Reasons to Be Happy by Katrina Kittle

Author:Katrina Kittle [Katrina Kittle]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: David_James Mobilism.org
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-28T05:00:00+00:00

115. Being safe

116. Having a home

117. Never having been physically harmed by anyone

118. Having my entire body intact

That night, in a new hotel room, sharing a double bed with Aunt Izzy, I couldn’t sleep.

I realized I’d gone four days without a binge or purge. Was I fatter? The hotel’s room didn’t have a mirror, so I couldn’t even look at myself.

Trying hard not to jostle the bed and wake Aunt Izzy, I reached down for my duffel bag. In the dark, I groped around until I felt my mother’s pink cashmere sweater. I pulled it up to my cheek and breathed deep. Even with the ever present smells of Africa all around me—palm oil and smoke—there she was. The lemon scent of my mother.

What was my dad doing right this minute? Thinking of my mother too? Thinking of me?

Did he miss me? I missed him.

• • •

We began our long drive to Tafi Atome in the morning. We stopped, hours later, for lunch, where I ate red-red—a stew made from cowpeas (what they call black-eyed peas) with red palm oil, tomatoes, really hot peppers, and onion.

Market stalls surrounded the roadside café—pyramids of oranges and coconuts, hills of limes, plastic flip-flops, used empty cans, rabbits strung up by their feet, chickens hanging in bouquets of three, whole goats, goat heads, goat legs, a pig.

I even saw a stall selling ingredients to make voodoo fetishes. Ben explained that Vodun is a real religion, but the idea we have in our heads of voodoo dolls and witch doctors all came from Western movies. I was already heat-dazed, my senses stupefied, as I gawked at buckets of vulture heads, monkey paws, monkey testicles, parrot wings, and dried chameleons. Coiled dead snakes, tongues of who knows what, horns, bats. Hooves, quills, a cheetah skin.

I watched people bargain over these items—the lemons, the tin cans, the dog heads—an aggressive process with lots of huffing, high-pitched cries of indignation, and people storming away from each other only to be called back. It made me afraid to buy anything.

I saw shiny bead necklaces I wanted to buy—not to wear but to disassemble for my cities. The bright colors tugged on me. I heard my mother’s voice say, “Our Hannah is a magpie.”

An African man saw me looking and said, “Ah, sister likes the beads, yes?” He tried to draw me closer, but my heart pounded and I scurried back to my aunt. The bargaining stressed me out. Why couldn’t there just be a fixed price?

“Sss! Sss!” a woman hissed at me—when a Ghanaian wants your attention, they hiss, kind of like we do to shush someone, but just an s, not an sh. “You like the beads? Mine are better. See.”

I was so relieved to drive away from all that wheeling and wheedling and demanding.

As we pulled away, I caught a last, longing glimpse of the beads as they flashed in the sun.

• • •

Later that day, after the highways turned into red dirt roads, we finally reached Tafi Atome.

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