Ancestor Stones

2 Asana, 1926: Shadows of the Moon

Hali! What story shall I tell? The story of how it really was, or the one you want to hear? I shall start with my name, but that is not so easy as you think. I have been known by many names. Not the way you are thinking. You people change your name the way you change your hairstyle. One day braids. Next day hot-comb. You marry and take a stranger’s family name in place of your own. A potho name, no less. But us, we never change the names that tell the world who we are. The names we are called by, yes. These ones may change.

I had another name once, before I had even seen the light of this world. My name was Yankay, the firstborn.

Sakoma: the month of emptiness. The women were making ready, whitewashing their houses, plastering façades streaked by the rain and stained with mould. Soon the doors of every home would be thrown open. Soft, new rice to eat instead of bulgur and mangoes. The hungry season was nearly over.

My mother’s hands were dipped in white, her face and arms flecked. That was how she was always able to remember I was born the week of the last rainfall before the dry season began. I had an appetite, she used to say, such an appetite because I was born at the start of the feast. That day she worked and felt her insides convulse. Pain seeped into her limbs, trickling out of her centre like juice from a lemon. With her right hand she went on smoothing the plaster in arcs like rainbows. The fingers of her left hand she began to click.

I was the firstborn of my father. Not my mother. My mother was a praying wife. My father inherited her from his uncle. After she was widowed she could have returned to her own people as the other wives did. But she stayed and chose a new husband from the younger brothers. She chose my father. It goes without saying that she must have admired him. Not because he had life, was vigorous with ambition, though he had and was those things. But because she didn’t stay a praying wife for long. Within a year she had conceived.

My mother was my father’s first wife. Well, it’s true there was one other praying wife before her, but that one went when my father brought my mother into the house. My mother’s status was high, you see. She had been the wife of a chief. The other woman had lived long enough. She wanted to be mistress in her own house. So she packed her baskets and walked back to her own village where she had sons.

So there was my mother, plastering her house. Alone and painting, no need for anyone else. This is the way she was. When the job was complete she laid the block of wood on the steps of the house and set off to the birth attendant’s hut. By the time she reached the end of the village she was clicking fast. Both hands. It was early morning. The women were sweeping their compounds and the front of their houses. Dust devils danced across the ground. They looked up when they heard the sound of her fingers. Mine was an auspicious birth: my father was already a big man. Every woman who was already a mother laid down her broom and walked. Their fingers picked up her rhythm, until ten, fifteen, twenty women clicked their fingers as one.

I wanted to come to this world, to the place where things happen, I didn’t want to stay where I was. I always had big eyes for this world and I was born with them open. My mother never feared for me. There are some children — you can tell the ones — born with a hunger for life. I was in such a hurry my mother didn’t even have time to drink the infusion of lemon tree leaves. I was born, to the chorus of their fingers, like the sound of crickets announcing the rain.

Afterwards the midwife prepared to bind my mother’s stomach. But my mother kept on clicking her fingers. The midwife pressed ten fingertips into her stomach. Shook her head. Click. Click. My mother asked for some of the tea, and they poured the cool liquid into her mouth. She arched her back. Click. Push. Click.

My brother slid into this world: small, still and silent. At first, they thought he’d gone with the leaves. My mother cradled him and called for him to come back. That was when she took my name away from me and gave it to him. If only he would come back, she promised, he would be the firstborn. She traced his features with her fingers. The baby opened his eyes, black eyes. He stared back at her. And he decided he wanted her. That was how it all began. This thing between him and me. Because his first deed in this world was to take from me what was mine.

We were twins. People thought we were lucky. They used to touch our heads as we passed by. Tap, tap. Stall holders called out to us: ‘Eh, bari!’ Twin! And they offered us delicacies to taste and gave our mother their best price without the bother of haggling. Women bending over their cooking pots lifted the lids and called us over. One month after our birth, our mother made an offering at the house of the twins: chicken eggs and palm wine, foods the spirits like to eat.

When I had three teeth my brother still sucked with his gums. My mother gave me a wooden spoon and a bowl of rice pap. I followed her wherever she went, holding my spoon. One day she sat on her stool and I leaned against her knees. A duck passed us with tiny ducklings trailing in her wake, like porpoises following a fishing boat. Wherever the mother duck walked her babies followed, attached to her by an invisible thread. She stroked my hair: ‘So who is my duckling?’ she asked. Me, I would have cried, if I had known how to speak. She bent down and caught a baby duck in cupped hands; she let me stroke the downy feathers before she released it. The duckling raced, wings flapping, towards its mother. I laughed. But when I saw my brother on my mother’s lap, still suckling with his old man’s gums, stroking her breast and squeezing milk from her nipple, I felt jealous. I wasn’t so pleased to be her baby duck any more.

The women who had witnessed my birth called me Nurr too — because I was the true firstborn, because they had already left the chamber when my brother arrived and didn’t hear my mother make him her promise. They thought maybe I would return. Because that’s what the first child often does. They had forgotten that my mother had children before, when she was married to another man. That happened in another place. They could only see what was before their own eyes. So they called me Nurr, a thing to be discarded, slung on the heap. That’s how people thought then. The bodies of children who wasted their mother’s tears they threw on the rubbish mound outside the town. Nobody would bury such spirits next to their very own relatives under the flamboyant trees.

I could walk first and even carry him. My brother barely bothered to learn to use his own legs; he knew I was there to bear his weight. One day our father informed his uncles that he had decided to leave the place where we lived to start a plantation. The land was there, you see. And so we left to found our own village. Outside the town, beyond the ring of light and into the elephant grass we went. I trailed my hands across the towering stalks, as thick as bamboo poles, grazing the tips of my fingers. And then we entered the darkness. High above us the monkeys cavorted and screamed our names. The crows laughed at our foolishness; a woodpecker darted ahead of us, rapping out a warning as it went; orchids dripped nectar on to us and it slid down the backs of our necks; we skirted great boulders and waded across pools of black water as the path closed up behind us. I looked up the dizzying trunks of the trees stretching far, far into the sky. I tried to see the sun.

Single file, we went. At the front the snake man with a long stick and a pair of dogs. After him my father and the diviner who led him to the new land. My mother walked a respectful distance behind them. My father had new wives by then. They walked behind my mother. I’ll tell you the rest of their names when the time comes, not now. Then I had eyes only for my mother. The youngest of the wives I walked alongside. She was a few years older than me — just a sprouting seedling wife. By this time I could carry nearly half a bushel of rice. We followed behind the others and shared a load. Behind us came karabom, my grandmother who had left her own house to follow her daughter to this new place.

Our belongings were carried on the heads of five indentured men. Every day my father sat in the courtroom listening to the disputes of men who laid down two coins to place their grievances before the elders. People respected him; he became chief advisor to the obai. Many of the men brought before the court were debtors. Sometimes my father agreed to clear their debts himself. And in return he took their sons from them, to labour for him until the day their fathers redeemed them. Whenever that day came.

The men toted giant baskets of clothes, a woven cage of guineafowl, a pair of piglets with their feet bound together, our great iron cooking-pots, sacks of rice, salt, groundnuts and the chest that held my father’s fortune in silver shillings — the Queen’s money — with metal locks crafted by Fula locksmiths. Last of all came my father’s iron-framed four-poster bed, carried aloft by eight extra men. Past the main foot road, the path narrowed. The bed couldn’t pass. The men widened the track, slashing at the trees on either side. Progress was slow. My father decided we must press on. A few times I turned my head and each time the bed was further and further behind us. Eventually it disappeared from my view, behind the twisted bends, the giant trunks and curtain of ropes. It arrived in our new home three days after us.

My brother walked along beside me. I was young but I knew things. I knew I was glad to be leaving the old place and the old women. My mother and father called us by the names the diviner had chosen for us: Alusani and Asana. As the sun rose Alusani fell behind. I urged him, but I couldn’t carry him. The bearers with their loads balanced upon their heads followed us with straight backs, their eyes fixed upon the horizon. Alusani trailed so far behind he became tangled in the feet of the first man. Our mother worried he was not strong enough to make the journey. So I walked on alone, under the weight of my load while Alusani rocked and slept under the canopy of the maka reserved for my father.

The sky turned to violet and the trees on the horizon dark blue. The planes of our faces faded and disappeared. After some time the path broadened again; the shadows of the trees grew skimpy. I smelled wood smoke: a scattering of houses and some tents in the centre of a clearing. We changed our clothes and sat down to wait while a messenger ran ahead. In a short time the headman came hurrying out of his house and knelt before my father. One knee on the ground. Hands clasped across his thigh. I listened to him explain everything was ready. He would accompany us to the place himself in the new light. And so we accepted his hospitality. I was tired and hungry, yet I was excited, too. I rested on my haunches and I watched as each man and woman came before my father and bent down to touch his feet. And I wondered who they were.

Like a mouse’s tail the path narrowed and came to an end. I rode on my father’s shoulders. Better than the hammock, I thought. There in the clearing stood four houses, so new the thatch was still green. Behind them flowed pale green waters, laced by mangroves, embroidered with water lilies: a river like a woman’s sleeve.

The place was known only as Mathaka. Pa Thaka, a fisherman who lived there alone without a woman of his own, cooked and washed for himself. The people thought it was a joke. Behind his back they called him a woman. My father gave our home a new name: Rofathane, resting place.

We were the descendents of swordsmen who came from the North. Holy men and warriors led by a queen who blew in with the harmattan on horseback from Futa Djallon, dreaming of an empire that stretched from the desert to the sea. They never reached the sea. The horses shied and started. Their legs buckled and they toppled over. After a while the people realised they were stranded. They couldn’t return to their homeland, so instead they settled where they found themselves. They were rice eaters. The grains they had brought with them they planted. In time their empire vanished, and another arose.

Rofathane, my father told me, had another meaning: oasis. Our new home was an oasis in the forest.

My mother told us our father was to become a coffee grower. She said this while she showed me how to grind the beans we had brought with us to make coffee for my grandmother. The beans were really for planting in rows on land that was being burned and brushed by the people from the houses in the clearing. These people had been given to our father by the obai, because he had helped him win the chieftaincy elections. And so they came to work by day, sometimes sleeping overnight, men and women side by side under thatched canopies. As the days passed the giant iroko trees crashed down one by one, great stumps wrenched out of the earth like a giant’s teeth. The land was burned and in the morning, when the fires had died down, I went out to look. I imagined the red earth beneath the blackened charcoal, as tender and new as the skin under the scabs of dried blood I picked at on my knee.

Soon after we arrived, other people followed: a blacksmith, a carpenter, a herbalist, extra hands to plant the beans we had brought, fingers to pluck the ones that would grow. A big man casts a long shadow and many people build their lives in the shade.

Until the first harvest arrived my mother allowed nobody but karabom to drink the dark liquid made from the beans. It became my job to make her coffee, to grind the beans first with a pestle and mortar, mix the powder with some of the water which bubbled all day on top of the three-stone fire at the back of the house. I poured the liquid into a small bowl and sweetened it with honey. Then I would carry her coffee to her, to the place where she liked to sit at the front of her daughter’s new house.

The house had the best position in the whole village: at a right angle to my father’s house, next to the mosque and within earshot of the people who gathered to exchange news after prayers. From the verandah she could watch the comings and goings at the meeting house, too. Together she and I sat and waited for the grounds to settle.

At those times, in the very early morning, she told me things nobody else knew. These weren’t the stories I heard her tell to the other women at the back of the house where they sat on stools in the evenings, their profiles warmed by the yellow light from the palm oil lamps. I remember the sound of their laughter: I thought of it as back-of-house laughter, different from the submerged giggles and half-smiles hidden behind hands at the front of the house.

Once I laughed with them. My grandmother told a story — something about a woman who began to cook for another man while her husband was away. When she had finished, there followed a moment of silence. Next to her, my father’s third wife snorted and laughed, and the laughter passed from woman to woman like an improvised melody. Though I didn’t understand the story, I opened my mouth wide and laughed along with them. The music stopped. Somebody sucked her teeth. My karabom aimed a piece of charcoal at me and it hit me just above the eyebrow.

You, I remember how you talked to your children. You asked them: ‘Do you want this or that?’ ‘Coca-cola or Fanta?’ ‘Front seat or back?’ You drove them around in a big four-wheel as though they were born with no legs. You let them push away the food everybody else was eating and you asked the cooks: ‘What else is there in the kitchen?’ And I heard the way your children answered you. As though the world was upside down, and you were the child, they the adults.

When I was a child I was told my voice smelled of fish. By the time I was allowed to speak I had forgotten how. That is how it was. The way we were raised to be who we are.

Karabom said: ‘Never say “good morning” until you have washed yourself.’ Yet the day I crossed her path in silence because I had not yet been to the stream she swore at me for my insolence. People who grew thin and died were being eaten away inside by witches, she told me on another day. I stared at the necklaces of loose skin around her neck, the empty flaps that hung to her waist. Even her ear lobes drooped; the holes where her gold earrings hung had stretched so I could see right through them. Karabom told me of witches who lured children with gifts of eggs and meat, only to suck their blood and steal their hearts, until one day all you saw running around was the empty flesh.

She pointed to the weaver birds darting in and out of their nests suspended from the branches of a tree, in perfectly spaced rows, as though some hand had hung them there. And she told me the birds were the souls of all the children who had died. Karabom’s lips were black, and when she spoke I could see her teeth gleaming against her dark, tattooed gums. I thought her lips and gums were black because she drank so much coffee.

In the sky the moon faded against the growing blue. There were men whose skins were luminous as the pale shadows of the moon when it dances across bare flesh, she said. Men who sailed their houses across the sea and who were so thin because they ate only fish and drank sea water. When she was my age people told stories of captured children who sailed with them across the sea and were fed to a powerful demon. Men from faraway villages stole the children in exchange for unearthly possessions.

‘Stay away from the footpaths.’ The air whistled in her nostrils and her breath carried the odour of decay, as though her body had become nothing more than a vessel for a mouldering spirit. ‘Only an outsider clings to the path. And run away from strangers. If they come in good faith they’ll reach the village and make their business known.’

After a while my mother would come and tap me on the shoulder. I wanted to ask her whether the stories were true. But my mother was always so busy. Too busy to listen. Busy in my father’s house counting little piles of stones: how many trees we had planted, how much the first harvest might yield, how rich we would surely become. When she cooked, my mother served my grandmother first — always, except when my father ate with us. I was brought up not to question my elders, so I kept the stories to myself. But I wasn’t frightened. To tell you the truth I didn’t believe them. Not so much as you might think. I knew people made up stories to tell children so that we would behave the way they wanted us to.

Hali, but I remember the day I saw one of the moon-shadow men with my own eyes.

I was swift. My mother used me as her messenger. I would run the whole distance — sometimes to the fields, to the herbalist when one of us was ill, to the headman at the next village, it didn’t matter — and I would deliver the message, repeat the reply once, twice and run back. Look at you, so busy writing everything down on pieces of paper. Scraps of paper to lose or put away in a cupboard to grow mildew. Nobody ever bothered to teach me to write. They didn’t need to. Instead I taught myself never to forget. When I was a girl, I could run. And I can still remember. Those times when my mother required an answer urgently she spat on the warm earth by her feet. The saliva began to shrivel at once, like a slug thrown on a fire. I would set off knowing I had to be back before the dark patch was gone.

This day, I remember, Alusani begged to come with me. I knew he would slow me down, but I agreed anyway. We walked in the shade of the coffee trees and entered the forest. Soon we passed the boulder marking the boundary to the village. We stayed away from the path. As we went we played a game we had played many times before. We made up riddles for the Trickster, in case he bounced down from one of the trees and refused to allow us on our way.

‘How do you carry water?’ I asked Alusani.

‘In a fishing net!’ He was quick as that. Then it was his turn to ask a question: ‘What do you pour on a fire to put it out?’

I knew that one, I didn’t need to think. I replied straight away: ‘Oil!’ This was how we always began, posing the easy ones first. The next riddle was one I had been saving. I was certain Alusani would never guess the answer. ‘What do you give a thirsty stranger to drink?’

I marched ahead, swinging my arms, certain of my victory. Behind me Alusani walked on. I knew he was puzzling over my riddle. One moment we were playing a game, the next I saw what I saw and I stopped breathing. I grasped Alusani’s arm. And I swear, if I hadn’t pulled my brother back he might have walked right into the man — right into the man whose skin was as white as day.

The moon-shadow man didn’t see us. We slipped between the roots of a cotton tree and we hid ourselves there, as though we were hiding in our mother’s skirts. We waited and we watched. All I could hear was the singing of birds, sounds of the forest. The moon-shadow man moved about the clearing, in and out of the streams of light, appearing and disappearing before our eyes. I imagined that if I only dared to reach out I could put my hand right through him. People said the Trickster could make himself invisible. But even though I was just a child I did not believe the Trickster was more than a story.

I wanted to whisper to Alusani, but my mouth was dry. I dared not close my eyes even to blink. I turned to Alusani. I felt my own eyes round with fear, but I saw Alusani’s eyes quick and bright as he watched that man.

The man who was made of moon shadows was surrounded by boxes. Boxes made of sticks and bound with wire. They lay scattered on the forest floor. First I had eyes only for the strange man: the way his massive feet crushed the foliage beneath them; his hands the size of palm fronds. He was gathering up the boxes, stacking them one on top of the other. Sometimes he paused, wiped his face against his sleeve, another time he used a cloth. Once he stood and gazed up at the sky. While he worked, we watched him. The air was filled with birdsong, the sound of a thousand birds. And I saw that the boxes were not boxes, but cages. And birds were imprisoned inside those cages: sunbirds whose feathers shimmered like oil across the surface of water, bright blue flycatchers, dark-throated warblers, palm swifts as small as your thumb, doves vividly plumed as parrots, and in one cage an owl’s black-rimmed eyes watching us from inside a white face.

