The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 57
“Who is this?” I asked, unable to recognize the voice.
“Amos. This Amos,” he said.
“Amos?!” I yelled. “Oh my! Hi! How are you?! Where are you?!”
“I’m in Ghana. I was able to leave Liberia,” he said with a wide relief that I could hear in his voice.
I was happy for him, yet his voice was like the prick of a needle. I looked down at my stomach.
“Oh, God bless you, Amos. Thank you for calling. I am well.”
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “But that is not why I am calling.”
My heart dropped.
“What?” Facia asked.
“What is it, Amos? What’s wrong?”
“I called around for weeks to find you. Once I arrived in Ghana. I called family around America looking for Liberians in New York, then when I found Liberians in New York I had to find someone who knew people at Columbia. I am so happy I found you.”
“Amos, what is wrong?” I asked again.
“Gus is alive. I know there is no way you can know so I wanted to make sure I told you.”
I screamed into the phone and raised my hands toward the ceiling.
“They’re alive,” I repeated, crying to Facia.
“He saved my life, Mam. Rebel almost kill me and Gus gave him money to let me go. I walked with them first but we parted. They were going to Lai. I believe they made it.”
“They in Lai,” I said, now laughing.
“Praise God,” Facia said and danced around the apartment.
The white noise returned and I thanked Amos through the haze. I was getting ready to hang up the phone when on the other side I heard Amos asking me to wait.
“Amos? Amos, I am still here,” I said.
“I am sorry, Mam. But I must tell you there are some rumors I have been hearing from people who escaped from the Cape Mount area,” he said.
“What? What rumor you hear?” I asked.
“They are saying Charles Freeman, the Ol’ Pa, is dead. That he was killed. He was looking for food in Burma and the rebels them mistook him for a Mandingo leader and shot him. The Ol’ Pa is dead. They say he was killed.”
That a day could be so bittersweet. That a day could be so cynical. That life could be so cruel, so vicious. I dropped the phone and tilted my head back. I clenched my dress, unable to breathe, and I screamed into the morning, screamed from my depths, from the ends of my fingers, screamed into the morning that a day could be so merciless, that a year could be so cold. Screamed into the morning until I had nothing left.
TWENTY-FOUR
The griots and the djelis do not write down their stories. They are divine tellers with memories that span thousands of years of our history. They never needed to write. Their memories are scripture. They tell the Ol’ Mas all that is and all that ever was and, on some occasions, what will be. Those Ol’ Mas tell their grandchildren, and when those grandchildren become Ol’ Mas, they tell their grandchildren, and when these grandchildren become Ol’ Mas, they tell their grandchildren, and so on. This is how we recite scripture. This is how the truth was kept, how some decisions were made, and so I paid attention when the Ol’ Mas told stories they had heard from their griots and djelis.
For instance, they said that you can tell a lot about what is to come by your dreams, and by the way your unborn child enters the world. If you dream of snakes, it means that someone will soon die. If you dream of water, a lake or the ocean, it means that someone will soon give birth. If children are not born crying, they will give much trouble when they get older. If children are born feet first, if they somehow manage to stand upright inside their mothers, then a battle is coming, and the mothers will win.
These superstitions lived on even with the growth of Christianity—children chewing bones in their sleep to wish death to a parent, thrusting a special dust on enemies to give them leprosy—all possible, even under a Christian God. So when the doctors told me that I would need a C-section, my first, showing me the image of my son standing upright inside me, it made me smile. It was the first time I had smiled in weeks, since the rumors of Ol’ Pa’s death reached us. I considered everything about Amos’s call. His raspy voice, as though he had also been crying for longer than anyone should, stirring all that good news with the bad.
That year had made me cynical, but I still believed that everything had meaning. The call I received, the call I had been waiting for, came from a man who would have been killed had it not been for Gus. And whatever circumstance led to them being on that dusty road on that day, at that time, whatever stroke of luck made the encounter with that rebel go as it did, it happened, and I understood it to be a direct act of God, having meaning beyond what I could understand.
These things were reminders of my smallness and the many ways life functioned outside my control; but there were those coincidences that gave me a glimpse, though I was small, of just how powerful I could be. And I wanted to tell my daughters this. I wanted to teach them their power and remind them of it every day I could, especially during the seasons they felt small. I wanted to see them grow to be mothers themselves. I wanted to see them fall in love. I wanted to be there when they graduated from school. I wanted to make them soup when they cried, and to tell them sorry I was not there.
They said my son was standing inside me, that he had chosen to straighten his back before entering what was then the coldest world, and I thought of those lives in Liberia. The