Laban Carrick Hill

Groundnut Soup World Writers Blog

Senegalese-American Writer Karima Grant

Born to a Senegalese mother and a St. Lucian father, Karima Grant is author of two children’s picture books (including the 2006 Sofie and the City), and a contributor to a number of young adult anthologies, journals, and magazines. In addition to facilitating leadership workshops throughout Africa, Karima also teaches literature and writing classes to developing writers. She lives in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and three children. She is currently completing her second adult fiction novel.

Excerpt from Grant’s novel Teggin

Clare – January 1982

The house in Goa Residence was unforgiving, defiantly squatting in the slickly kept garden of sweet grass, swaying palm, coconut, and date fronds. Partially concealed by the towering concrete jasmine and bougainvillea covered walls, its insides were musky with the scents of the sandalwood incense cones and the gardenia that laced its courtyard. The house groaned from the weight and number of the hands that kept it: 13 maids rubbing to shining the imported teak wood interiors from a country they could neither pronounce nor imagine; 10 garden hands tending the lavish garden with the imported soil nutrients and regular watering even as the country entered its second decade of drought; four chauffeurs to support the comings and goings of the household and its four luxury automobiles (all privately owned, the chauffeurs were known to boast; state cars were another matter); and of course the innumerable kitchen staff, producing most of the requisite delicacies that fed the gargantuan appetites and ambitions that lived within the house. At its worst, the Petit Palais was a silent, teeming city; at its best, it was a well greased empire with Maryse Kane, her mother-in-law, fixed firmly in its center.

It was rumored that Moussa had chosen the Northeastern territories’ fiercest tribesmen as night guards. Reputed for their unflinching loyalty, the purple dye of their indigo robes and turbans seeped into their pitch black skin, casting them in a permanent midnight tint, so that when Clare awoke from nightmare, the movement of night bore human shape and an inhuman glow.

Clare sat up in bed, hands clutching the bed sheets. She pulled her thin legs to her chest and counted her breaths, a habit left over from childhood and its profusion of nighttime terrors. Only when her breath had slowed, the numbers peaking, and she knew herself safely away from nightmare, did she reach for the light.

Christ. Ablaye slept soundly, his head nestled in a cove of pillow and sheet. Had he noticed her bucking? Had he reached to pull her away from nightmare? Clare rolled her eyes, and reached for his cigarette pack on the bedside table.

Smoking (for women anyway, she had remarked) had been one of the first habits Ablaye had politely, repeatedly encouraged her to leave behind in America.

“At least at first,” he had soothed when Clare had sharply raised her eyebrows, “at least until everyone knows you and can forgive little things like a cigarette every now and then.”

Foolish, thought Clare now. Months already, and don’t they all know me? And not a soul likes me. She looked once more to Ablaye. One cigarette, one lousy cigarette, she decided and extracted it from the pack.

Grabbing a silk kimono (another on the long list of no-nos… Silk robes in public, God forbid!), she pushed the remaining pack into her pocket, and moved not noiselessly from the bedroom, through the small hallway and into the courtyard.

The moon was only a waning memory of its former self, casting the courtyard in a luminous whiteness that emboldened the gardenias. Clare lit a cigarette.

Funny how the moon in Virginia could be the very same moon here. All those years, watching it from her bedroom window, one more thing in her life cold and distant. Yet here, its eventual death and rebirth signaled the start of the season of fasting. Jesus, thought Clare, a country of near starving people voluntarily starving themselves some more. And they wonder why they’re still backwards.

Cigarette to her lip, Clare pulled at it impatiently. What the hell made the season of fasting any different from any of the other 365 days a year? And seasons? They had to be joking! The days dragged bitterly from hot to hotter, she thought, loosening the kimono.

Her eyes wandered upwards to the house’s second floor, to her mother-in-law’s room. I wonder if she’s up. If she’s up somewhere, watching me out her window. Or if that creepy servant girl of hers is peeping. Clare shivered. She had caught Bintou more than once in her drawers, touching the silk underwear, sniffing at her perfume bottles. Jesus Christ, she thought again, flicking ash away, where am I?

She sat on the bench, looking at the house that surrounded her on four sides. Not much different from home. She recalled her arrival, the black Mercedes easing down the long driveway, the house coming into view, ending the promise of the driveway bordered by all those bright bushes with an abrupt stone finality. She had half expected to find Louis Fury waiting: small, colorless, hair the exact steel of his eyes, the exact silver color of the dime pieces it was rumored he fed himself every day (Clare knew better. So much of the mountain’s cool thin air ran through his veins it was a wonder he wasn’t blue). He could be here now, she said, looking at the entryway to the house. Standing there, hands holding themselves across the small of his back like I was muddy disappointment and he didn’t dare get them dirty.

