  “I don’t know,” Thula said. “Carlos says there’s no way of knowing. But if these hedge-fund people are open to lending us money, it’s because they believe we have a strong case and they’re confident their percentage will be many times what they lent us.”

  Everyone was silent for several seconds. “Do these people in America understand that money is really not what we’re after?” another elder asked.

  “Money is the only thing the courts in America can force Pexton to give us,” I said before Thula had a chance to speak. She never seemed to feel it was a burden to explain everything to everyone, but I longed to relieve her of this task whenever I could.

  “Juba is right,” she said. “The American courts can only make Pexton give us money, and then we can decide whether to use the money to clean the village. If we get a big enough sum, we can pay for people in America who know about cleaning lands and waters and air to come and look at the village and tell us what our options are.”

  “But why can’t the courts just make Pexton leave?” the first elder said. “I know you said it doesn’t work that way, but there has to be some law in the American books that says that people have the right to live peacefully on their lands. Can’t this man Carlos look for this law in his books and ask the judge to apply it to our situation?”

  “I’ll ask him, Big Papa,” Thula replied. “Carlos understands that restoring the village is what we’re most after, and I trust him to do his best to see that that happens.”

  “If you trust him,” Sonni said, “give him our permission to do what he must.”

  The day that Carlos filed the new lawsuit passed with less fanfare. I picked Thula up from a classroom after her lecture, and she showed me the fax from Carlos telling her to buckle up for the ride. I hugged her; we drove to see our parents, who hugged her and told her to get some rest—who knew how long it would take for the lawsuit to drag itself from court to court? They asked her to try not to think about the lawsuit, or the country.

  She couldn’t. There was too much to do.

  After Liberation Day (which she spent every spare minute preparing for, and spoke about nonstop, in the three years after Carlos filed the lawsuit), she formed a political party to pressure His Excellency into holding an election, the first presidential election in our country’s history. She named her party the United Democratic Party, though her devotees called it the Fire Party, for how often she shouted “Fire” with her clenched fist raised high. Her hope was that she would find enough supporters across the country to form local chapters of the party, ultimately resulting in a strong national presence. From within the ranks of the party, someone would arise who would stand up against His Excellency and defeat him in a democ
ratic election. Elections in the country were still a fantasy—His Excellency retained the right to have the only political party—but my sister believed it crucial to declare her movement a party, albeit an illegal one; it was imperative that her party be ready to go against His Excellency when he finally called for an election.

  Together with the Five and her Village Meeting students, she held a rally in a town outside Bézam, exhorting people to join her in being the fire that would burn down the regime in the voting booth. She spent her vacation time that year, the entire month she was off, doing similar events around the country. But her party would never take root outside the western part of the country. At some stops in the north and the east, no more than a dozen people attended. Imitators were springing up nationwide, many hoping to gain a popularity as large as hers and use it to enrich themselves. In Bézam and throughout the southeast, few people dared to align themselves publicly with her for fear of His Excellency. The eyes of other tribes were also opening; they wanted one of their own to be their leader, a man with a familiar name, not a woman they barely knew. Wasn’t it time every tribe started looking out for itself? they wondered. My sister tried to argue against such thinking. She tried to contend that the country might be made up of dozens of tribes but it was still one nation, a garden with flowers of assorted shapes and colors and fragrances, in unison forming an exquisite beauty. Few listened—unity seemed too vulgar a notion.

  Mama and I worried for her daily. Sometimes I slipped cash into her driver’s pocket when she was leaving for a trip. “She’s my only sister,” I said. “Please, watch over her.” The driver nodded. He had seven daughters; worry was all his wife did.

  I teared up in fear, with pride, whenever I watched her in front of an audience, telling them to dream with her. We traveled with her as often as we could—Mama, our new papa, my girlfriend and I. A couple of her friends from America visited; others sent cards with encouragements. She was a dove forging through a fire, burning yet soaring.

  * * *

  Carlos and his team of three arrived in Bézam a couple of years after Liberation Day. He told Thula, right at the airport, that there was something he’d been dying to tell her but he wanted to say it in person. He’d recently bumped into an old friend who worked at the Justice Department and told the friend about his Pexton lawsuit. The friend had confided in him that the Justice Department had a file on Pexton; they’d been gathering evidence on them since the massacre, evidence that showed Pexton breaking American laws by giving bribes to foreign officials. The department hoped to bring charges against them under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. What this meant, Carlos said, was that if the department won, the judge might force Pexton to make restitutions to Kosawa.

  When Thula repeated this, while our family was having dinner with Carlos and his team in Mama and Papa’s house, we all cheered.

  It was a long shot, Carlos cautioned—the odds of Kosawa’s getting anything out of it were minuscule—to which Thula, her face illuminated with euphoria, said, “You never know; impossibilities happen, that’s the great beauty of life.” We toasted that night as we ate pepper soup with goat meat, and land snails in tomato sauce with rice.

  After dinner, while everyone else watched American sitcoms on our parents’ television, I sat with Carlos on the porch to finish our beers and catch the late-night Bézam breeze.

  “I can’t remember the last time I saw so many stars,” the lawyer said, looking up.

  “You can move here and see them every night,” I said.

  He chuckled. “I’m not cut out for this kind of life,” he said.

