Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna

they do not really mean, and other words to say the things they do. And you cannot shout at them: ‘what do you mean? Say what you mean to say!’ Because then they look at you as though you had let the sun get to your head. As though you were a demented dog jumping up to bark at phantoms. You have to force yourself to pretend that what is really there isn’t there at all. You go on with your life.
    I heard it from Idrissa first. Idrissa heard it from Finda. I found her some hours later. She was removing the laundry from the bamboo poles where it hung to dry, folding each item neatly and adding it to the pile on her head. She told me not to worry myself about it. It was just foolish talk by superstitious folk.
    And I believed her. Just words. I didn’t know then the damage words can do. You can’t feel them, or see them. Someone opens their mouth to speak. The words are there. And then they’re gone. Except of course they’re not, now they’re inside the other person’s head, sticking to their brain. I should have remembered the line from the song my mother sang: words never die.
    I know who stirred up the villagers’ imaginings. My father was a Muslim. He disdained such talk. Though you would be mistaken if you thought that meant he did not believe. And even I, in my time I’ve seen some things that could not be explained. The
pothos
brought in laws against it, and that served to convince people all the more. For who would go to the bother of outlawing something that did not exist? And Pa Yamba, I had seen his box covered in charms and
sassa
in his back room where I sneaked in once with the other children. He still divined. Only now he lit incense, opened a Koran and chanted words in Arabic to summon the Djinna Musa.
    The ants. And the chickens all the way across the other side of the village. And people asked how the ants got to be right in front of her window like that. All over the almond tree that had been my father’s gift. And what about her sickness? Wasn’t that whathappened when you double-crossed the spirit that gave you your good luck? Or else you played at something you didn’t understand? Wasn’t she a Madingo? And he, who had younger wives, still so besotted with her for all that time. Not beautiful. Not so clever. Not even from a ruling family. What did she possess to make him want her? Nothing. She was only a woman. The whispers, the truth, the lies, all muddled up until everything became an accusation, in their mouths even the simplest fact sounded like a crime.
    They never stopped to ask about their own envy and their own jealousy. And what about a wrinkled old man without a wife who coveted a woman who belonged to his patron? And who used to be powerful but wasn’t any more. What about that? I was too young to ask the questions myself or I would have shouted out loud at them all.
    I was eating a pear. I remember the taste of it. The pear was overripe, oozing juice and yet sucking the saliva out of my mouth at the same time. It tasted faintly of medicine. I was sitting on the wall outside our house. Pa Yamba had been in my mother’s room for a long time. I knew my mother was dying because I had seen Saffie, the youngest of my father’s wives, come back from the forest carrying a basket full of the red fruits that grow on the Christmas bush. The fruit was inedible, though birds loved it. For humans they had only one use. When you dropped the fruits in water and left them there for a while they turned the water black and we used them for dyeing things. For dyeing our garments after a death.
    I was there when Pa Yamba came out of my mother’s room. I saw the line of his lips, pressed together, not quite straight, a small upward curve of satisfaction. And the glow that shone out of those stagnant eyes. And the renewed sureness of his step, the impact of his heel on the dirt. The confidence of power regained. I knew just by looking at him