“You don’t want to look like a hoochie mama,” she explained, rejecting low-rise jeans.
I did not fully understand her project at the time. I did not know how much I was broadcasting my pain, how obvious it was to Mrs. Kline that I needed help loving myself. I thought I was more worldly than this godmother of shopping. So I tried on the clothes thinking, uncharitably, This is nice but why should I care.
* * *
But the truth is, I needed Mrs. Kline. I needed the confidence and positivity she wanted to instill in me. Claire never talked to me about my body. I knew the basics of how my insides worked from eavesdropping. When we’d been on the run, we’d seen girls on their period, trailing blood. But there was no discussion or celebration, just taboo and fear.
I struggle to this day. I don’t know if I want to have children. In Rwanda, if you’re female, you are born with great value—not because of who you are as an individual or your mind, but because of your body. Because of your body, when you marry, your family will get cows. Because of your body, when you marry, your family will get land. Even for a city girl in Kigali, this holds true. Yet at any moment the value of your body can be stolen.
You can be ruined—konona, that’s the Kinyarwanda word for rape. I knew the word konona by the time I was four years old. My mother didn’t say it, but I heard it around the neighborhood. A young girl would go out to play and her mother would yell after her:
“Don’t be ruined. Don’t let your life be destroyed.”
The word itself does such violence. Because once you’re ruined, that’s it, that’s what the word tells you. The damage is permanent. You have no value and you will never get it back. The evil that was done to your body is now intrinsic to your being. The clear water of your body is poisoned. You are hostage to that idea.
I work every day now to erase that language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona, you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. Your family won’t get the cows. Your family won’t get the land. You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it.
My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame.
* * *
Mrs. Kline bought me my eighth-grade graduation dress. I loved how she saw me by then—she saw beyond me, into a beautiful future. The dress was black satin, strapless, with sky-blue panels on the sides. “This is a dress you can wear forever,” she said.
She took me shopping for sandals to wear with it. She knew my body well, as well as anybody then, my narrow wrists, my skinny feet. When she told the salesgirl my size, she asked her to bring pads to keep my feet from sliding around.
I considered my feet a vulnerability. They resembled my father’s feet: dark, narrow, small nails, with veins that looked like tree roots when I stood. For so long I’d been telling myself: My feet are too ugly and shameful to show the world. Animals lived in them. My feet reveal that I am weak.
I hadn’t told Mrs. Kline that narrative. I still kept that story to myself. The salesgirl kept bringing boxes—strappy sandals, wedge sandals, slingbacks. I tried them on and stared.
Mrs. Kline and the salesgirl favored a patent leather pair with an ankle strap and just one band across my instep.
I tried to see my feet in the mirror as someone else’s feet, and I decided they were good.
* * *
Winning, in Kenilworth, was cheery. You smiled, you got the best grades, you collected the most friends, you performed the highest cheerleading jumps.
I kept my fierce self hidden. Life was easier that way. The only time she emerged was with Susan, a girl in my grade, a bully who was pretty enough to get away with it.
Early in the year Susan decided to have a pool party, and one day she walked around the lunchroom, table by table, inviting all the girls except Jane, who was sitting next to me. Jane’s family was from Eastern Europe; she was petite and quiet, an easy target.
Later that afternoon, when we lined up for gym class—teachers at Christian Heritage Academy made us line up for everything; we were all to be obedient servants of God—Susan happened to be in the bathroom, so I excused myself from the line, entered the girls’ room, and locked the door. Susan was at the sink, washing her hands. When she finished, she started in on her hand sanitizer, her chapstick, and all the lotions in her purse.
I just stood, close to the sinks, and then said, “Hi, Susan.”
I did not use my nice Kenilworth middle-school voice but instead my do-not-fuck-with-me voice, which I hadn’t realized was so close to the surface. I didn’t want to get kicked out of the Thomases’ house or expelled from school, so I’d buried that fierce persona.
Susan opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.
“If you’re ever mean to Jane again, you’ll pay for it. Just because I’m being nice and playing nice and choosing not to play your mean-girl games does not give you the right to go around and bully people.”
Susan’s pink skin turned bright red. The voice that came out of my mouth was untamed, instinctive, aggressive, a hawk defending the hummingbirds on her turf from nasty blue and gray jays. Susan repacked her lotions into her purse and yanked on the door handle to leave, but the deadbolt was locked.
I enjoyed watching her fear more than I expected, more than I wanted to admit.
I unlatched the door and walked out.
* * *
I joined the cheerleading squad. I’d seen the Christian Heritage Academy cheerleaders stretching in the gym. They looked so happy, all bubbly, with matching peppy smiles and blue-and-white skirts. I had never considered just smiling and being happy. It seemed like a useful skill. I wanted to do that.
The physical challenge suited me. It took me out of my brain. If I closed my eyes and paused I saw magma and mayhem. So every free moment, I practiced. In the shower I performed the moves in my mind. I wasn’t used to the American rhythms, but I liked forcing my body to move as I willed it to. I liked the control.
