Little Bee

The tourist board that sent the freebies noted that Ibeno Beach was an “adventurous destination.” Actually, at the time we went, it was a cataclysm with borders. To the north there was a malarial jungle and to the west a wide brown river delta. The river was iridescent with oil. It was, I now know, bloated with the corpses of oil workers. To the south was the Atlantic Ocean. On that southern edge I met a girl who was not my magazine’s target reader. Little Bee had fled southeast on bleeding feet from what had once been her village and was shortly to become an oil field. She fled from the men who would kill her because they were paid to, and the children who would kill her because they were told to. I sat at my kitchen table and I imagined her fleeing through the fields and the jungle, as fast as she could, until she arrived at the beach where Andrew and I were being unconventional. That beach was as far as she got.

My missing finger itched, just thinking about it.

When they came in from the garden, I sent Batman to play in his bat cave and I showed Little Bee where the shower was. I found some clothes for her. Later, when Batman was in bed, I made two G&Ts. Little Bee sat and held hers, rattling the ice cubes. I drank mine down like medicine.

“All right,” I said. “I’m ready. I’m ready for you to tell me what happened.”

“You want to know how I survived?”

“Start from the beginning, will you? Tell me how it was when you first reached the sea.”

So she told me how she hid, on the day she arrived at the beach. She had been running for six days, traveling through the fields by night and hiding in jungles and swamps when daybreak came. I turned off the radio in the kitchen, and I sat very quietly while she told me how she holed up in a salient of jungle that grew right down to the sand. She lay there all through the hottest part of the day, watching the waves. She told me she hadn’t seen the sea before, and she didn’t quite believe in it.

In the late afternoon Little Bee’s sister, Nkiruka, came down out of the jungle and found her hiding place. She sat down next to her. They hugged for a long time. They were happy that Nkiruka had managed to follow Little Bee’s trail, but they were scared because it meant that others could do it too. Nkiruka looked into her sister’s eyes and said that they must make up new names for themselves. It was not safe to use their true names, which spoke so loudly of their tribe and of their region. Nkiruka said her name was “Kindness” now. Her younger sister wanted to reply to Kindness, but she could not think of a name for herself.

The two sisters waited. The shadows were deepening. A pair of hornbills came to crack seeds in the trees above their heads. And then—sitting at my kitchen table she said she remembered this so clearly that she could almost reach out and stroke the fuzzy black back of the thing—a bee blew in on the sea breeze and it landed between the two sisters. The bee was small and it touched down on a pale flower—frangipani, she told me, although she said she wasn’t sure about the European name—and then the bee flew off again, without any fuss. She hadn’t noticed the flower before the bee came, but now she saw that the flower was beautiful. She turned to Kindness.

“My name is Little Bee,” she said.

When she heard this name, Kindness smiled. Little Bee told me that her big sister was a very pretty girl. She was the kind of girl the men said could make them forget their troubles. She was the kind of girl the women said was trouble. Little Bee wondered which it was going to be.

The two sisters lay still and quiet till sunset. Then they crept down the sand to wash their feet in the surf. The salt stung in their cuts but they did not cry out. It was sensible of them to keep quiet. The men chasing them might have given up, or they might not. The trouble was, the sisters had seen what had been done to their village. There weren’t supposed to be any survivors to tell the story. The men were hunting down the fleeing women and children and burying their bodies under branches and rocks.

Back undercover, the girls bound each other’s feet in fresh green leaves and they waited for the dawn. It was not cold, but they hadn’t eaten for two days. They shivered. Monkeys screamed under the moon.

I still think about the two sisters there, shivering through the night. While I watch them in my mind, again and again, small pink crabs follow the thin smell of blood to the place where their feet recently stood in the shore break, but they do not find anything dead there yet. The soft pink crabs make hard little clicking noises under the bright white stars. One by one, they dig themselves back into the sand to wait.

I wish my brain did not fill in the frightful details like this. I wish I was a woman who cared deeply about shoes and concealer. I wish I was not the sort of woman who ended up sitting at her kitchen table listening to a refugee girl talking about her awful fear of the dawn.