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.
I turned them all down, but it seemed as though every time I answered the door another one fell over the threshold.
* * *
Ya Jeneba and Ya Sallay did not sit on the mat. They stayed only a few days and returned to the house they had continued to share in Rofathane, coming back to help with the preparations for the forty-day ceremony.
I watched how alike the two sisters had grown over the years. Throwing their heads back and clapping their hands when they laughed and they laughed easily, the same phrases, in the same lilting voice, the same gesture, wiping sweat from their foreheads with the insides of their wrists.
Their father had been counsellor to the chief of a neighbouring chieftaincy. Jeneba and Sallay were the daughters of the same wife, belly sisters. Jeneba the eldest by about thirteen years. Their mother died before Sallay was old enough to remember her. And though she was wet-nursed by another of the wives, it was Jeneba who cared for her sister. Carried her everywhere, played with her, plaited her hair, bathed her and slept with her at night — like a favourite doll. Nobody called Sallay by her name, instead they called her Baby Jeneba. Jeneba’s marriage to my father was a dynastic one, agreed by the families. When the time came for Jeneba to leave for her new home, Sallay ran after the hammock bearing her sister away. She ran and ran until somebody picked her up and carried her back. She would not stay, so they tethered her to a tree by one leg like a goat. The child sat down and refused to eat or drink, or speak. Nobody had ever witnessed such stubbornness in one so young. Some wondered if she wasn’t one of those children who could exist on nothing but air. Whatever, if she took no food or water she would become a spirit one way or the other. The trouble was that every time they untied her, she ran away down the path and into the trees to find her sister.