by Aimee Molloy
While in Paris on the weekends, Molly went to the American Cultural Center, where she met Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a modern jazz group very popular with the French. They struck up a conversation, and Jarman, impressed with Molly’s fluent French, asked if she’d be interested in working as their translator. She was overjoyed to do so—she knew very little about jazz at the time—and she spent several evenings accompanying Jarman and his band to meetings and to Paris’s underground jazz clubs. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and possibility. While she seldom drank alcohol and was interested in neither cigarettes nor drugs, she found the experience exciting and wild, if only because it was so astoundingly different from her life back home. But she sometimes struggled with feeling out of place. Jarman and the other members of the ensemble were at least ten years older than she, and at times she had to work hard to hide the self-consciousness she felt, both because of her age and her lack of worldliness.
This really hit home for her one night while at a club. In the middle of a set, a woman sitting at a table not too far from Molly stood up, walked to the center of the room, and began to dance. The woman may not have been beautiful, at least not traditionally so, but she was tall and graceful, and with the way she moved her arms, the way her body swayed, ensconced in the long flowing fabric of her dress, Molly thought she was the most gorgeous sight in the world. She was mesmerized and wanted nothing more than to watch that woman forever.
And she knew right then: that was how she wanted to live. She wanted to find a place where she too could stand on her own, walk to the center of a room, close her eyes, raise her arms, and, without even a thought that she might look foolish or make a mistake, without an ounce of self-consciousness, dance as freely and beautifully as she wanted.
MOLLY MOVED TO CHICAGO in 1970 to finish her course work at the Circle Campus of the University of Illinois, and after graduating in December she felt torn about where to head with her life. She worked part-time selling clothes at Marshall Field and Company, the well-known department store, before taking a job as a substitute teacher. While she was generally happy, she was never truly able to shake the idea that she was, in so many ways, gravely disappointing her mother. Ann’s greatest hope was that her daughters would grow up to be successful and financially secure, whereas Molly was never interested in that. She never concerned herself with money, and although she did hold a deep desire to one day become a mother, she couldn’t envision a life behind a white picket fence in the suburbs of Illinois. Whenever Molly returned to Danville to visit her parents, Ann did not attempt to hide her displeasure over the fact that her youngest daughter was wasting her life. Here was a young woman with so much talent and ability—traits Ann feared Molly was at risk of squandering by not pursuing the one thing that could protect her from a life of sacrifice and hardship: the pursuit of economic security.
By the time Molly had entered graduate school at the University of Illinois in 1972 to study French, hoping to one day get a job as a teacher or interpreter, she had given up trying to please Ann. She’d come to feel that her mother’s desire to mold her in a certain, specific way was like trying to mold a piece of wet soap in your hands. Try as you might, the soap can’t take the pressure; eventually it slips and falls away.
4
Wàcc-bees bi (The Newcomer)
After arriving in Dakar in October 1974, Molly was eventually able to persuade the university to keep the terms of the exchange agreement. She was given a spot in the master’s program, a fifty-dollar-a-month stipend, and a room in the women’s dorm, which she shared with an undergraduate student for sixteen dollars a month.
“Looking back, I’m not sure how I convinced the university to allow me to stay,” she says. “I just kept showing up at the offices saying, ‘I can’t leave. I’m here. We need to make this work.’ I think once they understood how much I’d come to love Senegal, they couldn’t help but say yes.”
Life at the university was not easy at first. While she’d thought her French would be enough for her to get by with in Senegal, most of the students communicated in Wolof. Originating as a commercial language used for trading purposes among the Wolof people and other ethnic groups, Wolof was the most common national language, spoken by 80 percent of the population. Of course Molly couldn’t speak a word of it, and even with the students with whom she could communicate, she found many cultural differences. With her tendency to venture out alone on the weekends to explore the music scene, the beaches, or the different local markets, Molly didn’t understand at first why the women in her dorm seemed to regard her so oddly. Many were away from their families and villages for the first time, and while she tried to engage with them as much as possible—asking their opinion on the African literature books she was reading, commenting on their lives as students—they seemed to have very little to say to her. But many asked if they could borrow money, thinking that most Americans were rich. She found this upsetting, partly because of the way it set her apart from the others and partly because she didn’t have anything to give. To buy her ticket to Senegal, she’d borrowed $1,000 from a Danville bank, and she had so little money that semester that she subsisted largely on banana-mayonnaise sandwiches she made in her room most nights, on bread she bought from a street vendor next to the women’s dormitory.
