Two
Years later, submerged in savage sadness, thought she should have known something was wrong, Mama should have known, Tantie Fanta should have known.
But what could they have done, even if they had known? If it is already destined, can we change what is written for us? And Binta, how could she know so much and yet not know that something was wrong? Binta, who taught herself to read and speak French.
knew Binta looked at Idris’s schoolbooks, but she didn’t know how much Binta had learned until that day at the clinic.
had a fever, again; her fevers came too often, and Mama said it was because mosquitoes loved children born in the rainy season.
Binta rubbed ’s joints, saying, “I want to take your pain from you,”
rubbing a little too hard, as though the force might dislodge ’s pain.
The government clinic gave free medicine, but it was in the next village and the wait there was always too long and Mama couldn’t spend a whole day without selling any yogurt or they would have nothing to eat at supper.
So Mama plucked herbs and made infusions that inhaled.
Binta said the infusions didn’t help.
They were hardly old enough to go that far on their own but Binta insisted.
“I will take her, Mama, I can go to the clinic with Kadi.
I know the way.
We can manage.”
At the clinic, the corridors were crowded, people waiting, babies crying, and Binta spoke to the woman giving out cards, she spoke in loud rapid French, and gaped, dumbstruck, because Binta was suddenly a new being, a winged angel made of sun rays, and not the sister with whom she had walked side by side for more than an hour in the humid heat.
“You can speak French!” said.
“But, Kadi, I listen to the radio,”
Binta said, as if did not listen to the same radio, too, as if everybody who listened to the radio could open their mouths for French words to come sailing out.
When Bappa Moussa finally allowed Binta to go to Conakry, years later, she came back to visit, speaking to everyone, even their grandmother, in Pular crammed with French words.
She said “share”
in French when she gave a packet of biscuits to the younger children.
She seemed, again, transformed by French, but in a different way, as a darkened angel, her eyes lined in very black kohl.
Binta was bursting to tell about a young Malinke man named Fodé, Fodé this and Fodé that, Fodé thought and Fodé liked, Fodé taught her this and Fodé bought her that; she was so much under his spell that she was unaware of the spell itself.
Vague uneasiness settled over like a cloud.
Binta unfolded the long jeans skirt she had bought for , with money Fodé gave her.
“Kadi, try it on.
All the girls in Conakry wear this,”
she said, and when seemed slow at changing, Binta picked up and unzipped the skirt.
barely liked the skirt, it was tight at the hips, but she feigned pleasure as they both looked in the cracked mirror leaning against the wall.
Something new in Binta, she sensed, would not tolerate a lukewarm response.
It was either the highest notes or total silence.
From underneath the pile of clothes in her bag, Binta pulled out a cassette tape of Sékou Touré’s speeches and showed it to .
Transgression sat in the air.
glanced at the door as if Bappa Moussa might walk in.
She did not know how the first leader of Guinea had harmed Fula people, but she had recognized from childhood the intensity of feeling he aroused, the bitterness of uncles and aunts.
Some Fula people wouldn’t even mention his name in their homes.
And here was Binta brandishing his words.
“Guinea prefers poverty in freedom to riches in slavery!”
she intoned, laughing.
At least those French words had heard before.
Binta said Tantie Fanta had hissed when she saw the tape, asking Binta to throw it away, to think of what that man had done to Fula people, and Binta said he hadn’t harmed all Fula people, only his political opponents who did him wrong.
“Do you want to listen to the tape?”
Binta asked.
“It teaches you so much.
We can play it in Bhoye’s player.”
“No, I won’t even understand it,”
said, her unease ripening to worry.
Binta was shedding her old skins too quickly, her flame burned uncleanly, garishly, as if the world might recoil from its glare.
’s skin prickled at Fodé, this stranger inserted into Binta’s life.
If Binta could no longer clearly see herself, if her dreams became shielded in Fodé’s fog, then she would never reach her destined greatness.
wanted to see Fodé.
She asked Mama if she could go back with Binta, for a week or two; after all, Tantie Fanta had been asking her to visit, to come and see Conakry.
