Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [84]
On her way out she passed close by me. I turned away, but still I smelled her. Cloying and sickly. I almost choked on the odour. Vanilla.
You know what people here sometimes say, that death makes saints of us all. I was thinking about that only the other day. After my mother died suddenly all her co-wives who had thought of nothing but how to usurp her began to say what a sweet tempered person she was, how kind, how generous.
When somebody dies, look at how all the women go to sit for hours in the family’s front room, offering words of comfort when only the day before they bad-mouthed the lot of them. Look at the men giving money to the widows, even though they spent the last year trying to put this same man out of business. Today everybody will tell you what a good man your grandfather was. How wise, how honest. But there was a time when these people turned on us and drove us from our home. And now they pretend as if it never happened.
Of course nobody likes to speak of that time now. What’s past is past, they say. Too quickly. Wanting to shut you up. Well let them try now. Because now you are here, you want to know. And now I will tell you.
It was soon after I stopped working for the European, Mr Blue.
On that morning I woke up to the sound of singing. Not the joyful sound of a wedding party. No, something angry in the distance. I stepped out of the door of our house. All around me were people running, throwing sand on the cooking fires, slamming shutters. A child was standing by the well, wailing at all the uproar. A woman ran and grasped her by the arm, dragging her along the ground, causing the child to cry even louder. She pushed the child inside the door of her house and ran off in search of her other children.
The wind was blowing in great gusts that day. It raced through the village like an omen: whipping up whorls of red dust, scattering the grain drying in the sun, rolling balls of chicken feathers down the street.
Inside the big house Ya Namina was shouting orders to the servants. One of my small brothers stood at the open back door. My father pushed a box into his hands. The box was wrapped in tattered cloths, so I knew it must be very ancient. Out of the back of the house, I watched my brother dart into fields, his legs spinning like wheels. Then suddenly he tripped. I caught my breath as I watched him stumble for a few paces until he righted himself. My father looked around, saw me standing there.
‘Hawa, go with him. Help him! Run! Run!’
Out of the open door, through the banana groves, into the dappled shadows of the trees. I ran silently, not daring to shout to my brother. Just past the silk cotton tree, I caught him up. For a few seconds we ran abreast, like a pair of panicked animals. Then we turned off the path, out of sight, and dropped to the ground.
We waited. Catching our breath again. Then we climbed up to our old lookout at the top of the sapele tree from where we could see the houses. From there we watched the people marching through the village, up to our compound and the steps of my father’s house. The wind picked up their voices and threw them like echoes across the treetops. To this day I remember the words:
‘We have spoken. Who so denies us, he is lost.’
Then the singing turned into shouting, the shouting into a great howling. The wind joined in, shaking the branches of the tree, threatening to send us hurtling to the ground. We were frightened and slid back down the tree trunk to the forest floor.
Later in the day we waited with our backs against the tree. My brother complained he was hungry, but I did not have time for that kind of talk. I told him to dig the crickets out of their holes in the earth. He wandered around scratching at the ground and came back with a bundle wrapped up in his shirt.