Who Fears Death

Chapter 3 Interrupted Conversation

PAPA ANCHORED MY MOTHER AND ME TO JWAHIR. ‌But even if he’d lived, I’d still have ended up here. I was never meant to stay in Jwahir. I was too volatile and there were other things driving me. I was trouble from the moment I was conceived. I was a black stain. A poison. I realized this when I was eleven years old. When something strange happened to me. The incident forced my mother to finally tell me my own ugly story.

It was evening and a thunderstorm was fast approaching. I was standing in the back doorway watching it come when, right before my eyes, a large eagle landed on a sparrow in my mother’s garden. The eagle slammed the sparrow to the ground and flew off with it. Three brown bloody feathers fell from the sparrow’s body. They landed between my mother’s tomatoes. Thunder rumbled as I went and picked up one of the feathers. I rubbed the blood between my fingers. I don’t know why I did this.

It was sticky. And its coppery smell was pungent in my nostrils, as if I were awash in it. I tilted my head, for some reason, listening, sensing. Something’s happening here, I thought. The sky darkened. The wind picked up. It brought … another smell. A strange smell that I have since come to recognize but will never be able to describe.

The more I inhaled that smell, the more something began to happen in my head. I considered running inside but I didn’t want to bring whatever it was into the house. Then I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. There was a humming, then pain. I shut my eyes.

There were doors in my head, doors made of steel and wood and stone. The pain was from those doors cracking open. Hot air wafted through them. My body felt odd, like every move I made would break something. I fell to my knees and retched. Every muscle in my body seized up. Then I stopped existing. I recall nothing. Not even darkness.

It was awful.

Next thing I knew, I was stuck high in the giant iroko tree that grew in the center of town. I was naked. It was raining. Humiliation and confusion were the staples of my childhood. Is it a wonder that anger was never far behind?

I held my breath to keep from sobbing with shock and fear. The large branch I grasped was slippery. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just spontaneously died and returned to life. But that didn’t matter at the moment. How was I going to get down?

“You have to jump!” someone yelled.

My father and some boy holding a basket over his head were below. I gnashed my teeth and grasped the branch more tightly, angry and embarrassed.

Papa held his arms out. “Jump!” he shouted.

I hesitated, thinking, I don’t want to die again. I whimpered. In order to avoid my subsequent thoughts, I jumped. Papa and I tumbled to the wet iroko-fruit-covered ground. I scrambled up and pressed myself to him trying to hide as he took off his shirt. I quickly slipped it on. The smell of the mashed fruits was strong and bitter in the rain. We’d need a good bath to get the smell and purple stains off our skin. Papa’s clothes were ruined. I looked around. The boy was gone.

Papa took my hand and we walked home in shocked silence. As we trudged through the rain, I struggled to keep my eyes open. I was so exhausted. It seemed to take forever to get home. Did I come that far? I wondered. What … how? Once home, I stopped Papa at the door. “What happened?” I finally asked. “How’d you know where to find me?”

“Let’s just get you dried off, for now,” he soothingly said.

When we opened the door, my mother came running. I insisted I was fine but I wasn’t. I was falling into oblivion again. I headed to my room.

“Let her go,” Papa told my mother.

I crawled into bed and this time tumbled into a normal deep sleep.

“Get up,” my mother said in her whispery voice. Hours had passed. My eyes were gummy and my body ached. Slowly, I sat up, rubbing my face. My mother scooted her chair closer to my bed. “I don’t know what happened to you,” she said. But she looked away from me. Even then I wondered if she was telling the truth.

“I don’t either, mama,” I said. I sighed, massaging my sore arms and legs. I could still smell the iroko tree’s fruit on my skin.

She took my hands. “This is the only time I will tell you this.” She hesitated and shook her head, saying to herself, “Oh, Ani, she’s only eleven years old.” Then she cocked her head and had that look I knew so well. That listening look. She sucked her teeth and nodded.

