Ancestor Stones (32 page)

James Smith & Sons. On New Oxford Street. I still remember the look in Ambrose's eyes when I gave it to him on his first day at the Inns of Court. He had opened it in the living room and twirled it around and around, even though I warned him it was bad luck. It was raining the morning he set off, a soft drizzle. He had clicked his heels and sung a chorus from ‘Singin' in the Rain'; it was so unlike him, so endearing, I laughed and embraced him. He kissed me in return and promised to cherish it always.

The door opened.

Am I proud of what I did? At the time, no. I was angry. I wasn't proud of myself, I was miserable. Only later I became defiant. Am I proud now? Well, now you're asking. Now I'm thinking back on it. Yes, actually. I believe I am.

I hit her. Again and again. Oh, what a noise she made as she went down. She begged me to stop. But I didn't stop. I beat her the way you beat a snake, to make sure it's dead. And maybe I would have killed her if the houseboy hadn't heard the
palava
and come running. He caught my raised hand. ‘Stop, Ma. I beg.' So softly, it brought me to my senses. And ever so gently he removed the umbrella from my hand.

I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.

When a woman is thrown out by her husband, there aren't many places for her to go. Ambrose said I had humiliated him, by playing into the hands of the gossips. That might come as a surprise to your way of thinking, but it's true. In the city appearances were the thing that mattered most. I had caused us to lose face; next to that Ambrose's fidelity was unimportant. Of the two of us, it seemed, I was the one who was in the wrong.

So there. No home. No husband. No job. The first person I went to was my sister Mary. And she was there for me, just as I had been there for her once, she made space for me and my sons in her tiny room at the Catholic Mission School for the Blind, but it was clear we couldn't stay there long. What I've learned, though, is that luck likes to stay out of sight until she's needed. Ya Memso had not seen my mother for many years, since before I left to go to England. From the time I married up until that day she had held on to my mother's share of my bride price. Well, the marriage was over, so she gave it to me to rent a place until I found a job. My qualifications were good, it didn't take me long. And with the rest of the money Ambrose had given me I paid for driving lessons and in time bought a small car of my own.

So you see, in this way my poor mother, bound to my father by her own bride price, unexpectedly gave me the keys to my freedom.

And do you know what else I think? I think Ambrose was bluffing when he ordered me to leave our house, imagining I would soon beg him to take me back. He didn't know I was my mother's daughter. He didn't know I preferred to make my way alone than live with unhappiness. Yes, Ambrose was wrong about that, just as he was wrong about many things.

There was one thing he was right about, though.

A single issue of Janneh's newspaper appeared on the streets. The next day the police rounded up all the newspaper vendors and put them in prison. As for Janneh, he simply vanished. His empty car, the headlights dying, was found at a crossroads one morning. Other people disappeared, too. A nursery school teacher here. A city councillor there. A poet ordered down from his crate in the marketplace. One by one, like lights going off all across the city. People talked about a labour camp in another country where the President was a friend of our President. But it was only a rumour. Nobody had ever come back to say whether it was true or not.

As for me, the gossip-mongers soon found new victims to torture with their tongues. Tongues like leather cords, tying a woman down, cutting into her every time she tried to break free. They laughed, not knowing that the last laugh belonged to none of us. Ambrose spent his days at the Attorney-General's office drafting new laws to take away our freedom little by little. And they never even noticed, they were too busy tittle-tattling. But one day they would find out what some of us already knew. That the reality was not so brightly coloured as the dream. That the dream no longer existed, maybe had never existed. It was all just a rainbow-coloured hallucination.

And when you reached out to touch it, your hand went straight through to the other side.

When I was a child
Karabom
warned me of the dangers of breaking the rules. I must be careful not to trespass in the sacred forest, she said, or the men who belonged to the secret society would snatch me and take me away and I would not see my mother for a long, long time. This was what happened to children who played truant, or who went wandering alone in forbidden places.

I heard these warnings all my life. Sometimes they came to town, the members of this fearsome order — to stir our terror in case, untended, it congealed into something resilient. Women and children ran away to hide, we were not even allowed to gaze upon them. Such was the power of the society, even the chiefs obeyed them for in times of peril it was the society we looked to for protection. For centuries people feared them even more than they came to fear the army.

Another day
Karabom
had warned me against keeping bad company. Two girls were walking home, she told me. One a girl of noble birth. The other a girl from a disreputable family, the kind of people who move from village to village like nomads. She had grown up doing as she pleased, disregarded her chores and never learned to cook. On their way they passed a place where the society men were busy in the forest. They could tell this by the tools left lying at the side of the path, among them the tortoiseshell drum they beat to warn people of their approach. The errant girl picked it up and, despite the protests of her friend, banged on it loudly, laughing wildly as she did so. Within moments they were surrounded
by masked men, who carried them away deep into the forest. They were not seen for a year or more. Even the wealthy father, with all his connections, could not find his daughter or free her from the men of the secret society.

‘What happened to them?' I wanted to know.

‘Who?' said my grandmother, knowing perfectly well. It meant she was finished with talking.

‘The girls.'

‘I don't know,' said my grandmother. ‘It's not important. They came back, but their chances were ruined. What man would want to marry girls like that?'

The question itched me like an insect bite for a few weeks, and then I forgot it. I was a child after all. Such was the awe in which the society was held that it was forbidden to speak of their doings, but still, there were whispers. I can tell you now the girls were not ravished, nothing like that. The society was an ancient and honourable one. But one that guarded its secrets and demanded respect. Those for whom awe proved insufficient were bound instead by its oaths of allegiance.