Binta bristled when Mama asked for a few more days, to get enough money for ’s transport fare.
I am missing my lessons, Binta said, irritated, and thought, sadly, that it was not about her lessons.
In Conakry, Binta showed the secretarial center where she was learning typing and shorthand, and the market stall where she worked as an assistant, and the part of the city where tree-cooled avenues flowed one into the other.
But she did not show her Fodé.
He was on a training course, Binta said, and nodded, even though she did not know what a training course was.
All she knew was that a person so close to Binta should have made time to come and greet Binta’s sister.
She cooked latchiri and kossan for Tantie Fanta, sieving the cornmeal smooth in the tiny kitchen of the self-contained flat.
At night, they watched TV, English films with French subtitles crawling across the screen, and they slept on the bed along the wall, their bodies blurring, Tantie Fanta’s, Binta’s and hers.
A kind of happiness warmed , a long-ago feeling from childhood, when they lived in the township with Papa, all in one room.
On the day before she left Conakry, Binta gave her some cash and said it was from Fodé.
They were standing by the table where Tantie Fanta’s hand mirror was placed face down, her creams and perfumes arranged in tidy lines as if for sale in a shop.
“He said it’s for you to buy something for the people at home,”
Binta said.
hid her hesitation.
If he was away then how had he sent money? “How can I thank him?”
she asked Binta and Binta evaded her eyes and said, “Next time you come.”
felt the urge to cry and plead with Binta, to say please, please, please, but for what she was not sure.
Please let us be as we used to be.
Please don’t avoid my eyes.
A memory came to her then in vivid light, of herself sitting on the floor as Papa ate his supper of ndappa, alert, watching him, eager to refill his enamel cup of water, but just as he took the last sip, Binta sprang up and took the cup.
On the way back to the village, squashed in a rickety Peugeot, felt almost relieved.
It was good to see Conakry, but she couldn’t live in this place that was never at rest, breathing in the exhaled breaths of too many people.
Smaller, quieter things appealed to her; she did not see the point of reaching to touch or feel what might bring discord.
—
Who would have thought that she, , would have a boyfriend before Binta did, and sit with him under the tree by the abandoned house on top of the hill.
It was the year before Binta left for Conakry.
They called the abandoned house Mariama’s Kitchen, and at village gatherings at dusk the teenagers would wander away and sit there talking, the girls a little apart from the boys.
Some of the boys took sticks and poked in the eaves for the large black termites that hid there.
A woman called Mariama had lived in the abandoned house until some years ago, when her husband beat her until her eye was swollen shut, because she served him bad kossan, the yogurt not properly soured.
He often threatened to take a second wife, and she often begged him not to, but this time she cradled her eye and told him, “Please divorce me.”
She had had enough.
Even when the elders and imams intervened, Mariama still said she had had enough.
Binta liked to perch on the verandah of the small shabby house, the roof already caving in, and the rustle of mice in the single bedroom.
“Maybe Mariama is in the city, maybe she is working in Conakry,”
Binta would say dreamily.
“Maybe she is a beggar on the streets,”
Amadou would say, and then he and Binta would argue, Amadou saying other women got beaten but didn’t desert their marriages, and Binta saying imagine all the years of beatings since Mariama married at fifteen.
They were good friends, Amadou and Binta, and similar; both of them were born dreaming.
There was a bone that birthed courage and believed she lacked that bone, or if she had it then it was feeble, soft and chewable like biscuit-bone.
Binta and Amadou’s courage bones were strong, hardy, they might bend but never break.
was astonished when Binta told her, “Amadou wants you.”
She was so unlike them; she was quiet and shy and she didn’t know the things they knew.
How could Amadou want her? Amadou, popular, swaggering Amadou, hands perched on jeans pockets, a township boy visiting the village.
He cracked jokes and was full of big talk of the businesses he would start as soon as he completed his apprenticeship in his uncle’s leather goods shop.
He pointed at a truck rumbling past, stacked with bags of grain, and said he would own twenty of those, transporting fonio and fabrics and pottery, and he would own twenty station wagons, carrying people on all the main roads across Guinea.
