The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 26

“Come now, you girls. Come finish your dress,” Ma said, pulling us back into her house.

We sat in front of the dress with zigzagging stitches across the front.

“It’s a pretty dress,” K said, caressing the cloth in Wi’s hands.

“Mam will like it,” K said to Ma.

“Yeh, she will like it plenty,” Ma said. I grew excited at the memory of Mam’s face and how it would wash over with joy when she saw the dress.

“Where is Mam?” K asked Ma.

“Mam still in America,” she said.

“When is she coming back?” K asked, biting her lip as she looked up at the ceiling and followed it back down to Ma’s face.

“Soon. She will be back soon and we will all go back to Caldwell. Yeh?” Ma said, trying hard to maintain a straight voice and face. K looked down at the dress in Wi’s lap. She had stopped stitching and we were all looking up at Ma for an answer. Ma continued to sew, periodically looking in the corner at her prayer mat, mindful of the time.

On the following night a barefoot fisherman walked to Ma’s porch where she sat plaiting Wi’s hair.

“Hello, Ol’ Ma,” he said. “You know when Ol’ Pa coming back? He took my boat.” Papa walked up behind the man with a lantern in his hand. He came to read to us and wish us goodnight, as he did every night before we slept.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” Papa asked Ma.

“The man is asking for Pa,” she answered. “He will come back soon. He should have come this morning,” she told the fisherman.

“Yeh, if he is not back by tomorrow night, we will send some boys to go look for him,” Papa said, and it was clear he wished he had gone with Pa on this trip. The fisherman nodded and left the house.

“Pa coming tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeh,” Ma said, wiping her face. She squeezed the lappa and settled on the floor where we sat. She looked into our faces as though they were road maps back to her love; she inquired silently and glanced about the wooden walls of her small house. He was neither there nor in our faces, not on the village circle or near the coop.

“Don’t worry, Ma. We will go look for him tomorrow,” Papa said. Ma untied the head tie from her head and cried into the aloe-scented cloth as her thick black hair fell to her back.

She met Pa when she was a teenager, they said, in those days when she could finally walk to the market in the evenings while her younger sisters and brothers continued working on the farm. The Vai people had been in Cape Mount for hundreds of years then. Pa was at a market stand selling the garments he’d sewn, the most crowded stand since he was so tall that it was hard to miss him. Ma had passed him while holding a friend’s hand, they said. They made sure their hair was fully covered as they approached him. He saw her pass and pointed directly at her.

“You,” he said with a voice as tall as him. “You will be mine.”

“But wait,” she answered in Vai. “Don’t I have a choice?”

Ma giggled and ran away with her friend. Some days later when she returned home from the farm, Pa was waiting there talking to her parents.

“He says he loves you. He says he wants you,” her Ma had said as she pulled her out of the room. “Do you want him? Do you love him?”

She had not seen him since the day she met him at the market.

Ma peeked into the room as Pa sat with his hands on his knees, nodding as her father questioned him. Her father was a chief, and she knew that the business of her marriage was a serious one. But there was this big, tall man, handsome, brave, and special even, she had said.

“Yes,” she said quickly.

Pa was made to convert to Islam to take Ol’ Ma’s hand in marriage. They had eight daughters and one son, three children dying before ten years old. Pa moved with her, almost right away, from Ma’s village. Ma’s father had not sent any of his daughters to school. The women were supposed to work on the farm with their many children while the men sat underneath palaver huts with their neighbors to discuss politics.

“I do not want a family on a farm,” he had told Ma when she became pregnant with her first daughter. And against Mam’s grandfather’s wishes, Pa took his children to the nuns at Catholic schools in Sierra Leone and Liberia, begging them to see his daughters through. As they grew, they would travel to London and France, to America and across Africa to “learn book.” The Ol’ Ma had educated daughters—something in her old age she was most proud of—a mold finally broken by that big man she knew at once she loved. He had changed her, as great loves do. And she had changed him—his only wife, his princess. And where was he now? How could he leave her now?

The next morning Papa left with a cousin and two other villagers in a canoe headed for Junde. The entire village knew now of Pa’s disappearance and they stood on the shore of the lake to bid Papa and his cousin a safe journey. Through the traffic of villagers, as I stood underneath Ma’s hand, I thought of Pa’s shoulders and how they turned toward us on the day he left. It was my peanuts that he went to find, a simple wish I wanted to take back, and begged God that Ma would not remember. When day broke again, a woman near the lake yelled out for Ma. With her head unwrapped, something that I rarely saw her do, she rushed out of her house and across the village circle to the lake, where