The Bite of the Mango

by Mariatu Kamara

  One night I had a dream that Salieu came into the girls’ ward and sat down beside me on a metal chair.

  “Why do you want to kill yourself?” he asked. “Why do you want to kill the baby?”

  I said nothing.

  “I know you didn’t like what I did to you,” he said. “And you weren’t ready for this. But I love you. And I want you to have this baby for me, because my wife and I only had girls. All I ever wanted was a son.”

  I turned to him with a tear-stained face. “I hate you,” I spat. “I don’t want to see you anymore. Go!”

  “I’m dead,” he said. “But I will always see you, and I will guide you. I also won’t let you kill this baby. I know you’re going to have a boy. And even though I won’t be with that boy, my family will take the baby and look after my son for you.”

  “How are you going to stop me from killing myself?” I shouted.

  “I know what you are trying to do,” he responded. “I come here every day to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Why did you do this to me?” I asked then.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied. “It was a mistake.”

  “NO! NO! NO!” I yelled. “It was not a mistake. A mistake is putting too much salt on the rice. If what you did to me was a mistake, it was the stupidest mistake you ever made in your life. You should have known better. I will never have a happy life now. I have no hands, and I have a baby growing inside of me that I will never be able to care for. It might as well die now, because it will die later. I won’t be able to look after it. I don’t want to see you anymore. I told you to go. Now go!”

  I woke with a start. The dream had felt so real that it took a while for me to calm down and realize where I was.

  When Abibatu arrived that morning, I described my dream, finally telling her what Salieu had done.

  “Ahhh, so you’re having a boy,” she said. “That will make Salieu very happy.”

  “Him happy!” I responded indignantly. “What about me? What about my happiness?” Back in my old world, I said to her, before the rebels, I had wanted to marry Musa, have four children—two girls and two boys—and wear a beautiful long Africana dress for my wedding. This had been my plan for happiness, I told her. Now it made me sad to remember it.

  Until recently, I had thought my cousin Adamsay was dead. I had even told the doctors, nurses, Mohamed, and Ibrahim that the rebels had murdered her. So many people were killed in that attack on Manarma, maybe as many as a hundred, I learned in Freetown. But Adamsay wasn’t one of them. The rebels had cut off her hands too. After, she made her way alone through the bush to Port Loko. She was wandering the streets, a dirty and bloodied figure in the crowded markets, when Abibatu’s husband stumbled upon her. Abibatu had brought her to Freetown.

  When Adamsay and I were reunited on the girls’ ward at the hospital, we cried and cried. We held each other for what seemed like hours, until she was taken to the operating room to have her wounds attended to. Since then, we’d spent most of our time together.

  By now, we had recovered enough from our injuries to spend our days outside. At first, Adamsay, Mohamed, Ibrahim, and I would wander the hospital grounds, peering into the street over the tall fence.

  From what I could see of Freetown, it was a hectic place, with lots of cars and people walking to and from work and the market. It was also hot, hotter than Magborou, probably because of all the buildings and the people crowded together. Air couldn’t circulate very well through the dirty city.

  Some of the women we saw were dressed in sleek skirts and blouses with buttons and strange collars. While I had never seen clothes like this before, I was even more intrigued by the way the younger women dressed. They wore pants, sometimes so short that their buttocks spilled out. In Sierra Leone, women are prized for having round, full bottoms. We hide our bottoms underneath our long skirts and dresses, because we’re brought up to believe we should show no one except our husband this very special part of our body. Our breasts, on the other hand, are what we use to feed our babies. So it’s quite normal for a woman to walk around with no shirt on, especially when there is a nursing child nearby. But to show off your bottom! My mouth hung open as I watched these girls over the fence.

  “Freetown sure is different from Magborou,” I exclaimed once to Mohamed as we observed such a scene.

  Mohamed didn’t reply. His eyes were trained on the women, and a strange smile transfixed his face. Men, boys, can be funny sometimes!

