The tree stood at the corner of my uncle’s house. During tangerine season it would bloom, and then slowly the flowers would turn to little fruits. Then to bigger ones. Green at first, we would watch in anticipation as slowly they turned yellow and then a deep orange.
“Would you like us to sell them for you grandmother?”.
One by one, my cousins and I, would walk up to the diminutive woman, 5 feet 2, and weighing less than 50 kilos at her ripe age of eighty, maybe more. We never knew how old she was. She had an ageless look about her.
“Mother was born before the turn of the century,” my father and uncles would say. Our eyes would open wide.
“No one could be that old,” we think. We would turn to look at the tiny woman. Hard at work. Drawing water from the water tank, baking bananas in the ash of her fire, cultivating her arrow roots, and sweet potatoes and cassava....
“Don’t eat too much,” She would chide. “You don’t want to die first when the drought comes. Condition your body to eat less”. She would tell us of the great famine. A time when there was nothing but dust. When all the animals had keeled over and died and all that was left to eat was bitter leaf, boiled, with salt, sometime with a little fat added, sometime not. No dried or smoked meat, no sour milk in the gourds.
Bitter leaf.
We would screw up our faces and think about when mama made us eat it. She would boil it and throw out the water, squeeze out the bitterness and fry it in onion and tomato, even add something less bitter to it – pumpkin leaf or cowpea leaf. “I must have squeezed out all the good stuff by now,” She would laugh. “Go on, eat, it’s not bitter anymore”. Sometimes we would eat it. Sometimes we would be difficult.
“Think of the starving kids,” Mama would plead. “You are lucky”. We suddenly remember her story. When she was at the missionary school, she would hide during meals. That way the other children would not see that she had no food, no lunch. If discovered - they persisted in offering her food - she would take what they presented with gratitude and think about her mother, now long gone, as she ate.
Grandmother says to my cousin, a boy, “Go up the tree now. Gather the tangerine.” We all go up the tree anyway. All of us - boys and girls - and bring down the fruit.
“How much shall we sell it for?” we ask. “Bring some money back for your grandmother”, my father would say. “You know she must have something for church”.
Eat them. That’s what grandma ends up saying. We sit down, on the ground, under the tree, holding its fruit in our lap. And slowly, juice trickling down our chins, we eat as much as our stomachs can hold. We forget, for the moment, what mama and grandmother said. We put out of our minds the starving children, present and past.
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