“Mama, what …”

“The sun was high in the sky,” she said in her soft voice. “It lit everything. That’s when they came. When most of the women, those of us older than fifteen, were Holding Conversation in the desert. I was about twenty years old …”

The Nuru militants waited for the retreat, when the Okeke women walked into the desert and stayed for seven days to give respect to the goddess Ani. “Okeke” means “the created ones.” The Okeke people have skin the color of the night because they were created before the day. They were the first. Later, after much had happened, the Nuru arrived. They came from the stars and that’s why their skin is the color of the sun.

These names must have been agreed upon during peaceful times, for it was well known that the Okeke were born to be slaves of the Nuru. Long ago, during the Old Africa Era, they had done something terrible causing Ani to put this duty on their backs. It is written in the Great Book.

Though Najeeba lived with her husband in a small Okeke village where no one was a slave, she knew her place. Like everyone else in her village, if she lived in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, only fifteen miles east, where there was more to be had, she would spend her life serving the Nuru.

Most abided by the old saying, “A snake is foolish if it dreams of being a lizard.” But one day, thirty years earlier, a group of Okeke men and women in the city of Zin rejected it. They’d had enough. They rose up rioting and demanding and refusing. Their passion spread to neighboring Seven Rivers towns and villages. These Okeke paid dearly for having ambition. Everyone did, as is always the case with genocide. On and off this had been happening since. Those rebelling Okekes that weren’t exterminated were driven East.

Najeeba had her head to the sand, her eyes closed, her attention turned inward. She smiled as she held conversation with Ani. When she was ten, she joined the journeys along the salt roads with her father and brothers to trade salt. Since then, she’d loved the open desert. And she’d always adored travel. She smiled wider and rubbed her head further into the sand, ignoring the sound of the women around her praying.

Najeeba was telling Ani how she and her husband had sat outside the night before and seen five stars fall from the sky. It’s said that the number of stars a wife and husband see fall will be the number of children they will have. She laughed to herself. She hadn’t a clue that this would be the last time she’d laugh for a very long time.

“We don’t have much, but my father would be proud,” Najeeba said in her rich voice. “We have a house that sand is always getting into. Our computer was old when we bought it. Our capture station collects only half as much water from the clouds as it should. The killing has begun again and is not far. We have no children yet. But we’re happy. And I thank you …”

The purr of scooters. She looked up. There was a parade of them, each with an orange flag on the back of the seat. There must have been at least forty. Najeeba and her group were miles from the village. They’d left four days ago, drinking water and eating only bread. So not only were they alone, they were weak. She knew exactly who these people were. How did they know where to find us? she wondered. The desert had erased their trail days ago.

The hate had finally made it to her home. Her village was a quiet place where the houses were tiny but well built, the market small but well stocked, where marriages were the biggest events that happened. It was a sweet harmless place, hidden by lazy palm trees. Until now.

As the scooters drove circles around the women, Najeeba looked back toward her village. She grunted as if punched in the stomach. Black smoke plumed into the sky. The Goddess Ani hadn’t bothered to tell the women that they were dying. That as they had their heads in the sand, their children, husbands, relatives at home were being murdered, their homes being burned.

On each scooter rode a man and on several a woman accompanied the man. They wore orange veils over their sunny faces. Their expensive military attire—sand-colored pants and tops and leather boots—were probably treated with weather gel to keep them cool in the sun. As Najeeba stood staring at the smoke, her mouth agape, she remembered how her husband had always wanted weather gel for his clothes when he worked up in the palm trees. He could never afford it. He will never afford it, she thought.

The Okeke women screamed and ran in all directions. Najeeba screamed so loudly that all the air left her lungs and she felt something give from deep in her throat. She’d later realize that this was her voice leaving her forever. She ran in the opposite direction from her village. But the Nurus made a wide circle around them, herding them back together like wild camels. As the Okeke women cowered, their long periwinkle garments fluttered in the breeze. The Nuru men got off their scooters, the Nuru women behind them. They closed in. And that was when the raping began.