  Another odd sight greeted us when we stepped outside: the patients themselves. Some of the men, women, and children, bandaged, bruised, and cut, would walk right out of the front gate of the hospital, carrying plastic shopping bags that they thrust toward passersby on the street. Sometimes the Freetown men and women would drop a few leones in a bag. Mostly, though, they would shake their heads and walk right on past.

  I soon understood that these patients were begging for money. Almost everyone in the hospital was poor and from the villages. They had ended up in Freetown after the rebels attacked them.

  I would soon learn too that kids like me, with no hands, made the best beggars of all. The people of Freetown felt sorry for us, so they gave us more money than they did older people.

  The citizens of Freetown all knew about the war. When it had started years before in eastern Sierra Leone, many villagers from the northeast of the country had fled to Freetown, and hundreds of them were now living there, at the hospitals, at places called refugee camps, and right on the streets, sleeping wherever they laid their heads. Later, the fighting had actually reached the city, in January 1999. When they hit Magborou, the rebels were retreating from Freetown.

  Ibrahim, Mohamed, Adamsay, and I decided one day to see what begging was like. Soon we were begging every day, though I hated every moment of it.

  My hatred toward the world began anew each morning. As the sun lifted, streaming through the windows on my ward, I’d wake with a sinking feeling. My first thoughts were always of my life before Salieu, before the baby, before the rebels came. Mornings reminded me of everything I no longer had.

  The day almost always started with Adamsay shaking me before most of the other girls were awake, and whispering: “It’s time to go.”

  As I headed toward the bathroom, I tiptoed around all the sleeping bodies, girls who hadn’t discovered yet that they could make a living by begging. I’d wipe a damp cloth over my face and hair. After, I’d straighten out my skirt and top.

  Adamsay, Ibrahim, Mohamed, and I would meet at the hospital’s front entranceway. We nodded hello but rarely talked as we walked off the hospital grounds. Even at that early hour, the streets were full of people.

  On a good day, we could make as much as 10,000 leones, or about three dollars, by pooling our money. The best days were usually Fridays, when we would stand outside the mosque and catch the men on their way out. They had been praying, so they were in a generous mood when they saw us.

  Most of the people in the street didn’t look at me; they looked down or around me. Sometimes they’d glance at my bandaged arms, where my hands used to be, and shake their heads. Sadness might cross their faces; other times I sensed relief that they themselves had been spared these terrible injuries. The only consistent thing in begging was that very few people dared to look me in the eyes. I learned to fix my gaze on the ground until someone dropped some leones in my black plastic bag. Then I’d raise my eyes to say thank you before quickly lowering them again.

  Ibrahim, Mohamed, Adamsay, and I used whatever money we collected to buy a bottle of water from the market to share. Mohamed, being Mohamed, always looked at the bright side of our lives.

  “You remember that woman in front of the bus station who talked to you, Mariatu?” he said one day.

  I nodded. A tall, skinny woman wearing a navy blue skirt and white blouse had asked me, “Where’s your family? Where do you live now? Why did they cut off your hands?”

  Like I always did when someone posed these questions, I had t
hought to myself, “Why do you want to know? It’s not as if my story is any different from that of all the other girls in Freetown with no hands because of the war.” But I still answered the woman.

  “My mom is back in our village,” I said. “I live at the hospital now, with my cousins. I don’t know why the rebels cut off my hands.”

  The woman put 25,000 leones into my black bag. It was a fortune, the most money I had ever made in one day by begging.

  “I think she wanted to adopt you,” Mohamed said now, winking at me. “I know you will be the one, Mariatu,” he added. “I know it will be you.”

  Mohamed meant that I’d be the one among the four of us to be taken in by a rich family. We’d been in the hospital for about a month, and rumors circulated everywhere that there were wealthy people, both in Freetown and in far-off countries, who adopted children who had been injured in the war.

  At first, I hadn’t known what this word adoption meant. But Mohamed explained that it was no different from the way my mother and father had sent me to live with Marie. I allowed myself to daydream a tiny bit about what life would be like as a daughter in another family, a wealthy family: nice clothes, food whenever I wanted it, safety, and sleep-filled nights—all the things we had in Magborou.