I seized Alusani’s hand and we crept out from between the roots of the tree. We tried to be quiet, but the fear refused to be bound and scattered suddenly. And so we ran. I didn’t see him. I didn’t dare turn around. At first I didn’t even hear him, my heart thrummed in my ears. I felt him. I felt the moon-shadow man look up, begin to come after us. I scraped my shin on a fallen log; my footsteps crashed through the undergrowth; cobwebs snatched at my face as I dragged Alusani after me. But in the end we were helpless as beetles at the mercy of a cat.

He didn’t touch us, Alusani and I.

He stepped in front of us.

We stopped. We did not move.

We waited.

I looked at him and beyond him, for a way past. He crouched down; he put his hand into the folds of his trousers. From his outstretched hand he offered us a gift. At first I was transfixed by those luminous eyes, such a colour: the colour of water. When I did look down I saw in his hand a peeled egg. The man reached into his pocket and brought out a packet, of paper instead of leaf. He opened it and sprinkled a little of what was inside on to the top of the egg. Salt. Just salt. The man held it out in front of him and uttered a sound like the noise a donkey makes — though not so loud as that. Still, it caused me to jump backwards. He pulled his lips back and showed us his huge teeth: ‘Hee-ah,’ he said, ‘hee-ah!’

I tried to warn Alusani. But he was less fearful than I, although I had never once thought so before. He reached out his fingers and he took the egg from the moon-shadow man.

It has been such a long time. In all that time I never spoke to anybody about what happened that day. Except now. Except to you.

Sometimes, when I used to remember, when I thought back to the beginning of what happened next, there was only one thing of which I was sure. That everything started with the man whose skin was like the shadows of the moon. The man who was busy filling cages with the souls of children.

My mother beat me for failing to deliver her message. I returned to her empty-handed long after the spit had dried on the ground. Worst of all I had taken Alusani with me into the bush. My brother tried to beg for me, but my mother was deaf, her anger like a whirlwind inside her skull, going round and round, her mouth pursed and tight as though someone had sewn it shut and pulled the thread.

Maybe in time, when I had acquired some wisdom, I would have come to laugh at my childish fantasies. Perhaps I would have thrown away the memory of the moon-shadow man along with all the other unimportant thoughts I never bothered to cherish. Maybe. Who is there that knows the answer? As it was I came to hold myself responsible, to believe what happened next came as a punishment. I took Alusani there. Alusani took the egg and I could not stop him. The memory stayed with me for ever.

Alusani began to visit the place of the spirits.

It was dawn. I ran to fetch my grandmother. I did not bow my head or greet her respectfully first. There was no time for it, no time for her to be angry either. She followed me to where Alusani lay on the cot we shared. His eyes rolled backwards into his skull. His back was arched, his body vibrated like a plucked string. Karabom heated water to prepare a poultice. My mother held Alusani on her lap and massaged his limbs until his joints unlocked and the light came back into his eyes. In time he drifted into a deep sleep.

In those days there were those people who had ‘four eyes’ — two to see the human world and two eyes on the backs of their faces, eyes that can see beyond what is here. People said twins had four eyes. Ours was a spirit so powerful it required two bodies. Sent by the ancestors, they said. Only, I didn’t have four eyes. I never saw a devil or a spirit or a ghost, though there were times I was afraid I might.

At night I pressed my ear against the inside wall of the house, imagining I could hear the spirits of the dead trapped in the space between the inside and the outside wall. That’s how we built our houses in those days: with two walls and two doors. The doorways were offset — to confuse spirits who wanted to come back inside into the warm. The blacksmith’s uncle died: a dried-out old man with a wheezing cough and a voice like a cracked flute. My mother and grandmother went to cry at his funeral. Late that night I listened for him, for the sound of his woman’s voice calling from the other side. And I pictured his sightless ghost wandering from house to house, trying its luck, banging into the walls and groping for the door.

Maybe Alusani really did have the gift. To this day I can’t tell you. I only know that once he started to visit the underworld he kept going back. Pa Yamba, the diviner, went into a trance and followed him as far as he could into the land of dreams. But Alusani was going further, he was crossing to the land of spirits, where he had been befriended by a man and a woman — a husband and a wife. The woman, especially, liked Alusani. Trapped in the land of dreams, Pa Yamba couldn’t get close enough to see who she might be.

The whispers rustled through the houses, like wind through the tops of the trees. People came to wait outside our compound bringing gifts: bowls of white kola nuts, embroidered cloths, leather pouches of precious salt. Maybe Alusani’s spirit woman had something to tell. Or maybe she planned to give him special powers. That happened a lot. People befriended by spirits used their knowledge to amass great wealth. Others could see into the future or hold conversations with the dead. At mealtimes my mother fed Alusani from her own plate and she passed his chores to me.

When he saw the attention he received, Alusani began to repeat demands from the spirits: rice bread, sugar cane, sweet potato cakes, steamed coco yams and eggs. Everyone knows you shouldn’t give eggs to a child, it spoils them. But my mother and grandmother were very afraid. They preferred to go without themselves than to upset the ancestors who might send a cloud of locusts or a bush fire. After three rainy seasons our coffee trees had reached twice the height of a man. In two more seasons the beans would be ready to pick.

Slowly Alusani became the opposite of himself. Where once he had been fine to look at and sweet-natured, now he was bloated and angry. The expression on his face was as bitter as the coffee grounds themselves and when he spoke his voice was sour with sarcasm. As often as I could I stayed away from him. Down among the groves I wandered between the rows of coffee trees growing side by side with the banana trees. I imagined my brother and I were like these trees, growing together but not the same at all.

My brother acted like a warlord. At supper he complained the soup was too peppery, so I left my place to fetch fresh lime for him. The sack in the storeroom was empty; I ran to the lime tree in the garden at the back of the house but by the time I returned he complained the soup had cooled. My brother looked at me with scorn. As though I was his servant. Day after day my dislike for him grew. I hated my mother, who had given away my birthright. And I was angry with my grandmother who ordered the cooks to prepare sweetmeats for my brother, and no longer let me sit with her when I brought her coffee in the morning.

Maybe today we would guess Alusani had a tumour growing inside his head like a kola nut, and take him to the Chinese doctors at the hospital. But people didn’t know these things then. People believed there was a reason for everything. Nothing happens for nothing, that’s what they said then, and still do say.

Alusani complained of a headache. I didn’t care. He said he wanted to lie down. As he turned away I saw his face had a look that was sly, one eyelid drooped. My mother told me to run and fetch the herbalist, have her bring her pan of herbs. Afterwards I sat on the step outside while the woman did her work. I watched the people arriving for prayers and leaving. Twice. Maybe three times, even. I waited there a long time, in case I was needed to run another errand. When I heard my mother call my name I jumped up and went inside, swaying in the sudden darkness. My mother sat on the side of the cot, stroking her son’s face. I had never seen her cry, but now I did. Karabom sat at the other end of the bed, holding my brother’s feet in her hands. My mother beckoned me to sit down and I did so. I bent my head down, and felt Alusani’s breath against my cheek, and waited. He spoke. I could barely hear him.

‘Brine’, he said.

And, though it took me time, I understood. The answer to the last riddle. What do you give a thirsty stranger to drink? Brine. Then Alusani closed his eyes.

My brother was dead. What else do you want to know? That’s how it happened.

How you look at me so?

You’ve guessed, guessed it didn’t happen that way at all. Well then, you are right. You’re cleverer than I thought. Yes, it is just wishful thinking. I wish there had been no fire between us the day Alusani died. Alusani complained of a headache, that much is true. And his eye, the sly look — that is true, too. But he died alone in the afternoon while I went about my errands and my mother counted stones in my father’s parlour. He went to sleep and never got up again.

We buried Alusani in a treeless plot on the outskirts of the graveyard. That same day I won my mother back. Every season, when she cooked the first pot of new rice, my mother had taken a knife and scored a line inside the lid of the wooden chest where she kept her most precious belongings. As we grew up she stopped bothering to count our anniversaries. Now the fear began to spread like a shadow at dusk. Alusani would return for me — because our spirit was cleaved in two.

What can I tell you? That she fed me treats, the way she had with Alusani? Or that she let me sleep in her bed on those nights when my father went to visit her co-wives? Maybe she allowed me to abandon my chores while she kept me by her side and let me pass the days playing childish games. I wish it had been that way. But the fear tainted her like dye dropped into water. Alusani, who had been her beloved, now became the very being she most dreaded. Determined not to let him have his way, she fought him for possession of me.

Pa Yamba fashioned talismans, coated them with saliva and betel nut juice, and dangled them from my neck and around my waist. I stood in his hut. It was dark and feverishly hot. Vapours from the fire filled the air, burning my lungs. At our house I saw my mother on her knees scratching a hole in the floor with her bare hands and she placed the amulet Pa Yamba had given her in the dark space. But in the morning the fear was back, more monstrous than before. I can’t tell you the times we waded across the stream to the opposite bank where the diviner lived. My mother begged him to conjure ever more powerful charms. But it was never enough. She had become the man who has convinced himself that his neighbour is out to steal his goat and builds a thousand fences around it.

We were standing in the market when my mother overheard a conversation between two women. One, a tray of smoked fish balanced on her head, claimed a moriman had rid her of a troublesome rival who would have put her out of business. My mother did not care what these women thought of her, the wife of a big man, and interrupted their talk. But the fish seller was flattered and answered my mother’s questions. The moriman had instructed her to sweep up her rival’s footsteps and to bring the dust. This was what she told us. And so in the amber light of evening we searched the corners of the house until we found one of Alusani’s footprints. I cried easily to see the shape of his foot in the earth. I wanted my mother to comfort me, but her face was flat and she went about the business briskly. The next morning she woke me early to walk to the town where the moriman lived. And there I knelt and watched all that remained of Alusani go up in flames.

And so it went for months. How many magic men I could not count. One splashed a liquid in my eyes that stung for a long time — to stop me from seeing Alusani and wanting to go to him. There were times I had a powerful medicine made from boiled roots rubbed all over my limbs. The moriman said it would deter wicked spirits. People believed these things then. My mother believed them, too. I did not. I was miserable. I smelled like rice left in the pot for days, slimy and sour. I was ashamed.

My mother was the senior wife. There was a time when I was so pleased with myself that I was the daughter of the most important of the wives. She paid the workers their wages and held the keys to the store; she ordered the provisions and hired the servants; it was she who had the authority to decide which of the women should cook for my father, or travel with him when he went away on business. I found there was nobody to help me. My grandmother shared her daughter’s fears. Even my father would not confront my mother, for she was older than him in years.

* * *

I was sitting outside our house on a stool with my tray on the ground before me, preparing ogere to sell in the market, wrapping the balls of fermented sesame seeds in leaves and tying the packages with raffia. I used to make the ogere myself, standing over the pot, stirring the seeds which boiled for the whole day. Then I would spread them out on rice bags and lay heavy rocks on top of them. After three days, I pounded the fermenting seeds into a paste with my pestle and mortar.

Ogere tastes good, but you know how bad it smells. That’s why we never cook it inside the house. Always on the three-stone fire in the yard. At that time it seemed a good job for me. I smelled so bad anyway.

Those days my chest felt bruised. I was growing breasts, though I didn’t know it. Your uncle saw me. And he knew what he saw. And he stopped and talked to me nicely for a while. I watched him walk away, swinging his prayer beads in his hand, his body outlined by the wind beneath his white gown, and I let my imagination follow him down the street. I saw the power of his shoulders, the strength of his arms and the narrowness of his waist. I did not notice the weakness in the line of his jaw. The next day he came back with a gift: a bowl of scented roseapples. He ate one, and afterwards he handed me an apple and had me eat it. But with every bite I took all I tasted was the raw ogere, it overpowered the sweet fruit and made me nauseous. Your uncle appeared not to notice. I saw a man who was kind to me, and I saw the way to free myself from my mother. I ran from the smoke straight into the fire.

There’s not much more to tell. It’s a true story. You never knew my name was Yankay, the firstborn. That I was once a twin. That I had a brother Alusani, the other half of my soul. Or that I grew jealous of him and longed for my mother to look at me, without knowing what it was I wished for. And how I watched a man with skin like the shadows of the moon collecting the souls of lost children in the forest.

One day you married one of these men and brought him home. As soon as I saw him so close I could not help myself. I reached out my hand and I touched his skin. And it was warm, so warm — not cold like sea water. But I made you ashamed and afterwards I heard you whispering, making apologies for me you thought I was too deaf to hear.

Maybe I acted like a fool — and you can call me that if you like. I don’t care because, you see, for one moment I was she, that girl again and I wanted to run to your moon-shadow man and beg him: ‘Tell me where Alusani is? Tell me which one of the birds flying in the sky is my brother?’

3 Mariama, 1931: Stones

I remember how it was when I danced with my mother. Sometimes I close my eyes and drift as though I am going to sleep. But I am not asleep. I am remembering a time when I was still a baby, before I knew how to talk or even walk.

Whirling. Whirling. Round and around. Don’t feel dizzy. Eyes closed. Nose between shoulder blades. Lips against soft skin. Breathe the scent of her. We dance. Me on her back. We want to go on for ever. This is how we dance on nights we go together to the women’s place — the secret place where women meet.

Supper eaten, mama binds me to her back. Holding me squashed against her breasts, bends over, twists my body round her own. On her back now. I know better than to fall off. Cling to her with my thighs, my fists. She drapes the cloth across my buttocks, holds it in her teeth. Ties two ends tight round her waist. Hitches the other corners up under her armpits — a knot above her breasts.

I’m part of her. Feel her flesh, muscles, sinews — walking, working, out in the plantation pruning trees. Feel her heart quicken and slow. I know who scares her. I know whom she loves. When my father passes she stiffens, drawing air into her nostrils — like an oribi we saw drinking at the river — and quivering beneath the stillness of her skin. We carry food to the workers at the plantation. She unwraps the pots, ladles soup on rice. Men come forward. Pa Foday, he comes close. ‘Momo’, he says. Thank you. Feel the creak of the cloth against her ribs as she catches her breath.

Evening time we slip away. Slip away to the secret bush. Walking quickly. Past houses, past gardens. Into the groves. She walks like a queen. Or like a woman on her way to meet a lover. Where the path from the rice fields meets the path from the stream, see the gap in the trees? See the cotton tree high above the rest? That’s where we’re headed. We follow an invisible path. No one can follow us.

Women are already here. So many women. Talking. Talking women’s business, they call it. We don’t care to talk. Not so very much. We wait to dance. When the talk is finished the drums start, the singing. And the dancing. We dance for the elders and the younger women, too. Whirling, whirling. Round and around. Round and around we go.

We dance until the light comes up and dances too, across a horizon flat and empty as a stage. And then we walk quickly back to the village, collecting sticks of firewood as we go.

Then I learned to talk. She stopped taking me with her. I might repeat secrets told, women’s special secrets. Wait, she said, until your turn comes. That was one time.

Then there was another time. The time when the dancing stopped. And when I said her name, a space opened up that I could fall into. Silence. Silence after her name. Silence where the music used to be. Once women bound their hands to drum all night. Afterwards they met in secret, real secret. Silent secret. Away from the eyes of men. Away from Haidera. But when they tried to dance, they couldn’t. The steps were gone. They had followed my mother when she went away.

I used to read the things written about us. These weren’t the books the nuns approved of. One book was by a Very Famous Author. Oh, all the writing on the back said how good this book was. This famous man lived in our country for a short time and then he wrote a story that would make sure nobody ever wanted to come here. A story about a man who arrived on these shores and lost his faith. Many years later I read another book by the same writer, about a woman who has to choose between her god and the man she loves. When I read that book I felt a pain, like I had been stabbed in my side. I felt this woman’s terrible choice as if it was my own. Because I remembered my mother and how she was forced to deny her own faith.

A woman has no religion. Have you heard people say that here? A woman has no religion. And maybe it’s true. We change our faith to marry and worship to please our husbands. But it was not always so.

In those days they were always coming to convert us. The Muslims from the North, the Christians from the South. We deserted our gods. But nobody wrote stories about that. Instead they congratulated themselves on how many souls they had saved. My own soul was saved twice. But my mother. My mother would not yield. And to this day nobody has ever come to me and said she was noble and righteous to do so.

We did not have a house of our own. No. We slept in a back room of my father’s house. Small, not so light, one window. It looked out on to the alleyway where old men came to smoke. The tobacco smelled like burning flowers. Not such a quiet room either. There was the women’s cooking circle behind us, too. Odours of simmering plasass, the scent of tobacco and talking, old men’s voices and women’s voices. Hush!

A plain room. But mama tried to make it into something pretty: striped country cloths on the floor, cloth dyed red with camwood on the walls. Lattice shutters over the windows. In the corner the box with her things in it, the things she brought when she came here.

1931. Yes, it was 1931. We didn’t count years in those days. That came later. Who was to say where to begin? What year was the first? So we began in many places: the Year the New Chief Came Out of Seclusion; the Year We Came to this Place; the Year the River Rose and Snatched Away Houses in Old Rofathane; the Year the First Coffee Beans Ripened. The Year of the Locust Disaster. That had been the year before. The villagers lit fires between the rows of trees and draped fishing nets over the branches to protect the beans. I was young. I thought a locust was some kind of fish that swam through the air. In the morning the trees were saved; there were crisp locusts scattered across the land and the air filled with their odour.

Yes, we remembered years by the things that happened. Important things.

So why do I say 1931? I’ll tell you. Because that was the year of Haidera. That much I know. I read it in a book by a professor of history. An English professor, but who wrote our history, if you understand me. And he said Haidera came in 1931. So I said to myself, well then that is the year of my mother’s story too. The man who wrote that book, he did not think much of Haidera. A fanatic. That’s what he wrote in his book. That Haidera was a fanatic. He said not so many people followed Haidera. But he was wrong. There were many people who loved Haidera Kontorfili.

