“Oh-oh,” cried Hawa, laughing at the sight of me, bedraggled, and now carrying in my arms a large suitcase that refused to roll through the sludge. “Look what the rain brings!”
I had not expected to stay with Hawa again, hadn’t warned her, but neither she nor anybody else in the compound seemed very surprised by my arrival, and though I hadn’t been a particularly successful or well-loved house guest the first time round, I was welcomed like family. I shook hands with the various grandmothers, and we hugged, Hawa and I, and said how much we’d missed each other. I explained that on this trip there was only Fernando and me—Aimee was recording in New York—and that we were here to observe in further detail what was being done in the old school and what might be improved in the new one. I was invited to join Hawa and her visitors in the small living room, dimly lit with white solar, more keenly illuminated by the screens of each girl’s phone. We smiled at each other, the girls, Hawa, me. My mother’s and father’s health were politely asked after—it was again considered astonishing that I had no siblings—and then Aimee’s and her children’s health were asked after, and Carrapichano’s and Judy’s, but none more solicitously than Granger’s. Granger’s health was what they were really interested in, for Granger had been the real hit of the first visit, far more than Aimee or any of the rest of us. We were curiosities—he was loved. Granger knew all the cheesy R&B tracks that Hawa adored, Aimee disdained and I’d never heard of, he wore the kinds of sneakers she most admired, and during a celebratory drum circle, put on by the mothers at the school, without hesitation had entered the ring, brushed his shoulders, body-popped, vogued and performed the moonwalk, while I cringed in my seat and busied myself taking pictures. “That Granger!” said Hawa now, shaking her head happily at the thrilling memory of Granger, compared to the dull reality of me. “Such a crazy dancer! All the boys were saying: ‘Are these the new moves?’ And remember, your Aimee said to us: ‘No, these are the old ones!’ You remember? But he’s not with you this time? It’s a shame. Oh, Granger is such a fun guy!” The young women in the room laughed and shook their heads and sighed, and then a silence fell again, and it began to dawn on me that I had interrupted a get-together, a gossipy good time, which now, after a minute of awkward silence, resumed in Wolof. Not wanting to go to the complete darkness of the bedroom, I sat back in the sofa, let the talk wash over me and my clothes air-dry on my body. Next to me Hawa held court, two hours’ worth of stories which—from what I could tell—ranged from the hilarious to the mournful to the righteously offended but never stretched as far as anger. Laughter and sighs were my guide, and the photos from her phone which she flashed in the middle of certain anecdotes and cursorily explained in English if I made a point of asking. I gathered she had a love problem—a young policeman in Banjul whom she rarely saw—and a big plan, already anticipated, to go to the beach when the rains ended, for a family gathering, to which the policeman would be invited. She showed me the picture from this event the previous year: a panoramic shot that took in at least a hundred people. I spotted her in the front row and noticed the absence of scarf, instead she had a silky weave on her head, parted in the center and falling to her shoulders.
“Different hair,” I said, and Hawa laughed, put her hands to her hijab and removed it, revealing four inches of her own hair twisted into little dreads.
“But it grows so slow, oh!”