All of the Okeke women, young, prime, and old, were raped. Repeatedly. Those men didn’t tire; it was as if they were bewitched. When they spent themselves inside one woman, they had more to give to the next and the next. They sang as they raped. The Nuru women who’d come along laughed, pointed, and sang, too. They sang in the common language of Sipo, so that the Okeke women could understand.

The blood of the Okeke runs like water

We take their goods and shame their forefathers.

We beat them with a heavy hand

Then take what they call their land.

The power of Ani belongs to us

And so we will slay you to dust

Ugly filthy slaves, Ani has finally killed you!

Najeeba had it the worst. The other Okeke women were beaten and raped and then their abusers moved on, giving them a moment to breathe. The man who took Najeeba, however, stayed with her and there was no Nuru woman to laugh and observe. He was tall and strong like a bull. An animal. His veil covered his face but not his rage.

He grabbed Najeeba by her thick black braids and dragged her several feet from the others. She tried to get up and run but he was on her too fast. She stopped fighting when she saw his knife … shiny and sharp. He laughed, using it to cut her clothing open. She stared into his eyes, the only part of his face she could see. They were gold and brown and angry, the corners twitching.

As he held her down, he brought a coin-shaped device from his pocket and set it beside her. It was the sort of device people used to keep the time, the weather, to carry a file of the Great Book. This one had a recording mechanism. Its tiny black camera eye rose up, making a clicking and whirring sound as it began to record. He started singing, stabbing his knife into the sand next to Najeeba’s head. Two large black beetles landed on the handle.

He pulled her legs apart and kept singing as he bore into her. And between songs, he spoke Nuru words that she couldn’t understand. Heated, biting, snarling words. After a while, anger boiled up in Najeeba and she spat and snarled right back at him. He grabbed her neck and his knife and pointed its tip at her left eye until she grew still again. Then he sang louder and bore more deeply into her.

At some point, Najeeba went cold, then numb, then quiet. She became two eyes watching it happen. She’d always been like this to an extent. As a child, she’d fallen from a tree and broken her arm. Though in pain, she’d calmly gotten up, left her panicking friends, walked home and found her mother, who took her to a friend who knew how to set broken bones. Najeeba’s peculiar behavior used to anger her father whenever she misbehaved and was beaten. No matter how hard the slap, she wouldn’t make a sound.

“This child’s Alusi has no respect!” her father always told her mother. But when he was in his usual good mood, her father praised this part of Najeeba, often saying, “Let your Alusi travel, daughter. See what you can see!”

Now her Alusi, that ethereal part of her with the ability to silence pain and observe, came forward. Her mind recorded events like the man’s device. Every detail. Her mind observed that when the man sang, despite the song’s words, his voice was beautiful.

It lasted about two hours, though to Najeeba it felt like a day and a half. In her memory, she saw the sun move across the sky, set, and come up again. It was a long time, that’s what matters. The Nurus sang, laughed, raped, and, a few times, killed. Then they left. Najeeba lay there on her back, her garments open, her pummeled and bruised midsection exposed to the sun. She listened for breathing, moaning, crying and for a while, she heard nothing. She was glad.

Then she heard Amaka shout, “Stand up!” Amaka was twenty years Najeeba’s senior. She was strong and often a voice for the women of her village. “Stand up, all of you!” Amaka said, stumbling. “Get up!” She went to each woman and kicked her. “We’re dead but we won’t die out here, those of us still breathing.”

Najeeba listened without moving as Amaka kicked at thighs and pulled at women’s arms. She hoped she could play dead well enough to trick Amaka. She knew her husband was dead and, even if he weren’t, he’d never touch her again.

The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.

