Adé: A Love Story (9 page)

After much back and forth, which Amina mercifully did not translate, an older woman, her eyes ringed with kohl, spoke while gesturing passionately with her hands, as if scripting a solution in the air. This time, Amina translated: Adé’s cousins would apply my
singo
and the elaborate henna designs that would cover my hands and arms, and Nuru would take charge of the many fittings for the vestments I would wear at various stages of the weeklong celebration. Another cousin would arrange for the preparation of the all-important chicken biryani.

Meanwhile, Adé was having his own meetings with men of the old town. One night after one of these assemblies, we were pressed against each other in the darkness of our narrow bed and he said abruptly, “I tried to talk and find a way around this, but it is true that I must go to your country and ask your parents for permission to marry you. The imam says this is the only way it will be allowed.”

I raised my head to face him. “The
only
way?”

“It is for your safety, and also mine,” Adé said. “Your parents will still have the right to reject me if we marry without their consent, and to give their full and true consent they must see my face.”

I sputtered. Of course my parents would agree, sight unseen, I said. They trusted me. I knew my own mind. I was not a child. I could make my own decisions. I wanted to marry him, and that would be enough for them.

He shook his head. “It will not work,
mpenzi.
We will not be married any other way.”

I had never heard Adé concede an impediment, nor had I, until that moment, imagined in any detail the looming cultural collision: Adé in my father’s office on Madison Avenue, or the apartment on the Upper East Side. Adé, who had never been in an elevator, never seen an escalator, never been on a plane. My father would find his approach antiquated, and brush it off.
If you make my daughter happy, of course you can marry her. That is all that matters.
My father would then take us to lunch at the steak-house across the street, clearing a path for us through the beer-drinking, gray-suited Wall Street guys, the likes of which Adé had never seen.

Family dinner would be torturous. My stepmother would ask Adé about his island, nodding politely as he attempted to describe the intricacies of woodcarving and his hyper-extended family. She would pretend to understand and take great pains to mute her judgment about the multiple wives and tens of cousins. She had never breached the continental divide; for all she knew Lamu was a rural Harlem. But later, in the privacy of their floor to ceiling beige bedroom, she would ask my father if her grandchild-to-be
could ask the four questions at Seder if he was part Muslim. My father wouldn’t know and would wonder out loud, as he took off his socks and stretched his pale feet, how Adé could make it through life without a glass of white wine every now and then.

My mother would be easier. I could take him to her house in Northern California, and settle into one of the small structures that resembled our room in the old town. She would stream African music—from West Africa, not East, where Adé was from, but African all the same—through speakers, and offer her future son-in-law a meal of collard greens, cornbread, and fresh roasted chicken. She would tell Adé the greens had come from her garden, and after dinner take his hand and lead him through her large house. She would show him the Native American arrowheads and African baskets she collected before introducing him to the sauna.

Adé would not be able to speak until after the tour. My mother would light the already laid fire in the great stone fireplace in her living room, and settle into the enormous brown cushions of her custom-made couch. Moments later, she would listen with great solemnity as Adé asked permission to marry me. In return, she would deliver a perfectly balanced, ideologically informed response.

“Ah, of course the two of you can marry. But it is not up to me. You will learn this if you haven’t already: my daughter is very independent, which is how she was raised. She does not need anyone’s permission to love. She is free.”

And Adé would nod, but think her bizarre, incomprehensible.

Later, walking the path to our little house on the property, he would ask, “Don’t your parents care who you marry? Don’t they
care about my family? Or what your life will be like in the future?” Then he would stop, turn to me, and say, “We will not be that way with our daughters.”

“No,” I would say. “We will not.” And then I would kiss him full on the mouth, on the hillside, under the moon.

