The Means That Make Us Strangers

Chapter 1

A tangle of arms reaching toward the fig tree. Among the thicket of deep-black arms stretching and wriggling toward the fruit, two arms stood out, shining pale as a full moon.

I remember thinking how different those arms looked, while waiting for fruit to drop as Maicaah shook the branch. I saw a fig hit the white hands and fall to the ground, and it was with shock that I felt the pain in my hands and realized the strange, white skin was mine.

The others scrambled to get the figs that had fallen in the grass. I stayed standing, turning my hands over and over in the sunlight that filtered through the leaves.

When Kinci stood up, I pulled her wrist until her arm was elbow-to-elbow with mine. Our arms were the same length, and we had matching beaded cuffs of yellow, purple, green, and red beads in the same zig-zag pattern. Underneath and around our bracelets, the skin of her arm was almost as dark as a black clay pot, with pink scar spots where she’d scratched at bug bites. A raised seam showed where she’d been cut by a rock while playing in the stream, and there was a flush of tannish pink at the bases of her fingernails. My arm was the color of dried grass, even paler under the dirt in the crease of my elbow. My ankles and feet were that same color, only dirtier.

“I’m white,” I said.

“Of course you’re white,” said Ibsituu, picking fig skin from between her teeth. “What did you think you were, green?”

“No, I mean, I look different. See?” I put my arm next to Kinci’s again to show her.

“So?” said Bikeltu. “Tlahoun has big ears. Ibsituu is short.”

Kinci laughed around her bite of fig. “Ibsituu is short because she’s younger. Adelaide’s whole family is different.”

I wanted her to take it back, to tell me that I looked just like her and the rest of them.

“It’s because you’re firanji,” said Maicaah. “Maybe where your family is from everyone is white.” He handed me a section of his fig. The pulp was tart and sticky, pink and not quite ripe. It stung the corners of my lips and the top of my tongue. I chewed quickly, swallowing large pieces of pulp and seeds, eager to get out my objection.

“But… the foreigners at the market don’t look like this.”

“The foreigners at the market are Tigray or Amhara. Or Italian—they’re light brown. But you’re more very light yellow.”

Bikeltu knelt in the grass to look for other figs that might have fallen. “Grandfather says God made all Oromo out of dirt. Maybe your people were made from something different.”

“Like what?”

“Like water,” suggested Ibsituu.

“Water isn’t white. That’s silly,” said Kinci.

“Is not! Water can too be white!”

Bikeltu sounded doubtful. “Water is only white when bumping up against a rock and going fast, and God would have to move pretty quickly to make people out of that.”

“I don’t think God made your people out of water. It has too many colors.” Maicaah pointed at the stream that meandered a few yards away from the fig tree’s shade. Parts of the stream looked greenish, reflecting the grass growing on the banks. Parts were brown with silt. Parts were so clear you could see the pebbles and the minnows underwater. Sunlight glinted off the planes of the water, moving continually.

“If your people were made out of the river, I think you would change colors depending on what was around you,” Kinci decided.

“Maybe your people were made out of clouds,” said Bikeltu.

“My skin isn’t that white!”

“Pretty close…”

“If her people were made out of clouds, wouldn’t they float? Or live in the sky?”

“Where did your parents live before they came here?” asked Kinci.

I didn’t like all this talk about ‘my people,’ as if I didn’t belong in the village. I tossed the rest of the fig toward the stream and wiped my hands on the folds of my skirt. “Sometimes they talk about a place called Carolina.”

“What’s it like?”

I had no idea what to tell them. I was born there, but I didn’t remember anything about it. I was relieved when Tlahoun and Ibsituu spotted an ostrich drinking upstream and ran away to chase it. The rest of us ran after them, urging them on and laughing at them. We never caught an ostrich, despite the number of times we tried. We sometimes got close, but never close enough to touch, not even the dirty-white tail feathers.

I was two when my parents moved to Ethiopia so my father could do his anthropological research among the Borana Oromo people of Ethiopia. I was sixteen when we left, in September of 1964.

