Ancestor Stones Read Online Free

on horseback from Futa Djallon, dreaming of an empire that stretched from the desert to the sea. They never reached the sea. The horses shied and started. Their legs buckled and they toppled over. After a while the people realised they were stranded. They couldn’t return to their homeland, so instead they settled where they found themselves. They were rice eaters. The grains they had brought with them they planted. In time their empire vanished, and another arose.
    Rofathane, my father told me, had another meaning: oasis. Our new home was an oasis in the forest.
    My mother told us our father was to become a coffee grower. She said this while she showed me how to grind the beans we had brought with us to make coffee for my grandmother. The beans were really for planting in rows on land that was being burned and brushed by the people from the houses in the clearing. These people had been given to our father by the
obai
, because he had helped him win the chieftaincy elections. And so they came to work by day, sometimes sleeping overnight, men and women side by side under thatched canopies. As the days passed the giant iroko trees crashed down one by one, great stumps wrenched out of the earth like a giant’s teeth. The land was burned and in the morning, when the fires had died down, I went out to look. I imagined the red earth beneath the blackened charcoal, as tender and new as the skin under the scabs of dried blood I picked at on my knee.
    Soon after we arrived, other people followed: a blacksmith, a carpenter, a herbalist, extra hands to plant the beans we had brought, fingers to pluck the ones that would grow. A big man casts a long shadow and many people build their lives in the shade.
    Until the first harvest arrived my mother allowed nobody but
karabom
to drink the dark liquid made from the beans. It became my job to make her coffee, to grind the beans first with a pestle and mortar, mix the powder with some of the water which bubbled all day on top of the three-stone fire at the back of the house. I poured the liquid into a small bowl and sweetened it with honey. Then I would carry her coffee to her, to the place where she liked to sit at the front of her daughter’s new house.
    The house had the best position in the whole village: at a right angle to my father’s house, next to the mosque and within earshot of the people who gathered to exchange news after prayers. From the verandah she could watch the comings and goings at the meeting house, too. Together she and I sat and waited for the grounds to settle.
    At those times, in the very early morning, she told me thingsnobody else knew. These weren’t the stories I heard her tell to the other women at the back of the house where they sat on stools in the evenings, their profiles warmed by the yellow light from the palm oil lamps. I remember the sound of their laughter: I thought of it as back-of-house laughter, different from the submerged giggles and half-smiles hidden behind hands at the front of the house.
    Once I laughed with them. My grandmother told a story — something about a woman who began to cook for another man while her husband was away. When she had finished, there followed a moment of silence. Next to her, my father’s third wife snorted and laughed, and the laughter passed from woman to woman like an improvised melody. Though I didn’t understand the story, I opened my mouth wide and laughed along with them. The music stopped. Somebody sucked her teeth. My
karabom
aimed a piece of charcoal at me and it hit me just above the eyebrow.
    You, I remember how you talked to your children. You asked them: ‘Do you want this or that?’ ‘Coca-cola or Fanta?’ ‘Front seat or back?’ You drove them around in a big four-wheel as though they were born with no legs. You let them push away the food everybody else was eating and you asked the cooks: ‘What else is there in the kitchen?’ And I heard the