Evening descended quickly, covering everything in grey.
“Come and eat,” Dogo said in Hausa, one of the languages that I grew up speaking. “Tomorrow, you meet your new master.”
Knowing that he could speak Hausa made me relax enough to sit down and eat the bowl of boiled beans he offered. He laid out a mat for me in the hut and spread out one outside for himself.
That night, my eyelids wouldn’t close shut. Every rustle, every bird cry, every whisper of wind kept me awake. I must have fallen asleep towards the beginning of morning.
“I’ll bathe first and then you’ll go next,” he said, sticking his head in the doorway, and waking me up.
Dogo wasn’t a very smart man. No wonder Wofa Sarpong treated him as he had. Even though the night terrified me, I could easily have fled into its darkness. Now, he was leaving me on my own so he could bathe. I decided that he’d looked at me and seen a small powerless girl. I watched through the door and when he was out of sight, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and stole some of the beans that were sitting in the corner of his hut and tied them in a knot at the top of my cloth. Wofa Sarpong had left Dogo only three farm tools, including a small machete, which I took.
Dogo hummed and splashed water on his body, and I slid out of the hut in the opposite direction, doing what Aminah and I should have done together a long time ago. On the tip of my toes, I stepped only where I could find wet soil. I walked fast and quietly, remaining only on paths where I saw footprints, because that would lead me to people and not into a leopard’s den. I walked and my stomach began to grumble. The thought of how I would prepare the beans hadn’t fully formed when I’d taken them, and now raw beans weren’t going to assuage my hunger. I kept going. I wanted to run as far away from Dogo as I could, then start asking for this place with blue water where Husseina had ended up.
I followed the trail and arrived at a part of the forest where palm trees had clumped together. They didn’t have the mismatched look of the rest of the forest. There had to be people around. I didn’t know if I could trust them, but I could trade them some beans or the machete for food and information and continue on my way. I pushed through the trees and came to an open space, not unlike Wofa Sarpong’s compound. Only, here, there were also huts made of white cloth, not unlike the cloth in Husseina’s dream. The similarity of it pocked the skin on my arms. I had come in with so much force that the people who lived there stopped and looked at me.
There were about five of them, all men, three of them paler than the white beans I’d stolen from Dogo. They looked just like people, with two arms and two legs, but their skin seemed to have no colour. Two men approached, one of them colourless. I couldn’t imagine what they would do to me, so I held up my machete and brandished it. It bought me some time. I could turn around and run back fast to Dogo and say I got lost or I could stay and try to fight them, but they outnumbered me. Or I could reason with them.
They kept their distance, and the colourless man, probably about as old as my father, crouched. He put his hands at his sides and waved me to him. I was well and truly stuck. I had nowhere else to go, so I dropped the machete and pinched my fingers together and brought them to my lips. If they could feed me, I would find the energy to outsmart them. The colourless man seemed to have understood me and barked out something to the other man he’d come with. He wore a hat that looked like the inspector’s at Wofa Sarpong’s. He came and took me by the hand, and I let him. His palms were soft and made me think of a gecko’s underbelly. Trust is a strange animal. I let the weight of my hands sink into his. I trusted him.
He took me to the front of a cloth hut and sat me on a mat. The hut was connected to the earth with strings and looked as if a small gust of wind could blow it over. A boy brought two calabashes—one with fingers of boiled green plantains, the other with water. I bit into the plantain, barely chewing before I swallowed. My colourless friend spoke, and a man who looked like me translated in Wofa Sarpong’s language.
“What do you call yourself?”
“Hassana,” I said, not even thinking that saying so could be used to return me to Dogo or Wofa Sarpong.
“Where are you going?”
What could I tell him? I didn’t have the word for the colour blue. I could just say the water.
The two men exchanged words, and the interpreter tried again.
“Where’s your family?”
I shook my head. I didn’t feel like talking. I looked at the plantain and returned to chewing. The plantain was mostly tasteless but with a slight sweetness that made me enjoy it.
All around the village, people had come out of their huts like ants before heavy rainfall. Women and children stared at me as if I had fallen from the sky. I decided to just eat my plantain. After that I’d thank them and get going. A woman brought me another bowl. In it was nkotomire stew, the green cocoyam leaf sauce that Wofa Sarpong’s wives often cooked. I only had half a finger of plantain left, so I broke it and dipped my fingers deep in the rich green sauce and slurped my fingers. I heard giggling. Children younger than me approached and were pointing at me and laughing. I bared my teeth at them and they screamed and ran to their mothers. I don’t know why I did that. I dug my fingers into the nkotomire and tasted the fresh palm oil that had been used to fry the sauce, the onions that had turned golden brown, the leafiness of the nkotomire and the sharp saltiness of the dried tilapia.
“She’s rude,” I heard one of the mothers say and suck her teeth.
Right then, I decided to bury in my chest the fact that I could understand them. I would play dumb and use that to get fed. When I understood where I was and where I needed to go, I would escape.
I licked my fingers clean of palm oil and stew and out of nowhere a loud round burp escaped from my throat. Suddenly it hit me: I had enjoyed the meal. Either the food was well flavoured, unlike Wofa Sarpong’s food, or I had begun to taste again. I stood up with the two calabashes. The colourless men had gathered by a wheel-like object that looked like the one on Wofa Sarpong’s cart. Everything was strange here—the houses, the colour of the people—but I grew brave. I went to the woman who had brought over the stew and palmed my right hand in my left and lowered my knee to the ground, to show her I was grateful.
“It’s all right,” said the woman, taking the calabashes and waving me away.
The older colourless man came back and parted the door to his cloth hut. He put his hands together and pressed them against his cheek and closed his eyes. Sleep, he was suggesting. The last thing I wanted to do was sleep, but I did as he said and went in and lowered myself on to the mat. I hadn’t taken my machete, I realized. Before I could protest, sleep fell on me and engulfed me with its warm dark fur.
We are at the waterhole, a gaggle of girls. She sits on the banks and dips her toes into the water. I duck into the water and come out, waving out to her at the shore. Come, I beckon. She shakes her shoulders up and down. Come, I insist. She refuses. We dance that way, until I wade to her and pull her into the water. At first her feet touch the pond’s bed, then I drag her in deeper. She falls and flails about, struggling to breathe. She is sucked into the water and disappears.
Heavy shapes hovering over me shook me awake. I had been dreaming about Husseina, as often happened, but it wasn’t her dream. Experiencing her dreams took something I hadn’t yet put my finger on. I pulled myself out of my sleepy state and realized the face closest to mine was Dogo’s. I almost screamed. He covered my mouth, dragged me outside the hut.