Little Bee

“No! Why would we have a proverb with wolves in it? We have two hundred proverbs about monkeys, three hundred about cassava. We talk about what we know. But I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country. Then people will nod their heads and look very serious.”

Sarah laughed again.

“That is a good trick,” she said. “Isn’t that what you say, Bee?”

I smiled. Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a bee. And when they run out of milk, all God’s creatures must go to the shop.

Sarah looked across at me from the driving seat.

“Bless you for understanding,” she said.

I understood, but Sarah’s happiness and Sarah’s future are more things I would have to explain to the girls from back home.

A country’s future is found in its natural resources. It is my country’s biggest export. It leaves so quickly through our seaports, the girls from my village could never even see it and they could not know what it looked like. Actually the future looks like gasoline. I discovered this when I was reading the newspapers in the detention center, and finally I made sense of what had happened to me back home. What had happened was, the oil companies had discovered a huge reserve of the future underneath my village. To be precise what they discovered was crude oil, which is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

The men came while we were preparing the evening meal, while the blue wood smoke mixed with the thick steam of the cassava pots in the golden evening sun. It happened so quickly that the women had to grab us children and run with us into the jungle. We hid there while we listened to the screams of the men who stayed behind to fight.

On the dashboard of Sarah’s car, a light went on.

“Oh,” she said. “We need petrol.”

Water sprayed up off the rainy road. Sarah turned the car into a service station. We got out. There were no other cars. I listened to the rain beating down on the canopy above the gasoline pumps. Sarah looked at me as she held the gasoline hose.

“Do you still want to stay?” she said.

I nodded.

The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden. I still do not know what gasoline truly looks like. If it looks the way it smells on a rainy morning, then I suppose it must flash like the most brilliant happiness, so intense that you would go blind or crazy if you even looked at it. Maybe that is why they do not let us see gasoline.

When the filling was finished, Sarah went inside the service-station shop to pay. She came out with a large plastic bottle of milk, and we drove back to the house. It was still only six thirty in the morning.

Sarah closed the front door behind us and she yawned.

“Charlie won’t be up for an hour at least,” she said. “I think I might go back to bed.”

I nodded. Sarah smiled. On her face was a look of relief. I realized: this is what you can do for her, Little Bee. You can understand.

I went into the kitchen and I filled the kettle to make myself a drink of tea.

Understanding. That would have been a good name for my village, even before the men came to burn our huts and drill for oil. It would have been a good name for the clearing around the limba tree where we children swung on that bald old car tire, and bounced on the seats of my father’s broken Peugeot and my uncle’s broken Mercedes, with the springs poking out from them, and where we chanted church songs from a hymnbook with the covers missing and the pages held together with tape. We knew what we had: we had nothing. Your world and our world had come to this understanding. Even the missionaries had boarded up their mission. They left us with the holy books that were not worth the expense of shipping back to your country. In our village our only Bible had all of its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? We understood that this was the end of the story.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one. From the rest of the world all we knew was from that one old movie. About a man who was in a great hurry, sometimes in jet planes and sometimes on motorbikes and sometimes upside down.