Our house here is mud and thatch, plenty large, with two rooms and a kitchen shed. A happier place, for sure, than the tin-and-cement box that packaged us up with all our griefs in Kinshasa. There, the cranky indoor plumbing constantly grumbled at us like God to Noah, threatening the deluge, and Anatole swore if he lived through ten thousand mornings in Kinshasa he would never get used to defecating in the center of his home. Honestly, a latrine does seem like a return to civilization.

But our life in this village feels provisional. We have one foot over the border into the promised land, or possibly the grave. Our plan is to pack up our truck again and drive from here to Sanza Pombo, Angola, as soon as we possibly can.There we’ll keep our hands busy in a new, independent nation, whose hopes coincide with our own. We’ve been leaning toward Angola for ten years now-Anatole had a chance to serve in the new government there in 1975, right after the treaty that gave Neto the presidency. But Anatole wasn’t yet ready to abandon the Congo. And then Neto died, too young. In 1982 another invitation came from the second President, Jose dos Santos. Anatole was prevented from accepting that post by the inconvenience of living in a two-meter-square room with a bucket of his excrement for company in the Thysville penitentiary.

I don’t believe Anatole has many regrets, but he would have been proud to work with Neto or dos Santos. Thanks to those remarkable men, plus others uncounted who died on the way, Angola has wrested itself free of Portugal and still owns its diamonds and oil wells. The industry of Angolans doesn’t subsidize foreigners, or any castles “with moats, and their children are likely to get vaccinations and learn to read. They’re still desperately poor, of course. They kept their diamonds and oil at a horrific cost. None of us predicted “what came to pass there. Least of all Neto, the young doctor-poet who just meant to spare his people from the scarring diseases of smallpox and humiliation. He went to the U.S. looking for help and was shown the door. So he came home to try to knock down Portuguese rule on his own and create a people’s Angola. Then he got some attention from the Americans. For now he was a Communist devil.

Ten years ago, when Anatole received that first letter stamped with the new, official seal of the Presidency of Independent Angola, it looked like dreams could come true. After six hundred years of their own strife and a few centuries of Portuguese villainy, the warring tribes of Angola had finally agreed to a peace plan. Agostinho Neto was President, in an African nation truly free of foreign rule. We so nearly packed up and went, that very day. We were desperate to move our sons to a place where they could taste hope, at least, if not food.

But within two weeks of the peace agreement, the United States violated it. They airlifted a huge shipment of guns to an opposition leader, who vowed personally to murder Neto. On the day we heard this I sat sobbing in our kitchen, flattened with shame and rage. Patrice came and sat on the floor by my chair, patting my leg with a little boy’s solemn endurance. “Mama, Mama, ne pleure pas. Ce n’est pas de la faute de Grand-mere, Mama.” It didn’t even occur to him to connect me with American disgrace; he thought I was angry at Mother and Adah. He looked up at me with his narrow little face and almond eyes and there was his father years and years and years ago saying, “Not you,Beene.”

But who, if not me, and for how many generations must we be forgiven by our children? Murdering Lumumba, keeping Mobutu in power, starting it all over again in Angola-these sound like plots between men but they are betrayals, by men, of children. It’s thirty million dollars, Anatole told me recently, that the U.S. has now spent trying to bring down Angola’s sovereignty. Every dollar of it had to come from some person, a man or woman. How does this happen? They think of it as commerce, I suppose. A matter of hardware, the plastic explosives and land mines one needs to do the job. Or it’s a commerce of imagined dreads, the Bethlehem housewives somehow convinced that a distant, black Communist devil will cost them some quarter in their color-matched living rooms.

But what could it possibly have mattered to them that, after the broken treaty and Neto’s desperate plea for help, the Cubans were the only ones to answer it? We cheered, the boys and Anatole and our neighbors all jumping and screaming in our yard, when the radio said the planes had come into Luanda. There were teachers and nurses on board, with boxes of smallpox vaccine. We imagined them liberating Angola and marching right on up the Congo River to vaccinate us all!

Rachel informs me I’ve had my brains washed by a Communist plot. She’s exactly right. I’ve been won to the side of schoolteachers and nurses, and lost all allegiance to plastic explosives. No homeland I can claim as mine would blow up a struggling, distant country’s hydroelectric dams and water pipes, inventing darkness and dysentery in the service of its ideals, and bury mines in every Angolan road that connected food with a hungry child. We’ve watched this war with our hearts in our throats, knowing what there is to lose. Another Congo. Another wasted chance running like poisoned water under Africa, curling our souls into fists.

But with nothing else to hope for, we lean toward Angola, waiting, while the past grows heavy and our future narrows down to a crack in the door. We’re poised on the border with everything we might need for an eventual destiny assembled around us. We have cots, the table and chairs we acquired in Kinshasa, a collection of agriculture books and teaching tools from Bikoki, my ancient suitcase of family treasures salvaged from Kilanga. Anatole has even kept the globe I gave him for a wedding present, painted by my own hand on a calabash while the nuns prayed their novenas. Their

weird library had St. Exupery but nothing so secular as an atlas of the world, so I had to work from memory. Later my sons set upon it like apprentice palm readers, trying to divine the fate of their -world from the lengths and curves of its rivers. Miraculously it survives the humidity and our moves, with only a few unwarranted archipelagos of gray mold dotting its oceans. Anatole cherishes it, and the astonishing fact that I was the first to tell him the shape of our world. But when I see it on his table I’m taken aback by what I overlooked at age eighteen: the Caspian Sea, for example. The Urals, Balkans, Pyrenees-whole mountain ranges vanished under my negligence. But the Congo is exactly the right shape and size, in relation to Europe and the Americas. Already I was determined, I guess, to give Africa a fair shake.

We are all still the children we were, with plans we keep secret, even from ourselves. Anatole’s, I think, is to outlive Mobutu and come back here when we can stand on this soil and say “home” without the taste of gold-leaf chandeliers and starvation burning bitter on the backs of our tongues. And mine, I think, is to leave my house one day unmarked by whiteness and walk on a compassionate earth with Ruth May beside me, bearing me no grudge. Maybe I’ll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be fair, the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided. Like the malaria I’ve never shaken off, it’s in my blood. I anticipate rewards for goodness, and wait for the ax of punishment to fall upon evil, in spite of the years I’ve rocked in this cradle of rewarded evils and murdered goodness. Just when I start to feel jaded to life as it is, I’ll suddenly wake up in a fever, look out at the world, and gasp at how much has gone wrong that I need to fix. I suppose I loved my father too much to escape being molded to at least some part of his vision.

But the practice of speaking a rich, tonal language to my neighbors has softened his voice in my ear. I hear the undertones now that shimmer under the surface of the words right and wrong. We used to be baffled by Kikongo words with so many different meanings: bangala, for most precious and most insufferable and also poison-wood. That one word brought down Father’s sermons every time, as he ended them all with the shout “Tata Jesus is bangalur.”