That year was also the Year My Teeth Fell Out. A warm evening in the dry season. My sisters were out, walking round the houses with their age mates. Arms encircling waists. Calling greetings to the people sitting at the front of their houses. ‘I pray good evening, aunty.’ ‘Good evening, uncle.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Thanto a Kuru.’ I thank God. ‘Remember me to your mother.’ ‘Yes, aunty.’ Or else they were sitting by the river, whispering into other girls’ ears. I was the youngest, too young to go with them. The one who called me, he returned. And the next one too who would have been another sister. Two children missing in between, like the space in my row of teeth.

I lay at home licking my gums. That day I told my mother I was sick and she gave me mimosa tea to drink. I sipped air in with my tea, through the gap in my mouth. The tea blistered my gums, already rough from sucking green mangoes with Bobbio, the Boy with No Voice. Lying in the fields sucking green mangoes. That’s what I did the day before. But I don’t tell such things to mama. I let my eyes follow her. I like to watch my mother. To me she is beautiful.

Today, as on other days, this is what she does:

She goes to the box and feels among the layers of clothes. She takes a tin, a tin wrapped up in red poplin, stitched with cowrie shells and leather-bound sassa. Fearful amulets to protect what’s inside. There is writing on the side. It says: ‘Woodbines’. Just so you know. For myself, I only knew that later. On the floor she folds her legs beside her and empties the cigarette cup. Pebbles and stones tumble on to the floor, she spreads them out with a hand like a fan.

There are seventeen of them. This I know. Because sometimes when I am left alone I go to the chest and take them out for myself. I empty them into my palm, feel their weight, listen to the noise they make, like they are talking to each other. Or to me. A pinkish pebble, curved in one place, flat on the other and inside dark and glistening like a sliced plum. A big one, flat and grey with a dimple that fits my thumb, just so. A dark stone, shaped just like a cigar and veined too, like a tobacco leaf. I hold it to my lips and copy the men outside. A cream-coloured pebble, with pale lines intersecting across its length and width: paths and a crossroads. A translucent crystal. A triangular stone, dusty like chalk. A black moon-rock. There are others. Ah, my favourite: white, five-sided, smooth as my skin, but rippled as the sand on the windward side of a dune.

Alone in her room, except for me, my mother talks to the stones. Yes, she does, and often. But first she gathers them up in her hands and throws them in the air like a celebration. She holds out her right hand and catches some, leaving others to fall. She counts them two by two. One, two. One, two. This is how she goes. And sometimes: one. She puts the single stone at the end of the line. She casts and counts and casts and counts. Two rows of stones. The road to life and the road to death. All the time she murmurs soft sounds. I know these sounds by heart. The cadence of her voice, the rhythm and sequence of the vowels, the placing of the consonants. Though not the words they make.

On Green Mango Day mama beckons me over. ‘See this here, Mariama,’ she says. ‘Here again on the road to life,’ I push my face in close. A small, plain stone the colour of sand. ‘Maybe a brother for you. What do you say?’ She lets her hand rest on my hair. I like it. I stay. But I have nothing to say. I don’t care for the look of the stone so much. She takes her hand away, folds it up in her lap with the other one. Now she’s talking to the stones. Telling them this week’s news. The important things that have happened to us.

Oh, she saw her clothes float away down the river. It was in a dream: a rainbow-coloured river of clothes. The brown hen hatched a deformed chick. It had no eyes. It died. A burial two houses away. My bellyache.

I’m happy. A little guilty. But the pleasure of hearing her tell the stones about me is sweeter.

Searching the stones for patterns and combinations, the answers to questions. What does she want? I don’t know, cannot imagine. Because I have everything I want right here. Right here. My sisters will be back soon. Now I’m sleeping with my head resting on her thigh. The sound of her chanting, like a lullaby.

In our room late at night she made snuff. Good snuff, they said. She ground the tobacco leaves, mixed the brown dust with cloves and lubi from palm nuts. The cloves were what made it special. One time I stole some of her snuff. Took a pinch in my fingers, and then swallowed it quickly when she walked back into the room. My head spun. Not like when we used to dance. I felt sick and nearly fainted. Oh, so this is what snuff is, I thought. What person would want that?

But people did. Every week or so we carried a jar of snuff to Madam Bah who sold it to the customers who visited her shop. She sat there, arm resting on the window frame of her front room, merchandise piled up behind her, outlined against the darkness. Matches, cigarettes. She opened up the tins and sold them one by one. ‘One stick or two? Tuppence each.’ Baking soda. Balls of black soap. Imported needles. On the table next to her, a wooden cabinet with a dented fly-screen. Inside, squares of deep-fried dough under muslin and sugar cane and snuff. Not a real shop. But the closest we had.

Madam Bah was an only wife but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. And she was the only woman who didn’t have a vegetable garden where she had to go weeding and watering garden eggs and yams all day. Madam Bah bought all her food in the market or from other women. Also she was the only person we called madam. Sometimes I thought this was because she was a shopkeeper. So she deserved to be called madam. Then I thought it was maybe because Ma Bah sounded funny. She travelled and brought Dutch Wax prints, Brillian, shirting, beads and ‘shine shine’ trinkets from far off places. Whenever word was that Madam Bah had come back from a trip my father’s wives stood in line to see what she had brought.

So here we come. With our snuff to sell. I stand with my nose over the window-sill shop counter. But first my mother wants to see a piece of Dutch Wax. And Madam Bah does not get up, but rocks back on her stool and stretches her arm out to reach the cloth. My mother slides her palm over the slippery surface of the cloth. She asks questions. The width? Yes, and the length? Good quality? Top quality, nods Madam Bah. She bats at a fly with her fan and it falls on to the counter, upside down, spinning. Madam Bah does not hold the cloth up so my mother can compliment the pattern. Always the conversations end the same way. My mother says: ‘Maybe next time.’ And Madam Bah says: ‘Yes, next time. Next time there will be more choice. You’ll see.’

Mama’s mother died of a swelling sickness back in the days of the old. Long before I was born. My mother had no brothers. When my father saw her she was visiting an aunt in the old place. She left her own people a long way behind when she married him. All the money she had of her own came from the sale of our snuff, which Madam Bah kept in her big jar and dispensed directly into the open palms of her customers or poured into the little glass phials and silver snuff-boxes they brought with them. From our room my mother sold snuff to the younger women, who slipped in between chores and smeared the dark dust above their back teeth. My sisters pinched me and told me not to tell. Nobody, especially Ya Namina. The younger wives were among our best customers.

Madam Bah gives me a piece of fried dough to eat. She leans out of her window and strokes my cheek. And smiles a small smile, with her head on one side. And she looks at me like this. ‘Such a shame,’ she says to my mother. ‘If she had been a boy … Then she takes a pinch of snuff. Sneezes. Clears her throat. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

Mama says: ‘It’s a fine one,’ in a voice that expects to be corrected.

There is Bobbio. Sitting by a pillar in the shade of the awning. Wearing his grimy duster coat. Ashy legs. From a distance he looks like an old man. Bobbio is always somewhere, hanging around the meeting house, sitting on the edge of somebody’s verandah watching them talk or eat, a forgotten guest. Sometimes, when I go outside to pee in the night, I see him. Standing silent in the shadows of a house not his own. Nobody knew what was the matter with Bobbio. Why he had No Voice. He lived with his grandmother, the birth attendant, who said he was born in Daruth. The way she said it made it sound like everybody in that town was the same way. I imagined a town of silent people, moving noiselessly about.

But other people whispered that Bobbio was slow because his mother conceived him while she was still breastfeeding her last child.

I liked Bobbio. Though he sometimes did things that made children chase him and grown-ups shoo him away. He banged his chest with his fist. Then he’d slap you with the back of his hand. Whap! Hard like that. Bobbio was strong. People became annoyed. But I understood. Me, me, he was saying when he hit himself. You, you. Trying to start a conversation. They thought he was stupid. Bobbio couldn’t speak. But he wasn’t deaf and dumb. Bobbio could hear. And he understood what we were saying.

In his hands Bobbio holds a string of raffia. He loops it round the little finger and thumb of each hand. And again around his index fingers so it looks like a pair of crosses. He loops the string again around his third finger, once more over his little fingers. And in a trice he slips his two index fingers through the web, turns his hands inside out and holds them up. The string had transformed into an angular crane in mid-flight. I run and reach for it. Bobbio is older than me and taller than me.

‘Show me, show me!’

Madam Bah laughs at this. Her laugh is loud and empty. Just a bigger version of her smile. ‘Maybe they’ll marry,’ I hear her say. A crease appears on my mother’s brow. And she opens her mouth and takes a breath and presses her lips together. Madam Bah doesn’t see. She’s counting money on her lap, below the counter.

We sit on the stoop, Bobbio and I. Sitting on the stoop watching the world. We do this a lot, on different stoops. Sometimes here. Sometimes my father’s house. Sometimes the house where Ya Namina’s mother sits all day and doesn’t mind us. What I like about Bobbio is his silence. Everybody else talks too much. We sit a while. I tie the string in knots and Bobbio takes it from me and begins again. This time slowly.

Against the glare of the sky the outlines of the houses begin to wobble. At this time of day the village is empty. Pools of rice spread out to dry in the sun. Rows of raffia stiffening and bleaching. But no people, for they are down in the fields and in the coffee grove. Only the elders are here, sitting in a row on the bamboo bench on the other side of the square from the meeting house. The old women sit on their porches. Everybody sits and waits for the day to end and the people to come back.

Behind me Madam Bah is talking. Still. While she counts out the money.

A man with woman trouble: ‘Don’t ask me. I mind my own business. But they say now he’s gone. Gone to fetch her back.’

Sucking her teeth, a new stranger in the village: ‘I hear he plans to stay. Well, we’ll see.’

The prayer meeting. Madam Bah’s husband the Fula carried news of this one from the town. He goes there on business. I try to imagine it. Imagine the town. And the Fula in it doing business. Running around in his white djellaba and baggy trousers. I cannot. I have never been to the town. I don’t know what business is. Though sometimes he does it with my father. My father says Fulas are honest because they believe that one penny of profit dishonestly made means they will lose the whole fortune. Me, I don’t think Madam Bah believes that. But then she’s not a real Fula. Just married to one.

It’s a big prayer meeting this time.

‘The Fula says there are so many people in town for this thing. Some all the way from Kabala. It’s going to be one big wahallah!’

‘Will you go?’

‘The Fula says we should. But I said: “Bo, leave me.” Let him go. I’ve too much to do already.’ And Madam Bah exhales so that her shoulders sag. She leans forward and beckons my mother close. Like she has a secret to tell her. And she takes my mother’s hands in hers and slips some coins soundlessly across. My mother knots the coins into a corner of her lappa.

She reaches a hand out behind her. Already moving away. Confident that I will catch it. And I do.

‘So that’s that.’

‘Until next time.’

I wave to Bobbio.

My Face.

Let me tell you about My Face. That day, at Madam Bah’s shop, I didn’t know about it. Nobody teased me. Not Bobbio. Not even the other children. We had no mirrors. We didn’t look at our reflections in the streams, the way they show us in films, kneeling down to stare at our features rippling in the water. We only knew ourselves by the reactions of other people. People might turn to look at you because you were so beautiful. Or because you were disfigured.

Madam Bah had a consignment of mirrors. Small squares of glass — some already chipped — with silvered backs. She let me hold one. In no time children crowded around, trying to see their own faces. The shopkeeper had known what she was doing — letting us play with one of the precious mirrors — because in no time the grownups came over to see what the commotion was about.

First I was too pleased just to see my own reflection. I turned this way. My reflection turned the other. I smiled, she smiled right back at me. It wasn’t long before we were poking out our tongues and pulling faces at each other. The mirror was passed from hand to hand. Everyone took one turn and then another. This time I winked. Right eye. Left eye. Right eye. Left eye. Left eye. I wiped the smeared surface of the mirror. Left Eye. I looked again. I stared at myself for a long time, until somebody snatched the mirror away. I put my hand up to my face and touched it. Traced my features, conjuring through fingertips the image still in my mind — my eye stretching down towards my mouth, lower lid pulled open. Exposed pink. A face made of wet clay somebody had dragged their fingers through.

At bedtime my mama rubbed her nose against my face. Nose to nose. Right eye. Left eye. The sloping eye and the straight. I was a happy child. Later I wondered what she made of it. For a long time I tried so hard to remember. What did she wish for when she spoke to the stones? When she asked them things. Did she ever ask them to make it right?

Haidera. Haidera. Haider Spider. Haidera Kontorfili.

Haidera Kontorfili said he could turn the sun into the moon and the moon into the sun. He could tell whether an unbroken egg would hatch a rooster or a hen. Every living creature knew his name. Whoever did not obey the rules of Annabi would one day be put to death. Unmarried women were Black Dogs. One day fire would come like rain and plague, would strike the unbeliever down.

He told us we should not fear the Europeans or pay the potho’s taxes. And of all the things Haidera said, it was this last one that brought the trouble down upon his head.

We are to go to the prayer meeting. The preparations take two days. Mutton roasted. Yams baked. Whole fishes fried. Ginger pulped for ginger beer. Black-eyed beans skinned, mashed, wrapped in banana leaves for oleleh. Sleeping mats, country cloths, canvas tents. A stove to boil water for coffee. The men haul sacks of rice and cut down great hands of bananas and plantains. I chase after high-stepping hens, push them into a basket, from where they protest in indignant tones.

The town is no more than the headquarters of one of the country’s poorest provinces. And yet I fear becoming lost. Noise pounding my ears, dust dry in my throat, air too hot to breathe. Looking this way and that. We huddle together, suddenly diminished. The streets are wide as rivers. The houses have rooms built one on top of the other. I watch as people walk up outsidestaircases. They look as though they are stepping through the air. Walking on air. Why doesn’t someone build a staircase all the way up to the sky, I ask myself? To find out what is really there.

We cross the street at the roundabout: cracked concrete covered in yellow grass gone to seed. Two men heave a handcart, one pushing, one pulling. Their naked muscles glisten and flash with sweat. A man with a monkey on a chain. It lurches forward, startling me — a tiny, wizened, old man’s face and a baby’s cry. Hawkers selling food. A man standing next to a barrel of water. A tin cup dangles on a string. My father calls him over. ‘Sssss!’ We wait while the man lugs the heavy barrel over. It takes a little time. My father drinks first and then the rest of us, one after the other.

In the main square a hundred families jostle for space. Men in inky-black robes stroll through the crowds or stand in pairs around the perimeter. One of them greets my father and directs us. We settle, light fires, spread mats, erect screens and awnings. The sun is high, our shadows like small pools of black wax. In the shade of the canopies we rest, we wait.

I am sure I am too excited to sleep. I put my head in my mother’s lap, breathe. I feel her stroking my hair, her fingers rustle when she touches the rim of my ear. Dream fragments float past behind my eyes. A bird woven out of string. Crows that shift shape into blackclad men. Staircases leading from cloud to cloud. And I sink through air as heavy as water, as if weighed down by sodden wings.

I am woken by a sound like a buffalo’s roar. All around me people are standing, getting to their feet. I scramble up, crane my neck. Nothing. I am too close to the ground.

‘Haidera! Haidera!’

Now I see him. Standing high up above the crowd on a platform: a man whose robes billow around him, even more full than those of my father, but plain, entirely unadorned. He wears a white turban. Around his neck an amulet swings on a leather cord.

‘Allahu Akbar!’

‘Akbar Allahu!’

People bow down, snatch handfuls of sand from the ground, rubbing their hands one over the other as though in water. Ahead I see my father wipe his hands across his face. He bows, kneels. My mother next to me, she does the same. I keep my eyes fixed upon my father as we pray under Haidera’s command: standing, bending, kneeling, stretching our necks like herons to touch our foreheads to the ground. The movements, the pattern, the rhythm, they are just like a dance.

Now we stop praying and listen to Haidera, whose voice is as thin and high as a bird’s, and like a bird’s it floats across the air so that even the people at the back can hear. He doesn’t speak the way we do, but with an accent from somewhere else.

‘I Am the Man Sent to All Worshippers in the Name of God to Tell You the Prophecies of Muhammad. My Song is Alla, Alla.’

Haidera talks. The sun arcs across the sky. It is hard to sit still so long. People cheer when he warns of false Mohammedans who come to trick us and take our money. They cheer again when he promises to stop them and to kill any who refuse to leave. The black-clad Shekunas carry sticks and short swords. I don’t doubt what he says is true. He tells us the terrible things that await those who do not follow Annabi. For them the rivers will drain into the soil, the rice harvest fail. His bird’s voice rises to a shriek, like the call of a peacock.

‘Those Who Will Be Saved Are Only the True Muslims.’

I touch my mama’s sleeve. She is wearing her best gown and she is beautiful. I pull her finger. I ask her if we are to Be Saved. Yes, she tells me and slides her hand out from beneath mine, strokes the back of my hand lightly.

I turn my head this way and that to look at the people listening to the preacher. People who come to Be Saved. People who have come to Be Healed, because that is what they say Haidera can do. There are families like ours, men with their wives and children. Here and there a lame leg stiffly extended; a gaunt figure propped up by the shoulders; a child’s inert frame wrapped in blankets; eyes that are opaque and unblinking. At the back are the beggars. Some have limbs that are missing. Others have limbs that are too big or too small. Some have limbs that are falling off. And there are poor people, who sit on the dry earth with none of the comforts we have brought with us: lined faces, scant clothing, lean and scarred bodies.

A way off: four people. Different from everyone else. Legs straight, hands clasped behind their backs. Standing when everyone else is sitting. And when the time comes to pray they alone do not kneel. Short-sleeved shirts and short trousers. Red round caps. Court Messengers who work for the pothos. There is one who comes to our village sometimes. The people greet him, but rarely invite him to eat. Sometimes my father calls for my mother to serve him a meal and I help her carry it out to where he sits on a stool outside the meeting house. He talks to my father and leaves again soon after. The Black White Man, they call him.

