(Fiction) The Fireside Kitchen

Akenji Ndumu

There she stood, a guardian at those gates of blackened plank, the creaking doorway into her fireside kitchen. The scowl on her face multiplied her wrinkles two-fold, curved them into and against each other like ravines born of renegade magma re-arranging the face of the earth. As earth was aged, so was she, all except her youthful eyes that shone florescent against the night-coal of her skin. She, seemingly cemented in front of those four walls, eyed the man in front of her, from his yellow construction cap to his dirty orange-overalls to his robotic determination to collapse her kitchen. He said I don’t make the rules ma’am.

Mami Manka’a knew her tongue could summon the weight of two generations’ wisdom to crush his rules to dust. But she stayed silent, and spoke the language of stares with incandescent eyes, to which the man reiterated, ma’am, this (paper waved, signature emphasized) is an ordinance from the Council y’understand ma’am? You’ve had two other warnings! Eyes, eyes, more eyes in response. His accent sounded senseless to her; daytime television English was hard enough to understand. But she recognized his message in two sounds present in that grassy backyard with the three American beeches and the 10x10 cement kitchen house: 1. the idling engine of the yellow Caterpillar machine told her not here to stay, just passing through, but I have business with you, and 2. the intermittent static on the man’s walkie-talkie said I’m not alone.

Mami Manka’a thought of how she wasn’t alone either. She had her son, Che, chief (actually, sole) architect, bricklayer, carpenter, and interior decorator of her fireside kitchen. He wasn’t home yet, but judging by the sun’s shadow on customary Fridays, he would arrive from work any moment now. So she stood in the way of the gentleman in the orange overall as a backyard activist lodged between her precious fireside kitchen and the bulldozer with the jaws watering to raze her fortress to dust and shatter its wooden door to pieces of plank  (surely to be used as firewood someday!) Che should come home soon. But right now, the congregations were beginning to convene: her two grandchildren (drawn by idling motor sounds), peering from the window of the house, a distracted runner (drawn by the sight of heavy machinery in the tranquil neighborhood) jogging in place along the sidewalk, and Ms. Janice, the next-door neighbor, slightly obscured by beech branches, perched on the corner of her high wooden balcony like a monarch surveying the throngs below, minions all. The ravines on Mami Manka’a’s face creased some more and with eyes raised to the queen, said to herself Madam Ja-nesse, you fit hel-ep me?

She had spoken to herself the same way years earlier when her flight entered the American coastline, and a Customs Officer ransacked her giant, ancient suitcase stuffed with all manner of dried food from eru to njangsa. And in a corner only she could see, were tucked away the benedictions of the family back home. At Dulles Airport, Che smiled for many minutes in greeting the mother he hadn’t seen in four years and when he kissed her cheek, the car’s combustion engine idled loudly like it had a bad cough. He lifted her red and iron suitcase with ease and lodged it on the back seat of the 1989 Crown Victoria emblazoned with the words Rodney’s Taxicab and led his mother into the front seat of the car. He then traveled back around to the drivers seat, buckled two seatbelts, and between bouts of static, reminded bossman Rodney Sir, I’m taking my mother home from the airport as I had asked, Sir. Give me a few hours.

The static reminded Mami Manka’a of her old transistor radio that used to harness Cameroon Radio airwaves even in outskirt Bafut village quarters like Akoshia.  For the first half-hour, the conversation was a roll call: two aunties died, Pa Achu too finally passed, married cousins already on their fourth child, a young nephew dropped out of school and missing in Nigeria. But from the way she spoke, Che knew the undulating hills of Akoshia remained unchanged in their stark difference against the plains of neighboring Bambui. As they drove together, she kept her eyes on her son with a mild perpetual smile that relaxed her wrinkles, and she remained entirely unfazed by the mile-long bridges, the glass-faced 20-story corporate suites, the swirling flyovers on the highway exit. Mami, you fit ever find road go house? Che joked to a mother who hardly stared outside windows in motion, no, not at the spectacular billowing towers of smoke consuming the rubbish heaps on the way out to Douala airport, not even at clouds seen through 747 airplane windows. She had boarded the plane at the international airport in Douala a few days earlier, and the metal bird seeped into the clouds with ease across one desert, one continent, and one ocean. But Mami Manka’a never really came in that cabin of that Air France 747. She came on the wings of her late husband’s blessings. The trappings of America were calling: Chè’s two children (whom she’d never seen) needed a care-taker in the away hours on Rodney’s clock. Still looking sideways at her son the taxi driver, she responded: I know all road.