She also felt that in many ways she had returned to an era she had just recently escaped. As a college student in the late 1960s, she had gone through a period of great personal and political transformation. She’d arrived at the University of Illinois a wholesome, conservative Republican with a strict Christian upbringing—albeit one she’d never fully bought into. In Danville, Molly and her sister, Diane, attended Trinity Lutheran School through the sixth grade, a private religious school. Her family was a regular of the affiliated church, part of the Missouri Synod, a conservative branch of Lutheranism that teaches the strict interpretation of the Bible, espousing the idea that all humankind are sinners who can only gain access to heaven through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Savior. Every Sunday, expected to sit primly through the long service held inside the small, rustic, Bavarian-style church, Molly tried her best to fit in. “Everyone was sitting so perfectly stiff, as if they had umbrellas up their bottoms,” she recalls. “Though it was never easy for me, I did what I could to mimic them, but it seems like I was always in trouble for something.” In high school, having accepted her parents’ political beliefs, she campaigned for Barry Goldwater, and when asked by a local newspaper reporter if she liked the longer, duck-tailed hairstyle popular among teenage boys, Molly said she didn’t. “I think short hair is neater,” she said. “Long hair looks too hoody.”
But once she became a student at the university, it didn’t take long before she shed her more conservative beliefs and ideals. Intrigued by the social transformations and political activism unfolding around her, she began to attend antiwar protests and marches for civil rights, and witnessed the beginnings of the feminist movement as it took hold, its members calling for equal rights, sexual freedom, and an end to modesty. Molly was enthralled. She grew her hair long and traded in the petticoat skirts and saddle shoes she’d worn in high school for sandals, big hoop earrings, and loose, colorful tops. She hemmed her miniskirts as short as everyone else, and for the first time in her life she began to undress in front of other girls; the modesty her mother had always expected of her felt silly now. After all, why should a woman feel shame about her body?
In Senegal, though, she felt as if she had arrived at a place and time that had missed this progress. The women she met were as she had once been: constrained by expectations and rigid social norms, and generally less free to simply be themselves. Perhaps it could be explained by religion, she thought. Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country—with about 94 percent of the population practicing the religion—and while most Senegalese women do not wear a veil, they do adhere to the tenets of their faith. Perhaps this was why the women did not go out much or express their o
pinions often, and why Molly’s roommate was compelled to finally approach her one day and explain a well-known Wolof proverb that warns that seeing a bare bottom at the beginning of the day brings bad luck all day long.
“The girls in the dorm would appreciate if you’d stop undressing in front of everyone,” she said, to Molly’s great embarrassment.
Molly did eventually grow close to one woman. Her name was Ndey, and she was from Mauritania, a nation just north of Senegal. They met during a meal in the student cafeteria and began to spend a lot of time together. Ndey came from a village called Sélibaby, in eastern Mauritania, several hours from the border of Senegal. Her family remained in the village, where her father was an ambulance driver and her mother raised her younger siblings. Molly had never met anyone from a place like Sélibaby—a remote African village lacking many modern conveniences—and she peppered Ndey with questions about what it was like to grow up there.
“What do people do for fun?” she’d ask. “Is it hard to live without electricity? What’s the food like?”
“You should just come see for yourself,” Ndey suggested one afternoon. “Come home with me for Tabaski.” One of the most important holidays in Islam, Tabaski commemorates the willingness of Abraham, the biblical patriarch, to sacrifice his son as commanded by God. It is a day of great celebration during which every family slaughters a sheep or goat. Molly couldn’t think of a better way to spend a week than traveling to a new country to witness this special holiday with an African family in a remote village.
A few weeks later, on a warm morning in late December 1974, as her family prepared for Christmas back home, Molly followed Ndey and dozens of other students from the university to the Dakar train station to catch the Bamako Express. Carved through some of West Africa’s most desolate terrain, the Bamako line opened in 1923 and was once considered one of the most luxurious train journeys through all of Africa, carrying passengers from Dakar to the capital of Mali. This was hardly the case when Molly and Ndey boarded the train that morning. The rundown cars were packed full of passengers heading home for the Tabaski holiday, and Molly and Ndey had to push their way through the crowd to search for seats, squeezing past the men and women strolling the packed aisles selling peanuts and oranges from thin, metal trays. Molly was sure she and Ndey were going to have to stand the entire twelve-hour journey to Kidira, a town in eastern Senegal near the Malian border where they would catch a bush taxi to Sélibaby, but they were fortunate to get two of the last seats in the back of the dining car, crammed beside other passengers sitting with large suitcases and packages balanced on their laps. The engine eventually creaked into action, and before long they had left behind the crowded, bustling streets of Senegal’s capital city and entered a long, seemingly endless stretch of dry savannah and eternal scrubland.
The trip was long and slow, and the passengers around her grew restless and bored, often laying their heads on the dining table to rest. But Molly was riveted, loving every minute of the journey—the adventure of taking a twelve-hour trip to a new country, the sights and smells of the train. Outside the window were her first sights of Africa beyond the two months she’d spent in Dakar. For most of the trip, she felt as if they were traveling through a place where only the brush and sand could survive, broken periodically by small collections of desert villages, standing like ancient sculptures in the bush, and surrounded on either side by vast forests of baobab trees hugging the horizon. They passed women in colorful wraparound skirts walking home from a well, large pails of water precariously balanced atop their heads, and men and boys crowded onto horse-drawn carts, heading back from a long day of work in the fields.