He smoked a cigarette openly, in the grove of trees.
The other boys gathered around him and listened, wanting to be like him, wanting to be him.
In the blaze of his attention, melted, and she never stopped being astonished that he had chosen her.
They stood hand in hand behind Mariama’s Kitchen and looked in the distance at the valley, dreamy with mist.
He kissed her, her life’s first kiss, his tongue like a warm slippery fish in her mouth.
It was not pleasant but also not unpleasant, because nothing with Amadou could be unpleasant.
She always brought her face willingly to his.
He shaved sticks of sugarcane for her and slowly she ate them, and sticky juice ran down her fingers like liquid silver.
“You will be my wife,”
he said.
wanted a harmonious home, and if you wanted a harmonious home, you married a close relative, to keep the lineage clean.
Like Papa and Mama, who were first cousins.
So she had dreamed of marrying her cousin Tamsir.
He had patient eyes like Papa and he was doing well, trading in Senegal with relatives, and Mama and his mother made comments about how they were a good match and as good as engaged.
The few times she saw Tamsir, in the village at Eid, she glanced shyly at him, both of them aware, in their rich, bashful silence, of a future already sealed.
Suddenly she no longer wanted Tamsir.
She had chosen without knowledge, had accepted Tamsir, unaware that boundless joy could be spun just from talking to a boy.
She wanted to be Amadou’s wife, she wanted nothing more, but Bappa Moussa would reject Amadou: he wasn’t related to them, he wasn’t wealthy, he was too young, close to her age.
Amadou talked of their future like a blind person, oblivious of the boulders in their path.
“I’ll make money and buy a white Peugeot and come and carry you away to Conakry,”
he said often.
Other times he said, “There’s something called a visa lottery, and I will get it and go to America and then send for you.”
Which would happen first, she gently teased him, the big white car to take her away to the city, or sending for her in America? And he replied, “Whichever God brings first.”
The last time she saw Amadou, she did not know it was the last time she would see him, until his cousin brought her a message, saying he had left for America in a hurry, his paperwork had suddenly come through, and he could not wait.
His cousin pressed an envelope into her hand.
Inside was his baby picture, in black and white, slightly faded.
Even as a baby he had that exuberant smile.
“Amadou said you should keep it and bring it when you come to America to join him,”
his cousin said.
She took the photo and said, “Okay.”
Paris was a fable you could touch, she knew of the Champs-élysées and the Eiffel Tower, but America was too removed from the spherical shape of her imagination; she could not see herself living there.
If she thought at all of America, she thought only of films.
—
kept the photo at the bottom of her small metal trunk, protected by camphor balls.
Months passed in silence from him, and then it was almost two years with no letter, no message, no word.
A sign if she needed one, that it simply wasn’t meant to be.
Not that she ever truly believed she would marry Amadou or go to America; her future was fire-dried, too firm to change without chaos, and she dreaded chaos.
It was unbearable to think of being without her family’s approval, cast out alone and shivering.
Yet there she was, as all that time passed, still imagining her marriage to Amadou, the imams gathered in prayer amid her aunts’ joyful songs, and then the children they would have, four boys and three girls.
One day, in a rare reckless moment, while Mama was bent over a wood fire and was peeling cassava, told Mama about Amadou, that he had gone to America and would send for her as soon as he could.
Mama straightened up and said, “Kadi, you must keep the lineage clean and marry close to home.”
“Yes,”
said.
What had she expected, opening her mouth like that? Of course Mama would say exactly that, as any good mother would.
Mama said Tamsir’s father would send word soon, very soon.
“Tamsir is your husband, Kadi,”
Mama said, and said, “Yes,”
and resolved to starve her mind of longing.
When word did come, it was Yaaye and another aunty shuffling in one evening, their faces downcast, but their eyes alight with the excitement of a scandal.
They said Tamsir had married a Susu girl in Senegal, and she was already pregnant, and his parents were drowning in shame.
listened, not fully comprehending.
“Is the girl Senegalese?”
Mama asked, a strange question, as if in her shock she could think of nothing better to say.