The children were getting bored at the static spectacle that was refusing to unfold in the backyard; like some kind of aborted theater, idle, unmoving, like a certain bulldozer engine. They breathed against the glass and drew circles. The jogger stopped jogging, and got busy changing the station on his Walkman.  Madam Ja-nesse, the regal, continued her reign. Caterpillar Man urgently conversed on his walkie. Mami Manka’a disappeared into her kitchen to rearrange the firewood stack. They needed rearranging along the special compartments Che had constructed along the back wall. The whole fireside kitchen project had taken him six months, a constant evening/weekend bustle, trips to the hardware store, spades in cement, loud bricklaying, used and misused wood, one man singing makossa tunes with a walkman that reminded his wife Frida of the chain gang choirs she saw on PBS after the cartoon roundups. It was a wonderfully solid crimson kitchen, like the German Fort in Bamenda, made of clay bricks that seemed to have spent just the right amount of time being fired dry in the kiln. The kitchen was the size of the second bedroom and looked small against the landscape of the yard, located in the exact center of three beeches that formed an equilateral triangle around the yard. It was surrounded by a tiny track of grass-free soil. The door was a painted green, made of pure plank. Inside, it had eaves to store dried food. From the garden section of the hardware store, Che handpicked the three stones that graced the center of the kitchen, an altar of sorts for Mami’s sacred flames, he’d said once in mid-work to the neighbor Ms. Janice, almost poetic, he thought to himself. Mami mounted a small garden next to her fireside kitchen, reared tomatoes and njama-njama leaves, best they could make it in this climate. She now had her own fortress, grounds and land, backyard gentry like she was before the move to America, complete. But beyond her bricks, grass and beeches, there was an American wilderness of endless tar and concrete (and beautiful, flowering dogwoods) that she only saw either from from afar through the small window of her kitchen or from the flickering box in the living room that held thrall over two children named Bih and Ambe. Now, while she re-arranged the firewood, through the door she saw Caterpillar Man losing patience and revving engines, ma’am you’ll have to come out of there! Through the kitchen window, she saw Ambe excitedly pull his younger sister away from the immobility outside back into the living room. What he had told her: Bih, it’s back! It’s back on tv!!

Mami Manka’a had noticed the television on her first day in the house, as she followed her son who was carrying her red and iron suitcase. She didn’t gawk, no, not at the existence of stairs in her own son’s house, not at the three-bulb chandelier, not at the refrigerator or the stately stove. No, she marveled at the age, size and weight of her own grandchildren, how Ambe inherited his grandfather’s face. Ambe was visibly unimpressed by his new grandmother’s body odor, and slowly made his way back to the television. That backside na ya own too? she asked in her native Bafut language, more than surprised at the spaciousness of the backyard. With television sounds churning in the background, she carefully admired the eerie familiarity of the way the backyard traced its way to a patch of trees whose English names she did not know. The compound was in a developing suburb, with a heavy presence of forest which was slowly being razed to mount a supermarket here, an electronics superstore there. In four years on the 24/7 America, with the security of certified taxi-driver and licensed practicing nurse salaries, Che and Frida had saved enough to acquire this property at low cost: two floors, a basement, mostly wood, no garage, three bedrooms. A modest affair at best, except for the backyard, itself a grassy sprawl that glided its way into a forest. Frida interrupted Mami Manka’a’s outside gaze and in welcoming her mother in-law, said: Mami, cam see ya room.

Frida led her away as she contemplated her new domain, an exodus away from Akoshia. Her subjects: five-year old Ambe (a raucous gentleman) and three-year old Bih (a quiet concentrator). From her throne at the kitchen counter where she worked the pots daily, she watched the spectacle of the children’s exploits as kinetic 25-inch TV images formed psychedelic swirls of light on their faces as they tussled over food, toys and space, or sang along to nursery rhymes on TV, under the grip of an old white woman on guitar who reminded her of the neighbor Madame Ja-nesse. She’d always start: Noww kids, sing’long with me usin’love ‘n all you got!

