I wondered if Steve would bring those machines which washed clothes and dishes here into the forest. Maybe they would unload them from the plane today. I wanted to see them, but most of all I wanted to see Stephanie.
In the morning, when we heard the plane approaching, I raced my brothers down the shady trail towards the runway.
I remained with my father on the periphery of the clearing and waited. First came Steve’s sons. Then Stephanie stepped out of the plane, smiling bashfully. She was very pretty. Her skin was as white as shiny rocks that I had seen way upriver, and her hair was like the yellow flowers that fall from the canopy.
I stood back and watched the Saint family pray with the Waorani pastors in the middle of the landing strip. Ñamé stood close to Stephanie. They were the same age, but she was much taller than him. I saw him grimace. Some new kind of embarrassment stretched across his face.
Their bags were unloaded and as far as I could tell there were no machines. My dad helped carry everything down the trail. I wanted to get close to Stephanie to see what she smelled like, but I hung back.
In the following days, I did whatever I could to escape my daughterly responsibilities. Mom was going to have another baby soon and she was always telling me to help her. But when she called for me from the canoe to accompany her to the garden downriver, I hid in the manioc patch nearby. All I wanted to do was to get close to Stephanie. Did she go to pee and poo, like me, in the forest, or did she go inside the house Dad and the others had built for her? Could she make chicha? What kind of things did she have to play with?
One morning, while I was washing clothes with Mom in the shallow creek by our camp, Stephanie and her mother, Ginny, walked down the trail towards us. They carried a basketful of clothes between them. I watched them out of the corner of my eye. They didn’t know where to put the clothes, or where to sit down. Mom stood up and placed a slippery wooden board over two stumps and then demonstrated how to wash clothes by hand.
Stephanie and Ginny watched curiously as she smacked a soap-soaked shirt against the wood.
“To get all the dirt out,” she explained.
Ginny couldn’t really understand and she shook her head, laughing. Mom laughed too. Ginny was slim and she had straight, white teeth. Her hair was scooped back on top of her head.
There were shrimp in the creek upriver. I could see them scuttling in the dusty silt.
“Look, there are kongiwe!” I exclaimed to Stephanie, pointing at the shrimp scooting along the sandy bottom of the creek bed. She squinted her eyes.
“She does not yet know how to see,” Mom muttered to me quietly.
“I will show her,” I said.
I trapped a shrimp with my two hands and showed it to Stephanie. She giggled.
“Let’s find more kongiwe,” I said, grabbing her soft hand. She resisted for a moment, looking back at her mother, who nodded approvingly.
As we walked away, I turned back to watch the women. I saw Ginny smack a t-shirt against the board, but not nearly hard enough.
“Harder,” Mom was saying. “Like this!”
I could hear the smack the t-shirt made this time although we were quite far away by now. As we walked up the sandy creek bed, I pointed to the shrimp that hid under the leaves. Stephanie tried to catch one but her hands were not quick enough. I showed her how to make a small canoe out of a palm leaf. Then I put a shrimp in the canoe and pushed it down the creek. We laughed together and splashed each other with water.
I wanted to ask her if there were creeks and trees and shrimp where she came from. But I knew that she would not understand me. How did the white people make planes and radios and chainsaws if they didn’t even know how to wash clothes or catch shrimp with their own hands?
Our new village expanded almost daily once Steve came to live here. Waorani pastors from villages all over the forest arrived with their families. Nemonpare became a fast-growing community of okos and sleeping houses. They were further apart than the houses had been at Toñampare, mostly nestled at the woods’ edge. And a little upriver was the camp. Some of the pastors lived there and gradually a longhouse was built, which they called the cabana. Steve explained that the camp was for tourists. He was going to invite Christian tourists to Nemonpare to experience Waorani life and worship. This would be good for our community. And he would teach our men skills: they would do carpentry and make fiber-glass canoes.
“He is different from Rachel,” everyone said.
Gradually, my family got to know the Saint family. My mom was especially friendly with Ginny, always helping her and showing her things.
“I know how it is,” Mom said, “to live among Waorani and not be Waorani.”
