“I don’t understand: how can you not think about the future?”
“We’re surviving,” I cried. “By the goodness of the Spirit—”
“You want me to not fight for my children’s future because you’re afraid.”
“I’m begging you to not make a mistake…I don’t feel good about this…”
“You’re pregnant. You never feel good about anything while you’re pregnant.”
“This is not the pregnancy talking.”
“Sahel, please.”
What did Malabo ever ask me to do that I didn’t do for him? He said, “Sahel, this is what I want to eat today,” and I cooked it. He said, “Sahel, wear this dress and not that one” and I said, “Of course.” I was following tradition, yes, but between him and me marital rules were useless—my spirit yearned to please his. And then I made a single request to him, and what did he say? He said, No, I won’t do it. He went to Bézam and he failed, and Bongo tried to undo what he’d done and he too failed. Now the people of the Restoration Movement are trying to undo and redo everything.
* * *
—
I don’t know what the outcome of the Restoration Movement’s fight on our behalf will be, but Thula, from the first time she heard them talk, believed that with them by our side, we will prevail over His Excellency and Pexton.
I noticed the calm that appeared on her face days after the Restoration Movement people first came to visit us, a couple of months after Bongo was taken to Bézam. I could see from the light returning to her eyes that they had convinced her when they promised us that they would help us reclaim and restore our land and water and air. After that meeting, the other children had fought over the sweet things the American man and woman brought, but not Thula; she had picked up the books they brought and taken them home. That day was the day she began living in books and, in effect, living in America.
Six years later, on the evening after the Sweet One and the Cute One informed her about the invitation from the school in America, she came to me in the kitchen as I was boiling yams and told me again that she’d go, but only if I wanted her to go. I told her she had my blessings to go, only if she wanted to go, only if her spirit was telling her to go. We sat in silence, watching the wood beneath the iron pot turn to crimson coal.
* * *
THE SWEET ONE AND THE Cute One were the ones who brought up the idea that the children of Kosawa would benefit from advanced schooling. They said it would be good for our village and future generations if our older children started attending the school in Lokunja, where the district officials send their children. Upon completing the Kosawa school, rather than the boys picking up spears to hunt and the girls becoming apprentices for their mothers, they would learn things that some of our village schoolteachers didn’t even know. The Restoration Movement men said we could plead with the government to improve our school and send us more qualified teachers, but the government would argue that Kosawa was too small to be deserving of a better school. Given that, the men said, our best chance at preparing our children for a future that might be far from Kosawa was to send them to the superior school that already existed. The Restoration Movement would pay for a bus to take children twelve years old and over to the Lokunja school.
What did we think? they asked us at the village square.
Rain had fallen that morning, but the evening was sunny and hot; it was as if we were living through two seasons in one day. The Sweet One and the Cute One were sitting next to our new village head, Sonni, under the mango tree. It had been two years since the massacre; grass had sprouted and covered the heaps beneath which the slaughtered lay.
Sonni stood up to speak, counting every word in that manner of his that makes me want to pull his tongue and force it to hurry up. He thanked the Restoration Movement men for their offer, saying that it would be good if our children could have better schooling. There would need to be another meeting of the men, he said, for fathers to talk about all this, to gauge everyone’s openness to the idea…But voices of mothers and fathers had already drowned his to say that no additional meeting was necessary, it would never be a good idea for our children to be taken on a bus to a big school in Lokunja every day; such a price could never be worth paying for the sake of further learning. What would be the purpose of the added schooling? We had fallen into the trap of animals: how would the children learning beyond how to read and write and do simple arithmetic cause our captor’s hearts to change so they might look at us and see something of worth? Though we trusted the people from the Restoration Movement, many said, though we were thankful for all they’d done for us, we simply couldn’t hand over our children to strangers in Lokunja. Our eyes wouldn’t be on them over there—if the government could kill them in our presence, what would it do in our absence?