ONCE I ACCEPTED
the necessity of the journey home, the trick was how to accomplish it. Suddenly, the reality of President Moi and the police state began to factor more prominently in our family conversations. First, Adé needed a passport, and for that we would have to go to Nairobi. He would be the only one in the family to have the little blue book, and only if we were lucky and bribed the right official with the right amount of money at the right time. As we mapped out our route, it occurred to me that Adé had never seen Nairobi and neither had most of his family. I tried to comprehend this, how people could limit their movement to such a tiny area—an island and two small coastal towns—no matter how sprawling and chaotic. And then we started hearing the stories. One of Adé’s cousins had been trying to get to Saudi Arabia for twenty years and disallowed fourteen times.

An uncle threw up his hands. “He was trying to make the hajj, to Mecca, and they blocked him even from this!”

Even Adé’s stepsister, the oldest daughter of Nuru’s husband, was punished for trying to leave the country to go to secondary school in Tanzania—raped by a government official who promised her a passport in return.

The stories were awful, but I did not think they held any particular relevance for us. I was American. I would be with him and speak to the official in charge. The passport would be approved. If not we would go to the American Embassy and I would meet with someone in an air-conditioned room. I would explain, and they would agree to help me within a few hours. I thought it might take two days, maybe three, for the paperwork to be processed, but no one seemed to believe me. I had long forgotten the hundreds, maybe even thousands of posters of the president plastered all over the city. The relief Miriam and I felt once we were far from Moi’s piercing eyes.

One night in bed, already exhausted from the endless planning, I asked Adé if he thought our plan was too dangerous. The timing seemed inopportune. Many people said Moi’s government was near collapse, and each day brought newspaper reports on government soldiers attacking peaceful protestors calling for democratic elections. Members of Parliament were disappearing, or found dead. By now I had seen it too—the tribalism Adé often mentioned. In the months I had been on the island, several Swahili had lost their jobs to men from the Kikuyu tribe, relatives once or twice or three times removed from the president.

“Ah no, of course not,” Adé said, as if we had our own special tunnel to the other side of trouble. “It is fine. We will succeed. I will meet your parents, and then it will be finished.”

Adé showed no special interest in travel itself; his preference was only for me. His acceptance of our mission was complete; travel, with all of its risks and rewards, was now a part of his life forever. His biggest concern was for me. When we traveled together, I would be seen as Kenyan, he reminded me again and again in the days leading up to our departure. From the people
this would mean familiarity: easy conversation and a total disregard for my personal space; from the police, it would mean disdain and a cold inhumanity.

“The police work for the government,” he said. “And the government wants us all to be afraid so we will not push for elections, so we will not control our own future. If you were
mzungu
it would all be very nice,
Yes madam, no madam.
But if they think you are Kenyan, they will keep you from standing up. I feel sorry for my country. But it will not always be like this. Things cannot stay the same forever.”

I nodded, but did not, could not, comprehend the reality. From my sheltered American perch, I imagined checks and balances, the rights of the individual, and judicial protection, even though history had shown me otherwise. In the town where I was born, Jackson, Mississippi, whole police departments were run by violent white supremacists, by the Ku Klux Klan. When I was a child the Klan threatened my parents for “stirring up trouble” by pushing for integration, but in my family mythology, my parents had fought back and won. That was the American way. I could not imagine defeat.

The next morning, Nuru walked us to the boat, drawing her black scarf over her face so that only her eyes could be seen. She watched us climb aboard the creaking ferry with tears in her eyes, the three of us sober with the gravity of the journey ahead. We were leaving all that was safe—the familiar streets of the old town, the protection of Adé’s sprawling family, and our room at the top of the hill, with its perfect, unobstructed view of the sea.

MY EDUCATION BEGAN
almost immediately on the bus from the coast to the capital. One minute the long, narrow machine was careening over the dividing line and back, and the next, we were hurtling through the darkness in the middle of the night. And then a giant spotlight shown through the giant windshield, and men in uniform waved the driver to the side of the road. Many of the passengers were unmoved by the change in momentum, but most woke up quickly, their eyes becoming alert once they heard the police yelling at the driver. He jumped out as directed and was pushed to the side.

