“Nobody loves him,” said a sharp-eyed young woman who was sitting opposite Granger with her wrapper pulled down to her waist and a baby at her right breast, which she now shifted, applying the child to the left. She had a handsome, intelligent face and was at least a decade younger than me, but her eyes had that same look of experience I’d begun to see in certain old college friends during long, awkward afternoons visiting with their dull babies and duller husbands. Some girlish layer of illusion gone.
“All these young women,” she said, lowering her voice, taking a hand from underneath her baby’s head and waving it dismissively at the crowd. “But where are the men? Boys, yes—but young men? No. Nobody here loves him or what he has done here. Everybody who can leaves. Back way, back way, back way, back way.” As she spoke she pointed to some boys dancing near us, on the verge of adolescence, picking them out as if she had the power to disappear them herself. She sucked her teeth, exactly as my mother would. “Believe me, I’d go too if I could!”
Granger, who I’m sure, like me, had assumed this woman did not speak English—or at least could not follow his and Judy’s variations on it—nodded now to every word she said, almost before she said it. Everyone else in earshot—Lamin, Hawa, some of the young teachers from our school, others I didn’t know—murmured and whistled, but without adding anything else. The handsome young woman pulled up straight in her seat, acknowledging herself as someone suddenly invested with the power of the group.
“If they loved him,” she said, not whispering at all now, but neither, I noticed, ever using his proper name, “wouldn’t they be here, with us, instead of throwing their life away in the water?” She looked down and readjusted her nipple and I wondered if “they,” in her case, was not an abstraction, but had a name, a voice, a relation to the hungry baby in her arms.
“Back way is craziness,” whispered Hawa.
“Every country’s got its struggle,” said Granger—I heard an inverted echo of what Hawa had told me that morning—“Serious struggles in America. For our people, black people. That’s why it does our soul good to be here, with you.” He spoke slowly, with deliberation, and touched his soul, which turned out to be dead center between his pectorals. He looked like he might cry. It was my instinct to turn away, to give him his privacy, but Hawa stared into his face and, taking his hand, said, “See how Granger really feels us”—he squeezed her hand back—“not just with his brain, but with his heart!” A not so subtle rebuke intended for me. The fierce young lady nodded, we waited for more, it seemed only she could bring a final meaning to the episode, but her baby had finished feeding and her speech was done. She pulled up her yellow wrapper and stood to burp him.
“It is an amazing thing to have our sister Aimee here with us,” said one of Hawa’s friends, a lively young woman called Esther, who I’d noticed disliked any hint of silence. “Her name is known all over the world! But she is one of us now. We will have to give her a village name.”
“Yes,” I said. I was watching the woman in the yellow wrapper who had spoken. Now she was wandering toward the dancing, her back so straight. I wanted to follow her and talk some more.
“Is she here now? Our sister Aimee?”
“What? Oh, no . . . I think she had to go and do some interviews or something.”
“Oh, it is amazing. She knows Jay-Z, she knows Rihanna and Beyoncé.”
“Yes.”
“And she knows Michael Jackson?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she is Illuminati, too? Or she just is acquaintances with Illuminati?”
I could still make out the woman in yellow, distinctive among so many others, until she passed behind a tree and the toilet block and I couldn’t find her again.
“I wouldn’t . . . Honestly, Esther, I don’t think any of that stuff is real.”
“Oh, well,” said Esther equably, as if she’d said she liked chocolate and I’d said I didn’t. “Here for us it is real, because there is a lot of power there for sure. We hear a lot about this.”
“It is real,” confirmed Hawa, “but on this internet, believe me, you can’t trust everything! For example, my cousin showed me photos of this white man, in America, he was as big as four men, so fat! I said, ‘Are you so foolish, this is not a real photograph, come on! It’s not possible, no one could be like this.’ These kids are crazy. They believe everything they see.”
? ? ?
By the time we made our way back to the compound it was black outside, starlit. I linked arms with Lamin and Hawa and tried teasing them a little.
“No, no, no, even although I call her Little Wife,” protested Lamin, “and she calls me Mr. Husband, it is the truth that we are just age mates.”
“Flirt, flirt, flirt,” said Hawa, flirting, “and that’s it!”
“And that’s it?” I asked, kicking the door wide with my foot.
“That is certainly it,” said Lamin.
In the compound many of the younger children were still awake and ran to Hawa, delighted, as she was delighted to receive them. I shook hands with all four grandmothers, which always had to be done as if it were the first time, and each woman leaned in to try to tell me something important—or, more accurately, did tell me something important, which I happened not to understand—and then, when words failed, as they always did, pulled me slightly by my wrapper toward the far end of the porch.
“Oh!” said Hawa, walking over with a nephew in her arms, “but there is my brother!”
He was a half-brother in fact and did not look much like Hawa to me, was not beautiful like her and had none of her flair. He had a kind, serious face, which was round like hers but double-chinned with it, a smart pair of glasses and an utterly neutral way of dressing that told me, before he did, that he must have spent time in America. He was standing on the verandah, drinking a large mug of Lipton’s, his elbows resting on the lip of the concrete wall. I came round the pillar to shake hands with him. He took my hand warmly but with his head drawn back, and a half-smirk, as if bracketing the gesture in irony. It reminded me of someone—my mother.
“And you’re staying here in the compound, I see,” he said, and nodded at the quiet industry all round us, the shrieking nephew in Hawa’s arms, whom she now released to the yard. “But how does rural village life treat you? You have to first habituate yourself to the circumstances to appreciate it fully, I think.”
Instead of answering him I asked him where he had learned his perfect English. He smiled formally but his eyes hardened briefly behind his glasses.
“Here. This is an English-speaking country.”
Hawa, unsure what to do with this awkwardness, giggled into her hand.
“I’m enjoying it very much,” I said, blushing. “Hawa has been very kind.”
“You like the food?”
“It’s really delicious.”
“It’s simple.” He patted his well-rounded belly and handed his empty bowl to a passing girl. “But sometimes the simple is more flavorsome than the complicated.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“So: in conclusion, everything is good?”
“Everything is good.”
“It takes a while to acclimatize to this rural village life, as I say. Even for me, it takes a minute, and I was born here.”
Somebody now passed me a bowl of food, though I had already eaten, but as I felt that everything I did in front of Hawa’s brother was being presented as a kind of test I took it.