It was nearly ten o’clock at night when the train finally screeched to a halt in Kidira. “We have to cross the river here and enter Mali,” Ndey explained as they disembarked. “Tomorrow we’ll catch a bush taxi from the town center into Mauritania.” As they made their way from the station toward the river, Molly expected to catch sight of a bridge they’d be walking across, but none came into view. Instead, they walked down the banks of the river to the water, where a pirogue—a large flat-bottomed canoe—waited. Molly, Ndey, and several other students from the train piled into the boat, and under the soft blue light of the moon, they began the twenty-minute ride across the Senegal River into Mali.
As they landed and began walking through a small town on the other side of the river, a woman from the nearby village approached the six students and invited them to spend the night in her home.
“Is it okay for us to spend the night with a family no one knows?” Molly whispered to Ndey, as she followed the others.
“Of course. This is Africa, Molly! People help each other out when they’re in need. You will better understand this the more time you spend here. Who knows? One day we may help out one of her children.” The woman led them to her simple home, where she spread sleeping mats on the floor and prepared a dinner of bread and sardines from the local market.
The next morning, after waiting several hours in the hot sun for an available bush taxi to arrive, they finally flagged down a large truck heading in the right direction, its open bed already full of passengers as well as piles of luggage and bags. Ndey, Molly, and the other students hopped onto the back of the truck, and after more than three hours of bumping across the desert on an unmarked dirt path cut through the dry savannah, they arrived in Sélibaby.
The village was beautiful, with small, adobe huts covered in thatched roofs and large verandahs attached in front. With no electricity or running water, Molly felt as if she had traveled back in time, arriving in a world beyond history. She’d felt the same way in Europe at times, standing in the ancient monastery at Mont Saint-Michel or on the steps of the Acropolis in Athens, but nothing compared to what she felt here in Sélibaby. As she and Ndey walked around the village, stopping at every mud-brick house to say hello and wish people a happy Tabaski, Molly could picture what it was like to live two thousand years ago.
She stayed in the village for a week, sleeping on a thin foam mattress in Ndey’s room. Molly kept a journal at the time. In it, she wrote: “I knew as the train pulled out of Dakar late Saturday afternoon amidst throngs of people that I should prepare myself for a bit of culture shock. For although Dakar is in Africa, Africa is not always in Dakar.” Given the significant French influence in Dakar, there was easy access to Western amenities like modern movie theaters and slick cafés selling French or American food, where expatriates gathered to drink beer and exchange stories. But during her first few days in Sélibaby, Molly found that despite the stark differences with Western civilization—and despite the fact that she could not communicate with the people, as they too spoke Wolof—here, in what felt like the real Africa, she didn’t feel culture shock at all. Rather, she felt more welcomed and at home than she ever had before, even more at home than she did in her own house growing up. Everyone was committed to making her feel comfortable, and the only thing that seemed to matter was that, as a guest, she felt happy and at ease. Eager to fit in, she rejected her jeans for the long boubous she’d bought in Dakar and joined the women in their work, helping them carry water from the well in the mornings and cook dinner in the evenings. And just like everyone else, she used the latrine—a crude hole in the ground surrounded by a fence made of millet stalks to offer a little privacy. At night, around the cooking fire and oil lamps, Molly joined Ndey’s family, feeling as if she truly belonged.
This year Tabaski fell on December 25th, and Molly woke that morning on her mat in Ndey’s room thinking about her family. Ann Melching loved Christmas. She was very skilled at creating the right atmosphere, and the Melching home was always beautifully adorned with a large tree, tasteful lights, and plenty of Christmas decorations. Molly thought fondly of her family gathering for the holiday, but she was far more eager to witness the Tabaski celebrations. Everyone rose early. While the men were at the mosque, the women readied the sheep to be sacrificed after the special morning prayers. At three in th
e afternoon, everyone rushed to put on their best outfits before going from house to house to extend holiday greetings to each of their neighbors.
A few days after Tabaski, Molly and Ndey were paid a visit by Mamadou, a man they had met on the train. He was from Sélibaby, where his wife and children still lived while he studied to become a doctor at the University of Dakar. Tall and lanky, he sank into the pillows laid on the mats on the floor and explained why he had come.
“I needed to leave my house,” he said in French. “They’re cutting my daughter today.”
Molly was confused. “What do you mean they’re cutting your daughter?”
Mamadou glanced uncomfortably at Ndey before answering. “It’s a tradition we practice here. They cut the girls’ genitals—usually the clitoris and the lips.”
