I don’t stop walking until I am back in Ibiku.
Here is truth. I try to forget, and living in Keme house make it easy as long as nobody ask any question for which nobody have any answer. Yétúnde’s children still ask who I be in this house since I don’t stand for discipline like a mother, nor share in their mischief like a sister, but they don’t ask me. One time, past a year now, I am in the granary pounding grain as I do, and two of them run to their mother in the kitchen. The two of them have a bet about who Sogolon is. So who she be? they ask. She say, Ask your father. Certain things about the father I asking too, not to him but myself. A voice in my head that sound like me say, Look at you, your questions used to come with an answer clear as night or day, but now you can’t tell if is dusk or dawn. I curse myself because I don’t know what that mean even though I am the one saying it. I curse until I understand myself. That is, not long ago all questions in my head was simple, with yes or no, come or go, hot or cold, good or evil. Now come questions that don’t have one-word answer, when they have an answer at all. What is the yes or no to the question of the linen paper that I sometimes wear around my waist to remind myself of Emini? What it mean that I have to remind myself now? That my memory fade faster than the ink on this royal parchment? My first thought was to stop going to the donga because I working off too much of my rage in a place that it not meant for. My second thought is that rage is not what bothering me, but other things that I can’t name. Won’t name. Keme. Me and Keme. There is no me and Keme. There is Keme and his wife, Yétúnde, that is her name, which I say over and over. I live with a man and his wife, and yet I know exactly which mushroom remind me of the tip of his cock when I pull the skin back. Nasty girl, that voice say to me, but the quiet voice say, As long as he is cock, then he is not man, and as long as he is not man, he is not . . . what? He don’t bring marriage promise and I don’t bring dowry. I don’t look like a concubine, and me and the wife is not sister. We not even friend. We not enemy either, but yet one more thing in this house that is just too gray. And Keme still hungry for my mind, though I don’t see what he find in it. It make him feel like a brother, but I don’t fuck my brother. As for fucking, is this fucking when it move so slow, slow meaning he mean it, slow meaning he care, slow meaning that this must be how people who lucky to meet in a love match fuck? One time he make me holler with just his finger, and afterward all I could think was that the least of him touch me, yet that was the most of him I ever did get. This man is making my thinking messy. That is what he is doing and I going to need him to stop it. Except I don’t.
Night come and I wonder who put it in my head that I supposed to be the instrument of anything named vengeance. If the divine sisters’ spirits crying out for justice, that is a cry for the ear of devils. I never sorry to see a single one go. And Emini never look at me as no sister, but how could she, being the princess? Maybe she did try as within her strength, even if that was never good enough. I wrap her linen paper around me without thinking, until I think about it. Sometimes I wear it before a fight, but I don’t want to think about that either. Sometimes I have even been hit, slashed, right where the papers are wrapped around my body, but never once do they tear or smudge. What am I supposed to think of that? Thinking come anyway. Of that time riding in the wagon on the way to Mantha, me waking up from every bump, Emini not sleeping. Me seeing her looking at me every time I open my eye. Before she even talk, I get this feeling that she was trying to know me and that was new to her and for me too. For the only way I could know this was because I knew the opposite, her not showing no interest in me at all. Her and everybody.
“What is it like to be alone?”
I don’t answer. Being alone still perplex her. For her it mean just her and the servants, or the lions, or whoever been there so long that they are one with the drapes. I see it, that from she was born, Emini have people watching her, following her, caring for her under threat of their own life. The same women who follow her to chambers, undress her, and try to amuse her also hold the bowl under her when she cut shit loose, also wipe her, and also make the whole concern go away. They hide her stink from her, but they always in her company. Even after they take everything from her, I was with her alone. The thought, her on her own in a room of her own, perplex her spirit until she have to say out loud, Good riddance to all that. She will die alone. By the moment I witness it, she was already dead. Some dawn she will come back to tell me she is roaming the lands between death and life because nobody come to sail her to the otherworld. She cannot book passage because her spirit won’t settle and neither will her baby.
Fuck the gods and drown her in a well of piss, for I don’t owe her a thing. Nothing about my life from the day Miss Azora find me was my choice, and if I did have the choice it would never lead to no royal house, and no royal house would even know of me. This is how it really go: The princess, the divine sisters have one thing in common, that they both take me against my own will, and all of them dying and leaving me alive mean the gods love to make joke. Then why on certain nights and certain mornings a whisper come to me saying, Woman, you delay. And undying quiet will never come to your head until you make haste. You think what you have now, when Keme come to your bed and you listen him sleep, is peace, but that is not peace, that is comfort. Comfort is a lie that shame the gods. Comfort is how you fool yourself. Comfort, like happiness, can’t last.
I lose the fight that night, but it was a white band fight. I lose because I hear news among the crowd that steal my mind from everything else.
Ugliko district. Call it dusk. Two men back in the donga crowd said a word and a third agree, saying, They making a mockery of justice, a mockery of decency, hark they soon make a mockery of mockery if nobody do anything. You see those two, last quartermoon? No, but we hear that they killed a woman because the two take it for a joke to throw her up into the sky, higher than birds fly, but not catch her. Flap, flap your wings, they say. Laugh at it they do when she land and burst open in the street. Next time be like the cat, the green one say, we hear it. Her husband and three children take it to a magistrate but he say, Where are the witnesses? Hear me now, they take what they want to take, eat what they want to eat, last moon they rape a boy with a knife so no need to tell you how fare he. You would think things would be better after the witch purge, but they worse. And this King, this better we not say, for I know one of their kind can hear from over a thousand paces away.