The next baby in our family was a girl and I was asleep when she was born. She appeared in the night, and in the morning I found her in Mom’s hammock, lying peacefully on her breast. So now there was Ñamé, Opi, me, Víctor, Loida, Emontay, and Nengere.
Each night, all of us visited the Saints’ house: anyone in the village who wanted to could go. Mom carried Nengere tied to her and the rest of us walked. Emontay was two years old and soon fell asleep. So did Loida. But for me the evenings were an adventure, the closest I had ever come to leaving the forest.
An electricity generator rumbled outside and this made many remarkable things possible. There was light from bare white bulbs, which drew swarms of moths and tiny flies into the rafters. We sat on the floorboards that my father had milled with the chainsaw and watched a thing called a television. I couldn’t understand the words but it didn’t matter: this was the world Dayuma had talked about! I was watching the very place where the white people lived, where the planes came from!
Night after night, I stared at the television with my mouth open. I learned that the white people outside the forest didn’t eat very often. I never saw them sleeping either. The men were always fighting and killing each other. I thought about what Rachel had said: The world is very big and there are many more cowori than Waorani.
“Tonight we will watch the story of Jesus,” Steve Saint said one evening, standing by the television and clasping his hands together. “Lord God, open our hearts to the story of Your son, He who died for our sins. Bring Him into our hearts tonight so that we may deepen our faith in You, our savior. Amen.”
When the people had found that Jesus’ grave was empty and the movie was over, Steve turned off the generator. Though he never said it, I could tell that he didn’t like us to spend so much time at his house. If he had not turned off the generator, we might have stayed all night. But now only one candle flickered and it was time to go home.
“I want to have your eyes,” I said to Stephanie. “Blue eyes.”
I was sitting on the floor of her room, staring at my face in her pocket mirror. She was on her bed, playing music on a magical wooden box which rested on her lap. It was called a keyboard. Suddenly I felt embarrassed. Why had I said that?
She nodded at me, smiling, and said: “Waponi.” That means good or welcome in my language. I felt relieved that she hadn’t understood me.
Stephanie had many things in her room. She had a wooden bed with a mattress and very soft, colorful blankets. Her clothes were folded up neatly and stacked on a dresser. She had combs, brushes, ribbons, bows, and barrettes for her hair and achiote for her lips. She also had dolls and stuffed animals arranged around the bed.
Had she made all of these things herself? I wondered about her colorful clothes. Were they dyed with roots or bark or leaves?
I stared at my own reflection in the mirror. My nose was wide and flat. My skin was dark. My lips were big. My teeth had many spaces between them. Stephanie’s were straight and white.
I looked at her again and noticed that her head was round, like a turtle egg. I turned my head sideways to look at my own profile. Flat. My head was flat at the back.
Am I pretty? I wondered.
“Mom,” I said, early one morning in the oko, “do you think that Stephanie’s hair is very beautiful?”
Mom was sweeping the floor with a palm-leaf broom. Nengere was still a tiny baby and Mom was pregnant again. She looked tired. She paused, adjusting the cloth wrap over her shoulder, patting my baby sister back to sleep.
“Sit down here,” Mom said, looking at a tree stump. She sank down into the hammock. “Let me look at you, because you must have lice. And they are making you jealous of Stephanie’s hair!”
Mom had never called me jealous before. I sat on the small stump next to her and closed my eyes. Her fingers moved quickly through my scalp. This was my favorite time with Mom, and the more brothers and sisters I had, the less often it happened. Ever since I was a little child, this was how I knew she loved me. The way she combed through my hair, picking out the eggs, crunching the lice between her teeth.
“We haven’t washed our hair together in a long time,” I said hopefully. Mom sighed in agreement.
Several days later, I followed her into the forest to harvest slimy leaves, frothy reeds, and oily fruits: the shampoos and conditioners of the forest.
“For her hair to reach below her butt,” she said, “a woman must know that there are certain plants to make the hair shine and other plants to keep the tips from fraying. And there are also plants to nourish the roots. Why do you think the toucans have such shiny feathers?”
“The fruits they eat?”
“Uuuu! The animals are our teachers too. Remember that.” She pointed to an ungurahua tree in the distance. “See, the toucans are eating the petomo fruits to make their feathers shine!”
