My mother's hands
Mama asked me something in the kitchen and did not wait for an answer. I think she knows.
Mama was cutting ugu in the kitchen and I was pounding, and without looking up she said, that your friend, the one who walks with you, he is a good boy? And I said yes. And she said good, and went on cutting, and that was all.
I have replayed it forty times. The one who walks with you. Not the one from choir, not Emeka, not your friend from town. The one who walks with you. She has seen us walking. Of course she has; this is Owerri, the whole city has seen us walking. But she chose those words and she did not look up.
Her hands. I watched them the whole time, because I could not look at her face. They are the hands that fed four children through the years when NEPA came on for an hour a day. They are steady. They did not stop. If she knows, and I think she knows, then she has decided something with those hands, and she has decided to keep cutting.
I do not know what to do with hope. I am not built for it. I am writing this down in case I am right, so that later I can look back and say: she knew in August, and she kept cutting.