The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
- Publish Date: April 2, 2019
- Language: English
- Genre: Biography, History, East Africa
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 3 MB
- Pages: 304
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 0451495330
When I was a regular child, I lived in Kigali,
Rwanda, and I was a precocious snoop. My nickname
was Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard,
including that my sister Claire, who was nine years older
than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer
instead of doing family errands after school.
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When she did follow directions—go buy tomatoes,
pick up six Cokes for guests—she spent only a quarter of
the money my mother gave her, because Claire, even at
fourteen, could look out for herself. She understood
value. She knew confidence was currency. She realized
that if she told the tomato vendor she’d pay him less
today but return every week and buy only from him, he’d
accept the bargain, she’d pocket some money, and they’d
both walk away happy.
She also knew life was harder and more costly when
I tagged along. I talked too much. I tattled. I asked too
many questions. I also had a lisp and was difficult to
understand. Claire made fun of me, how my tongue got
in the way. She told me to repeat words, and laughed.
We lived in a gray stucco ranch house on a gravel
road, up the hill from the market, near one of the few
tennis courts in the city. The houses in our neighborhood
sat close together, each with a red roof and fenced with
creosote bushes, thick and dense, and trimmed weekly
into tidy partitions.
In our backyard was an outdoor kitchen, with a big
sandbox in which my mother buried carrots and sweet
potatoes to shield them from the heat and make them
even sweeter. In the front yard stood a mango tree, old
and wet, with sturdy leaves. You could sit in it and it
would hug you. Every day when we came home from
school, Pudi and I climbed up and stood in the branches,
in what was then my whole world, shaking the leaves,
pretending the tree was a bus that would take us to
Butare, where our grandmother lived, about three hours
away, or even to Canada.
My mother was short and curvy and regal and
poised, with high cheekbones, like my grandparents, and
bright white teeth with gaps between them, which
Rwandans consider beautiful. We have a word for it in
Kinyarwanda: inyinya. She’d fallen in love with my
father and they’d decided to marry against his family’s
wishes.
My mother spent her mornings at church, just up
the hill, and her afternoons in the garden, which was her
Eden. There she taught me the names of plants—
cauliflower, bird-of-paradise—and how to care for each,
which ones needed to be in the cool soil under the mango
tree and which needed direct sun.
She grew oranges,
lemons, guava, and papaya; hibiscus, plumeria,
sanchezia, anthurium, geraniums, and peonies. I would
pluck the stamens off the tiger lilies and rest them above
my lip, the orange pollen leaving a bright powdered
mustache.
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