Ancestor Stones Read online

  And I wonder what they would think if they came here now, those hapless port drinkers. Of all the glorious gifts the forest had to offer — fresh coffee.

  SEEDS

  2

  Asana, 1926

  Shadows of the Moon

  Hali! What story shall I tell? The story of how it really was, or the one you want to hear? I shall start with my name, but that is not so easy as you think. I have been known by many names. Not the way you are thinking. You people change your name the way you change your hairstyle. One day braids. Next day hot-comb. You marry and take a stranger’s family name in place of your own. A potho name, no less. But us, we never change the names that tell the world who we are. The names we are called by, yes. These ones may change.

  I had another name once, before I had even seen the light of this world. My name was Yankay, the firstborn.

  Sakoma: the month of emptiness. The women were making ready, whitewashing their houses, plastering façades streaked by the rain and stained with mould. Soon the doors of every home would be thrown open. Soft, new rice to eat instead of bulgur and mangoes. The hungry season was nearly over.

  My mother’s hands were dipped in white, her face and arms flecked. That was how she was always able to remember I was born the week of the last rainfall before the dry season began. I had an appetite, she used to say, such an appetite because I was born at the start of the feast. That day she worked and felt her insides convulse. Pain seeped into her limbs, trickling out of her centre like juice from a lemon. With her right hand she went on smoothing the plaster in arcs like rainbows. The fingers of her left hand she began to click.

  I was the firstborn of my father. Not my mother. My mother was a praying wife. My father inherited her from his uncle. After she was widowed she could have returned to her own people as the other wives did. But she stayed and chose a new husband from the younger brothers. She chose my father. It goes without saying that she must have admired him. Not because he had life, was vigorous with ambition, though he had and was those things. But because she didn’t stay a praying wife for long. Within a year she had conceived.

  My mother was my father’s first wife. Well, it’s true there was one other praying wife before her, but that one went when my father brought my mother into the house. My mother’s status was high, you see. She had been the wife of a chief. The other woman had lived long enough. She wanted to be mistress in her own house. So she packed her baskets and walked back to her own village where she had sons.

  So there was my mother, plastering her house. Alone and painting, no need for anyone else. This is the way she was. When the job was complete she laid the block of wood on the steps of the house and set off to the birth attendant’s hut. By the time she reached the end of the village she was clicking fast. Both hands. It was early morning. The women were sweeping their compounds and the front of their houses. Dust devils danced across the ground. They looked up when they heard the sound of her fingers. Mine was an auspicious birth: my father was already a big man. Every woman who was already a mother laid down her broom and walked. Their fingers picked up her rhythm, until ten, fifteen, twenty women clicked their fingers as one.

  I wanted to come to this world, to the place where things happen, I didn’t want to stay where I was. I always had big eyes for this world and I was born with them open. My mother never feared for me. There are some children — you can tell the ones — born with a hunger for life. I was in such a hurry my mother didn’t even have time to drink the infusion of lemon tree leaves. I was born, to the chorus of their fingers, like the sound of crickets announcing the rain.

  Afterwards the midwife prepared to bind my mother’s stomach. But my mother kept on clicking her fingers. The midwife pressed ten fingertips into her stomach. Shook her head. Click. Click. My mother asked for some of the tea, and they poured the cool liquid into her mouth. She arched her back. Click. Push. Click.

  My brother slid into this world: small, still and silent. At first, they thought he’d gone with the leaves. My mother cradled him and called for him to come back. That was when she took my name away from me and gave it to him. If only he would come back, she promised, he would be the firstborn. She traced his features with her fingers. The baby opened his eyes, black eyes. He stared back at her. And he decided he wanted her. That was how it all began. This thing between him and me. Because his first deed in this world was to take from me what was mine.

  We were twins. People thought we were lucky. They used to touch our heads as we passed by. Tap, tap. Stall holders called out to us: ‘Eh, bari!’ Twin! And they offered us delicacies to taste and gave our mother their best price without the bother of haggling. Women bending over their cooking pots lifted the lids and called us over. One month after our birth, our mother made an offering at the house of the twins: chicken eggs and palm wine, foods the spirits like to eat.

  When I had three teeth my brother still sucked with his gums. My mother gave me a wooden spoon and a bowl of rice pap. I followed her wherever she went, holding my spoon. One day she sat on her stool and I leaned against her knees. A duck passed us with tiny ducklings trailing in her wake, like porpoises following a fishing boat. Wherever the mother duck walked her babies followed, attached to her by an invisible thread. She stroked my hair: ‘So who is my duckling?’ she asked. Me, I would have cried, if I had known how to speak. She bent down and caught a baby duck in cupped hands; she let me stroke the downy feathers before she released it. The duckling raced, wings flapping, towards its mother. I laughed. But when I saw my brother on my mother’s lap, still suckling with his old man’s gums, stroking her breast and squeezing milk from her nipple, I felt jealous. I wasn’t so pleased to be her baby duck any more.

