Lions and Wildebeests

This is one of my very favorite books that I have written so far. Hope you enjoy:)

________________________________________________

Prologue

Dear God, help me through girlhood to womanhood; I wish for Your help along the way, for I have much to tell You:

                Long, long ago, a beautiful African woman fell in love with a Dutch sailor man who had come as a merchant. They lived together, but her tribe did not accept him and wished him to go away. He went away, but not before he left behind his tragic little present, a son. The son looked just like his father, but also like an African and was accepted. The son married a pretty African woman, the daughter of a prophet for the ancestors. The son fathered ten children, and one of his daughters married an African, then her daughter married another, then her daughter married another from a different tribe farther in the east than anyone else in her extended family had dared, then an African son was born in the new tribe of the husband, and a son married another African, and another daughter married another African until the sin of the original woman was forgotten. They say that the woman went to the Heaven where her Dutch beloved went, for she was converted to Christianity thanks to him. She only ever loved him even after she was proposed to seven other times. Good for her, for I am left to suffer from her mistakes.

            I am a Christian even though all those ancestors I told you about never converted; they say that I am a Christian because I am a Dutch descendant despite the fact that it was over six generations ago. Anyhow, I have yet another thing that ties me to them, the Dutch. Though I look as African as the next person according to build and appearance, I have light grey eyes and thick hair. Every girl in my tribe has thick hair that can grow out to a reasonable length to their shoulders without being cut, but my hair is to my shoulders without any style. My mother never cared to cut it in a beautiful style like the other girls wear their hair. I just wear a giant curly afro, fairly manageable, but so…different. I just put it back in a ponytail and forget about it.

            I am known as the tragedy of my parents and a disgrace to my father; I am my mother’s fault because her ancestor is the one that betrayed them. Fortunately, they have my older sisters and younger brother, who look normal. So, anyway, I am called Tragedy or Stormy Eyes, because I stole the rain from the land; all the storms that my people miss are inside of me. I always get weird looks when I walk about, but I am still expected to act like a normal girl and do normal things, though I am tolerated, not accepted.

March-April: The Rainy Season

Chapter 1: Abdel and Me

What is the point of bullying?

                I left the school hut early, as usual, trying to escape my usual bullies, Anotida and Nabila. They seemed to track me like the Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Boerbels track game for the hunters of our tribe. Anotida, fortunately, was kept back late talking to a worthy suitor and the most athletic and handsome boy in our tribe our age, Ranako. Her sister looked over at them jealously. The pair had been betrothed from birth and was bound to get married soon. At least she had someone. Ranako’s coming-of-age ceremony was scheduled for soon as well. But then a lot of us are getting our tribal marks because the bridge between sixteen and seventeen is a big one; the Makishi dancers had already started announcing the mukanda months ago. Anotida caught sight of me fast enough, and her sister’s dark eyes glinted as she leaned against the hut. Oh, how I wished for those dark eyes.

            “Hey, Stormy Tragedy, where are you going?”

            “Out,” I grumbled.

            Nabila shoved me, but I didn’t fight back like I would toward anyone else because the two girls are the daughters of our leader and chief, Kokayi. They get the best clothes, the best boy attention, and the best life that our poor little village can muster.

            “Just leave me alone…” I snapped as I stumbled backward with my books.

            Anotida laughed and shoved my books out of my arms. My sister, Kakra, passed by and just looked at me in disgrace. Saburi, the older of the two, just sighed. She wanted to help me, but she did not want to do anything to get herself in trouble. Her light brown eyes almost got her judgment, but they weren’t that big a deal. If only I could have gorgeous dark eyes like my beautiful African sisters, who look like the elegant African queens of generations past. Sometimes I like to imagine being a descendant of one of those queens and think on the possibility of the reality of it. But one would not be able to tell by looking at me, so the fantasy, in the end, is just a fantasy.

Anotida smacked me just to provoke me as I sat in the sand.

            “Cut it out!” I groaned as Nabila began tearing the pages out of my nicest school book.

            I moved quick as though I were lightning to grab the book from her and began running onto the dry land. Fortunately, I am the fastest of anyone in our village that has ever been. The prophetess says that it is as though the lightning of the storms captured in my eyes gives me speed in my feet; she says that the curse and the storm held within me gives me its characteristics. I am light like the wind and fast and graceful like a cheetah. A golden figure suddenly flashed out between me and my pursuers.

            “Abdel!” I gasped.

            It was not the first time he had saved me, and I always feared my beloved golden lion would go too far.

            “Abdel, come!” I called.

            He roared in the face of the two girls before he stiffly turned to me.

            “Now!” I insisted and added a low growl at the end.

            “You accursed demon, call your creature off!” Anotida scolded.

            “Your blood will be the end of you yet!” Nabila warned.

            Abdel came to me and stood at my side with his amber eyes flickering and his tail flicking back and forth. He was completely focused on them as they slowly backed off.

            “Go!” I yelled, trying to keep back tears. “Go! Why do you torment me so?”

            They backed away, their eyes wide, the eyes I wished for with all my heart: dark eyes like the night sky, so deep and solid, strong, unreadable…and not judged.

            I did not wait to see if they had obeyed me. Instead, I kept running into the thickets of my beautiful Africa, the sands crunching beneath my feet, splaying between my toes like it was welcoming me to become one with it. I rushed under a ledge surrounded by rough undergrowth and a few sparse trees. There, I stopped to catch my breath. Abdel strutted up to me in his noble lion fashion and laid his head in my lap before letting the rest of his body collapse behind him with a grunt. He touched my face with his nose and sniffed at the tears. I wrapped my arms around his golden mane. He let out a giant lion yawn and stretched so that his long thorns of claws surrounded each of my crossed legs. He nudged the Bible in my lap, which I dared take to school, and gazed up at me. I turned to my favorite Bible story, Daniel and the lions, and began to read to him as he lay his head down easily in my lap.

            My people are one of the only tribes in Africa, they must be, who don’t see the might and majesty of lions. They don’t accept me, no, but they don’t accept lions either.          

            I leaned back against the sandy dirt wall and melted into the wonder of God’s Word.