Enter Boy Juma Boy, the district’s Member of Parliament. Heoffers to pay 140 thousand shillings (a lot) to bring in the best witch doctor in the world. Which he does. There has been a lot of excitement around here because of it. Mwanamisi’s husband, Mausud, is the one who contacted the MP for a cure. As he put it, “If it is a real curse, we need a witch doctor. If it is not real, we still need one because the people here all believe we need one.” Our neighbor on the left is the prime suspect—a grumpy old man and quite possibly an evil wizard.
I’ve been talking to people about what will be done with the witches or wizards once they find them. Some say they will be forced to lick a red-hot, charmed metal instrument that won’t hurt them if they’re innocent. Some say they will have to eat a poisoned papaya that won’t make them sick if they’re innocent. Still others say they’ll have to go to the District Commissioner’s Office and pay a fine. Mwanamisi says people are angry enough that they might lynch the person responsible for the curse. She also said not to worry, that she and her husband would protect us from any “trouble.” We are living in Salem.
Last weekend in front of crowds of maybe 1,000 villagers from around here, dressed in their most colorful kangas, the witch doctor arrived, dressed in capes and beads and a secondhand Lakers tee shirt. He proceeded to throw eggs into, paint chicken blood on, search for charms in, climb on the roof of, and sprinkle red holy water on three houses in a row—Mwanamisi’s, the old man’s, and ours. He claimed to have seen the evil spirit on the roof, in the thatching of the old man’s house, but then it apparently changed into a ratlike, snakelike creature and leapt into the thatching of our house. So everyone ran over to our house while the witch doctor went inside to search for it. He even searched inside our choo. He found some beaded charms and other evil wizard fetishes in the other houses but not ours. Luckily.
In part, it was exciting. Everyone around us was excited too—there was dancing and singing and costumes and an exorcism to watch. To us nonbelievers, though, it was also like watching a play. The witch doctor would roll around with the invisible thing, and point in the direction it fled, describing the shapes it took as he mixed up the next concoction. The people around us would say things like “Yes, I felt the hot wind as the evil passed through me!” or “I saw it penetrate that corner of the house!” As we talked to our neighbors in the crowd, they would all start off the conversation as though they didn’t believe in it, but when we reserved judgment, they would explain that it was all true, a real spirit needed to be cast out.
Then, when the whole crowd turned on our house, I felt something else. Suddenly I realized how much I didn’t know about the people in the crowd. Our neighbors loved us, right? They knew we loved them, right? They wouldn’t find a stray hair ball and think it was an evil charm, right? What exactly had Mwanamisi said about lynching? As I was looking at Dave and he was looking at me, Zaina, an amazing little girl, ran over to me and held my hand. Suddenly, we were surrounded by smiling neighbors. Mwanamisi told us later that they had all been worried that the evil thing had come to nest in our house, not that it had originated there. They had wanted to reassure us. (So there is nothing for you to retroactively worry about.)
Then the witch doctor cleansed our house and moved on to cleanse Mwanamisi’s. He’s currently narrowing down the list of suspects to a small ring of wizards who’ll be punished to free the girls of the curse. People agree that it’s probably the old man and his friends, and that he cursed the school because it was built on his land without his permission. It makes it all even more complicated to think that the old man might well have consulted another witch doctor and bought a curse to be placed on the school. David is visiting with Mausud now, asking all sorts of questions.
The witch doctor is on his way back, and I must go. I can tell he’s coming because I just heard the animal horn he blows.
Gotta run,
Love again,
Katie
NEW YORK CITY
August 27
Dear Kate,
All night long I had crank collect calls from some jail in Virginia coming in on auto redial. The electronic voice would say, “You have a collect call from—” and then instead of his name some guy was saying, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” Then my friend Trajal gave a dance performance at 6:30 this morning. Why so early? He wanted to “disrupt” our ideas of how performance time fits into our lives. This was all fine and good, but I had to get up at 5:30 and now my eyes are burning. Is that what he wanted us to take away from his work, I want to know.