Clare shook her head, the light brown hair she had cut in a pageboy falling around her ivory colored face. That night -- already worlds ago, damn Ablaye! -- Louis’ voice had been gruff, and after her years in New York, impossibly Southern.

“Daddy?” she had screamed into the phone filled with impossible hope fueled by the frenzy of the champagne and clamor of their going away party.

“Hello?” Plugging her ears, rushing to the bedroom door, carrying the phone in her hands. “Daddy, it’s me.”

“Clare?” Not disbelieving, not wondrously, Clare had known. There was not one bit more of discovery left in this world for Louis Fury. “What in the name of God’s good earth would have you call me at this hour?”

Because it’s been four years, Daddy. Four long years, don’t you miss me?

“Why that’s just it, I’m going to be married. I am getting married!”

There was a pause, and Clare had feared the line had gone dead.

“Did you hear me, Daddy? Married, and he’s just wonderful – absolutely perfect!”

Louis Fury, the last pillar erected by those free colored men of the mountains, His voice did not waver.

“You finish your studies? You find work?”

“The school’ll mail the diploma.” I would have invited you, but would you have come? “Work? We-ell yes and no, but that’s another story… But him, Daddy, him!”

“What you mean another story? My money foot the bills for all this storytelling, what you become up there, girl, a damn storyteller? It’s an unreasonable time of the night! What’s this foolishness about? Marriage? By God, Clare Fury, no shotgun in there?”

Clare had flushed then, thinking of the baby her father still had no knowledge of.

“No, no . You don’t understand! HelovesmeandIlovehim!” A rush of words to get it all out, to have it make sense, but instead they had tumbled from her mouth haphazardly. “He’s from Africa, Daddy, but not jungle like we would think! His father for heaven sake’s is in government; he’s the Prime Minister, actually, and he has just finished a master’s at Columbia, and he is wonderful, simply wonderful! And his name is Ablaye, well really Abdoulaye, but we call him Ablaye for short—“

“Goin’ where? With whom? Clare Maty Fury, have you lost what little sense you was born with? “

“Daddy, it’s not like what you think. His father’s the prime minister, I said! And Ablaye is likely to become one too.” Can’t you see it? I am on my way! Life has finally named me hers.

“Abla-who? What on earth kind of name is that, Clare Maty Fury! What kind of savage have you gone and gotten yourself mixed up with, a Muss-lim or some type of Hin-doo?”

“I-I told you, he is African—“

“African! I always said you did always have the sense of a pea! What the hell you up there doing with an African after all I did for you, girl!”

“ I am in love, and he wants to marry me, Daddy and aren’t you happy for me and we will go there to live, we are going there in a month to live…” Happily ever after, Daddy, happily ever after.

“I don’t give a gilded rat’s ass if he’s the Goddamn King of the Jungle and you his Jane! This my repayment for all the investment I put in to you and your life. We talkin’ your inheritance, Clare, your inheritance! Thrown away for some cheap lowdown Black monkey ass selling you on his piece of jungle kingdom? What you playin’ at, Emperor Jones! Never expected much at all from you, Clare, but never this! Why, you proving yourself to be nothing but commonness, no better than the trash that surrounds these hills!”

And so it had continued, on and on, with Clare holding the phone a little ways from her ears, standing in the abuse falling around her like rain. Now, in the garden, Clare flicked the cigarette from her fingertips (they will complain tomorrow, probably dust the cigarette for tell tale fingerprints), and stood up. I never worry about you Daddy. You’ll live forever, living this long without a heart. She tossed her head at the memory of the phone line going dead in her ear, the flatness of the dial tone finally echoing the severance she had known life held for her. You have no people, Clare Fury.

Nevermind, Daddy, she had thought then. You’re wrong as always. I have someone now. Someone who loves me. Hadn’t Ablaye claimed Clare from the first time he had seen her? Hadn’t he forgiven all her imperfections, even the baby?

You could never see it, Daddy. Never understand what belonging might mean. You and your old ghosts of the mountains. All your people dead, buried, or crazy. I don’t want to be little Clare Fury, carrying all that. Daddy, someone chose me, can’t you see? Someone chose me and took me far the hell away from you and your mountain. I can be different now, I am finally free.

In the garden, Clare stood, casting a long glance upward to the bedrooms of the main house. You’ll know anyway, won’t you? You’ll know it was my cigarette, even though it’s Ablaye’s brand. Aren’t you lucky? One more thing to hate me for. One more damned thing.

Doesn’t matter, Clare told herself. Doesn’t matter one little bit. I will always have Ablaye. Always, always, always. And she turned and walked back into the apartment.


But she didn’t sleep.

