The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 42
“You hear me?” Mam stepped out of the car and slammed the door. I watched her lappa suit disappear into the house before I opened my door to the night’s chorus.
When I entered the house, Mam was still in the foyer, frozen in front of the television that blared throughout the living room. Papa was leaned forward on the couch, carefully minding a BBC report on Liberia.
“They may start fighting again-oh,” Papa said, shaking his head.
A reporter spoke over a camera shot of civilians running from crossfire with small bags of belongings and children on their backs and waists. They looked like Papa and Mam. They looked like my sisters and brothers, like me. According to the reporter, people had begun to evacuate after a bomb went off in Monrovia, but ECOWAS—a regional union of African states—and the United Nations had recently stepped in to negotiate with Charles Taylor and his rebel opposition. The civilians ran quickly as pieces of their belongings fell on the road behind them.
“They may start fighting again,” Papa repeated himself, hypnotized by the images on the screen. “Ay-yah!” Mam said as the tears from outside dried on her cheeks and new ones took their place. Mam’s shoulders shook and she surrendered to her sadness. When Papa noticed that she was crying, he stood straight and put his arm around her. He looked over Mam’s dropped head at my face for answers.
I shrugged and went to my room. And that night I had another nightmare. I woke up, nearly a woman now underneath my thin nightgown, and I pulled open the door to my parents’ room where a thin stream of light ran across their bodies. I wanted to sleep between them, as I had done as a child, but Mam felt so far from me—my denial of her now a disheveled bridge across a wayward stream of our misunderstanding. I lay at the foot of their bed, and it did not take long for Mam to rise and grab me a pillow and throw, find her way to me, and hug me back to sleep.
SIXTEEN
“Guess what!” my friend Tina yelped as soon as I hugged her hello. I welcomed her excitement after the monotony of blank screens and wasted time in front of that novel, and the writer’s anxiety it caused. We met at a local museum and I knew as she approached, by how quickly she walked toward me with the anxiousness of those who are running away from one thing while running toward another, that there was news.
“What?” I asked, entering the building.
“I found out my ancestors are from Ghana.” I smiled as she sang the country’s name.
“That’s cool, girl. DNA tests are great.”
“Oh my God, I’ve been there before but I’m going back with my cousin by the end of the year.”
“That’s dope,” I said, still smiling, and we proceeded through the exhibit while I brought up another topic of discussion, which Tina freely indulged.
That night she called me, energetically low, unpredictably upset.
I was, as Tina explained, not as supportive as she had imagined I would be. As an African-American whose history and heritage had been stolen during the transatlantic slave trade, she reminded me that her family had no place on the continent to call home in the way that mine had, and she expected that I would be happier for her.
“I was happy for you. I am happy for you,” I insisted. “What was I supposed to do? Jump up and down?”
She said nothing, so I knew the answer was, perhaps, yes.
“I’m sorry,” I said when the silence made a home. “I’m so sorry.” For not being as supportive as she needed. For that history and those ships, I am so sorry.
“I guess I don’t know what I was expecting,” she said. But I knew. I understood.
She was not the first friend I had who had tested their blood for traces of a stolen home. I would often get calls about either DNA results or news that they were dating an African, usually a Nigerian guy who had just become comfortable with his foreign identity after years of being teased in grade school. Being from Africa was now cool and those boys knew it. My cousins, my friends, the boys I met in college who hid their too-long middle names with ritual emulation of their American friends, overusing “nigga” to camouflage the smell of okra sauce and fried fish, now changed their profile icons to West African flags and I wondered: What took us so long?
“I mean, I guess you’re pretty Americanized anyway, so I get it,” Tina said. “You don’t talk about Liberia that much.”
And where could I begin to tell that story? I ignored the comment because the admission would feel like rocks in my mouth—that Liberia lived with me every night, in my dreams, that I wear it on my skin and in the rhythm of my love stories. Where could I begin to tell her that there were dragons there too? That going to Ghana could give her a kind of peace, yes, but not the kind she was looking for. To say that would be to break her heart and I could not. She did not want or need the truth of her homegoing—not the whole truth. Tina wanted Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa and William Tolbert’s Africa and Thomas Sankara’s Africa and Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s. And we dream perhaps one day their versions of Ghana and Liberia and Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast will be resurrected. But those of us who have been pushed into new homes, new countries, know that our dragons killed those places too.
After Johnny Boy, there was the dream again of Satta and the jug