An Okeke woman will never kill a child kindled inside of her. She would go against even her husband to keep a child in her womb alive. However, custom dictates that a child is the child of her father. These Nuru had planted poison. An Okeke woman who gave birth to an Ewu child was bound to the Nuru through her child. The Nuru sought to destroy Okeke families at the very root. Najeeba didn’t care about this cruel plan of theirs. There was no child kindled in her. All she wanted was to die. When Amaka got to her, it took only one kick to get Najeeba coughing.

“You don’t fool me, Najeeba. Get up,” Amaka said. The left side of Amaka’s face was blue-purple. Her left eye was swollen shut.

“Why?” Najeeba said in her new voiceless voice.

“Because that’s what we do.” Amaka held out a hand.

Najeeba turned away. “Let me finish dying. I have no children. It’s best.” Najeeba felt the weight in her womb. If she stood up, all the semen that had been pumped into her would splash out. She gagged at the thought and then turned her head to the side and dry heaved. When her stomach settled, Amaka was still there. She spat on the ground next to Najeeba. It was red with blood. She tried to pull Najeeba up. The pain in Najeeba’s abdomen flared but she kept her body limp and heavy. Eventually, frustrated, Amaka dropped Najeeba’s arm, spat again, and moved on.

The women who chose to live dragged themselves up and walked back to the village. Najeeba closed her eyes, feeling blood seep from a cut on her forehead. Soon there was silence again. Leaving this body will be easy, she thought. She’d always loved traveling.

She lay there until her face burned in the sun. Death was coming slower than she wanted. She opened her eyes and sat up. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the bright sun. When they did, she saw bodies and pools of blood, the sand drinking it up as if the women had been sacrificed to the desert. She slowly stood, went over to her satchel, and picked it up.

“Leave me,” Teka said minutes later as Najeeba shook her. Teka was the only one alive among the five bodies. Najeeba sat down hard beside her. She rubbed her aching scalp where her assailant had pulled her hair so brutally. She looked at Teka. Her cornrows were encrusted with sand and her face grimaced with each breath. Slowly Najeeba stood and tried to pull Teka up.

“Leave me,” Teka repeated, looking at her angrily. And so Najeeba did.

She trudged back to the village, only going in that direction out of habit. She begged Ani to send something along to kill her, like a lion or more Nurus. But it was not Ani’s will.

Her village was burning. Homes smoldered, gardens were destroyed, scooters were aflame. There were bodies in the street. Many were burned, unrecognizable. During these kinds of raids, the Nuru soldiers took the strongest Okeke men, tied them up, doused them with kerosene, and set them afire.

Najeeba saw no Nuru men or women dead or alive. The village had been an easy conquest, off guard, vulnerable, unaware, in denial. Stupid, she thought. Women moaned in the street. Men wept before their homes. Children walked about confused. The heat was stifling, radiating from the sun and the burning houses and scooters and people. By sundown, there would be a fresh exodus east.

Najeeba softly said her husband’s name when she got to their house. Then she wet herself. The urine burned and ran down her bruised legs. Half of the house was on fire. Their garden was destroyed. Their scooter was on fire. But there was Idris, her husband, sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.

“Idris,” Najeeba softly said again. I’m seeing a ghost, she thought. The wind will blow and he will blow away with it. There was no blood running down his face. And though the knees of his blue pants were crusted with sand and the armpits of his blue caftan were dark with sweat, he was intact. This was him, not his ghost. Najeeba wanted to say “Ani is merciful,” but the goddess wasn’t. Not at all. For, though her husband was spared, Ani had killed Najeeba and left her still alive.

When he saw her, Idris shouted with joy. They ran into each other’s arms and held each other for several minutes. Idris smelled of sweat, anxiety, fear, and doom. She dared not wonder what she smelled like.

“I’m a man, but all I could do was hide like a child,” he said into her ear. He kissed her neck. She closed her eyes, wishing Ani would strike her dead right there.

“It was what was best,” Najeeba whispered.

