The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 41

of unpacking because there were always hands around waiting to meet her needs or requests as they came. And she always said that just when she began to fall for it, she left for New York. There were days she spoke of Caldwell, which she said she imagined was muddied with broken sticks of wood that formed nothing more than the shapes of Liberia’s recent chapter, that hosted nothing more than companies of squatters and their poorly strewn tents and many children.

So she and Wi had planted a palm tree outside of that Texan home, similar to one of her trees in Caldwell. And looking at the tree that day, ripe baby leaves lifting slowly in and out of sleep from the morning breeze, the voices of new neighbors clamoring around us since the cunning narrative of Y2K had finally died down, and subsequently everyone resumed buying houses in suburban cul-de-sacs and carried on waiting for Godot, I knew I wanted to leave. I could not believe the new walls and hallway. I could not believe the arched doors and frames, the clear glass windows that overlooked our new street in the home that was now our own. Not borrowed, not rented, but ours, ten years after moving to our new country. I heard them all laughing downstairs. Yet. There was that restlessness again, and then, the understanding that the quiet life outside our front door, beyond that driveway, did not match my internal melody. It never had.

I had learned Vai when I was five years old and forgotten it by the time I was six. At eight I traded fufu and soup for McDonald’s Happy Meals, although the starch had been my favorite thing to eat for years and one of my first words. At thirteen I folded the lappa suits my Ol’ Ma and aunties mailed from Logan Town and ELWA, 10 Monrovia 100 Liberia, in favor of Express and NY & Co. jeans, although they never correctly fit my too-skinny waist and hips.

Mam noticed our new interests when we were teenagers, and dishes like cassava leaf and palaver sauce took a back seat to spaghetti and meatloaf when we had friends visiting. During the week, when friends and teammates from Little League, dance squads, and basketball teams raided her house, she would come downstairs and speak, spend time listening to our stories or the laughter shared after games, and then she would go upstairs and rest.

“You don’t mind, do you?” we asked her as we turned down the penetrating drums and cymbals of Nimba Burr, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Fela and Femi Kuti for musical alternatives that our friends could recognize.

“No, I don’t mind,” she would say, smiling without teeth.

We were at my high school on an open house night. Mam wore a lappa suit with colors that nearly parted the sea of white faces in the hallway as we walked. We arrived in class and the teacher greeted me and Mam. We found two empty seats. I saw familiar faces of classmates. Most of them resembled their mothers and fathers; some of them came with grandparents. I smiled at class friends when they caught my eye. They grinned back, then surveyed Mam’s lappa suit in bewilderment. My legs shook nervously throughout. I saw them look at her as though she was from another planet, a species they had only briefly skimmed in history books and at museums. They all seemed alike. Khaki Dickies or dress slacks; button-up blouses or T-shirts with the face of our school mascot plastered across their breasts; stringy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail or worn down their shoulders with feathered bangs just above their eyelids; blue and green and brown eyes all passing by the corner where my mother and I sat; pink and red lips; white and yellow teeth; pale and tan hands; fat and skinny necks. And there was our beautiful Mam—a legend, a relic, an enigma. Toward the end of the teacher’s presentation, Mam raised her hand and asked a question. She had to repeat herself, but she was gracious, always gracious, and I, I was silent during the entire drive home.

“What’s wrong?” she asked as she parked in our driveway.

“Nothing,” I answered and turned toward the door to exit the car.

“You haven’t said anything. What’s wrong?”

The moonlight bounced off her cheeks and her breath grew rapid in the silence.

I said nothing, but then I said something stupid, like she could have asked me rather than having to repeat herself, because some people didn’t understand her accent. She was taken aback because she was a teacher, a successful teacher recognized by the state, and she spoke all day, and she said her students had no issues with her accent. I said it wasn’t a big deal.

“It is a big deal. You brought it up,” Mam said.

“Well, maybe next time just ask me afterward. I hate those things anyway and didn’t want to stay longer than we had to. Nobody did,” I said.

“They make you not want your mother to sound African in school now, then? That’s what we sending you to school for?”

“No—”

“I am African. And so are you!” Mam’s voice cracked as the locusts cried outside our car, along the narrow driveway that led to our new house, a house that never quite blended with the rest.

“Look at me,” she said. “Are you ashamed of me?”

“No,” I must have said.

“Good,” she continued. “Because if you’re ashamed of me, then you’re ashamed of yourself.”

I wanted to argue with her but I had neither the energy nor the courage to lie to her that I had not been proselytized, that I was not a victim of an education that did not have her in mind.

“You are African,” she said, tears streaming. “The book, the book they show you with Africans in jungles with no clothes. You know better. Don’t let them make you shame, yeh? You are African.” The words hurt more than I had imagined. I had never heard