Becoming Ebony

In the Beginning

17 In the Beginning In the beginning, there were women, and all things, creeping and non-creeping, were good. That was before time could tell daylight from night. When men could speak women’s tongues; before the sea turned blue and took up rolling, foaming, like a big glass of fresh palm wine. Before oceans learned to rise and fall, before rivers were first named rivers. Before they named the Cavalla River, Cavalla, after the fish or the fish after the town, or the town after the river. When Cape Palmas, where I come from, became Cape Palmas; before there was even a cape or palm trees. Before Cape Palmas began to give birth to palm trees that sprouted with fat bottoms and began to rise, and the coconut learned to be sister to the nut palm, and the nut palm to the bamboo palm, the bamboo palm to the thatch; or when their grandfather made them blood relations or straw relations or bamboo relations or cabbage relations or long, thin leaves relations, or whatever it is that makes them seem identical twins. But bamboo knows how to prick my finger when I touch it with an angry heart; the palm tree will prick lightly, while the coconut stands there, tall. Coconut breasts hanging from its chest, or head, or whatever. The way a bamboo grove used to prick 18 our toes when Mudi and I wandered under its swampy territory. That was before the time when women took upon themselves to birth babies, even though men knew how to, or before men went around boasting of having this many children and this many sons upon their mere fingers. Iyeeh says men really birthed babies then, and women boasted of being the fathers of babies then, and the children ran for their fathers like they do today for their mothers when a father calls them for whipping with a cane. That was long before the car road bulldozed the giant walnut, the oak, chopping up the towns and the forests into roads, and rubber trees sprang up where the forests were, and the coffee became a tree, becoming first cousin to the cocoa, and the palm nuts went to the city to be sold for coins. We girls grew wings like pepper birds—no, no, like eagles, or like jet planes, and could fly or hop on a truck to the city where streetlights cannot tell the villager from the city dweller; where a man cannot tell his wife from his lover; his inside children from his outside children; where all have lost their hearts to the bars and the dangling lights, and people fight on street corners; and after all that, I and all the girls of the world learned to run wild too, like wild flowers—no, no, wild, like men. All the women of the world becoming just men. ...