But I knew better than that. Life hadn’t been fair to me. I kept quiet. And that day I learned how to turn my luck around.
5 Serah, 1950: Woman Palava
My mother? I haven’t thought about her in a long time.
My mother left.
Tried to alter her destiny. Looking back it was a brave thing to do, I suppose. Foolish, maybe. I don’t know. Who did she think she was?
She was Saffie. The tenth wife. Imagine it.
A tenth wife has no status. Not much better than a servant. But sometimes it is the lowliest people who have the most courage — because they’re the ones with the least to lose.
There are things I remember. I don’t know if any of it makes sense. Some questions were never answered. And there were other things I made myself forget.
Well, let me see. Where do you want me to start?
My mother used to tell me how she first met Ya Namina. My mother was a young girl standing at the side of the path when Ya Namina and her entourage passed by on their way back to Rofathane. She had been at court with her husband and was returning without him. My mother was carrying a pot of water and she stepped off the side of the road to allow this woman past. Whoever she was, my mother could see she was important. Everybody around her was laden while she walked ahead unburdened.
Ya Namina had journeyed for many miles. She beckoned the child with the water pot over. My mother lowered the heavy pot from her head, filled a cup of water and held it out to the older woman, bowing as low as she could. Bent over double like that she noticed the woman’s feet: long toes, and toenails that curved at the ends and pointed downwards. Ten toes pointing at the ground.
As my mother stretched out her hand for the empty cup, the woman touched her chin, tilting her face upwards. She asked her name and what family she belonged to. That was it. Where it all began. How she became my father’s next wife.
Three years later she saw the moon. Two years after that she was taken to her husband’s room. Ya Isatta performed the obligations on behalf of Ya Namina, bathing her, rubbing her limbs with oil and perfume, carrying her into the room. That night my father sat on a cushion on the tapestries on the floor, counting silver coins, stringing them, through the hole in the middle of each one, into great ropes of money. My mother perched on the edge of the fourposter bed, a bed as big as a boat, and watched him until she became drowsy and fell over backwards. In the morning she woke up alone.
The next night he brought out a board hollowed out in twelve places, six on each side, and numerous small, silver beans. He beckoned her to sit opposite him, took a handful of the beans in one hand and allowed four to drop into each hollow. Afterwards he gathered up the contents of one and began to count them out. One, two, three, four. All this was done in silence. My mother gazed at him. He jabbed his forefinger at the board. She dropped her eyes. He never spoke.
Later he stood up, placed a round felt hat upon his head and left the room. My mother was a virgin. But she had been initiated and she was a married woman. She knew enough to know this was not the way it was supposed to be, though she let on to nobody. Not even Ya Isatta who called her to one side the next morning with a crafty look on her face. That was how they often spent their nights together. Playing warri. She became very good at it.
Of course, these were things I found out later. Ya Memso was prone to those sorts of indiscretions.
It wasn’t as though nothing ever happened. My mother gave birth to me and then to my brother. But, warn? Warri is a fine game. But when was a board game ever enough for a woman?
All this was many years ago, around the time people began to build square houses. All my father’s wives lived in round houses. My father’s house was square, it’s true — it was so large. In every other respect, though, his house was built in the old way, without bricks or cement and with a thatch roof.
All the time I was growing up, corners and angles gradually replaced curves and arcs. Some people warned it was inviting trouble in through the door, making hiding places for every kind of spirit in search of a warm, dark place to nestle. The women complained the new-shaped houses were dirt traps, a nuisance to sweep, with corners full of dust and spiders’ webs.
Back then my father began to draw up plans for a new house. A house with more rooms for visitors, for relatives, for new wives maybe and new children. A house with a roof of corrugated iron.
I was one of the last. The oldest children had grown up and left home. The first coffee trees had overreached their prime. New seedlings were planted every year and every year extra labourers brought in to tend the bushes. At harvest everyone, wives and children included, had to pick alongside the men in the fields. And afterwards we helped to husk the sun-baked beans, pulling away the tacky pulp with deft, skinny fingers. Raking the pale green beans out in circles on the ground, so many moons fallen from the sky.
My father was a wealthy man. No doubt about it. But everywhere glittering riches were being dug out of the earth. In the next door chieftaincy gold had been found on one family’s land. Now the men were marrying wives from the ruling families, building houses, acquiring followers.
I remember where it all started:
A dry, cool morning, I watch the horizon fade, swept over by the red dust of the harmattan like a line drawn in the sand erased by the tide.
In front of us men shovel piles of sand. Others walk to and fro, toting great blocks of baked clay. They come from the village, the village given to my father a long time back. Some of them are the same ones who work in the plantation. Others I have never seen before. In the morning they arrive and depart by nightfall. Every day for weeks now my brother and I have left our house to take up our place opposite the site. Yaya is fascinated.
The walls of the house climb as each row of bricks is cemented into place. The new house is being built next door to the old one, and it is exactly the same shape, but all the dimensions are so much bigger. Right in the middle of the dry season storm clouds sailed over the village and unleashed a storm. Magnificent rumbles straight from Pa Yamba’s magic box. Spears of rain tearing into the new walls of the house, washing away the foundations. Yesterday our father himself appeared to say the men must work every day now until the house is complete. I heard the foreman try to tell him the men needed one day off to work in their own fields. My father’s face looked as though it had just been caressed by a freezing hand. A rigidness around the upper lip, a tugging at the corner of the eyes. I saw it. I know these things. I am a child, versed in reading adult faces. The foreman understands these things as well. His nerve sputtered and died.
No problem, Pa. And he scurried away like an ant.
Today I am foreman and Yaya is the labourer. Our bricks are baking on top of the drying rock, a great slab jutting from the earth in front of our home where my mother dries the clothes. The bricks are nearly ready, though the house we are building has run into some difficulties, just like my father’s house. The bricks crumble, the mud dries out and won’t stick. Today we work at refining our recipe, squatting on our haunches over the hole where we mix earth and water together, using a pair of sticks to swill a slippy sliding mess.
Busy, we are. Preoccupied with problem solving. Until our mother calls. Until it’s time to do something else.