“You staying here for the Ghost Homecoming or going to visit family?” the old man asks.
“We stay here in Strong Medicine City,” Grandmother says. “My co-wife, our husband, our sixteen children – their spirits return to this compound for Homecoming.” The old man lowers his plate, and Grandmother senses the manufacturing of an appropriate condolence.
“We’re doing our Telling tonight,” she says. “If you’ve done yours, we won’t mind if you go ahead and sleep, but if you haven’t, you’re welcome to join us.” The old man looks at his wife.
“We would be honored to join your Telling,” he says.
“Good,” my grandmother replies. “Yaa, go and get some blankets. I’ll pour our guests some tea.”
The Origin Telling may be shared only once a year, during the week that precedes the night of the Ghost Homecoming. Before we call the dead back to earth, we acknowledge that there was an earth before us, and we remember the time of the first people – folk who might have found themselves vulnerable to or willing to engage in transformation but who never died. I extend a woven blanket the grim turquoise and blacksmith’s orange of sunset to the old couple before kneeling on the floor beside Grandmother and wrapping us up. Grandmother begins to speak, and the old couple and I close our eyes. You listen to a story, but you dream a Telling. It’s not enough just to hear it – as with a hymn, you must fit it to your soul’s own understanding.
…It was still upon them: the memory of being dust. A moment ago, they had been else: earth and then earth quickening, earth and then earth breathing. They rose from the ground a marvel of fingerprint and footprint, swallowing and blinking, but they could still recall before – their dusthood. They were the First Man and the First Woman, then, before summer had come twice to establish itself as a season, the First Father and the First Mother…
…Every day the First Father went hunting with his spear, every day, until he was a Grandfather and a Great-grandfather and a Great-great-grandfather. Then, one evening, when he was running after a stag, the creature stopped and turned and stared at him.
“We are no longer enough to feed all of you,” the stag said…
…That evening, the First Grandfather repeated the stag’s words to the First Grandmother. She looked down at her hands; then she looked up at him.
“No,” he told her. But she didn’t lower or change her gaze…
…That night, they lay down beside each other, but when morning came, the First Grandmother was gone. The First Grandfather whirled outside searching for her until he saw her, far, far away, at the other end of the island. She stood tall, her feet flat on the ground, her arms outstretched.
“Stay,” he called to her. “Stay, and be human with me.”
But she said, “I’m not changing. I am life and the giving of life. From now on our daughters will have wombs within them and within the earth. I will become plants, and our daughters and granddaughters will tend me. They will bring life, birthing it from themselves and raising crops from the earth and drawing water from the rivers. We will care for each other and go on.”
Dust to flesh, now wood. That was all. And everything that grows from the earth – vegetable and fungi, tree and vine, bush and grass – those are beings that came after that moment, from her.
Grandmother’s arms remain outstretched like tree branches after she finishes the story of the Forest Grandmother. Her head is thrown back, and her face, animated by neither wariness nor adoration, looks hardly human. She could be either woman or wood, and I resist an urge to call her back to me from what seems an impending metamorphosis. Finally, she lowers her arms and looks at me. She smiles.
“You did it, little girl. You got us through the night.” She turns to the old couple who are both still awake and raises her empty cup. “This tea came from my granddaughter’s first hybrid. She bred it from my co-wife’s plant Mbuya’s Flower.”
The old woman leans towards Grandmother and looks at her. She takes the cup from Grandmother’s hand and squeezes her emptied fingers. She glances back at her husband.
“You should have told us you were Mbuya’s family — we would have stayed in another home. The week leading up to the Ghost Homecoming must be almost more than you can bear… My husband and I would have understood if you had turned us away – we lost a daughter and a son in the Massacre.”
Grandmother pulls her hand away. The old couple looks at each other and stands, and Grandmother goes to open a gold urn that stands by my other grandmother’s picture.
“Here,” she says, offering them a handful of dried original Mbuya’s Flowers faded to the blue of canine eyes. “Chewed, these should keep you on your feet until you get to your daughter’s.”
The old man shoulders their bags, while the old woman pours the flowers into a pocket of her robe with grave care as though they were gunpowder or stardust.
“Thank you,” they tell her. The old woman grasps my hand with discrete urgency. “You look out for your grandmother, hear?”
I nod as Grandmother looks on. She appears to be watching after the old people as they leave our compound, but she’s not. She’s vigilantly inspecting the morning.
This is so fluid and seamless…and reads almost like a song. Wow.
‘Brewed lightly, it’s the color of twilight; the longer you steep it, the more it approaches dusk.’
‘The photograph is sepia. Loss seems intrinsic to sepia to me. I imagine if you looked at a sepia photograph of someone still living, it would seem marked by the past perfect tense.’
‘There is a riddle to photographs. Some make their subjects look as though they are caught behind glass, inaccessible and silenced.’
Those lines are really, really beautiful and vivid.
Well done. I really enjoyed reading this.
D’accord! This is writing at its most rarified. Very exquisite level of delivery and a mastery in the rendering.