Then he held her back and Najeeba knew. “Wife,” he said, looking down at her open garments. Her pubic hair was exposed, her bruised thighs, her belly. “Cover yourself!” he said pulling the bottom part of her dress closed. His eyes grew moist. “C-c-cover yourself, O!” The look on his face grew more pained and he held his side. He stepped back. He looked at Najeeba again, squinting, and then he shook his head as if trying to ward something off. “No.”

Najeeba just stood there as her husband stepped away, his hands held before him. “No,” he repeated. His eyes spilled tears but his face hardened.

His face was blank as he watched Najeeba go into the burning house. Inside, Najeeba ignored the heat and the sounds of the house cracking, popping, and dying. She methodically gathered a few things, some money she’d hidden away, a pot, their capture station, a hand game her sister had given her years ago, a photo of her husband smiling, and a cloth sack of salt. Salt was good to have when going into the desert. The only picture she had of her deceased parents was burning.

Najeeba wasn’t going to live for much longer. To herself, she became the Alusi that her father said had always lived in her; the desert spirit who loved to wander off to distant places. Once in her village, she had hoped her husband was alive. When she found him, she hoped he would be different. But she was an Okeke. What business did she have being hopeful?

She could survive in the desert. Her yearly retreats with the women and her Salt Road journeys with her father and brothers had taught her how. She knew how to use her capture station to pull condensation from the sky for drinking water. She knew how to trap foxes and hares. She knew where to find tortoise, lizard, and snake eggs. She knew which cacti were edible. And because she was already dead, she wasn’t afraid.

Najeeba walked and walked, searching for a place to let her body die. A week from now, she thought, as she set up camp. Tomorrow, she thought as she trudged along. When she first realized she was pregnant, death was no longer an option. But in her mind, she remained an Alusi, controlling and maintaining her body as one controls a computer. She traveled east, away from the Nuru cities, toward the wastelands where the Okeke lived in exile. At night when she lay down in her tent, she’d hear Nuru women’s voices laughing and singing outside. She’d voicelessly scream back at them to come in and finish her off if they could. “I’ll tear off your breasts!” she said. “I’ll drink your blood and it’ll nourish the one who grows inside me!”

When she slept, she often saw her husband Idris standing there, disturbed and sad. Idris had loved her dearly for two years. She would wake up and have to look at his picture to remember him as he was before. After a while, this didn’t help.

For months, Najeeba dwelled in limbo as her belly grew and the day of birth approached. When she had nothing else to do, she sat and stared into space. Sometimes she played her Dark Shadows hand game, winning it over and over, a higher score each time. Sometimes she talked to the child inside her. “The human world is harsh,” Najeeba said. “But the desert is lovely. Alusi, mmuo, all spirits can live here in peace. When you come, you will love it here, too.”

She was a nomad, traveling during the cool parts of the day, avoiding towns and villages. When she was about four months along, a scorpion stung the heel of her foot while she was walking. Her foot painfully swelled up and she had to lie down for two days. But she eventually got up and moved on.

When she finally went into labor, she was forced to admit that what she’d been telling herself all these months was wrong. She wasn’t an Alusi about to give birth to an Alusi child. She was a woman in the desert all alone. Terrified, she lay in her tent on her thin mat in her desert beaten nightshirt, the only item she had that fit her swelling body.

The body that she had finally admitted to being hers was conspiring against her. Violently pushing and pulling, it was like battling an invisible monster. She cursed and screamed and strained. If I die out here, the child will die alone, she desperately thought. No child deserves to die alone. She held on. She focused.

After an hour of terrible contractions, her Alusi moved forward. She relaxed, retreated, and watched, letting her body do what it was made to do. Hours later, the child emerged. Najeeba could have sworn the child was shrieking even before it came out. So angry. From the moment the child was born, Najeeba understood that it would dislike surprises and have little patience. She cut the cord, tied the belly button, and pressed the child to her breast. A girl.