My father told us we were moving two weeks before we left. He said he needed to report back to the universities that had provided his funding. He said it would be good for us too, for me and Mary and Cassie to transition back to American culture. He said they had just sent word about the tickets.

“What do you mean, ‘back home’?” I said. “This is our home. Cassie was even born here. Marmee and I came as babies.”

“Of course the United States is your home,” he said. “We always knew we’d be going back sometime.” He’d already taken the lamp back to his typewriter and was reading over what he’d written before dinner.

“I don’t want to go.”

He laughed as if I’d said something funny. “You can’t stay here by yourself, Adelaide. If your mother and I go, you have to come with us.”

“Most of my friends are married—I’m fully grown!”

“In American culture, you’re a child until you turn eighteen. We’ve talked about that.” He leaned back from his table and took a breath, as if he was going to start one of his lectures on the sociological construct of families in North American versus Oromo culture.

I walked out of the house. I wasn’t a kid, no matter what he said. Of the girls I’d grown up with, I was the only one still stuck under my parents’ roof, having to follow their rules and decisions. Now they were going to make me go with them to an entirely different country.

No one followed me outside to make me come back in. My father hated shouting, and I was in a mood to shout—at him or at anyone who stopped me. I left the dinner cleanup for my mother and Marmee and went to Kinci’s,

My father didn’t say anything more about it, and he left for a conference two days later. My mother never said anything about it, but a few days before my father was due back, she pulled the suitcases out from under the sleeping cots and told us to start packing.

We packed everything—clothes, books, baskets, cooking utensils—in five suitcases and a big green trunk my parents had brought with us when we first arrived.

Marmee and I started with the spare linen, the sheets and pillowcases and tablecloths that always made other people in the village stare at our excess. We packed the school books we weren’t using: Marmee checked to make sure our mother wasn’t looking, then slipped her Latin textbook into the bottom of the heaviest suitcase. We folded our spare clothes next, carefully running our hands over the drape of the long skirts, the printed patterns of head-scarves, the knots of the beaded jewelry we only used on special occasions. We left my father’s books on his shelf so he could pack them himself exactly the way he wanted.

Cassie sat on one of the goat-skin cots, reading, mouthing the sounds of letters like I’d taught her The sunlight pouring through the open doorway didn’t really reach her in that corner, and she had to angle the page to catch the chinks of light that came through the bound sticks that formed our walls. The thatch roof always made it dark and cool inside, which was nice for almost everything, except for reading.

Cassie’s friends came and crowded around the doorway, blocking most of the light. They greeted my mother politely, as was expected of them, but there was no lapse into friendliness after that, the way they teased the other village mothers. They simply stood, balancing with one foot on the calf of the other leg, imitating hunters, staring at the things strewn about the room and the open suitcases that covered the dirt floor.

“Adelie, Marmee, why are you still inside? We’re going to see the goatherds. Do you want to come?”

Mother told us we couldn’t, and eventually our friends went away, taking Cassie with them.

Later, I would wish I could have packed my favorite tree, the wide expanse of the fields, the smell of coffee roasting over the fire, the sunset. Later I would wish I could have found a way to stay, there in the village, where I belonged.

Mother told us to pack while she cooked. All the other mothers in the village made their daughters help them with every step, but Mother preferred to cook over the open fire herself; she said the flames and ash made her nervous for our safety, even after all these years.

When we packed everything else we could think of, Marmee and I started packing the herbs and spices hanging from the roof beams, wrapping them carefully in spare strips of cotton: fenugreek, basil, turmeric, ginger, cumin seeds, cardamom pods, red peppers. Our mother looked over and noticed what we were doing.

“Don’t pack those,” she said, as if we should have known.

She leaned over to examine the nearest suitcase. She pulled out the head scarves, the long skirts, the beaded necklaces and bracelets and head ornaments.

“You won’t need these in Carolina,” she said. She left them in a heap and returned to the fire pit. Marmee and I looked at each other.

Marmee whispered, “What does she mean we won’t…”

I asked aloud, “What do you mean we won’t need these? They’re the only clothes we have.”

