by Jennifer Juo
Sylvia found work at a hospital in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Minneapolis even though it was a long commute from her home. Because she bought their modest house outright with Winston’s life insurance money, they had no mortgage and were able to live comfortably on her nurse’s salary. She sent the children to the local public high school and saved the rest of Winston’s life insurance money for their college education. She knew Winston would want them to attend good universities. Thomas, particularly, excelled at school.
But Sylvia never quite fully recovered from Winston’s death. She never got the chance to say goodbye to her husband or to ask for his forgiveness, and this held her back, prevented her from beginning her life entirely anew. Several men asked her out on dates at the hospital, but she declined them all. She could not forget the two men in her life, one who was the love of her life and one who needed her love to live.
***
In 1996, after ten years in America, Sylvia went back to Africa to honor her husband. She knew she had to go back, everything felt unfinished because she had left so hastily. The ADA had invited her to accept an award on Winston’s behalf. They were naming a new conference center in his honor. Now ten years later, they were remembering him. A life lost, she thought, and only now did they memorialize him. Sylvia knew it was Donna’s doing; she was now director at the ADA. But she didn’t know if she could face Ayo, now married to Donna. He had written about their three children, two were adopted orphans and one was their own child.
Lila accompanied her on the trip. Thomas had just started a PhD program at Harvard, busy doing medical research on tropical diseases, and could not leave. But Lila was in a limbo period after college and was searching for her “roots”—something that Sylvia knew was her fault. Lila had just returned from teaching English in China, and she desperately wanted to come with Sylvia. Sylvia knew it would be good for her. Her daughter needed closure too.
Lila was now twenty-three years old, close to the same age that Sylvia had been when she had first arrived in Africa. Her daughter possessed that unique, dark Eurasian beauty that boys shied away from but men fell for. Lila was dating a British archeologist-adventurer type in his forties she had met in China. Sylvia wasn’t happy about the age difference, but she knew it was related to Lila’s desire for a father figure.
They were met at the Lagos airport by a group of ten armed escorts sent by the ADA. Nigeria had been through a dark period during the early 1990s. But recently, the previous dictator Abacha had been deposed, and things were gradually improving. Still it wasn’t safe, and Sylvia was glad to have this small army of guards.
The next morning, the driver and armed escorts brought them several hours inland to Ibadan. Everything was as Sylvia had remembered it—the rusty-tin roof houses and swarming street vendors; the lush banana trees in the distance; the thickness of the tropical grass, each blade wide and thick. For a moment, she felt like she had never left but was venturing into town to do her shopping.
As she drove, she looked down at the bag on the car seat between her and Lila. It held the lacquered box of Winston’s ashes. They had sat on their living room mantelpiece for ten years in suburban America. They didn’t belong there.
They arrived at the white gates and royal palms of the compound. This was her old home—a place she had tried to escape, even hated once, but now she felt only fondness and nostalgia. They drove up to the clubhouse and guesthouse where they would stay.
Ayo came to see Sylvia, and she waited for him inside the clubhouse. She saw him as he came through the glass doors. He still possessed the same athletic physique, but she noticed his hairline was receding. He was in his early fifties.
“Sylvia.” He came up to her and gave her a hug. He smelled the same to her, that faint bittersweet scent. She stepped back a little, feeling dizzy, and looked up at him. Despite his fading looks, she was still drawn to him. Deep down, she knew she would always love him even though they had gone their separate ways. She was forty-five years old now.
“You look fabulous,” Ayo said, smiling at her. “You look exactly the same, not a day older. Except you cut your hair.” He touched her short, stylish bob as if he missed her long hair and the decade that had passed.
***
The next day, Sylvia and Lila attended the naming ceremony in Winston’s honor at the new Winston Soong Conference Center. Donna went up to the stage to give a speech. She looked older, more mature now. She was no longer a free-loving hippie student but a sophisticated, powerful middle-aged woman. Winston Soong, my friend and colleague, was a pioneer, she said. He did not lose his life in vain. Without him, we would not be where we are today. As Sylvia listened, she wondered what had happened to Simeon’s family.
Winston’s efforts had been the beginning of change, Donna continued. Development aid had become much more wary of too much involvement by multinational agribusiness. Indigenous farming practices were now being integrated into agriculture development. The use of tractors was banned on African soil. The world was becoming increasingly environmentally conscious and was moving away from chemical and energy-intensive industrial agriculture. Instead, small scale, pesticide-free organic farming with low energy input was on the rise. It was the beginning of a new, greener Green Revolution. Through Donna, the ADA had become a leader in this new approach. But still, she warned, with the advent of biotechnology in the late 1990s, genetically engineered seeds were replacing the old hybrid miracle seeds, and multinational agribusiness was becoming an even more formidable force. The fight would continue.
***
Sylvia and Lila returned to their old house on the compound, now empty. After they had left, a string of families living in their house had all witnessed snakes coming into various rooms. Their former home had become infamously known as “the snake house.” No one wanted to live in it. The gardeners cut down the dense, snake-infested bamboo bushes near the house—the presumed reason for the snakes—but still no one dared move in.
Sylvia and Lila walked around the house to the back garden. The garden was much the same except all the trees and bushes were bigger, more overgrown. They walked under the frangipani tree near the screened porch dining room—a place where so many attempts at family life had failed to happen.
Sylvia took out the lacquered box that had held Winston’s ashes these last ten years. She opened the box and motioned to Lila. She wanted to return him to the African soil—the dusty orange dirt he had worked so hard to turn into a miracle. She tossed a handful of Winston’s ashes under the frangipani tree, onto the thick blades of tropical grass layered with white blossoms. Then she and Lila walked around and tossed his ashes around the garden, under the thin papaya trees, the spot where the vegetable garden used to be, once full of leafy Chinese greens.