  Clearly, I wanted to say, glancing at him. If someone had told me that he’d just walked out of a movie, I would have believed it, considering his flawless profile and heavy stubble, an overwrought handsomeness highlighted by his sleek hair. He had an expensive-looking watch on his wrist, and a wedding band on his finger, though from the way he looked at my sister, and the number of times he complimented her during dinner and leaned over to rub her shoulders, it was evident to me he’d gladly forget his vows if Thula gave him a chance. He would find out, if he tried, that neither he nor any man alive stood a chance with Thula while Austin still lived. One story from Thula about an experience she and Austin once had would be enough to tell him that his cause was lost.

  “I know you don’t need to hear it from me,” I said, “but I still want to thank you for taking this case. Kosawa means everything to my sister.”

  “My uncle told me,” he said.

  “Professor Martinez?”

  He nodded. “He can’t stop talking about his star student who is going to change her country. We’re sitting together at family dinner—him, my parents, the whole family—and he says, ‘Hey, Carlos, what do you say about helping this village?’ And everyone starts talking about all the terrible things happening in the world, and how I could do something about it—‘Come on, Carlos, just help this one poor village.’ ”

  “So you’re here because your family pressured you?”

  He laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “Defending the big guys is what I enjoy doing, but I thought I’d fight for the little guys for once, do something different. It’ll make my parents happy. My dad drove cabs fourteen hours a day so my siblings and I could go to college, and when I got into law school he told their friends that I was going to become a lawyer to put bad guys in prison. I don’t ever intend to make a career out of that, but at least, the day Kosawa wins, my parents can show the news clipping to their friends.”

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t see Carlos and his team before they left for Kosawa, or after they returned, but Thula told me their trip was successful—they flew to America with an abundance of videotaped interviews, and photos, and soil and water samples. Their presence had also enlivened the village. They had shared stories about the America of 2007, how a woman just became the third most powerful person in the government there; and how some men were fighting for the right to marry each other, which made the elders laugh so hard they nearly lost the rest of their teeth. The evening before they left, palm wine had flowed and the Americans had played the drums while the children danced and the adults clapped.

  The next day, Kosawa began a new season of waiting. Women continued trekking for hours to find fertile lands. Mothers boiled water for babies. The forest supplied bushmeat, which brought in money for basics. Children died because of Pexton, and for reasons that had nothing to do with Pexton. Newborns arrived to replace them. Families fled. Families returned, often for the sake of grandparents who wanted to die where they were born. Days of serenity intermingled with days of despondency.

  Through it all, Thula never wavered, even as years came and went and her students from her Village Meeting graduated and new students came in and graduated. Even as she received a promotion and became head of her department, which led her to suspend her party activities so she could focus on her students, who remained one of her best chances at realizing her vision.

  She still traveled the country, to speak to occasional gatherings of her supporters, the young people who walked with high shoulders even in the presence of soldiers and greeted each other by raising clenched fists. She traveled also in response to letters she received asking her please to come and speak to one community or another because, emboldened by her story, they’d decided to stage protests in front of government offices and corporation factories. She exhorted the protesters never to stop believing that change was going to come. Whenever she arrived somewhere, women welcomed her with joyful dancing. “Look at what one of us is doing,” they sang. “Look at what a woman can do.”

  She knew many were those plotting her demise, but she did not fret. Not even when she sensed she was being followed around Bézam by a man in dark glasses whom she’d spotted sitting in a car outside her house; shadowing her in the supermarket; lingering around her office with a cellp
hone to his ear. It did not surprise her—of course Pexton was going to try to scare her. But they misjudged her. They didn’t expect she’d smile at the man whenever she saw him, wave at him sometimes. She told Carlos and the Five about the man, and they all agreed that she should take cautionary measures for her safety. But my sister was never one to slow-dance with fear; she refused to hire a private bodyguard. Once or twice when I was with her, I saw the stalker and begged her to be careful. She laughed and told me to stop worrying. One day, the man stopped following her. When she told Mama that she could relax, the man was gone, Mama cried in relief.

  * * *

  When Thula first returned home from America, Mama often took me aside to remind me that I mattered too, that everything wasn’t about my sister, I shouldn’t feel compelled always to put aside my needs for the sake of Thula. Mama could see, as only a mother could, that around Thula I often forgot that I had a story too, that Mama and I both had stories and dreams unrelated to Thula’s vision for Kosawa and our country.

  Sometimes, in her kitchen, Mama and I reminisced about the time after Thula left for America, when it was just Yaya and us in the hut, Yaya unable to get out of bed, Mama and I sitting on the veranda, enjoying our last days in our hut. We both cried the morning we closed up the hut and set out for Bézam to live with my new father. We left after we’d buried Yaya within a week of her moving to live with Malaika. We gave away our possessions to friends and relatives; the hut we abandoned was as bare as it was the day Big Papa built it, likely to stay forever vacant now that Kosawa was emptying.

  We arrived in Bézam with a bamboo trunk stuffed with old clothes, smoked meats, sun-dried vegetables, and spices wrapped in leaves. Mama had carried it on her head from one bus to the next, wary of trusting the city’s food too soon. On every prison visit to see Bongo she had brought along food—never had she eaten food not from home.