Mother barely looked up from the cooking. “Your father is bringing some American clothes back with him after this conference.” Her voice was the same even tone as always, like the walk of a mule, unwavering, unemotional. Her eyes were half-open the way they had been almost every day for the last six months, since the baby came.

“What does American clothing look like?” Marmee whispered again.

I shrugged. The only American clothing I knew were the things our dad wore to conferences and the old baby clothes our parents had kept in the trunk. When Mother stepped outside, I repacked the head scarves, the skirts, and the beaded jewelry. I covered them up with a large maroon sheet and shut the suitcase. We left the rest of the herbs hanging in their place.

Marmee and I carefully packed the baby things when my mother was outside. They were still folded, neatly, in the basket next to my parents’ bed, where my mother had put them while she was waiting, in those last few days before. When he was born blue, too still and soundless, we buried him in the local way: a shawl for a shroud, a grave covered by rocks. He never needed the basket or the clothes. Now none of us wanted to touch the things.

Marmee put the baby basket and everything inside it at the bottom of one of the suitcases, but the suitcase wouldn’t close on top of it. As quickly as I could, handling them as little as I could, I unpacked all the white, lacy clothes, the soft bibs, the ancient-stained but clean-smelling diaper cloths, the plastic-headed diaper pins, and I hid them all under other, unsuspicious things. The things had belonged to me and Marmee and Cassie, but they were his now. We put the basket under our bed, to deal with it later.

Somehow we didn’t do a good enough job hiding the baby things. Two days before we left, in a torrent of last-minute activity, my mother suddenly stilled where she was kneeling, her fingers caught in the pastel green cable knit of a baby blanket. She stood up and went outside, and we didn’t see her for half an hour. I couldn’t tell where she’d gone.

“Is Haadha all right?” asked Cassie, using the word for mother that all of our friends used. Our parents made us speak English in our house, but we sprinkled in Oromiffa words when we were talking to each other, when we didn’t want to have to stop and think of the English equivalent.

“Wrap that sheet tighter around the pot, Cassie,” I said, and I stuffed the baby blanket down between two of our dad’s old sweaters. I watched the doorway until Mother returned.

In the afternoon, I heard the ibis call just outside the window.

“I have to go to the bathroom. Mama, I’ll be gone for a bit.” I didn’t look at my sisters—I wasn’t sure if they recognized Maicaah’s signal—and I didn’t wait for my mother’s answer.

I ran toward the cape chestnut tree and answered his call with one slightly lower-pitched. He dropped a nut on my head, and I cursed at him, smiling. I looked around to make sure no one would see me climbing the tree.

“You know you aren’t supposed to climb like that,” he said. “Only boys climb that way.”

“Are you saying I’m not a girl?” I smiled, chin down, the look that usually made him look at my mouth. I loved it when he looked at me that way.

“You are definitely not a village girl.” He looked away instead of at me. Sunlight and leaf shadows dappled his narrow head with its loose curls.

I let him be in his mood. I settled myself more comfortably on the tree branch, the lower of the two at this perch. I pulled a leaf off the tree and dropped it; it caught the wind and twirled to the ground slowly.

“Maybe I could come visit you,” he said. “Next year I’ll be old enough to work in the city. I can earn enough for the trip, and I can visit you.” His eyebrows were so much thicker than they had been when we were younger, but his eyes had the same intense, dark pressure that they always did when he was serious.

“I think it costs a lot of money.”

“That’s all right. I’ll save up my money. I won’t eat, if I have to.”

“You have to eat,” I told him. “If you don’t eat, you’ll get even skinnier and then your mother will really hate me.”

His eyelashes looked so long when he blinked. He smiled, the dark shadow of hair moving on his upper lip. “My mother doesn’t hate you. She would like you better if you were staying.” He had a different explanation every time I brought up his mother.

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see when I return.”

“When will that be, Adelie?” He reached forward, and I thought for a second that his fingers would touch my face, but he pulled on one of my braids instead.

“I won’t be gone long; you’ll see. When I turn eighteen, I won’t be a child anymore and I can leave them to come back here.”

