She declared a major in anthropology because she felt she’d never learned to understand humans; her childhood had given her no great notion of how her own species worked. She was desperate to go as far away from her parents as she could. Leona wrote with skill and conviction and her Fulbright application was chosen. Three months later she was ensconced in a bathroom-sized mud-and-cow-dung inkajijik, in a manyatta filled with identical inkajijiks. They all circled the central livestock corral and were protected from lions and elephants by thorny acacia branches piled in a ring around the whole cluster. In the rare letters to her parents, Leona referred to her new home as a “gated community.”
Dusty and crowded, the manyatta was noisy with the grunting of livestock that lived inside the circle of thorny branches, and the sounds of hyenas, wildebeests and the occasional lion from outside. The small door to her hut was open—as they all were—and she loved the voices she could hear almost always, even brighter in the night, from the tiny huts all around her. She loved the constant scent of other humans and the way the livestock made the air smell tangy. It surprised her at first that she even loved the lack of physical space in the Maasai culture and how a child climbed into her lap every time she sat down and how the other women included her without question in their daily lives. For the first time she felt seen. Eventually she realized her comfort came from the fact that she was foreign. The language barrier and the cultural differences gave her the perfect excuse to feign misunderstanding, to keep people at a manageable distance—not physically, perhaps, but emotionally. At home she couldn’t hide this way. Her unwillingness to be vulnerable was an obvious thing, a scarlet letter people read as standoffish, odd. Here, her days were filled with sound and the presence of people, and she felt warm in it, relaxed, fully in charge of the depth and frequency of any emotional exchange.
But through everything—the meals she shared with the villagers, the long walks to the spring to collect water in her bucket, the rare rainstorms that saw her side by side with the other women in the village slapping fresh mud and soggy cow dung on the leaky inkajijik roof while rain poured down her back—she remembered the first rule of the anthropologist, Participate Only to Observe, and she held back the one thing she could: herself.
Here in Loita, people expressed curiosity about Leona. Women and children crowded into her little inkajijik to watch her. These women wanted to know about her father and her mother and her old life. It wasn’t lost on Leona that her first experience of bonding with other women was in a language she didn’t speak fluently and in a place half a world away from where she’d come.
She liked the questions the women asked, she liked the way they wanted to know her; it was novel and pleasant. Mostly, she loved that she could pick and choose her answers, and that they could never know what she held back—they couldn’t force intimacy against her will. When she spoke to them about herself, she chose her words like picking fruit from a tree, selecting wisely—concentrating on telling them things that didn’t hurt. She painted a picture of her life up to now that was simple and easy, a life that didn’t make her sad. Mother, Father, school and work. She deflected the conversation when she had to. It was easy to edge away from dangerous memories by changing the subject to the differences between a Maasai home and an American one, or how American people dressed and what they ate. Only Simi pressed. Her curiosity was relentless, and she asked endless questions about life outside the village. Her brief education had given her a rare glimpse into the world, and she drank Leona’s stories like water. Simi was different from the other women. She didn’t loiter by the river gossiping, or tease the other women to make them laugh. She had several books, children’s primers, really, that she’d kept from her days at school. Once she showed them to Leona. She proudly lifted them from a small basket tucked under her bed. She could read, she told Leona proudly—none of the other women in the village could.
After that, Leona selected a couple of novels she’d brought with her—beloved classics. The Call of the Wild was Simi’s favorite. Simi poured over the book. She’d sit under an acacia reading for hours, oblivious to the annoyance of the other women who called her lazy and proud. Her innate intelligence broke down the urge to judge things. She’d ask Leona to explain the words she didn’t understand, like snow. She said she liked the way the dog was in charge, the loyalty he showed. She said she’d never thought that even Americans could be cruel to each other—in Kenya, America was seen as a perfect place where only good things happened.
It suited Leona to be emotionally removed from the commotion around her and to have the freedom to be on the outside looking in. Here, nobody expected any more than that from her. Back home, when another person did something Leona didn’t comprehend, something that hurt or confused her, she felt a terrible sense of bewilderment, of sinking beneath the surface into a place where she couldn’t breathe—the fear of not understanding what she felt she should have understood. Here, that panicked sense was gone. She didn’t want to cross that line, to feel confused and misunderstood without a reason again.
Leona knew that in Maasailand, babies weren’t recognized until they were three months old. Children are loved, but utilized, and the utility is treacherous. She’d seen babies die of disease before they took their first steps; she’d observed death rites for teenagers bitten by snakes, toddlers who fell into cooking fires and the bleeding body of a seven-year-old fatally mauled by a hyena while tending goats outside the village. It was prudent, Leona thought, to hold your children at arm’s length when you lived the hard life of the Maasai. Anything could happen, after all. Life out here was fragile; you had to be tough. This is what she told herself when her baby was born. These were the thoughts in her head. She convinced herself it was good to keep distance between herself and the baby. She wrapped her leaky breasts tightly with a kanga and let another nursing mother in the village feed the baby. She let Simi take the baby to her house to sleep, and she let Simi carry the baby on her back during the walks to the river. This was the line that she drew between herself and her child.
Simi loved the baby. With no children of her own, she was free to adopt a baby who couldn’t, for whatever reason, be cared for by its own mother. Leona knew that Simi was more of a mother to her child than she was. She also knew Simi’s place in the village, as a childless wife, was precarious. She said yes when Simi asked to make it official; she consented to an adoption ceremony—the laiboni slaughtered a ram and both women ate the fat. That was the traditional process. Leona knew, in her own head, that her daughter would never really be Maasai, that she was, by her inherited DNA, privy to the perks of being American, but she felt better in an unexpected way. Her child had two parents now.
The Maasai elders gave the baby her first, sacred, name. The name only used by the parents, nobody else. Nalangu, they whispered to Leona, which meant “from a different tribe.” And that’s what the little pale baby looked like. A different tribe, an alien being that Leona observed; who she watched learn to roll over on a rawhide blanket, who she watched nursing from another woman’s breast, who took her first steps in the red dust and dried dung of the manyatta. Leona watched the baby grow in the same way she watched all the babies of the village grow. She allowed her baby to go to Simi for comfort, and not come to her. She spoke to the baby in English, but she spoke to all the kids in English—their parents wanted them to learn. She convinced herself that nothing was different, that the nine months of her pregnancy never really happened and the terror she had felt through it all was just a bad dream.
At night, though, Leona often woke up sweating and terrified, her nightmares alive in her mind. She dreamed of her baby disappearing into a puff of smoke, or being carried away in the mouth of a lion, the wide tawny shoulders heaving as it leaped over the thorny fence, the shaggy blond mane curling slightly over the cold, yellow, animal eyes. Those nights she’d sit bolt upright and reach over to check for her baby’s presence. The baby was never there. When she was awake, Leona hated the version of herself she saw in the nightmares; it wasn’t the smoke or the lion that caused the frantic heart beating and the suffocating breath, but instead it was the vision of herself, just standing there watching, calmly stirring the chai in her dented enamel cup with her metal spoon, in concentric circles, over and over again, while her child vanished before her eyes. What kind of mother did nothing but watch?
Leona found peace and freedom in concentrating on her work. It was important, not just to her, but to the community.