On the walk, he asked, “Are you seeing anyone?”
“I have three children!”
“My father married a woman who already had children.”
Kevin was different. He proved honest and offered an unheard-of level of respect. No public displays of affection? No problem. She had to go to church, or didn’t want meet up some days? Then that’s how it was. No drama.
In an era when Belgian ex-pats sent their wives back to Europe so they could freely pluck through Dungu’s slender young girls as though they were toothpicks, this sandy blonde man patiently, diligently courted Francisca. He visited her every day at her school, during her break, when he brought her snacks of fried bananas and peanut butter.
Francisca confided in Mama Koko and asked her to size him up. So Mama Koko showed up at snack time at the school to assess this American. As she left, she gave Francisca her unambiguous verdict. “He’s not a hypocrite. He looked me in the eye.”
Francisca’s dad, André, was another story. He didn’t believe Kevin would stay for the long haul. It was bad for his daughter, and bad for his family. Francisca was embarrassed. She avoided introducing the two for years.
After three years, and two extensions of his Peace Corps service, Kevin wanted to stay on. He wanted something serious, and asked Francisca to move in with him. Instead, citing the children, she moved back to Mama Koko’s compound, which a constant rotation of thirty-plus relatives called home.
Kevin returned to America for a six-week vacation, promising to come back. Every week, a friend from the Procure delivered postcards for Francisca from America, with pictures of things like whales and bridges, and always the line I think about you every day. Every week, she heard the motorcycle coming, and knew more postcards were being delivered, along with her friend’s taunts: Does this guy ever sleep? He writes you all the time! She kept them on a stack by her bedside, reading and rereading secretly in her spare time.
One day, Francisca was working over the open charcoal stove at Mama Koko’s when her sister Justine whispered, “You have a visitor.”
Francisca looked up. Kevin stood in Mama Koko’s yard, strapped down with an oversized, frameless backpack stuffed with hefty reads like The Seven Mysteries of Life, Monopoly Capital, and The Development of Economies. His arms were overloaded with bags, his red work boots dangling by a string.
Francisca just stared at him.
He finally prompted her. “This stuff is kinda heavy.”
Francisca pointed to her mud hut, with a dirt floor. “That one is mine.”
Home
• • • •
Most of Dungu accepted me as quasi-family, by virtue of Kevin’s reputation, which had hung on for twenty years after he and Francisca left. Francisca introduced me around town as his sister. From time to time, before she could divulge the official story, a long-lost acquaintance or “other cousin” approached us on the street: “This is your daughter, all grown up?! How good of you to bring her!”
It was the first and only time I was mistaken for Congolese.
Francisca sometimes heard people talk about us nearby, loud enough for her to hear. “If that’s Kevin’s sister, then things might really change around here. He’s the kind of white person who gets things done.”
Francisca was nervous that any mention of activist, author, or media would lead people to believe that money was flowing to her family when it wasn’t. But the charade grew more awkward one night when I went to check my e-mail at the Canadian Brotherhood’s Internet café. An older Canadian monk approached me, asking, “You are Kevin’s sister?” Before I could answer, he said, “I have something to show you.”
He pulled out his laptop, which stored old films of Kevin building houses in Dungu in the early 1980s. He was so young then—only twenty-three or so—and looked like a member of the brat pack gone lost in Africa. His name inspired respect, perhaps because he’d stayed so many years, and not in the Belgian part of town. They all said so. He wasn’t like other white people. He stayed on everybody’s level.
The day Kevin showed up with all of his earthly possessions in his overstuffed backpack, boots dangling by a string, he moved into Francisca’s hut and started eyeing an abandoned adobe house on the property. It had four bedrooms, but the roof had been eaten away by termites. When it rained, water ran down the walls. Kevin replaced the roof, patched the walls, and repainted. Soon they had a lovely four-bedroom place with a sitting room and a dining room and an open floor plan appropriate for young children.
