Free Adé: A Love Story by Rebecca Walker Page A

the sounds of the four of them talking in the kitchen under the fluorescent light that shone blue or green, depending on how the light struck the eye. Adé must have told them about me because when I wandered in, they made me a plate of food and started to ask questions about my life in the States. Their concerns were practical, and the sisters communicated with the same straightforward intensity as Nuru had months before. But I was no longer frightened of this way of slicing straight to the heart of things. It was a relief to get to the basics, to know the strength of the foundation before deciding how high a tower, how deep a future, was possible together.
    They were especially interested in the details of my parents’ divorce. I told them I was still in school and eight years old at the time. My mother had moved to California and my father remained in New York, so I spent my childhood traveling back and forth between them. His cousins nodded knowingly. The splittingof families was not a new phenomenon. Determining the dimensions of the scar tissue was the thing to be done.
    “How far was your mother’s house from your father’s?” Asma asked. “From Malindi to Lamu, or Malindi to Nairobi?”
    “No, no,” I said, searching for a closer parallel. “More like Nairobi to Saudia,” using the same shortened version of Saudi Arabia that I had heard so often at Nuru’s house when they were discussing the ultimate pilgrimage—making the hajj.
    “Ohhhh,”
said the three of them almost at once, while looking at me with pity.
“Far.”
Khadija ran her hands over her kanga, punctuating her assessment of the damage.
    Later that night, in the bigger bed they had given us, Adé told me more about the women. Halima had mental problems and would never marry, he said. These troubles had been with her “since she was a little girl and her father wanted nothing to do with her.” She was being taken care of by the other two, both sisters by different fathers. Khadija was studying to become a doctor—“not an ordinary doctor but one who helps people who have problems in their heads, who cannot understand things as they are.” And Asma, the one with the chocolate skin who laughed at my stuttering Swahili, was “to be married to a man in a high position” and would always be known as the one who married so-and-so, with a name of prominence and respect. From then on, it would be as if the entire family had married this man, because that is how it was in Swahili culture. I did not ask what kind of high position. Politics, religion, it meant the same: she would have more power as his wife, which would elevate the power of all of us.
    In the morning, the sisters asked me what I thought of Adé’s father and I made a face, opening my eyes wide and raising myhands as if to say I could make neither heads nor tails of him. They looked at each other, and laughed.
    “He is not a good man,” Khadija said.
    “Adé is the best that came out of that one!” Asma agreed. “He will not dare come to the
harussi.
Nuru would not allow it.”
    And then they laughed and laughed, and I laughed along with them because I knew Nuru too, and she would never tolerate her ex-husband’s presence. The image of any attempt he would make to show up despite her wishes was comical, absurd. But Adé did not laugh as we did; he chastised us.
    “He is my father. It is not right for you to speak of him this way.”
    Halima turned her head away from where he sat, as if his voice were coming from somewhere else.
    “You will never have to see him again,” Asma said. “You have given him money even though it is he who should have given it you, or is it? He has seen Farida is healthy enough to have children. You will have your own family now. He cannot ask anything else of you. It is over,
basi.
”
    Adé was quiet. She was right. There was nothing more to say.

ON THE DAY we returned to the island, a heated discussion was taking place in the small causeway