Sally Beth grew impatient. If Alethia were so comfortable with the people here, why didn’t she do something to help raise awareness? Something to stop it. “I don’t understand why people don’t speak out against such a barbaric practice. I mean, it seems savage, one of those things that make people think Africans are not civilized. I grew up hearing that Africans were cannibals.”
Alethia shrugged. “Some of them are, and some of those are kind and gentle people otherwise. But Africa is many nations, many peoples; some are crueler than others, just like anywhere else. My people, the Maasai, are considered savage and warlike, and they circumcise their girls, but they respect the dignity of other humans. They’ve never kept slaves—have never sold even their enemies into slavery. Then, tribes in Guinea are considered more peaceful, but they enslaved the people they conquered and sold them to slave traders. In the same way, not every tribe circumcises. Different people have different ways of seeing things.”
Sally Beth was affronted by Alethia’s casual attitude. “But why doesn’t the church do something to stop it? Nobody talks about it at the clinic or the mission. It’s like they don’t care!”
“Oh, they care. We all care very much. But it isn’t appropriate for us to interfere.” She stopped and looked directly at Sally Beth. “How would you feel if someone from another country came into your home town, set up a church and a medical clinic and began preaching about how awful you and your culture are because you circumcise your baby boys? We have a job to do here, and that’s to help people and teach them about Jesus, not to condemn practices that they consider important—and have considered important for a very long time.” Seeing Sally Beth’s stunned look, Alethia softened her tone. “Many people do give it up on their own once they spend time with us and come to understand that it isn’t a universal practice. My grandmother was surprised to find that people don’t do it in America. She was circumcised like Mara was and sewn up with thorns. If she had not left here, she may have had my mother circumcised. I have aunts who have been cut, and their children, too.
“But why do they do it in the first place? Hack off parts of little girls that are important?”
Alethia turned to her, hesitating briefly before plunging on. “Okay, which do you think is prettier? This?” She composed her face into a gentle expression, eyes half closed, lips together and smiling slightly. “Or this?” She opened her eyes and mouth wide, baring her teeth and sticking out her tongue grotesquely. “That’s the way they look at it. They like a smooth, closed surface. It means chastity and cleanliness, and believe it or not, Sally Beth, it’s the women who are the biggest fans of it. Many times, it is the grandmother who performs the procedure, and I’ve known women who have asked to be reinfibulated after childbirth. That is, they want to be stitched up again.”
“Speaking of that, how do they manage? Childbirth, and sex, for that matter.” Sally Beth surprised herself at her own frankness with this young woman she had met only two days earlier. But it was important to her to know, to understand. How could these people who seemed so joyful and so kind do this to their children?
Alethia smiled gently. “It’s hard to understand. It’s a very patriarchal society. It is considered a right of a husband to open an infibulation. It’s pleasurable to them. Usually, women have surgery to prepare them for childbirth, but as I said, a lot of women ask to be reinfibulated afterwards.”
Sally Beth gasped. “That’s awful! And women don’t get any pleasure at all, do they? Just the pain!”
Alethia’s smile tightened. “People see things differently.”
Rage surged through Sally Beth’s arteries. She squared her shoulders, resolving then and there that she would change things. “Well, you may think you have no right to interfere, but I don’t see anything wrong with it! And I’m going to see what I can do to educate women, to show them that they don’t have to put up with that—that—”
Alethia stopped her. “Sally Beth,” she said grimly, gripping her hands and looking directly at her. “Do not. Outsiders have tried before, and all it does is insult people and drive them away. It completely reverses the good we can do here. All we have the right to do is to help them and tell them about God’s love, not judge them and condemn them.” Her eyes grew more intense. “I am serious. You can do a huge amount of damage—to these people, the church, and to yourself.” She stopped, started again, and hesitated again.
“Years ago, a Finnish woman went on a campaign to do just that. She went in to educate everybody, especially the women, and told them that FGM was a horrible crime to women—“
“FGM?”
“Female genital mutilation. It’s what we arrogant Westerners call it. I shouldn’t have called it that in the clinic. It’s condescending and belittling, but I was mad and my tongue got away from me. Anyway, this woman from Finland came, preaching against it. She won a few converts, but in the end, the entire village rose up against her, invaded her home one night, tied her to her bed, circumcised her, and then murdered her. This is something you don’t go messing with.”
Overcome with the knowledge of the horror Mara had suffered, Sally Beth felt like crying, but Alethia would not let her indulge in her anger. “Enough of this,” she said. “Let me get you another cup of tea, and then I’ll take you back to the mission. I need to get back in time to tuck the children into bed.”
“I think I should just go on,” Sally Beth said miserably. “It’s getting late, and you have a lot to do.” She stood.
“Okay,” replied Alethia. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you, Sally Beth. I sort of have gone through the same kind of outrage, although I’ve had a different perspective because my grandmother has talked about it. Just remember, all cultures do things that other cultures would be horrified about. In America, people get facelifts to keep from looking old. Here, that would be considered an atrocity. I know an American doctor who gets mad at people for piercing their children’s ears. It’s all a matter of how the culture perceives it. You may not be able to understand it, but you don’t have the right to condemn it.”
