The Children
WE WENT TO BéZAM TO welcome her back home, the five of us who were left. Death wasn’t the reason our numbers had decreased once more, and for that we were thankful. Still, we wished, as we rode the bus she had sent us money to hire, that every single one of us who had ever lived could be there the moment she walked toward us, a decade since we last saw her, the thinnest and most quiet of us—who could have imagined she would one day become our leader?
Six years before she returned, we were still seven, but two of our friends later decided to leave for the sake of their families. One of them told us he wanted to be a part of us no more after an evening when we’d gone to set a fire at Gardens. Nothing about that operation had been far from the routine—we had once again outrun a watchman who fired shots in our direction as we disappeared into the darkness—but the next evening, while we were laughing about how close we’d been to our demise, deliberating what actions to take next, this one of us had sighed and said he couldn’t do it any longer. Bravery wasn’t his paramount virtue, clean as his heart was, so we did not try to reason with him. We did not ask him to consider the future when he told us, eyes on the ground, that he couldn’t continue putting himself in such close danger of lying faceup in a coffin, or sitting in a prison, leaving his wife and young children more destitute than they already were. He argued that nothing had changed despite the pipelines we’d damaged, the fires we’d set, the tanks we’d destroyed. None of it had done anything besides force the government to get tougher on lawbreakers and double the capacity of the prison in Lokunja, a prison in which three of us were currently sitting. The three of us who were free gave our friend our blessings to be a part of us no more, thanking him for everything. We told him we couldn’t put an end to the assaults, not until Pexton met our demands, which they appeared willing to do the following month, when they asked the Sweet One to tell us that a new overseer would soon be arriving at Gardens, and the man was eager to start a dialogue with us.
* * *
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The new overseer came to meet with us within a week of his arrival at Gardens. On one side of him stood his interpreter; on the other side Sonni, the Sweet One, and the Cute One. The interpreter began the meeting by telling us the overseer’s name—Mr. Fish, which made our children giggle and our wives cold-stare them down—the American town in which he was born, the many parts of the world he had traveled to, the years he had spent learning about our country. He said Mr. Fish was eager to start working with us so he could get to know us better and find ways in which we could live in harmony.
Our ears stayed with the interpreter, but our eyes rarely left the overseer’s face. For more than an hour he stood before us, dressed in a wax-print shirt, ignoring the seat reserved for him despite the heat that was flooding his face with sweat. His constant smile gave him the air of a human with an open heart, the kind of heart we rarely saw from overseas or Bézam, the kind Bongo and Lusaka once hoped they would find in the capital.
From the moment this American arrived in Kosawa, having walked from Gardens in the evening of that hot dry-season day—he left behind his car, we later learned, to show us that the distance between us was small—we could tell he was no ordinary oilman. The brightness in his eyes was a balm for our disintegrating spirits.
When he entered the village, waving, young children—some of them ours, none of them acting differently from us when we were that age—peeked at him from behind their mothers’ skirts. Several cried, finding the stranger frightful, never having seen a man with skin and hair so bright. But when our wives tried to take them home, they begged to stay so they could stare for many more minutes at the curious face.
* * *
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We sat on stools close to the front at that first meeting with Mr. Fish, our older brothers and uncles still in the very first rows, alongside our fathers. Now that we were married, having child after child, we’d become the fathers, and our fathers had become the grandfathers, and our grandfathers had joined the ranks of the ancestors, leaving us to be the ones whose words and deeds would determine the future of the next generation.
Our wives waited with our children under the mango tree. The women did not cry as much as our mothers used to in our childhood, but their faces bore little hope that the simple things that make a life content would be abundant in the lives of their children. Most huts in Kosawa were still full, but there were constant whispers about who might soon be leaving, who couldn’t bear it any longer. Even if children were no longer dying as often as they did when we were younger, they were still getting sick. Pexton was sending less bottled water with each passing year, knowing there was little we could do to make them keep their word. Our air was getting dirtier, despite promises. They spilled their oil on our land with recklessness; we spilled it in vengeance. No new envelopes of cash had touched our hands, not even Sonni’s hands—all we had was more of too little.