Out in front my father nods. There are sins Haidera has seen here with his own eyes. Big eyes, with lines above and beneath. ‘Promiscuousness.’ Drawing the word out, turning it into four words. Prom. Isc. Uous. Ness! His mouth snaps shut on the end of the word, the tongue disappears with a flick like a tail into a hole. My father bobs his head. ‘Slander.’ Bob, goes my father’s head again. ‘Blasphemy.’ Bob. ‘Greed.’ Bob. ‘Envy.’ Bob, bob. And my father looks around him now. His chin lifted slightly. ‘Gambling, cheating.’ My father nods firmly. ‘Usury.’ This time he doesn’t nod. ‘Excessive polygamy.’ The preacher’s voice whistles, sibilant, trembling. Something shifts in the air.

Ya Namina, of course; Ya Isatta Numokho; Sakie, my own mother; Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay Kamara, Tenkamu, whose family name I never knew. Memso and Saffie, who are still young and under the tutelage of Ya Namina. My father’s wives are gathered around him with the exception of two who are new mothers. They have returned to their families and are not expected back until the children are weaned, two years from now. We are all here. My father sits at the head of us.

But I don’t have time to think any more about that. A ripple runs through the mass of people near the platform. The crowd splits apart. A man stumbles forward like a shipwrecked sailor thrown up on the sand. In his hands he holds a carved wooden statue. Other people follow. Each holding a figure, sometimes more than one. They lay them down in front of the platform. A mound rises. Some people turn and bow to Haidera. One man prostrates himself, the whole length of his person pressed to the ground, and stays there until two of the Shekunas heave him up by the arms. The crowd roars as each new supplicant comes forward.

Up on tiptoe I can see Haidera pacing back and forth. Now his disciples are taking carvings from people and throwing them on the pile. I can barely hear what he is saying. He gesticulates, points up at the sky with his left hand, his voice rises and falls. A few words carry above the noise of the crowd. He is talking about Blasphemy and Native Idols. The preacher bites into his lip, emphasises the word Native, the way he did when he talked about Promiscuousness. As though it were something Rancid.

From behind, a shout. I swivel round. A man dashes out of one of the houses around the square. In one hand he is holding a small soapstone figure, the ones the farmers bury in the fields when they plant the first seed. In the other hand he clutches a string of beads. He is wheeling around like a kite in the sky, like a crazy man. Now two more are rapping on the door of another house. No answer. They push at the door, which opens easily. In and out. More men join in. Not Shekunas. Those ones watch but do nothing. Ordinary men. Forcing their way into shops and homes, whooping every time they find an old god to confiscate.

Whose houses they are I cannot tell you, because nobody dares to utter a challenge. The mob tears around the square and down an empty side street, out of view. There are sounds: the rush of feet, splintering wood, the echo of voices.

The fire blazes into the night. Nobody goes near it. You might think it was a stinking cesspool instead of a warm fire on a cool, bright night. A night when the stars have come out to watch the earth. Nobody warms their hands. Nobody borrows a brand for their cooking fire. Nobody pushes a yam into the embers. Instead men with long sticks poke around in the ashes. And where they find a statue or a figure that has survived the heat, they set about smashing it into powder.

Some pieces went missing. I don’t know.

I know it was after Haidera. But how long after, this I cannot tell you — a day, a month, a year; these measures of time change constantly when you are a child. Sometimes a day is longer than a year. Sometimes a month is shorter than an hour. I wish I could remember.

Mama stopped making snuff.

My sisters and I tried to make the snuff instead. We searched for the pestle and mortar and ground the tobacco, lubi, cloves. Mama lay on the bed, a distracted presence. Did not watch us or answer our questions. She had lain there many days. Only sometimes she rose, went to her box and pulled out her possessions, sat on the floor surrounded by strewn clothing. Other times she slept. We took over her duties, cooking and carrying the food down to the plantation workers. We told nobody, except Pa Foday. We said she suffered from the fever, though it was not the time of year. Between us no mention was made of it; we dared not look at each other. Instead we shared out the tasks, uncomplaining. For once, no bickering.

But the snuff gave us away. We did not have our mother’s special knowledge of the precise amounts, the balance between the ingredients. I carried it to Madam Bah, who coughed for a long time, then stepped out from behind her counter and followed me to our room. We, my mother’s daughters, waited outside. After a short while Madam Bah went to Ya Namina’s house next to the mosque, and together they returned and went into mama’s room.

From that day we ate our meals in Ya Namina’s house.

Mama was sick. Nobody could heal her. So she went in search of a cure of her own. The door to her room left standing open. Dressed only in an old gown. Hair uncovered and loose, standing out at every angle, like the dolls we made with sticks and goats’ hair. She rose from her bed and walked out of the village.

When a person dies our people cry and sing. The drums sound. The house is home to many visitors. When my mother went away there was silence. My father’s house was still. The silence slid down the mud walls. Great drops stretching slowly from the eaves, smothering the thoughts that hung in the air. It clotted every crevice. It rose in the back of my throat when I tried to ask about my mother, and threatened to make me retch. It filled the house until we could no longer open our mouths for fear of drowning in it.

My father, in order to avoid being drowned, went away on business with his sixth wife.

And this same time was when the dancing stopped. The steps followed mama when she walked out of the village. She went, leaving behind everything, even her name. So I wrapped it in longing and kept it for her.

Clouds spread over the sky. Overripe fruit drops from the trees at night and morning brings the smell of wet earth and the sweet stink of rotting flesh. The river is dammed. The water rises. After dark, house-children — black-eyed geckoes — feast on swarms of mosquitoes.

I was sharing a plate of rice with my sisters at the back of Ya Namina’s house when mama’s ghost walked back into the village. Three people saw her with their own eyes. Salia Bangura and his woman had argued and he was late that morning. She walked past them both without a word of greeting. The alpha was shaving with a piece of broken mirror on the steps of the mosque. Over his shoulder he saw the figure of a woman, dripping with dew. Afterwards he pointed at the shattered glass, dropped in fright. Old man Bangura, spoiling for a fight he could win, began an argument over whether a ghost would possess a reflection. Nobody could agree. What they did agree on was this: spirit or mortal man, it walked straight up the main road towards our father’s house.

We heard them shout and dropped our plate. We ran with greasy mouths and fingers. But by the time we reached the place where the three of them stood with open mouths, she had vanished.

The next time I see her for myself.

Up the river mangroves crowd the banks. There we like to dive into the muddy waters and pull oysters from the tangled roots. Below, the river spreads out, glistening green, weed streaming just below the surface like a witch’s hair. Here boulders are scattered across the sand, black pearls at a Tuareg woman’s throat. It is morning, raining. Drops of rain splash on to the water, as though on to a scalding pan. Steam rises from the bottomless below. Insects race along the surface of the water, escaping on pinpoint feet. It was once my favourite place. I used to come here and dig fish out of the mud, fish with no fins and bulging eyes.

At first I don’t notice her, standing half hidden in the shadows on the sharp line where the trees meet the river, in front of the abandoned fishing hut. Her hair is scattered about her shoulders in tangled ropes. Her dress is tattered, torn at the neck so it hangs down like a flap of skin. One breast is naked, tilted up, pointing at the sky. She is watching me.

I climb down from the rock, slowly. Afraid of startling her. She is so very still.

‘Mama,’ I cry. I start to run. She jerks slightly. Takes a step towards me, extending clasped hands, like she is begging me for something, imploring me. ‘Mama,’ I run faster, I catch my foot on a rock. She steps into the sunlight.

That day some boys from the village on the opposite bank had crossed to set some traps on our side. Now they see her.

‘Hai! Hai!’ One of them bends to pick up a stone.

‘Leave her alone!’ But I’m too late. Like a hounded stray my mother cowers, starts to back off. She is gone before the stone hits the branch of a nearby tree. A shower of splintering bark and leaves. I race to the boy nearest me and push him in the chest. Hard with the heels of my hands.

‘She’s a crazy woman,’ he touches his temple and laughs loudly, ‘Craz-y. Let her go from here.’

I run after her. I run behind the fisherman’s hut. She is nowhere. Inside the hut a tree grows through the middle, out through the roofless roof. The mud is crumbling away from the walls, leaving wooden poles exposed like ribs. Inside there is a place on the floor, like the warm spot underfoot where a chicken has roosted for a while.

Pa Foday: he brought my mother back. As soon he came back from the plantation and heard the news. Without even a lamp, he searched all night until he found her. I remember that night because of the dry thunder. The lightning lit up the sky as bright as day. I prayed it would help Pa Foday.

And it did. He walked into the village leading her gently. And my mother walked behind him as though she had only just learned how, as though the soles of her feet were tender as a newborn’s and had never touched the ground.

Pans of boiling water. Balls of soap. Comb. Clarified palm oil. Fresh clothes. Under the supervision of Ya Namina the two junior wives entered and left the chamber where they kept my mother. We waited outside like we had the time before. Later I heard them whispering to each other at the back of the house. But when they saw me hovering close by they stopped talking. They stood up and walked away, gathering their lappas around them, as if to cover their indiscretion. Little hurried steps. Shuffle, shuffle.

I crept up to the back of the house. I took a stool and placed it beneath the window. I braced myself when it creaked under my weight. Half up. Half down. On one leg. In the room at the end of the house I heard Ya Namina and my father talking. I thought maybe I would creep along the wall to listen. But I wanted to see my mother. I pressed my sloping eye against the crack between the plaster and the window shutter.

Still to this day I can picture her, so clearly I could keep her there for ever. They had shaved her head. What else to do? Hair so badly matted it shattered the teeth of the comb. They threw the locks on the fire. Days later I found a singed lock lying in the ashes. I stole it, hid it in a crevice in the rocks — at the place Bobbio and I once hung out eating green mangoes. A long time ago.

Alone in her room, she was dancing. No faltering footsteps, no baby gait. Body curved like a palm tree yielding to the embrace of the wind. One foot crossing the other. Crossing the other. Arms extended. Chin lifted. Head tilted: naked, shaved head. Fingers fanned backwards. Turning a perfect arc. Round and around.

Round and around.

In the end Bobbio, the Boy with No Voice, was the only person who dared to break the silence.

Early evening. The light, heavy with dust, hovered between day and night. I sat on the three-legged stool at the back of the house, filling oil lamps. I looked up to find Bobbio standing close by. Watching me in silence, unblinking. Like a house-child. Like he could see into my soul. That was a thing about Bobbio, I remember. He could hold anybody’s gaze. For him there was nothing to it. Even after they looked away, he just carried on gazing at the back of their head. People learned to avoid catching his eye for fear of inadvertently starting a staring match. In fact, people often pretended Bobbio wasn’t there at all. I knew what it was now to have eyes slide over you, like greasy eggs in a pan.

Bobbio led me by the hand. Down to the river bank. Made me stand on the jagged rocks, pressing my shoulders down with balled fists. Then he stared at the ground, concentrating. He began to stamp and kick, like a cricket hopping about on smouldering grass, pick up stones and throw them over his shoulder. He flung a pebble at the water. It bounced once and sank.

I had never seen Bobbio act this way. Flecks of foam flew from the corners of his mouth. A shiver trickled down my back, a trail of goosebumps in its wake. People said a krifi called Tang Bra lived here. Boatmen told tales of an invisible weight in the back of their boats. The mud dragging at their poles. Nobody came to this place at night.

Slowly the tension came alive, stirring in my belly like roiling eels. I got up to go. Bobbio grabbed my hand. It was nearly dark. Leaning over me Bobbio looked like his own shadow.

Bobbio is standing very close to me. His breathing is loud. I don’t know what he wants. He lets go of my left hand and takes up my right. Turns it over. Palms slide across one another. Something warm, heavy, drops. I am confused, it feels familiar. I squeeze my eyes closed. Feel the weight in my hand. A surface smooth as skin. One, two, three four five. I open my eyes. Strain to see in the nearly-night. There it is. Rippled like the sand on the windward side of a desert dune. A white, five-sided stone.

Now it is I who seizes Bobbio. ‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?’ I force him to look at me. I know he understands. He returns my hands to me, waves at me to sit down. Like a spectator at a masquerade I watch while Bobbio tells his story.

And here it is. Together with the little I knew for myself:

The Shekunas forced people to forsake the old gods, learn Arabic and pray in the new way. There were bonfires in every town and village. People were afraid. They carried their prayer mats to the fields, dropped to their knees and touched their noses to the ground every time a stranger approached.

In the first few months that followed the meeting my father became suddenly more devout. Yes, I remember that. I thought little of it. I thought little of anything in those days. Where before he left his wives to their own devotions, during that time he demanded their presence in the mosque every Friday. I wore a head veil and accompanied my mother. We sat at the back of the mosque among the other women. Ya Namina, she took to accompanying him there every day. So did the two youngest wives, keen to demonstrate their obedience.

Any activity Haidera said was haram, our father forbade. No more drinking palm wine in the village. Haram. Instead the old men sat out near the fields late at night passing the gourd from one to the other and wandered back towards the houses on unsteady legs at dawn. All matters connected with the old religion: charms, even the beads mothers hung around the waists of little children. Haram. Offerings of cakes and kola nuts at the graves of the dead. Haram. Dancing, drumming. Haram. The secret gatherings of women. Haram! Haram!

It was our usual habit, on those nights when it was our mother’s turn to be visited by our father, to sleep in the house of Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay. For those three nights we shared mats with their children. It was during one of those times, while he wandered through the darkness, that Bobbio saw them.

A man striding. A woman pleading. Please. Please. Bobbio marches with matchstick straight legs and arms. Begs with a sideways bent body and clasped fingers. Points at me. Cradles an invisible baby in his arms. Your mother. My mother and my father. In the night. Your father is very angry. Hooded eyes, a rigid mouth. Now a sorrowful face. Your mother is crying. Bobbio follows them. At a distance. Ducking in and out of shadows. Down to the river.

I wish Bobbio could speak. I wonder what they are saying to each other. Bobbio stares at me silently. Your mother. Yes? My mother. Bobbio looks around. Points beyond the trees in the direction of the houses. Something about the village? Our house? No! No! Madam Bah’s shop! Now, I am certain. The snuff. Of course. My father found out about us making snuff. Not good, but not so very bad. I let the air out of my chest.

Bobbio shakes his head. Shoulders droop. For several moments we are silent, gazing at each other. My friend drops to his knees, mimes a person praying. The mosque. Praying in the mosque. Your mother. My mother is a Muslim? Shakes his head vigorously and waves a finger. Not. My mother is not a Muslim? Shakes his head despondently. Shrugs. Your mother is not a good Muslim.

That evening my father had interrupted my mother in her room, as she read her fortune in the stones. My mother never looked for trouble, perhaps that’s why she wasn’t more careful. She never believed trouble might look for her. But at that time my father was in the grip of a fever, determined to end all the superstitions that marked us out as half-hearted Muslims. He demanded her stones.

My mother pleaded. Crawling towards him, trying to touch his feet. I watched Bobbio grovel on the ground, holding illusory garments around imaginary breasts. Reaching out to touch invisible feet. O mama! I felt my heart pounding. My father stepped smartly back, refused to allow her to abase herself. Now Bobbio was up, chest out. He pulled her up. Bobbio grabbed me and held me against him. I felt myself go limp, just as my mother had. He threw up his arm. Scattered the stones to the stars.

Bobbio could see in the dark, almost. He noted where the stones had fallen. When my mother and father had gone he went closer, inspected the stones lying on the ground. Saw they were different to the ordinary river pebbles. He slipped back into the shadows. Left them there. That was all.

A dark rock the shape of a man’s cigar. A broken pebble, open like a split plum. A stone with a dimple that fitted my thumb. A twinkling crystal. A pale three-cornered stone. I won’t say I found them quickly. Not at all. Bobbio helped me. But even then, there were some I never found, whose faces I did not remember as well as I imagined.

The Ancestors, she called them. Her murmured chant, once engraved upon my brain, now suddenly was gone. The effort of remembering turned into a great rock. Then, when I finally abandoned the effort, the words appeared, like a sculpture carved out of sandstone. And now I recognise them for what they are.

Names.

The name of my mother’s mother. Of my grandmother. Of my great-grandmother and her mother. The women who went before. The women who made me. Each stone chosen and given in memory of a woman to her daughter. So that their spirits would be recalled each time the stone was held, warmed by a human hand, and cast on the ground to ask for help. And as the names emerged from the shadows, I saw how my father had destroyed my mother.

Mama returned. She stayed for a while. Then one day she left again. Danced on the outskirts of villages where superstitious villagers, thinking she was possessed by the spirit of some siren, left food out for her. Nearer the town they chased her away with sticks and stones. Once, twice, maybe three times, she returned, but the restlessness was too great. She could not stay. Each time Pa Foday brought her back. Eventually the time came when she went away for good.

As for Haidera Kontorfili, the authority of the Shekunas grew ever greater. He began to tell the world that the rule of the pothos was at an end. So the Europeans sent soldiers to arrest Haidera. The preacher swore he would never surrender. The Shekunas lay in wait on the opposite side of a bridge and killed the first man who tried to cross: a white man. Soon after, reinforcements arrived armed with guns.

Haidera was killed in battle, they said. The hyenas feasted on his body. The order went out: taxes to be collected and defaulters punished. But Haidera’s followers claimed their leader had used his magic powers to evade his captors. He had transformed himself into a deer and galloped away.

4 Hawa, 1939: Fish

My life wasn’t supposed to be like this. But a lot of things happened to me that weren’t my fault. If things had been different, I could have been like you. Listen to what I am trying to tell you. The truth. The way it really was.

I never had luck. Not like other people. Yet I stand by and watch other people win all the time. Two days ago my neighbour came back with banknotes flapping out of his pocket, the new ones, not even the old ones. He had bought a lotto ticket and won. Later he came with soft drinks and beer for everybody in the compound. By the time I arrived there the others had already helped themselves. My own one was flat, but I drank it just to show willing.

