“What’s happening?” she asked one wizened woman.
“Emurata,” the woman answered.
When Leona first came to the manyatta, she forced herself to watch everything, all the rituals and ceremonies. Her work was to observe, without emotion, the daily life and events that reflected the beliefs of the people she wrote about. Her least favorite ritual was the girls’ coming-of-age rite, the emurata. She found it impossible not to wince at the cutting of the flesh, and she found herself unable to keep from feeling a harsh judgment against the entire idea. Her resolve to observe everything without critique was tested every time she was audience to an emurata. After watching three of them, she convinced herself she had all the information she needed about the practice and stopped going to the ceremonies at all.
The ceremony had started and the moran began to dance. They stood in a circle, impossibly tall and impossibly thin, backs as straight as the spears they held. When they began their singing, they chanted uh-uh-uh-uuuu-huh and the straight-bodied jumping made their braids slap against their backs and the iron of their spear tips glisten in the sun—Leona knew the circumcision was about to start. She stood up and walked past the dancing moran. She wanted to be outside the village, far enough away so that the wind in the acacia trees would fill her ears instead of the sound of the rites.
Vaguely, as she made her way through the crowd, she glanced around for Adia. It was rare that she was alone with the girl, but she wanted that now. It occurred to her she would miss the daily interaction—as unsubstantial as it was—with her daughter. A tingle of worry nibbled at her from somewhere deep and hidden. Her parents’ letter, the guilt it made her feel, pressed into her mind. She wanted to hurry, but she was caught between the desire to leave and the unfamiliar feeling of maternal responsibility leaking through her. Where was Adia?
Leona could tell the instant the knife met flesh by the sound of the deep-throated cry of the girl that rose from the squat dung-and-wattle structure and hovered in the air. An image flashed into Leona’s mind of Adia, sprawled and bleeding. It couldn’t be her, Leona knew. At three, Adia was far too young, but the image of her daughter being cut, now or years from now, set Leona’s heart pounding. Someday Adia would be thirteen. Someday, if Leona did leave her here, Adia would think of the cutting as normal, as necessary. This would be her world. Maybe her father was right. The idea of giving him credit for parenting advice made Leona sick, but she couldn’t ignore it. This was her daughter, after all. And then some tiny, unwelcome shoot of a poison plant took root in her mind—a thought she didn’t want to think. As much as she hated them, there was a part of Leona that desperately wanted her parents’ approval. They were happy to have a grandchild. It was the first thing Leona had done to inspire their pride.
Leona’s head throbbed, and she felt a trickle of sweat beading down her back. Her heart was beating too fast now, she wanted to sit down, to be able to breathe slowly and pull her thoughts back to where she could contain them, control them.
Then the girl screamed again. Of course she screamed. Of course she writhed against the knife. And Leona, alert and wild with panic, bounded across the dusty paddock.
The quick absence of light when she bent into the ceremonial inkajijik made her stop and rub her eyes, but when she opened them, through the haze of smoke, she saw her small blonde daughter sitting ramrod straight in a gaggle of little girl age-mates, watching intently as the bleeding almost-woman curled in pain under the glinting blade. Leona’s eyes watered, the wood smoke thick in the air. Through the tears, she thought she could see blood in the dust, little bands of soft flesh left behind.
In one fluid movement, Leona leaned over the embers in the fire pit and pulled her daughter up and out into the light, hissing through the smoke that choked in her throat as she dragged Adia, “You can’t watch this. This is not for you... Not for you. Not for us.”
Through her panic, Leona didn’t see Simi approach, concerned, and when Adia turned away from Leona to pull herself toward the other woman, who grasped the girl’s other arm, Leona responded by pulling harder. Flickers of her life as a child popped in her mind. It wasn’t all bad. There was the summer camp she loved, the elderly neighbor lady who bought all her Girl Scout cookies one year after Leona admitted to being too shy to go door-to-door, the ice-cream truck in the summer, the smell of the Christmas tree in December and the Thanksgiving dinners they shared with friends who always brought Leona little presents. Was she stealing that life from Adia?
“You are not Maasai,” Leona hissed. She saw Simi then, and their gazes held, both women clutching the girl who stood, sobbing, in the dust between them.
“I adopted her,” Simi said.
Leona remembered the ram, and the fat she had eaten and the relief it brought her to know she wasn’t solely responsible for the baby. Simi had helped her. Surely, though, she hadn’t meant forever? Surely Simi knew that Leona didn’t really have to obey the traditions of a culture that wasn’t her own?
“You are her second mother,” Leona said, watching Simi’s face carefully—there was nothing but alarm in her eyes. Adia twisted, trying to release herself, but instead stumbled.
“I am her first,” Leona continued. “She has a family in America.” She thought of the letter, of her parents’ concern that Adia be educated, be allowed to live like an American. Leona wished there wasn’t a minuscule part of her that didn’t agree with them. She hated that, on some level, she knew they were right.
Adia jerked backward and fell. Leona kept her grip, but Simi, in an instinctual moment, leaned forward to break Adia’s fall. In that second, Leona pulled Adia out of Simi’s reach.
“Simi, she can’t be a Maasai. I can’t let that cutting happen to her.”
Then her own daughter’s voice, thick and raw, hysterical, rose above the manyatta like the call of an exotic bird, out of place, far from home. Whether she was screaming from the pain of Leona’s tight grip around her upper arm, from the humiliation of being dragged out of the ceremony or from fear of the sudden and uncontrolled presence of a mother she hardly knew, Leona didn’t know. She didn’t care. Leona pulled Adia up and held her up against her hip. She knew that she had to get Adia away from here quickly, while the conviction was strong. She stumbled as fast as she could to where her car was parked.
“This is not your real life, Adia,” Leona said over and over again. “You are not Maasai. You are like me. You are like me.”
Leona’s car was dented and rusted to the point of being colorless. Now, she pulled the back door open, grateful it was unlocked—her shaking hands could never have managed a key—pushed Adia into the back seat and clicked the child’s seat belt firmly. She didn’t say goodbye to the people she’d lived with for so long, she didn’t let Adia say goodbye. She was frantic to leave, driven by the thought that if she didn’t go now, her own fear would force her to change her mind again and leave Adia behind. Simi was screaming frantically on her knees in the dust, other women gathering by her, and one began running toward the car. Leona slammed the driver’s-side door shut so violently that the window slid down into the door frame, off its track, rendering it useless. She managed to fit the key into the ignition and start the car. She popped the brake and hit the gas pedal. Adia screamed and screamed, crying out for Simi as the car bumped wildly on the lumpy, dusty road. She banged on the window with her small fist and kicked the back of Leona’s seat.
Leona felt like a kidnapper.
It was getting dark