He gave Yemaya’s daughter a kiss in return for saving his life, even though she had come to him as a sea cow. But when he entered the water it was a pair of human arms that wrapped around his bare torso, and it was human lips, soft as clay, that touched his.
“Don’t you look at me, fisherman.” That was Daddy’s voice, imitating my mother. “Don’t you dare look.” And so he didn’t, not the whole while they spent in the warm water. But when they finished, he opened his eyes, just a slit, for just a peek—
All he saw was a sea cow’s sleek brown back as it dove for deeper water.
Eight months later, a woman walked out of the ocean. A woman with hair the color of a whitecap at the breakwater and a belly as shiny and round as an onyx cabochon. At that point in the story, Daddy always got quiet and soft. Not precisely remorseful, but his mouth full of a devastating awareness of what he had done.
“I had the advantage, Nena,” Mami told me once, in that singing tongue that belonged only to us and to the sea. “I knew his face in the moonlight, and he had loved me without ever knowing mine.”
“He knew one of your faces, Mami.”
At that her nose crinkled, a little joke between the two of us. “Nena, your father is a fisherman. He does not see the face of a fish any more than he can see the face of the mangrove.”
“The mangrove has a face?”
She sighed like a wind across the open sea. “Child, you cannot imagine how beautiful.”
Mami lived with us and cooked for us like a good Laarin fisherman’s wife. She and I took baskets of salted herring south every ten days to the great market on the nearby Ofu border. We stayed until sundown, when only a layer or two of fish sweated at the bottom of our great baskets, and the red canvas stalls lay in their deconstructed geometry on the packed earth of the international fairground. Mami would ask, “Is there anyone left to give us their money, Nena?” And I would reply, even when I could spy a few hearthwomen hurrying from last stall to last stall like panicked vultures, “No, I don’t see anyone, Mami.” The last few fish were for the beggars. I knew that, just as I knew we were never to tell Daddy. After the market guards were off drinking the day’s pay at the tavern boats docked in the placid north edge of the Egun River, we gave one herring each to anyone who approached us until we had no more left.
When we returned, Daddy would count the money, look at Mami, and mutter something about selling the stock too cheaply. Mami would pretend that she hadn’t heard, if it was a good day. If it was a bad day, he’d go on and on about shoddy business practices and make wild conjectures about how Mami spent the extra money. Food, wine, prostitutes of all genders, trinkets for me. I would try to intervene: “Daddy, don’t you want to hear a song I learned at market?” or “Daddy, why don’t we go to Uncle Uche’s tavern together?” When he’d really gotten going, even this last wasn’t enough to move him. He’d look at me as though I were a runt of a fish left straggling at the bottom of his boat. He’d take Mami’s hand and drag her into the bedroom and lock the door. Sometimes he’d hit me, sharp, between the ribs, and I would sit, gasping just like that fish. For years I sat watch outside that door, as though I could do something about whatever was happening inside. Their screams. Their silences.
One day, Mami shattered his wine jug against the wall. She pulled open the door so fast that I fell backward, staring up at her face, still as a mangrove’s. She stepped around me and walked out to the sea. She waded up to her waist in the waves, and no further, the white of her hip-cloth billowing around her. “Yemaya, Mami Wata, Mother,” she called, over and over, in that susurrating tongue, while I watched with my heart in my throat.
Daddy stumbled out of our two-room cottage and down to the shore, telling her to come back, begging her forgiveness, swearing his love. She ignored him until he gave up and went back inside. I stayed; I was always the stronger of the two of us. After the moon had risen high in the sky, she left the water. She climbed up that hill on legs that did not tremble, and paused like a ghost in the doorway, limned by the moonlight behind her. I crouched between them, forgotten, afraid I might not exist, afraid I was no one’s child.
“I went to find a locksmith,” she said, in a careful, clipped tone I would not hear again for years.
Daddy gasped as though she’d shot him with a Tanger cannon. He looked up at her and then down, disbelieving, at the wound: the iron key strung on a double cord of twisted rhinoceros leather that had never left his chest since I had known the world.
“I-it’s been charmed,” he said.
Mami’s lips curled up. He lurched to his feet and ran to the other room, where he kept the strongbox. I had never seen him open it, and he didn’t now. He just cursed in smugglers’ pidgin and squatted in front. He was so scared. I wanted to ask Mami what she’d done, but she stayed staring at the hollow space he had left, and I knew she could not see me. I cried for her, instead. I cried for the child they had never let me be.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Daddy got sober for a few years after that. Got sober and found religion, old Ofu style: he was baptized for Olokun, the god and goddess of the deep, the progenitor and partner of Laarin’s own Yemaya. He went out as a sailor and shrine-keeper on Ofu-sponsored deep-sea voyages to other islands and the Tanger coast, trips that lasted months and gave me and Mami plenty of time alone. No more night smuggling raids for Daddy’s drinking money. He was a respectable Laarin trader now. She remembered me, with Daddy gone. She smiled more, but not as wide. Daddy had moved us to a better house in a better part of town. It was also farther from the water. We stayed in our familiar hut until the days when the ship was due back, when we’d break out the fancy cloth and head scarves and cowrie ankle bands that he had bought for us, and clean the dust from the floor and the eaves of the two-story house in eastern Laarin, with real windows of thick, opaque glass.
When Daddy left, there was the mother tongue, the waves, and the deep. There was the water, which ran through me as it did my mother, though it had been transmuted by humanity.
“I’m weaker than you, Mami,” I told her.
“I cannot even put my head beneath the waves, Nena. It is you who are powerful.”
“You would be a goddess if he had not kept you here. I’m half human. I’m weak, like he is.”
“You think your human side makes you weak? Your father became weak, Nena, but he did not start that way.”
I could hold the lightning in my hands when I was thirteen. I could drink a rain cloud like a pint of palm wine, and the next morning my piss was orange as fire. But when I hovered in secret over a noontime pool of still water, the haunted eyes of a little girl stared back at me; her face faded into the scenery, like a ghost in her own life, barely there.
When I was fourteen, and the Tanger trade partnership turned into something quietly ominous, Daddy skipped the dry season’s trading expeditions. Mami and I worried that he’d go back to the taverns, but he stayed with us. He took me out among the mangroves and then to the breakwater so I could learn how to throw the nets and haul in a catch. He taught me how to knock a red-beaked parakeet from a tree with a slingshot and how to smoke out a wasps’ nest so that we could feast on the honey-soaked paper within. I felt some new, spiky thing growing within me over those long, hot afternoons, with their easy words and loamy silences. I was not just the daughter of a sailor and the granddaughter of a goddess: I was a girl whose eyes looked past the shoreline, and whose face was just coming into color. I don’t know if he saw it, but it wasn’t for him anymore, in any case. “Do you want to dance, child?” he would ask me some evenings, as he rowed us back along the mangrove coast. I always said yes. When we got back at sundown, he brought us to the town square.