Eight #3
In her dream, Amadou was knocking loudly on her grandmother’s door in the village, and she woke up to the sound of knocking, thinking it was still the dream.
Knocking, knocking, and then banging on her door.
This door, the door to her apartment in America, the door a short distance from her room.
Her heart was beating fast.
She flew up, confused, calling for Binta.
The apartment was empty.
Binta had gone to school.
Whoever was at the door must have heard her.
Now they were shouting.
“, open, please! , we want to get your story! , this is how you can get justice!”
She stood trembling from fear.
Who were they? How did they find her apartment? She walked very slowly, as silently as she could, to the peephole.
She could see four people, two holding cameras.
A sudden banging on the door made her jump.
“! We just want to talk to you!”
When did they come? Had Binta run into them? She remembered now the two pills Binta had brought her last night, with a glass of water on a tray.
“It’s for cold but it will help you sleep, Mom,”
she had said.
’s head felt stuffed with cotton wool.
She checked her phone.
There was a voice note from Binta saying she was fine, in school, and would see her later.
“Mom, please eat,”
Binta said at the end of the message.
Banging and banging at the door.
It sounded as if more people had come.
She was trembling.
How could this happen in America? Strangers banging on her door, demanding to be let in.
She did not trust them at all.
Some of them might indeed be journalists, but what if the guest had sent someone to kill her? Powerful people could do anything.
What if they shot a gun through her door? She had heard of somebody shot through the door.
She got on her hands and knees and crawled to her bedroom.
The banging started up again.
“! Open the door! Just a few questions!”
Her phone was ringing, a number she didn’t know.
More calls came in, all numbers she didn’t know.
She sent Binta a voice note, saying Binta should go to her friend Yaa’s house after school.
“There are people banging on the door.
I don’t know what to do,”
said.
Then she wished she had not said that, she didn’t want to worry Binta.
She crawled back to the living room and pushed her couch, in tiny moves, as quietly as possible, until it was against the door.
She was shaking.
Back in her bedroom, she locked the door.
Her apartment was so small, she heard the banging as clearly as if she were still at the peephole in the living room.
There were new voices. “!”
She was trembling.
The guest would send people for her.
A man as important as him, there was no way he would not send people to kill her.
She thought of Bappa Moussa and his frightened eyes, saying powerful men could kill you and nobody would talk.
She was trembling more.
Had they also found Binta’s school? She called Binta a few times.
Binta’s phone would be in her locker, it was class hours now, but still called.
Her hands shook.
She could not think clearly.
Calls were coming into her phone, back to back, clogging up her phone line so that she could not make her own calls. She switched her phone off. She switched it back on, and quickly called Chia.
“Kadi,”
Chia said.
The buzz of call-waiting marred the line.
“Miss Chia, he will send people to kill me! He will send people to kill me!”
She felt herself losing control, breaking into the smallest pieces of fear.
“Kadi, what is going on? Where are you? Why are you talking like that?”
“Yesterday, in the hotel, a guest, he force me…”
Chia shouted, “No! I just saw it on TV! I was going to ask you about it! It’s you? Oh God.
Kadi, are you okay?”
Chia’s shock was calming, it allowed to collect herself, to think more clearly.
She told Chia that there were strangers at the door, that she was scared they would harm her.
Chia asked her to call the detective, and to ask for help leaving the apartment, and to come to her house right away.
called the detective, and he said he was sorry, they were just talking of moving her into protective custody before her name leaked to the press.
did not fully understand.
He asked her not to open the door, and said he was sending people to her.
She packed a small bag, feeling disoriented.
She put her jeans in the bag and then brought it out.
Two uniformed policemen were at her door.
She heard them saying “Police!”
and asking the hum of people to please give way, to please move.
The detective, on the phone, asked her to unlock her front door and then go into her bedroom, so the policemen could let themselves in.
He didn’t want anybody taking pictures of her.
Even the policemen scared her, large White men with weapons stuck on their waists, taking up all the space in her small apartment.
They had a white cloth, like a blanket.
They asked if she was ready to leave, and then draped the cloth over her head, and led her out, past the strangers gathered at her door, to their car parked outside.
The white cloth, like what was used back home to wrap dead bodies in before they were buried.
In late morning’s unforgiving chill, the car smelled of stale coffee, and the policeman driving seemed irritated.
