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Bobo—Boarfold

COMING-BACK

BABIES

Some Africans believe that if your baby dies, you must bury it far away from your house, with proper magic and incantations and gifts for the gods, so that the baby does not come back, time after time, and plant itself inside your womb only to die a short time after birth.

This is a story for people who need to find an acceptable way to lose a multitude of babies. Like us. Five born, three dead.

I came after a dead brother, whose body had not been properly buried in the soul-trapping roots of a tree and for whose soul there had been no proper offerings to the gods.

But I am alive.

I was not the soul of my dead brother. He had a soft soul, I think. Like my sister, Vanessa, has. He was blond and blue-eyed and sweet like her, too. People wanted to pinch his cheeks.

But I plucked a new, different, worldly soul for myself—maybe a soul I found in the spray thrown up by the surge of that distant African river as it plummets onto black rocks and sends up into the sun a permanent arc of a rainbow. Maybe I found a soul hovering over the sea as my parents made the passage back to England from Africa. Or, it was a soul I found floating about in working-class, damp-to-the-bone Derbyshire.

I came to earth with a shock of black hair and dark green eyes. I had a look on my face as if somebody had already pinched my cheeks (so that they did not need repinching). I have a pair of the signature tackie lips. Fuller lips. On me, they look overlarge and sulky.

My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English nor am I of the sea. Meanwhile, Adrian’s restless African soul still roamed. Waiting. Waiting to come back and take another baby under the earth.

Adrian is a Coming-Back Baby, if you can believe what some Africans say.

I should have been a Coming-Back Baby, but I didn’t believe what some Africans say.

That Coming-Back soul searched for me. Undoubtedly, there was a struggle for my soul on the train coming up from Cape Town. That was the closest I came to being a Coming-Back Baby.

Boarfold

ENGLAND,

1969

To begin with they lived in a semidetached house in Stalybridge, Cheshire. But it was unthinkable to either of my parents to continue living in such ordinarily lower-middle-class circumstances. So, in spite of their lack of funds, but with their usual, brazen disregard for such details, they bought a farm in bordering Derbyshire with borrowed money. There was no house on the farm, just a barn, still rank with the smell of cow shit, ancient horse pee, old dusty chicken droppings. Dad was selling agricultural chemicals to suspicious, low-browed farmers, Mum was sleeves-rolled-up running after two small children, a goat, several chickens, and a hutch of rabbits whom she couldn’t bear to slaughter when the time came to turn them into rabbit pie, so she let them free where they overpopulated the Derbyshire countryside.

Girls at Boarfold

When the rain came in the winter and as far as the eye could see a gray shroud hung over the hills, the adventure of England wore off. My parents were more broke than ever, but they were not going to rot to death under a dripping English sky. Dad quit his job. They rolled up the entire farm and sold it as turf to a gardening company, which would unroll it as lawn in suburban Manchester. They rented out the barn (now equipped with flush loos and running water, and the cow shit scraped out to reveal scrubbed old stone floors) to gullible city folk as “rural cottages” and fled.

Dad went ahead to Rhodesia by airplane. Mum followed by ship with two dogs and two children.

The ship trundled steadily down the African coast with the slow, warm winds pushing her south, past the equator, where the air felt thicker and the sun burned brighter, all the way past the welcoming, waving beaches of the tropics and to the southern tip of the continent.

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat