chiefmother

I met the grandmother of the chief of the tiny coastal village near where I am staying, and she has been extraordinarily gracious. Today I went to visit, bringing with me two bottles of a spicy local ginger and hibiscus drink called bissap. She wanted my name and the name of the town I come from and wrote everything down in a beautiful script on a folded piece of lined paper. Her little grandson set out plastic chairs from a stacked pile. Local children crept closer and closer until they were crouching underfoot and they leaned in, leaning on me from all sides, patting my hair and coiling it softly in their tiny fingers, cuddling against me confidingly so that every way I looked up, there were three or four more little faces leaning in and gazing. They treated me as though I was an exotic curiosity but at the same time, like someone they had already loved and trusted all their lives and had been kept away from for too long. The most beautiful feeling. “My friend my friend! Picture me! Picture me!” And when I did, they melted like a froth of sea foam into a thicket of accomplished gangster gestures, cool and hilarious at once. And when I did, all the photos were blurred but one, because eighteen children leaning in on all sides made the body of us jostle as one, like a kind of dance.