“No, Guinean.
But she lives in Senegal like him,”
Yaaye said.
“A Susu girl,”
Mama said and snorted in disbelief.
“The blood of that faithless tribe will now poison the lineage.”
Mama glanced at and averted her eyes.
The lineage would have been kept clean if she birthed Tamsir’s children.
She felt ashamed, even guilty, as if by longing for Amadou she had triggered the scandal of Tamsir’s reneging.
A photo was passed around, of a svelte dark girl, about ’s age.
The person Tamsir had chosen.
The inheritor of ’s future.
From the photo alone, she was beyond reproach: a pretty face, pious-looking, a sweet-natured smile.
More aunties and cousins had gathered, their contempt, like peppery fumes, directed at the Susu girl, and their voices no longer hushed, saying she had entrapped Tamsir, she was diabolic, how else could Tamsir, so levelheaded and responsible, end up in this shameful mess? In the midst of her disorientation, felt a strained relief, a small sprinkling of hope.
Amadou could come and make his intention known now, while Tamsir’s disappointment was still a fresh open wound.
Bappa Moussa would accept him, if only to cover their shame, because Susu girl or not, Tamsir had rejected her.
Cast her aside.
But the scale and surprise of his betrayal was almost redeeming and for this she felt a dark gratitude—it so occupied everyone that her own humiliation sank unseen.
Had Tamsir left her for another Fula girl, the rejection would have more deeply stained her.
—
In the following months, drifted.
No longer waiting to marry Tamsir and have children.
A feeling of being empty-handed, which was different from being empty.
All thoughts of Amadou were banished, finally, she told herself, no more fanciful imagining of a man who had forgotten her.
In place of those thoughts was a dull void.
Mama told her Tamsir was not God’s wish for her, and a better husband would come, but shame glowed in Mama, in the false defiance of her words.
Only Binta was untroubled, even pleased.
“I told you Tamsir was never your husband,”
Binta said.
“Amadou will come back.
Even his own family has not heard from him since.
It is not easy abroad.
He must be trying to get himself settled before sending for you.”
shook her head to shake off Binta’s words, afraid they would bring back her hope.
Binta had come back because Bappa Moussa asked her to, and he told her she must marry first, as the elder daughter, as if to push attention away from ’s failure.
Only their cousin, Thierno, could handle Binta, Bappa Moussa said.
He had finished secondary school and was trading in Ivory Coast, he was wealthy and forward-looking, he condemned men who took second wives and had assured Bappa Moussa that Binta could work as a secretary if she wished.
A perfect match, thought: a successful, impressive groom, a beautiful ceremony, fragrant bandages for Mama’s broken pride.
“Kadi, I don’t like him,”
Binta said.
“You’ve seen him three times.
You’ll come to like him,” said.
“He doesn’t talk much,”
Binta said.
“Because he knows you will talk for both of you,” teased.
“That necklace he sent me is so cheap,”
Binta said.
“He will start buying nicer things after he brings your taignai,” said.
Binta scoffed.
Then she said, “Malinke men are not tightfisted like Fula men.”
kept silent.
“They take good care of their wives.
Tantie Fanta said they only want Fula women for our beauty but that is not true,”
Binta said.
Still said nothing, her chest tight.
She was never outraged by Binta, but now she felt something close; Binta could have all the Malinke friends she wanted but, for marriage, of course she had to show good sense.
To marry her Fodé, or any man who was not Fula, was a blasphemy too dire even to entertain.
“Kadi, you’re not saying anything.”
“There is nothing to say.”
“Tamsir married a Susu girl and yes, nobody is happy, but when he brings his child, they will welcome the child and soon they will welcome the Susu girl,”
Binta said.
“It’s different for men.”
“In Conakry, I see Fula women married to Malinke men,”
Binta said.
“They must not come from good families.
We come from a good family.”
“True,”
Binta said and sighed, resigned.
exhaled.
Binta hadn’t meant any of that, couldn’t have meant it, she was just playing, hovering a teasing foot over murky water.