The yoweme vine meandered snakelike, along the sandy banks of the creek. Now Mom sliced through the juicy green liana. I stood barefoot in the water, wiggling my toes on the pebbles at the bottom while I stared at my reflection in the rippling water. I felt a familiar ache inside me.
“Why is our skin so dark?” I asked.
Mom was kneeling in the muddy banks of the creek, filling the basket with short lengths of the vine that she had bundled with palm leaves. I could tell she didn’t like my question.
“Because we live in the forest,” she said, “and we are close to the earth.”
As we walked through the woods back to the village, I thought about that. Did she mean that we were dirty? Is that why we were the color of dried leaves?
After we washed my hair, Mom sat in a hammock behind me, running a peach palm comb softly through the ends as they rested in her lap.
“A young girl cannot let boys touch her hair,” she said. “A girl’s hair is sacred; only her mother or sisters can touch it, otherwise it will start to fall out!”
I thought my hair was very shiny now but Mom said: “Next time we will look for the vatacawe tree: its oil smells like vanilla and it will make your hair even shinier than this.”
“Is it like Johnson’s oil?” Ñamé piped up.
No one knew what he was talking about.
“That’s what the white people use,” he said. “It comes in a bottle. Stephanie was using it in her hair the other day. It was the color of honey but it smelled horrible.”
Suddenly, I wanted to show Stephanie my shiny hair. I knew she was at the church. I wriggled away from Mom.
“I’m not done yet!” she said, but I was already gone, with Víctor close behind me.
The church was near the oxbow lagoon where the anacondas lived. It was made of wood boards and metal sheet roofing. The floor was dirt. Stephanie sat in the first row next to her mother. She was barefoot and wore a white dress.
We weren’t used to going to church. Steve did not try to make us go the way Rachel had. I lingered with Víctor in the shade of a guava tree and then entered quietly. Mincaye stood at the front, his eyes closed and his palms upwards in a prayerful trance. In the back row, all the mothers were whispering to each other and looking for lice in their children’s hair. I liked that. It made me feel comfortable. Rachel had hated lice hunting and was always hissing orders and wagging her finger about it during church.
I knelt in front of Stephanie, holding the ends of my hair in my hands, careful not to let it touch the ground.
“My mom washed it,” I whispered to her, proudly. “She used the yoweme vine.”
She nodded at me and put one finger in front of her lips: “Shhhhh.” I didn’t know what that meant. She took my hair in her hands and began to make braids.
Her father stood at the front of the church, one arm over Mincaye’s shoulder. When Steve spoke, everyone listened very carefully. There were no whispers coming from the back of the room now.
“When Mincaye was a young man,” Steve said with a warm smile, “he had black stains all over his soul because he did not know the trail of Wengongi.”
Mincaye’s wife laughed loudly. She was the woman who had received the earrings the day the helicopter had arrived back in Toñampare and she was wearing them right now. Although they were no longer so shiny. She shouted: “He spear-killed my father and took me as his wife when I was a little girl!”
Everyone laughed and hooted and hollered.
“Yes, and he spear-killed my father too,” Steve said, squeezing Mincaye’s shoulder playfully.
I knew all about the killing of the missionaries by now. In fact, I had heard countless times about how Rachel’s brother, a pilot, had died along with four others on the river beach near Toñampare. But I didn’t know about the black stains.
“The black stains of sin run very deep,” said Steve. “But because Mincaye has opened his heart to Wengongi . . .” He paused, looking tearful. “God has forgiven him and whitened his soul.”
Stephanie’s hands were gentle, calmly weaving my hair, strand over strand. Do I have black stains on my soul? I asked myself. I realized, with some concern, that I might. I had never even spoken to Wengongi.
As Steve talked, a gigantic black beetle lumbered across the dry, cracked earthen floor of the church. It was shiny and horny, like the devil. Víctor, who had followed me in, suddenly snatched it off the ground, quicker than an ocelot, and scurried out of the church. I leapt up behind him. As I ran down the trail home, my hair slipped out of Stephanie’s braids.
God’s tourists soon started to appear. A few came by plane but large parties arrived in a line of canoes.