They walked out to the porch. Alethia flipped on the light. “Put your bike in my van. You should never ride into the bush on your own in the dark. You could easily get lost. Most of the people here are kind, and they would help you, but some are not. I don’t want to frighten you, but one way some people earn a living here is to kidnap people and hold them for ransom. To tell you the truth, you should not have ridden out here by yourself in the first place. She hurried Sally Beth out to an ancient van that was covered in bright, crudely painted flowers. On one side was written in childish letters:
“For GOD so loved the WORLD, HE gave his ONLY BEGOTTEN SON so that we may have LIFE EVERLASTING. John 3:16.”
As she dropped Sally Beth off at the mission, Alethia leaned over to hug her. “God bless you, Sally Beth. I will pray that He will ease your mind about Mara and others like her. Come back any time.”
“I’ll be back on Saturday,” she replied, “and we can start making those dresses.”
“I’ll pick you up. Stay the night, and you can come to church with us on Sunday. Pastor Kimkutu is no more long-winded than Pastor Umbatu, and afterwards we can picnic on the lake.” She grasped Sally Beth’s shoulder, giving her a look full of love. “Thank you, God, for Sally Beth. I’ll see you Saturday.”
Sally Beth felt humbled and beaten, and yet, somehow encouraged. Alethia needed a friend, and so did she, for she was suddenly feeling quite alone and alien in this strange land. She tried to tell herself that she should be less judgmental and more accepting, but the image of Mara’s infected wound made her wonder anew what was wrong with people who would allow such a thing.
Lord, I don’t know what to do. They tell me my job is not to tell people how to think, even if they think wrong, but just to show them Your love. If You were here, would You allow this? It’s hard to know what to do, or even to think, so please show me. And thank You, too. Despite all this misery, You have given me another fri
end. Someone from back home. I had forgotten how much I missed it and the people, and just an American accent. And John, too. Thank You for bringing him here. I’m beginning to feel like we all belong to each other.
Fourteen
October 5, 1978
Throughout the next day, Sally Beth nearly made herself sick worrying over the practice of female circumcision. She found herself looking at all the native women differently, wondering if they had suffered through the awful procedure. By teatime, she realized she was obsessing about it. You should not think about a person in terms of what body parts they have or don’t have. That makes you almost as bad as the people who rob these women of them. Think only of their hearts and their spirits.
She was relieved when, right before supper, John arrived, bringing mail, including a letter for Sally Beth. Glad to have something to take her mind off her conversation with Alethia, she opened it eagerly. “It’s from Lilly!” she exclaimed. “John, I’m so excited, I can’t read it fast enough,” she said, handing it to him. “Will you read it to me? Her handwriting is so sprawly it’s too hard for me to decipher.” She did not mind if John knew she had difficulty reading. He was as comfortable as an old sweater, and she knew he would never make fun of her.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d love to. Now I won’t have to wait to hear the news second hand.” He took the letter and unfolded it.
September 18.
“Wow, it got here fast! Only two and a half weeks,” he said.
Dear Sis, I am having the best—“she’s written best in all caps and underlined it four times”—the best time in my photography classes, so much that I don’t mind that I am having to take English and math! We have real-life assignments, and for my first one I started going to Tucker High football games and they let me stand right on the sidelines because I told them I was with the newspaper, which of course is a lie, but they are so excited to imagine that a newspaper photographer would come and take their pictures that they let me walk right on the field. I started taking some of the developed prints to the games with me, and their mamas love them—I took close-ups of the boys on the benches, and I am able to capture their excitement—and their misery when they’re losing—and they’re so cute and little but they think they are grown-up. Anyway, I sold a bunch of prints to their parents, and they went like hotcakes! It’s amazing. I haven’t even bothered to get a real job because now I am just going out into the streets taking pictures of children playing, and since I’m a girl and I talk to their mamas, nobody minds, and you wouldn’t believe it, but I have a real business going.
In my class we’re paired up with a partner for a show for the final—I got the only other “grown-up” in the class (everybody else is only eighteen or nineteen), who is the most fascinating person. He’s not my type, in case you’re wondering, he’s just a little too crazy and rough, (more yours!) but he’s very interesting. He has hiked the whole Appalachian Trail and wrote a book about it—he’s a real journalist and is taking photography classes so he can include pictures in his books. He also writes real pretty poems. I even understand some of them. Ha ha.
Anyway, he’s making me think more (imagine that!), and the professor likes what we are doing so much he is pretty much letting us make up our own projects, which will be worlds above what everybody else in the class is doing. Imagine the difference between Lawrence’s photographs and the first ones I took on the road. That’s about the difference between our work and the rest of the class.