“You had better,” he said. He let go of my hair and leaned back. “I still wish I could go with you. You could hide me in one of those big suitcases.”

I imagined him with his knees tucked under his chin, legs pressed against his chest, trying to fit his tall frame inside a suitcase. He used to fold himself up like that when we were children. Once we were hiding from Kinci, and he skinned his knee while rushing to get into the hiding spot between his parents’ house and the tree that grew so close to its walls. The deep scrape had bled all over both of us, and he had started crying.

I saw the scar, still on his knee, eye level in front of me. The skin was faded, pink, puckered just below the sharp angles of his knee. I reached out a finger and touched it lightly.

“Do you remember when you got this?” I asked.

He said nothing, and I looked up at him. His eyes were so serious again, and I couldn’t look away. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but it felt important, like whatever came next would change the world.

Slowly, he put the tips of his fingers over mine. It was very gentle pressure; my fingers pressed slightly into the bones of his knee.

“Promise…promise me you will come back,” he said. “And that things will be the same.”

“What things?”

I knew what he meant. I wanted to hear him say it, to acknowledge the agreement we made in joking seriousness when we started using the ibis call, after I was too old to be spending time alone with a boy. A fly landed in the place where his shoulder met his collar bone, and a second passed before he swatted it away with his free hand. I leaned forward, my weight shifting on the tree branch.

Then I heard my mother calling from the riverbank. “Adelaide!”

If it had been one of my sisters calling, I would have ignored her. I would have stayed in the tree with Maicaah until he said what I wanted to hear.

My mother called again, searching, the tinge of worry already creeping into the vowels of my name. The semblance of our small, private world up in the tree faded.

“I have to go,” I told him.

“Don’t go, Adelie,” he said.

“Adelaide!”

“I will come back. Soon.”

“Promise you won’t stay in that foreign land with your people?”

“They’re not my people.”

“Promise?” He pressed a little harder against my fingers, still against his knee. My paleness was almost camouflaged between the dark skin of his hand and his knee.

“I promise. The village is my home.”

“Adelaide!” I began to pull away. I checked to make sure no one would see me emerging from the foliage.

“Adelie. Don’t go,” he whispered. It stole my breath.

“I promised you: I’ll be back.” The first tear rolled out of my eye just before I pulled my hand free and jumped out of the tree. I landed hard on my feet. “Coming!” I said in English, loud enough so I hoped my mother heard. I brushed the wetness off my face and made sure there were no leaves clinging to my skirt or scarf before I walked back to the house.

I didn’t look back at the tree. I couldn’t.

I went to Kinci’s mother’s house after dinner, just before dark. It was a time when only immediate family visited each other, not a time for polite company. It was the time when Kinci’s mother always told me to come so she could braid my hair.

I sat as I had so many times, on the soft floor with her rounded knees at my ears. She undid the old braids and started anew; Kinci knelt on the floor next to me, helping her. They kept tilting my head one way or the other as they braided, and my neck was a familiar kind of stiff from trying to hold still. My hair was so different from the other girls’, so slippery in comparison, but Kinci’s mother was willing to do it. Haadha Meti had braided my hair my whole life, ever since we arrived in the village. She took pity on me and my two-year-old tangles while my own mother fussed night and day over the implacable baby that my sister Mary had been. Kinci and I got our first braids on the same day, matching rows of neat, parallel braids ending in twists. Haadha Meti said she had to try putting all sorts of things in my hair before she could get the twists to stay properly.

The fire flickered its shadows over the uneven wooden walls, and Kinci’s mother told us stories like she always did. Kinci had to lean back frequently to give herself a break; her pregnant belly looked even bigger when she stretched.

“Almost done, Adelie,” said Haadha Meti.

She had taken extra care this time, parting my hair precisely and weaving small, careful braids. I could feel her twisting the ends so they stayed put. “Are you making it extra fancy, Haadha Meti? It feels very elegant.”

“There,” she said. Both she and Kinci stepped back to look at me. I stood up, feeling self-conscious at their staring. I ran my fingers over the thin lines that crossed my scalp.