Chatter around town swelled, even among close friends. The standard refrain became What are you doing with a white guy, he’ll leave you. Francisca knew how these things could go: Her best friend was living with a Belgian who had shipped his wife and kids back to Europe to make space for his young Congolese plaything.
Kevin and Francisca spent time around other American and Belgian-Congolese couples hoping to avoid gossip. They went to parties in Little Belgium often. One week, when Francisca stayed in because she wasn’t feeling well, her friend told everyone Francisca was pregnant. And you know Kevin’s not happy about it. That’s what Kevin told me. He didn’t come to Congo to have some baby. He’s pretty sure it’s not even his.
Francisca was pregnant, and kids weren’t their plan. By then, she was throwing up at random times nearly every day and had missed a couple of periods.
Francisca confided in Mama Koko, who already knew what everyone was saying. Kevin-doesn’t-want-it-even-if-it’s-his rumors had spread through town overnight and arrived at Mama Koko’s along with the town gossips for morning coffee. Mama Koko shut them down. “If the child is black, it’s my grandchild. If the baby is mixed, it’s my grandchild.”
Mama Koko counseled Francisca. “I know you. You know yourself. Don’t worry about it.” As for Kevin, “You live with him. You need to talk to him and trust what he says.”
Francisca told Kevin that night.
Kevin was normally a quiet guy. But when Francisca told him about the baby, he couldn’t hide it—he was thrilled. He asked: If the baby is a girl, could we name her Natalie?
Kevin spent his free time working fine wood into a crib, and every day when he came home, he asked, “How is Natalie today?”
Who’s Natalie? the family wondered. They didn’t name unborn babies. Nor did they prepare with baby goods, for fear of a stillbirth. But when Francisca was six months pregnant, Kevin came back from Kinshasa with two suitcases full of baby everything: extra mosquito netting, baby powder, lotion, clothes, diapers, soap, and a beautiful fabric for Francisca to make herself a dress to wear home from the hospital, with a set of elegant gold earrings to match.
A few months later, Francisca went into labor when Kevin was out. Mama Koko walked her across town to the hospital. When Kevin got home and heard, he ran straight into the maternity section. It was time. Kevin scooped Francisca up from her bed and carried her into the delivery room, fussing and making sure everything was in place: Was Francisca comfortable? Did Mama Koko have a nice chair? How about a massage for Francisca’s feet? Breathe, Francisca, breathe.
A woman in labor a few beds down had been watching them. She screamed at her husband. “You see that! What the hell is wrong with you! I should have married a white man! That is love!”
They had a boy, Isaac.
When Francisca came home, Mama Koko and her aunties took care of everything, as was the custom. New mothers were expected only to breast-feed, snuggle the baby, and rest. Kevin rallied the guys in the family to take over cooking and cleaning on the weekends to give the women a break. Everyone was in. The guys took pride in their hearty meals and dish-scrubbing skills, until male neighbors started to show up, complaining that this type of behavior would do nothing good for their own domestic situation. Their wives were already talking about it, so please knock it off.
Kevin brought home more beautiful fabric from Bunia for Francisca a year later, when she was pregnant with their second child, though he asked her not to wear i
t yet. When Solomon was born, the congratulations went on for weeks. It confused Francisca enough to ask: “Why do you keep congratulating me? You already saw the baby.”
“Your upcoming marriage!” her friends said, which was weird, since as far as Francisca knew, there were no wedding plans. News was all over town, on account of the government-issued notices posted on the mango trees throughout the town center announcing their marriage: If anyone objects to their upcoming marriage March 30, 1989, speak now or forever hold your peace. But Francisca had been hunkered down at home with Isaac and baby Solomon hadn’t seen the announcements.
That night, Francisca asked Kevin, “What’s all this talk? Are we getting married?”
“Yes!” he said, with a huge smile. He was planning it as a surprise, making all the wedding arrangements. The fabric he had brought from Bunia for a dress was meant to be her wedding dress, a wax-block print pattern with oversized blue and gold lotuses.
