The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, стр. 68
A neighbor stood in the doorway.
“They waiting, Ol’ Ma,” he said.
“Okay, we come,” Ol’ Ma said.
Papa waited in the village circle with Satta. We took turns hugging friends and family, each goodbye making me heavier and heavier, so that when we turned around to leave, K on Papa’s shoulders and Wi and me each holding a hand, my steps were painful. My footprints were deep and the sand crept through the holes of my slippers. I turned around at the waving collective as we approached the canoe. There had been so many goodbyes, but none had felt like this. That waving crowd of protectors, watchers of my childhood. Papa squeezed my hand. He lifted each of us from the sandy shore, placing us carefully in the teetering canoe.
“We going to see Mam?” I asked Papa again through the stuttering tears. Satta sat across from us in the canoe, her gun tall behind her back.
“Yes,” Papa said, this time without hesitation.
I leaned against him, looking back once more at those on the shore, my Ol’ Ma in front of the crowd. I wanted to touch the lake. I wanted to put some of Lake Piso’s water in my mouth and rinse out the bitter taste.
TWENTY-NINE
We walked with Satta until the sun almost left the sky, toward a town called Vonzuan, north of Junde. I was finally full from the food Satta had brought, after seven months of surviving off the baby fish that the fishers were able to catch, but I was tired from crying for Ol’ Ma and kept tugging at Papa’s shirt to get him to hold me. Those walking on the road scurried away when they saw Satta, her gun hitting her leg with every step. Papa followed close behind her.
I looked up at Satta’s bare, dark neck below her stunted braids. She was not like Mam or my aunties or the other women in the village. She did not walk like them, but she did not walk like Papa either. She did not walk like the rebels on the road. She was different. When other big people moved in the war, they were not certain about their next steps. They did not know if they would remain on the road or have to run into a swamp to dodge rockets or tanks. But Satta knew the steps she would take. She was smaller than other big people, shorter though her shoulders were wide, but she walked in a bigger way than them, godlike with the certainty of her steps. When we crossed the paths of other rebels, I felt Papa’s reluctance. He walked slower as he followed Satta, pulling us close to his leg. She would nod at the rebels or stop and talk, though only for a short while, and we waited with Papa close by. Some of them yelled at Satta and looked at us for a moment before letting her pass. But most looked at her for a long time, up and down and up and down, like Papa looked at Mam. I wondered if Satta had met Hawa Undu and if she had tried to talk him out of this war. If he had looked at her this way too. The farther we walked, the more crowded the road became.
“We going to see Mam?” I asked.
“Yes. We see her soon,” Papa said.
Sometimes while we were walking I felt his leg shake. He was sweating and his breathing was faster than the times we were walking after leaving Caldwell. I was so tired that I eventually stopped.
“Come. Come, we have to keep going,” Papa said.
“No, I tired.”
“What wrong with the girl?” Satta asked, turning around. “Let’s keep going-oh,” she said standing close to Papa.
“Tutu, we have to go. Let’s go see Mam,” he said, tugging at my hand. With each step, my feet were reacquainted with a merciless pang. Papa leaned forward, still holding K, and kissed my head.
“We will be home soon, yeh? Tell me … say to me the memory verse you just learned. You remember, yeh?”
“I remember,” Wi said behind him.
“Good. Good girl, Wi,” Papa said and leaned down and kissed her head. “Say it for me. Say it with your sister.”
“The Lord … the Lord is my strength and my refuge; whom shall I fear?” she said.
“Say it again, yeh?” Papa said.
“The Lord is my strength and my refuge; whom shall I fear?”
After several repetitions my crying ceased. I joined my sister’s litany until my legs became numb, until those walking on the road became gray as the sun hid its face behind dormant clouds.
We made it to Vonzuan in the afternoon. We had stopped only once, to share an orange, before we were told we had to continue. There were few civilians like us in sight, and there was a junction where two mammoth tanks and other rebel cars had gathered. The tanks were deliberate in their pointing, and the boys who crowded around them were saying what I knew were bad words while they yelled and laughed together. Some were dressed like Satta. Others were not wearing T-shirts—only pants.
“Stay close,” Papa said.
Satta talked to the boys, and while we waited I remembered that I would see Mam soon. I wondered if she smelled the same and if her hair would feel just as soft and cold through my fingers. Mothers do not forget their daughters, Korkor had once told me, so I knew she would recognize me, even though it had been so long since she had seen me. I wondered if she was wearing one of her colorful dresses or the lipstick that made her lips the color of plums.
Satta finally returned to where we stood. As she walked away from the boys, they whistled at her.
“They say the bus going in ten minutes. Ten minutes it will be here,” she said.
“What bus?”
“To the border.”
“Rebel bus we taking?” Papa asked, alarmed.
“That the only way. They letting women and children who make it to the