Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [30]
Our mother did not come out. Instead I carried the package to her.
‘Open it, mama!’ I cried.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, shoulders hunched, feet on the floor pointing straight ahead. She looked as though she had been sleeping. I did a little jig. My mother didn’t even turn to look. She seemed bored by my playful ways. The light on her skin gave a dull cast, for a moment it seemed to me she was old. She was sitting with her hands across her stomach. The air rustled in her chest like dried leaves.
‘It’s late now. In the morning you’ll see it. Now it’s time to sleep.’
But it wasn’t time to sleep. The village was still awake. Out back, Finda was preparing the last of the dishes for the celebrations the next evening. My brain was whirling with excitement.
‘But I want to see it now. Let me see it.’ I made my voice into a whine, but with a threat. Like the noise a mosquito makes. My mother lay back and turned over, pulling the cover over her shoulders.
‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated. She twisted herself around to look at me over her shoulder, smiled at me in a way that made me feel less bad. ‘Send Finda for me.’
In the morning the air was cold and smelled of dust. I washed and slipped my new dress over my head. It was too long, but I had a year to grow into it. The cloth was shiny and stiff, not worn soft like my everyday clothes. I ran to find my mother.
That moment when I opened the door: in the dream, I see her again. She is wearing her new gown, standing before the opaque light spreading through the shutters behind her. Only, in the dream we are not in the old place, but in the bedroom of the house I lived in with my husband after I was married. Everything is as it was when I lived there as a young wife, even the heavy, woven bedspread we were given as a wedding gift and the animal skins on the floor that my husband brought back from the place where he worked.
And in the dream I am thinking, how can I be married already if this is my mother, so young?
Nothing had prepared me that morning for the sight of her in that dress. Along dress, made of printed cloth from Europe, embroidered with yellow and blue thread across her breast. Sleeves that billowed out and narrowed into cuffs fastened with real buttons. When she walked the pleated skirt brushed the floor. In those days the women wore simple tunics and on special days, like when it was somebody’s forty days, maybe an embroidered gown or a long skirt and tamule with sleeves that stopped at the elbow. I had never seen a dress such as this.
That day we bluffed better than anybody, walked in front of them all into the mosque. I felt the envy in their glances. I held my head so high. When we sat down at the back I could see my brothers in their new bubas practically under the alpha’s nose. My father was at the front wearing an agbada of pure white, with a red sash over his shoulder. At the back we didn’t pay much attention to the sermon; the women gossiped among each other. All talk that day was of each woman’s outfit. From the outset I knew my mother’s dress made the greatest impression of all. My mother was the very first to wear the new style like the Creole women in the big city.
That day! The best day of my life. The day every one of my father’s wives wished she was my mother. And every one of his daughters wanted to be me. I had no fears. No cares. I