Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [60]
The other girls nicknamed her Marie Palaver. Over time a syllable slipped out unnoticed: Marie Plaba. She was troublesome. Cussed. She was my first friend. And I couldn’t believe my own good fortune. To some people we were an odd couple. I could see as much reflected in Sister Anthony’s smile, though she encouraged the friendship between us. She thought I was a good influence.
The mission was built on top of the old graveyard. Nobody really wanted the nuns here, or their school. But the obai was worried about giving offence, so he let them have a piece of land no one cared about. Outside the dormitory window you could see the outlines in the earth, like old flower beds. The trees with upturned candelabra blooms: there was only one place where they were planted in such abundance.
The new girls were always afraid. Afraid of what they had heard. Fearful of the nuns who were as pale as the dead. And had a way of looking at you, but not seeing you. Even when you were walking towards them, their eyes would just glide over you. Then at the last minute, just when you had convinced yourself you maybe didn’t exist, they would greet you. For most of us it was the first time we had ever seen people like that, with eyes of coloured glass and hair like saffron threads. Well, it’s true I had once seen the District Commissioner in the place where we lived. Still it was strange to be up so close to them. I didn’t know how to behave exactly. When the Reverend Mother addressed me I drew my hand up to my forehead and saluted, as I had seen the Court Messengers do. Marie sniggered at that. It was the first time I noticed her.
In the dormitory where there was a shortage of beds — when they saw the world changing the local people changed too, and decided now they wanted to send their daughters to the nuns’ school — some of the girls shared a single bunk lying top to toe. I lay in the crook of Marie’s body, sharing a pillow, and listened to the ghost stories she made up late into the night.
Marie told me stories of women and their night-husbands; women lured away from the river bank when they went to fetch water; women who were visited by bush spirits and later gave birth to their children. Marie’s mother had been a birth attendant. Once she had seen a spirit child for herself. It had two faces and four arms and legs. You could see it was part human. Born dead. It lay on the floor wrapped in an old cloth.
The school caretaker was a one-legged man. He was the only person I have ever seen like that who did not use crutches. He hopped everywhere, tall and straight, a human pogo stick. Sometimes when the wind called and the building creaked there were strange bangs and thumps. Marie said it was One-Foot Jombee, hopping through the dark on his one good leg.
I was thrilled and yet I was afraid. Afraid of the stories. And as I lay there listening to her I was afraid too that the end was near and would take with it the sound of her voice.
I would go to sleep and dream strange dreams. A palm tree with leaves of human hair. A chair made of living flesh and bones and skin that was rooted to the ground. A snake wearing a red cloth embroidered with cowrie shells. The white nuns with skin like eels’ beneath their habits and long flowing hair hidden under their wimples. I dreamed I hid behind a coconut tree and watched them cast off their clothes and slip into the sea like Mammy Wata.
These visions began to enter my thoughts even when I was wide awake. Not so I thought they were actually there before my eyes. No. More like a flashing picture that appeared and just as quickly disappeared. After it I felt weakened, and that made me know it must have been the work of some kind of devil. In morning Mass I prayed to God and to the Virgin Mary, in the hope that the dreams were messages from Heaven. The answer never came, but I noticed that when I was praying the visions stayed away.
A class in Idaho had raised the money for my baptism.