Free Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed Page B

nervous. With every command the old women chanted “Ameen” andthe young women clapped. Then the old women brought out small drums, got to their feet, and started drumming in earnest. Jinnow stood behind Isir, grabbed her around the waist and forced her to dance, the crowd ululated and danced with them. Jinnow tore off Isir’s headscarf and pulled at her hair. Jama watched as Isir’s movements took on a life of their own. Jinnow was an inch away from her face, shouting and crying, “Nin hun, nin hun, a bad man, a bad man, never tie yourself to a bad man, we told you he was useless, useless while you were brave and strong, Allah loves you, Allah loves you.” Isir’s tears flowed freely down her face; she looked like a lost little girl to Jama. Jinnow spun around Isir with more energy than he could have imagined, steam was rising from the women and no one noticed his head hanging upside down in the window. Isir had her head flung back, her eyes half-closed but staring unseeingly into Jama’s, she was saying things that Jama could not understand. Jinnow was encouraging her, shouting, “You are carrying this load on your back and you are staggering around with it like a tired camel, stop here and pass your load to me! Send him out of your soul! You are full of ghosts! Spit them out! Get your freedom, my girl!”
    Isir carried on weeping while the compound women danced around her, clapping their support and flushing out their own grief.
    Isir became a small ally against the compound women; she slept in the same room as Jinnow and Jama and joined in on their late-night conversations.
    “I used to sleep right there next to Ambaro, where you are now, Jama, plaiting our hair, tickling each other.”
    “That’s right, that’s right,” encouraged Jinnow.
    “Jinnow would throw a slipper at us to quieten our laughter.”
    “They had no sense of time.”
    “Do you remember, aunty, how she would read our palms? Telling us all kinds of things, how many men we would marry, how many children we’d have. She scared the other girls with that talk.”
    Jama sat up on his elbows and listened attentively to the women.
    “It’s because she had the inner eye and she didn’t soften or hide what she saw. I saw it in her from an early age, I watched her read the future in shells when she was not yet five, grown men would come and ask her to tell them their fate. Did she tell you all this, Jama?” Jinnow asked.
    Jama scanned his memory. “She only told me that I had been born with the protection of all the saints and that a black mamba had blessed me while I was in her stomach.”
    “That is all true, you had a very auspicious birth, every kaahin and astrologer envied your signs, even Venus appeared the night you were born.”
    Jama rested his head on his arm and sighed loudly. If only he could meet his father, he would believe all of their fanciful words.
    Jama went to the abattoir every morning, and his eagerness and industriousness meant he was always picked out, creating enemies for him among the other hungry children, but only a few resentful slaps or gobs of spit landed on him. Jama saw the sweaty, smelly work as a kind of test that, if passed, would entitle him to see his father, a trial of his worth as a son and as a man. He wrapped all of his abattoir money in a cloth and hidit inside a tin can in Jinnow’s room. The bundle of coins grew and grew in its hiding place, and he could feel the reunion with his father approaching, whether his father came to him or he went to his father, Jama knew it was fated to be. He read it in the clouds, in the entrails of the carcasses he delivered, in the grains of coffee at the bottom of his cup.
    After work, he often wandered around town, sometimes as far as the Yibro village that nestled against the thorny desert on the outskirts of Hargeisa. He walked through the pariah neighborhood looking for signs of the magic that Yibros were said to possess, he wanted some of their powerful