—
Sahel, Juba, Nubia, and Thula’s new papa came from Bézam. We had no body for them. We buried the Five, but for Thula we only cried. We held Sahel, begged her to be strong. She fainted, again and again. She asked for a cup of poison; we refused to give it to her. Nubia told us she’d hidden all knives from Sahel when they got the news. The Spirit will restore, we told Sahel. We didn’t believe it that day, but we told it to her, in desperation. Three times in one life. Three vanishes for one woman. Juba tried to be strong for his mother, but his own heartbreak wouldn’t allow him. Nubia kept one arm around her husband, their son, Malabo Bongo, in her other arm.
Our fathers told us that Malabo Bongo was a replica of his father’s big papa—the same small, sad eyes. We cried for the child too, as we did for our own children, the burden he would have to bear for the things done and undone to those before him. His life, like the lives of our descendants, in good ways and bad ways, would be only a continuation of our story—nothing could save him from that.
—
We were refused one last chance to enter Kosawa and empty our huts. The government decided the land had become too contaminated for human presence. His Excellency ordered Kosawa burned. What once were our huts became ashes. Our mothers’ kitchens, ashes. Our barns and outhouses, ashes. Our ancestors’ pride, ashes. Nothing remained of Kosawa, except for what we kept in our hearts. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, winds of every kind came and blew away the ashes of what used to be our home.
—
Pexton took the bodies of the overseer and his wife back to America, to their sons. It was only months later that we learned their full names: Augustine and Evelyn Fish. In stories printed in our country, there were pictures of them, smiling, with their sons. A couple that loved life: executed. Their sons: orphaned. A tragedy in every sense. No one called Thula’s death tragic. There were no pictures of her in most newspapers. Or of the Five. She was the Fire Lady. The Five, her disciples. Fire Lady, Fire Lady: how many readers of those stories cared for her real name, her full story?
The story told about her was mostly about her time in America, how she’d spent days in jail there for one misdeed or another. Some wrote of how His Excellency’s freedom-loving government had allowed her and her followers to speak out and march. She was given privileges accorded to every citizen of the republic—why did she have to turn to violence? In America the newspapers wrote that New York was where she had learned violence; she wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to travel to New York and leave as a radical. They wrote of how she had attended meetings in a place called the Village, a gathering of people who hadn’t learned how to channel their anger positively. Others argued that violence had been in her blood long before she traveled to America: our government confirmed for those who inquired that, indeed, Thula’s uncle Bongo had been one of the men responsible for the kidnapping of Pexton workers decades before. Thula had taken it further by acquiring guns and orchestrating killings. A violent family—how sad.
Her former students and busloads of devotees came from across the country for her one-year death celebration, which we held in her big papa’s village. We’d stopped crying by then, but Sahel hadn’t, though she now cried for her new husband too—he’d died months after Thula, leaving Sahel alone in a big house. She yearned to return to her birth village now that she was entering her final years, she wanted to sit on verandas and laugh old-woman laughs with Lulu and Cocody. But Juba and Nubia wanted her in Bézam so they could do everything to make her happy, visit her often, and spend nights at her house, so Sahel could feed and bathe and sing to Malabo Bongo and his little sister, Victoria.
—
Juba said Austin had written him a condolence letter in which he said Thula often talked about wishing everyone would wear yellow at her death celebration. So we all wore yellow. Flowing yellow dresses for the women, newly sewn for the occasion, along with yellow head-scarves and yellow earrings. Yellow trousers and yellow linen shirts for the men.
In the square where her big papa once sat in a corner, we beat the drums around a framed photo of Thula, taken by Austin, in which she’s wearing a white dress, walking the streets of New York. Her hair is at the top of her head in a bun; she’s smiling.
We felt her spirit around us as we sang and danced till the sun left us for a while. Before we dispersed, Juba thanked us for loving his sister. He told us that he would like to close the
