Little Bee

I was thinking, if the head of the United Nations telephoned one morning and said, Greetings, Little Bee, to you falls the great honor of designing a national flag for all the world’s refugees, then the flag I would make would be gray. You would not need any particular fabric to make it. I would say that the flag could be any shape and it could be made with anything you had. A worn-out old brassiere, for example, that has been washed so many times it has become gray. You could fly it on the end of a broom handle, if you did not have a flagpole. Although if you did have a spare flagpole, for example in that line of tall white flagpoles outside the United Nations building in New York City, then I think that old gray brassiere would make a fine spectacle, flying in the long colorful line of flags. I would fly it between the Stars and Stripes and the big red Chinese flag. That would be a good trick. Thinking about this, I made myself laugh.

“What de hell you laughin at, Bug?”

“I was thinking about the color gray.”

Yevette frowned.

“Don’t yu go crazy too please, Bug,” she said.

I lay back on the bed and I looked up to the ceiling, but all that was there were those long chains dangling down. I thought, I could hang myself by the neck from those, no problem.

In the afternoon the farmer’s wife came. She brought food. There was bread and cheese in a basket, and a sharp knife to cut the bread with. I thought, I can cut open my veins with that knife, if the men come. The farmer’s wife was a kind woman. I asked her why was she doing this good thing for us. She said it was because we were all human beings. I said, Excuse me miss but I do not think Yevette is a human being. I think she is another species with a louder mouth. Yevette and the farmer’s wife started laughing then, and we talked for a little while about where we had all come from and where we were going to. She told me the direction to go to Kingston-upon-Thames, but she also told me that I shouldn’t. You don’t want to go to the suburbs, dear, she said. Neither fish nor flesh, the suburbs. Unnatural places, full of unnatural people. I laughed. I told her, Maybe I will fit right in.

The farmer’s wife was surprised when we asked for five plates instead of four, but she brought them anyway. We divided the food into five portions, and we gave the biggest helping to the daughter of the woman with no name, because she was still growing.

That night I dreamed about my village before the men came. There was a swing that the boys had made. It was the old tire of a car, and the boys had tied ropes around it and suspended it from the high branch of a tree. This was a big old limba tree and it grew a little way apart from our homes, near to the schoolhouse. Even before I was big enough to go on the swing, my mother would sit me down in the dark red dust by the trunk of the limba so I could watch the big children swinging. I loved to listen to them laughing and singing. Two, three, four children at once, all ways up, with legs and arms and heads all tangled up and dragging in the red scrape of dust at the lowest point of the swing. Aie! Ouch! Get off me in the name of god! Do not push! There was always a lot of chatter and joking around the swing, and up above my head in the branches of the limba tree there were grumpy hornbills that shouted back at us. Nkiruka would get down from the swing sometimes and pick me up in her arms and give me little pieces of soft uncooked dough to squeeze between my chubby fingers.

Everything was happiness and singing when I was a little girl. There was plenty of time for it. We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. I sat in between the roots of my limba tree and I laughed while I watched Nkiruka swinging back and fro, back and fro. The tether of the swing was very long, so it took a long time for her to travel from one end of its swing to the other. It never looked like it was in a rush, that swing. I used to watch it all day long and I never realized I was watching a pendulum counting down the last seasons of peace in my village.

In my dream I watched that tire swinging back and fro, back and fro, in that village we did not yet know was built on an oil field and would soon be fought over by men in a crazy hurry to drill down into the oil. This is the trouble with all happiness—all of it is built on top of something that men want.