Kindly as he looked, we couldn’t understand why this young man, who lived in Bézam and therefore worked for Pexton or the government, hadn’t run to Gardens to tell the overseer—a friend of his, most likely, since they were both American people—that we’d killed his uncle. Why was he allowing the men to bury his uncle in Kosawa? Why wasn’t he taking his uncle’s body back to Bézam? He seemed unhappy to be in our village, his eyes bloodshot and often downcast and avoiding ours, but at no point did he look at us angrily, or in disgust. He was merely alone in our midst.
As one of our grandfathers offered last words over the lowered coffin, telling the Sick One to travel safely to his ancestors and find it in his heart to forgive us for failing to restore his health, we looked at our mothers, our eyes full of tears, our bodies split into equal portions of fright and grief and shame. We could tell from our mothers’ faces, and their trembling hands, and how tightly they held our youngest siblings to their bosoms, that they too were in fragments. Had we asked them to explain what was happening, they wouldn’t have been able to answer. All they knew was what our fathers had told them, that the Sick One’s nephew was on our side, he’d come to see our suffering so he could tell the world about it and by so doing bring us the changes his uncle couldn’t. It made no sense to us why the Sick One’s relative was on our side, but, then again, simplicity fled Kosawa the night we obeyed a madman and took three representatives captive.
The young man, whose name we gathered was Us-things, smiled at us as we were departing the burial ground. We wished we could hug him and tell him that all would be well, but Bongo took his attention away from us, because he wanted to whisper something into Us-things’s ear. We hoped Us-things would stay with Bongo in the back room of the Nangi family’s hut, and we hoped that our friend Thula would eavesdrop, put aside her taciturnness for a bit, and tell us all there was to know about the American.
We would have no such chance.
Of all the ways we’d imagined on those nights when we’d lain in bed stiff with trepidation, why did we never consider that we’d be away when the soldiers arrived and we’d return to find them waiting for us in the square, nine guns loaded and pointed at us? Where was the Spirit on that afternoon? Where were the blessings we’d been promised?
How fast those bullets came.
How we stumbled, how we staggered, how we cried, fleeing into the forest.
How heavy the blood flowed—the blood of our families, the blood of our friends. Why do we hope on when life has revealed itself to be meaningless?
Sahel
The week before she left for America, she said to me on the veranda, Mama, you know I’m going to come back, right, and when I didn’t respond, she said, I’ll never abandon you, and when I still didn’t respond, she started to cry the kind of tears I hadn’t seen her cry since she was a baby. She became my baby again, for one last time.
They told me about her new home. They said she would be living at school. When I asked how this was possible, they said the school compound was many times the size of Kosawa, and that at the school there would be houses with books and houses with beds and houses with food, and that once she got there she would simply walk from one house to another, she would no longer need to take a bus to school every morning, like she’s been doing the past five years. They promised me that this school was worth her crossing the ocean for, that this was one of the few schools in the world where all knowledge available to man could be found, and that by the time she returned she would have more understanding of everything-worth-understanding than she would need for the rest of her life, which meant that we would all have more understanding too—what could be more important than that? Our people were dying for lack of knowledge, they said, and if a child of ours could go to America and bring knowledge back to us, someday no government or corporation would be able to do to us the things they’ve been doing to us.
—
I stood up from my seat and told her that I needed to go check on the meat I was smoking in the kitchen, but I really just wanted to go cry alone. I had no comfort to offer her. I only had my own tears. What use are a mother’s tears to her child?
When they came to tell me that she’d been selected to attend this school, I had stared at the news bearer as he spoke—at his huge, chapped lips, made even bigger by his small head. He has a name, but the children call him the Sweet One, since he can’t seem to wipe off cheerfulness from his face. He has been the representative from the Restoration Movement to Kosawa since our story reached America and people who share no blood with us arrived, determined to save us.
I’d listened to him speak in the village square on countless occasions, I’d sat down with him to talk abut Malabo’s disappearance, I’d watched him help Thula with her homework, but I’d never looked at him like I did
