Mount Pleasant Read Online Free PDF

actual violence. But once again the matron was unable to mete out the threatened punishment.
    Later she admitted, “I looked everywhere for you, did you know that?”
    Her voice grew gentle, and she asked, “Where did you go?”
    That day Sara realized that Bertha’s anger wasn’t just surprising—it was strangely inconsistent. After each of her attempted escapes the girl would find herself once more in front of the blue silhouette of the matron, who stood waiting in the doorway of her house of suffering, hands on her hips. Flabbergasted, Sara would let herself be dragged into the bedroom by a Bertha who raised an impotent whip—a Bertha whose mouth spit out angry flames but whose hands only waved the whip and never used it. Once, at the sight of Bertha’s seething face, Sara began running backward, terrified by the lady’s silent defeat. “I am tired of chasing after you,” Bertha exploded. “I am worn out, do you hear me? Don’t make me chase after you ever again!”
    â€œDidn’t you ever ask her why she couldn’t…,” I started to ask one day, regretting the phrase as soon as it was begun.
    â€œWhy she couldn’t what?”
    Sometimes Sara dreamed that a woman was coming through the shadows to take her away. The woman would open a door leading into the forest and Sara would rush right after her. But soon all the paths would fade away beneath the little girl’s feet and she’d stop dead. She’d watch the woman disappear in the distance. Once or twice she ran to catch up with the elusive woman. Sara ran but soon grew tired. Although she never saw the face of the woman in her dreams, Sara was convinced it was her mother. This faceless woman haunted both her nights and her days for quite a long time. Sara never saw her mother again, except in her dreams. These became moments of real torture, from which she’d awake screaming in terror.
    â€œWhy do you cry out in the night?” Bertha scolded her. “You should speak during the day, not at night.”
    â€œI thought she had sold me,” Sara admitted, her voice filled with despair. “To think how I hated her for that!”
    No, her mother couldn’t have sold her. Looking deep into her empty eyes, her deep wrinkles, and her enigmatic silence, I told her so: “That’s just not the kind of thing a mother would do.”
    Sara seemed to accept what I said.
    â€œYou’re right,” she replied distractedly, scratching her feet, lost in her own thoughts.
    I breathed a sigh of relief.
    â€œI always thought,” Sara confessed another day, her hands spread open to include me, “that my mother was a prisoner of her woman’s body, too.”
    Even the loss of her virginity hadn’t opened the doors of freedom for Sara. Had she first met Bertha in Foumban, the situation would have been dealt with differently: shame would have sealed the girl’s fate, and she would have been sent back to her mother’s house, her body bearing the scar of rejection. A cousin or some other young girl in the family would have taken her place; Bertha would have bribed the Tangu, the chief of the sultan’s police, and the whole thing would have been resolved quietly. If her impurity had been discovered on the eve of her introduction into the sultan’s bed, chicken blood, instead of the girl’s own, would have stained the royal bed …
    The archival documents wax eloquent about this period of Njoya’s life, although they are quiet about the ins and outs of his bedroom and antechambers. Colonial modesty? I have found notes from bureaucrats, as well as from priests, botanists, veterinarians, and even anonymous travelers who had spent no more than one night as Charles Atangana’s guests, but who still found the words to fill page after page of their notebooks. Yet about Njoya’s intimate relations, these scribes said precious