The neighborhood mosque called out the dawn prayer. From the window of the bedroom, Clare watched, seeing and not seeing as the night guards bent and folded in their ministrations. Some place. Some faith. A little bit of hullabaloo from the mosque and everyone within earshot fell to their knees. The hall and walk spaces of the palace littered with people in various states of prostration. Ablaye had reminded her time and time again that she was never to cross the way of the praying, but Clare found it damn near impossible with a people willing to drop everything to grovel before God.

She had even caught Ablaye at it, one evening, and had laughed out loud.

“Since when?” she had queried, but Ablaye had shut his eyes and continued mouthing his prayers. When he was finished, he folded up the prayer rug and placed it gently under the bed and got into bed.

“Recent purchase?” she inquired lightly.

Ablaye had sighed and turned on his side. “Yes.”

“I never knew you were so…” she moved her hands in the air as if feeling for the word.

“I am home now, Clare.” He had said now simply. Tiredly.

Her heart had beat too fast in her chest and so she had slipped into bed silently. What harm can it do? She had told herself against the rapid beating of her heart. It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. She had reassured herself.

This place made her jumpy, she thought now. Brought out the absolute worse in her. No wonder Houraye had no plans on coming back, despite whatever she claimed in all those letters she wrote. Too many people, Gods, and ghosts all under one roof.

Growing up the only daughter (the fact that she was not a son tragedy enough it seemed), of the last of the last of a dying race, Clare recognized in the portraits that filled Goa Residence the same obsession with memory and forbearers she had run from. The pictures and portraits her father looked to from over the familiar crystal snifter of Johnny Walker Gold Label, were nearly identical to the red skinned Kanes, faces hidden beneath turbans and fabric, holding themselves and their guns with the arrogance of self made power. Underneath each portrait a name embossed in gold plate. Ancestral names, names given to all the boy children, echoing each other over and over again: Ibrahim Kane, Abdoulaye Kane, Moussa Kane. Ibrahim Kane. Abdoulaye Kane. Moussa Kane. Kane is close to God, they whispered in tones so hushed she could confuse them for the creak of the floorboards.

“My father’s people are from the far north of the country.” Ablaye had explained. Yeah, thought Clare, but they’re all here now. Ghosts united in their sentry of the house, of the Petit Palais as the stronghold of the Kanes.

What had been so different about her father’s people? Preservation specialists named Pride, Bullet, and Law who had long ago carved a society in the mountains far away from the creeping stain of slavery. Building their mansions so spitting close to God, the townspeople had claimed them unworldly. Piercing grey eyes, sight running from this world into the next, they could be cousins to the men on the wall of her new home, Clare knew. Like Goa Residence and the rest of the capital, her father’s people had forever turned its back on anything and anyone lesser or inferior. Like the Kanes, they lived forever from those portraits.

Not a damn difference between them and Louis, really. Both obsessed with themselves and their past. At least Moussa had his sons. Three of them at that. Louis had become the lone descendent, if you didn’t count Clare, and Louis had certainly stopped counting Clare long ago. But still, the houses were the same: contemptuous, insolent, the Fury home staring down time and the town below, withering both to broken and brittle leaves the wind scattered on Louis’ front wraparound porch.

Here, she thought, it’s the country. Moussa has a whole damn country at his disposal. The thought made her smile. Why Louis Fury, you should be jealous. Moussa Kane, ol’ Mr Jungle King himself has you beat!

Claustrophobic, all of it, Clare knew. No space for breath or life. When she was fourteen, she had watched as her father ordered men, both rusty and colored and dirty and white to construct and erect colossal pillars in the entry to his mausoleum. He will keep me here with him, she thought miserably. He will keep me with him forever. Then and there she had changed the shape of her dreams, forcing it from belonging to escape. Escape from Louis, the mountain, from a history that would choke her.

Clare moved from her place in the window and undid the kimono. She got into bed beside Ablaye, who obligingly, if unconsciously threw a heavy dark arm upon her.

Turning her head, Clare’s eyes fell upon the portrait of Abdullah Kane, Abdoulaye the 1st – a great grandfather namesake Ablaye had once explained to her, but Clare only half listening had played with his ear instead-- whose shadow dominated the room. As always he stood at attention, his robes muted only by the sepia tones of the portrait. His eyes, like the old velvet Jesus portrait in Mrs Green’s living room back in New York, peered at Clare unabashedly.

Yet more disapproval, she thought to herself, tiredly. Wasn’t there any other emotion in this damned country?

Lying next to Ablaye, Clare closed her eyes against the lamplight, but still the elder Kane pressed himself into her thoughts.

No, she sighed. Ghosts were as unlikely to vacate the premises here as they were back in Virginia. Nor leave Clare alone for that matter.

Now, with the small light weak against the stiffness of the teak furniture, Clare looked at Abdullah Kane and set her jaw.

It’s not over yet, pal. You’re not rid of me that fast, she sighed and kissing Ablaye’s shoulder, counted until the nightmare faded away to dark.