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IN THE GARDEN
Abou heard Mallik declare that if the women didn’t plant vegetables soon, the harmattan would wither all the plants before a single potato matured. The women refused to work the garden plots until a full month into the cool season and that was too late, he said.
"Elles ne sont pas serieuses!” grumbled Mallik. The plots should have been turned, manured and watered when the last rain fell. The fertilizer would be wasted. The women were doomed to poverty by their own pig-headedness.
For weeks, most of the women spent their nights out among the reedy, shoulder-high millet stalks of the bottomland fields, shooing birds and hurling rocks at bushpigs. The midwife told Mallik that vegetables would have to wait until the grain was safely stored away.
The cooperative garden, after ten years, had gone from a novelty to a tradition. Abou, who was twelve, couldn’t recall a time before the garden. He had never known the village before the drought, either. Old people’s stories of tall grasses and wild animals struck him as syrupy nostalgia. This dry world was the only real one.
When the drought started, wiping out four consecutive millet harvests, Adema the midwife proposed that the women grow vegetables. At least they wouldn’t be relying on the rains, she said. Imagine that! Hard times and more water to haul! But Adema had grown up in St. Louis on the coast, so she knew about eggplant, carrots and potatoes. Her words carried weight and one day a group of about forty women carried stakes and thorns out near the river and put up a fence around an empty field. This is how they persuaded the merchant who owned the field to let them have it. They tilled the field like the gardens in St. Louis, dividing it into plots an arm's length wide and ten steps long. Each woman would have two plots-one for herself and one for the cooperative. Men who passed the garden that evening laughed as their wives threw picks against the stone-hard earth. The men said that a field that small wouldn’t feed a child for a week.
When the women had watered the plots for a week Adema said it was time to plant. She came out to the field one evening with canisters covered with brightly-colored labels. But planting turned out to be confusing. Though she remembered seeing the St. Louis gardens as a girl, she had never actually planted vegetables. There was a low hum of fear and a deep groan erupted from Maïmouna Bâ when they discovered the strange shape of the seeds.
"You see? You see the picture?" Maïmouna Bâ cried, pointing at one label. "We're growing big orange penises!"
Adema liked to tell that story, as she did this morning, seated in the door of the clinic. For Abou it was a welcome distraction from the pain of having his wound checked and cleaned, as the doctor insisted on doing every couple of months.
The garden plots soon overflowed with lush cabbage leaves and potato stalks. In their excitement, women ripped young okra from their stems and uprooted premature potatoes. Adema urged patience. When the first onions were big enough, she brought them to the clinic and showed how to cook them. Soon onions and eggplants were popping up in noon bowls all over the village.
Ten years later, M’Belé and nearby villages treated vegetables the way that pagans in France treat wines. Each village had a specialty. The M'Belé market grew busiest halfway through the cool months, when women brought their produce and greens to sell in the shade of the gnarled old acacia. Large perfect cabbages, ripe eggplants like mothers' breasts. M'Belé was known for its potatoes-the women dug up three tons of potatoes a year, and planted other vegetables along the margins of their plots. From the herder villages of the arid hills came horse carts full of women eager to sell their brimming bowls of onions and greens, and to buy M’Belé potatoes. In the morning the horses' harnesses rang as they passed Mallik’s house on the market road, where he took his bread and coffee.
"Of course," Adema would say, "now everyone knows vegetables are worthwhile. Even the women who used to complain the garden was too much work. 'Whoroo!' they said, 'our backs are broken from hauling water before we’ve even started the day’s cooking.'”
The clinic’s site overlooking the garden gave her a good stage for entertaining patients with garden stories. Sitting on the steps, her eyes bright and sly and her white smock glowing under her chin, she moved a story along with such authority that even Doctor Sarr once waited five minutes before interrupting to ask her help dressing a punctured leg.
Mallik appeared on his way to the garden. "Give me some lettuce seed!" the young nurse called to him.
"Him? Mallik wouldn’t give seeds to his own mother," Adema said. “For him it’s cash only.”
"I'll give you seed," he laughed. "Come to my house late tonight. Late. Alone."
"Careful, Mallik!" warned Adema. "Her father will beat you to death if you don’t pay the brideprice first."
"How much?"
Adema thought a moment. "Two hundred thousand francs," she said. "And a bull."
"Bis-i-mil-lahi!" he cried in head-wagging astonishment.
"It’s not so much! You have a government salary.” The young nurse sounded peeved.
"Too much! I’ll pay a packet of sugar."
The nurse and Adema gaped. "Mallik!"
"D'accord, two packets of sugar and a box of tea. But that’s my last offer.” Sweeping his arms in wide arcs he waved off further bargaining, and traipsed off to inspect the newly-dug plots.
"He needs a woman," said the nurse.
“He needs more than that,” Adema said. She spat thoughtfully.
Mallik took most of his meals with Adema's family because he was from the far north and had no family here on the river. For the sake of the women's garden, Adema said, she set aside her distaste of Haratins. Mallik paid her a monthly fee for board and sometimes a bit more in months when her husband's gendarme salary was late.
So Adema endured Mallik's annoying habits and occasional rudeness. “Making guests welcome-that’s Islam,” she told Abou’s grandmother. She held her tongue when Mallik sat stiffly apart from the conversation and smoked his foul pipe, or left before the third round of tea. Adema’s father complained that if freed slaves must be arrogant they should at least provide tea and sugar.
When she walked through the market to the clinic she passed Mallik propped lazily on the counter in one of the Moor shops, guffawing with the owner and speaking in the corrupted Arabic of the North. And when she asked him to bring guava and mango seedlings from the city, he hedged and complained about the high costs of fertilizer and the uncertainty of government giveaways. He was enthusiastic only when talking about the need for clear records and proper plant spacing.
"Adema, the carrots are too close together! Instead of fifteen dwarfed carrots," he said, waggling his fingers before her in a tight, gnarled bunch, "each woman could have three or four large perfect ones, and get much more money. They have heads of stone!” He jabbed his temple with one of his carrot fingers.
"He hasn’t got the spirit of this place yet," Adema would say in Mallik’s defense. Some rumors held she was sleeping with him.
After a long day at the clinic her patience was gone. After dinner he was carping about thinning again. "Look at the onions that come from upriver,” he said. “The women there leave space between each one. You know how well they sell."
"Upriver is for bumpkins!" cried Adema. "Why talk about upriver? You forget that we had the first garden! M’Belé’s women were the first to say, We’ll work rather than starve!"
"I talk about improvements and you tell me history," Mallik said. He knocked his silver straightpipe against the heel of his hand. Adema's daughter took the empty bowl from the room and returned with a lamp and a handbroom. She swept the crumbs from the mat.
Mallik frowned. "I’m going," he said. "Tomorrow we plant and I must figure out how to spread one sack of fertilizer among a hundred plots. May we pass the night in peace!"
"Amiin,” said Adema. “Mallik?"
He stood before his sandals, silhouetted against the foyer wall.
"It’s not the end of the month, but-” Adema paused. She sighed. He didn’t make this easy. "My husband's salary hasn’t arrived yet."
"You shouldn’t send him so far to be a gendarme.”
“We need a sack of rice.”
"Let me see. I had some unexpected expenses this month.”
“Mallik, we need rice.”
“Until tomorrow.” Mallik stepped into the sandals.
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