People with bad thoughts were always taking my luck away. I was still a girl, I was gutting fish — slitting open the bellies with a sharp knife, pulling the gleaming dark mass from within. The fish were fresh, some still alive. Under the table cats darted in and out of our legs, snatching at the pieces that fell. One moment I was concentrating on my work, the next I felt a sharp pain in my foot that made me cry out loud. A dirty white cat stared up at me with cold blue eyes. Somebody tried to shoo it away. The cat clung to the ground with its claws. We waved our arms. It hissed back at us. One of the women, braver than the rest, threw a knife which clattered on to the ground. The cat jumped up on to the wall of the house and away. Later the same women would not look me in the face. They all knew it, you see. When a cat bites you, it’s a sure sign somebody out there is trying to change your luck for the worse.

When I was a child I was always being blamed, blamed for everything. It was easy to make me the scapegoat because I had nobody to defend me. So in time I found ways to make my own luck.

I remember a time of happiness.

On the first day of fishing the women gathered with their nets at dawn on the edge of the village. Then there was not one among them who dared to begin without her. Yet she took her time, always. Dressed with great care. Oiled her scalp between the partings of her hair. A bracelet dangled from her wrists, around her throat a necklace of red and white beads. And when she was ready she would call for me to fetch her fishing net down from the hook on the wall. Then she walked, with deliberate steps, down past the houses towards the stream. Never breaking her stride. When they saw her they ceased their chatter and followed her.

In those days she was my father’s favourite wife. She alone. If anyone tells you any different, they’re lying. This was the reason they waited for her. They knew she had my father’s ear. Whatever medicine the Tuntun had placed around the river would have been lifted. The day she collected her net and walked to the river — for all the women in the village that was the most assured sign.

At the waterside she tucked the trailing cloth of her lappa into the waist and shook out her net. I ran forward and picked up the end — so it didn’t drag across the ground. I walked behind her as she waded in. When the water reached her waist she gripped the bamboo hoop firmly in both hands. I let go of the tail, and watched it swim after her.

The way she walked — no concession to the rising water. The cloth around her waist swelled with air, and for a moment dragged behind her like a giant snail shell. Her breasts bobbed on the surface and her movements were as fluid as the water itself. Below the surface the outline of her body shifted into thousands of shapes. For a brief moment the sun caught her profile. She didn’t turn once. It was as though she were entirely alone.

The shallows turned to churning mud in the rush that followed. The women slipped and scrambled down the bank into the water like buffalo on a collapsing cliff. They jostled for the prize spots close to the bank or else midstream, where the weed grew densely along a sand spit and the fish liked to conceal themselves in the shadows. The slow ones were left to drag the bottom of the river, scooping water and fish into the open mouths of their nets.

Almost out of sight my mother walked on, between the banks of mangrove, heedless of the presence of water snakes and crabs. The boughs of the trees growing on opposite banks formed a bower over her head.

She kept flowers in her house. My father teased her for it, but she loved them, even the yellow blooms from the coco yams and the pale orange okra blossom that grew in everybody’s garden. She picked them and put them in water. He built her a house opposite his own; he only had to look across to see her every day. That was where I lived as a small child with my two elder brothers. When he visited he insisted that she shared his food with him. Sat down next to him, like an equal, and ate from the same dish.

I remember the sound of my father clapping his hands loudly and me running quickly to stand in front of them both. I bowed my head. ‘Eh bo! Will you look at this child. Taller with every day. How about a song for us? What songs do you know?’ My father was sitting with his legs crossed, wearing a loose-fitting green gown with a trail of embroidery down the front.

I was nervous and I felt my face growing big and hot. I thrust out my chest and pushed my shoulders so far back I felt my shoulder blades touch each other behind my back. I began a song we children sang down at the fields when we were scaring birds from the crops. We would sing across to each other, high up on our platforms above the fields. It was a song known to anyone who had ever been a child.

My father clapped, picking up the rhythm, and joined in with the reply. I remember how surprised I was at that. It was strange to think of my own father as a child and that once there were people who could tell him what to do.

And yet I noticed things about my father. Outside he had a stern face, which did not care to smile. He built the mosque and was inside it five times every day. He walked quickly. And people hurried around him, offering greetings, showing respect. A sober man. Yet I saw my mother do things nobody else did. He used to lie with his feet in her lap while she massaged them, pulling at his toes gently one by one. And I saw her hit him with a fan! Across his face, as though she were slapping him with the back of her hand, but using her fan instead. She touched him only lightly. Still, I had never seen anybody touch my father. For a long time I couldn’t remember what happened next. Maybe I had made myself forget. And then I realised the reason I couldn’t remember was that nothing happened. She hit him with her fan. Laughter. The conversation between them carried on.

That evening my mother sang the next part. Where my father’s voice was heavy and rich, like the smell of the best coffee beans, my mother’s was high and clear as an empty sky.

Then it was over. My father laughed and clapped again. He called me to sit by his side while he ate. I never could cross my legs properly, I don’t know why. My thighs ached and I was unable to take my eyes off his plate. Guineafowl stewed with honey and whole lemons. It was not a dish the other wives cooked. I hadn’t eaten. My stomach groaned loudly. My father laughed and his body shook. He held out a morsel of guineafowl in his fingers, and I reached up to take it from him. Then I remembered my mother. I hesitated. Hunger had prevented me thinking properly. Perhaps my father would consider me greedy. I glanced up at my mother, saw her slight smile, the way she inclined her head towards me. And I knew I had done well.

That day, or maybe it was another time, my mother fetched the small seven-stringed guitar she owned. Lately, since I have been thinking about her, I have wondered where she learned to play such a thing. I have never seen a woman play one before or since, only the travelling players on market days.

She sang a song for my father. It was a Madingo song about love. Not a love song. You couldn’t really call it that. I knew it off by heart:

Quarrels end,

But words once uttered never die.

Lovers part,

But love lives on.

Marriages end,

But hearts survive.

You leave your mother’s breast,

For your father’s side,

And why should this be so?

Because love forever changes.

When from her father’s house,

A girl goes to a man,

We see the same again,

Love’s constant changes.

And when into the night she slips away,

To her lover’s arms,

The same rule applies, my friend:

Love’s inconstancy.

My father laughed again, a different laugh this time. My mother sent to me to go and find my brothers. The sound of her voice wrapped itself around me and followed me out into the darkness of the compound where the words broke free and floated up to the stars.

Of course my mother was not a slave. What man would treat a slave that way? Do you ask a slave advice and talk to them about how to run your affairs? Do you listen to what they have to say and then go away and do what they tell you? My mother even had a girl of her own to help her. Does a slave have a servant? So stupid. Some people were jealous of her, that’s all. Because he brought her gifts. If he went away — on those occasions when he couldn’t take her with him — he never once forgot to bring her something back. The fan — that was a present. It was the shape of a kola leaf, like an upside down heart, finely woven in different colours. Another time he gave her a real gold nugget. And when he came back from Guinea he brought her an almond tree in a pot. The tree was in flower and she had it placed next to the open window of her bedroom, so she could enjoy the scent all through the night.

He chose her name himself. Tenkamu. I don’t know what it was before. It isn’t important. My mother was sent here by her parents to stay with relatives who lived in the village. My father saw her and he liked her. Maybe it’s true he held the mortgage on the family lands. Some people say they sent her here deliberately, in the hope that she might catch his eye. That’s just loose talk.

The truth is Pa Yamba was the one who noticed her first. When he went to speak to my father, he didn’t realise the younger man had already decided in his own head to marry her. Pa Yamba wanted her for himself. He had a temper, he dared to challenge my father. But my father was firm. He told the older man to look for a woman of his own; this one was spoken for. Ten ka mu. Look for your own. That was what her name meant. Look for your own woman.

Pa Yamba thought people were laughing at him every time they called her by that name. Sometimes they were. He thought my father owed him more than that, because it was Pa Yamba who had led us to this place. In all the years that passed he still had no wife of his own. He followed her with those eyes, eyes as flat and still as the bottom of a pond in the dry season.

My father’s house had two wings. My father’s room was in one wing and it had two doors: one reached from the inside of the house and another that opened straight out on to the verandah. Anybody who had business with my father waited beyond the outside door. I’d see Pa Yamba there among the people who arrived every day with claims of being distantly related, hoping for a donation. I’d watch him watching her.

I knew the other wives bad-mouthed my mother behind her back. They did not care that I heard them. That’s the way our people are. If it suits them they’ll not let the presence of a child constrain their tongues, though they should know better. When I was growing up I heard the things they said: calling her the ‘Madingo’, talking about how my father had never paid a bride price for her, saying she was given away for nothing like the bruised fruit at the end of market day. They were stupid women. I knew it couldn’t be true. But still somewhere inside I felt the shame burning like a coal in my belly, making me sweat with anger.

For the most part my mother behaved as though those women were not part of her existence. She did not share their cooking, or send me across to borrow ginger or salt. She turned her face away and got on with her own life. And soon I learned from her. I acted the way she did; I learned to look through them as though they were made of water instead of flesh and blood. And I plugged my ears with imaginary mud so I couldn’t hear the things they said.

Still, their narrowed eyes and twisted mouths surfaced in my dreams and their spiteful words seeped through the mud.

Finda the servant told me my mother was the only one of the wives my father had chosen for himself. ‘Except for the third wife and he soon tired of her. She only lived to dance. In the end she danced so fast all the thoughts flew out of her mouth.’

All the rest of the wives were chosen by Ya Namina. After my father brought my mother into the house, Ya Namina went out and found more wives. She didn’t like a wife she couldn’t control. Always she and my mother were polite to each other, but when Ya Namina spoke, sometimes in her voice there was something metallic inside, like a vein of iron running below the surface of the earth.

Ya Isatta, my father’s second wife, had no children and so she always took Ya Namina’s part — forever fearful she would be sent back to be a burden on her own family. Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay, everybody knew these two sisters were really married to each other. Ya Sallay was sent to live with her older sister. They were so happy living in that house together, Ya Sallay married my father just so as to avoid being sent away to a husband of her own. They kept to themselves. The younger wives: Balia, Koloneh, Memso, Saffie — well, they were just Ya Namina’s housemaids.

Do you know the meaning of the word in our language ores? Ores. It means co-wife. The women who share your husband with you. The women with whom you take turns to cook. The women you give whatever is leftover in your own pot. The women who are the other mothers of your children, who suckle your baby when your own milk has dried up or unexpectedly soured.

But the word has another meaning, too. Do you know it? No? Then let me tell you.

It means rival.

My mother was the sixth wife. She was tall — for a woman — almost as tall as my father. And she could even have been as strong as him. I know now she wasn’t so very beautiful, because people tell me I look like her. Her mouth was big, with perhaps too many teeth. But she was bathe, the favourite.

Yes, I dreamed about her the other week. She’s back in my thoughts again. For a few days afterwards I was able to see her face in front of my eyes — like a photograph. I never owned a picture of her. All of this was before the shop with the Kodak sign painted on its shutters opened in the town. For two days following the dream I saw her clearly. But then her features smudged. Sometimes I would be able to recall one thing, say her eyes: whites so clear, like moons against the dark night of her irises and her skin. There it is. You can picture a person easily, no trouble — right up to the time when you try to remember their face. Ah, then you can sit and stare at the wall all day if you like. Until you give up. And suddenly there they are, as clearly as if they were standing before you.

That was the way I remembered my mother: on the morning of the festival, standing in her room before it was properly day, silhouetted against a cold, new light.

Back then Pray Day was overtaking all the festival days. To meet the new year everybody swept their houses and Ya Namina ordered the servants to clean out my father’s house from top to bottom. Three of my mother’s co-wives came hurrying back from visiting their families, looking healthy and still plump for ones who had fasted all month.

The cooking began days in advance. Then it wasn’t straightforward as it is now, no radio announcements from Mecca to tell you the moon was really hovering in the sky, only you couldn’t see it because of the dust or the clouds. No. We waited until we saw it ourselves, even though that meant we sometimes began to cook too early, the food spoiled and we all fasted for an extra day or two; sometimes we began to cook too late and the feast wasn’t ready in time.

There were roasted meats and special dishes baked with coconut milk and spices. I was young and didn’t fast; even so the smell made my mouth water. On the morning of Pray Day everyone answered the first call to prayers and afterwards we would carry dishes of whatever food we had prepared as gifts from house to house.

But that was not the reason we all looked forward to the festival. In our house my father presented each of his wives with a costume specially for the day. The new clothes were delivered the evening before, ready for the last day of the fast.

That year my mother spent the whole of the day preparing herself. Finda worked on her hair for all of the morning: plaits so fine it was as though each comprised of no more than six hairs. These she wove, three by three, into thicker braids and then again, until my mother’s head was covered in shining coils decorated here and there with tiny pale cowrie shells. In the afternoon she sat for two hours with the ends of her fingers resting in bowls of lali until the tips turned red. She sent me out to pick a new loofah from the vine, and I found a fine one. On the way home I held it close to my ear and shook it, listening to the sound the seeds made, like trickling water. Afterwards I emptied out the seeds and carried it to my mother. In her bedroom I rubbed her back and her arms with it, smoothed her with shea butter until her skin glowed deeply as a garden egg.

We were on the front balcony watching the darkness, watching for my father’s gifts to his wives to be delivered. Ibrahim and Idrissa pretended not to be interested. They were throwing the eyeless husk of a lizard at each other: dodging and ducking, laughing in their newly deep voices, forgetting that they were men. Our own garments were inside, finished by the tailor in the weeks before. I had picked out the cloth with my mother at the Fula shop. We watched as my father’s retainer came out from his room. We smothered our laughter as Ibrahim walked on the outside edges of his feet and made his legs bow and tremble, bending like the old man under the weight of the packages. We followed the retainer with our eyes as he passed through the compound, visiting one house and then the next.

Our mother did not come out. Instead I carried the package to her.

‘Open it, mama!’ I cried.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, shoulders hunched, feet on the floor pointing straight ahead. She looked as though she had been sleeping. I did a little jig. My mother didn’t even turn to look. She seemed bored by my playful ways. The light on her skin gave a dull cast, for a moment it seemed to me she was old. She was sitting with her hands across her stomach. The air rustled in her chest like dried leaves.

‘It’s late now. In the morning you’ll see it. Now it’s time to sleep.’

But it wasn’t time to sleep. The village was still awake. Out back, Finda was preparing the last of the dishes for the celebrations the next evening. My brain was whirling with excitement.

‘But I want to see it now. Let me see it.’ I made my voice into a whine, but with a threat. Like the noise a mosquito makes. My mother lay back and turned over, pulling the cover over her shoulders.

‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated. She twisted herself around to look at me over her shoulder, smiled at me in a way that made me feel less bad. ‘Send Finda for me.’

In the morning the air was cold and smelled of dust. I washed and slipped my new dress over my head. It was too long, but I had a year to grow into it. The cloth was shiny and stiff, not worn soft like my everyday clothes. I ran to find my mother.

That moment when I opened the door: in the dream, I see her again. She is wearing her new gown, standing before the opaque light spreading through the shutters behind her. Only, in the dream we are not in the old place, but in the bedroom of the house I lived in with my husband after I was married. Everything is as it was when I lived there as a young wife, even the heavy, woven bedspread we were given as a wedding gift and the animal skins on the floor that my husband brought back from the place where he worked.

And in the dream I am thinking, how can I be married already if this is my mother, so young?

Nothing had prepared me that morning for the sight of her in that dress. Along dress, made of printed cloth from Europe, embroidered with yellow and blue thread across her breast. Sleeves that billowed out and narrowed into cuffs fastened with real buttons. When she walked the pleated skirt brushed the floor. In those days the women wore simple tunics and on special days, like when it was somebody’s forty days, maybe an embroidered gown or a long skirt and tamule with sleeves that stopped at the elbow. I had never seen a dress such as this.

That day we bluffed better than anybody, walked in front of them all into the mosque. I felt the envy in their glances. I held my head so high. When we sat down at the back I could see my brothers in their new bubas practically under the alpha’s nose. My father was at the front wearing an agbada of pure white, with a red sash over his shoulder. At the back we didn’t pay much attention to the sermon; the women gossiped among each other. All talk that day was of each woman’s outfit. From the outset I knew my mother’s dress made the greatest impression of all. My mother was the very first to wear the new style like the Creole women in the big city.

That day! The best day of my life. The day every one of my father’s wives wished she was my mother. And every one of his daughters wanted to be me. I had no fears. No cares. I did not see how life could get any better. But then my luck changed like the wind. And my life turned around completely.

* * *

There were so many of us — children of my father. And yet I had few friends among my brothers and sisters when I was growing up, only Idrissa and Ibrahim who were my belly brothers. Mariama and her sisters were gone. Ya Janeba and Ya Sallay’s children kept to themselves: like their mothers they appeared not to welcome outsiders. My brothers, too, preferred their own company or that of the other young men around. And although they sometimes came and boasted to me of their exploits, we spent less and less time together.

Finda was my friend. I followed her as she went about her chores. When my brothers and I fought I ran to hide behind her. And it was she I asked the things I didn’t understand, when Idrissa and Ibrahim sniggered into cupped hands but refused to tell me what was funny. Finda didn’t tell me either, but she scolded them and that was good.

It was Finda I turned to when I noticed my mother growing taller.

I’ve told you my mother was a tall woman. And so she was. Only those days, every time I looked at her, she seemed higher than ever. Though my father was always telling me I had grown, I even began to imagine I was shrinking. I measured myself, scratching a mark on the outside wall of the house with a stick. One afternoon we were trapped by the rain, watching it fall out of the sky like sheets of glass, distorting the shapes of the houses and trees beyond, turning the ground into miniature rapids of red mud. I was helping Finda to husk groundnuts, breaking open the soft, steaming shells and peeling the thin membrane from each of the nuts.

Finda set down her pan and told me my mother was sick.

I didn’t know what she meant. I asked the only question I could think of: ‘Why would that make her taller?’

‘Your mother isn’t taller. That’s just the way it looks.’

A wasting illness had stolen her appetite. And as her body drew in so it seemed to lengthen.

‘When will she be better?’

‘Soon. God willing.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Next tomorrow then?’

‘Soon. God willing.’

