The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 44
“I think it’s time,” I said in the void.
“Come then,” Mam had said finally, as if conceding a fight she had long hoped she would lose. “Come home.”
SEVENTEEN
I arrived at night. From the sky, Monrovia was a mass of blackness with the occasional pocket of light that looked no more significant than a colony of fireflies. Almost everyone in the plane sounded like Papa and Mam, and for that reason I felt safe. I thought I would experience fear or anxiousness, those friends who consumed much of my last memories in that city. But there was warmth, a victory in the landing, mild clapping in the cabin.
As I exited the plane and descended the stairs onto the tarmac, the smells of fresh rubber sap, fried greens, and sweat competed for my senses. I examined the faces and postures of those waiting on the ground for hints of familiarity. Words, both shouted and spoken quietly, clashed into each other as the airport workers hustled to accommodate and also size up the passengers of their latest flight.
I had been staring at a woman’s freshly painted red nails and the neat fit of her uniform when she caught me.
“Welcome,” she said, smiling as she searched my face and eyes to see if I was of any importance.
“Thank you,” I whispered and hurried into customs.
I entered a small room with posters labeled “Liberian” and “Diplomat” and “Non-Citizens,” which looked to have all at one point been white but were since stained by neglect, and noticed that a thin man wearing a T-shirt too big for his frame held a torn piece of paper with my name on it.
“Hi, Wayétu, welcome home,” he said as soon as I read the sign. “Your Pa sent me for you.”
I nodded and smiled, immediately following him as he processed my passport and led me to an area where the entire flight stood shoulder to shoulder, anxious for their bags to teeter across the broken ribs of an outdated carousel.
“How was your flight?” he asked, as though he knew me, content and committed to my comfort and happiness, as much as to delivering me to Papa and Mam without error.
“It was fine,” I answered, as the carousel shifted, then reluctantly inched along.
“Don’t worry,” the man said, “just point out the bags to me. Your Ma and Pa waiting outside.”
He rushed to grab my bags as soon as I pointed to them, squeezing his way between the unmethodical assembly. We exited the crowded room and airport, and a sea of black faces waited anxiously outside. There were Ankara and country cloth shirts and dresses on some of their bodies, the kind that Mam used to wear, while others wore light T-shirts and shorts to cope with the dry season humidity and Harmattan winds. Immediately, I realized that I was an entity for consideration. I was wearing jeans and sandals with a white blouse, and I wore my weave in a ponytail that hung down my back. People looked at my face, at my clothes and bags, as if I were an alien, before tiring of it all and searching beyond where I stood for the family member or friend who had not yet emerged.
The man led me past the initial group to the edge of the parking lot.
I recognized them in the distance, peering ahead as if waiting for a right answer in a mass of incorrectness, the only one that mattered.
They looked the same. Papa wore a polo shirt and fidgeted with his keys. He wore glasses now and they glared in the distance. Mam held her purse with both hands, her neck searching, her braids thin and neat.
There is a weight that builds on shoulders when one leaves home. The longer a person stays away, the heavier the burden of displacement. I saw Papa and Mam standing there and the lost hours returned, came back to me in layers. There were familiar intonations that gathered across the parking lot, those vowel-heavy words like an ocean pushing against me, those faces and bodies like mine, like my friends’, and the burden lifted, died in that moment. Mam started toward me with her arms extended, crying, and I hurried to her, buried myself in the resurrecting cloud of her presence.
“There she is,” Papa said and joined our embrace, his brooding body an extra sheet of nostalgia.
“Sorry,” Mam said, crying over my shoulder, and I was not sure for what. My recent heartbreak? The long flight? We would talk longer, in private, she gestured this with a nod, and I took comfort in the fact that she had not changed. Papa paid the man sent in to help me, who by now had loaded the truck with my bags.
“Thank you, chief,” he said, nodding, and scurried to another cluster of vehicles that had just arrived, hopeful for his next gig.
Our drive home was pitch black except for Papa’s two beaming headlights on the dim road away from Robertsfield airport. I rolled down the window so those smells could awaken my memories—peanut soup, oil from dry fish, the rising smoke from charcoal pots. The night sky was so complete with constellations that I gasped. We navigated the dusty and bumpy roads in the darkness, and I saw clusters of palm trees, various congregations of pen-pen drivers, and moonlight markets of vendors selling coconut, corn, and other goods remaining from the day. I searched faces, scanned them as they filled the dirt junctures of those roads.
That night, Mam made my favorite dish. She served me cassava leaves over rice with deep-fried fish and pepper sauce, and as soon as the warm greens rested on my tongue, I was ashamed for having attempted to make the dish myself.
“You eat rice with a fork now?” Mam asked, as she and Papa filled their spoons.
I laughed with her and glanced at the polished, naked spoon