Praise Song for the Butterflies. Bernice L. McFadden
by Bernice L. McFadden
For all of those little black girls and little black boys.
For those delicate butterflies, those beautiful innocents.
The word trokosi comes from the Ewe words tro, meaning deity or fetish, and kosi, meaning female slave.
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
—Charles Dickens
a brief history of ukemby
Shaped like a kinked index finger, confined between Ghana and Togo, Ukemby is a nation about which very little is known before the seventeenth century when the first Portuguese colonist arrived. That said, there are signs of an early British presence, possibly explorers who succumbed to malaria and/or were murdered by the inhabitants who were, in fact, explorers in their own right, having trekked to Ukemby from regions that are now part of Ghana, Benin, Namibia to the south, and as far east as Tanzania.
The Portuguese used Ukemby as a slave-trading post for Europe and the Americas until the Slave Trade Act of 1807, at which point the Portuguese all but abandoned the colony, save for the criminals and undesirables they deserted upon their departure.
The Portuguese withdrawal left the region vulnerable, ultimately making way for the German Empire to invade Ukemby in 1875 and place it under military rule. Many Ukembans were subject to forced labor, building infrastructure and mining diamonds and bauxite.
Following World War I, the Germans relinquished control of the territory, and the US swooped in to fill the void. The Bureau of Ukemby Affairs was soon established and charged with creating schools to educate and assimilate the children to US standards.
Christianity was deemed the new American territory’s official religion; the worship of African gods and deities was outlawed and made punishable by flogging.
Children were forbidden to speak Wele, their native language. If discovered doing so, the parents of those children were flogged. If the infraction happened a second time, the tongues of the violators were removed. A third infraction was punishable by death.
Even so, many defiant elders continued to secretly pass on the language, customs, and traditions of their ancestors.
The American trusteeship was dissolved after World War II and Ukemby finally became an independent nation. A new constitution was adopted by referendum, and a democratic election was held in 1949, installing the country’s first African prime minister.
In his first official act upon taking office, Prime Minister Mbeke Kjodle abolished all of the assimilation laws and policies that had been put in place by the Americans, freeing the Ukemban people to openly practice their own customs and traditions. Shrine slavery was one of the traditions that ascended from the darkness back into the light.
After
New York City
Summer 2009
On the morning of the day she killed him, the sun sat high and white in a sky washed clean of clouds by an early-morning downpour. A faint rainbow hovered just beyond the abandoned PS 186. The damp air hummed with hip-hop music, car horns, and courting dragonflies.
Wide hips swaying beneath the sweeping, multicolored skirt, flip-flops smacking musically against the wet pavement, Abeo marched down 145th Street with her head held high.
A gold-and-purple straw purse hung in the crook of her elbow, weighed down with four bottles of homemade hair oils, a magazine, a letter from her aunt Thema, a cell phone, and the rusted screwdriver she carried for protection. In all the years Abeo had been working in and around Harlem, she’d only had to brandish the weapon once, and that was when a drunkard threatened to toss his beer can at her because she had not returned his hello.
When Abeo reached Lenox Avenue, she turned the corner and joined two other women waiting at the bus stop. Abeo nodded in greeting. One woman mumbled good morning; the other diverted her eyes to her hands, pretending to examine her perfectly polished fingernails. A bus approached, thick with passengers, and Abeo and the other women climbed aboard, inserted their MetroCards into the slot, and pushed their way to the center of the mass.
Lenox Avenue was already bustling with activity—people traveled the sidewalks, clutching coffee cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, hauling plastic bags crammed with groceries, pushing baby carriages.
She exited the bus at 127th Street and continued on foot toward her place of employment—the Queens of Africa Braiding Salon, located on the corner of 125th and Lenox.
She stepped swiftly past the Nigerian, Sudanese, and Guinean hawkers who stood alongside black and sapphire velveteen blankets displaying items for sale: bootlegged CDs, DVDs, East African soaps, oils, incense, and trashy novels.
As she hurried past them, they called out to her: “Something for you today, mama?” Abeo waved her hand and kept walking. Up ahead she could see the hair shop’s sign—a gaudy gold-and-green monstrosity illuminated with red lights. Standing beneath the sign was Mohammed, an elderly man the color of black sand, with a beard as white as cotton. His back was bent, but his eyes were as effervescent as a newborn. Mohammed sold roasted peanuts from a silver pushcart, and he and Abeo were passing acquaintances. Abeo knew that he was a widower, had three children and eight grandchildren, and that he had been in these United States for half a century, never once returning to his homeland of Ukemby. Mohammed knew that Abeo was married with two children and that she worked as a braider and had not been back to Ukemby since she’d arrived in New York in the winter of 2003. Those were the things they knew about each other and not much else.
When Abeo spotted him, she raised her hand in greeting, and in that moment she realized with great horror that she knew something else about Mohammed; she knew the man standing beside him. Her heart jumped into her throat and her bladder let go, streaming urine down her legs.
His name was Duma and she’d known him as intimately as a man of the cloth knew his god—or more appropriately, the way a sinner knows The Evil One.
Abeo watched frozen as Duma tossed a roasted peanut into the air, tilted his head back, and opened his mouth. The nut bounced off his bottom lip, fell to the ground, and rolled across the pavement toward Abeo. When it bumped the rounded rubber toe of her flip-flop, she uttered a strangled cry and sprung into the air.
Mohammed gave her a curious look. The smile on his lips faded to a frown when he saw the frightened expression on her face. His eyes swung to Duma and then back to Abeo, just as she started her charge. Teeth bared she barreled toward them with the screwdriver raised high above her head.
BEFORE
Port Masi, Ukemby
1978–1985
1
Abeo’s first memory was from a Saturday in 1978. She was two years, eight months, and twenty-three days old the morning she awoke in her parents’ large mahogany bed. The room was shrouded in the gray haze of early morning. Outside, a car engine roared to life, the rusty hinges of a wrought-iron gate squealed open, and a choir of roosters began to crow.
Abeo rubbed the sleep from her eyes, searched the room for signs of her parents, and in her quest caught sight of her dark face and button nose in the oblong mirror that hung over the chest of drawers.
Abeo yawned before calling out, “Mama!” over and over until her mother, Ismae Kata, appeared in the doorway.