By now, we were all sitting up, eerily still. Adé and I had shifted and twisted our necks to see what was happening, and brought ourselves to full attention as a team of soldiers boarded the old shell of a bus. They were noisy and demanding, lumbering through the center aisle, banging on seats, barking orders, and pulling down bundles from overhead racks. The soldiers had guns—M16s or AK-47s or Kalashnikovs, I couldn’t tell—slung over their shoulders, and as they rummaged through the sacks, pocketed yards of cloth and handfuls of fruit, smiling when they found small stashes of money or bangles of gold. Before I could
stop myself, I demanded, in English, that the soldiers stop. Adé tried to hold me back but my outrage was instinctual. People were losing what was likely their life savings, the result of months if not years of labor. My reaction was natural, inbred, and inviolate.

And then I felt the barrel of a gun against my cheek—cold, hard, and terrifying. I had leapt from my seat, and one of the soldiers grabbed me. He pressed his large hand around my mouth and moved his body so that the butt of the gun would make contact with my face. It occurred to me that if the gun fired, the bullet would exit through the top of my head and lodge itself in the aluminum roof of the bus. As if in a dream, I imagined the metal passing through me, and relinquished my resistance. I felt the silent, potent awareness of my fellow passengers, watching the scene unfold. Most had seen or heard about
kitu
like this: things that happened on the night bus to Nairobi.

The soldier turned me away from Adé, but I sought his eyes anyway, and then heard his voice, composed as always. Adé spoke quickly in Swahili, calming the soldier, explaining, apologizing, and somehow managing to keep his dignity at the same time. He knew the tone had to be perfect, a sign of desperation might cause the soldiers to become drunk on their own power, but humble logic might remind them that indeed there was someone or something more powerful to reckon with, a higher authority beyond their control.

I let my body go slack until finally the soldier threw me back into my battered seat where I remained, looking up at Adé in disbelief as he sank back down next to me and wrapped his long, protective arms around my shoulders. The soldiers took everything of value and jumped off jauntily when they were finished, tapping the side of the bus and telling the driver to move on. As
the bus made it over the slight curb from the shoulder and back onto the road, the passengers stood to check their things and assess what was lost. I went into what I suppose was a kind of shock, and stayed awake for the next six hours fighting catatonia. Adé’s arms were warm, but I was not. I stared out the window into the black night, waiting for a glimpse of daylight that might reveal the familiar shapes of things—trees, buildings, the road itself.

Adé tried to reassure me before falling asleep. “It is over. That is it, they are gone.”

But for me it was not so easy. Something inside of me had shattered, and I could not put the pieces back together so quickly. I did not think, as I imagined Miriam would have, that I had just experienced “the real Africa.” I thought instead that Adé was only the king of his tiny island, which meant that the farther we traveled away from it, the less likely I was to be his queen. The shift from powerful to powerless rocked me to the core. It was not a position I wanted to inhabit. I did not find it redemptive or romantic. I was not titillated by danger. For the first time since I arrived on the continent, I felt dread. I saw myself as a foreigner, an interloper in a struggle that was not my own. I had my first pang of homesickness. Then I felt like a coward, and tried to wave it away.
It was normal. I am fine. We are fine.
But it didn’t work. The seed had been planted.

When the sun finally rose, Adé stirred in his seat, and asked if I was okay. I nodded, stroked his hand, and leaned over to kiss his mouth. But I had lost our words.

IN THE MORNING
we arrived to the familiar, incessant bustle of the city, the frenetic energy that had sent me to the island in the first place. I could tell Adé was enthralled by the tall buildings, fancy cars, and restaurants on every street, but he took everything in with cool detachment. He intuitively understood his innocence could be exploited, that he could be seen as an easy target for someone looking for a mark. He revealed his giddy excitement only after we had arrived safely at the hotel, the tiny stack of rooms Miriam and I found the year before. After I handed my credit card to the man behind the desk, he gave me a key and pointed to the tiny metal box that was to take us up. Adé eyed the elevator quietly, but once inside, it began its slow ascent, and his eyes widened. He jumped up and down to feel the jerking of the carriage. He smiled at me then, a huge, happy smile, like a child discovering a long-coveted toy, too long hidden inside wrapping paper. He leaned over and planted a wet kiss on my cheek.