Matou, Nata’s younger sister, lived a life carefully measured in tasks, commands, and silences on the other side of town, in Bakau.
Her days passed like a breeze — uneventful, indistinguishable from one another, dissolving into a mechanical rhythm she had learned to follow but never to love. Wake before sunrise. Sweep the compound until the dust settled into her nostrils. Bathe in cold water that shocked her awake. Serve the household. Walk to school with Samuel, little Dan, Martha, Margo and Jane. Return. Eat what remained after others had eaten. Wash. Clean. Sleep. Repeat.
It was a life of order without belonging.
Each day brought new learning — a new chore, a new command, a new word in the clipped Creole of the household — but these lessons were drenched in fatigue. What remained constant, carved deeper into her spirit with every passing week, was the quiet realisation that she would never truly belong there. She felt it in the way eyes followed her movements, in the tone used to address her, in the distance carefully maintained between her and the family she served.
She was a child — and therefore powerless.
Too easy to accuse. Too small to defend herself. Too honest to pretend.
The memory of the missing sock, four years earlier, still lingered like a bruise that had not faded. The humiliation of being searched, of seeing her few belongings shaken out before everyone, of hearing whispers rise like smoke around her name — it had taught her something no one had intended to teach.
In that house, innocence did not protect you.
Only silence did.
Yet even within that quiet suffering, Matou’s spirit remained gentle. She possessed no bitterness sharp enough to wound others. Her temperament was soft, her nature accommodating, and that softness made her useful — and therefore tolerated.
The children gravitated toward her.
They sought her hands for play, her imagination for their games. She shaped dolls from scraps, built houses from clay, created small worlds beneath trees where laughter was allowed to exist freely. In those moments, she felt almost like herself again — almost like the girl she had been at home playing with her younger siblings, Khadja Bobo and Bubel.
But joy never lasted long.
Aunty Bae always watched.
From the verandah, her eyes narrow, her voice cutting across the yard whenever Matou laughed too loudly or lingered too long.
“Matou! Go sweep.”
“Matou! Stop wasting time.”
“Matou! You forget who you are?”
Her tone was not openly cruel. It was colder than cruelty — dismissive, reducing, corrective. It reminded Matou that she was not a child among children but a presence meant to serve.
At night, the unspoken cruelty deepened.
It came without warning — a pinch in the dark, sharp and deliberate. A sudden kick when she turned in sleep. A harsh whisper close to her ear reminding her she was “lucky” to lie down on a proper bed.
At first, Matou startled awake each time, her body jerking upright, heart pounding against her ribs. Her eyes would search the darkness, trying to locate the source of pain, trying to measure the threat. But no one else stirred. The room remained still. The world pretended nothing had happened.
Slowly, something inside her changed.
The body, when it cannot fight and cannot flee, learns a third language: it freezes. It retreats inward. It numbs.
Matou began to tune out the pain.
Her mind drifted elsewhere when the pinches came. She stopped responding. She stopped gasping. She stopped defending the small territory of her sleep. It was as if her body decided that feeling less was safer than feeling fully.
Psychologically, it was a child’s survival mechanism — dissociation before she had words for it. She learned to separate herself from her body. The pinches belonged to the skin. The whispers belonged to the air. She would travel somewhere softer in her mind, somewhere where no one could reach her.
But the body keeps score.
Her sleep grew heavier, stranger. Some nights she thrashed restlessly, chasing comfort that never came. Other nights she fell into an unusually deep sleep — the kind that swallowed awareness whole. It was as though exhaustion wrapped her in a thick blanket to protect her from waking pain.
And sometimes, in that heavy, guarded sleep, she wet the bed.
It happened quietly. Shamefully.
She would wake before dawn to the dampness beneath her, panic rising in her chest like smoke. The humiliation burned deeper than the pinches ever had. She moved quickly, heart racing, stripping off her clothes and pressing it against the sheet to absorb what she could. She would drench her wrapper deliberately, spreading the moisture so it would not betray its source. Then she scrubbed the mat with frantic, practiced hands, wiping and airing and turning it over before the first light crept into the room.
