Today, as on other days, this is what she does:
She goes to the box and feels among the layers of clothes. She takes a tin, a tin wrapped up in red poplin, stitched with cowrie shells and leather-bound sassa. Fearful amulets to protect what’s inside. There is writing on the side. It says: ‘Woodbines’. Just so you know. For myself, I only knew that later. On the floor she folds her legs beside her and empties the cigarette cup. Pebbles and stones tumble on to the floor, she spreads them out with a hand like a fan.
There are seventeen of them. This I know. Because sometimes when I am left alone I go to the chest and take them out for myself. I empty them into my palm, feel their weight, listen to the noise they make, like they are talking to each other. Or to me. A pinkish pebble, curved in one place, flat on the other and inside dark and glistening like a sliced plum. A big one, flat and grey with a dimple that fits my thumb, just so. A dark stone, shaped just like a cigar and veined too, like a tobacco leaf. I hold it to my lips and copy the men outside. A cream-coloured pebble, with pale lines intersecting across its length and width: paths and a crossroads. A translucent crystal. A triangular stone, dusty like chalk. A black moon-rock. There are others. Ah, my favourite: white, five-sided, smooth as my skin, but rippled as the sand on the windward side of a dune.
Alone in her room, except for me, my mother talks to the stones. Yes, she does, and often. But first she gathers them up in her hands and throws them in the air like a celebration. She holds out her right hand and catches some, leaving others to fall. She counts them two by two. One, two. One, two. This is how she goes. And sometimes: one. She puts the single stone at the end of the line. She casts and counts and casts and counts. Two rows of stones. The road to life and the road to death. All the time she murmurs soft sounds. I know these sounds by heart. The cadence of her voice, the rhythm and sequence of the vowels, the placing of the consonants. Though not the words they make.
On Green Mango Day mama beckons me over. ‘See this here, Mariama,’ she says. ‘Here again on the road to life,’ I push my face in close. A small, plain stone the colour of sand. ‘Maybe a brother for you. What do you say?’ She lets her hand rest on my hair. I like it. I stay. But I have nothing to say. I don’t care for the look of the stone so much. She takes her hand away, folds it up in her lap with the other one. Now she’s talking to the stones. Telling them this week’s news. The important things that have happened to us.
Oh, she saw her clothes float away down the river. It was in a dream: a rainbow-coloured river of clothes. The brown hen hatched a deformed chick. It had no eyes. It died. A burial two houses away. My bellyache.
I’m happy. A little guilty. But the pleasure of hearing her tell the stones about me is sweeter.
Searching the stones for patterns and combinations, the answers to questions. What does she want? I don’t know, cannot imagine. Because I have everything I want right here. Right here. My sisters will be back soon. Now I’m sleeping with my head resting on her thigh. The sound of her chanting, like a lullaby.
In our room late at night she made snuff. Good snuff, they said. She ground the tobacco leaves, mixed the brown dust with cloves and lubi from palm nuts. The cloves were what made it special. One time I stole some of her snuff. Took a pinch in my fingers, and then swallowed it quickly when she walked back into the room. My head spun. Not like when we used to dance. I felt sick and nearly fainted. Oh, so this is what snuff is, I thought. What person would want that?
But people did. Every week or so we carried a jar of snuff to Madam Bah who sold it to the customers who visited her shop. She sat there, arm resting on the window frame of her front room, merchandise piled up behind her, outlined against the darkness. Matches, cigarettes. She opened up the tins and sold them one by one. ‘One stick or two? Tuppence each.’ Baking soda. Balls of black soap. Imported needles. On the table next to her, a wooden cabinet with a dented fly-screen. Inside, squares of deep-fried dough under muslin and sugar cane and snuff. Not a real shop. But the closest we had.
Madam Bah was an only wife but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. And she was the only woman who didn’t have a vegetable garden where she had to go weeding and watering garden eggs and yams all day. Madam Bah bought all her food in the market or from other women. Also she was the only person we called madam. Sometimes I thought this was because she was a shopkeeper. So she deserved to be called madam. Then I thought it was maybe because Ma Bah sounded funny. She travelled and brought Dutch Wax prints, Brillian, shirting, beads and ‘shine shine’ trinkets from far off places. Whenever word was that Madam Bah had come back from a trip my father’s wives stood in line to see what she had brought.
So here we come. With our snuff to sell. I stand with my nose over the window-sill shop counter. But first my mother wants to see a piece of Dutch Wax. And Madam Bah does not get up, but rocks back on her stool and stretches her arm out to reach the cloth. My mother slides her palm over the slippery surface of the cloth. She asks questions. The width? Yes, and the length? Good quality? Top quality, nods Madam Bah. She bats at a fly with her fan and it falls on to the counter, upside down, spinning. Madam Bah does not hold the cloth up so my mother can compliment the pattern. Always the conversations end the same way. My mother says: ‘Maybe next time.’ And Madam Bah says: ‘Yes, next time. Next time there will be more choice. You’ll see.’
Mama’s mother died of a swelling sickness back in the days of the old. Long before I was born. My mother had no brothers. When my father saw her she was visiting an aunt in the old place. She left her own people a long way behind when she married him. All the money she had of her own came from the sale of our snuff, which Madam Bah kept in her big jar and dispensed directly into the open palms of her customers or poured into the little glass phials and silver snuff-boxes they brought with them. From our room my mother sold snuff to the younger women, who slipped in between chores and smeared the dark dust above their back teeth. My sisters pinched me and told me not to tell. Nobody, especially Ya Namina. The younger wives were among our best customers.
Madam Bah gives me a piece of fried dough to eat. She leans out of her window and strokes my cheek. And smiles a small smile, with her head on one side. And she looks at me like this. ‘Such a shame,’ she says to my mother. ‘If she had been a boy … Then she takes a pinch of snuff. Sneezes. Clears her throat. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
Mama says: ‘It’s a fine one,’ in a voice that expects to be corrected.
There is Bobbio. Sitting by a pillar in the shade of the awning. Wearing his grimy duster coat. Ashy legs. From a distance he looks like an old man. Bobbio is always somewhere, hanging around the meeting house, sitting on the edge of somebody’s verandah watching them talk or eat, a forgotten guest. Sometimes, when I go outside to pee in the night, I see him. Standing silent in the shadows of a house not his own. Nobody knew what was the matter with Bobbio. Why he had No Voice. He lived with his grandmother, the birth attendant, who said he was born in Daruth. The way she said it made it sound like everybody in that town was the same way. I imagined a town of silent people, moving noiselessly about.
But other people whispered that Bobbio was slow because his mother conceived him while she was still breastfeeding her last child.
I liked Bobbio. Though he sometimes did things that made children chase him and grown-ups shoo him away. He banged his chest with his fist. Then he’d slap you with the back of his hand. Whap! Hard like that. Bobbio was strong. People became annoyed. But I understood. Me, me, he was saying when he hit himself. You, you. Trying to start a conversation. They thought he was stupid. Bobbio couldn’t speak. But he wasn’t deaf and dumb. Bobbio could hear. And he understood what we were saying.