He could see Francisca’s reservations, so he held her. “We’ve already been married all these years. It’s just legal. Just making it official. Did I need to ask you again?”
“Let’s do it!” she said. “But no P.A.” Public affection, that is. She still had a rule about it.
Kevin had already written Francisca’s dad about the traditional arrangements. When André arrived from the coffee plantation, Kevin showed proper respect by asking two of his Congolese friends to stand up and make his case. In matters of marriage, men didn’t speak on their own behalf.
Normally a big dowry was expected for a first daughter’s marriage, but the family already loved Kevin. They didn’t need lots of livestock or money, so Kevin made a small donation for the sake of tradition. They formed a small procession consisting of all the kids, André and Mama Koko, brothers, sisters, and onlookers from town, Francisca in her beautiful wax-block print wrap, and gold earrings to match, as they made their way to The Bureau, decorated with impatiens for the special occasion.
All the aunties ogled, since men don’t usually plan weddings in Congo. Kevin had arranged everything, including palm leaves interwoven with bougainvillea strung around the yard. He served chicken, fish, goat in sauce, roasted peanuts, and fried plantain. They borrowed a car battery to plug in the cassette player, and danced to Congolese music, mixed with the occasional tune by Earth, Wind & Fire.
In the distance, rain clouds gathered and threatened a downpour over their outdoor reception, so a group of Francisca’s aunties slipped away to the back of the house. They tied potato leaves on their heads and around their waists, chucked an axe at the ground so it stuck upright, poured ash in a circle, and danced, invoking the ancestors. Our first daughter is married today! Don’t dishonor us to let the rain fall and disrupt our celebration! Then one of the aunties pulled up her skirt and shook her bare buns at the east, as aunties were wont to do on big celebration days, or really any occasion their spirit-summoning skills were needed.
They came back around the house and assured Francisca: Carry on. It won’t rain.
And it didn’t.
America
• • • •
America. They never meant to stay. They had planned a life in Africa.
With two new babies and the three kids Francisca brought to their union, Kevin decided it was time to graduate from the Peace Corps’ volunteer wages. He decided a degree in engineering would be their ticket: With a master’s degree, he could comfortably support a family, do meaningful work, and they could live in any corner of Africa. All they needed was a couple of years in America for graduate school.
During their final evening walks in Dungu, Kevin coached Francisca on what to expect, from the street sweepers scrubbing the roads with water to the bright city lights.
Francisca knew to expect huge buildings. She didn’t expect that America would make her feel so small.
They arrived in Seattle in the winter. Kevin’s parents greeted them, taken aback by Francisca’s flimsy cotton outfit. It was far too thin for blustery Pacific Northwest weather. “How could you let her come here in something so light!”
“It’s what she wears,” Kevin said. He loved Francisca in a bright wrap, just like the day they met.
“She’s cold!” his dad said, bundling her in his puffy coat.
Kevin’s step-mom took her shopping the next day. Francisca wore bright colors that made her stand out, not darks. She didn’t want to blend into her clothes and disappear. No one would notice her. Francisca scanned the boutiques for patterns, colors, flowers, anything with hints of home.
No such luck. In a dressing room, Francisca found herself draped in a muted dark-purple woolen plaid jacket, with a matching skirt that hit below the knee.
“You look so good!” her motherin-law said, trying to buoy her.
I look so stupid in this thing. How on earth am I going to dress like this?
“It will keep you warm,” her motherin-law said. Francisca hated it, but she had only just met her new in-laws. “Yeah, it’s good.”
When they moved to Kevin’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, Kevin worked all day and studied his engineering texts late into the night. Francisca hated being dependent, but she couldn’t even figure out how to grocery-shop on her own.
Francisca knew only a few words of formal British English she’d learned in school, like Good morning, sir. Good afternoon. How do you do? She was lost with this American English: Hi. How you doing? Or What’s up? (She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she was sure it was very aggressive.)