“Beautiful,” said Kinci. She tweaked the ends of a few braids to lay straighter.

Haadha Meti swatted Kinci’s hands away. “You look much more grown up, Adelie. You can go forth into the world and represent our village well.” She bent over to kiss my forehead.

It felt like she was sending me off for a wedding. “I’ll be back, Haadha Meti, I promise.”

Her eyes looked like they didn’t believe me. “May God grant that,” is all she said.

Kinci and I walked in the dark to her house on the other side of the village. Her little brother escorted us, but he stayed several feet behind, kicking rocks. The night air smelled of rain; we pulled our long scarves closer around our shoulders. Kinci and I walked arm in arm, like we had the night before her wedding. She was eager to go home now, but she had been so nervous that day.

“How’s the baby? Still kicking?”

“Not so bad right now,” she said. “I think he calmed down listening to Haadha’s stories.”

“You still think it’s a boy?”

She ran her hand down the side of her swollen belly. It was so strange—I knew her hands as well as I knew my own, but this Kinci was different from the little girl I’d grown up with. I could see it in her eyes and her face; every day she was changing into someone beyond me.

“I’m sure it’s a boy. Solomon’s family always has boys first. Also, my dream.”

I nodded. She had told me about her dream two months earlier, when we were alone doing chores and she’d said how afraid she was to have this baby, afraid to go through childbirth, afraid to become a mother. She had become so terrified, as she talked, that her hands started to shake and she couldn’t shuck any more corn. I hugged her until the crying stopped, but I hadn’t known what to say. That was before I knew I had to leave.

“I’m sorry I’ll miss the baby’s birth,” I said. “I’ll have to bring back something special for him from Carolina. What should it be?”

Kinci laughed and thought for a minute. “One of those funny hats your dad sometimes wears.” Everyone in the village thought my dad’s blue Marines’ baseball cap was funny.

“All right,” I told her. “I’ll bring back a funny hat for this little one. He can wear it with pride all over the village.” I hugged her good night around the mound of her belly.

Then my house was all packed, and it was time to go.

We walked from our house out into the sunlight: Dad first, then Mother, Cassie, and Marmee. I lingered. Each of us carried a suitcase, and we also had woven bags, the kind the women used to hold seeds during planting season, only ours now held books to read on the trip and fruit to eat and a change of underwear, just in case something happened to our luggage.

Everyone was to walk with us to Nekemte, and my family would catch a bus from there for the first leg of our trip. There wasn’t a village custom to describe what to do when a family moved away. So, after much discussion, the village elders had decided to follow the custom for when a daughter leaves to marry someone from a village far away. I could tell my father was uncomfortable with that innovation, but I felt glad there was some protocol that could be adapted even if it didn’t really fit.

I had never before seen a house as empty as ours. The dirt floor looked smooth and interminable, like it had doubled in size; the crooked legs of our table looked like the bones of a skeleton, and the two cots were like dead animals against the walls. The thatch roof didn’t have the usual odds and ends hanging down—no herbs drying, rustling. Even my dad’s books were gone from his shelves. The house smelled of ash and wool like normal, but it was clear, for once, of smoke, and without the haze I could plainly see the sooty thatch above the cold fire pit.

“What’s happening to our house?” I asked suddenly from just inside the doorway. My parents turned back to look at me. Behind them, my mother’s bright Carolina sunflowers leaned in their usual angle away from the wall of the house, but it looked as if they were reaching toward my mother, trying to cling to her before she left them.

Mother waved me forward impatiently. “We gave it to the village elders. Come on, Adelaide. We have to get there before noon or we might miss the bus.”

I gripped the edge of the doorway as I stepped out of the house, into the common space of the village. One of the men took the suitcase from me, and I finally walked forward, toward my family and the gathered villagers. I felt like I’d forgotten something, and I kept clutching my bag, my pockets, my beaded bracelet, to see if it was all there.

“What are you wearing?” Kinci asked when she joined us.

“Clothes like they wear in Carolina. Aren’t they strange?”

