The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

It is April in Caldwell. Wayetu overhears Mam’s name from another room again. Sometimes, when it rains, she thinks that she hears her mother’s voice outside. She asks the others to tell her where Mam is. The answer is always the same: in New York. Wayetu asks to go there, though no one knows why, when “Liberia’s sweetness [is] incomparable” (6). She watches young boys and their Ol’ Pas going to the Atlantic to fish. Some boys watch the professional player Oppong Weah play soccer against Chelsea. Many of the boys walk alone to the markets, where they buy bushmeat and shoelaces—or plantains and eggplants from the farms in Nimba—for their Ol’ Mas. Young girls can pull water from the wells with buckets and balance them on their braided heads. They help wash the collard greens in kitchen sinks “in front of kitchen windows that [face] pepper gardens” (6). Wayetu, on her fifth birthday, is old enough now to pull water from the wells (though she has not yet gone) and to wash the greens. After she washes the greens once, Korkor, her family’s domestic servant, sends Wayetu away so that she will not ruin her birthday dress.