When we gathered in the square for a meeting, the American man and woman repeatedly sighed and shook their heads while the Sweet One spoke, though they couldn’t understand our language. The Sweet One told us that the American man and woman had wanted to see us for themselves: they knew stories like ours existed, because fighting for people like us was what they did, but they’d never seen a case like ours, this magnitude of subjugation. The American man and woman gave our children books and sweets that tasted like honey. They wanted to be hugged, we could tell, the woman especially, her eyes full of tears, but they didn’t ask for a hug, and as much as we would have loved to hug them in appreciation, we did not deem it proper to behave as such with Americans.
No one had told us they’d be coming, so we had no food prepared for them. When a few women joined their heads together in conversation and then asked the Sweet One if their group could wait so the women of Kosawa could kill and roast a couple of chickens, the Sweet One whispered to the American people, who smiled and told him to thank us so much, how very kind of us, but they’d already eaten. As they were leaving the square to get into their car to return to Bézam and then America, someone burst into song, and soon all the women and girls, myself included, were singing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sung, and yet I joined in adding a third part to the melody, every woman swinging her hips and raising dust, our voices soaring, first with a song of gratitude, asking the Spirit to bless our visitors for coming to see us, then the song from the tale our mothers used to tell us when we were children, the one about the three little fishes who escaped the belly of a monstrous creature by itching the insides of its stomach for so long that the monster got a stomachache and vomited them out. The Restoration Movement people swung their hips alongside us, the American woman red-faced and runny-nosed and crying hard. Somehow the drums appeared. As the men beat them in unison, we sang the fishes’ plea: This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to say it, but our story cannot be left untold.
* * *
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A month later, the Sweet One and the Cute One began coming to see us by themselves.
Though they live in Bézam and travel to other villages as well, they always seem to have time for us, staying with us when a new death adds to our sorrow, sleeping on our bare floors if they have to, or at the Sweet One’s uncle’s hut in one of the sister-villages.
The day they brought the Pexton money, they told us, before handing it to us, that we didn’t have to take it. They said that no amount of money could undo what Pexton had done to us, but we took it anyway, because, much as we hated them, we needed their money to help us carry on after all we’d lost. Besides, it was our money, from our oil.
The Restoration Movement men said the money was just for the time being, to help us dry our tears. They said their people in America would get us more money for every spill that has ever happened. They would make Pexton pay for the toxic waste on the river, and the dirt in the air, and the poison in the well water, and for the farms that might not be fruitful for another generation, and why not for the children who never got a chance to grow up, and the parents whose broken hearts will never heal.
After they’d done all that, they said, they would ask Pexton to clean up our land so Kosawa could return to the state it was in when our ancestors first arrived here. But that would all take years, they cautioned; some of us might not be alive to see a restored Kosawa and a new envelope of money, in which case it would go to our children.
They gave us the money from Pexton in large straw bags.
A straw bag for each of the ninety or so huts of Kosawa, handed to the head of the family. I was the head of my family. What woman dreams of becoming the head of her family? I never wanted such a burden—I’d seen what it had done to Malabo’s relationship with Bongo—but there I was, extending my hand and receiving the money, more cash than my husband made in the last three years of his life combined.
Someone started a story that the money we received couldn’t have been all the money Pexton had given, that the people at the Restoration Movement office in Bézam must have kept some of it for themselves, and that the Sweet One and the Cute One must have taken their cuts. The rumors flew from hut to hut, some saying that the Restoration Movement was giving us only what they thought would make us happy; perhaps we should go to Gardens and ask a supervisor to tell us exactly how much their people in America had sent us. Tunis is the one who told me about the rumor. He said Malabo’s cousin Sonni—who had become our new village head after the massacre—had asked him to help put an end to the rumor. I’d never liked Sonni and his manner of taking too long to think before speaking, and I doubt Malabo would be happy to see that someone whose presentation reeked of weakness had become leader of Kosawa, but I agreed with Sonni on this: If we learned that the Restoration Movement and the Sweet One and the Cute One had kept some of the money for themselves, what would our recourse be? Would we start a fight against the very people fighting for us?