  The women who had witnessed my birth called me Nurr too — because I was the true firstborn, because they had already left the chamber when my brother arrived and didn’t hear my mother make him her promise. They thought maybe I would return. Because that’s what the first child often does. They had forgotten that my mother had children before, when she was married to another man. That happened in another place. They could only see what was before their own eyes. So they called me Nurr, a thing to be discarded, slung on the heap. That’s how people thought then. The bodies of children who wasted their mother’s tears they threw on the rubbish mound outside the town. Nobody would bury such spirits next to their very own relatives under the flamboyant trees.

  I could walk first and even carry him. My brother barely bothered to learn to use his own legs; he knew I was there to bear his weight. One day our father informed his uncles that he had decided to leave the place where we lived to start a plantation. The land was there, you see. And so we left to found our own village. Outside the town, beyond the ring of light and into the elephant grass we went. I trailed my hands across the towering stalks, as thick as bamboo poles, grazing the tips of my fingers. And then we entered the darkness. High above us the monkeys cavorted and screamed our names. The crows laughed at our foolishness; a woodpecker darted ahead of us, rapping out a warning as it went; orchids dripped nectar on to us and it slid down the backs of our necks; we skirted great boulders and waded across pools of black water as the path closed up behind us. I looked up the dizzying trunks of the trees stretching far, far into the sky. I tried to see the sun.

  Single file, we went. At the front the snake man with a long stick and a pair of dogs. After him my father and the diviner who led him to the new land. My mother walked a respectful distance behind them. My father had new wives by then. They walked behind my mother. I’ll tell you the rest of their names when the time comes, not now. Then I had eyes only for my mother. The youngest of the wives I walked alongside. She was a few years older than me — just a sprouting seedling wife. By this time I could carry nearly half a bushel of rice. We followed behind the others and shared a load. Behind us came karabom, my grandmother who had left her own house to follow her daughter to this new place.

  Our belongings were carried on the he
ads of five indentured men. Every day my father sat in the courtroom listening to the disputes of men who laid down two coins to place their grievances before the elders. People respected him; he became chief advisor to the obai. Many of the men brought before the court were debtors. Sometimes my father agreed to clear their debts himself. And in return he took their sons from them, to labour for him until the day their fathers redeemed them. Whenever that day came.

  The men toted giant baskets of clothes, a woven cage of guineafowl, a pair of piglets with their feet bound together, our great iron cooking-pots, sacks of rice, salt, groundnuts and the chest that held my father’s fortune in silver shillings — the Queen’s money — with metal locks crafted by Fula locksmiths. Last of all came my father’s iron-framed four-poster bed, carried aloft by eight extra men. Past the main foot road, the path narrowed. The bed couldn’t pass. The men widened the track, slashing at the trees on either side. Progress was slow. My father decided we must press on. A few times I turned my head and each time the bed was further and further behind us. Eventually it disappeared from my view, behind the twisted bends, the giant trunks and curtain of ropes. It arrived in our new home three days after us.

  My brother walked along beside me. I was young but I knew things. I knew I was glad to be leaving the old place and the old women. My mother and father called us by the names the diviner had chosen for us: Alusani and Asana. As the sun rose Alusani fell behind. I urged him, but I couldn’t carry him. The bearers with their loads balanced upon their heads followed us with straight backs, their eyes fixed upon the horizon. Alusani trailed so far behind he became tangled in the feet of the first man. Our mother worried he was not strong enough to make the journey. So I walked on alone, under the weight of my load while Alusani rocked and slept under the canopy of the maka reserved for my father.

  The sky turned to violet and the trees on the horizon dark blue. The planes of our faces faded and disappeared. After some time the path broadened again; the shadows of the trees grew skimpy. I smelled wood smoke: a scattering of houses and some tents in the centre of a clearing. We changed our clothes and sat down to wait while a messenger ran ahead. In a short time the headman came hurrying out of his house and knelt before my father. One knee on the ground. Hands clasped across his thigh. I listened to him explain everything was ready. He would accompany us to the place himself in the new light. And so we accepted his hospitality. I was tired and hungry, yet I was excited, too. I rested on my haunches and I watched as each man and woman came before my father and bent down to touch his feet. And I wondered who they were.

  Like a mouse’s tail the path narrowed and came to an end. I rode on my father’s shoulders. Better than the hammock, I thought. There in the clearing stood four houses, so new the thatch was still green. Behind them flowed pale green waters, laced by mangroves, embroidered with water lilies: a river like a woman’s sleeve.

  The place was known only as Mathaka. Pa Thaka, a fisherman who lived there alone without a woman of his own, cooked and washed for himself. The people thought it was a joke. Behind his back they called him a woman. My father gave our home a new name: Rofathane, resting place.

  We were the descendents of swordsmen who came from the North. Holy men and warriors led by a queen who blew in with the harmattan on horseback from Futa Djallon, dreaming of an empire that stretched from the desert to the sea. They never reached the sea. The horses shied and started. Their legs buckled and they toppled over. After a while the people realised they were stranded. They couldn’t return to their homeland, so instead they settled where they found themselves. They were rice eaters. The grains they had brought with them they planted. In time their empire vanished, and another arose.