We hid in the branches of the miwago tree that hung over the river’s edge and laughed at them. When a girl with freckles stepped out of the canoe and sank waist-deep in the mud, yelping for help, my brothers laughed so much they nearly fell from the tree. They were still chuckling as Mincaye and Tementa dragged her out.
“God’s tourists!” Opi scoffed. “They don’t even know how to get out of a canoe!”
There were three canoes filled with them. I had never seen so many cowori. I wished I could follow them upriver to the cabana where they would stay but Mom never let me.
“Why don’t Mom and Dad let us go with God’s tourists?” I asked.
“Because the white boys like to touch boobies,” Ñamé said, laughing.
I laughed too, but my laughter was uneasy. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen them in the river touching the boobies of the Waorani girls!”
Ñamé was a rascal. I never knew if I could believe him or not.
Opi said, “It’s because the Waorani pastors want the white people all for themselves. They don’t want our family to get the binoculars and the knives and all the clothes that God’s tourists give them – they want it all themselves.”
I thought about the things that Stephanie had in her room. It was true that she hadn’t given me any of her dresses or dolls or anything at all. And it was also true that the pastors’ girls were always wearing pretty dresses and new rubber boots.
I had to go and see the camp and find out what God’s tourists did upriver in the cabana. Just before dusk, as Mom and Dad were gutting fish at the river’s edge, I jammed my blanket and mosquito net into my chigra. I pushed Nengere in the hammock one more time and then snuck down the trail that led to the landing strip.
I ran barefoot through the cool grass, hoping that none of the neighbors would see me as they returned from their gardens or from a hunt. It was late. The sky was changing color, like a fallen orchid flower rotting on the forest floor. At the edge of the landing strip, I followed a narrow trail through a swamp, over a creek, and into the lush and dimming light of the towering forest. Night was falling and my heart pounded in my chest.
“Ooooooooooohhhhh, ooooooooohhhhhhh!” I heard in the distance.
It seemed to be behind me. But sometimes the forest plays tricks. Sounds ricochet, winds swirl, spirits laugh.
I hid within the buttress roots of a giant kapok tree, shielded from sight. Then came the patter of footsteps.
“Ooooooohhhhh, ooohhhhhh!”
“What are you doing, you little crazy boy?” I hollered.
Víctor said simply: “I followed you.”
“I can see that! Now go back home!”
“No, I’m coming with you, wherever you’re going. I have contact with the jaguars. So they won’t attack you.” Víctor had no fear about walking in the forest at night.
We walked onwards in the sprinkled light of the moon. Soon, we stood at the edge of a small clearing, gazing at the wild, flickering shadows of a fire. We heard a mix of voices. White-man talk as well as Wao Tededo. Behind us, the woods creaked and pulsed, moaned and hooted.
I wondered, suddenly, if our uncontacted relatives stood like this, wherever they were, on the edge of the forest, silently watching the white people.
“Let’s sleep in the woods,” Víctor whispered. “Like the jaguar, within the roots of the kapok tree.”
But when we heard the familiar chants of an old hunting song and the thumping of the earth, like a herd of wild peccary, we were unable to resist. We walked towards the cabana.
The longhouse was glowing with candles and small wood fires at either end. For a minute we lingered in the shadows, watching. Stephanie and the freckled girl were barefoot, their arms clasped together with the Waorani women: mostly these were the wives of the pastors.
We edged closer to the flickering light of the longhouse. I felt excited. “They’re dancing! The cowori are dancing to our songs!”
But Víctor had already disappeared into the happy herd of Waorani men, who were stomping their feet on the earth, leading God’s tourists around the longhouse and singing “Cayawe, cayawe,” an old hunting dance about tracking and spearing wild peccary.
Stephanie saw me then and waved to me, laughing.
“Poi, poi,” she mouthed, beneath the chanting. “Come here.”
Soon, I was circling the room, hand in hand with Stephanie and one of the village elder women, whose name was Watora. She was famous among our people because she was brought up by jaguars.
No one seemed to think it was strange that Víctor and I had arrived at night, out of nowhere.
That night, Víctor and I lay down to sleep on the dirt floor by a small fire in the corner of the longhouse.