Remember when you were a child you used to ask so many questions? La i la! Aunty, what's this? Aunty, what's that? Your father spoiled you. Letting you talk too much. He should have used a firmer hand with you, I told him so. But your own children talk even more. Just open their mouths and say the first thing that comes into their heads, doesn't matter who else is speaking. When I tell them to be quiet, you frown at me. Oh, it's natural to be curious. How else are they supposed to learn? Aunty, you mustn't stifle their imagination. And you turn away from your elders to answer the questions of a foolish child.

But sometimes a child learns best by finding their own answers.

Look at this
lappa
. You see a piece of cloth, isn't it? Me? I see a head-tie. I see a skirt. I see a sling for a baby. I see a cloth to dry myself. I see a sheet to lay upon my bed. I see a covering for a door or a window. Or this empty tomato puree tin? You would just throw it into the rubbish, eh? But to the girl selling groundnuts here — it's a cup to measure her sales. To that woman sitting behind
her stall, it's an oil lamp. To our way of thinking there are many ways of looking at the same thing.

Sometimes you think you are trapped. Either you walk one way down the road or the other. A road to the left. A road to the right. Choose, it doesn't matter which. Neither one is what you want. But sometimes, if you look very closely, you can see the path curling through the trees. Hard to see. But only because nobody has yet trodden it.

Does any of this make sense to you? You think so? That means you don't understand at all. Maybe I just have to tell you how it happened.

‘No married woman ever bore a bastard.' Those words of my mother came back to me twenty years after she uttered them, soon after we buried my father.

The year was 1985. I was watching those of his wives who had outlived him still sitting on the mat. Some had even come back from their families to sit there. Not cooking. Not fetching water. Doing no work at all. Spending their days idle while the rest of us waited on them hand and foot. These women would not bear a bastard, it would be a miracle if any of them bore a child at all. Most of them were older than me. But still, we must all pretend to wait and see. They would sit there for a whole other month, while everybody else looked after them. Because this was our custom and it was a very old one. Nobody would challenge it, for fear of being called disrespectful.

Our father lived to be over a hundred years old. He had married eleven women and he was the father of some three dozen children, most of whom were believed to be his. But in the end he died alone. Out in a worker's hut, surrounded by the forest and close to the fields he had gone out to inspect. He must have felt unwell and lain there to rest. The creatures of the forest found him first. My mother, Ya Namina was away. Ya Isatta should have been in charge, but she was a weak woman and least favoured of all the wives. And since nobody bothered to tell her anything, she thought he had gone to be with one of the others.

The corpse was in an appalling state, the silence surrounding it confirming every suspicion. Still, the elders insisted my father had been dead no more than twelve hours, so like a good Muslim he could be buried the day he died.

Cloths were hung in front of the windows. Photographs of my father displayed on every surface. Two bolts of black calico purchased and transformed into mourning robes. My mother instructed the tailor on the style in order to avert disagreement. She waved away all help, for she had already buried one husband, and by that time so had I.

The day my mother made that remark about married women came soon after the birth of Alpha, my second child. I was still wearing black for my second husband, whom I mourned an entire year because I had loved him a great deal but also because it gave me more time alone. She had watched my belly with narrowed eyes, counting off the months in her head. An afternoon as I sat playing with my new son, she urged me to make myself respectable. In case there were other children waiting to come.

My mother always thought I should have become a head wife like her, to have other wives to do as you say. She could not imagine how a woman could want anything else. But I was not married to my second husband for long enough to go looking for younger wives, even if I had wanted to. My husband was a good man, but too much given to discussing politics. Mostly he argued with his friend Pa Brima, and always both men ended up standing and shouting at each other across the table. Pa Brima was always the first one to sit down. One day, though, he stayed on his feet. My husband was greatly vexed. So much so that he came home still full of anger and sometime during the night choked to death on his own opinion.

That night they had argued over whether everybody deserved a vote. One man, one vote. This was in the days before those sorts of elections. Pa Brima thought it was the most foolish thing he had ever heard. ‘You take some useless youth and you give his opinion the same weight as one of the elders?' he demanded. Later he blamed himself, wept that he had killed his best friend. I remembered
that argument of theirs years later, when we had elections but everybody already knew who would win. All of us with a vote, but nobody to vote for.

After a respectable period, suitors began to appear. Don't forget, this was a long time ago. I was still a woman many people considered to be attractive. I knew how to dress, how to carry myself. I knew how to keep house. I was still capable of bearing children, that much had been evidenced.

The first man told me all about his many possessions. How many pairs of shoes he possessed, how many shirts. He even owned two Western-style suits as well as many dozens of robes and embroidered tunics. Oh, and so many other things! On his fingers he ticked them off one by one. Leather-bound copy of the Koran: one. Camel hair carpets: three. Electric fans: two. Transistor radio: one. Refrigerator: one. He handed me a picture of himself standing next to the fridge. Only in the photograph the fridge was a painted one, because it had been impossible to carry the real fridge all the way to the photographer's studio. In my head I saw him one day counting me as one of his possessions. The two of us posing together for a photograph. Me, with flawless matt skin, gazing up at my husband: unblinking eyes, lips parted in a frozen smile, gleaming teeth. A perfect, painted wife.

An old man stared at me through watery eyes, squeezed my breast with trembling fingers and told me to be at his house in the morning.

The
sabu
who was representing the next suitor gave me one week to make up my mind. She had another prospective bride in mind. After three days she returned and told me to hurry up. Their number two choice was now in receipt of a rival offer.

The fourth man had dead eyes and a shadow that seemed to follow him, hovering behind his shoulder. When he sat down he was entirely still, all except for his leg, which jigged up and down as though it had a life of its own.