Later, wondered: What if Binta had insisted on her Malinke man, might things have been different? Or was it Binta’s destiny, written into her life, bound to happen no matter who she married? She often wondered about people who sought to know their futures.
Why would they want to know of tragedies hurtling down toward them that they could not step aside to avoid? It was Binta who wanted to have the surgery before her djamougal ceremony with Thierno.
Tantie Fanta agreed that she should, but it was Binta who wanted it.
A doctor in Conakry had told her the heavy bleeding would stop, the days spent hunched over in pain would end.
She did not tell Thierno because she said it frightened men to think their wives might not easily birth babies.
Only and Mama and Bappa Moussa and Tantie Fanta knew.
Even Bappa Moussa Binta had not wanted to tell, but Mama said they should, to give him respect.
Maybe they should have listened to Bappa Moussa.
He was resistant, afraid of any kind of surgery, asking, “Why must she have an operation instead of enduring it like other women?”
Things were growing inside Binta’s womb, Tantie Fanta explained, and the surgery would remove those things, which would stop her heavy monthly bleeding.
Still, Bappa Moussa was unconvinced.
Only when Tantie Fanta said Binta would not be able to get pregnant without this surgery did Bappa Moussa agree.
—
’s first thought was —why has Tantie Fanta come, she was supposed to send word, and why has she come with all these relatives?
Already in ’s head, darkness was gathering.
Tantie Fanta opened her mouth and said five words and her voice cracked to pieces.
She said, “Binta did not wake up.”
did not understand.
“What do you mean by she did not wake up?”
Mama asked, which was exactly what wanted to ask.
“They did the operation, and after the operation, Binta did not wake up,”
Tantie Fanta said.
“When will she wake up?”
Mama shouted.
“Fanta, when will she wake up?”
A sudden furious blur of motion.
Mama was flat on the ground, jerking violently, and the ground was brimming with dust, and somebody was trying to hold Mama but her body refused to be subdued.
From deep in her throat came a guttural keening as ancient as unformed earth, the ugliest, most spine-chilling sound had ever heard.
It shattered the shock-strangled air.
In that moment understood that her sister was dead.
She felt an implosion in her heart, the beginning of a deathless sorrow, the moment that love forever turned to loss.
For years to come, she would bolt awake from a dream about Binta, so achingly clear that she always looked around, searching the room as if Binta might be there.
In the dream, Binta was startled by her own death, and she was standing in the government hospital, which looked strangely like Mariama’s Kitchen, wearing a floor-length caftan, saying, “Kadi, you said you would stop the bleeding.
Kadi, why did you say you would stop the bleeding?”
—
The house swelled and filled with Binta’s shadow, Binta’s scent, Binta’s voice.
Sometimes, in the sway of the palm trees and the quickening of a breeze near the abandoned house, felt Binta, a small shiver, a cascading of goosebumps.
Binta was everywhere.
A cruel offering of false hope.
watched Mama and her siblings cry, and she felt no urge to comfort them.
They were in the same room but they were so distant and far away.
Mama, with her white scarf, a widow’s scarf, draped over her head.
Would she get another scarf? But there was no scarf for mourning a child, because a mother was not supposed to lose a child.
Mama said to visitors who came with small gifts to pay their condolences, “I have other children, God gave me other children.”
But it was a lie and felt angry to hear Mama say that, as if Binta could be replaced.
Binta was her sunlight child and Mama’s heart had died with her.
“You are my first daughter now, Kadi,”
her mother told her, and did not respond, feeling again the anger spread through her.
I am not your first daughter, she wanted to say, nobody but Binta can be your first daughter.
When she overheard her mother tell a close friend, “Binta would have become somebody.
She would have brought me glory,”
it made her angry too, but the anger was cleansing because it was a response, finally, to truth.
Binta would have brought Mama glory.
It was true, Binta was the child blessed with the kind of graces that brought glory, and Mama should not pretend that Binta could ever be replaced.
began then to feel angry with Binta for dying, because by dying Binta had malformed all their lives, and their future, and left her with a burden she did not know how to lift.
To bring glory to Mama, to become somebody.