Becoming Ebony

Wandering Child

51 Wandering Child The child that wanders will not know her mother’s grave. —Grebo proverb In my father’s house it is payday, just before Christmas, so the house bubbles full of unwelcome guests— It is so long ago now—twenty years? Maybe, thirty. There is beer, hot-pepper-soup and laughter. Pay day, my father is making pay-day talk. In the kitchen, my father’s wife, Ma Nmano, is cooking goat meat soup with crushed tomatoes in a huge pot; or we children are cooking the soup while Ma sits there like the traffic police, pointing to this or that as we rush around to give her what she needs. Eight years ago at the airport, it is my own mother standing there, wiping tears not just from the war. She wipes one drop and then another while the plane groans and waits so my family and I can flee home. Ma Nmano is here too, wailing not just for my departure, but also for TK, my foster brother. TK who had promised her a nice bronze coffin, a long, white gown to wear so when she met God, he’d know she was Hne Nmano, Sagba, and nothing less. TK and I would hold a great wake-keeping, lots of food and lots of talk . . . for our childless mother, and I’d sit there on The Mat with my hair open, tearful, wailing, a red mourning band around my head. All the Grebo people would line up to shake my hand, long faces; the women would sit close to me, arms around my shoulders. Then on funeral day, 52 the Grebo band would arrive, playing, “Na Nyebioh, Nyankeh Hne, Na Nyebioh.” Then we’d dance the way she would dance during those New Year’s Day mornings when the bands came with the new year to wake us. New Year’s Day, and we children ran out to the front and rocked to Grebo rhythms. And all the last minute fuss in the kitchen, whether to cook palm butter in this huge pot or potato greens in that. The women arguing among themselves over how much pepper the wailing women would want, and the kola nut bowl there in the middle of it all; people coming in, taking a bite of kola nut and a pinch of hot spicy pepper. The beer and gin and soft drinks passed around while TK and my brother, Toh, ran up and down, checking on the grave site, or whether there was enough for everyone to eat and drink. Grandchildren she never really had, running around playing Nafoot, mimicking the wailing women on The Mat, while the neighborhood filled with hundreds of wanted and unwanted mourners. Family from all over would come back home, sleeping everywhere in the house because it was time to send Ma off. Instead, one day rebels came for TK, shot him right there, my father and Ma, pleading . . . Here I am, peeling eggplant. My childhood follows me around where I slice one eggplant after the other, to fry and steam cook. I will cook make-believe Liberian Torgborgee. They say Africans want to have Africa in America, 53 pounding fufu to swallow, hunting for cow’s feet in Chicago, Detroit, or New York. A hundred miles in search of palm oil, gari, palm butter, sweet potato leaves. Every alien wants to find home in other people’s country. After I fled the war, Ma died. One month, my father waited for everyone who couldn’t come to put The Mat down. ...