Discovery was her greatest fear.
Thank God, the family never noticed.
Or perhaps they did and chose not to look too closely. Margo, one of Aunty Bae’s grandchildren, was known to wet the bed often. Whenever dampness was found, suspicion drifted naturally toward her. Matou never corrected it. She simply lowered her eyes and remained silent. They all slept in the same bed with Aunty Bae in her room.
In that small mercy, she found relief.
At least this shame passed unnoticed. At least Aunty Bae did not sharpen her voice over this. Matou breathed with a fragile sense of solace — perhaps she does not mind the wetting because she does not know it is mine.
But even this, too, was her body speaking.
A child under constant stress often regresses — returning to earlier patterns of safety. The bedwetting was not weakness. It was overflow. Her nervous system, stretched thin by fear and hypervigilance, could not always hold itself together through the night.
She was living in a state of silent alertness — listening for danger even in sleep. And when sleep finally conquered her, it conquered her completely.
Perhaps her body remembered the closeness of her siblings — how they once slept tangled together without fear. Perhaps it remembered her mother’s steady breathing beside her. Perhaps her spirit refused to accept that vigilance should be permanent.
And so longing grew inside her.
Not loud. Not dramatic.
Just steady.
A longing for the kind of sleep that comes when you know no one will hurt you in the dark.
She missed her family with a force that seemed to echo inside her skull — a steady thudding like blood rushing through her ears whenever the house fell silent. In the early months she had cried constantly, tears soaking her wrapper in the dark. But over time, the crying lessened. Not because the pain had softened, but because she had learned that grief could live quietly.
Children learn survival quickly.
What surprised her most was the strange yearning that took hold of her — a longing she had never expected.
She missed poverty.
Back home, poverty had meant hunger, worn clothes, sometimes uncertainty about shelter. But it had also meant laughter, shared suffering, and belonging. At home, even scarcity had warmth. Even hardship was softened by love.
There, she had been someone.
Here, she was useful.
She missed Borogie most — the steady presence of her mother, the firm kindness of her voice, the certainty of her protection. She missed her father’s authority, even when it frightened her. She missed her stepmother Nenneh Dado’s sharp tongue, now strangely comforting in memory. She missed her siblings — their noise, their chaos, their closeness.
In the Owens household, abundance existed without affection. There was food, but no tenderness in the giving of it. There was shelter, but no sense of home.
The isolation deepened whenever the household gathered as a family — speaking in shared memories, laughing in familiarity she could not enter. She became invisible in those moments, a shadow passing between voices.
She learned their language quickly — not from curiosity, but from necessity. Creole was the language of instruction, of command, of correction. It was the language of survival.
Her father had insisted she remain Muslim, and she obeyed without question. Yet every Sunday, she watched the household prepare for church with quiet fascination. The children dressed in pressed garments, their faces shining with anticipation, their steps light with belonging.
She envied not their faith but their unity.
Yet Sundays offered her an unexpected gift.
Aunty Bae, a devoted churchgoer, left early with the family. Her departure emptied the house of tension. The compound fell into rare silence. For a few hours, Matou breathed freely.
She would sit alone beneath the avocado tree, tracing patterns in the dust, thinking about her family, about home, about the long road to joy. Those moments became her sanctuary — quiet spaces where she allowed herself to imagine a future beyond service.
At twelve years old, however, freedom seemed impossibly distant.
Childhood stretched endlessly before her. The years she must endure felt like a lifetime. She calculated time carefully — how long until she was grown, how long until she could choose her own path, how long until she could return home.
It seemed forever.
Yet hope remained.
She whispered to herself at night:
“One day.”
One day she would return to her family.
One day she would belong without explanation.
One day her hands would serve those who loved her.
The longing did not break her.
It shaped her — making her patient, observant, resilient beyond her years. Between comfort and affection, she learned which truly sustained the human heart.
To be continued…
