Ancestor Stones

18 Abie, 2003: The Women’s Gardens II

London, November 2003.

During the last days of my stay in Rofathane I decided I wanted to bathe in the river. The morning was cool, a steaming bucket stood outside my door. It was pleasant enough to stand in my palm frond enclosure, and to pour hot water over myself, but that day I wanted the sensation of water gliding over my body. I tied a lappa around myself, searched for the nub of black soap. It was barely light and I passed not a soul on the path through the old coffee groves and the women’s gardens, down to the river.

Slippery mud oozed between my toes, as I waded out into the water. A little further out, where a bed of weeds like tattered ribbons rippled in the current, the river bed turned to sand. Into the deeper water now I released the knot of my cloth and let it float on the surface. A tree, ebonised by time and the water, lay partly submerged. The roots reached up into the air like a giant’s hand. I knotted the soap in a corner of the cloth and suspended it from a limb. The water was cool, unexpectedly so. I shivered, raising tiny goosebumps on my skin, took a deep breath and plunged below the surface, coming up for air twenty yards on, where the river parted around an island of mangrove. I kicked out down the narrower of the tributaries, turned on to my back and floated for a few minutes with my eyes closed, feeling the faint warmth of a new sun on my face. I swam back to retrieve the cloth. I bathed, lathering my body, watched the bubbles swirl away. And after wards, I climbed up on to the bank where I shook the river water out of my hair. I would tell Aunt Serah I no longer needed hot water in the mornings, I made up my mind to bathe in the river for the remaining days of my stay.

Wrapped in my sodden cloth I walked back to the village, passing the women on their way down to work in their gardens. Isatu, who gave birth to twins a few months ago, pressed an avocado into my hand and I walked on, tearing away the papery skin, biting into it like an apple. The scent of fruit, of damp earth, the ‘touk touk touk’ of a tinker bird, the women with their babies bound to their backs — there is nothing here that could not be a hundred years old, that could not have been exactly the same on the day Asana arrived here as a girl riding on her father’s shoulders.

On my way through the village people called out little courtesies to one another and to me: ‘Did you sleep well?’ And I replied: ‘Thanto Kuru.’ I was no longer a stranger. I knew just where into all of this I fitted. Because in this small world everybody had a place, meaning they all knew how they came to be here. A story of which every detail was cherished. And I had mine.

An hour later I left the house and set off in the opposite direction, past the last house in the village, down to the flat grassland on the edge of the forest. There I found Alpha, alone and kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by seedlings in black plastic bags. He was planting them, one by one, in a row in the ground, concentrating so hard he didn’t hear me come up behind him. The sun was still low in the sky, my shadow trailed behind me. I stood behind Alpha for a few moments, watching him. When I saw him reach for the next seedling, I bent down and passed it to him. He took it without turning around and I wondered if he had known I was there all along.

‘After tomorrow maybe we’ll be finished planting out,’ he said as he pressed the mud down around the roots. ‘It shouldn’t be too long until the rains come. Maybe two weeks, three weeks. We must keep them watered until then.’

I knelt down a few feet away, picked up a trowel and began digging, copying Alpha’s actions.

‘Am I doing this right?’

‘Yes, Abie. That is quite all right.’

With my hands I moulded the earth into a miniature moat around the plant, feeling the dirt burying itself under my fingernails, then I poured water into it. The first three rows of trees had been staked, to save them from marauding porcupines and some kind of cane rat called a cutting grass. Alpha had supervised as the men set wire traps around the perimeter.

‘I’m thinking we’ll plant cassava as a cover crop. We can dry and store some of it.’

‘Good idea.’

We had left the old plantation as it was and begun a new one on the other side of the village. The trees that lived on in the forest had survived the fire, but neglect had taken its toll. Their beans were a long way past their best. So we took cuttings and began to raise seedlings.

In the meantime a certain giddiness had come over my aunts as if the time spent remembering the girls and women they once had been had invigorated the spirits. They’d lifted the past from their own shoulders and handed it to me. I didn’t see it as a burden, not at all. Rather a treasure trove of memories, of lives lived and lessons learned, of terrors faced and pleasures tasted.

