Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [117]
And in that moment I saw something else.
I saw the hidden path curling between the trees.
My mother was ready. The women had knocked on her door and now she preceded them down to the river. She walked with her chin up, one shoulder bare where her dress had slipped. The silence blew through the gathered crowds like a breeze, people stood and watched in awe.
Women were coming from every direction, out of houses, up the path, through the crowd, women laying down their cooking spoons, women preparing to leave the fires unattended, women squeezing through the people. One, two, three. Ten, twenty, thirty. Seventy, eighty, one hundred. One by one the women fell in behind my mother, from the oldest to the youngest.
Every woman in the village. Except one, and that one was me. I let them pass. I stepped aside to join the men.
Yes, it’s true. I can see you’ve guessed it, but don’t know quite whether to believe it. Me, your own aunty. Well, you’ve guessed right. It was nothing dramatic. I let the men of the society come to me. I let it be known that I would consider relinquishing the birthright of womanhood in exchange for the liberty of a man. And in time they found me. After all, there are few women who would choose such a life. Naturally, there were those things I missed, mostly the company of other women. But I had made the life I dreamed of, and it suited me. I had taken my own path, neither right nor left.
After a while we heard the singing and knew it was over. When the women reappeared their mood was changed, they were dancing, shuffling their feet through the dust, swaying their bottoms. Somewhere in the centre of them all she walked alone. They had dressed her in a new costume made from a heavy blue fabric: a silk damask of four hundred threads, real damask from Syria, double-sided with highlights of silver woven through the design.
I knew because it came from my own store, I had chosen it myself. On her shoulder she wore a sash of the same cloth, her hair was hidden inside a tall headdress. My mother, walking towards an unknown future. As beautiful as a bride on her wedding day.
CONSEQUENCES
14
Hawa, 1991
Sugar
It had rained during the night, an unseasonal rain. In the morning the ground was stained in dark patches, like sweat. The light was dull, there were no shadows at all. And yet the rain had done nothing to clear the air, which was heavy and hot. I woke early, went outside to urinate and afterwards I lay on my bed, looking up at the rafters.
From somewhere in the darkness above me a drop of water fell slowly through the dense air, shattered upon a rafter and showered on to me. I didn’t move. I felt the water sliding down my face. In my mind I saw the next drop, swelling and growing like a ripe breadfruit ready to drop from the tree. Instead of a drop of water I imagined a great fruit whistling through the air, smashing on the rafters and covering me in sticky flesh and juice. With that thought I pulled myself up.
There was a hole in the roof, and by the time the rains came the zinc would have rotted in a dozen more places. I told myself I must remember to tell him when he came home, so he could go and borrow a ladder from my uncle opposite and climb up there to take a look. He would know what to do. He would send into town for a hammer and nails, and some sheets of zinc. Then he would climb up there again to fix it, while I prepared him something to eat. Maybe groundnut stew, which was always his favourite with smoked catfish from the river. Or then again I would have made that to celebrate his homecoming. Maybe a bowl of pepper soup and some coco yams. Or sour sour. Or cassava leaves. There were no leaves left in my plot, I had lost them all to the locusts. I would have to go into town to the covered market, to see what I could find. I would buy only the best: the youngest, sweetest leaves.
Whenever he came home the truck dropped him off at the roundabout in town and he would walk to the house. Not sticking to the road, but in a straight line.