Najeeba cradled her and watched in horror as she, herself, bled and bled. Images of lying in the sand with semen seeping out of her kept trying to creep into her mind. Now that she was human again, she was no longer immune to these memories. She forced the memories away and focused on the angry child in her arms.

An hour later, as she sat weakly wondering if she would bleed to death, the blood slowed and then stopped. Holding the child, she slept. When she woke, she could stand. She felt as if her insides would fall out from between her legs but standing wasn’t impossible. She took a close look at her child. She had Najeeba’s thick lips and high cheekbones but she had the narrow straight nose of someone Najeeba didn’t know.

And her eyes, oh, her eyes. They were that gold brown, his eyes. It was as if he were peering at her through the child. The baby’s skin and hair color were the odd shade of the sand. Najeeba knew of this phenomenon, particular only to children conceived through violence. Was it even spoken of in the Great Book? She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t read much of it.

The Nuru people had yellow-brown skin, narrow noses, thin lips, and brown or black hair that was like a well-groomed horse’s mane. The Okeke had dark brown skin, wide nostrils, thick lips, and thick black hair like the hide of a sheep. No one knows why Ewu children always look the way they do. They look neither Okeke nor Nuru, more like desert spirits. It would be months before the trademark freckles showed up on the child’s cheeks. Najeeba gazed into her child’s eyes. Then she pressed her lips to the baby’s ear and spoke the child’s name.

“Onyesonwu,” Najeeba said again. It was right. She wanted to shout the question to the sky: “Who fears death?” But alas, Najeeba had no voice and could only whisper it. One day, Onyesonwu will speak her name correctly, she thought.

Najeeba slowly walked over to her capture station and connected its large water bag. She flipped it on. It made a loud whoosh and created the usual sudden coolness. Onyesonwu was jarred awake and started crying. Najeeba smiled. After washing Onyesonwu, she washed herself. Then she drank and ate, nursing Onyesonwu with some difficulty. The child didn’t quite understand how to latch on. It was time to go. The birth blood would attract wild animals.

Over the months, Najeeba focused on Onyesonwu. And doing so forced her to care for herself. But there was more to it. She glows like a star. She is my hope, Najeeba thought gazing at her child. Onyesonwu was noisy and fussy while awake, but she slept just as fiercely, giving Najeeba plenty of time to get things done and rest herself. These were peaceful days for mother and daughter.

When Onyesonwu grew sick with fever and none of Najeeba’s remedies worked, it was time to find a healer. Onyesonwu was four months old. They had recently passed an Okeke town called Diliza. They had to go back. It would be the first time in over a year that Najeeba was around other people. The town’s market was set on the outskirts of the town. Onyesonwu fussed and burned against her back. “Don’t worry,” Najeeba said as she walked down the sand dune.

Najeeba worked hard not to jump at every sound or whenever someone brushed against her arm. She bowed her head when anyone greeted her. There were pyramids of tomatoes, barrels of dates, piles of used capture stations, bottles of cooking oil, boxes of nails, items of a world that she and her daughter didn’t belong to. She still had the money she’d taken when she left her home, and the currency was the same here. She was afraid to ask for directions, so it took her an hour to find a healer.

He was short with smooth skin. Under his small tent were brown, black, yellow, and red vials of liquids and powders, various bound stalks, and baskets of leaves. A stick of incense burned, sweetening the air. On her back, Onyesonwu peeped weakly.

“Good afternoon,” the healer said bowing to Najeeba.

“My … my baby is sick,” Najeeba cautiously said.

He scowled. “Please, speak up.”

She patted her throat. He nodded, stepping closer. “How did you lose your …”

“Not for me,” she said. “For my child.”

She unwrapped Onyesonwu, holding her tightly in her arms as the healer stared. He stepped back and Najeeba almost wept. His reaction to her daughter was so much like her husband’s reaction to her.

“Is she …?”

“Yes,” Najeeba said.

“You’re nomads?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

Najeeba pressed her lips together.

