That evening Solange and her two sisters had already gone around back to help their mother prepare dinner. It disturbed Mama’s sense of hospitality when I tried to help. Telling her I enjoyed cooking did nothing to change her mind, so I stayed out front with the boys. They were hitched up on the porch banisters, listening to Roland recount some ordeal until he tired of hearing himself and stood, head hanging, shoulders slumped. He looked dejected and seemed to want sympathy. Instead of commiserating, they teased him.
So Roland turned to me. The boys had been speaking in Fon, the language most natural to them at home, so to clue me in, Roland translated the situation into French, all the while avoiding my eyes. His lips moved while he looked vaguely toward the ground. This was a sign of dishonesty where I had come from, and I felt the gulf between us. But he couldn’t do things differently; in his country, if a younger person looked directly at an older person when speaking, it was considered defiant. So it was his smooth, narrow forehead I watched as he lamented about his girl troubles. “She won’t obey,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows sharply.
“Obedience” won the Editor’s Prize in Nonfiction from The Missouri Review in 2006. Read the full story here.