  Rofathane, my father told me, had another meaning: oasis. Our new home was an oasis in the forest.

  My mother told us our father was to become a coffee grower. She said this while she showed me how to grind the beans we had brought with us to make coffee for my grandmother. The beans were really for planting in rows on land that was being burned and brushed by the people from the houses in the clearing. These people had been given to our father by the obai, because he had helped him win the chieftaincy elections. And so they came to work by day, sometimes sleeping overnight, men and women side by side under thatched canopies. As the days passed the giant iroko trees crashed down one by one, great stumps wrenched out of the earth like a giant’s teeth. The land was burned and in the morning, when the fires had died down, I went out to look. I imagined the red earth beneath the blackened charcoal, as tender and new as the skin under the scabs of dried blood I picked at on my knee.

  Soon after we arrived, other people followed: a blacksmith, a carpenter, a herbalist, extra hands to plant the beans we had brought, fingers to pluck the ones that would grow. A big man casts a long shadow and many people build their lives in the shade.

  Until the first harvest arrived my mother allowed nobody but karabom to drink the dark liquid made from the beans. It became my job to make her coffee, to grind the beans first with a pestle and mortar, mix the powder with some of the water which bubbled all day on top of the three-stone fire at the back of the house. I poured the liquid into a small bowl and sweetened it with honey. Then I would carry her coffee to her, to the place where she liked to sit at the front of her daughter’s new house.

  The house had the best position in the whole village: at a right angle to my father’s house, next to the mosque and within earshot of the people who gathered to exchange news after prayers. From the verandah she could watch the comings and goings at the meeting house, too. Together she and I sat and waited for the grounds to settle.

  At those times, in the very early morning, she told me things nobody else knew. These weren’t the stories I heard her tell to the other women at the back of the house where they sat on stools in the evenings, their profiles warmed by the yellow light from the palm oil lamps. I remember the sound of their laughter: I thought of it as back-of-house laughter, different from the submerged giggles and half-smiles hidden behind hands at the front of the house.

  Once I laughed with them. My grandmother told a story — something about a woman who began to cook for another man while her husband was away. When she had finished, there followed a moment of silence. Next to her, my father’s third wife snorted and laughed, and the laughter passed from woman to woman like an improvised melody. Though I didn’t understand the story, I opened my mouth wide and laughed along with them. The music stopped. Somebody sucked her teeth. My karabom aimed a piece of charcoal at me and it hit me just above the eyebrow.

  You, I remember how you talked to your children. You asked them: ‘Do you want this or that?’ ‘Coca-cola or Fanta?’ ‘Front seat or back?’ You drove them around in a big four-wheel as though they were born with no legs. You let them push away the food everybody else was eating and you asked the cooks: ‘What else is there in the kitchen?’ And I heard the way your children answered you. As though the world was upside down, and you were the child, they the adults.

  When I was a child I was told my voice smelled of fish. By the time I was allowed to speak I had forgotten how. That is how it was. The way we were raised to be who we are.

  Karabom said: ‘Never say “good morning” until you have washed yourself.’ Yet the day I crossed her path in silence because I had not yet been to the stream she swore at me for my insolence. People who grew thin and died were being eaten away inside by witches, she told me on another day. I stared at the necklaces of loose skin around her neck, the empty flaps that hung to her waist. Even her ear lobes drooped; the holes where her gold earrings hung had stretched so I could see right through them. Karabom told me of witches who lured children with gifts of eggs and meat, only to suck their blood and steal their hearts, until one day all you saw running around was the empty flesh.

  She pointed to the weaver birds darting in and out of their nests suspended from the branches of a tree, in perfectly spaced rows, as though some hand had hung them ther
e. And she told me the birds were the souls of all the children who had died. Karabom’s lips were black, and when she spoke I could see her teeth gleaming against her dark, tattooed gums. I thought her lips and gums were black because she drank so much coffee.

  In the sky the moon faded against the growing blue. There were men whose skins were luminous as the pale shadows of the moon when it dances across bare flesh, she said. Men who sailed their houses across the sea and who were so thin because they ate only fish and drank sea water. When she was my age people told stories of captured children who sailed with them across the sea and were fed to a powerful demon. Men from faraway villages stole the children in exchange for unearthly possessions.

  ‘Stay away from the footpaths.’ The air whistled in her nostrils and her breath carried the odour of decay, as though her body had become nothing more than a vessel for a mouldering spirit. ‘Only an outsider clings to the path. And run away from strangers. If they come in good faith they’ll reach the village and make their business known.’

  After a while my mother would come and tap me on the shoulder. I wanted to ask her whether the stories were true. But my mother was always so busy. Too busy to listen. Busy in my father’s house counting little piles of stones: how many trees we had planted, how much the first harvest might yield, how rich we would surely become. When she cooked, my mother served my grandmother first — always, except when my father ate with us. I was brought up not to question my elders, so I kept the stories to myself. But I wasn’t frightened. To tell you the truth I didn’t believe them. Not so much as you might think. I knew people made up stories to tell children so that we would behave the way they wanted us to.