Girls invited me to Old Orchard Mall. They invited me to McDonald’s for milkshakes and laughed when I complained they were too sweet. They invited me to sleepovers, but after attending two I stopped going. All night the girls would talk about who liked which boys, who were best friends. They wanted to share secrets and bond.
I did not want to bond. It was easy to perform the rituals of casual friendship, but this I didn’t want. These girls who believed they were my peers were not my peers at all. I thought: We can have this moment, but we will never be best friends. I’ve seen this before. This is just how it starts: all cute and adorable and they’re buying you soda and candy and the next thing you know, they want to kill you.
5
Claire taught me never to accept gifts. She learned this from our mother. There are no gifts, Claire said. No candy, no bread, especially from men. She insisted on figuring out how to survive indebted to no one, so she hustled.
UNHCR forbade refugees to leave the camp. But Claire noticed people near the edge of the camp trading with the Burundians who lived nearby. The locals had almost nothing themselves. They lived like the family who’d taken us into their hut. They wanted to trade for the cheap plastic containers UNHCR gave us to carry water. They wanted to trade for the soy powder UNHCR gave us so we would have protein.
This lit Claire up. Anything we couldn’t use she brought to the fence. “Do you want this?” she asked, showing a man’s sweater to a sixteen-year-old boy. “This is very nice. This will look very nice on you. I’ll take that bag of potatoes.”
One day, near our tent, I noticed Claire singing. One of the camp managers was Canadian and had the power to give a few refugees jobs. Claire knew that to get a job, here, at her age, in this sea of ruin, she had to broadcast her scrappiness, intelligence, and drive. So she practiced the only English song she knew, “Home Again,” over and over. Home again! Ho
me again! When shall I see my…Home again! Home again! I shall see you when I return…Home again!
She had no idea what the words meant. Neither did I. But she belted out her song for the camp manager as if this situation was not totally perverse. Claire would not hand over her dignity. She would not let you believe that you’d hollowed her out. She did not say her name out loud, like I did, chirping like an idiot, protesting too much. Claire said her name to herself. But she understood that to have a life she wanted, to hold on to her identity, she did not need you to see her in a certain light; she needed to retain that light from within. Beyond that, she needed money. She needed a job.
The camp manager heard Claire out. Then he asked, “What useful skills do you have at your age?” Claire said she could help take care of the orphans at the camp, organize volleyball and basketball games for them, create clubs like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, lead them in dances and songs.
Claire got the job. She coached the girls in sports and pulled them to the side and said don’t take candy or bread from men. I didn’t join.
* * *
I did our laundry in the river. This meant leaving camp midmorning, so I could be there at noon. Upriver was for drinking, downriver for washing.
Along the shores stood giant boulders and large pine trees, odd envoys of permanence in a crumbling world. To wash clothes, as I learned from watching the older women, you first make a ring of rocks in the river. You soak your clothes, along with smashed pine needles, inside that ring. Then you pound each clothing item against a rock to shake loose the filth and bugs.
On really hot days, while the clothes soaked, I swam and watched the heat rise off the hills. In the distance, the valleys looked like water. I wanted to play. I wanted to be back in the mango tree with Pudi, pretending that we were on a bus to Butare. I asked the older women, “Can you see it? Can you see the ocean?” They had no energy for my games.
Around 1:00 p.m., I wrung out our clothes and laid them on the hot boulders. By early afternoon, the stones had absorbed so much heat that our wet skirts, T-shirts, and underwear sizzled when I spread them out. The hope was that the heat of the rocks would burn the lice and nits. This worked, sometimes, with thin cotton but never with the blankets, into which the nits burrowed too deep for the rocks to sear. To delouse the blankets you had to boil them in a gigantic pot.
At night, I listened to people talking around the fire at our unit. The banter was raunchy, a release for the adults, but the laughter and stories unmoored me. I yearned to be protected, and I was not protected. Each night, I floated away, half asleep, half awake.
In my dreams, I walked around the camp collecting all the stuff I could find, everybody’s forks, beds, pots, and chairs, all the belongings anybody had left. I carried that stuff back to my tent and I built an enormous pile, a fantastical tower of junk, all the clothes, water jugs, stacks of stoves. Once I’d built the tower, I climbed up to heaven to look for my parents. I didn’t want to have to die to find them. I wanted to see them but remain alive, tell them that I was okay. So I built my rickety spire, climbed, and looked around. In those dreams I got close to my parents, I knew they were there, but I never actually saw them. I never even asked God where they were.
* * *
In Kigali my mother had insisted that we check in on our elderly neighbors. Claire insisted on that now.
There was one old couple in our unit—maybe eighty, very short, with black feet. They never wore shoes. They were Batwa, members of one of Rwanda’s indigenous tribes. The woman, who I called Mucyechuru, or Grandmother, wore an orange cape and wrapped a cloth around her head. She argued with her husband about his cooking. I’d never seen a woman stand up to a man like that.