He looked behind her and then said, “Hurry. Let me see her.” He inspected Onyesonwu, asking Najeeba what she had been eating, for she and her child weren’t malnourished. He handed her a corked vial containing a pink substance. “Give her three drops every eight hours. She’s strong, but if you don’t give this to her, she will die.”

Najeeba uncorked it and sniffed. It smelled sweet. Whatever it was, it was mixed with fresh palm tree sap. The medicine cost a third of the money she had. She gave Onyesonwu three drops. The baby sucked in the liquid and went back to sleep.

She spent the rest of her money on supplies. The dialect in the village was different, but she was still able to communicate in both Sipo and Okeke. As she frantically shopped, she started to accumulate an audience. Only determination kept her from running back into the desert right after buying the medicine. The baby needed bottles and clothes. Najeeba needed a compass and map and a new knife to cut meat. After buying a small bag of dates, she turned and found herself facing a wall of people. Mostly men, some old and some young. Most around the age of her husband. Here she was again. But this time, she was alone and the men threatening her were Okeke.

“What is it,” she quietly asked. She could feel Onyesonwu fidgeting at her back.

“Whose child is that, Mama?” a young man of about eighteen asked.

She felt Onyesonwu fidget again and suddenly she was flush with rage. “I’m not your mama!” Najeeba snapped, wishing that her voice would function.

“Is that your child, woman?” an old man asked in a voice that sounded as if he hadn’t drunk cool water in decades.

“Yes,” she said. “She’s mine! No one else’s.”

“Can’t you speak?” a man asked. He looked at the man next to him. “She moves her mouth but no sound comes out. Ani has taken her filthy tongue.”

“That baby is Nuru!” someone said.

“She’s mine,” Najeeba whispered as loudly as she could. Her vocal cords were straining and she could taste blood.

“Nuru concubine! Tffya! Go find your husband!”

“Slave!”

“Ewu carrier!”

To these people, the murder of Okekes in the West was more story than fact. She had traveled farther than she’d thought. These people didn’t want to know the truth. So they watched as mother and child moved about the market. As they watched, they stopped and talked with friends, speaking ugly words that grew uglier the more they were exchanged. They grew angrier and agitated. They finally accosted Najeeba and her Ewu child. They grew bold and self-righteous. Finally, they struck.

When the first stone hit Najeeba’s chest, she was too shocked to run. It hurt. It wasn’t a warning. When the second hit her thigh, she had flashbacks of a year ago, when she died. When instead of stones, a man’s body had slammed against her. When the third stone hit her on the cheek, she knew that if she didn’t run, her daughter would die.

She ran as she should have run when the Nurus attacked that day. Stones hit her shoulder blades, neck, and legs. She heard Onyesonwu screeching and crying. She ran until she burst from the market into the safety of the desert. Only after scaling the third sand dune did she slow down. They probably thought they’d driven her to her death. As if woman and child couldn’t survive alone in the desert.

Once safely away from Diliza, Najeeba unwrapped Onyesonwu. She gasped and sobbed. There was blood running from just above the child’s eyebrow where a stone had hit her. The baby feebly rubbed at her face, smearing the blood. Onyesonwu continued to fight as Najeeba held her tiny hands back. The wound was shallow. That night, though Onyesonwu slept well, the medicine having broken her fever, Najeeba cried and cried.

For six years, she raised Onyesonwu alone in the desert. Onyesonwu grew into a strong feisty child. She loved the sand, winds, and desert creatures. Though Najeeba could only whisper, she laughed and smiled whenever Onyesonwu shouted. When Onyesonwu shouted the words Najeeba taught her, Najeeba kissed and hugged her. This was how Onyesonwu learned to use her voice without having ever heard one.

And a lovely voice Onyesonwu had. She learned to sing by listening to the wind. She often stood facing the wide open land and sang to it. Sometimes, if she sang in the evening, she attracted owls from far away. They’d land in the sand to listen. This was the first sign Najeeba had that her daughter was not just Ewu but very special, unusual.