The weeks rolled past, my mother took to her bed. The house was quiet. My brothers were out all day. I sat at home and waited for my mother to get well again. Sometimes I went to her room and sat with her. The room smelled of un-aired clothing, sweat and something rotten. My mother was a black woman, but out of the sun her skin yellowed like a dried tobacco leaf. I tried to keep her company, to tell her the things that occupied my day but she seemed not to listen because too often she would laugh suddenly in the wrong place or ask a question that had nothing to do with the thing I was saying.

My father sent for a doctor. Somebody from the town. The man arrived by bicycle and carried a battered black bag, empty except for a stethoscope. Finda was displeased when he pressed the cold metal disc against my mother’s breast, but she told me after that she did not protest because she knew my father had placed his faith in this man who was taking so much of his money. Under the doctor’s instructions we gave her one tablet, aspirin, each day and every other day Finda rubbed her body with mentholatum from the brown glass jar the doctor brought us from the pharmacist. We waited. My mother grew thinner.

My mother was ashamed of being sick, of the sour smell that rose from her and stained the air. Finda brought star lilies and placed them in my mother’s room and their thick scent mingled with the odour of sickness. As if contaminated by my mother’s shame my father stopped his visits. Instead he arranged for her to visit the hospital in Kamakue. I was not allowed to go, though Finda went and my brothers too.

Idrissa described the big white building, surrounded by walls built of concrete breeze blocks and lawns of spiky grass, walkways wrapped in bougainvillaea and morning glory. I imagined my mother would be happy there, among the flowers. Of course we expected miracles. Finda was the only one who had any doubts. The others of us — her children — imagined our mother would come home restored to the way she was before.

My brother told me how they waited many hours to see the doctor. They were sent away at the day’s end with no choice but to sleep by the side of the road outside the hospital since they did not know a soul in that place. Our mother was weak and her breathing was troubling her. The dust from the road affected her greatly. Eventually a woman offered her a place to stay, though there was not room enough for Idrissa and Finda, who lay down under the eaves. In the morning they returned to resume their place in the queue. When their time came they found they did not understand the doctors’ language, nor they ours. They did not have the words to explain how my mother was so changed she had become another person. The doctors looked her over, made her open her mouth, and peered into the corners of her eyes. When the examination was over an orderly was brought in to translate. The man had a wife from our parts and could speak a little of our language. The beds were full, he explained. They should come back the next week or before that if she turned much worse.

It had taken nearly three days’ travelling to bring her there.

My mother sank into her bed until she merged with the bedclothes. Her spirit shrank and crept away to hide in the dark recesses of the house. For a long time things seemed to stay the way they were. My mother gently fading from life.

Two months passed. I was up early on a moist, warm morning. It had rained the night before and the ragged clouds had cleared from the sky. The sun shone strongly, patches of the ground steamed and the vapours rose up and danced in the sunlight.

Just then I forgot about that dark room and the bitter promise contained inside those walls. I felt happy. Every morning when I woke from dreaming, for a few moments I was peaceful until I remembered, and the sagging feeling returned. Once I saw Finda somewhere away from the house, standing in the street with some of her companions. They were laughing, some foolishness or other. I had walked past quickly, turning my head away. Keeping it turned even when Finda called out to me. But that day, when I noticed the rains were nearly over, I too managed to forget.

I passed my mother’s almond tree at the front of the house. I was responsible for watering it. The leaves looked withered and so I forgot whatever it was I had been doing and I hurried about my neglected chore. As I returned to the same spot I noticed something about the tree. I saw it fleetingly, at first. The leaves were shaking, though the air was quite still, no wind. I saw the trunk, the branches — moving, writhing, darkly flexing like muscles on a labourer’s back. I stopped where I was, afraid to go any closer. It was as though the tree were alive, trying to pull its roots up from the pot. Finda, passing by with a tray of guavas, saw it too. She screamed and it was her scream more than anything else that caused me to start. We both dropped our loads at the same time and I remember how, for a moment, I watched the beads of water and fruit race across the dust like differently sized marbles.

Remember how we used to build our chicken coops high off the ground to protect the hens from the mongoose? In another house a pair of chickens disappeared from their roosts, nothing left but bones and feathers. Not a mongoose. They always gnawed through the cane bars and carried the chickens away. No, not a mongoose. Something else.

And in yet another house something that glistened and boiled black in their cooking pot, where the remnants of a meal had disappeared. The whole compound heard the woman shriek when she raised the lid.

Ants. And ants, too, covering the almond tree, making the branches shimmer and sway before our eyes with their myriad glistening bodies and waving antennae. The two of us carried the pot to the river, it was heavy and the ants crawled up our arms and covered them with fiery bites. We lowered the tree into the water and the ants floated off, struggling on the surface of the water, drowning. Then we dragged the almond tree back to its place and trailed a ring of ash around the base.

It wasn’t as though nobody had ever seen driver ants before. Or lost a chicken or two. You could tell when they were coming, the cockroaches flying ahead of the marching columns trying to save themselves. They infested the roofs of houses and dropped down from the thatch. But the talk began all the same. And the way those people talk, sideways, out of the corners of their mouths, using some words to say what they do not really mean, and other words to say the things they do. And you cannot shout at them: ‘what do you mean? Say what you mean to say!’ Because then they look at you as though you had let the sun get to your head. As though you were a demented dog jumping up to bark at phantoms. You have to force yourself to pretend that what is really there isn’t there at all. You go on with your life.

I heard it from Idrissa first. Idrissa heard it from Finda. I found her some hours later. She was removing the laundry from the bamboo poles where it hung to dry, folding each item neatly and adding it to the pile on her head. She told me not to worry myself about it. It was just foolish talk by superstitious folk.

And I believed her. Just words. I didn’t know then the damage words can do. You can’t feel them, or see them. Someone opens their mouth to speak. The words are there. And then they’re gone. Except of course they’re not, now they’re inside the other person’s head, sticking to their brain. I should have remembered the line from the song my mother sang: words never die.

I know who stirred up the villagers’ imaginings. My father was a Muslim. He disdained such talk. Though you would be mistaken if you thought that meant he did not believe. And even I, in my time I’ve seen some things that could not be explained. The pothos brought in laws against it, and that served to convince people all the more. For who would go to the bother of outlawing something that did not exist? And Pa Yamba, I had seen his box covered in charms and sassa in his back room where I sneaked in once with the other children. He still divined. Only now he lit incense, opened a Koran and chanted words in Arabic to summon the Djinna Musa.

The ants. And the chickens all the way across the other side of the village. And people asked how the ants got to be right in front of her window like that. All over the almond tree that had been my father’s gift. And what about her sickness? Wasn’t that what happened when you double-crossed the spirit that gave you your good luck? Or else you played at something you didn’t understand? Wasn’t she a Madingo? And he, who had younger wives, still so besotted with her for all that time. Not beautiful. Not so clever. Not even from a ruling family. What did she possess to make him want her? Nothing. She was only a woman. The whispers, the truth, the lies, all muddled up until everything became an accusation, in their mouths even the simplest fact sounded like a crime.

They never stopped to ask about their own envy and their own jealousy. And what about a wrinkled old man without a wife who coveted a woman who belonged to his patron? And who used to be powerful but wasn’t any more. What about that? I was too young to ask the questions myself or I would have shouted out loud at them all.

I was eating a pear. I remember the taste of it. The pear was overripe, oozing juice and yet sucking the saliva out of my mouth at the same time. It tasted faintly of medicine. I was sitting on the wall outside our house. Pa Yamba had been in my mother’s room for a long time. I knew my mother was dying because I had seen Saffie, the youngest of my father’s wives, come back from the forest carrying a basket full of the red fruits that grow on the Christmas bush. The fruit was inedible, though birds loved it. For humans they had only one use. When you dropped the fruits in water and left them there for a while they turned the water black and we used them for dyeing things. For dyeing our garments after a death.

I was there when Pa Yamba came out of my mother’s room. I saw the line of his lips, pressed together, not quite straight, a small upward curve of satisfaction. And the glow that shone out of those stagnant eyes. And the renewed sureness of his step, the impact of his heel on the dirt. The confidence of power regained. I knew just by looking at him that day that he had used my mother for his own ends.

There are some things I learned early on. When I was a child, even before I realised I had to make my own luck, one thing I worked out for myself was never to let people discover the things you knew. Keep them to yourself, because then you had the power and they did not. People will always talk loosely; they forget who is listening. In the same way I learned you must never ask a question. Because then people will guess there is something you wish to know. Keep quiet. And listen.

They said she confessed before she died.

And there was more.

So much more.

Ya Isatta’s unborn children. My mother had eaten them. And it was she who had been the cause of the flu that left all our chickens lying lifeless in the dust one morning. Even lime and pepper would not revive them. The small whirlwind that spoiled the rows of trees grown from the new kind of coffee bean — that was caused by her dabbling. Pa Yamba had extracted all of these things from her before she died.

Ya Isatta said they should bring back the red water. That was the way, a long time ago, they used to discover who was up to no good. By making them drink it and the ones who proved to be witches died and that was that. And she demanded to know who would compensate her for her lost children. She said it before she saw me standing there. Afterwards she gave a kind of grunt, a noise halfway between a sniff and a snort. And then she took a great big breath, far more air than she needed. And she pushed it out through her nostrils noisily, her lips pursed together and her mouth turned down.

That moment I wished it were all true. I wished my mother had killed Ya Isatta’s children. I wished Ya Isatta would carry on inhaling until she sucked her own nose into her face, followed by her lips and her teeth and everything. I imagined her face disappearing like muddy water swirling down a hole until there was just a black space where her head should have been.

Those foolish women with their okra mouths, they did not dare talk that way in front of my father.

She was buried the same day. Finda told me my father took over the arrangements himself, making sure Finda bathed and anointed the body with the proper care, hiring readers to recite verses at the burial. Afterwards at the graveside, she said, he took some crumbs of the newly dug soil and placed them on his tongue. And he mourned her as though she had been a man, for forty whole days instead of seven.

Still, a man marries expecting to lose a wife or two. Wives pass on all the time bringing new lives into the world. Nobody dresses up all in black, just the hem of a lappa trailed in black dye. Relatives arrive to stay in her house, lay claim to her gowns, her cooking pots, her jewellery, even her little guitar which none could play but someone could sell.

And when the week is over everything is gone. Only her children are there still to be disposed of.

Ibrahim and Idrissa, they were the lucky ones. Not so long after my mother died men appeared in the village, one a white man. They set up a table in the middle of the village next to the barrie. The potho sat behind it. The other one — a Koranko, so told the short scars that marked his cheekbones — stood next to him. The potho said he was the Queen’s representative, recruiting soldiers to fight in a war to save the Empire. The Empire to which every one of us belonged. The pair were travelling throughout the country enlisting fighters. They had orders from the Queen that each village must nominate at least six men to the cause.

A distance from the houses more men were cutting down bamboo poles and binding them with ropes, laying palm leaves on top. In the evening we watched the same men stripped to the waist, torsos glowing in the red evening light, marching up and down in rows and swinging their arms under the command of the Koranko whose name was Saj Majoh.

Saj Majoh acted as translator for the white man. Under his command the recruits ran, jumped, lifted up logs, until he was satisfied they had the strength to become soldiers. In the evening he told the men who gathered around that they would be given as much food as they could eat and taught to march, to fire a gun and to read and write. He told them that in addition to all of this they would be paid three silver shillings every single week.

My brothers promised they would write as soon as they learned how. Nobody thought to ask how I would read their letters. They marched away, pounding the ground with such force they caused the earth to shake, singing a newly learned song at the tops of their voices. All the shouting and stamping disturbed the bats hanging in the branches of the cotton tree who loosened their claws, unfolded their wings and swirled up into the sky above the brigade of men, trailing them like an omen.

Ibrahim and Idrissa were being sent away to fight in a war, but still it made me envious to watch them go, and sad to think I was left all alone. The question nobody cared to answer was who would take care of me. My mother’s family had left without taking me with them for they were poor and thought I would be better cared for in my father’s house. Finda was just a servant, I was not her responsibility. Besides, I had seen how she acted around the sugar cane seller, standing with her hands on her hips, her back arched so her breasts and bottom jutted, denouncing the quality of his produce in a too, too loud voice. And I had seen the way he stood, resting on one leg with his chin pointed at her as though he relished the insults.

You know that fountain at the crossroads in the middle of town? Three pools of water and a fountain. Well, the pools are empty and the fountain doesn’t work, and now the concrete is all cracked. Built for a big conference twenty years ago. All those heads of state flew in. I remember. I remember standing outside the brand new hotel, watching them arrive one by one in black limousines. The presidents and generals sitting in the back, waiting while their drivers climbed out and walked round to open the door for them. Then the driver had to close the door and walk all the way back around, start up the car and drive out. They could have just reached for the door handle. I didn’t think of that then. We were so impressed. The cars were all backed up. It took some of those big men twenty minutes just to get inside the hotel. And that fountain never worked properly from the start. It was painted in the colours of the national flag. The pools of water were supposed to trickle into each other.

This is what I think about luck. Luck is like adjoining pools of water, each flowing into the other. One pool might be dry, the next pool overflowing. It’s the same with luck. Some people have everything. Other people have nothing. The people who have plenty just seem to get it all, all the luck that ought by rights to belong to someone else. That’s the way it was with me. Always the luck just seems to drain out of my pool and into somebody else’s.

The first time I had this thought I was floating on the water in a canoe. I was on my back staring at the sky with my eyes shut, the sun a vast orange ball against a black sky. I squeezed my eyelids harder shut and watched the colours change: bursts of blue, then violet, then red, like fireworks.

Somewhere Ya Isatta was calling my name. I could not have heard her from where I was, but I knew it anyway. I knew she would be calling me to run with a message, or fetch her a cup of water, or help her search for her head-tie or prayer beads because that was all she ever did, all she ever had done since she moved into my mother’s house.

When I opened my eyes the world had turned black and white, blurred, like a charcoal drawing somebody had tried to rub out. Sketched trees and mangroves, branches overhanging me black against the sky, and the grey, twisted trunk of the tree the canoe was tied to.

I sat up and stared at the water. I saw my own reflection and gazed at it for a second before the movement of the canoe in the water caused my face to wrinkle suddenly. The sun glared down on the water, but here and there, where the shadows of the trees fell, it was possible to see right down into the yellowish depths to the mud and weed growing on the bottom. A shoal of tiny fish darted past, zigzagging, flashing as their scales reflected the sunlight. I watched them go. In less than a day the fishing season would start again.

The canoe floated upstream of the dam the men had built across the water. The dam was built every year during the dry season when the water was low. When the rains came the stream swelled and the level of the water above the dam rose. The fish spawned and grew fat, trapped behind the wall of logs. On the last day the men set their traps: long, conical baskets pushed into the dam wall at intervals. They stuffed the ends with rice and the fish swam down to feed and were trapped. In the morning, at the same time as the women prepared to enter the water with their nets, the men would come down and heft the baskets out of the water. Baskets brimming with fish. Fish for the evening meal. Fried fish for breakfast. Fish for smoking in giant kilns. Fish for the days of hunger, when the river was barren as the desert.

As I stared into the water I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Pa Yamba had tricked her when she was dying and I thought of all the people who chose to believe the lies because it suited them that way. I thought about her life, now overshadowed by the manner of her death. I thought about all these things. And as I sat there — just like that, I thought of a way to turn my luck around.

I crawled out of the boat and made my way through the tangle of trees to the edge of the dam. The ground was muddy. I nearly caught my foot on roots many times. Tiny crabs hanging from the branches dropped down and clung to my clothing. I worried about the water snakes that liked to disguise themselves among the roots of trees. I pulled my lappa up and knotted it up around my chest and I slid into the water on the other side of the dam. I waded in until the water came up to my chest.

It wasn’t easy. Especially with the first one. I was hampered by the water and my feet slid in the mud. So then I found a piece of wood and pushed it in between the edge of the basket and the logs, and in that way I levered the basket out. The water came gushing through the hole I had made, and with it dozens of the fish caught behind the logs.

Thrashing carp and smooth, whiskered catfish, curled eels, snapping tigerfish and snouted barbs; fish spotted, striped, scaly, smooth. Water and fish poured over me and almost knocked me over. I put out my hand and touched them as they swam past, stroking their sleek bodies with my fingertips. The next moment they were gone. I stood there breathing for a while, waiting to see if anybody who happened to be down by the river had noticed. But all was quiet except for the faint hum of insects and the sound of water pouring through the hole in the dam.

The rest came easily. And by the time I reached the other side the dam was beginning to break up. Small logs dislodged themselves and floated downstream after the traps and the fish. I pushed at the remaining heavy logs and they felt light. I thought probably it was too dangerous to swim back the way I had come, so I made my way up the opposite bank and crossed further upstream where the water was deeper but the river was narrower. And I walked back home through the rice fields and allowed my clothes to dry on the way.

Of course they all thought it was her. My mother — come back for revenge. Whatever else they did or did not believe, there was not a soul in the village who dared defy a ghost. And Pa Yamba made an offering to try to appease her. I laughed inside, especially when Ya Isatta began to tell me how much like my mother I was, trying to flatter me. I just bowed my head modestly and thanked her, never looking at her directly. But I could feel the big yell growing in my chest, bursting to come out. How I wanted to throw back my head and open my mouth wide and shout at her, shout at them all and tell them it was me. It was me. It was me who let the fish out.

But I knew better than that. Life hadn’t been fair to me. I kept quiet. And that day I learned how to turn my luck around.

5 Serah, 1950: Woman Palava

My mother? I haven’t thought about her in a long time.

My mother left.

Tried to alter her destiny. Looking back it was a brave thing to do, I suppose. Foolish, maybe. I don’t know. Who did she think she was?

She was Saffie. The tenth wife. Imagine it.

A tenth wife has no status. Not much better than a servant. But sometimes it is the lowliest people who have the most courage — because they’re the ones with the least to lose.

