Ancestor Stones (23 page)

Our teacher, Mrs Silk, was not this sort. Not at all. For a start there was the way she looked at you, straight in the eye. And she would ask you to look her in the face too, when you spoke. It got me into trouble with my grandmother, who slapped me for being so bold. But when you talked to Mrs Silk and saw the way she looked at you and smiled and nodded. Well, it made you feel good in yourself. Like you were saying something interesting. So I learned to look down at my grandmother's feet, and up into Mrs Silk's eyes.

Every morning Mrs Silk arrived at the school in her husband's car. And every morning we gathered at the windows to watch. Mrs Silk sat in her seat, making no move to get out. Her husband would climb down and walk all the way around the front of the car to open her door. And then he kissed her.

Kissed her!

On the lips!

Just like that!

In front of us all!

We'd whoop and duck down out of sight quickly, before they looked up.

What did we think? We thought: what shameless people are
these? Such behaviour in public! But secretly I had another thought, and I think some of the other girls did, too. How this man must love his wife to allow himself to act that way. Yes, Mrs Silk was very lucky. Oh, and I prayed one day I would have a husband to love me like that, too.

We used to powder our faces with chalk dust. To dampen the shine. We smuggled in hot-combs and ironed each other's hair in the dormitory at night. I wonder the teachers never seemed to ask themselves how we had curly hair one day and straight hair the next.

Hannah Williams. Now she was the first one to own a pair of shoes. Brought them back after she went to stay in the city with her Creole father, who had a job in the Government offices. I had never owned a pair in my life. And I didn't know anybody who did, although my grandmother embroidered slippers for women who were getting married. So frail, with soles made of canvas. By the end of the day they were spoiled.

Everybody wanted to walk in Hannah's shoes. Come evening she would take them out and let us take turns up and down between the bunks. One girl walked like a duck. Another fell flat on her face. Everybody cheered the ones who walked well. My turn came early on, because I was in Hannah's group of friends. I slipped the shoes on.

La i la!

It felt as though I was stuck ankle deep in river mud. I couldn't flex my feet. It was as though a great weight rested upon each one. I could barely lift them off the ground and put them back down. Still, when everybody cheered, I tell you, I was grinning like a fool.

The dormitory had a wooden floor. Hannah's shoes made a slapping sound. In the corridors of the school Mrs Silk's heels tapped out her progress to the classroom door. You could hear her swivel where the corridor divided. Kop, kap. Swivel. Kop, kap. One day I crossed the compound in Hannah's shoes and walked with them down the school corridor to see if I could make the same noise, but I could not. Hannah was upset with me for wearing her new shoes out of doors.

I yearned for a pair of shoes of my own. By this time I was staying with my grandmother in town during the school holidays, in the house we had once thought of as the house of treats. Well, I begged her. I volunteered for every errand and every chore and when I was finished, I invented new ones. I whitewashed the stones at the perimeter of our property. I even soaped and rinsed the nanny goat. No thanks. None at all, my efforts went unacknowledged. Then one day, when I was on the brink of giving up: ‘Wash your face and oil your legs,' she said.
‘Makone
. We're going to town.'

There were two shoe stores, two styles of shoes for girls. There was Bata Shoe Store on the main road near the police station. Further down the street, beyond the general store with the poster for Blue Band margarine was the shop selling Clarks shoes. I knew what I wanted. I wanted Clarks shoes. The styles were close, but Clarks were butter coloured and soft as skin. Bata shoes were made of an inferior leather, dark and stiff. Hannah Williams had Clarks shoes.

Clarks shoes: one pound, eighteen shillings and sixpence.

Bata shoes: one pound fifteen shillings.

I remember the prices exactly.

We went to Bata.

Well, I did not want those shoes. Not at all. So I claimed they didn't fit. I pushed my toes together and walked like a crow. I hopped up and down, as though the floor was burning. The saleswoman knitted her brow, pursed her lips and drew in her chin. She pressed at the ends of my toes with her fingertips, measured my feet a second time. Lengthways. Widthways. She brought down a second pair, then a third. Still no luck. After a while she stood back and shrugged her shoulders, turned to my grandmother and said: ‘Once they are worn in the leather will soften, you'll see.'