My father had brought back three identical khaki skirts for Mother, Mary, and me, and a shorter dress for Cassie. My skirt landed at the middle of my calf, slightly shorter than I was used to. The fabric itself was thicker than the village dress, and I couldn’t walk in it as easily. Our blouses were different colors but matching styles for the three of us—short sleeves, buttons, collars. My light blue blouse was puffy at the shoulders and tight under my armpits. Mary and I had fastened all the buttons, up to the highest one that pinched the skin at our throats, but then Mother told us we could undo one button—just one, she repeated. Mother carried our shoes in her woven bag. She said we didn’t need to wear them until the bus picked us up from the market.

Kinci pulled at my skirt and fingered the sleeve on my blouse. “They look strange. But not bad, I guess. At least, I am pretty sure Maicaah doesn’t think they look bad.” Maicaah stood several feet away, staring. I couldn’t quite understand his expression, so I laughed at him with Kinci.

A village elder made a speech about bonds that went beyond blood, and then my father made a speech expressing gratitude for their generosity, and then the singing began. It felt like a holiday with all the singing, the way it had when we accompanied Ibsituu last year, only now we were singing a mixture of songs from harvest, church, and festivals instead of just the traditional wedding songs. The elderly women marched my sisters and me up to the front of the crowd with our mother. I pulled Kinci with us, but she held back.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I can’t,” she said in a low voice, as if she didn’t want to be overheard.

“What? Why not? Everyone is coming. Only the oldest women are staying behind.”

“And the young women who are heavy with children.” Her arms rested on her middle. “My mother and Solomon agreed that I shouldn’t walk to Nekemte today. I have to stay here.”

I hadn’t thought what it would be like to actually say good-bye to her. I didn’t know what it would be like to walk to town without her, to not be able to tell her about it right afterward. It would be so long before I saw her again. How would I remember all the things I had to tell her? “My sister,” I said.

Kinci started to cry as well, wiping away tears with her pink palms. “Stop it. The baby doesn’t like me crying.”

We hugged, gripping each other tightly. The beads of her necklace pressed against my collar bone, and my stomach bumped against the bulk of her belly. I felt the baby kick, and I jumped back. We laughed together, looking down at her stomach.

“Come, Adelaide,” my father called. The front of the procession was already beyond the farthest of the village houses, and there were only a few people left to make up the end of the crowd.

“Come back soon, Adelie,” said Kinci.

I hugged her again, leaning into the sharp pain from her beads, then wiped away my eyes so I could see clearly and ran toward the front of the procession to join my family.

My mother didn’t speak the whole walk to Nekemte. She stared straight ahead, as if there was nothing to see; she wore her old, odd straw hat that shaded her face with crisscrosses. My father walked hand in hand with the village elders, singing loudly with them and joining each new song as the previous one finished.

Mary, Cassie, and I followed, the three of us in a row, me in the middle. The road was fine dust under my feet, and the cotton-soft top layer rose in puffs with each step to cover our clothes and skin. I could feel the grit settling on my face and in my teeth. First Cassie took my hand, and then I grabbed Marmee’s. I felt like Jethro’s daughter in that story from the Bible.

We walked away from our thatch-roof home, away from the cluster of open-air ovens buried in the open space at the center of the village, away from the little stone-covered grave on the hill, away from the cape chestnut and the fig tree and the stream.

I could see Maicaah’s oblong head in front of us, where he was walking a few steps behind the village elders. He was eating a pomegranate, periodically flicking bits of fruit skin into the shrubs. He didn’t once look back at me. I hoped the elders wouldn’t realize he wasn’t singing.

The group’s singing gradually became a murmur as we came to the edge of Nekemte. When we reached the square it faded away altogether, and we just stood there, self-conscious in front of the town dwellers. Everyone waited with us for the bus, a whole crowd of us, but no one knew what to do while we waited. It was a while before we saw the moving cloud of dust on the horizon—the bus that was approaching to take us away.

My mother took out of her bag lace-trimmed socks and stiff shoes and handed them to me. Then she pointed us to the well in the center of the square.

