He was right. Two months after the massacre, the Sweet One and the Cute One, along with the man from the neighboring country and the man and woman from America, arrived for that first meeting.
The Sweet One and the Cute One—we can never forget their goodness. How they kept coming to visit the families of the dead and the imprisoned. How they sat in silence in every hut, knowing that no words could accomplish what their presence had. When we cried they looked to the ground, and when we offered them food they ate it.
Their dedication convinced us that the day of our restoration was nigh.
Thousands of people in America read our story. Hundreds called the Restoration Movement office in Great City to find out how they could help us. That is what we learned, based on the report the American man and woman brought during that first meeting. Mothers called, crying, after they read about our children. Young people marched around Pexton’s office, shouting: Shame on you, Pexton; shame on you, murderers. We were no longer alone. Many stopped buying oil from Pexton. Money flowed to the Restoration Movement for our salvation. People who had seen Austin’s pictures told other people, and those other people passed the story to their friends and neighbors. The Sweet One told us that the American people were like us, they passed stories from mouth to mouth, and that our story was spreading faster than a fire set off by a dry-season spill.
Pexton swore they had nothing to do with the massacre, but Austin’s story in the newspaper had pictures of documents that proved their alliance with His Excellency. The more Pexton tried to argue that their business relationship with His Excellency did not mean that they endorsed the slaughter of peace-seeking people, the more people believed our story and the more money poured in for our salvation.
The Restoration Movement would use some of the money to cover all expenses related to getting our men out of prison, the Sweet One told us. They would allocate part of it to pay for a bus to take us to Bézam every three weeks to visit our prisoners. After their release, the Restoration Movement would use the rest of the money to hire the best American lawyers to fight Pexton until it met our demands. We cried our first tears of relief during those meetings, though so mingled was our hope with our sorrow that we couldn’t exhale.
—
The Sweet One and the Cute One took us to Bézam every three weeks, as promised. Yaya, with her last bit of strength, went to the kitchen on every one of the early mornings before the trip to supervise the food I was cooking for Bongo. We packed for him fried meat and smoked chicken, things our relatives in other villages had brought to us, to share in our suffering. We packed fruits we had dried under the sun, so he could eat them when he ran out of his leftovers.
The trip took one day, since we didn’t have to change buses. Sometimes on the ride, the Cute One read letters American people had written to us, willing us to be strong, reminding us that our battle was theirs too. He showed us pictures children there had drawn for us. One of them was of a little man and a big man, the little man standing and smiling while the big man was tumbling because the little man had sent his little spear into the neck of the big man. The Cute One told us that the child’s teacher had taught him in school that, every so often, little men do triumph. We forced ourselves to smile: we had learned no such thing in school, it had never been so in our lives.
We reached Bézam in the early mornings. No matter how tired we were upon our arrival at the prison, the sight of our men, and the realization that they were still alive, strengthened us. We slept on the bus ride back to the village, exhausted in every way.
The last time I saw Bongo, he wasn’t feeling well.
Just a cold, he said, but his eyes told a different story. He ate little of his food. Please, eat more, I said; otherwise, I’ll worry, and I’ll tell Yaya and she’ll worry too. He forced a smile, knowing I wouldn’t ever add to Yaya’s suffering by telling her of his condition. I pleaded with him, scooped it up for him, but he wouldn’t eat. Beside us, Lusaka listened to his wife telling him a story. Lusaka’s daughter tried to make conversation with Bongo, asking him how he had slept, but Bongo avoided her eyes, which surprised me, Bongo never having been one to be shy around girls. Farther down the bench, Gono took notes while Woja Beki spoke between coughs. We had heard that Gono was running a separate endeavor to free his father—in addition to the one the Restoration Movement was running—but we had no way of knowing if it was true, or if it was true that Gono had angrily quit his job at Pexton after Pexton told him that they couldn’t do anything to help him get his father out of prison. We also heard that Gono and his mother were no longer speaking to his two other brothers who worked for the government, because the brothers had refused to quit their jobs to show solidarity with their father. The brothers had supposedly said that they had families to feed, and Woja Beki had neither reprimanded nor frowned on his sons for their choice: everything he’d done was for his family too. We believed these rumors, though we had no way of confirming them—Jofi, Woja Beki’s third wife, who had been our source of intelligence about that