So, long story short, we are going to finish the project just as quick as we can—there’s no need to take the whole rest of the semester to do what we can do in just a few weeks, then we’ll keep going and put together a book! Phil, my partner, says he knows a publisher who will publish it! I know these hills almost as well as you do and have a way to get to children, (and to tell the truth, I take better pictures than he does), and he’s a writer so we are going to do an “in-depth” (I love that word! Phil uses it all the time) photographic essay with poetry about the mountains, calling it “Flora and Fauna in the Alleghenies,” but instead of plants and animals, we’re going to call children “flora” and “fauna,” because children are as pretty as flowers and as wild as wild creatures. And every picture is going to be either a very beautiful child or one acting wild. Get it?? It’s an interesting challenge, making them as beautiful as we can (I’m learning to play with the light, and there are tricks you can do in the darkroom) or catching them acting like a crazy person.
Jimmy Lee is back and guess who came with him??? Ha ha. Tucker has no idea what’s about to hit it. So far everybody thinks Edna Mae is fat, and word is out that Myrtle is badmouthing her all over the place. I sure hope I’m there when Edna Mae meets her (tracks her down!) I just hope I have plenty of film in the camera when she does! They’re doing it all proper—Edna Mae is staying with Lenora and Ike and everybody is getting along like a house afire. I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t come home just in time for a wedding!
I hope you are having fun in Africa, and I wish I was there with you so I could take pictures (and to see you!) Maybe I will come over there someday. Everybody misses you and says to tell you hey.
By the way, Elvis Chuck called you on Sunday, and I just happened to be home for a change. We had a nice, long chat. He said he had called three times before, and he was beginning to wonder if he would ever get the chance to talk to you. Was he ever surprised that you had gone to Africa! Hope you don’t mind, but I gave him your address. I don’t know what you did on that bus (I was busy myself), but whatever it was, it sure made an impression on him. He sounded like he misses you.
John stopped here and looked at Sally Beth over the top of the letter. “Elvis Chuck? On a bus? Have I missed something?”
She blushed and laughed. “Oh, it was nothing. Lilly is just being silly. Keep reading.”
He looked askance at her, but returned to the letter: The house is empty without you, but maybe that’s because I’m hardly ever there either. I’m always out taking pictures. Click! Click! Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!
Love, Lilly.
P.S. Everybody looooves my car! You wouldn’t believe how many guys have asked me out because of it, but believe it or not, I’ve been too busy and working too hard to go out much. I’ve paid Jimmy Lee $30 already, and I think I can give him $30 every couple of months. He didn’t want to take it, but I told him you would kill me if he didn’t, and he didn’t want my blood on his hands. And Edna Mae says she’ll kill me if I mention one more time about paying her anything at all.
P.P.S. I’m taking a class called “women’s studies” that I signed up for thinking it would be about how to be a lady—you know, how to dress, walk, set a table, etc. I thought it would be easy because Mama already taught all that stuff, and we had it in home ec in high school, but it turns out it is a philosophy/literature class with stuff written by or about women. It’s not easy, but I sort of am enjoying it. My favorite author so far is Kate Chopin. Most of those writers have some pretty wild ideas, but they sure do make you think!
Love again,
Lilly
Sally Beth made him read it a second time, although she waved him on when he started reading about Elvis Chuck. She laughed at the part about Edna Mae and explained to John that Edna Mae was not fat, except in all the right places and that Jimmy Lee was acting crazy in love with her. She started to mention that he had gotten over Geneva awfully fast when she suddenly remembered that John had been in the same boat, but that John’s feelings for her cousin had run a lot deeper. She fell silent, not knowing what to say without reminding him of his loss.
He made it easy. “It’s still early. Why don’t we go up for an hour or so after supper, and you can see the sunset from the lake?”
“Oh, John, that would be just great!” Her excited little hop made him smile.
By the time they were aloft and skimming over the water, Sally Beth said, “I wish I could fly!” and before he knew what he was promising, John foun
d himself saying, “Why don’t I teach you?”
“Really?” she squealed. “You’ll teach me? When can we start?”
“How about right now?” He started pointing out the instruments to her. “Here, you take over. Keep steady by watching this line here. See? That fixed line is us, and this one that moves is the horizon. Tilt to the right. See how the line is floating? Now, move back to level. That’s all there is to it.” He sat back in the seat and made a show of stretching and putting his hands behind his head. “Just wake me up when you get back to the mission if you need any help landing.”
Sally Beth laughed, and not just at John’s little joke. She was flying. She held the power of an aircraft in her hands, and she, and she alone, was keeping it aloft. Glancing upward, she pulled the nose of the plane up and sped toward a cloud. She wanted to whoop, she felt so powerful and free. The whole, wide sky belonged to her; she was swimming through air, through clouds, through the golden sunshine and the dust motes alive in the sparkling air.
He broke into her thoughts. “You want to try turning around?”
Yes, she did. She wanted to try loops and spirals and rolls and death plunges, screaming to the earth until the last second, and then pull up sharply into the pale blue sky and then do it all over again. The feeling was marvelous. It was like—like—she couldn’t come up with the right word for it, it was so big and freeing and wonderful. She had to make up a word. “It is tremendglorious! How do you turn around?” She banked to the left over the water without waiting for an answer.
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