- I can see her walking away from me—white dress clinging on hips swaying, twist of torso in diagonal folds, thighs toning to the incline of steep jagged road, carrying wedding cake atop her head. She is flanked by other brown skinned women climbing hills with cake, one hand occasionally rising to steady sweet cargo. I wish I knew her face. That I could run to catch her, look longingly up into her gentleness, and stride to nuptials hand-in-hand.
- From a far-off distance—like drone camera hovering—I can see them beyond the crowd of villagers’ (men, women and children): pairs and pairs and pairs in white cotton garments (and approximations of white), men and women matched for communal ceremony. They’ve been called by missionary—trained in colonial respectability—to make their unions legitimate/legal/church-sanctioned, as if household, children, and skin bonds were not holy legitimacy enough. This, nonetheless, is a pleasant memory of grandeur and spectacle amid so much glorious mundanity.
- Watching as the uncle who stole my mothers’ inheritance—the one they call Cahoooon—passes on horseback, while I march tiny legs up and down those hills for miles to church. They call him Cahoooon, and credit him with our grace and regality.
- I vaguely remember the gleam of your smooth black skin the day Aunty Becky stood by your side and declared, “I like this one. She should come stay with me.” The packing of a bag the next day. The trek along those steep hills. The disappearing of you into her barren home, a home her own children had long ago abandoned. I weep for the Bea still locked there. For the Bea liberated by the long-locked S’Edna that afternoon, too soon before she died and left you. I long for the mothering denied you. I love you now the way S’Edna should have loved you then. The way her mother should have loved her. You’ve lived long enough so I could love them with a mother’s love. Thank you for staying.
- Remember, brother, when you were but raisin-wrinkled-nugget, before I was born, and our uncle, the excruciatingly pretty one, called you ugly? Remember the day she left you in the bassinet just outside the front door while she ran to buy milk or coconut cake in the shop across the street. Thank God for absent predators, and the nosy neighbor, or friend, who scolded our mother for her stupidity. I wish, for you, the handsome toddler, the backstabbed teenager, she had stayed.
- Remember, mother, the afternoon the maggots invaded. Did that really happen? First fly, then maggots, then infestation. Shooing flies from lunch and dinner. Those were the same days you went missing. Steady gait replaced with shuffling walk to stumbling dance on the edge of face fall. Mumbling mouth moves, with no air to buoy words. I longed for the comfort of darling, and babe, and joke, and round warmth of giggle in your throat. The flies have now disappeared as you had, and I can hear your return. Through phone signal, your warm, round giggles tickle my ear. How long before you leave again?
on memories that are and are not mine
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