How Beautiful We Were(9)

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Mama fastens the rope that keeps our front door closed. Her hands tremble as she makes knot after knot; she seems convinced a tightly locked bamboo door will prevent soldiers from getting to us. She hurries to do the same to the back door. Juba and I are in the parlor, sitting with our grandmother, Yaya—Juba is on Yaya’s lap, I’m on a stool next to hers. Yaya strokes Juba’s head with one hand, places the other around my shoulders. Besides the sound of Mama’s efforts, our hut is quiet. Kosawa is quiet.



“My dear children,” Yaya says, softly, “let’s go to sleep. We need a good rest so we’ll be ready to face whatever tomorrow brings.” She is wrapped by a peace I haven’t seen since the day Papa left. “If anyone comes to take something from us, we’ll give it to them, even if it’s our lives they want.”

“Bongo and all the men are together right now, sharpening their machetes,” Mama says as she re-enters the parlor. Her voice is quivering. “If those soldiers think they can just come here and…”

“But, Mama, the soldiers have guns,” I say, struggling not to cry. Papa told me, before he left, never to cry unless I must. “How will machetes help us?”

“Jakani and Sakani will take care of that,” Mama replies.

I ask no more questions. The twins—our village medium and medicine man—are capable of incredible deeds. They’re beyond human, but they’re mortals; they too can die.

“We’ll all sleep in my bedroom tonight,” Yaya says, staring afar. “We’ll dream the same dream, maybe a dream in which we see your papa and your big papa.”

Everyone is silent again, listening to the quietness outside. Yaya rises first, leaning against her cane. Juba and I follow her to her bedroom. Without rinsing our mouths or changing into our sleeping clothes, we go to lie on either side of her. Mama sleeps on the floor, no one beside her for comfort now that Papa is gone and tradition forbids her from ever sharing a bed with another man. I hear Juba and Yaya falling asleep—their breaths turning into light snores—but I know that, like me and most of Kosawa, Mama will stay up all night; life gifts easy peace only to the very young and very old. Nothing can hinder my thoughts from rushing to the moment when Mama and Yaya and Juba are slaughtered in my presence. I wonder how long I’ll spend dangling between this world and the next before finding myself among my ancestors, who I hope will welcome me and teach me how to be at home in their world. I pray they’ll help me forget the few good things of this world. Perhaps it won’t be hard for me to get used to this unimaginable land—Papa and Big Papa are already there, Mama and Yaya and Juba and Bongo will accompany me there. We’ll be together again, but first we must die.



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MAMA AND PAPA CAUTIONING ME never to go near the big river is my first memory of life. Without their warning, how would I have known that rivers were not ordinarily covered with oil and toxic waste? Without our parents’ stories about their childhoods in a clean Kosawa, their days spent swimming in rivers that ran clear, how would my friends and I have known that the sporadic smokiness that enveloped the village and left our eyes watery and noses runny wasn’t an ordinary occurrence in the lives of other children our age?

The year my age-mates and I were born, while some of us were on our mothers’ breasts and the rest of us were spending our final days in the land of the unborn, an oil well exploded in Gardens. Our parents and grandparents told us that the explosion sent crude and smoke higher than the trees. It filled the air with soot, a sight everyone thought was an omen, never having seen the likes of it before. By our sixth year of life, though, after our parents had come to know the fullness of the curse that came from living on land beneath which oil sat, they’d realized that what they saw that day was no omen—it was merely a broken oil-well head, long overdue for replacement, but why should Pexton replace it when the cost of its negligence would be borne largely by us?



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One evening, when I am five, while sitting on the veranda with Papa, I ask him why the oil fields and surrounding dwellings for Pexton’s laborers are called Gardens though there’s not a single flower there. Papa thinks for a while, chuckles, and says, Well, Gardens is a different sort of garden, Pexton is a different sort of gardener; the oil is their flower. I ask Papa if the pipelines that begin in Gardens have an end—they seem to run on forever, wrapping around our village and passing over the big river, through our farms, and deep into the forest, the end nowhere in sight. Papa tells me that everything that has a beginning also has an end. In the case of the pipelines, they start at the oil wells and end in a faraway town many hours away by bus, a town near the ocean. There, Papa says, the oil is put into containers and sent overseas, to that place called America.

I ask Papa about America, if it has as many people as Kosawa, and he tells me that, from what he remembers in school, America has about seven thousand people, most of whom are tall men; the overseer at Gardens was from America. He and his friends came to Kosawa to get oil so that their other friends in America would have oil for their cars. Everyone in America has cars, Papa says, because the hours over there go by so fast that people need cars to get to places quickly and do everything before the sun goes down. I ask him if I can someday own a car and use some of our oil. Papa smiles at my question and says, Of course you can own a car, why not? Just make sure you buy a big one so you can use it to take me hunting; that way, I don’t tire my legs trekking to the forest every time. Being that I hate Pexton, I say, I wouldn’t want their oil in my car, so I’ll need to buy a car that does not use oil. Papa tells me that cars must use oil, but I insist mine will be different. Papa chuckles at my fantasy. Then he starts laughing. He laughs so hard that I start laughing too, because the delight in his eyes tickles my heart.