Hali!

What did I do? I threw myself on the floor and wept. What do you
think
I did? I begged my grandmother to take me to the store where they sold Clarks shoes. My grandmother was a stern woman. In the market she sent me to the stall holders to ask their best price. Once. Twice. The traders complained to me they were barely
making a profit, but always they lowered their prices. Only after the third time would she come over, exchange greetings and watch them closely while they packed her purchases.

But Bata Shoes was a shop with assistants and a ceiling fan.

She gave in so quickly, I was surprised. My tears dried on my face. And yet as we walked to Clarks Shoe Outlet she held my arm with a grip so tight I could feel the flesh squeezing through her fingers.

Once inside the store I was terrified my grandmother might change her mind. So I forced my foot inside the first pair of Clarks shoes I was given and jumped to my feet. I strode up and down like a soldier on parade. My grandmother ordered the shoes wrapped. She paid and we walked to the door. I tucked my new shoes under my arm and carried them home. I tried to keep a straight face. I tried not to do anything that might annoy my grandmother. And I tried not to think about the way the shoes had pinched slightly across the arch, and how I could feel the ends with my toes.

Lord have mercy! But those shoes gave me so much grief. Even to wear them a little each evening left me hobbling.

So I lent them to the girl who helped in the kitchen. She had broad, strong feet. Rice planter's feet. It was her job to wash us; she used to scrub our hands and the soles of our feet using blue soap and the brush with which she scoured the floor and walls. She was silent, resolute and almost impossible to please. The loan of my shoes she regarded as a singular favour. By the time I packed them in my box ready to go back to school they were a size bigger.

Sundays was the single day footwear was permitted on the school grounds. Between those times I practised walking until I was about the best in the school. At the end of that term my feet had already outgrown my shoes. Still I wore them for four more months before I was ready to give them up. I knew I'd never get another pair so soon. I simply learned to live with the pain.

Now, how did it go? It went like this:

Back to back,

Belly to belly;

I don't give a damn

‘Cos I done dead already.

After dark we used to sneak away from my grandmother's house and gather outside the home of the half-Lebanese son of the garage owner, the only person in that place who owned a gramophone. It was he who used to play the Zombie Jamboree. Only certain kinds of women went to his house. Women who wore tight dresses and smoked cigarettes, who looked each other up and down and sideways beneath heavy lids and kept sullen faces, so they always looked like nothing around them was good enough. We called them High Life women.

A floating population of us lived in my grandmother's house. I really don't have any idea who some of them were, but each child arrived with a claim of kinship, no matter how fragile. Parents who were short on funds sent their children to stay. And in return, my grandmother never sent their offspring back. She raised us well, though I don't remember any active upbringing as such. No. Rather, we were like a collection of differently coloured and shaped bottles left out to collect rainwater, some half-filled, some almost empty. You learned from being around her what would earn a nod of approval or awaken a furious rage. I don't remember her ever touching us, not even when we cried. And certainly we could not imagine her young, no matter how we tried. Yet somehow she left us all with the impression, like the afterglow of a radiant dream, of having been thoroughly loved.

Still, we ran away from her when we could. First to watch the High Life women and strut to the Zombie Jamboree on our dance floor of dust, in the square of yellow light beneath the window of the garage owner's son. Later, when the Lakindo clubs started to be held among the stalls of the empty marketplace, and before the elders banned them because so many men complained their youngest wives were disappearing at night to attend the dances, we used to hide and watch the couples dancing in the dark.

We didn't celebrate birthdays. We didn't know when we had been born. Presents came occasionally, always unannounced, which made them all the sweeter. The year I turned approximately sixteen my grandmother returned from the market with a pair of red patent-leather shoes with real heels. The choice seemed so utterly unlike her in any way I wonder if later, when she looked with a different eye, she didn't disapprove of her earlier self in buying those shoes. But I guess at the time she thought they were as smart as I did.