“Heat okay?”
he snapped at her, and she wanted to say, “Sorry,”
thinking she had done something, before she realized he was asking about the heat.
As they drove, stared at a tear in the back seat while her legs kept trembling.
She thought of how she had barely seen through the white cloth, the firm policeman’s hand guiding her, and how she had wanted to stay like that, an unseeing moving white cloud.
They said they would take her to the police station first, keep her at the station for a while, in case some journalists had followed them, and then another car would take her to Chia’s.
“Thank you,”
she said.
“Thank you.”
—
She told Chia what happened, just as she had told the detective, the nurse, the manager, the investigator, but as she told Chia she allowed herself to relive it, moment by moment, the naked White man, his swift rush to her, his force.
His force was careless, so careless, as though he was handling an inanimate thing that could not break.
A thing.
He had done this before, many times, she was sure of this, because his force was so casual, so natural and unthinking.
There was no hesitation to his carelessness, no tugging of conscience.
But she was not a thing.
She was a woman and she was breakable.
He was a powerful man, he could have all the women he wanted, and yet he did this to her.
Her old life was over, the careful life she had built for herself and Binta, the future with Amadou; the certainties she held, all were gone.
Her fear was souring and sinking, and now rage grew in her, circling and rising until all she could feel in herself was rage.
Nobody understood.
She felt nakedly alone.
Chia and Miss Zikora were complaining that she was being called a “maid”
in the press and she didn’t understand that.
So what if she was called a maid? She was a maid, after all, and she loved her job, and she wanted nothing more than to rewind time and go back to being a maid with a perfect daughter and a man finally about to come home.
After she first told Amadou on the phone, slow-crawling seconds of silence gave way to the hiccupping sound of sobs.
He was crying.
“I’m not there to protect you, I did something stupid and they locked me up and I’m not there to protect you,”
he said.
His tears repulsed her.
He was supposed to be stoic, like a proper Fula man.
Later, he comforted her, telling her everything would be okay, and shouting about that bastard old White man, that waste of a human being, but by then his crying had already left a residue of resentment.
Amadou said the guest was a rich man, and he must pay, he must pay her millions, the bastard dog.
Amadou’s excited tone, the rise as he said “millions”
in English, upset her, as if it was all just a game at which they would win.
She shouted at him; didn’t he know the guest could send people to harm her and Binta, and why did he keep talking about money, money, money? Wasn’t she doing well with her job? Weren’t her younger ones in school back home, wasn’t her mother well taken care of? She hung up on him and firmly said, “No,”
when the operator asked if she would accept a collect call from Arizona.
Her phone rang nonstop, relatives calling over and over.
One waspish cousin asked, “Is that really what happened? Have you told us everything?”
Another cousin said, “Kadi, you never had this kind of ambition,” as if it was ambitious to be assaulted by an important White man.
Tantie Fanta said, “He is the head of the Multilateral Nations, he is the overall head, a powerful man in the world,” as if that was what mattered the most, and silently hung up, pretending the line had cut off.
She didn’t want to talk to Tantie Fanta, or to anybody else, even her mother.
Mama had placed a curse on the guest and his children and their children, her voice stronger than usual, as if she had suspended her recent ailing health.
And she kept asking what would happen next, what would happen to her job, and kept saying she did not know, she just did not know.
Each time her phone rang, stared at it, until Binta reached across and took her phone and said, “Mom, I’ll switch this off now.
You need to rest.”
But, of course, she didn’t rest, she couldn’t rest.
The detective said she and Binta would have to leave Chia’s house and be in protective custody for some time—a week or two or three, he couldn’t tell her.
They would live in a hotel, without their cell phones, and Binta could not go to school.
Why? did not know, she did not understand.
Her longing for her apartment was a subterranean ache, that small square of the world that was hers alone.
The solace of her kitchen.
She thought of the day, not long ago, when she was in her kitchen, on her day off, and felt contentment wash over her, calming, refreshing waves of contentment, as she stood by the sink, sieving cornmeal, breaking apart dried fish, and pausing to watch a whole pepper float in her pot, yielding its spice and heat.
—
Zikora said an American lawyer, an expert on assault cases, wanted to represent for free.
