A few weeks after her marriage to Bukari, Nata began to notice a strange change in her body. It started with her mouth — her saliva thickened, tasting metallic and unfamiliar. It coated her tongue with a bitterness that made swallowing unpleasant. She kept wiping her mouth with the edge of her wrapper, but the wetness only seemed to multiply. Food lost its appeal. Water made her gag.
And then came the nausea. Each morning, just as the first roosters crowed, she would stumble outside with her hand pressed against her belly, gagging behind the storeroom or near the lemon tree in the yard. Sometimes, she threw up bile. Other times, nothing would come, just a dry heave that left her sweating and dizzy.
At first, she told no one. She thought perhaps it was the new food, the new air, the unfamiliar silence in Bukari’s home. She tried to will it away, but the symptoms grew louder, more demanding.
One evening, as she sat under the mango tree scraping rice into a basin for the chickens, her mother came to visit.
Borogie, tall and still strong in her stride, approached with her usual grace. She noticed the way Nata sat — leaning slightly, holding her stomach, eyes dull with exhaustion.
“My daughter,” she said, crouching beside her. “You’re not yourself.”
Nata hesitated. Then, almost in a whisper, she confessed.
“Ma… my mouth tastes strange. I feel sick all the time. In the mornings… I throw up.”
Borogie’s face tightened. She placed a hand on her daughter’s knee. “And your blood — has it come this month?”
Nata shook her head.
Borogie sighed deeply, a sound that carried the weight of every woman who had ever walked this path too soon. “You are with child,” she said simply.
Nata blinked. The words floated toward her as if through water. With child? She barely felt like a woman. How could she be carrying another life? She didn’t understand how her body had already started the work of motherhood before her mind could make sense of the marriage itself.
“I don’t know what to do,” she murmured.
Borogie looked into her daughter’s eyes, searching for pieces of the little girl she once knew — the one who tied corn husks into dolls and slept curled beside her in the rainy season. She cupped Nata’s face, rough palms against soft cheeks.
“You don’t have to know everything,” Borogie said gently. “But you must hold on. For yourself. For the baby.”
And then, after a pause, she added in a trembling voice, “You’re not the first to walk this path barefoot, but may God help you be the last.”
…………………
Bukari had not been unkind. In fact, to outsiders, he was the ideal husband — quiet, respectful, generous with the elders. He provided food, paid his dues, and even brought home kola nuts for Borogie when he visited her garden.
But to Nata, he remained a stranger.
They rarely spoke beyond greetings. He would leave early in the morning and return at dusk. Their only private interaction was in the room they shared — where he took what tradition said belonged to him, and she gave what was expected, silently. The age gap stretched between them like a river she couldn’t cross. He was thirty — steady, composed, full of opinions about the world. She was fifteen — barely done playing chase in the compounds.
One night, she watched him undress, his back turned to her, the fan creaking above them. His shoulders, broad and unfamiliar, rose and fell with each breath.
“Bukari,” she asked hesitantly, “Do you… want this?”
He paused. “Want what?”
“This marriage. Me.”
He didn’t answer right away. Then he muttered, “It is what was decided.”
That was the last time they spoke in the dark.
…………………
In the weeks that followed, Nata’s belly began to harden, slightly pushing against her wrapper. Her body, like the seasons, shifted without her permission. She no longer played with her cousin’s children. She no longer fetched water from the well. The community began to refer to her as “the young madame.” It was meant to be respectful. But to Nata, it sounded like a verdict.
She didn’t feel like a madame. She felt like a child wearing her mother’s shoes—too big, too loud, too uncomfortable.
In the evenings, when the air was cooler, Nata often sat alone behind the house. Her thoughts drifted to Matou, her younger sister. Where was she? Had she eaten? Was she still afraid of the dark? The longing in her chest was unbearable. She had been ripped from that world too soon — no proper goodbye, no gentle transition.
Sometimes, she imagined packing a small bag, wrapping coins into her wrapper, and walking all the way back to Jeshwang. But each time she stood to begin that imaginary journey, her legs reminded her of the burden she now carried — a baby. A life forming inside her.
“I don’t even know how to be alive myself,” she whispered one night, “how can I raise another?”
………………..
In 1970s Gambia, girls like Nata were everywhere — in compounds, in markets, beside firewood piles — married before they bled regularly, before they understood their own anatomy. It was the way of things. To wait too long was to risk disgrace. To resist was to bring shame.
To be married at fifteen wasn’t unusual. In fact, some were married younger. Precocious marriage was seen as protection — against boys who whispered in alleys, against pregnancies out of wedlock, against the danger of growing up free.
But for Nata, it didn’t feel like protection. It felt like a theft.
She was not rebellious by nature. She did not scream or shout or run. Her rebellion was quiet. It sat in her gaze, lingered in her silences, bloomed in her daydreams.
One afternoon, she visited her mother’s garden. The walk there had become harder with her growing belly. She sat in the shade of the sour orange tree, sipping water from a calabash, and watched Borogie crush groundnuts into paste.
“Mama,” she asked softly, “were you this young when you got married?”
Borogie paused, her hand stilling in the mortar. “Younger,” she said.
“Did it hurt?”
Borogie looked at her daughter. She saw the swelling in her ankles, the fatigue in her eyes, the loss of brightness that had once been her pride.
“Yes,” she said. “It hurt for a long time.”
“Why didn’t you stop it from happening to me?” Nata asked, her voice steady.
Borogie blinked. A slow tear slid down her cheek.
“Because I couldn’t,” she whispered. “Because I didn’t know how. Because I thought — maybe it would be different for you.”
Nata nodded. The breeze rustled the cassava leaves. Birds chirped in the distance. For the first time, mother and daughter sat not as parent and child, but as women scarred by the same system.
………………………..
That night, Nata dreamed of water. She was swimming in the River Gambia, her belly flat, her limbs light. She dove and spun, laughter bubbling up in her throat. But when she surfaced, the river was gone. She was alone in a dark room, her hands covered in blood, her mouth filled with the metallic taste of tears.
She woke with a jolt. Bukari was already gone.
The mattress beneath her was damp. Her night wrapper clung to her thighs. A sharp pain shot through her abdomen.
She clutched her belly, panic rising. “Not now,” she whispered. “Please… not now.”
But she knew something was wrong.
She cried out for the woman next door. Within moments, Borogie had been called. She arrived breathless, carrying a basin and rags.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Let me see.”
Blood. So much blood.
Borogie sent for the birth attendant, who arrived with herbs and calabashes and steady hands. They worked in silence, Borogie holding Nata’s hand, whispering prayers into her ear.
After hours of pain, tears, and blurred memories, Nata fell asleep.
When she woke, the bleeding had stopped. The baby had been lost.
No one said it outright, but she knew. She felt it in her bones.
Bukari came that evening. He stood by the door, staring at her small frame curled under the bedsheet. Then he turned and walked away.
They never spoke of the miscarriage. Not once.
But something changed that day.
Nata no longer cried at night. She no longer asked questions. She no longer sat by the lemon tree dreaming of escape.
She became quiet. Watchful. A girl pretending to be a woman.
And the world, too blind or too proud, kept calling her “lucky.”
To be continued…
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