That evening my mother sang the next part. Where my father’s voice was heavy and rich, like the smell of the best coffee beans, my mother’s was high and clear as an empty sky.
Then it was over. My father laughed and clapped again. He called me to sit by his side while he ate. I never could cross my legs properly, I don’t know why. My thighs ached and I was unable to take my eyes off his plate. Guineafowl stewed with honey and whole lemons. It was not a dish the other wives cooked. I hadn’t eaten. My stomach groaned loudly. My father laughed and his body shook. He held out a morsel of guineafowl in his fingers, and I reached up to take it from him. Then I remembered my mother. I hesitated. Hunger had prevented me thinking properly. Perhaps my father would consider me greedy. I glanced up at my mother, saw her slight smile, the way she inclined her head towards me. And I knew I had done well.
That day, or maybe it was another time, my mother fetched the small seven-stringed guitar she owned. Lately, since I have been thinking about her, I have wondered where she learned to play such a thing. I have never seen a woman play one before or since, only the travelling players on market days.
She sang a song for my father. It was a Madingo song about love. Not a love song. You couldn’t really call it that. I knew it off by heart:
Quarrels end,
But words once uttered never die.
Lovers part,
But love lives on.
Marriages end,
But hearts survive.
You leave your mother’s breast,
For your father’s side,
And why should this be so?
Because love forever changes.
When from her father’s house,
A girl goes to a man,
We see the same again,
Love’s constant changes.
And when into the night she slips away,
To her lover’s arms,
The same rule applies, my friend:
Love’s inconstancy.
My father laughed again, a different laugh this time. My mother sent to me to go and find my brothers. The sound of her voice wrapped itself around me and followed me out into the darkness of the compound where the words broke free and floated up to the stars.
Of course my mother was not a slave. What man would treat a slave that way? Do you ask a slave advice and talk to them about how to run your affairs? Do you listen to what they have to say and then go away and do what they tell you? My mother even had a girl of her own to help her. Does a slave have a servant? So stupid. Some people were jealous of her, that’s all. Because he brought her gifts. If he went away — on those occasions when he couldn’t take her with him — he never once forgot to bring her something back. The fan — that was a present. It was the shape of a kola leaf, like an upside down heart, finely woven in different colours. Another time he gave her a real gold nugget. And when he came back from Guinea he brought her an almond tree in a pot. The tree was in flower and she had it placed next to the open window of her bedroom, so she could enjoy the scent all through the night.
He chose her name himself. Tenkamu. I don’t know what it was before. It isn’t important. My mother was sent here by her parents to stay with relatives who lived in the village. My father saw her and he liked her. Maybe it’s true he held the mortgage on the family lands. Some people say they sent her here deliberately, in the hope that she might catch his eye. That’s just loose talk.
The truth is Pa Yamba was the one who noticed her first. When he went to speak to my father, he didn’t realise the younger man had already decided in his own head to marry her. Pa Yamba wanted her for himself. He had a temper, he dared to challenge my father. But my father was firm. He told the older man to look for a woman of his own; this one was spoken for. Ten ka mu. Look for your own. That was what her name meant. Look for your own woman.
Pa Yamba thought people were laughing at him every time they called her by that name. Sometimes they were. He thought my father owed him more than that, because it was Pa Yamba who had led us to this place. In all the years that passed he still had no wife of his own. He followed her with those eyes, eyes as flat and still as the bottom of a pond in the dry season.
My father’s house had two wings. My father’s room was in one wing and it had two doors: one reached from the inside of the house and another that opened straight out on to the verandah. Anybody who had business with my father waited beyond the outside door. I’d see Pa Yamba there among the people who arrived every day with claims of being distantly related, hoping for a donation. I’d watch him watching her.
I knew the other wives bad-mouthed my mother behind her back. They did not care that I heard them. That’s the way our people are. If it suits them they’ll not let the presence of a child constrain their tongues, though they should know better. When I was growing up I heard the things they said: calling her the ‘Madingo’, talking about how my father had never paid a bride price for her, saying she was given away for nothing like the bruised fruit at the end of market day. They were stupid women. I knew it couldn’t be true. But still somewhere inside I felt the shame burning like a coal in my belly, making me sweat with anger.
For the most part my mother behaved as though those women were not part of her existence. She did not share their cooking, or send me across to borrow ginger or salt. She turned her face away and got on with her own life. And soon I learned from her. I acted the way she did; I learned to look through them as though they were made of water instead of flesh and blood. And I plugged my ears with imaginary mud so I couldn’t hear the things they said.
Still, their narrowed eyes and twisted mouths surfaced in my dreams and their spiteful words seeped through the mud.
Finda the servant told me my mother was the only one of the wives my father had chosen for himself. ‘Except for the third wife and he soon tired of her. She only lived to dance. In the end she danced so fast all the thoughts flew out of her mouth.’
All the rest of the wives were chosen by Ya Namina. After my father brought my mother into the house, Ya Namina went out and found more wives. She didn’t like a wife she couldn’t control. Always she and my mother were polite to each other, but when Ya Namina spoke, sometimes in her voice there was something metallic inside, like a vein of iron running below the surface of the earth.
Ya Isatta, my father’s second wife, had no children and so she always took Ya Namina’s part — forever fearful she would be sent back to be a burden on her own family. Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay, everybody knew these two sisters were really married to each other. Ya Sallay was sent to live with her older sister. They were so happy living in that house together, Ya Sallay married my father just so as to avoid being sent away to a husband of her own. They kept to themselves. The younger wives: Balia, Koloneh, Memso, Saffie — well, they were just Ya Namina’s housemaids.
Do you know the meaning of the word in our language ores? Ores. It means co-wife. The women who share your husband with you. The women with whom you take turns to cook. The women you give whatever is leftover in your own pot. The women who are the other mothers of your children, who suckle your baby when your own milk has dried up or unexpectedly soured.
But the word has another meaning, too. Do you know it? No? Then let me tell you.
It means rival.
My mother was the sixth wife. She was tall — for a woman — almost as tall as my father. And she could even have been as strong as him. I know now she wasn’t so very beautiful, because people tell me I look like her. Her mouth was big, with perhaps too many teeth. But she was bathe, the favourite.