I’m a little sad to be working again. Yes, I realize I have not told you a thing about what I do at my new job yet. Well, it has begun, and I’m a hundred percent relieved to have escaped the commute to Westchester. Not only do I walk to work but the website has a small staff, so I’m nearly meeting-free.And I’m in a leadership position, so we’ll get to see what I’m like as a boss. My brother thinks I’ll be a natural.
I was out with my former colleague Sam. He was telling me how he had lunch with this gay guy from his office, and that they went for sushi and he told Sam that sushi is a good substitute for sex. This made Sam uncomfortable. He thought it was flirty—that the implication was that they were eating sushi because they wanted to have sex with each other. Sam said that he wanted to say, “You know, I’m not gay.” I told Sam that it sounds like he’s a little homophobic. He conceded, yes. I suggested that he just do what he would do with a woman—mention his girlfriend. But he hates that (as do I). Finally I told Sam that when his friend said sushi was a good substitution for sex, Sam should have said, “There’s nothing like pussy.” Sam had never heard me say the word pussy. I can’t believe I just wrote that word here at work. Twice. I’d better print, send and delete this document before the corporate spies track me down, fire me for being a dirty girl, and jail me so all I can do is make crank calls.
One person who is exploring the “nothing like pussy” theory these days is Delia. Has she written to tell you that she has a girlfriend? If she hasn’t already, she will, as she loves to talk about it. That’s right, our Delia is dating a woman. (And I worried about her dating Stack!) Jessica is a head turner. She’s very tall with dark skin and light eyes. She’s only twenty-one but she’s mature. Delia’s very cute about the whole thing. In what may be seen as a related move, Delia has dyed over her white-blond hair to revert to her natural brown. At the same time, she has renounced the red dresses and pink frills of her blond wardrobe. Looks like somebody’s search for identity is stabilizing. Needless to say, I’m glad for her. I don’t think I’ve watched any of my friends go through this kind of transition, but, as she and I have discussed, it’s no real adjustment for me. I’m mostly curious. For instance, Delia told me that she’s “having a little trouble jumping the next sexual hurdle. . . .” I said, “You mean you don’t want to get fancy with her stuff?” Yup, she confesses, but soon I expect I’ll hear how it went. When Delia called home to say that she liked a girl, her mother’s response was, “Well, you know how I feel about men.” What I like most about Delia’s newly discovered sexual proclivity is the implication that nothing about our lives is set in stone. Today I’m a working girl in New York and you’re an intrepid do-gooder. Tomorrow you could be eating pâté and wearing black tights and I’ll have run away with a lion tamer. Thank God for the unknown future.
But for now I’m still dallying with William. Last time we went hiking we lay down on a rock and ate a big Rice Krispie Treat that he had brought. I said: I didn’t have you pegged as a Rice Krispie Treat kind of guy, and he said: I’m not, but I suspected you were a Rice Krispie Treat kind of girl. How true. We figured out what the clouds looked like. I saw an empty duck and a full duck. He couldn’t catch the last bite of Rice Krispie Treat in his mouth and kept trying. I admitted, I’m kind of good at that (years of tossing candy corn) and threw it up and caught it on the first try. He asked, Were you a trained seal in a past life?
This weekend I’m going to DC to
check on my grandparents with Josh Stack. My friends are envious that I get to spend a whole weekend with him. I want to say, Hey, aren’t I just as fun? Apparently not. I haven’t seen Stack for a while, but I feel clearheadedly happy about spending the weekend with him. My grandfather has been ill lately, and while he was in the hospital, he finally married Rosa. Even though we had some warning, of course, it still happened too quickly, for Steven and me at least. But now we know Rosa a little more. The fact is that she cares for him lovingly and seems to lift his spirits. And he is truly devoted to her. So even though it’s painful to know that the situation would not have appealed to my grandmother, their obvious happiness wins. It just makes me sad to see it, although, in a rather gracious way, Rosa hasn’t changed much in the house, beyond adding photos of her relatives. This makes it feel like my grandmother isn’t being erased. My grandfather’s back at home and mostly better now. Having Stack around will diffuse the situation. I know he’ll be both polite and charming, and they, like the rest of humanity, will want us to be a couple. But, although we will share the high, comfortable bed in the basement, we will behave ourselves.