The words (whatever they meant) rang in Mami Manka’a ears as she emerged from arranging firewood and spotted Madame Ja-nesse (now with a glass of lemonade). She turned to face an increasingly distraught man bearing a municipal council ordinance, Where’s the owner of the house ma’am? I’m calling the cops ma’am? Mami Manka’a’s eyes read relief as they saw a man emerge from inside the house onto the balcony, an unlit cigarette dangling in his mouth and a fluorescent green lighter twirling in his fingers. A tiny green tube had always been the source of Che’s fire. Customary on evenings, while his broad shoulders stretched beyond the edges of the reclining chair in the backyard, his form embedded in relaxation pose, he would dangle a lengthy menthol 100 from his lips, and the lighter would birth a flame. If evening birds could ever be quiet, one could hear the crackles as he cradled the flame against the wind, and the tobacco would char to smoke. From the kitchen counter with knives wielded against tomatoes or eyes weeping over onions, Mami Manka’a often watched her son catch a smoke after coming in from work, after shuttling passengers across town, after moving the world. But today, she watched him from the door of her kitchen as he ignored the white stick in his mouth and rushed down from the balcony towards the crimson kitchen and the idling motor in the backyard. Sir, she’s gotta move! I ain’t got time for this! The ordinance was passed into Che’s hand. When his eyes scanned words ‘zoning code of the municipality’, he knew exactly what this was, as he’d seen two of these ordinances before. He had quietly folded them into his bedside chest, telling only Frida. Che, distraught, told the man: Mista, can I talk to you over here?

There is this story that Che could’ve told the man but in America, folk tales are never legal cases. He could’ve taken him inside and showed him the electric stove, with its concentric circles that glowed a hell-hot red when the knob was turned from “Lo” to “HI”. Mami Manka’a always complained about feeling the heat and missing the fire: fiya dey but fiya no dey, for hot electric circles do not need fire-keepers, they do not need a social agreement with a fire-tender; they give up the power to negotiate HI and Lo, how and when to come on, where to spread, who could use them. How they just burned with a thoughtless dependency, an aching normalcy that left no embers and no ash. Over months, Mami Manka’a accustomed herself to the quotidian shuffle of a meal prepared on red-hot circles with no flame, to the festival of noise born of Ambe, Bih and PBS cartoon specials, to the erratic work hours of taxi-drivers and LPNs, to hot-cooked plates cum cold TV-dinners, to quiet family meals sound-tracked by the manufactured guffaws of sitcoms. Che understood well that for Mami Manka’a, this blast furnace of a modern kitchen was a cold-hearted place, and almost expected it when she asked him the following, while pointing to the backyard: I begg ma pikin, ya go mek -me kitchen fo backside ya?

Che held a degree in physics, not masonry. But as for his proficiency in bricklaying, there was history learned from churning mud and cement with his father Ta Neba. He hadn’t touched a spade in ages though. He also hadn’t solved a physics problem in four years. ‘Merica ‘trong!  teacher work hard here. what will you do? and with that lamentation, he abandoned beloved force-trajectory computations for Rodney’s employ, shuttling around town in a brown ’89 Ford Crown Victoria LTD taxi and driving his wife to and from work during her eternity of nursing shifts. They reluctantly forfeited the Bih and Ambe sing-alongs, their rowdy riots, their obligatory siestas, their revolts against brief bouts of famine and their satisfaction-smiles after consuming juice bottles. Mami Manka’a was witness to it all from the sidelines, understanding their needs (food and space) even without long conversation, conversations impossible anyway because the children spoke neither Bafut nor pidgin, and carried inflections similar to the screech of daytime TV. She yearned for the familiar crackle of her transistor radio when they played traditional songs, but always started. Good afternoon and welcome to Radio Bamenda!