Still today and every day those women appear to me in my mind’s eye, my aunts in all their guises, often when I am least expecting it. Vibrant and noisy, tumbling through time, jostling for my attention, and always with something new to say about whatever it is I am doing. Superior by far to any box of disintegrating diaries and lifeless letters.

I passed Ya Namina’s house, which is how I have come to think of it. A workman was knocking nails into the edges of the window frames. An evening a week earlier, as we all sat keeping company in front of the house, Asana had voiced her intention to move in, to live in her mother’s house again. A moment later she eased herself slowly to her feet with the aid of her stick, saying she was on her way to bed. On the steps of the verandah she turned to Aunty Hawa, who that particular evening had scarcely shared in the talk, but sat silent as the chatter flew around her. ‘And will you stay with me?’ she asked. Aunty Hawa jumped up and ran over to her, and I saw her bend down and fleetingly touch her elder sister’s feet.

They were all there on the day planting began. Serah poured a libation over the first seedling and uttered a short impromptu prayer. Then she told us she had something to say. She had decided to look for her mother. She and Mary planned a trip to the South, to the town where Serah’s mother was last heard to be living. It was only a beginning, so many years and a war had intervened, but the women who made gara were full of information and all knew each other. They would carry with them the pieces of cloth from Serah’s marriage box to show them. Every woman had her own designs like a trademark, somebody might remember. And afterwards Hawa sang a song, surprising me with a voice that was powerful and true. Gradually the others joined in, and I hummed along to the parts that were familiar, until after a few verses I had the confidence to sing out loud.

The day before I was due to return to the city to catch my flight to London the four of them decided to join me for my morning bath in the river. They were already there by the time I arrived, I heard the sound of their laughter and bickering bouncing across the water. I suppose, strictly speaking, Aunty Asana shouldn’t have been there, but that was just a convention after all. And if I had learned one thing about my aunts, it is that they would not be bound by anything so flimsy.

Coming down the narrow path I saw them before they spotted me, Asana and Serah out in the dark water, beyond the fallen tree, their breasts bobbing round and high as young girls’ breasts on the surface. Asana as lithe and whole as ever she had been. Hawa standing with her back to me, slim and straight, a sentinel waiting for her son to come home. Mariama in her element, shaking her head, a shower of crystal droplets like an elaborate crown.

Four African ladies having a bath, a group of water maidens basking in the river.

And later, when we had climbed out and were drying ourselves, Mariama called me over. She grasped one of my hands in both of hers and pressed an object into my palm, something heavy, warm and smooth. I opened my fingers and looked down. It was wet and glossy: a pure, black pebble.

That was three years ago, and every year since I have returned to Rofathane, taking with me my husband, my daughter and my son. The seedlings have taken root and now the young coffee trees stand taller than my children. And we have planted more: limes, almonds and cashew nuts, chillies and ginger, too. The first crop left the village, loaded into a truck in wooden boxes with the words ‘Kholifa Estates’ stamped on the side.

I am writing this at my desk in the den. In front of me sits a bowl of stones, a gift to me from Mariama along with the one she gave me in Rofathane. In the silver light of the morning they seem to glitter, sending out flickers of light and the occasional flash, like tiny shooting stars. Especially the crystals, the black stones and a grey one, the one that looks as though somebody has pressed their thumb into it. On summer days the corals and reds shimmer in the sun. And in the evening it is the pale stones, the smooth opaque cream pebble, the chalky rocks, which continue to glow in the dusk, long after the sun has gone.

My daughter loves to play with them while I write and she waits for a moment of my attention. In her hands they rustle and click against one another. Yesterday she came into my room.

‘This is my favourite,’ she said, holding up a stone roughly in the shape of a hexagon, smooth to the touch, but with a pattern of ripples. Then she gathered up all the stones, bent her head down over her cupped hands.

She remained that way for a long time until I asked: ‘What are you doing?’

‘Listen,’ she beckoned me down.

I lowered my head to join her. ‘What is it?’

‘Listen to the noise they make,’ she replied. ‘It sounds like they’re talking.’