Ishmael Beah

I guess the sound of how the brushing was going, how the trees were being cut down and falling into the forest, he assumed that my grandmother, or the person who was doing the brushing, could only be a man.

So he sent his greeting as if he was greeting a man.

My grandmother came from under the bushes.

She arranged her head cloth, tied her shirt properly, put her wrapper around and looked very distant and stepped onto the path.

The man froze.

My grandmother walked up to him and slapped him really hard and said, you know,

Don't you have any training?

Do you think all these bushes are only cut by men?

And then the man, after awakening from this stupor of unbelief, ran down the path, looking behind him, thinking my grandmother was going to chase me down.

And my grandmother looked at me and smiled a little bit and undid some of her stuff again and went under the bushes and started swinging machete and asking these trees again.

This was my grandmother.

And she had that same smile that she casted whenever she came to visit my older brother and I. We were living with our father after our parents had separated.

And so whenever my grandmother was coming, my father would get really nervous.

He wasn't somebody who was afraid of anybody, but he would tuck in his shirt, and he would pace up and down.

He would sit down.

He would stand up.

And we knew our grandmother was coming.

And when my grandmother arrived, we took advantage of this moment to ask for things that we would not necessarily ask of our father.

Because he would say yes in front of our grandmother.

And so my grandmother...