There are things I remember. I don’t know if any of it makes sense. Some questions were never answered. And there were other things I made myself forget.

Well, let me see. Where do you want me to start?

My mother used to tell me how she first met Ya Namina. My mother was a young girl standing at the side of the path when Ya Namina and her entourage passed by on their way back to Rofathane. She had been at court with her husband and was returning without him. My mother was carrying a pot of water and she stepped off the side of the road to allow this woman past. Whoever she was, my mother could see she was important. Everybody around her was laden while she walked ahead unburdened.

Ya Namina had journeyed for many miles. She beckoned the child with the water pot over. My mother lowered the heavy pot from her head, filled a cup of water and held it out to the older woman, bowing as low as she could. Bent over double like that she noticed the woman’s feet: long toes, and toenails that curved at the ends and pointed downwards. Ten toes pointing at the ground.

As my mother stretched out her hand for the empty cup, the woman touched her chin, tilting her face upwards. She asked her name and what family she belonged to. That was it. Where it all began. How she became my father’s next wife.

Three years later she saw the moon. Two years after that she was taken to her husband’s room. Ya Isatta performed the obligations on behalf of Ya Namina, bathing her, rubbing her limbs with oil and perfume, carrying her into the room. That night my father sat on a cushion on the tapestries on the floor, counting silver coins, stringing them, through the hole in the middle of each one, into great ropes of money. My mother perched on the edge of the fourposter bed, a bed as big as a boat, and watched him until she became drowsy and fell over backwards. In the morning she woke up alone.

The next night he brought out a board hollowed out in twelve places, six on each side, and numerous small, silver beans. He beckoned her to sit opposite him, took a handful of the beans in one hand and allowed four to drop into each hollow. Afterwards he gathered up the contents of one and began to count them out. One, two, three, four. All this was done in silence. My mother gazed at him. He jabbed his forefinger at the board. She dropped her eyes. He never spoke.

Later he stood up, placed a round felt hat upon his head and left the room. My mother was a virgin. But she had been initiated and she was a married woman. She knew enough to know this was not the way it was supposed to be, though she let on to nobody. Not even Ya Isatta who called her to one side the next morning with a crafty look on her face. That was how they often spent their nights together. Playing warri. She became very good at it.

Of course, these were things I found out later. Ya Memso was prone to those sorts of indiscretions.

It wasn’t as though nothing ever happened. My mother gave birth to me and then to my brother. But, warn? Warri is a fine game. But when was a board game ever enough for a woman?

All this was many years ago, around the time people began to build square houses. All my father’s wives lived in round houses. My father’s house was square, it’s true — it was so large. In every other respect, though, his house was built in the old way, without bricks or cement and with a thatch roof.

All the time I was growing up, corners and angles gradually replaced curves and arcs. Some people warned it was inviting trouble in through the door, making hiding places for every kind of spirit in search of a warm, dark place to nestle. The women complained the new-shaped houses were dirt traps, a nuisance to sweep, with corners full of dust and spiders’ webs.

Back then my father began to draw up plans for a new house. A house with more rooms for visitors, for relatives, for new wives maybe and new children. A house with a roof of corrugated iron.

I was one of the last. The oldest children had grown up and left home. The first coffee trees had overreached their prime. New seedlings were planted every year and every year extra labourers brought in to tend the bushes. At harvest everyone, wives and children included, had to pick alongside the men in the fields. And afterwards we helped to husk the sun-baked beans, pulling away the tacky pulp with deft, skinny fingers. Raking the pale green beans out in circles on the ground, so many moons fallen from the sky.

My father was a wealthy man. No doubt about it. But everywhere glittering riches were being dug out of the earth. In the next door chieftaincy gold had been found on one family’s land. Now the men were marrying wives from the ruling families, building houses, acquiring followers.

I remember where it all started:

A dry, cool morning, I watch the horizon fade, swept over by the red dust of the harmattan like a line drawn in the sand erased by the tide.

In front of us men shovel piles of sand. Others walk to and fro, toting great blocks of baked clay. They come from the village, the village given to my father a long time back. Some of them are the same ones who work in the plantation. Others I have never seen before. In the morning they arrive and depart by nightfall. Every day for weeks now my brother and I have left our house to take up our place opposite the site. Yaya is fascinated.

The walls of the house climb as each row of bricks is cemented into place. The new house is being built next door to the old one, and it is exactly the same shape, but all the dimensions are so much bigger. Right in the middle of the dry season storm clouds sailed over the village and unleashed a storm. Magnificent rumbles straight from Pa Yamba’s magic box. Spears of rain tearing into the new walls of the house, washing away the foundations. Yesterday our father himself appeared to say the men must work every day now until the house is complete. I heard the foreman try to tell him the men needed one day off to work in their own fields. My father’s face looked as though it had just been caressed by a freezing hand. A rigidness around the upper lip, a tugging at the corner of the eyes. I saw it. I know these things. I am a child, versed in reading adult faces. The foreman understands these things as well. His nerve sputtered and died.

No problem, Pa. And he scurried away like an ant.

Today I am foreman and Yaya is the labourer. Our bricks are baking on top of the drying rock, a great slab jutting from the earth in front of our home where my mother dries the clothes. The bricks are nearly ready, though the house we are building has run into some difficulties, just like my father’s house. The bricks crumble, the mud dries out and won’t stick. Today we work at refining our recipe, squatting on our haunches over the hole where we mix earth and water together, using a pair of sticks to swill a slippy sliding mess.

Busy, we are. Preoccupied with problem solving. Until our mother calls. Until it’s time to do something else.

A shadow falls over us. A hand appears: palm stained red by the earth, knuckles callused and grey. Short fingernails, ridged and blackened. I watch the hand. It pours grey dust from a funnel of torn paper. A moment later another hand tosses in a handful of sand. In front of my eyes our mixture transforms into something tacky. The hands take two of our bricks, smear them with the mixture, slap one on top of the other.

‘Give it to me.’ Yaya reaches out.

I look up. A man is smiling down at me. He has lips curved like lily petals, a tiny pink patch right in the middle of his lower lip, shining eyes, white teeth, an erratic beard. The lips uncurl and reform into a new shape, a flower spreading its petals at dawn.

‘So, little brother, whose house are you building?’

‘It’s our house. Me and her. And our mother’s house,’ says Yaya, not looking up. In a small serious voice. A will-not-be-mocked voice.

But this man is not mocking us.

‘Maybe when you’re done there you can come and help us with this one. Eh?’ The man jerks a thumb in the direction of the unfinished house, the half-a-house. His thumb curls back on itself like a wood shaving. I try the gesture out myself, experimentally. ‘And what is your name, little brother?’

Yaya does not answer. He is laying bricks with a shuttered intensity.

The man watches and waits. Taking all the time in the world.

‘His name is Yaya,’ I say suddenly. I can’t bear the silence. And: ‘He’s my brother. I’m bigger. He’s smaller.’ Because I think this man is nice — for a grown-up.

‘And what about you, little sister?’

‘My name is Serah Kholifa.’

‘Well, Serah Kholifa. Yaya Kholifa. That’s a fine house you are building. I hope that one day you people will invite me inside there to eat with you.’

Now it is I who wonders if he isn’t mocking.

‘Yes,’ I reply. This time I use my polite voice for grown-ups.

The foreman is whistling. The man doesn’t say anything. Just smiles. The foreman shouts his name — what was it? — and begins to move in our direction, to see what is going on. The man turns away. He is smiling, jogging slowly backwards on the balls of his feet. ‘Don’t forget me now, Serah.’

He points a finger at me. I nod. Then shake my head. Then, confused, again I nod. Yes, I promise not to forget you.

We have to clear the bricks because my mother comes with a load of clothes to dry. Only the bricks have left dirt and dust all over the drying rock. So our mother sends me to fetch water from the jar by the door. She is not pleased. And she is angry because there is cement in my hair. My braids are cemented together. She plucks at my head with sharp fingers like a chicken looking for insects in the dirt. A little way off I can see the man. He is leaning against a longhandled shovel, watching us.

Late in the afternoon I follow my mother down to the river with a new load of washing. The colour of the sun has deepened and the red dust sparkles in the air, the day has turned a hazy amber, like a piece of coloured glass tumbled by the sea. The light settles gently on our skin, the soft glow outlines our features.

Down on the rocks I help scrub the clothes clean with black soap, and I hold one end and twist one way while my mother twists the other and together we wring the water out. And afterwards Yaya and me, we bathe in the stream and watch a single, stray, green-blue, glistening bubble hovering over the river. And we practise opening our eyes underwater. And make boats out of leaves and sail ant families across the water in them.

And then I see the man again. He is coming down the path behind our mother and he passes the boy, the one who can’t speak and never grew up. The man is wearing country clothes with a triangular pocket at the front of his smock. The boy is standing in the grass. And the man raises a hand and the boy raises one also. And they slap their hands together high in the air. The sound bounces off the water. And the boy laughs and the man carries on walking towards us, while the boy stands on one leg like a heron watching him.

That’s all I really remember about him. That day he sat next to my mother for a short while. He asked for a piece of our soap; I saw her stand up and go to the laundry basin, unwrap it and hand it to him. And then he slipped into the water and swam with us. He let us ride on his back, and we squirmed and slid off his skin, which was as smooth as a manatee’s. And then I laughed so much I took a big breath and forgot I was underwater; he held me up and squeezed me until I spewed reedy green river water back where it came from. And he said:

‘Sorry, Ma,’ as he handed me back to my mother. And she said:

‘Come on. Yaya. Serah. Enough.’ He waved at us as we walked away. And when I turned around at the last place where you could see the river, I saw him covered in lather, soaping himself with the slither of black soap.

For a long time I thought that was all it took: a shared ball of soap between a man and a woman.

But that was just the beginning. Not the whole of it. Not even the half of it.

He wasn’t the usual kind of grown-up. We would talk about him in the years to come. In hushed voices. Remember when? We had gathered together fragments of the story and tried to make them fit, wedging in a little detail, filling a space with a new revelation, a sudden realisation.

We called him the Cement Man.

The Cement Man. Our name for him. Not the name she refused to call when she faced the elders: the unspoken name that circled in the air like a fly. So why, asked the elders, not too unkindly because after all this was just woman palava, though more serious than most — also because they knew they had her — why did she now refuse to swear?

Sometimes when I look at the past I see a swamp: cloying, dark, impenetrable. Like the mud we swilled as children building our playhouse. Mud covering everything, smeared over the detail of recollections, submerging memories. Mud you wade about in trying to locate a lost image or event. Then, usually when you least expect it, the mud throws something up: perfectly preserved as a corpse in a peat bog.

Night-time. I tumble out of my dreams and into the silence of the bedroom.

I can hear my breathing. Scared breathing. Short, breathless breaths. My eyes are open wide letting in the darkness, watching the shadowy figures scuttle to the edges of the room where they slide along the walls and slip back into the place where the wall meets the floor. Banished by wakefulness, they promise to return as soon as I close my eyes again.

I can hear my brother breathing. Open-mouthed, snuffle-nosed breathing. Still holding on to life breathing. The breathing of babies and little children, as though they can’t ever get enough air.

My mother’s breathing: deep-sleep breathing. Long, slow breaths. Shimmering snores suspended in the air.

Three kinds of breathing.

In my bladder, an irresistible urgency. I lie on my back, wishing the feeling away. Then I reach over and rock my brother, vigorously. I’m afraid to go to the toilet in the dark. Yaya is ashamed he still wets the bed. This is our understanding. We go together at night to the toilets behind the houses. So I don’t have to cross my legs and pray until dawn. And he doesn’t dream of floating on warm water and wake up in a cold, sodden bed.

We bang the door and stamp our feet, announcing our presence for the benefit of the lizards and cockroaches who lurk in the dark places and cling underneath the overhang of the hole in the floor. The hole gives way to a bottomless pit and a nameless, simmering, steadily rising tide. I squat first: knees together, ankles splayed, thighs quivering, head bent watching the steaming trickle fall into the terrifying blackness.

We march back past the banana groves. The night is cool. A huge moon dangles over the village, like an overripe fruit. The shadows are solid, sharp, small. A dog lifts its head. A nose swings our way like a weathervane, marks our progress for a while and then is tucked back beneath a tail. A lamp behind a window outlines a door and the lattice work of the shutters. Giant shapes move about inside.

We have been gone no time at all. No time at all. And yet in that time everything has changed. Something is happening in the village. Something mars the silence, rumbles beneath the stillness. It takes a moment to realise it.

Far away the sound of voices raised and bare feet pounding the ground and the flicker of torches. People! People purposefully marching. People we have never seen before.

Something is happening and we are awake to see it. Not going to miss it, not going to sleep through it like all the other somethings that happened after we had already gone to bed. Nobody will say to us: ‘Oh, you were already asleep by then,’ when they tell the story in the coming days. We are awake. Whatever it is we’ll be the ones to tell the other children in the morning.

We hurry in the direction of our house, a pair of busybodies, to spy from the safety of our bedroom window and discover what business has brought these good folk to us in the middle of the night.

They are ahead of us. Passing our father’s new house now. The smell of wet plaster carries on the breeze. The house is finished. Today the carpenter came and hung the doors: heavy, wooden doors decorated with carvings of monitor lizards — our family tana. The carvings are not good. The lizards look like pigs.

The people march on. We follow behind them at a discreet distance. Hearts thumping, scared breathing, not wanting to be seen. What if it is the poro spirit come to town? Then we should run and hide, our mother warned us one day chasing us back from the fields, ‘Or he’ll catch you and take you away. And I’ll never see you again.’ I giggled so hard as I tried to run I ended up with a stitch in my side. Then her face grew solemn. She once lost a brother that way. A little brother who had been sitting in the road when the spirit came to town. Caught unawares, by the time they heard the sound of the tortoiseshell the spirit and his dancers were already close. She was on the verandah and ran inside. The women slammed closed the windows and doors. It was too late to fetch him in. They thought he would be all right; in those days they left the very little ones. But when they came out he was gone. Into the sacred bush.

My breathing comes faster, my toes curl under me, as though my feet are afraid to touch the ground. I reach out and touch Yaya’s arm.

Then again perhaps they have come from a celebration. Perhaps there will be dancing, a bou bou or a masquerade.

But then they would be singing. And they definitely are not singing. And nobody is improvising steps or clicking their fingers. The sound of their voices falls somewhere between a shout and a murmur.

The crowd slows. A short distance from our own house now. We are nearly home.

And now they are upon it.

They stop. In front of our house.

In front of our own house.

And we stop too.

And the first thing I feel is guilty. Guilty. A mental checklist of offences committed and undetected. As though the appearance of dozens of people in the dead of night might be something we have brought upon ourselves. For practising swear words when we are alone. For holding spitting competitions. For someone’s doves we accidentally set free; they flew up into the branches of an orange tree and broadcast their freedom with thunderous coos. We didn’t try to catch them. We ran away.

Then she is there standing in the frame of the door, struggling to make herself decent. Eyes small with sleep, bare shoulders luminous in the moonlight. When they see her the crowd quiets and lets one do the talking. And we stand still, trying to catch the words that flutter past like dark moths. And then we see all of them, our mother now among them. She is at the head of the crowd, but she is not leading them. Nobody lays a hand on her. I sense the invisible will that propels her forward. They move away down the street. And we run for the safety of our own house and our own beds because we know — we just know — that this is something of which we should not be part.

And he wasn’t with them. I’m sure of it. Maybe he was hiding. Or had fled before he was brought in front of the court. Those people were his supporters, come to clear his name.

The sequence of things is difficult. But that must surely have come first. The people from the village came to beg. They had come to plead. But running beneath the words, the forms of deference: an insistence. They would be heard. My father would hear them. An insistence, not yet a defiance.

That’s all I remember of that time.

Then came the court case.

The boy who was under the table was Soulay, younger son of Ya Koloneh. That was how it worked in those days. I mean, there are different ways of learning. You had to observe the way things were done. The boys who were chosen learned at the feet of the elders.

The elders met in the barrit. It was in the middle of the village right next to the well, where the women met. A round building with a tall, conical, thatch roof the shape of a witch’s hat, open sided so that people going about their tasks could stop by at any time to hear what village business was being discussed there by the elders.

Whenever something important was happening we children would try to see inside. Sometimes we managed to shove our faces in between the elbows of men sitting on the periphery wall. Most times they drove us away, swatting us like flies with a long switch.

I remember playing this game. Even when it was my own mother who had been shamed and brought before the elders.

Soulay was older. He had a way about him, I remember. A way of holding his head so that it rocked back on his skinny shoulders. He used to hunch them up around his chin, so his head looked like an egg in an egg cup. His smile occupied the entire lower half of his face and showed all his teeth at once. And he could pop his cheeks louder than anyone. And spit the farthest. And once a line of ducklings followed him around for weeks, thinking he was their mother.

We met at the karanthe behind the mosque, feverish with curiosity. Nothing this exciting had happened since Salifu Kamara got stuck up the breadfruit tree. He’d climbed up with a long stick to get at the fruit. I don’t know, but somehow he dislocated his shoulder. Everyone heard him hollering. The men ran and fetched a fishing net, urged him to leap. It took ages for him to work up the courage. Each time he seemed about to go he’d stop, shout down more instructions. To the right. To the left.

When he did jump the net wasn’t taut enough. Pa Kamara slammed into the ground with such a thud the earth trembled. He broke his leg. They carried him away in the net all the way to the Kroo bone-setter in Mabass.

For ages afterwards we played that game with an old lappa: Pa Kamara jumping from the breadfruit tree.

That day in the karanthe we were as eager as the other children to hear Soulay tell his story. It makes me ashamed now to think about it. I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand the consequences — for her, for Yaya, for me.

She does not call his name. She denies she is faithless. And yet, when they bring out a powerful sassa, one from the village of the accused man — she falters.

We don’t care about the accusations. We don’t understand them anyway. It is the gory details we crave. What did the sassa look like? We want hair, horns, hoofs. And there must be something red in colour we can tell ourselves is blood. Sacrificial blood. Palm oil or betel nut. Dead things and red things.

