Mother handled the photos with mostly casual interest, except for the ones that showed my sisters. Over these she paused, for an extremely long time, as if she were listening to small, silent confessions.

Finally I made mine. I told her he had died. She was strangely uncurious about the details, but I gave her most of them anyway.

She sat looking puzzled. “I have some pansies I need to set out,” she said then, and let the screen door bang as she walked out to the back porch. I followed, and found her in her old straw gardening hat, a trowel already in one hand and the flat of pansies balanced in the other. She ducked under the tangled honeysuckle toward the garden path, using her trowel like a machete to hack through some overgrown vines that crowded her jungly little porch. We marched purposefully down her little path to the lettuce bed by the gate, where she knelt in the leaf mold and began punching holes in the ground. I squatted nearby, watching. Her hat had a wide straw brim and a crown completely blown out, as if whatever was in her head had exploded many times.

“Leah says he would have wanted to go that way,” I said. “A blaze of glory.”

“I don’t give a damn what he would have wanted.”

“Oh,” I said. The damp ground soaked the knees of her jeans in large dark patches that spread like bloodstains as she worked.

“Are you sorry he’s dead?”

“Adah, what can it possibly mean to me now?”

Then what are you sorry about?

She lifted seedlings out of the flat, untangling their nets of tender white roots. Her bare hands worked them into the ground, prodding and gentling, as if putting to bed an endless supply of small children. She wiped the tears off both sides of her face with the back of her left hand, leaving dark lines of soil along her cheekbones. To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths. I am a mother.You aren’t, he wasn’t.

“Do you want to forget?”

She paused her work, resting her trowel on her knee, and looked at me. “Are we allowed to remember?”

“Who’s to say we can’t?”    .

“Not one woman in Bethlehem ever asked me how Ruth May died. Did you know that?”

“I guess.”

“And all those people I worked with in Atlanta, on civil rights and African relief. We never once spoke of my having a crazy evangelist husband still in the Congo somewhere. People knew. But it was embarrassing to them. I guess they thought it was some awful reflection on me.”

“The sins of the father,” I said.

“The sins of the father are not discussed. That’s how it is.” She returned to her business of stabbing the earth.

I know she is right. Even the Congo has tried to slip out of her old flesh, to pretend it isn’t scarred. Congo was a woman in shadows, dark-hearted, moving to a drumbeat. Zaire is a tall young man tossing salt over his shoulder. All the old injuries have been renamed: Kinshasa, Kisangani.There was never a King Leopold, no brash Stanley, bury them, forget.You have nothing to lose but your chains.

But I don’t happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

“I’ll discuss it,” I said. “I despised him. He was a despicable man.”

“Well, Adah.You could always call a spade a spade.”

“Do you know when I hated him the most? When he used to make fun of my books. My writing and reading. And when he hit any of us. You especially. I imagined getting the kerosene and burning him up in his bed. I only didn’t because you were in it too.”

She looked up at me from under her hat brim. Her eyes were a wide, hard, granite blue.

“It’s true,” I said. I pictured it clearly. I could smell the cold kerosene and feel it soaking the sheets. I still can.

Then why didn’t you? Both of us together.You might as well have.

Because then you would be free too. And I didn’t want that. I wanted you to remember what he did to us.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Leah Price Ngemba

KIMVULA DISTRICT, ZAIRE 1986

I HAVE FOUR SONS, all named for men we lost to war: Pascal, Patrice, Martin-Lothaire, and Nataniel.