Víctor asked: “Are the cowori really people?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are they actually people, or are they something else?”
“They are people,” I said.
“Do they know how to hunt animals?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then they’re not people.”
I didn’t respond. I was getting sleepy.
“And,” he said, “they smell funny.”
The night pulsed with croaking frogs and hooting owls. An older white man, sleeping in a hammock near us, was breathing heavily.
Víctor whispered suddenly: “Do white people fart?”
I laughed.
“I’m not going to sleep all night,” he announced, “so I can find out if they fart or not!”
In the morning, we sat on the beach. I hugged my knees to my chest as we watched the freckled girl walk into the shallows of the river with her clothes on. The cowori, all of them, were standing in a half-moon at the river’s edge, holding hands.
The Waorani pastors had surrounded the freckled girl in the water. Tementa held her arms to her chest. Mincaye took her by the back of the neck, one hand over her mouth and nose. Then suddenly he plunged her backwards. When she surfaced again, she covered her face with her hands. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing.
“Wengongi!” Mincaye exclaimed, his palms facing the sky. “A long time ago you created Adam and Eve and all of the forest and the animals, and we did not know you, and so our souls were black and we spilled red blood with our spears.”
Those black stains again. I did not like them.
“You have brought the cowori to us from far away,” Mincaye continued, “and now they have accepted you into their hearts, and the water has made their souls pure so that they can feel you closer and we can become brothers.”
Why is Mincaye cleaning the souls of the white people? I wondered. Aren’t their souls already clean?
One by one, the white people walked into the shallows and the Waorani pastors dipped their heads into the water.
Mincaye peered all around. “Will anyone else open their hearts and accept God’s love?”
Stephanie turned to look at me. She nodded her head, smiling, coaxing me into the river. I turned to Víctor. He was busy burying crickets in the sand. My mind raced. Maybe if I go into the water, I thought, Stephanie will give me her clothes and she will teach me how to play the keyboard and I will fly in the plane with her to the Land of Rachel.
I stood up. Víctor stared. Faces turned to look at me. Slowly, I walked down the beach. My shoulders were stiff and hunched. I felt Stephanie watching me as I waded into the water up to my chest. If my soul was black, and it probably was, because Mom got mad at me so often, maybe this would clean it.
Mincaye’s hand was cold on my neck. Three more pastors, Tementa, Paa, and Yowe, surrounded me, crouching in the water. I could smell their warm breath. Their eyes were beaming with pride.
“Let the blood of Your son clean Nemonte’s soul of sin so that she may become Your daughter,” Mincaye intoned to Wengongi.
His fingers pressed against my nose and mouth as he plunged me into the river. I kept my eyes closed. For a moment I entered a different world, the world beneath the surface of the water, its sound deep and endless, its touch cool and soft. And then my body was tilted upright again and water was falling off me and I was wrapped in light and air.
“Father God in the sky!” Mincaye called, his voice cracking suddenly. “In the name of Your son, Jesus Christ, Nemonte is now Your daughter. She will not fall back into darkness. Her soul has been cleansed. She will be a beautiful daughter for You. She will listen to You, and serve You, and work for You, oh Lord.”
I stood very still in the middle of the river. I listened for the voice of God but instead there were shouts of “Hallelujah, hallelujah” from the river’s edge. I looked at Stephanie. She was crying. Her face was bright red.
I stared around at all the faces. Near me, the pastors. Further, the cowori. Why were they crying? Why couldn’t I cry? Why did I feel as if absolutely nothing had happened?
Víctor stared at me with enormous owl eyes that said: What have you done? You are crazy.
The pastors kept talking, each in turn, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was dazed. Soon, I was standing in the shallows with all the white people.
“Lift up your hands to the sky,” Steve said, “and make a prayer to Wengongi!”
Was I supposed to talk out loud to Wengongi? I looked at the freckled girl. Her eyes were closed, her head bent backwards, hands stretched outwards. I tried to do the same, although it felt very strange.
“I am now Your daughter,” I whispered under my breath, uneasily. “When will you speak to me, Father?”
I waited. A school of bocachico fish darted upriver. No word from Wengongi.