Soulay enacts my mother’s terror for us, shivering and quivering as she backed away. We watch him with glassy eyes, breathing hotly through open mouths. No shuffling. No sniffing. No nose picking or scab scratching. And afterwards we ponder the information with delighted disgust and sated bloodlust.

She refused to call the man’s name.

Now she claims her confession was falsely given. The elders looked at each other and around. One peered through empty spectacle frames. Another swatted himself with an animal tail, encased at the anus point in an ivory handle. Together they looked down at her — this woman neck deep in woman trouble. How could it be so?

An afternoon, when the new house was nearly completed, my father called her and told her he wanted to bathe. She replied she would fetch water. But he shook his head. No, he said, down to the river. The two of them, together. Her husband never bathed in the stream. That was the place for children and unmarried men, men without wives and daughters.

It was the hour before darkness. The river was quiet. She agreed to his request. What else to do? In the water he stretched out, swimming off into the deep. He called to her to follow. She was nervous; reassured by his voice. A game, perhaps? His manner suggested playfulness and appealed to the part of her that was curious and eager as one who had never been favoured.

Imagine her:

Fingers pull at the sodden knot of her lappa, she lets it unwind and float on the surface of the water.

At first she thinks little of the firmness of his grip, the finger digging into the flesh of her arms. Her nervousness, the current. Together they swim to the other side, far from the houses. A tenth wife. Alone with this man, who is her husband. Confused. Growing less hopeful that this behaviour is the manifestation of a sudden ardour.

Can’t swim. Naked. And in deep water. Points her toes downwards like a dancer — and still can’t feel the bottom. Just reeds tickling her toes like a water spirit’s fingers. A leaping in her guts, panic straining to be freed. And only his grip — painful on her upper arm — keeps her from taking in gulps of water. Meanwhile darkness steals across the water.

Imagine him:

A husband who feels his age. Righteous, yes. Indignant, somewhat. He wishes he’d never been told the rumours. If she had been one of the more senior wives, and discreet, the other wives might have made arrangements. Now it was already too late. And there was the man himself to consider. It went beyond what was obvious.

And so he pulls her out of sight into the darkness under the mangroves. He confronts her with what he knows, repeats the talk. She had been seen. They had been overheard. And he demands a confession, there and then. And she, with her toes pointed down and her chin tilted up, grabbing breaths as fast as she can. She confesses.

The court imposed a fine for woman damage.

The elders of the court saw this was a time to be firm, to teach a lesson to those young men who could not afford wives of their own. But they were too quick to make an example of the Cement Man.

And my father — he overplayed his hand, he underestimated his tenth wife.

We went with her. At first we moved around. We stayed with my mother’s mother in her house in the town, a house built on stilts. The house of treats, where a pot of tea warmed on the sideboard all day long, where my grandmother let us play with her hair and sleep in her bed at night and gave us little sips of condensed milk. More than once our mother left us for a few days.

All the time I waited to go home. I have forgotten now the moment when the consciousness flowered. It happened out of sight, like a night bloom. Closed one day and open the next. We were never going home. I was a child. It was not for me to ask. No. You overhear a little thing here, another thing there. And some things you pick up when you are a child, you only really understand when you become an adult.

At some point I came to understand all of it: the travelling, the boarding, the buying and selling; all of this was so my mother could pay her bride price back. To free herself from our father.

A long time later I was standing underneath the cold neon light in a supermarket. Around me people were opening boxes of eggs, checking the shells for cracks. In my hand I held a box of half a dozen. A fat man with a beard dressed in blue one-piece overalls like a giant romper-suit swung into me. The carton spun upwards into the air, the eggs exited six ways. The fat man tried to catch them. He was surprisingly quick and snatched an egg out of the air. The shell broke in his hand. We were both left standing there. Bright yellow yolk and transparent mucous slid from his fingers. I found some tissues in my bag. We stared at the mess on the floor.

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘They’ll get it.’ Waved his wiped-clean hand. Stepped around the mess.

We deliberately both walked away from it and from each other in opposing directions. And as I walked away I felt a shiver, a sensation of hot and cold, of some strange suppressed panic.

I travelled away, in a direction I didn’t want to go, backwards in time. For a long while the memory was gone. Only the feeling was left.

Back then we travelled east with a hot-metal smell in our nostrils, crouched on the floor of a mammy wagon, playing with tiny metal ball bearings, racing them up and down the floor. Yaya and I, we want to stand up and feel the hot, gummy wind in our faces, sit on the sides of the lorries like the young lorry boys lizardeyed in sunglasses, who perch with their backs to the cab, and sometimes crane over to talk to the driver through the open window. And never fall or have to steady themselves with undignified abruptness. Even when the truck drives over a pothole. Or lurches to a stop and the women all clutch at their leaping bosoms, and at the same time check the damp wads of cash strapped below their breasts. I want to stand up and reach up to catch the passing branches who nod their approval as we speed by.

I have never even seen a truck before, but I am fearless. In a very short time we two newly superior beings snigger at the foot travellers who drop their loads and flee into the bush at the approach of her stampeding wheels and roaring engine.

At the roadside a man is selling watermelons. The truck stops and people climb down. Some of the young men light cigarettes. The woman next to us asks me to mind her bundles and trots off into the bush, hitching up her skirt as she goes. The men wander beside the road, turn their backs, as though moved to contemplate the way we have just come. I walk over to look at the fruit stacked in a pyramid taller than I am. My mother comes up behind me and buys a melon from the vendor who breaks it open for us, pushing the point of his knife into the skin and forcing the flesh apart. And we eat slices of it with our faces turned to the wind, the pale pink juice drying sticky on our chins. And save the smooth black seeds and flick them out of the moving truck one by one.

Later we pass a bus with a broken axle, sliding sideways like a crab caught on the edge of the surf. We leave it far behind as we roll on past shanty towns of scrap metal and tin into the unknown. And there we arrive coated in dust, like we have been rolled in flour and readied for frying. And when I blow my nose the snot comes out red and thick.

At night the cockroaches drop from the ceiling of the rented room. And in the morning we find them lying upside down under the beds. And I sweep them out and wonder, do they fall from the ceiling already dead? Or do they faint trying to walk upside down and bash their brains out on the floor? Behind thin cotton curtains six other cots are partitioned off like separate states. They are empty. The town keeps nocturnal hours.

In the early hours of the morning the bursts of music, the shouts and the coarse laughter steal into my dreams. I lie wedged between my brother and my mother, our bodies stuck together with sweat.

By day Yaya and I stand on the town’s main street and watch rickshaws and carts bumping along the road. A truck full of men — shirtless, carrying picks and shovels — roars past, nearly knocking us down. Once in a while a shiny car glides by, scraping its suspension on the rutted road. We run alongside and try to peer through the dark glass. Try to imagine who could possess a vehicle such as that.

Eventually we stop and stand still, dizzy at the sight of so much. The people hurry past us heaving bundles, sacks and crates. People here rarely smile or greet each other. After a while I begin to notice that most of the people here are men. We walk past queues of them, arms and legs covered in cracked red mud like elephants’ skin, waiting outside the Syrian diamond traders’ shops. We press our noses against the windows, see men hand over leather pouches, dealers weigh little pieces of grey grit on tiny brass scales.

The view from our window looks out over pits that line the river like sores on a leper’s mouth. Men in loincloths wade up to their thighs through the rusty shallows, other men dig at the sticky mud with shovels, on the banks of the river more men sift the mud and water in round trays. A vaporous sunlight glazes their shiny black ant bodies and a sour wind drifts across the houses.

One carat equals ten pounds. Two carats equals twenty pounds. A full three carats equals one hundred and ten pounds. Enough to buy a fleet of bicycles, marry, build a house of baked bricks with a zinc roof.

Our mother’s bride price equalled the price of a one carat diamond. Cash only. On top of which she received a cow which was hers for the milking. Non-returnable. Two country cloths and four double lengths of waxed cotton, one dozen sticks of salt at two shillings each, cowries, rice, cocoa beans, gold and one umbrella, distributed to guests and family: all were listed by the court and added to the debt. To be repaid in full.

Our mother knew enough to know that the people who made money in the gold rush were not the miners, but the ones who sell buckets and spades. And so she buys a three-legged stand and sets herself up in business selling eggs on the roadside.

We buy our eggs for two pennies each, boil them and sell them for five pennies each. A perfect plan except that firewood is not free. Here the trees have all been pulled down to make way for the mines and railways. Firewood sells for fifteen pence a bundle in town, twelve pence a bundle on the road out of town. A dozen eggs equals twentyfour pence, plus fifteen pence firewood equals thirty-nine pence.

Twenty-one pence profit per dozen. And living costs and everything on top.

Not all the eggs are good. Some contain the pale foetuses of baby chicks, others are watery and grey. Each time this happens our profits are reduced. The eggs must be conserved. We do not eat them for lunch. We do not eat anything. We nibble kola nuts to ward off the hunger and thirst just like the men in the pits. And mother sends me on the long trek to buy firewood out of town.

And at the end of more long days than we can bear it is enough. And the end when it comes is marked only by an egg slipping through fumbling fingers and fracturing on the ground. I laugh, because for some reason I think it’s funny. And because we have been fooling around Yaya laughs with me. And so I laugh all the harder to encourage him, and just because I want to. The giggles rise in my chest like bubbles of air under water. I don’t notice the way Yaya’s laugh hovers and bursts. Only vaguely do I hear the sound, like a whistling in the air.

My mother slaps me hard across the face.

I have forgotten what was so funny. It isn’t funny any more. I bend down to try to scoop the egg up. It stares back up at me like a sorry eye, quivering with glutinous tears.

‘Leave it.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I say as many times and as quickly as I can. And again: ‘I’m sorry.’ Because I am: deeply, desperately, suddenly. Frightened faces, Yaya’s and mine. No pride, no urge to sulk or seek refuge in swaggers.

‘And you think that’s enough,’ my mother says, ‘just like that? You say you’re sorry?’

‘But I am sorry.’ My mother looks at me. Her face is empty.

‘Well Serah, sometimes sorry isn’t enough.’

A gecko, hanging in the crevice between the ceiling and the wall, turns its head and blinks as if in disbelief.

The next morning a line of ants trails across the floor, up the legs of the bed, across the mattress, up the wall and through the window, carrying away grains of sleep and dead skin.

My mother, curled up on her rented cot, weeps. I clutch her and cry too. I hurt her hurt. I grieve her grief. Yaya sits on the end of the bed, leans over and places his head on her legs, curls up there awkwardly grasping her calves. And the bad feeling settles itself over us like a blanket.

Hours later I sit up straight and watch my mother as she sleeps. She sleeps on her side with one arm bent beneath her head, the other stiff and straight, trapped under her body. Thinner now, the bones have crept to the surface. A web of cracks in her heels, outlined with dirt. In the dark cups beneath her eyes, a sheen of sweat and oil.

Behind her shoulder is a tiny, keloid scar with points like a star. I reach out and touch it, feel the slipperiness with my forefinger. When I was very little I used to like to stroke it while I sucked my thumb, when it was still my turn to be carried on her back. Once she told me a shooting star had fallen out of the sky and landed there. Another time she said a firefly had settled on her and forgotten to put itself out first. The last time I had asked her, a few days before, she told me it was nothing: just a spark from a lively fire.

Jagged silvery lines glimmer in the thickening gloom, across her hip bone and in the curve of her that dips from the peak of her hip down and out again towards her stomach. Some years after my brother was born she became pregnant again. She was asleep in the house; I heard the sound of her calling and ran inside. Water! Soaking the sheets, leaking through the straw mattress, dripping on to the floor where it formed tributaries and ran across the uneven floor into the corner of the room. And my mother clutching her stomach with one hand and waving at me with the other. I lurched forward, but she wasn’t beckoning. She was waving me away.

‘Out! Out!’ And Ya Memso running in behind me. My mother’s closest friend among the wives. A tiny woman, so short I once asked my mother if she had grown up yet. Ya Memso went to her, as I backed out of the door.

No more children, then. Just us two. And only many years later, when I was sitting in front of my own husband, on the far side of a table and a silence that neither of us could cross, I sat and stared into the corner of the room at the fluff, the angled shadows, the dark seam where the floor met the walls. Fatigue made my skin hurt, my teeth ache. For a few moments I gazed into that corner, forgot he was there. And the memory came back to me then. Not in a flash. Rather it fluttered down like a feather.

I stay awake and watch her until gradually the outline of her body withdraws into the darkness.

Orange robes. Bright against her skin. I notice my mother is beautiful. This is the first time I have seen her since we came back. I don’t know how many months ago that was. It is harvest time. Out past the fields the rice is hanging in bundles on frames to dry. In the plantation the red coffee beans in their new red skins shimmy and shine. It makes your eyes ache to look at them for too long.

I had almost forgotten the village existed, and yet in no time I have assumed old habits, returned to the places I consider my own. The water has closed over those weeks. Memories of our time away slipping down the sand, red mud and threadbare curtains and lizard eyes being washed away. The tide of the present rushes in to fill the space.

One difference. Our mother has no longer been with us. She left us. She didn’t stay. And in that time everything has changed.

Now, from where I stand blocking the light from the door, I watch her. She looks different and the same. Oddly familiar. Like a feeling of déjà vu. We have embraced. A spontaneous rush forward transformed into an awkward clutching. And now we face each other from opposite sides of the room.

Not so Yaya, who sits by her feet, refuses to leave her surrounds like a dog by the warmth of a fire.

Yaya remembers nothing of the journey home. We wrapped him in all the clothes we possessed. He was shivering, his insides pouring out like brown tea and the colour leaching from his face as though his spirit were draining out. And the other passengers in the mammy wagon complained, but then said sorry. Again. Sorry, Ma. When they saw how ill the woman’s son was. And might die. That would bring them bad luck, without a doubt. So they became solicitous and offered us the food they had wrapped in cloths and banana leaves, pieces of sticky sweet rice bread and pepper chicken. It was the first real food I had had in days; I crammed it into my mouth. Afterwards I felt nauseous and had to hold on to the sides of the truck. One lady who knew about herbs made the driver stop by a guava tree. She picked the leaves and made some tea for Yaya. We were let down at the footpath to the village. And somehow we stumbled the last miles home.

Tiny Ya Memso is asking far too many questions. The words jostle and barge each other on their way out of her mouth. She moves around the room, flapping her hands like a pea-hen trying to get off the ground.

Brought back, we were, as though we had been accidentally taken in the first place. Goods discovered in the bottom of the basket at home. Shoved there by a gluttonous toddler or a batty grandmother who keeps pinching things. So sorry, a mistake. Here you are. Won’t happen again. Sorry, sorry.

And by now we call him the Cement Man, because we have worked out a thing or two. And so have all the other children.

They sing a song. The last line goes like this:

Bo, hide them, hide them all, O Chief,

For he is coming, the Wife Thief!

Shame bubbles up and pricks at the underneath of my skin. And the tune hangs around like the smell of smoked fish. At night I can’t sleep, I hit my head to try to knock the melody out.

Patterned cloths of green and blue, waxed and beaten. The palms of her hands are stained green and blue, and the edges of her cuticles, too. Blue-green crescent moons. Now she is a business-woman, with a business making gara cloths. Ya Memso, as excited as a child, has already hidden hers in the bottom of the trunk where she hoards things for the day the sabu comes to ask about her daughters. My own is lying a thousand miles away on the other side of the room on my mother’s lap.

I watch her and wish she would just go away.

In time my wish came true. This time she headed to the South. We saw her again, from time to time. Always when my father was away. She never did pay him back. She was in debt to him for the rest of her life, like the men whose lives he owned, unable to marry again until such a time as she repaid her bride price.

As for me, I no longer wanted her for my mother. I could not bear to be reminded of that awful time, I just wanted everything back the way it was before. Ya Memso treated us well. She even started a marriage box for me, with the cloth my mother brought. And gradually she added things she made herself and things she bought.

In the beginning Yaya talked about her a lot, wanting to know whether I remembered this or that. Like the way she could fold her tongue in two. The way he could and I couldn’t. Once he asked me to sing a song, a lullaby. I told him he was far too old for such things. Next he wanted us to go out to the main road and find a lorry to take us south. It was foolishness.

People change as time goes by. As you change yourself. I wish she were here, so I could tell her the things I understand now that I didn’t then. You look a bit like her, around the eyes. Maybe the shape of the face. Yes, an oval face — your father’s. People sometimes thought she came from somewhere else.

For a long time I would not let myself think about her. The years passed. A question sat itself down on the edges of my mind. Just beyond my subconscious. Like a patient pet waiting to be noticed and allowed inside. And the question was this. Why did she refuse to swear? Why did she turn away and refuse to swear her innocence?

Well, did they or didn’t they? The Tenth Wife and the Cement Man?

‘Guilty,’ cried the elders one, two and three. Obvious to anyone but a fool. But a time came when that wasn’t enough for me. She insisted my father had threatened her. I thought about it for a long time.

She could have worn the clothes of the victim. She could have pleaded and begged. But she refused. When the moment came she saw her choices, she could not betray herself, seeing what her life would become. She told the elders she was faithful. But when the people from his village brought the sassa forward and demanded she vow on her own life that there was nothing, in that moment she saw the starkness of her choice.

In the game of warn an opponent faced with losing must sometimes sacrifice in order to win.

She didn’t shrink from it, the way Soulay told us. Rather she refused it. Turned her back on one life, turned the corner to a new one. Because she had nothing left to lose.

Or so she thought.

This was what I believed for a long time. Then another day I looked again and found there was a different thought sitting in the exact same place I found the last one.

At the river, that day — the day Yaya and I swam with the Cement Man — my mother sat on the bank and watched us. And she saw in him the same thing we had seen. A man who wasn’t like other grown-ups. A man with pink-splashed lips. Orchid petal lips. And she could not bring herself to swear because she knew something.

She knew that in her heart that she had wished it.