I’m going to pretend to go to the gym now.
XOXO,
Hilary
NEW YORK CITY
September 20
Dear K8,
This follows on the heels of the package I sent you this morning. At the post office I only had ten dollars because my bank card went haywire, so I had to befriend the woman weighing the package in order to get her to let me remove candy, piece by piece, until I could afford to send it. So I babbled, “Candy for my friend in Africa. Last time I sent her a package with different stuff in it I could tell she liked the candy best . . .” et cetera. So we got your package weighed and sent. Then the postal woman said to her co-worker, “Susanna, we need to get some candy for our jar.” I was leaving with all the extra candy when I turned at the door, went back, and handed the woman the bag of candy pumpkins and Reese’s cups saying, “For the jar.” She laughed and accepted. New York can be a small town.
Things are no longer so dreamy with William, I regret to report. He has informed me that “something is missing.” What that means, although he made a valiant attempt to explain, doesn’t really matter. It has no point, of course, beyond the fact that this won’t work for him. Something about how he only feels passionately about people who are unavailable. Blah, blah, blah.
Where did this news leave us? Well, he suggested ordering food and playing Scrabble. I said, “Scrabble won’t alleviate this news . . . but it almost will.” As I leaned over to help him come up with a seven-letter word, he ran his hand down my spine and suddenly we were back in it. He tore my clothes and broke my bed and left his socks. I suspect we’ll eke a few more hikes out of this experiment before it goes belly-up. Still, I’ve given up on this one. Even though I wasn’t looking for a perfect match, I can’t envision ever recovering from his statement. I’m not really surprised that this one is as doomed as the rest. Love doesn’t happen to me. I’m the 7UP of romance, never had it, never will.
Oddly, the new me, amidst this ambiguity, cries easily. I was over at Stack’s plying him for comfort food and watching TV for the first time since I moved to my TV-free home. We saw the news, and there was a woman who’d been blind for twelve years until her son was killed in a car accident and they gave her his corneas or retinas or something. So now she can see, and for the TV cameras they show her a picture of her dead kid and she says, “Michael (for that was his name), you said you’d always be my eyes.” I cried. Then we watched A Chorus Line, to which my response was more in character: I fell asleep.
As if the William episode weren’t my share of relationship talks for the week. Yesterday one of the producers who reports to me said that she was “sad” about a project that we’re working on together—the much-needed redesign of the site—so we went outside to talk about it. I walked us toward my roof, a not bad place to talk, and she started to tell me that she has some trouble working with me in a team. (She has hit me with issues like this since I started working here. For example, out of the blue she once said, “Forgive me if I’ve ever been catty to you.” I had no idea what she was talking about.) So she’s commenting on how we’ve been working and it’s getting confusing and I’m thinking, But there’s nothing complicated here. I just want to get some work done. Yes, I am managing several people and I’ve never been a boss before, but I have such simple goals in this job: to make this website better and to create a pleasant working environment for all involved. I tried very hard to listen and explain, but it got us nowhere because she concluded that she wants to keep working exactly as we have been! What did she need? Assurance that I didn’t consider her inferior? To express that she doesn’t have the time or ability to do the job she’d like to do on this? Actually, I was pretty shocked by the whole thing. You know I pride myself on fairness. I could not understand her complaints, even though she was speaking English. Who knows? I tried. Don’t you think I tried?
