As I was walking back from the burial ground with most of the village, I sent a silent prayer to the Spirit to spare my children and me, whatever might befall. My eyes were lifted up to the hills when someone toward the front shouted: Soldiers.
Quiet descended.
Children ran and hid behind their mothers.
Soldiers were in the square. Nine of them. Nine guns drawn and pointed at us. One of the soldiers shouted for us to approach.
We walked toward them, into the square. We stood in front of them, all of us except Austin. While we were still frozen, he had managed to escape their watch and dashed off to observe from behind a hut. It was from his hiding place that he took off the camera he’d been carrying around his neck. With this camera he began darting from the back of one hut to another, clicking, clicking. Only later, after the burials, would we learn he had taken pictures of everything, pictures he would send to America.
The pictures would show that Bongo and Lusaka went to the front of the crowd to speak for the village, though they wouldn’t show what was said—Austin would write that down, what he heard. Austin would tell the American people how Bongo and Lusaka had informed the soldiers that our village knew nothing about this newspaper story the soldiers were referring to, they did not know why lies were being spread in America about what Pexton was doing to us. Austin would tell of how Bongo and Lusaka had stammered when asked which of them was the village head, before saying that neither of them was, officially, but the village had recently undergone changes in leadership. Austin would write about the moment when the spokesman for the soldiers—a man whose forehead was so large a hut could be built on it and there’d still be space for a front yard—had interrupted Bongo and Lusaka and barked for the real village head to come forward, demanding to know who he was, at which point Woja Beki had stepped to the front and said he was the former village head, his was the name the government had in its books, but things had recently changed. “What things have changed?” Soldier Forehead barked. Woja Beki was in the midst of mumbling a response when the Leader and the Round One and their driver, still in the back room of Lusaka’s hut, began shouting, calling for the soldiers to come rescue them. It was then we knew the end had arrived.
* * *
IT’S THE BLOOD I’LL ALWAYS remember.
When I lie dying, I may forget the sound of those guns as they went off, or the shrieks of mothers fleeing with babies on their backs and dragging by the arm any child they couldn’t carry, but I’ll never forget the blood of our people. Jakani’s and Sakani’s blood, the first to spill. Would the bloodshed have started if they hadn’t come running toward the soldiers? Why didn’t the twins stay in their hut? Two spears each, one in each hand. Spears faster than bullets. Spears that knocked four soldiers dead at the moment bullets entered the twins’ skulls. Their blood shot upward before their bodies went downward. Four soldiers gone, and only two of us down. The soldiers had to at least even the numbers. Bullets began flying, felling children like little trees that did not deserve to grow. Felling mothers through their backs. Felling fathers as they attempted to save their families. Five children. Four women. Five men. We did not know who they were then.
Where was Thula? Juba was home with Yaya, but where was Thula? I cried out her name as I ran. Thula, Thula. Only later would I learn that my child had lain on the ground at the village square through it all and acted dead; she had tried to run but had tripped and fallen. Afraid that her legs wouldn’t be able to carry her fast enough, she had stayed still, hoping her death would be quick if they found her out. Only after eleven days of being unable to speak would she tell me that she had opened her eyes to see the soldiers reload their guns as her tears mingled with the blood of the slain around her: an age-mate one of them, a cousin another.
I ran past the burial ground. Some ran up into the hills. I found a hiding spot behind a tree. Thula, I cried out. The sounds of many others, calling different names, drowned out my voice. We heard more gunshots. We ran farther into the forest.
But Bongo could not run. Lusaka could not run. Woja Beki could not run.
The soldiers grabbed all three of them before we could say goodbye. They seized them and freed the Pexton men while we quivered in the forest.
The Pexton men told them everything; they must have.
I can imagine the Leader’s face as he told the soldiers of the ordeal he’d been put through. Lusaka was the mastermind, Bongo his lieutenant, Woja Beki the great betrayer. There’s one more, he must have told the soldiers. The crazy one, the lunatic, the brainless idiot. The soldiers went around the village looking for him. Come out, they shouted to Konga. Come out or we’ll hunt down every single person in this village and finish them off. In our hiding places, we dared not breathe. They went into our huts and pointed their guns at the old and the sick. Where’s the madman? they said. Tell us or you’ll die. Yaya, on her bed, said nothing. Juba knelt before them, crying. Please, he said, I don’t know. They went into the next hut, and the next. They came after us in the forest. Fast as they might have been, they couldn’t get us—we knew the forest better, how to disappear in it.