When the brothers returned to their village, they packed their belongings and left to create a new village, one in which every child would grow up to be as fearsome and dignified as a leopard. They founded Kosawa and anointed the eldest of the brothers to be their woja, for the blood of the leopard was most apparent in the strength that allowed him to tread upon snakes and scorpions. Through these brothers, we came to the world.
After finishing the story, I’d sit in silence, waiting for Papa’s praise, which always came in the form of a semi-smile.
Sometimes he asked me to sing the song our ancestors sang as they laid the foundation for Kosawa, the song that would later become our village anthem. My singing voice is as pretty as a rooster’s crow, and I took no pride in using it, but I knew Papa’s heart needed a balm, so I would sing for him: Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.
Other times, at the end of the story, Papa would say nothing, and I would have nothing to add, because I knew I couldn’t give him what he longed for. All I could do was wait alongside him and Mama for the day the womb doctor would come to our hut and leave with a smile on her face—which she did, the day Mama’s belly finally got big enough for all of Kosawa to see that Papa’s dream of a son was about to come true.
The evening Juba was born, Papa lifted me and spun me around as we both laughed, his eyes so full of gladness they glistened. The entire village sang and danced in our hut until there was no food or palm wine left, at which point everyone said their good nights. But I couldn’t sleep. I woke up whenever Juba cried so I could help burp him when Mama was done nursing. When he urinated in my face while I was changing his napkins, I giggled; he was too perfect. Sometimes I worried Papa would stop being my best friend when Juba got older, they’d form a father-son duo and I’d be left out. But I also knew that Papa’s love for me was boundless—the likely thing to happen was that Papa and Juba and I would become a best-friends trio. I’d learn how to wield a spear and go hunting with them and return home with the biggest kill Kosawa had ever seen.
* * *
I TOSS TO MY RIGHT. I toss to my left. My mind can find no rest. Beside me, Juba and Yaya sleep soundly. I think about calling out for Mama, asking her if I can come lie next to her, but I don’t want to wake her up if she’s sleeping too. I lie on my back and stare into the darkness. I think about how the air and water of Kosawa progressed from dirty to deadly.
Though Pexton has been here since Papa was a little boy, they didn’t start becoming the cause of many deaths until three years ago, after they decided to add a new oil well at Gardens. It was then, with the increased wastes dumped into it, that whatever life was left in the big river disappeared. Within a year, fishermen broke down their canoes and found new uses for the wood. Children began to forget the taste of fish. The smell of Kosawa became the smell of crude. The noise from the oil field multiplied; day and night we heard it in our bedrooms, in our classroom, in the forest. Our air turned heavy.
At the end of that first dry season, a pipeline burst and oil flooded the farm of the mother of one of my friends—her family barely had any harvest that year; some days, I had to share my food with her during recess. Weeks later, a new spill turned into a fire that ravaged the farms of six families, forcing mothers to go searching for new land deep in the forest, a trek that left many with little strength for toiling. In the midst of all this, the gas flares got worse, the smoke blacker. For reasons we couldn’t understand, the smoke always blew in our direction, never in the direction of Gardens and the hilltop mansion of the American overseer. With every new oil spill or day of gas flares so savage our skin shriveled and we needed to shout to hear each other over the screaming flames, Woja Beki sent someone to Gardens to talk to the supervisors, who, in turn, sent laborers to inspect the damage, patch up what they could of the old, rusty pipelines, and assure us that the spills were of no harm, the air was fine, Pexton was abiding by the law.
Not long before I turned eight, two children died in one month, both of them having suffered high fevers but otherwise different symptoms.
Papa and the other men of Kosawa made the coffins and dug the graves, and Mama and the women cooked for the bereaved families and wept alongside the brokenhearted mothers. We children did what we could to make the brothers and sisters of the departed feel less alone—we sat next to them in silence when they needed to cry, and let them decide what games we should play when they needed a break from their sadness. Nobody thought much about the fact that two children had died in one month—in a village of dozens of children, it was not uncommon for such a thing to happen. Only after my classmate Wambi began coughing while the rest of us laughed, and then began vomiting blood; only after we’d buried Wambi and coughs like his began echoing across the school compound and bouncing from hut to hut, some children urinating blood, others burning with fevers no amount of cold baths could bring down, several dying; only a few months before my brother, Juba, died and came back to life in Papa’s arms, did parents start wondering if it was possible their children were dying from the same cause.