She was too shy to speak more than a little here and there. Some people were patient. Others peppered her with questions, choosing to not hear the words through the French accent. Excuse me? What was that you said? What’s that accent? Where are you from? Excuse me. What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? I can’t follow. She would repeat and repeat and repeat herself to selectively deaf ears. Sometimes she would escape to the bathroom to cry.
Francisca’s hair was growing into an Afro that she could no longer get a comb through. She attended a neighborhood church on Sundays, and noticed the minister’s wife had lovely, comb-able hair.
Francisca abhorred makeup, or anything fake, really. The thought of chemicals on her hair was a radical move, but she wanted to fit in, and she had noticed that ladies didn’t wear Afros in America. The minister’s gracious wife connected Francisca with another parishioner who specialized in black hair and agreed to do Francisca’s for free.
On the way into Kevin and Francisca’s modest rental home, the hairdresser made sideways comments that landed funny: Nice place… . What are you doing living here? By morning, clumps of hair stuck to Francisca’s comb. Her hair was falling out. Humiliated, Francisca wrapped her clumpy, balding head in a scarf and went to church anyway. Francisca showed the minister’s wife the box she’d fished out of her bathroom garbage. “But this is for white people’s hair! She knows better,” the minister’s wife said.
Francisca skipped church on Sundays from then on.
Francisca felt like she was shrinking. Kevin could see it. Francisca the leader, the one who owned the classroom, who haggled at the market, was slipping away. They made plans to get back to Africa.
In 1994, after finishing graduate school, Kevin was offered what appeared to be the perfect job in Rwanda, stationed in the resort town of Gisenyi, a lush hill town overlooking Lake Kivu, right on the border with Congo. Their new life was a dream combination of both of their worlds, one that left Francisca and Kevin scratching their heads, wondering What the hell did we do right?
Kevin’s job came with a freshly renovated lake-view house on a hill. To Francisca, it was paradise: whitewashed cement and brick, huge glass windows, lavish flower gardens, room for a vegetable garden in the back. The house came with a staff of five—a cook, cleaning lady, gardener, security man, and a driver—all of whom made Francisca uneasy. The cook stayed out of the kitchen because Francisca handled all the family meals.
There was just one problem. Along the ninety
-some-mile drive to Gisenyi from Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, they had to pass through thirteen military checkpoints, and even in the resort town of Gisenyi, people on the street seemed closed off and tense.
The day after their cargo container arrived with all their things from America, the phone rang at five in the morning. It was Kevin’s colleague: “You guys are going on vacation right now. Pack the car.”
The Rwandan president’s plane had been shot down, igniting long smoldering ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis.
Francisca peeled back the beige curtains in the living room and saw that the road out front was covered with Hutu militia who would come to be known as Interahamwe, “those who kill together.” Kevin and Francisca woke the kids, quietly slipped them into their car, and drove to the border of Congo. The soldier at the checkpoint stopped them. “Where are you going?”
Kevin played it cool. “We’re just going to see her family.”
“Do you have a letter of permission?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not going. Nobody’s leaving.”
They went back home and pulled the blinds tight, staying inside, listening to gunshots coming from the nearby hills, trying to calm themselves down. Was it really so radically different from where they had lived in northeast Portland? In their neighborhood back in Oregon, three kids within a two-block radius had died from stray bullet wounds.
But as the morning went on, the gunshots grew more frequent, and closer.
Bombs exploded nearby, shaking their glass windows.
Then came the bloody screams from the university just behind their house.
Kevin and Francisca pulled mattresses onto the floor, up against a wall, as far away from the windows as possible, to avoid shattered glass. They lay there, trying to reassure the children, trying to tune out the gunshots next door that killed their Tutsi neighbor.
Their cargo container in Kigali was left behind, including all of Francisca’s family photos, along with everything in their home. Francisca bundled up a few changes of clothes for the kids, and they left. Their car crawled through the deserted streets, passing men with machetes. When they finally arrived at a UN office, other foreigners had gathered. Kevin insisted they stay in their car, away from the crowd, in the event of a bomb.
Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen Page 7