We waited our turn for the water. It was cool to the touch, and I first drank some and carefully splashed some over my face, wiping the drips off my chin with the bottom of my blouse. Then my sisters and I leaned into each other as we each balanced on one foot to wash the other one. I poured a little water on my right foot and rubbed away the muddy trickles with my sock, careful to use every drop under the watchful eyes of the Nekemte women. I could feel their triple scorn for us: we were with the villagers, we were so strangely white, and we were using their water to clean something as innocent as dirt off our feet. The socks stuck to my damp skin when I tried to put them on, and the shoes made my feet feel clamped in.

Cassie splashed a handful of water on her clean foot and let the excess run off, not even trying to catch it and reuse it.

“Cassie, don’t be wasteful,” I scolded her in Oromiffa for the benefit of our spectators.

Marmee dried Cassie’s foot quickly and tied the shoelaces for her. Our feet looked odd in shoes, with thin bows erect at odd angles. Mother had taught us the knots, but we had rarely used them.

“It is time,” my father said to the villagers. The eldest of the elders gave a last speech and led us all in one last song. Then the women said goodbye to my father and mother and hugged my sisters and me. Some of the men were crying as well. Kinci’s littlest sister clung to my legs until her father pried her away.

“Good bye, Adelie,” said Maicaah from two feet away. His hands were on his hips, and he kept his distance, as if we were little more than strangers. I searched his face for some sign of our promise, but there was none.

“Good bye.” My sight clouded with tears, and I turned to follow my father. Maicaah stopped me and put his arms around me for a quick hug. I barely registered the flat sinews and muscles of his arms and his chest before he pulled away again. I heard a few adults clear their throats around us.

“Come back soon,” he whispered, a little hoarse.

“I will.” I smiled at him, blinking at the blur that threatened my sight of his face. Then I turned and boarded the bus.

My sisters and I had never been on a bus before, and we had marveled at them along with the rest of the village kids as they snaked their way through the market town. Sometimes we had ridden with Dad on his motorcycle for short trips, but now the motorcycle was staying in the village, a bequest to the elders, to help with hospital visits.

I wasn’t sure what to think of the long stretch of the bus aisle cluttered with bags and animals, people sitting one behind the other like they were waiting in a line, the seats with stuffing and springs that clawed their way out of the leather covers. The windows were smudged and streaked inside and out. The seats we found were fenced in by cages of chickens in the aisle. My sisters and I shared a seat behind our parents.

We waved, and the villagers waved back: Tlahoun, Bikeltu, Haadha Meti, Kinci’s father, other elders, Kinci’s little sister and brother, Cassie’s friends, Maicaah. The bus jolted forward, and we waved out the window until the villagers were out of sight and Nekemte faded into the horizon.

It was a few hours later, when Marmee was asleep against the window and Cassie was asleep against my shoulder, that I felt something in the pocket of my skirt. I pulled out several small, jewel-red lumps: pomegranate seeds. Five of them. I held them carefully in my palm with my fingers curled around them to make sure they didn’t fall.

I had no idea when Maicaah had slipped them in my pocket. When he was giving me a hug? I hoped no one had seen.

They were so pretty, luminous really. And from Maicaah, the last thing I had from him. I remembered the feeling, so brief, of his hug. In front of everyone else, even his mother. It seemed a sacrilege to eat the seeds and make them disappear, to have no more physical trace of their small, gleaming beauty, no more trace of him, of the hug, of the large group in the square waiting to wave us away.

I carefully sucked the flesh off each seed, using my teeth to clean away the clinging fibers that I knew would rot soon, the fruit that wasn’t meant to last. When I was done, the seed cores lay pale yellow in my hand, like tiny dried bones. I cupped my palm carefully around them and put them back in my pocket for safekeeping. Every few minutes I checked my pocket and recounted the seeds to make sure none had fallen out. The chickens in the aisle watched me, jealous, but no one in my family noticed.