After they had spread his ashes around their old garden and there was nothing left in the box, Sylvia bent down and grabbed a clump of the ochre dirt. She thought—so this was the soil he gave us up for. This was the soil that had driven him in life. Suddenly, Sylvia felt she had to understand it. She felt the coarse unforgiving dirt in her hands. It was part of her husband. She held her fist tight as some of the dirt fell from between her fingers. So this was what he had been all about. Some people were meant to make a mark on this world. Others were meant to love. She turned around and tossed it back, letting it fall on the green lawn next to the fallen white frangipani blossoms. White was the Chinese color of death.
Lila took out a worn piece of paper from her pocket and began reading a poem by a Senegalese poet named Birago Diop. The dead are not dead, she read, the dead are never gone. They are not under the earth. They are in the forest, they are in the house. They are in the child that is wailing. The dead are not dead. Sylvia hoped her daughter would find peace at last.
Then Sylvia closed the lacquer box. She knew this would have to be her farewell. Her relationship with Winston would remain unfinished. She would never be able to ask for his forgiveness, but she suddenly felt her burden ligh
ten a little. She had finally returned him to the soil where he belonged. Perhaps one day she would find his spirit or he would be reincarnated in the form of Thomas’ child, and then they could meet again.
Sylvia broke off a white frangipani blossom from the tree. Its milky white blood stained her skin. White was the color of milk, semen, and water. Life. Sylvia was Chinese, she was African, she was American. She was from everywhere. She was from nowhere. She tucked the white frangipani blossom in her hair and walked back to the car. White was the color of purity. Her life could begin again.
***
A woman emerged from a hut. She went to the well to pump water for her family. The water sloshed against the sides of her plastic bucket, splashing her face. The sun was still rising, halfway up the sky, its rays filtered through the acacia trees in front of the hut. The woman boiled the water in a large blackened pot over an open fire, preparing ogi, a breakfast porridge made from corn, ground into a powder, and then mixed with water.
The corn came from the small plot adjacent to the cluster of huts. She had planted and tilled it herself, just as she and other women have done for decades. On the plot, she also planted vegetables—tomatoes, peppers, cowpeas, and cassava. Simeon’s wife, Abike, was part of a rural women’s farming cooperative that practiced agro-ecological methods, a natural push-pull system of farming, integrating traditional farming techniques with cutting-edge science. On her farm, Abike planted her crops in between nitrogen-fixing plants that naturally enriched the soil. She cultivated special plants that naturally repelled pests through scent or by trapping them in sticky grasses. To conserve and improve her soil, she laid dead leaves and branches on the ground along with wild animal manure that her children collected in small containers. Her children also helped find rocks to construct stone bunds or rock barriers to prevent soil erosion.
Abike also planted shea trees as part of the rural women’s cooperative, founded by a local Nigerian woman, a new leader in development. Using traditional methods of extracting the shea butter by hand and without the use of chemicals, the co-op made pure skin care products, much in demand in the West.
Her husband had killed himself many years ago, but Abike had used Winston’s money to send all her children to school. Her eldest son would be graduating next year from the University of Ife with a degree in accounting.
Next to their village there had once been a plantation owned by a government official. He had long since lost favor and fled to London to become a corner shopkeeper in Brixton. The plantation land had since been abandoned. The women in the co-op reclaimed the land by replanting local trees on the razed and barren farmland. The trees grew fast, the foliage hiding the metal carcass of an abandoned tractor. All that remained were the broken headlights, peering out of the bush.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Juo is Chinese-American but was born and raised in Nigeria, West Africa. She attended boarding school in England, and moved to America at the age of seventeen. She has lived in San Francisco and Seattle for the past seventeen years. She currently lives in Singapore with her husband and two sons.
www.jenniferjuo.com
www.facebook.com/seedsofplenty
www.twitter.com/jenjuo
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Julie Mosow, my editor who worked and reworked the manuscript and story with me until it was ready to be in print. I am greatly indebted to my writers group, friends, and family in Seattle who spent years with me as I wrote and researched this novel. I appreciate your constant feedback and reading and rereading of my manuscript. So much gratitude to my writers group—Nancy Brenner, Elizabeth Coulter, Karen Heileson, Laura Swindlehurst, Lori Whittaker, and our dear friend, Kathy Medak, who we lost to cancer. Thanks also to my other writer colleagues, good friends, and family who endured reading drafts as well: Diane Owens, Joe Richardson, Margaret Rodenberg, Ingrid Olsen, Alicia Trochalakis, Jodi Nishioka, Melissa Sebastien, Krista Lewis, Melissa Tarun, Cam Bradley, Jasmine Juo, Peter Juo, my mother, Rosalind Juo and my University of Washington instructor Scott Driscoll. Finally, special thanks to my husband, Garth Bradley, for all his support and love on this project.
I did extensive research to write this novel. In particular, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb’s book, The Afterlife is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa, inspired many rich details about the spirit world and village life. Thank you also to David Sewell and Stan Claassen, colleagues of my father. My father and his colleagues dedicated their life’s work to agricultural aid in Africa. Stan provided clarifications on some of the agricultural details and David, a pilot, kindly hosted me in Nigeria in 2007 but recently lost his life when his plane crashed in the African bush. Finally, this novel is dedicated to my late father Anthony Juo who showed me the world and gave me the perspective to write about it.
