It takes 45 minutes to walk to our fields. They are technically in Guinea. My family knows I ride my bike 50 horrid k to and from Kédougou. They know I've done "karate." They don't know I'm planning on climbing Kilimanjaro, but I'll try to explain one of these days. Still, they could not believe I'm capable of walking to the fields. "I don't think you can," everyone kept saying.
"I have leg, yes?" I answered.
They pondered this and said again, "I really don't think you can."
It's true I can't wash clothes, cook, shuck peanuts, pull water, pound, and haali the pulaar the way every other villager can. But, come on! Sometimes I find myself starting to try hard to prove myself in each area. Then I let it go. It's the broken dish philosophy: if I suck at something, maybe they'll ask me to do it less! Plus, there won't be yet another perceived reason to worship the white. I'm trés cool with my villagers being more skilled than me at their own livelihoods. But, still, WALKING?
To heads shaking in disbelief, I suited up for the journey. I opted for Tevas (thanks, Cindy!) instead of the papery flipflops everyone else wore, rubbed in sunblock-- which they'll never understand, put a spoon in my pocket, and filled up my battered nalgene. "That's all your water?!" my jaja asked.
"Yes?"
"Hadiatou! You need more than that! Don't you have a big bottle?" I brought the big bottle. They're often right and it's kind of nice to be fretted over anyway.
We went to Guinea. They were impressed with my ability to walk even more than with skipping stones. (Tell me how generation after generation have lived next to these rivers and no one skips stones!) The cotton fields are gorgeous. As we walked towards them, I had a feeling like I was walking on the board of CandyLand, reaching fields of poporn plants-- or more appropriately, cotton candy.
We crunched over corn husks to piles of cotton that looked remarkably like snow drifts. With fields of green in the distance, I felt like we were travelling through the seasons: autumn, winter, spring... I touched the cotton. It felt like cotton. "Do you know cotton?" a girl asked.
"Yes."
"Do they have it in your country?"
"Yes..."
"They have fields?"
"No... we buy it."
I pictured the cosmetics isle of Stop n' Shop and knew that from the next time I saw a bag of pristine carebear cloud balls to the last, I'd think of this moment.
I wanted to jump in the pile, but I was nervous due to the previously mentioned snake sightings. "No snake here!" they encouraged me. It felt like a warm cartoon cloud. I could've stayed all day, but then I remembered sorpians and jumped out.
Cotton blooms from pretty pink-purple flowers that dry out and turn into thorns. After an hour or so I could almost hear my fingers say, "Dont go near that thing!" I got the hang of it. Depending on its stage in growth, the flower will divide the cotton ball into little marshmallows, or it will be one big ball of insect bed. If you pinch your fingers around just so, (careful of the thorny part!) you can grab it all in just one go. But sometimes they're stubborn to leave and the wisps string out like magicians' scarves.
I thought about slavery. People who picked cotton here were captured and forced to pick cotton in other countries. What they had to remind them of home were balls of cotton and sore fingers. All day.
Selling cotton brings my family's only income. I think you must know a person is at the bottom of the chain if he or she picks cotton. We all use it; we need someone to do it, but who wants to? I wish all the pale kids with summer jobs at fast-food joints at home could be the ones. There's no shame, but it's definitely the bottom. My fellow pickers complimented my work. One said she'd love me as a co-wife. I couldn't say that what made me work hard was the knowledge that this wasn't my life. It made me happy and guilty and sad.
Senegalese and Guinean hills watched us from under a haze like a coating of dust on an unrealistically beautiful painting.
