One evening, in Lulu’s kitchen, while Thula and a friend were watching Yaya, Cocody and Lulu told me about the evenings after their first bleed, when their mothers had called the women of Kosawa to celebrate them. We laughed as they reminisced about the women, most long gone, who told stories from their journeys through womanhood, stories that they must have passed back and forth in smoky kitchens but which they just had to share again, for they relished telling them over and over: accounts of how they had spat into their husband’s soups in moments of spite, and how they knew which position to use to conceive a girl, and which to use for a boy, and how they’d faked illnesses when they didn’t feel like cooking and their husbands had served the children fruit for dinner, and if only their husbands knew how many steps ahead their wives always were, but what use was that cleverness for the wives who discovered from a foe or a friend that their husbands had visited a woman’s bed in another village? What could a wife do besides sigh and carry on after she confronts her husband and his response is that none of it is true, why was she asking questions, leave him alone. The stories never lacked for flavor, Lulu said, and they made her at once proud and furious to have been born a woman.
* * *
THULA ENTERED MY ROOM FOUR days after the Sweet One and the Cute One suggested the Lokunja school. “Mama,” she said to me as I was folding clothes on the bed, “I’d like to take the bus to the school in Lokunja.”
“No,” I said. She turned around and left.
The next morning, she came to me in the kitchen after she had bathed and put on her blue uniform.
“Mama, please,” she said. “I really want to go to the school in Lokunja.”
I continued frying her eggs; I said nothing.
After the eggs were ready, I put them on a plate alongside some fried plantains. I handed it to her and told her to go eat on the table in the parlor, away from the smoke.
She left, and I plated Juba’s breakfast and brought it to him on the table, just as he was about to finish putting on his blue shirt and khaki shorts. I watched them eat, like I did every morning—Thula eating four slices of plantain and a couple bites of eggs; Juba eating all of his food plus Thula’s leftovers. After they were done, they went into Yaya’s room, to hug her goodbye. Yaya didn’t sit up from her lying position; only her mouth moved as she told them to make sure to obey their teachers. They nodded, left Yaya’s room and hugged me before heading off, Thula holding Juba’s hand and walking only as fast as her little brother’s legs could take him. He still needed her protection. He only started going to school after Bongo died and their great-uncle Manga went to the school and begged the headmaster to allow Juba to start in the middle of the term because, though his age-mates were still running around naked, Juba’s right hand could go around his head and touch his left ear, evidence his brain was large enough for school.
I checked on Yaya after the children were out of my sight. I brought her a pot to spit in, or urinate, or excrete, whatever she needed to do. I still do this daily. Some days she cannot sit up to use the pot, so I lay a plastic sheet under her buttocks and place a cloth over the plastic so she can excrete lying down, after which I clean and dry her.
If her feces has a smell, I don’t smell it. She’s my mother. Whatever suffering she has to bear, I bear it with her. Until the day she leaves me, or tells me to leave her, I am hers and she is mine. She has lost all her teeth, so I mince her meat, and chew her cocoyams before putting them in her mouth, the same way she once chewed food before putting it in the mouths of my husband and my children. When she needs to cry, I sit on her bed and we cry together. I wipe her eyes and I beg her to stop crying—while she cries, I too must, I can’t let her cry alone. Other times we just let our tears silently roll until we run dry. We mourn the men we’ve loved and lost, and, some moments after, we imagine the beautiful day when we will reunite with them in the land beyond.
* * *
—
A week after Thula first heard about the school in Lokunja, she comes to me again to beg me to let her go there. I’m sitting on the veranda; one of my aunts has just left after a visit. Thula comes and sits next to me. She asks me if I can talk to the Cute One and the Sweet One on her behalf, let them know that she loves their idea of the village children attending a better school. I sigh and turn my face away. She changes seats so she can look into my eyes.
“Mama, please,” she says.
“You really want to go to this school?” I ask her.