Becoming Ebony

War Baby

21 War Baby Ma Hawa sent for me because Gbayon swallowed his breath with a piece of candy. It stuck to his three-year-old throat and took his breath down with it. Our neighbor’s son lay still and pale, no fingers or toes or eyelids moving, yet, in the weeds about the house, the wind tossed things about, aside, and neighbors hollered and scrambled to bring the boy back. Someone whispered that they would have a long way to go, to get to Gbayon’s father who had gone to war all these years. In all the whispers, Gbayon’s mother screamed to keep her wailing above the gossip. Gbayon’s father was standing right there, hearing it all; that someone would have to cross a river to get Gbayon’s father. If the birds should hear this, we will have a long night on our hands, I thought, a long night on our hands. It takes a real woman to know who her baby’s father is, and not tell. To stand up to a warrior husband and tell him that the child dying was conceived out of season, out of house, out of the usual way of things, and say to another man, this is your child indeed, your child. This child that was now one relic of our war. When all the real men had left for war, and the women, left behind to watch the rockets fall, to watch the children die of kwashiorkor, of measles, to watch it all go up in smoke, and then in the quiet, right when it was too cold to wait, commandos took the women in the early mornings and evenings, the bloodless part of the civil war, now becoming bloody. On the ground, the dying boy twitched, a toe twitched, a finger moved. It was not good for a war child to leave in such a way, you know. ...