Her husband, who I called Musaza, or Grandfather, spit when he talked. He had a tattered brown hat with a wide brim, like a cowboy hat. His eyes were sunken, his teeth were terrible, and the curly hairs on his chin were gray. On Sunday he wore black pants and a white shirt, and he used a rope as a belt.
I adored them. I began lingering at their tent to avoid going to the bathroom. I still had a horror of slipping and falling into the feces and was scared of catching a disease. So I’d stand there, hopping around, asking Mucyechuru and Musaza to tell me stories so I could distract myself from needing to pee. I so craved a narrative, especially now that nothing made sense.
Musaza told me a folktale about a giant clay pot that never broke, no matter how hard people tried. Rocks, lightning, hammers—nothing could shatter it. The pot contained enough soup to feed the world. I wanted to find it. I learned how not to pee for a really long time.
Mucyechuru and Musaza had always lived without much. When God passed out gifts, they told me, God gave some people land. He gave others height. When God got to the Batwa people, he had nothing specific left, so he told them to share the forest.
* * *
One day Mucyechuru and Musaza invited me to join them foraging in the woods. They looked for amaranth leaves to make the maize tolerable to eat without oil.
We walked on faint paths up the hills into the pine trees. The forest floor was covered with pine needles and clover, and Musaza scolded me if I stepped on the clover. “If you treat the plants with disrespect,” he said, “they become angry, and angry plants taste terrible.”
Buried in the ground cover we found mushrooms—Musaza called them the meat of the forest. In the brush we found green tomatoes—a miracle to me; I hadn’t seen a tomato in months.
Mucyechuru and Musaza moved their hands and feet with a gentleness that made me ache, the gentleness of Mukamana buttoning my bathrobe. When they found a tomato plant, they placed a few pine boughs around the stalk and leaves to hide the treasure.
Nobody in my world was tender and protective of me anymore. Certainly not Claire. Claire refused to stand in line to collect only two scoops of maize when we were meant to be given four. What did it mean that Mucyechuru and Musaza were protecting the tomatoes for the future? Would I still be here?
Of course we were starving, so Mucyechuru and Musaza taught me to eat bugs: grasshoppers, the green ones. The black grasshoppers, Musaza said, were trying hard to stay alive. The green ones we could eat as long as they were flying toward us. This meant the grasshoppers were grateful to have been alive and ready to give themselves up as food.
We also foraged on people’s farms. This was stealing, yes, but Mucyechuru and Musaza stole with a code. When you pick someone’s vegetables, Mucyechuru told me, you have to leave something to grow back—clip a vine and tuck it into the soil or plant a seed.
* * *
Near Christmas, Claire woke up with dysentery. I’d already seen it a dozen times. Someone wakes up with a fever. Throws up. Their bowels explode. They scream and scream until they’re too weak to scream. They shit blood. By night all the water has drained from their body and they’ve lost seven pounds.
Many children in camp who got dysentery died. Their small bodies, already so malnourished, could not withstand such a brutal attack. Many adults died too. The cycle was always the same: scream, vomit, shit, bleed, then get rolled up in a bedsheet and placed by the latrine to be buried or burned.
The morning Claire woke glassy-eyed and delirious with pain, I ran to find Musaza and Mucyechuru. They moved Claire’s bed—a palette of grass—close to the door of our tent, so that she could have fresh air. Musaza made her drink a potion made of charcoal and a bright green tincture of leaves. Claire still screamed and vomited and shit blood. All day I prayed, if you could call it that. Really I just pleaded: Please don’t let her die. There was no alternative, no room for what if…? Claire had to make it. I was seven.
For three days Claire moaned and drifted in and out of consciousness. I slept outside with Mucyechuru and watched the moon. It was the only time I slept away from Claire.
At last her fever broke. I found some charcoal and mixed it with water and leaves
and tried to make Claire drink it. She refused.
* * *
Now I feared the latrine even more. For hours I’d stand outside Musaza and Mucyechuru’s tent, asking for stories.
Musaza told me about a girl who thought she was the most beautiful child in the world, and how her stepmother tricked her and told the child to sit on a mat, but the mat was covering a giant hole in the earth and the girl fell deep inside. The girl tried to climb out but failed. She screamed and no one came.
He told me about the moment when the sun goes down on the shore of the ocean—that’s when you can lift up the sea and walk underneath and visit wherever you want.
He told me that if you hike in the moonlight you can enter Tera, the landscape of the past.
“Are there animals there?” I asked.
“Yes,” Musaza said, “of course.”
“What type of animals?”
“What kind do you think?”
“Lions? Are there lions?” I asked.
“Yes! Beautiful lions, so grand and big and they don’t hurt anyone.”
“Are there tigers?”
“Yes, majestic tigers, so fast and smooth you can ride on their backs.”
“What do the lions and tigers eat?”
“They eat vegetables,” Musaza said, “just like us.”
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 6