The Caterpillar engine suddenly roared and the children reappeared at the window. The neighbor Ms. Janice shivered slightly, sending a mild splash of lemonade down the balcony into her neat row of peach blossoms and purple violets. The jogger was now holding court in front of the new arrivals, filling them in on the details of the angry machine and the crimson kitchen. The man responsible for the commotion was turning the machine ninety degrees to face the unmoving old lady. Che clambered up the side of the machine, paper in hand, screaming the best he could into the ear of a man determined to just get through the damn workday. Che did not have time to relay the details of the fireside kitchen’s first day: when Mami Manka’a cooked a hefty pot of sese coco. How she gathered dried firewood from the patch of forest behind the house. How she wished to summon lightning to conjure a fire like she had seen with her own eyes once before, but she settled for the kindling of slow-matches and fire-sticks, lighting newspaper pieces beneath a criss-cross formation of fire-wood. And then she blew. And blew. And in blowing, thought of the sense-less musing of her son the scientist: how he said fire consumes that which allows it to exist, ruminating on oxygen, and the endless fires that ruled the world in the time before the beginning, three hundred million years ago, a scorching earth. She understood none of this, only the experimental truth of her breath against a struggling fire.  Eventually, the wood smoked, and some of the smoke burned to yellow flames, some was captured as black soot along the wall, some escaped through the window, door and small chimney as a white exhaust. She bred the flicker to an inferno, the charcoal glowed, the flames in full sight, the wood in crackling conversation that resembled the static of transistor radios. Onto three stones she lifted an iron pot full of water, peeled cocoyams, njama-njama leaves and spices from the African food store. There, she sat patiently, like a blacksmith at his forge, listening to birds and watching Ambe chase Bih between three Beeches. She coaxed the two children into her sooty mansion with smiles and roasted corn, and while they listened, the light of the fire flickered on their faces, dancing with minor shadows.  Che and Frida joined them, and she spoke on, stories with chuckles, with jabs, with profound advice, she gossiped of cheating husbands and wives, of the last big game caught in Akoshia, of her first ride in Fernando’s mini-bus. In her multitudes of decades, she grew to consider pens, typewriters, paintbrushes, keyboards, microphones, cameras and other fabricators of that ilk as only secondary to the ink of her tongue. Excuse me?! Excuse me?! Mami did not understand the daytime TV accent but she knew the neighbor’s shrill was coming from outside her kitchen. She emerged, smiling in invitation. The shrill continued: what’s going on here?! Is there a fire?!

The jaws of a bulldozer are not designed to heave human bones. And that certainly wasn’t in the machine driver’s job description for the day. He idled the engine again, and grabbed the walkie-talkie to call in codes. There’s nothin’ I can do, man. I can’t fix this for you. He said so looking at Che. Che didn’t see the sympathy in the man’s eyes, as he was looking away at the woman on the balcony, now taking her last gulp of lemonade with a glow on her face as bright as her blouse that matched the colors of her black-eyed susans in the flower bed below. Those were the flowers she had been trimming when Che had walked up to her one evening when his mother was busy inside, with the first ordinance crumpled in hand, asking the question of Madame Janice. I know it’s you.  what exactly is it that you want huh?

She retreated back to her flowers calmly. A supernova of flowers glittered all around her house. The yard was smooth as a football field. This was one of the rare times they had spoken to each other. It wasn’t a secret that Mami Manka’a’s impeccable fires and rising smoke never impressed her, that the constant hum of the foreign tongues in the yard nudged her out of skin and out of place a little, that the old Crown Victoria out front was jus a little tacky, that the line on which Mami Manka’a’s bed-sheets sometimes hung to dry outside was definetly not preetty, you jus don’t aire laundrey in the neighborhood heare, and don’t gemme started on the wild veggie jungle out theare. Noww, look, you can have a barbecue on Independence day like ev’rybody else but you just can’t go lightin’ fires all days all year.
A Plans Examiner from the City Hall, bearing a Right of Way, had showed up weeks before to survey borders, scrutinizing the setback requirements of the municipal zoning codes and by-laws. Chè wrestled with the Municipal Council, and had succeeded in overturning the “Stop Work” order issued during the construction of the fireside kitchen. Undaunted, Ms. Janice investigated every weapon in the legal arsenal: the possibility of an easement agreement between her and Mr. Che, invoking the city’s “critical area” regulations, getting land use permits, considering environmental regulations. Finally, with the help of a friend at the Municipal Council, she invoked a loophole in the local Restrictive Covenant. And thus came the ordinance. Two ignored, and third came upon a yellow bulldozer. I can’t help you anymore sir, the police will be here to settle the situation.

