Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna Page A

that day that he had used my mother for his own ends.
    There are some things I learned early on. When I was a child, even before I realised I had to make my own luck, one thing I worked out for myself was never to let people discover the thingsyou knew. Keep them to yourself, because then you had the power and they did not. People will always talk loosely; they forget who is listening. In the same way I learned you must never ask a question. Because then people will guess there is something you wish to know. Keep quiet. And listen.
    They said she confessed before she died.
    And there was more.
    So much more.
    Ya Isatta’s unborn children. My mother had eaten them. And it was she who had been the cause of the flu that left all our chickens lying lifeless in the dust one morning. Even lime and pepper would not revive them. The small whirlwind that spoiled the rows of trees grown from the new kind of coffee bean — that was caused by her dabbling. Pa Yamba had extracted all of these things from her before she died.
    Ya Isatta said they should bring back the red water. That was the way, a long time ago, they used to discover who was up to no good. By making them drink it and the ones who proved to be witches died and that was that. And she demanded to know who would compensate her for her lost children. She said it before she saw me standing there. Afterwards she gave a kind of grunt, a noise halfway between a sniff and a snort. And then she took a great big breath, far more air than she needed. And she pushed it out through her nostrils noisily, her lips pursed together and her mouth turned down.
    That moment I wished it were all true. I wished my mother had killed Ya Isatta’s children. I wished Ya Isatta would carry on inhaling until she sucked her own nose into her face, followed by her lips and her teeth and everything. I imagined her face disappearing like muddy water swirling down a hole until there was just a black space where her head should have been.
    Those foolish women with their okra mouths, they did not dare talk that way in front of my father.
    She was buried the same day. Finda told me my father took over the arrangements himself, making sure Finda bathed and anointed the body with the proper care, hiring readers to recite verses at theburial. Afterwards at the graveside, she said, he took some crumbs of the newly dug soil and placed them on his tongue. And he mourned her as though she had been a man, for forty whole days instead of seven.
    Still, a man marries expecting to lose a wife or two. Wives pass on all the time bringing new lives into the world. Nobody dresses up all in black, just the hem of a
lappa
trailed in black dye. Relatives arrive to stay in her house, lay claim to her gowns, her cooking pots, her jewellery, even her little guitar which none could play but someone could sell.
    And when the week is over everything is gone. Only her children are there still to be disposed of.
    Ibrahim and Idrissa, they were the lucky ones. Not so long after my mother died men appeared in the village, one a white man. They set up a table in the middle of the village next to the
barrie
. The
potho
sat behind it. The other one — a Koranko, so told the short scars that marked his cheekbones — stood next to him. The
potho
said he was the Queen’s representative, recruiting soldiers to fight in a war to save the Empire. The Empire to which every one of us belonged. The pair were travelling throughout the country enlisting fighters. They had orders from the Queen that each village must nominate at least six men to the cause.
    A distance from the houses more men were cutting down bamboo poles and binding them with ropes, laying palm leaves on top. In the evening we watched the same men stripped to the waist, torsos glowing in the red evening light, marching up and down in rows and swinging their arms under the command of the Koranko whose name was Saj Majoh.
    Saj Majoh acted as translator for the