Mami was a terrible dancer. She balanced on those banyan legs like a newborn giraffe, and even her years on land, it seemed, couldn’t change that muscle-deep distrust of open air and hard ground. Laarin is famous for its feast days and dances—at least, it was, before the Tanger blockade stopped the flow of foreign ships and the musicians who lined our circular plaza and played until sunrise. But she sang like a summer storm, and Laarin opened its heart to her in those blessed days. That’s what we call them now, the last free trading season before the Tanger invasion of the southern Ofu territories and the blockade of the Egun Bay. The last time we had our music. Not the gods’ chants of Ofu priests and priestesses or the rolling drums of the Highat tribes to the east, but a Laarin beat: polyglot, inventive, wild, and irreverent. To us, this was Yemaya’s music, no matter what the official Ofu liturgy held. And my mother was one of ours, though Laarin had watched her with careful eyes since the day she rose from the shallows, clad in a simple shift of white. She had never tried to appear human, which angered and embarrassed me and made me love her even more fiercely. She was a child of the sea, a daughter of Yemaya, a goddess stripped of her skin and locked behind one uncanny face.
When Mami whipped us with her song, Daddy and I went dancing. We did Omozgo two-step, and the broom jumpers of the people he had traded with farther up the northeastern coast, and the jerk-motion hat tricks he had learned right here as a Laarin smuggler’s boy. Daddy might be a sailor, but he was at home on steady ground. He tried to ask Mami to dance when she sat silently on the border wall, but his tongue was as clumsy as his feet were fluent. He stuttered his way through: “Would you do me—the honor?—of da—”
Mami took pity on him and held her long fingers against his full lips. “Of course not, but I am honored by your asking.”
Daddy liked to claim he lost his speech around Mami because he could never forget he was talking to a “princess” of the kingdom below water. Right around the time he died, I realized that her status had never intimidated him. It was his guilt. He wielded his water wife as though she were the talking tortoise of the tale: to get better work, a better house, better wine. But he always knew Yemaya would have her due.
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A year after those blessed days, when the Tanger blockade had set the full force of its cannons and steel against us, my divine grandmother made her displeasure known. It started with heavy rains, far too late in the season. Then the rain stopped, and the fish stocks of the bay plummeted. Even the seaweed beds died of a mysterious disease that left them inedible, stinking of eggs. I would go with the neighborhood girls to collect larvae beds of water flies from the shallows and bake them into cakes. Daddy was dismissive: “Poor-man’s food,” he said, and went out again to pray at Olokun’s rites. He came back with millet cake and red beans from the offering and we ate in secret, before anyone could see our prosperity. He told us that Olokun wouldn’t let these light-skinned foreigners track their bloody boot prints across the Egun Peninsula. The great kingdom of Ofu would stop them. But the Tanger with their steel and cannon and deity of gunpoint benevolence ran across the southern plains as though they were in a feast day footrace. They stopped at the southern mouth of the Egun River. They squatted down in the mud and watched. Daddy prayed and offered to Olokun. But he returned from his fishing night after night with a net full of empty crab shells and old fishhooks. Everyone’s catch was bad, but his could have glowed from the bad mojo. All of Laarin kept clear of us, as though Yemaya’s punishment would touch them if they lingered.
One day, the fishermen returned to harbor even more long-faced than usual. An armada had been spotted just on the horizon: Tanger steel ships, cannons bristling like teeth from the hulls. The mandible of the Tanger. With the land army encamped a few days’ ride south in Ofu, we were now trapped in their jaws. It would be easy work for the armada.
The whole city gathered for our war rites, which had not been invoked in nearly a century. We sang to Yemaya, sacrificed our best livestock, and threw garlands of white flowers into the water. For a week, Laarin begged our own Yemaya for her help, but the sea kept her counsel, quiet and sterile as a puddle. Mami stayed home, her lips pursed, her back to the sea.
“Mami,” I asked her, fear so hot on my skin that it made me brave, “why is Mami Wata so angry with us? Why won’t she defend us?”
She gave me a cool stare. I swallowed back the terror I always felt at these moments when her alien remoteness took her too far for me to follow.
When she finally spoke, it was in smugglers’ pidgin. “You don’t take from Yemaya,” she said, “if you’d still like to sleep.” The phrase was common among Laarin smugglers. I had heard it whispered in reference to my father. But I had refused to understand until that moment.
“But how could he have taken you? Didn’t you come to him?”
Her eyes came back to me and crinkled at the edges, as though she really were human. “I did. And he made sure I had to stay. He never gave me the chance to choose.”
Daddy had started drinking again. He never did handle responsibility well, and guilt is the heaviest kind. He hoarded bootleg palm liquor instead.
I knew what she meant, though I had struggled to avoid thinking of it most of my life. I had known since the day they fought and she threatened him with the locksmith: the charmed iron key and the strongbox that he checked every night but never opened. He was terrified of her leaving him. So he made sure that she never could.
I said to my mother in the language just the two of us shared, “You’ve slept next to him insensible for a thousand nights. Why not take the key from his neck?”
“It burns my skin. It has a charm.”
“Why not ask me to do it?”
“Would I ask my own daughter to betray her own father? Have I been such a poor mother to you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Go back! Go back now! Can’t you see she’s killing us? If he’s too weak, then do it yourself.” We were sitting at the shore. She twisted herself to look at the water, as though it repelled her but drew her just the same.
“I will return there eventually. I am Yemaya’s daughter. But not yet. He needs me, Nena. He will die without me.”
I knew my father, knew how he looked at her, how he drank when she went to the water, how his gaze followed her like a moth follows the moon whenever she was in his sight. I knew Mami only told the truth.
I felt it again, as though I were losing myself, drowning in the storm that raged between them, as though I were not their daughter but a bit of seaweed, a tossed spar splintered from a wrecked ship. I filled my lungs with air and dug my nails into the soft skin of my wrist. “If you don’t go, we might all die.”
My mother, she did not even answer me. The waves heard me, though. They said, “Come, daughter, come. Make it right, if they will not.”