Page 17 - WTP VOl.VII#5

up the ounce of dark khaki liquid—cooling and aerat- ing it as it went down—and placed the glass back on the tray. Moussa rose to refill the teapot from the clay water container. He added more sugar, and again set the pot into the charcoal.
We were close to the end of our month’s travel in Mali’s Inland Delta. We had visited more than twenty villages, photographed weavers, recorded oral histories, and collected textiles for Mali’s na- tional museum. Chieck had shot a hundred hours of video, Moussa had recorded interviews with weav- ers, dyers, and old men of every ethnicity who had stories to tell, Yaya’s fluency in his many languages took a leap, I’d snapped a thousand photographs of women’s work the men were not privy to and filled a journal, and we were all still friends, for the most part—which was a wonder, given Chieck’s stiffness, Yaya’s solicitousness, Moussa’s moodiness, and my insecurities.
Moussa pulled the teapot from the coals and swirled it before pouring Seconds. He offered the chief, who took a glass, Yaya, who passed to Chieck, then he himself slurped down a shot of tea. The chief, bless his heart, motioned toward me with his glass before putting it back on the tray, but Yaya shook his head and clicked his tongue, a familiar way of saying, “No. Don’t be concerned.”
It had become the standard joke that “Rachelle, elle prend le quatrième,” Rachel takes the fourth. Uh-huh. The truth? There is no fourth, except for the goats.
~
My eyes were closing when the two older sons of the chief appeared at our compound entryway. It’s impossible to knock on mud brick as on a door, so, everywhere, people announced themselves with
a clap-clap of the hands. We stood and repeated
a shortened version of the lengthy formal greet- ing I’d come to know so well. They declined tea
but offered to take us up on a dune where a breeze could be found. I looked at Moussa, my eyes and brow screwed up from recalling near disaster two days earlier. I didn’t want to leave the safety of the village. A dune was the last thing I wanted to climb. Moussa laughed.
Moussa looked to Yaya.
Yaya looked at me. “Allons y,” Let’s go, he said.
The heat, of course—even if the temperature hadn’t
"Ididn’t want priority. Priority was accorded a
century earlier to a woman who had a spell of vapors. I wanted equality."
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