  Then the horrible words I was greeted with at least once a day broke into my thoughts.

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU, BEGGAR GIRL?”

  A minibus called a poda-poda was speeding by. A couple of teenage boys leaned out the window, taunting me.

  “Can you even feed yourself?” one called out.

  “Guess you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the other yelled. “Now someone will have to look after you for the rest of your life.”

  I kept my head down, pretending I couldn’t hear. But the words were like a knife stabbing into my heart. A thick knot filled my throat. I wanted to kill myself again.

  “Why did this have to happen to me?” I raged inside.

  CHAPTER 9

  I knew that when our bandages came off and were replaced with thin plastic strips, or big Band-Aids, to keep the wounds clean, we would have to leave the hospital. I thought we’d be returning to Magborou, which frightened me. The rebels! What if they were still prowling the countryside? The hospital staff worried about this too. They told Abibatu that we could move to a camp called Aberdeen, set up in Freetown to accommodate people injured in the war.

  It wasn’t safe to return to Port Loko either, so Fatmata helped Abibatu make the arrangements for our move to Aberdeen. She agreed to live with us for a while and help me when the baby arrived. I was excited. I looked forward to the move and the chance for us all to be sleeping under the same roof.

  One rainy day, as Adamsay, Mohamed, Ibrahim, and I returned to the hospital from begging, a young man with a wide smile and a chubby face met us at the front door. He looked familiar, and for good reason: he was Mohamed’s uncle Abdul. Mohamed jumped right into his arms.

  Abdul lived in Freetown, and he explained that he’d seen Mohamed’s name on a Red Cross list of people displaced from their villages that was posted on a billboard in the center of Freetown. When he learned his nephew was in the hospital, he dropped what he was doing and hurried right over.

  Abdul reminded me a lot of Mohamed. He told similar jokes, and he was always in a good mood. He started to do for the boys what Fatmata and Abibatu did for me, including preparing their food. He also took them for long walks when Mohamed and Ibrahim weren’t out begging.

  Abdul was a proud, happy man. He held his head high, with his chest out, and he walked and talked with confidence. When Fatmata was present, though, his eyes stayed downcast, his body slumped, and his speech was sometimes slurred; he always seemed nervous, too, rocking slightly from side to side. Yet when he did manage to look Fatmata’s way, the loveliest smile came across his face. Fatmata’s personality also changed around Abdul. She was no longer calm and collected. Instead, she became super chatty, talking about everything from the rain to the horrible conditions at the hospital, where many children slept in the hallways because there weren’t enough beds. Abdul and Fatmata were falling in love, I realized with a start, and I began to take great interest in this spectacle unfolding in front of me.

  One night, after Fatmata had helped me into bed, I snuck out and followed her through the halls. It wasn’t difficult to stay hidden, since the hospital was crowded at all hours of the day and night. Abdul was waiting for her near the main entrance. Shyly, they took each other’s hands and went out into the Freetown twilight.

  Love has a way of being infectious. Watching them, I forgot about my problems for a minute. But as I turned to go, I saw some girls sitting on the floor, their backs up against the wall, their hands amputated like mine. I thought of my own hands, of Salieu, and of the baby growing inside me.

  Our impending move to the amputee camp was in the air. Abibatu collected our begging money to buy supplies, including pots, pans, bedding, pepper, and rice. She also used some of the money as bus fare for Abdul. He’d agreed to travel to Manarma and Magborou in search of Marie and Alie. It was a dangerous mission, and Fatmata pleaded with him not to go. None of us had heard anything about my aunt and uncle since the night of the attack. Their names never came up when people in the hospital who’d been caught in the rebel raids on the villages compared stories.

  “What happened to Ya Marie and Pa Alie?” I would ask. But no one had an answer. I feared they were dead.

