How Beautiful We Were(8)
“And exactly how long do you suggest we keep them prisoner?” another added.
“You’re crazier than Konga if you believe we can maneuver people in Bézam.”
The commotion returned—everyone speaking, no one listening. The Pexton men and Woja Beki watched us, as if we’d lost all senses. Several of our grandfathers stood up to upbraid Lusaka: How could he be so na?ve as to think Pexton would bow to our threats and demands? What made him think they cared? What would happen when the soldiers arrived the next day with enough bullets for every living thing in Kosawa?
“When the soldiers arrive,” Lusaka said, “we’ll tell them that if they kill one of us, we’ll kill these men.”
“And what if they don’t care?” a mother cried. “What if they let us kill the men and then kill us after? Does Pexton care if these men live or die?”
“It does,” Konga replied, silencing everyone with the boom of his voice. “Pexton would never let anything bad happen to its men, because Pexton loves its men.”
Most of our grandfathers nodded in approval, as if they’d seen evidence of this.
We believed it too, because it was now obvious that the Spirit had possessed Konga. Having gone mad and lost all knowledge of the near and far past, he had no way of knowing how Pexton felt about its men, so it had to be the Spirit speaking through him. Of this we had no doubt—the Spirit was in our midst and it was telling us to dare. Those of us who had been crying dried the remnants of the tears on our cheeks. Our mothers and fathers whispered to one another as they nodded and sighed deeply in relief.
Lusaka clapped again to quiet everyone. “It’s simple,” he said softly. “If Pexton doesn’t stop killing our children, I’ll kill these three of its children with my bare hands.”
No one in the village square made a sound.
Lusaka wished everyone a good night and began walking to his hut.
Konga ordered the four young men to seize the Pexton men and Woja Beki and follow Lusaka. “Don’t you dare touch me,” the Leader said. The young men dared.
They grabbed one man apiece, each man resisting in his own way—the Leader flailing his arms, his subordinates kicking and punching the air, Woja Beki wagging his finger and speaking with clenched teeth, ordering the young men to stop, reminding them that he was their leader, the blood of the leopard flowed thickest within him, he gave the orders here, they’d better not forget that. Konga asked for four more young men to come help. Eight rushed to the front, our friend Thula’s uncle among them—a young man named Bongo, whose zeal to put an end to our woes awed everyone, being that he didn’t yet have a child. Now reckoning with twelve men, the captives fought less, cursed more. Their voices receded. Woja Beki’s wives’ and children’s whimpers became apparent. Two of his children were in our class. We did not attempt to console them; we’d long since stopped liking them.
Konga thanked us for coming and told us that the meeting was now officially over. He wished us a good night. “Tomorrow,” he said, “everything is going to change.”
* * *
—
Some of us walked home scared. Some of us floated, jubilant and light. Our friend Thula, thinking of her missing and likely dead father, walked head down, holding the hand of her little brother, Juba, a child who had died from Pexton’s poison and come back to life through the mercy of the Spirit. Behind them, their mother and their father’s mother walked slowly, hoping, we imagined, that they would soon have answers about the fate of their husband and son. Like every family in Kosawa, the Nangi family wanted liberation from their pain. We were all hopeful that night—we hoped even as we feared.
Tomorrow the soldiers will arrive, and we might be dead by sunset.
Tomorrow Pexton will surrender, and we might live to see our old age.
We tried not to think about our future. We wanted to hold on to that night for as long as we could, savor this optimism that had descended upon us, the faint promise of triumph. We wanted to be overcome with madness like Konga and relish the fleeting ecstasy wrought of fearlessness, anticipating our new lives as conquerors.
They’d proclaimed victory over us prematurely. That night, we declared war on them, and the next morning we awaited their arrival.
They should have known we’re not easily defeated.
Thula
THE HUT IS WARM, BUT my teeth chatter. My mind thrashes around, compelling me to imagine the spill of my blood after a bullet tears open my belly. I wonder how many bullets it would take to kill me—what would my corpse look like? I’ve spent my entire life around death, and yet I fear it. The mystery of it confounds me. How someone could be here and not here, in our world but also gone from it, with a nose closed off to air, eyes that won’t open, a sealed mouth, a human but just a thing. I hate this world, but I don’t yearn to leave it. I want to live long and see what life after a twisted childhood looks like, but I know death is eager to claim me—my journey to reunite with Papa might begin tomorrow. Once, after the funeral for one of my friends, I asked Papa about the crossing from this world to the next, how lonely and treacherous it would be, and he told me that it was different for everyone, it all depended on what kind of life a person had led, words that offered me no comfort. “You’re not going to die for a long time, Thula,” Papa said. A lie, we both knew it—what human can guarantee another long life?