Grandme Ife wrapped her arms around my body. Her head came up to my chin, her mop of shrubby white hair tickling my lips.
'Are you hungry?' she asked. 'I am going to cook only the things you like.'
…
At night, the huts on the hills looked like a crowd of candles. We ate supper on the back porch. My grandmother cooked rice and Congo beans with sun-dried mushrooms. She was wearing a long black dress, as part of her devil, to mourn my grandfather.
'Tell me, what good things have you been doing?' asked my grandmother.
'She has been getting all the highest marks in school,' said Tante Atie. 'Her mother will be very proud.'
'You must never forget this,' said my grandmother. 'Your mother is your first friend.'
I slept alone in the third room in the house. It had a large four-poster bed and a mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mattress sank as I slipped under the sheets in the bed. It was nice to have a bed of my own every so often.
I lay in bed, waiting for the nightmare where my mother would finally get to take me away.
We left the next day to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Tante Atie had to go back to work. Besides, my grandmother said that it was best that we leave before she got too used to us and suffered a sudden attack of chagrin.
To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
We each gave my grandmother two kisses as she urged us to go before she kept us for good.
'Can one really die of chagrin?' I asked Tante Atie in the van on the way back.
She said it was not a sudden illness, but something that could kill you slowly, taking a small piece of you every day until one day it finally takes all of you away.
'How can we keep it from happening to us?' I asked.
'We don't choose it,' she said, 'it chooses us. A horse has four legs, but it can fall anyway.'
She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.
Chapter 4
That whole week, Tante Atie left for work before dawn and came home very late at night. She left me food to eat and asked Monsieur Augustin to stop by in the mornings and evenings to check on me. When she came home, I watched, through the faint ray of light that crept across the sheet, as she tiptoed over to our bed, before going to sleep. That was how I knew for sure that she had not run away and left me.
I went to school every day as usual. After school, I went into our yard and spent the afternoons gathering the twigs and leaves that kept it from being clean.
When I came home from school Friday afternoon, I saw Tante Atie sitting on the steps in front of the bougainvillea. When she saw me, she ran towards me and swept my body in the air.
'You cleaned up real good,' she said.
I had done my last cleaning that morning, before leaving for school. The dead leaves were stacked on top of fallen branches, twigs, and dried flowers.
Tante Atie kissed both my cheeks and carried my notebook inside. The living room seemed filled by the suitcase that she had bought me for the trip. While I was working on the yard, I had somehow told myself that I would be around for more potlucks, more trips to my grandmother's, even a sewing lesson. The suitcase made me realize that I would never get to do those things.
'I know I have not been here all week,' Tante Atie said. 'I wanted to work extra hours to get you some gifts for your trip.'
She poured hot milk from a silver kettle that she had always kept on the shelf for display. Stuck to the bottom of the kettle was a small note, Je t'aime de tout mon coeur. The note read, 'I love you very much.' It was signed by Monsieur Augustin.
I reached over to grab the note dangling from the kettle. Tante Atie snatched it back quickly. She held it upside down and looked at it as though it were a picture, fading before her eyes.
She turned her back quickly and placed the note on the shelf.
We sat across the table from one another and drank without saying anything. I tried to hide my tears behind the tea cup.
'No crying,' she said. 'We are going to be strong as mountains.'
The tears had already fallen and hit my cheeks.
'Mountains,' she said, prodding my ribs with her elbow.
She bent and picked up a white box from the heap of things that she had bought. Inside was a saffron dress with a large white collar and baby daffodils embroidered all over it.
'This is for you to wear on your trip,' she said.
My mother's face was in my dreams all night long. She was wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair. She opened her arms like two long hooks and kept shouting out my name. Catching me by the hem of my dress, she wrestled me to the floor. I called for Tante Atie as loud as I could. Tante Atie was leaning over us, but she could not see me. I was lost in the yellow of my mother's sheets.
I woke up with Tante Atie leaning over my bed. She was already dressed in one of her pink Sunday dresses, and had perfume and face powder on. I walked by her on my way to the wash basin. She squeezed my hand and whispered, 'Remember that we are going to be like mountains and mountains don't cry.'
'Unless it rains,' I said.
'When it rains, it is the sky that is crying.'
When I came from the wash basin, she was waiting for me with a towel. It was one of many white towels that she kept in a box under her bed, for special occasions that never came. I used the towel to dry my body, then slipped into the starched underwear and the dress she handed to me.
The suitcase was in a corner in the kitchen. The table was covered with white lace cloth. Tante Atie's special, unused china plates and glasses were filled with oatmeal and milk.
She led me to the head of the table and sat by my side. A slight morning drizzle hit the iron grills on the door.
'If it rains, will I still have to go?' I asked her.
She ran her finger over a shiny scar on the side of her head.
'Yes, you will have to go,' she said. 'There is nothing we can do to stop that now. I have already asked someone to come and drive us to the aeroport.'
She took a sip from the milk in her glass and forced a large smile.
'You should not be afraid,' she said. 'Martine was a wonderful sister. She will be a great mother to you. Crabs don't make papayas. She is my sister.'
She reached inside her pocket and pulled out the card that I had made her for Mother's Day. It was very wrinkled now and the penciled words were beginning to fade.
'I would not let you read it to me, but I know it says some very nice things,' she said, putting the card next to my plate. 'It is not so pretty now, but your mother, she will still love it.'
Before she could stop me, I began to read her the words.