In that sixth year, a realization came to Najeeba: Her daughter needed other people. In her heart, Najeeba knew that whatever this child would become, she could only become it within civilization. And so she used her map and compass and the stars to take her daughter there. What place sounded more promising for her sand colored daughter than Jwahir, which meant “Home of the Golden Lady”?

According to Jwahirian legend, seven hundred years ago there lived a giant Okeke woman made of gold. Her father took her to the fattening hut and weeks later she emerged fat and beautiful. She married a rich young man and they decided to move to a large town. However, along the way, because of her immense weight (she was very fat and made of gold), she grew tired, so tired that she had to lie down.

The Golden Lady couldn’t get up, so this was where the couple had to settle. For this reason, the flattened land she left was called Jwahir and those who lived there prospered. It was built long ago by some of the first Okekes to flee the West. The ancestors of Jwahirians were of a special breed, indeed.

Najeeba prayed that she’d never have to tell her strange daughter the story of her conception. But Najeeba was a realist, too. Life was not easy.

I could have killed someone after my mother told me this story.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “You’re so young. But I promised myself that the minute anything began happening to you, I would tell you this. Knowing may be of some use to you. What happened to you today … in that tree … it’s just the beginning, I think.”

I was shaking and sweating. My throat felt raw as I spoke. “I … I remember that first day,” I said, rubbing the sweat from my brow. “You chose that spot in the market to sell some cactus candy.” I paused, frowning as it came back to me. “And that bread seller forced us to move. He shouted at you. And he looked at me like …” I touched and pressed the tiny scar on my forehead. I’m going to burn my copy of the Great Book, I thought. It’s the cause of all this. I wanted to drop to my knees and beg Ani to burn the West to the ground.

I knew a little about sex. I was even a little curious about it … well, maybe more suspicious than curious. But I didn’t know about this—sex as violence, violence that produced children … produced me, that happened to my mother. I stifled an urge to vomit, and then an urge to tear at my skin. I wanted to hug my mother but at the same time I didn’t want to touch her. I was poison. I had no right. I couldn’t quite bring myself to grasp what that … man, that monster, had done to her. Not at eleven years old.

The man in the photo, the only man I’d ever seen for the first six years of my life, wasn’t my father. He wasn’t even a good person. Betraying bastard, I thought, tears stinging my eyes. If I ever find you, I’ll cut off your penis. I shuddered, thinking how I wanted to do worse to the man who’d raped my mother.

Up to this point, I’d thought I was Noah. Noahs had two Okeke parents, yet they were the color of sand. I’d ignored the fact that I didn’t have the usual red eyes and sensitivity to sunshine. And that aside from their skin color, Noahs basically looked Okeke. I ignored the fact that other Noahs had no problem making friends with “normal looking” children. They weren’t outcast as I was. And Noahs looked at me with the same fear and disgust as Okekes of a darker shade. Even to them, I was other. Why hadn’t my mother burned that picture of her husband Idris? He’d betrayed her to protect his stupid honor. She’d told me he died … he should have died—been KILLED—violently!

“Does Papa know?” I hated the sound of my voice. When I sing, I wondered, whose voice is she hearing? My biological father could also sing sweetly.

“Yes.”

Papa knew from the moment he saw me, I realized. Everyone knew but me.

“Ewu,” I said slowly. “This is what it means?” I’d never asked.

“Born of pain,” she said. “People believe the Ewu-born eventually become violent. They think that an act of violence can only beget more violence. I know this isn’t true, as you should.”

I looked at my mother. She seemed to know so much. “Mama,” I said. “Has anything like what happened to me in the tree ever happened to you?”

“My dear, you think too hard,” was all she said. “Come here.” She stood up and wrapped me in her arms. We cried and sobbed and wept and bled tears. But when we were finished, all we could do was continue living.