But Elhadji Ibrahima had already found a lawyer, an African American man he said had helped many Guineans get their papers.
trusted Elhadji Ibrahima to know what was best, with his steadfast avuncular love supporting her all these years.
She had been reluctant to tell him in detail what had happened in the hotel room, ashamed that her story would disgust him, a disgust he would feel toward her, too.
But the unflinching condemnation in his voice freed her.
The guest’s status did not intimidate him or dim his blazing outrage.
He never whispered.
He said he had long heard stories from hotel workers, about the bad behavior of powerful men.
“He was naked and waiting for a maid.
It could have been any maid, any woman.
What a godless specimen of a human being,”
he said.
“This is America, that man will pay for his crimes no matter who he is.
He dishonored you, Kadi, but God has a plan for you.
I predict that generations will honor your name, because this case will stop all those wild animals who call themselves men from abusing hotel maids.
Our lawyer is good, and this is a straightforward case to win.
You will see, many will bless you in the future.”
And as he spoke, she wept, her tears, for once, lighter and less troubled.
Now Zikora was asking Chia for the lawyer’s name.
“I’ll look him up, I’ve never heard of him,”
Zikora said crisply.
As Zikora got up to leave, followed her to the porch.
“Miss Zikora, thank you,”
she said.
She didn’t want Zikora to feel slighted.
If she didn’t already have a lawyer then of course she would go with whomever Zikora brought.
But she could never reject anything that came from Elhadji Ibrahima.
“No problem, Kadi,”
Zikora said.
Zikora was different from Chia, closed where Chia was open; she wanted you to know of herself only what she wanted you to, and nothing more.
From the beginning, felt a kinship; she, too, understood the desire to pour yourself inward, back inside yourself.
She recognized Zikora’s new brittleness after somebody placed a curse on Kwame, the paranoia and helplessness, the confusion, of being under a curse, unable to save yourself.
But the evil potency of curses leaked away over time, and Kwame would come back to Zikora, and to fatherhood.
no longer told Zikora this, and more time had passed than she first predicted, but she was sure Kwame would come back.
One day he would be untied.
Little Chidera would yet have a father.
“Thank you, Miss Zikora,”
said again.
didn’t want to meet even the lawyer from Elhadji Ibrahima.
But Chia said she had to.
“Kadi, I know you don’t like talking.
But you’ll have to talk for us to get justice.
I’ll stay with you.
Omelogor and Zikora can call in, too.”
Chia wanted to drive her to the lawyer’s office but the lawyer said he would come to them; he didn’t want to risk someone recognizing and following her.
Zikora was busy at work and couldn’t call but Omelogor did, Chia’s laptop screen filled with her face.
felt tense.
The lawyer’s name was Mr. Junius.
He came wearing a crisp suit and a blue tie that intimidated her; to think he drove from D.C.
dressed up like that just to meet her.
It felt to her like a waste of an outfit.
He had an easy, amiable air, which seemed at odds with the sharpness of his suit.
He sat at the tip of the sofa in Chia’s living room, as if to better focus, for fear he might not if he sank in more comfortably.
He asked where she was from, and said he knew Guinea well, he had traveled all over, Kankan, Kindia, Koundara.
And Conakry, of course.
“How come?”
Omelogor asked.
“Sorry?”
He turned to the laptop, slightly to his side.
“How come Guinea? It’s not very well known.
When I was in grad school somebody actually still called it French Guinea.”
He laughed, an unexpected sound, and Omelogor laughed, and instantly a team was formed, he and Omelogor on one side, the people who did not know Guinea on the other.
“Well, Stokely Carmichael for one.
I grew up in a very conscious family.
My father wouldn’t even tolerate my calling him Stokely right now! But I was also fascinated by the country and its ties with the civil rights movement.
John Lewis talks about visiting Sékou Touré.
Nobody in Georgia gave him dignity and everyone in Guinea did.”
“Fannie Lou Hamer went to Guinea, too,”
Omelogor said.
“Oh yes, yes.
Many others—”
Chia cut in, “ is anxious about all this, as you can imagine.”
Mr. Junius seemed reluctant to move his eyes away from Omelogor’s face on the laptop screen.
He told that he would guide her through it all, it would be okay, and they would win the case.
He said “it will be okay”
so often that knew it would not be.
If cross-examination was so easy, then he would not have said it so many times, prep you for cross-examination, cross-examination, cross-examination.