  I was overjoyed when my fears proved unfounded. Within a week Abdul returned, bringing Marie and Alie with him. They were dusty and dirty, and much thinner than they had been, but their bodies were intact. We crowded around Mohamed’s bed after dinner one night as Marie and Alie explained that they’d hidden in the bush during the attack at Manarma. Afterwards, Alie had gone from village to village, risking his own safety, trying to find out where we were. When we didn’t appear, they were scared we’d either been killed or taken into the bush to be soldiers along with the rebels.

  At one point during the evening, Adamsay whispered to Marie that I was pregnant. Marie began to wail, her cries echoing through the boys’ ward. She cried and cried. Later, I helped her walk back to my ward to spend the night in my bed.

  “If I’d only believed you when you told me about Salieu the first time,” she sobbed, after I told her about the rape. “If only I had paid more attention. Mariatu, will you ever forgive me?”

  I wiped away Marie’s tears with my bulky bandages. “Abibatu says we’re moving to a nice new home,” I consoled her. “Just wait and see: our luck will change.”

  Just short of two months after I’d arrived at the hospital, we moved to the Aberdeen Amputee Camp. It wasn’t what I’d expected. The camp was filthy with litter and with laundry that had fallen from the clotheslines hanging everywhere. There were dogs, and people of all sizes and skin tones, speaking an array of Sierra Leone dialects. The smell of garbage, dirty bodies, and cooking food was sickening.

  Our new home was a big tent divided into eight rooms by canvas doors. It housed about five families, and each amputee was assigned one room. I shared mine with Abibatu and Fatmata, who had been living in Freetown with a distant relative. We looked right across at Adamsay’s room, where Marie and Alie were also going to sleep. All of the families shared a fire pit outside to cook food. The supplies we got from the camp were bulgur, cornmeal, cornstarch, palm oil, and beans—that was about it.

  There was little for anyone in Freetown at the time, let alone us injured kids. Due to the war, farmers could not bring their produce into the city to sell. Meat, cassava, beans, and fresh water were increasingly difficult to find. That responsibility soon fell to the kids. We became the breadwinners in our families through begging.

  There was a central place in the camp where everybody would congregate to hear news of the war. We learned there that rebels had crept many times into the camp at night and stolen the scant food that was available. “Be careful,” a woman who shared our
tent warned us. “Don’t travel around the camp alone at night, and sleep with lots of people beside you. If you have a knife or a gun, keep it handy.”

  I knew that no one in my family had a weapon.

  A few people at the camp had tried to grow a garden, we heard, but the rebels had dug it up. There were rumors that the rebels had even invaded the medical supplies storage room and taken all the bandages, pills, medical equipment, and IVs. The rebels sent letters, according to some of the people at the camp, threatening to return. No one was sure if the rumors were true, but it scared us all to hear of the rebels’ words. One day someone at the camp read aloud a letter supposedly written by a rebel.

  We’re coming to get you. We’re coming back to finish you all off. The government isn’t helping us, but they’re helping you, taking care of you. So we are going to come back and chop off the hands of anyone who still has theirs, including the hands of the people looking after you. Why? Because you don’t deserve the help from the government, the money they are giving you, the clothes and food. But we do.

  The letter chilled me to the bone, reigniting all my terrible memories. In fact, the words were a lie, because the government wasn’t helping us. There were more than 400 of us at the camp who didn’t have hands. At least four times that many people, mostly family members like Abibatu, Marie, and Alie, had moved there to look after the injured. The camp wasn’t really big enough for all of us—it was about the size of the soccer stadium in Freetown.

  Our relatives cooked for us and fed us. The camp received a shipment of flour once a month that was doled out to the first few hundred people in line. Our family had to show up early or we got nothing. The begging money my cousins and I collected paid for most of our food and clothes. On the days we didn’t earn much by begging, we ate nothing, or just a few spoonfuls of rice. We were starving.

  About a month after we moved to the camp, Abdul appeared one evening after dinner. Now that Mohamed and Ibrahim had Alie to help care for them, Abdul had settled back into his old life, running a small shop in Freetown. He said he wanted to tell the family something special and asked if we could gather the following night.