Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [0]
Aminatta Forna
For Yabome, oya ka mi
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Family Tree
Butterflies
PROLOGUE
1. Abie, 2003
The Women’s Gardens
SEEDS
2. Asana, 1926
Shadows of the Moon
3. Mariama, 1931
Stones
4. Hawa, 1939
Fish
5. Serah, 1950
Woman Palava
DREAMS
6. Asana, 1941
Bitter Kola
7. Mariama, 1942
Kassila the Sea God
8. Hawa, 1955
Josephine Baker i47
9. Serah, 1956
Red Shoes
SECRETS
10. Hawa, 1965
The Music of Flutes
11. Mariama, 1970
Other Side of the Road
12. Serah, 1978
The Dream
13. Asana, 1985
Mambore
CONSEQUENCES
14. Hawa, 1991
Sugar
15. Serah, 1996
The Storm
16. Asana, 1998
The Box
17. Mariama, 1999
Twelfth Night
EPILOGUE
18. Abie, 2003
The Women’s Gardens II
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Further praise for Ancestor Stones
Imprint
Butterflies
I see her sometimes, usually when I least expect it: a reminder of her. In the bow of a lip: an outline a blind man could trace with his fingertips. The curve of the continent in the sweep of a skull, in the soft moulding of a profile. A man on a bus. Sitting alone. Tall above the slumped bodies of the other passengers: a surviving lily in a bowl of wilting flowers. For several seconds I gazed up at him. He never looked my way. The bus moved off over the bridge and I watched it go. And for a moment I felt it, the tightening in my guts, the drifting melancholy — the return of a forgotten nostalgia.
On Sunday mornings I have seen her in the shape of a thousand butterflies winging their way down the Old Kent Road, where only hours before razor-cut youths stumbled out of doorways and barelegged, barefoot girls walked home — holding on to their handbags and high heels. The butterflies’ dark heads were crowned with turbans, their bright robes like great iridescent wings billowed in the gusts of air from the passing traffic. In twos and threes they came together to form a colourful cloud, a great host of butterflies winging their way through the grey walls of the city to spiritual pastures: to the People of Destiny Mission, to the Temple of Christ, to Our Lady’s Church of Everlasting Hope.
What do they pray for, I wonder? Held captive by fate and history in this dark country.
For some miracle, a pair of ruby slippers? A click of the heels, a spinning tornado to whisk them up and set them down again in a place far, far away — beneath a burning amber sun.
PROLOGUE
I
Abie, 2003
The Women’s Gardens
London, July 2003.
It began with a letter, as stories sometimes do. A letter that arrived one day three winters ago, bearing a stamp with a black and white kingfisher, the damp chill of the outside air, and the postmark of a place from which no letter had arrived for a decade or more. A country that seemed to have disappeared, returned to an earlier time, like the great unfilled spaces on old maps where once map makers drew illustrations of mythical beasts and untold riches. But of course the truth is this story began centuries ago, when horsemen descended to the plains from a lost kingdom called Futa Djallon, long before Europe’s map makers turned their minds to the niggling problem of how to fill those blank spaces.
A story comes to mind. A story I have known for years, it seems, though I have no memory now of who it was who told it to me.
Five hundred years ago, a caravel flying the colours of the King of Portugal rounded the curve of the continent. She had become becalmed somewhere around the Cape Verde Islands, and run low on stocks, food and water. When finally the winds took pity on her, they blew her south-east towards the coast, where the captain sighted a series of natural harbours and weighed anchor. The sailors, stooped with hunger, curly haired from scurvy, rowed ashore, dragged themselves through shallow water and on up the sand where they entered the shade of the trees. And there they stood and gazed about themselves in disbelief. Imagine! Dangling in front of their faces: succulent mangoes, bursts