Also, I had a strained family dinner last night, wherein Steven, my dad and I talked about the fact that my grandfather gave some of my grandmother’s jewelry to Genevieve when she and my father were still together. I find myself sentimental about everything that was my grandmother’s, and I know that she expected me to have her jewelry since she said so to my mother more than once. This seems especially important now that my grandfather is remarried and I don’t know what will happen with my grandmother’s scarves and gloves, her clothes and books. Steven is dismayed that this could happen in the first place. He wishes our family had a stronger notion of legacy. And me, I missed my grandmother and cried at the table in the restaurant. (I was the only girl and someone had to do it.) There is no resolution, although I will eventually talk to Genevieve, with whom I am friendly, and will ask her to leave the jewelry to me and Steven or our kids.
I know it’s supposed to be good to talk things over. But you know what? I’m tired of it. I say: Less talk, more Scrabble.
—H
KWALE
October 1
Dear Hilary,
I can’t stand the fact that I’m writing another stinking letter. I mean, it’s nothing personal, I’m happy to be in mental communion with you and my family and everyone, but, geez, you know? What can I say and how can I say it—it wears me so. It’s not even aesthetically pleasing since I’ve only got this half inkless ballpoint pen and ripped out exercise book paper. (It’s always nice to complain about something the people around you are working their fingers to the bone to get, like pens, paper, and schooling so their children can learn to write.) Sigh, I can’t even complain happily.
Oh, and thanks for the package! Right after I opened it I threw up. Well, not until after I had eaten all the peanut butter M&M’s. Which I guess wasn’t really their fault (although I was a mite suspicious of the blue ones!?) since I’d been sick and throwing up all week anyway. Truth be told, I actually sort of knew that I’d be throwing them up in a moment or two and really did not care. (I even admit to the fleeting thought that if I heaved quickly enough, I’d get to taste them twice, which did not actually happen.) So I just ate them down and enjoyed every morsel. I tossed Dave the Skittles to keep him away from the real game. Typically, he even has some left today. He very much enjoyed the fact that I chowed down all my candy and then yakked. A few cracks about me being a real joy on Halloween or something. Whatever. We know how to get a sugar high he’s never gonna feel, right? Anyway, thanks for the treats. May all your packages return to you (different ones) a hundredfold someday like a chain letter.
After having cleaned up, or rather wiped off (cleaning up being rather an exaggeration around here), I promptly put on the new shirt you sent. Dave insisted on breathing in the aroma of American laundry detergent first. It is definitely the cleanest thing in our house. Maybe in the whole village. I looked through the photographs and thought they were of some of your new friends that I have yet to meet. Then Dave pointed out that they
included shots of me. (Does it mean something that I didn’t recognize myself?) So thanks for those too.
Let me interrupt this barrage of appreciation by asking if you can believe I got my butt kicked by Kenya again? I mean, my God! I was so sick with this one that at one point Dave was spooning broth into my mouth and dousing my head with the coldest water he could find like I was Mary from Little House on the Freaking Prairie or something. He wanted to try to get to Mombasa, but it was really late, and we probably would’ve had to wait forever for a vehicle. Plus, I wasn’t too excited about taking the hour-long walk to get to the road. But, hey—what’s a little more brain damage anyway?
Walking to school this morning the kids passing by were saying to me, “Good morning, class.” And there were some one-day-old baby chicks pecking around the cassava garden. The pineapples are growing. The old woman washing dishes in the stream said, “Jambo, Mama,” which is a nice, kind greeting (as opposed to her previous snide mimicry of my bad accent). There was also a flattened, gray chameleon on the path next to some huge pink blossoms. Typical morning.
A little while ago, Mwanamisi’s six-year-old son, Sefu, came knocking at the door to show me the decomposing bat he’d been playing with. (“Look at my bird!”) The truth is that when he came to the door to show me, I looked at it, confirmed to myself that it was actually what I thought it was, and kind of smiled at him as if to say, “Yes, honey, that’s a really nice rotting bat.” Then Dave looked up from reading a book my uncle sent and asked, “What was that?” Only when I said, “Oh, Sefu just wanted to show me the putrid, rotting bat he was playing with,” did I realize I probably could have gotten it away from him and given him a piece of chalk or something. It’s shocking what no longer shocks me.
Dear Exile Page 10