I wore them to my graduation. And later to my first dance. In those days the dances began at four o' clock in the afternoon. Yaya and I walked the three miles from home barefoot, we washed our feet at the standpipe and clumped into the dance in our shoes. The first time was a disaster. My feet sweated in the heat. Inside the plastic shoes they slipped and slid like eels in a bucket. Our dance routine collapsed, we stumbled over each other's feet, bruises like purple and black pansies bloomed on our shins.

From then on we wore our shoes to rehearse. At the next dance we rhumba'd like professionals. And for the first time I danced with somebody other than my brother.

Janneh was five years older than me. A student at the university in the South. He had a voice the colour of deep water, tapered fingers, long legs with high calves and two scoops of muscle and flesh for his buttocks. He owned a motorbike. A motorbike! In those days few people even had bicycles, though you could hire one outside the petrol station. You couldn't actually ride away on it, though. You sat on the back and they pedalled you to your destination.

The Honda's engine was as loud as the roar of a forest beast, it drowned out my screams. My skirt was bunched up between my legs, I pressed my knees together and held on to the padded seat between us. I couldn't bring myself to touch him, to actually put my arms around his waist. Going up a hill I felt myself sliding dangerously backwards. At the last moment I reached out and grabbed Janneh's shirt, slid my arms around him. Down the other side my body was pushed against his. I felt my stomach flip. Just for
a moment I pressed my nose against his shirt and breathed in. A warm, pungent smell, cloudy and pure at the same time. Like the smell of crumbled chocolate. Or new puppies.

My legs were trembling as I let myself into the house. From gripping with my thighs on to the motorbike, I told myself. Only once I was in bed did I remember Yaya, who walked all the way home alone. My brother did not dance with me for days.

The first elections were held four years before we were supposed to become independent. So the people could practise voting, I suppose. We were allowed to choose our own Prime Minister and some members of the cabinet, although the British would still tell them what to do. That way the Prime Minister could practise his new job without the burden of actually having to make any real decisions. They gave us the cow but kept hold of the tether.

The second time, though, it was for real. Janneh told me he had written a paper about the ways our constitution needed to be changed; it had been published in a newspaper. The motorbike belonged to the People's Progress Party. Janneh travelled with a cardboard box of fliers and posters strapped to the pillion seat. The posters bore a picture of the PPP's candidate, a man with a parting cut like a railway track into his hair and small, pursed lips. A week after I met Janneh, I stopped to look at one of the posters on a pillar box at the post office.

‘Mouth like a goat's anus,' said the man behind me to the albino boy shining his shoes. ‘Doesn't stand a chance. Tell me why they even bother coming to stand here, eh?'

The albino was silent. He flexed the shoeshine cloth and pulled it back and forward across the toe of the man's right foot. When he spoke his voice was high and light as the sound of a bamboo flute: ‘They say they have candidates all over the country. Every constituency. One people. One country.'

‘Parah!'
replied the first man. ‘Let them take this one back to where he came from. Give us our own sons first.'

The wind whipped our faces like a damp cloth, we flew through clouds of dust. At the sides of roads upon which no other vehicle
travelled, we stopped to picnic. From high on an escarpment we watched a tornado spin across the plain below, watched people trying to outrun the gathering storm as it rumbled across the landscape, bearing down upon them like a snorting bull. Behind it the sky shone blue. And on the horizon a rainbow arced across the sky. On our way back down the dirt track crumbled and slid away under our wheels. In the next town we pasted the goat man's image over the face of the candidate for the opposing party. We handed out fliers to passers-by. At the kiosk where we stopped and Janneh treated me to my first taste of popcorn the vendor took a flier from a stack on his counter, folded it into a funnel shape and poured popcorn into it. Then he sprinkled greyish salt all over the popcorn and the goat man's crumpled features.

‘Doesn't matter,' said Janneh. ‘Actually, it's a fine thing. Helps spread the word. More people than ever get to hear our name.'