The bus took us to Addis Ababa, descending into the city around dinner time. It was already dark, but I could tell from the lights and the number of buildings that this was a city larger than I could imagine. It smelled of diesel exhaust and hot metal, like my dad’s motorcycle but stronger. We were speckled with chicken poop and feathers. I still had dirt in my teeth and inside my nose. The tightness of my shoes echoed in a headache.

We stayed that night at the home of some missionaries, white like us. The next morning they took us to the airport.

I remember the signs at the airport in Addis had translations in five different languages—English, Italian, Arabic, French, and Portuguese. There were men wearing elaborate turbans, suits and ties in brown and black, or colorful long tunics like I’d never seen before. There were fewer women, but they were in all sorts of styles too—most in dress suits with hats and gloves, some in long skirts, a few in burqas, two in Chinese gowns, one woman in a beautiful ensemble that my mother called a sari. The stewardesses all wore matching light blue outfits with white gloves and blue hats. We spent the whole flight with our faces pressed against the airplane windows, marveling at the world passing by beneath us. The city of Addis and its mountains gave way to tiny-animal herds on dusty plains, then desert, and then we were in a landscape of clouds.

We flew to Rome and had to wait there for two days before we could fly to London. We went on one sightseeing excursion in Rome. There were so many people, and the noise was deafening. We stayed the rest of the time in our room, playing cards. The suitcase with our American clothing hadn’t arrived with us, so we washed our blouses and underwear in the bathroom sink. My skirt still had the speckled white outline of a stain from the chicken poop. The pomegranate seeds were still safely tucked into the right-hand pocket.

At the airport in London, all the people looked as if they had been left out in the sun too long and been bleached of all their color. I couldn’t stop staring.

“There are so many white people,” I said to Marmee.

A woman standing five feet away frowned at us, and I realized that she could understand. English was no longer our family’s secret language. Here everyone else spoke it too, and I felt exposed somehow, or betrayed.

“Everyone looks just like us,” said Cassie. “We don’t stand out here.” It made me anxious too—as if, camouflaged, we would be lost in the crowd.

“Excuse me, love,” said someone behind us, with a luggage cart. We turned to stare, confused about what the man needed. “Pardon me; I just need to get by.” We moved out of his way and stood back against the wall. I felt like a stray animal, stuck in the path of an oncoming herd. I felt like I was moving as sluggishly as in a nightmare.

The next day we flew from London to New York and from New York to Atlanta. By the time we arrived in Atlanta, we’d been in five cities on three different continents in the course of six days. My head was so overwhelmed with unfamiliar sounds, colors, smells, textures, that I couldn’t take in anything more that was new. Cassie had broken out in a rash. Marmee’s eyes had been glazed for days. My feet had numerous blisters from the stiff shoes, and my braids had gotten fuzzy from sleeping in strange places. My arm was red around the cuff of my bracelet beads; Dad said it was from swelling caused by airplane altitude. I’d gripped the seeds so often that my mother noticed and asked me what I had in my pocket. I didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask again.

When we arrived in Atlanta, I could only feel relief that the journey was almost over.

Two aunts, three uncles, and five cousins met us in Atlanta. I remember thinking how white-pink they looked, how yellow their hair was. They greeted us effusively, in a clump, everyone close together, talking at us. I smiled as best as I could and held tightly to my sisters’ arms.

They drove us, in a caravan of three cars, to my mother’s home town: Greenville, South Carolina. I was in the middle of the front seat of my uncle’s car, sandwiched between my father and my aunt, whose name I couldn’t remember, while my uncle drove. The adults talked around me as if I wasn’t there.

I leaned to the side just enough to reach into my pocket. I ran my fingertip over each seed, counting them again: feeling the small, smooth pits, the one pointy end, and the other more rounded side. They were so slight I was afraid they’d slip through the seam of the pocket and fall to the floorboard of my uncle’s car and be lost forever. I gathered them into my fist and kept my hand wedged in my pocket.

Eventually I fell asleep on my father’s shoulder, thinking of Maicaah’s head against the wide sky as we walked to the market town, singing as if it were a holiday.

I just had to hold on until I turned eighteen. And then I’d go back. I had promised I would.

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