Che cursed the woman on the balcony in Bafut. The neighbors were now a congregation, a silent congregation watching. Che cursed some more. The police arrived, the police agitated, the police swung cuffs like key chains. Che retreated to his mother the statue, and with a gentle nudge on her shoulder and a certain look in his eyes, she moved away with her son to the evening shadow of a Beech tree, Che stared at Madame Ja-nesse, at yellow bulldozer jaws, at flickering police lights, and his eyes, his eyes in pyrotechnic madness smoldered their bodies with fire-scars and burn-mosaics, like an uncontrolled flame. In him they had ignited tinder, and tinder never smokes to incense. Mami Manka’a saw the same things too but she continued standing silent. She was thinking of Ta Neba’s bones in Akoshia. Ta Neba oh. She added in Bafut: I know a woman who outlived her husband by 50 years.

Her husband, Ta Neba passed in 1989, aboard the Nkwen-Akoshia QuickQuick clando bus that ended a not-so graceful swerve at Four Corners Bambui market amid Mami Esther’s vegetable stand. The bus tumbled in all the directions of the winds, the psychedelic swirl of colors across its body sparked fireworks against cement. That day in ’89, the Quick-Quick mini-bus driven by Fernando became the deathbed, the funeral pyre, a most beautiful casket in the world for all seventeen souls on board that eleven-seat machine. Ta Neba was buried in a patch of rich grass behind his compound that edged its way to a eucalyptus forest beyond. She was his second wife. The first died under the mid-wife’s gaze. Like her other children, Mami Manka’a raised the boy Che into the gaze of Akoshia’s eucalyptus trees, watched him trip on the stubble of burnt elephant grass, slapped him a million ways to one when he hauled more dust on his body home than a mini-bus late for the next village, and witnessed him mix mud like his father, a bricklayer. Together, they built her Akoshia fireside kitchen. Like corporeal alchemists they blended water, mud and sweat, they stacked even rows of mud bricks to dry in the sun, they churned cement, they mounted brick by brick those four walls to her tiny kitchen, never forgetting escape hatches for the smoke. They negotiated used corrugated zinc sheets for the slanted roof and orchestrated a masterwork of carpentry to uphold the roof, racks to dry corn and a roof storage to keep dry goat meat over seasons. Most important, they found three stones to create the centerpiece of the kitchen, placing them in the usual triangular fashion, secure enough to hold small pots between and far enough apart for those big feasts whose concoction frequently require giant iron pots. For the first day, they even gathered the driest sticks of wood the nearest eucalyptus branches could afford, to insert between the stones. They did this in Akoshia, father, son, her eyes in tow. This was years before Chè’s graduation from the University of Yaounde; this was years before 1989, when her kitchen wall was black from many family meals, many sessions of storytelling, many nights of shelter in rainy season downpours, the tap-tap on the roof matching the rhythm of the crackling corn. Three years after Ta Neba’s passing, she scattered the charring wood coals amid the remnants of the ash to cease the burning. She stood up in her kitchen to see his grave, to witness the growing grass fed by his strength and reminded his son that radio di talk plenty talk fo crise economique. Che was holding a scholarship letter in his hand. Go ‘Merica noh, go mek da money mek we chop, we go hosipitol, we giv offarin fo Sunday. Go pikin.

From the balcony, the family watched the razing of the fireside temple, the caterpillar tires desecrating her njama-njama leaves, three stones gathered in a clump, at the foot of a mountain of crimson and grey dust and broken plank. Mami Manka’a couldn’t smile as he surveyed the disarray beneath the caterpillar tires. She looked beneath the newly constructed wooden deck where Madame Ja-nesse stood. She carefully observed just how its timber could be a potent tinder for the greatest of all bonfires, One that would barbecue those flowers, and a lot more, an independence day fire the neighborhood wouldn’t miss. Madame Ja-nesse pursed her lips a little before answering a call on her cordless phone and disappearing into her home. Che turned to his mother, and promised to take extra shifts if she could watch the kids, to eventually move, move to a house with a with a chimney, and a hearth. Mami Manka’a repeated the word, under her breadth, never understanding, Ahearth.

Akenji Ndumu is a Washington DC area based writer and journalist.