Wayétu Moore

Hold Your Ear: The Panang-nang Song

That morning I woke up to laughing. It was not the kind of laughing that I was used to—the conversation of guffaws that frequently took place between Momma and Aunty Jeannice when recalling old classmates from the College of West Africa and Ricks Institute.  It was the sound of amused cannons, whose shots collided in the air and burst loud sighs and prolonged exhalations, the jovial clatter of memories and regret; it was the sound of not one, but at least three other aunties surrounding my mother at what I assumed was the kitchen table from the echoes that awoke me from my sleep.

Every morning for four months, I expected that my eyes would be opposite of the Connecticut attic ceiling.  Every morning I was reacquainted with a new ceiling, new walls, a Memphis room that provided another way to pacify our displacement after the 1989 war. I walked toward the laughter, down a blue carpeted hallway, under a framed photo of Aunty Jeannice when she participated in the Miss Liberia pageant, when she was even more beautiful than I knew her to be–long with a sweet round face and my father’s eyes.  There was also a frame that included baby photos of my sister and I which Daddy sent to Aunty Jeannice while we were still in Liberia.  The sun had already risen and the living room transitioned from the orange tint that usually soaked it in the morning, to a bright blue that the laughter languished in as I walked through.  My cousins, Aunty Jeannice’s three sons were laid out on the living room floor on old comforters and spit crusted pillows.  Another male cousin, the son of Daddy’s brother, my Uncle Elroy, lay on the couch as one of his feet brushed the floor beneath it.  In the kitchen, Momma sat beside Aunty Jeannice as they peeled potatoes.  Momma’s stomach seemed to grow larger each night, so much recently that she insisted that my new brother would arrive just in time for my birthday.  They sat across from my Aunty Rita and Aunty Eileen, two aunts from Minnesota who had just arrived in the middle of the night for the first annual Moore family reunion.  Aunty Rita, Uncle Elroy’s wife, was a short, round, and very lovely woman with wire-rimmed glasses that never slipped down her nose.  Aunty Eileen was Daddy’s first cousin—who we were forbidden to call by her first name—drove down with Aunty Rita and her family, excited to see my father and his family since news had spread of our escape from Monrovia.

“Dat de middle one deh?” Aunty Eileen asked excitedly as I entered the kitchen from the living room.  She touched her head, shaved low and dyed blond, and covered her mouth with her fair, almost orange hand.  Aunty Eileen moved to America before I was born, and it was our first time meeting.  She beckoned me to her and kissed my cheek once I arrived only a few inches away from her healthy fingers.  She smelled like an assortment of candies, none that I had ever tasted, but knew I would love if I ever did.

As I was about to walk away from her she pulled my arm back and attempted running her fingers through my hair.

“Ay! Mamawa, what you wih do to deh hair?” she asked with an accent so thick that I went over the words in my head twice before confirming for myself what she had said.  My other aunties laughed, slapping the table and their knees.

“I wih press it when we finish puttin’ de food on de pot,” Momma giggled with them. “Leave my baby alone.”

“But she got thick hair,” Aunty Jeannice said as she pulled my arm and imitated Aunty Eileen’s gesture of digging her fingers through my mane and attempting to pull outward.  I had not braided it the night before, as Momma instructed, and now my hair resembled an electrocuted mullet.

“Thick and kinky!” Aunty Rita said taking me from Aunty Jeannice.  She turned me around and inspected my head painstakingly, shaking her face as her lips quivered until she finally burst.  I found it funny as well, and smiled at Aunty Rita and bit my lip as she pinched my cheeks.

“Look at her, lookin’ just like Ma,” Aunty Rita said finally.  “Mam, you can talk to yor family? Dey still in de interior?”

“Yeh, I can talk to dem” Momma answered, still smiling, but noticeably distracted by the question. “Dey in Logan Town.  Dey wih go back to Lukin Town soon.”

“Look, dey got so big!” Aunty Rita said looking back at me, sensing the severity of the question. “Can you cook yet?  How old are you now?”

“Seven,” I said.

“Can you cook?”

I bit my lip and blushed until my head shook from side to side.  Through my nerves and childish amusement, Aunty Rita straightened up the large t-shirt that I was wearing as a nightgown so that it did not hang off of my shoulders.

“Go get ready,” Momma said behind me.

I was thrilled to be excused from the kitchen, although I knew that I would be expected to stay there during the day to help the other women cook.  My mother and aunties filled me with an unremitting joy, even when I understood that they were teasing me.  I enjoyed looking at their faces and picking gestures from their lips and eyes that I would mimic when the sun was high enough to go outside and play.  I enjoyed listening to them laugh after every other sentence, then hear the repetition of the joke or anecdote as they shouted to the other room where Daddy and the other men sat.  I usually went back and forth between the two rooms, watching the faces of Daddy and my uncles just as intently, memorizing the sentiments and words that made their eyes raise.  The only thing that bothered me about the visits, was that while chatting with my aunties, Momma and their accents would become so deep and they spoke so quickly that sometimes I could not understand them.  Their voices were naturally only recognizable by their children and other Liberians while they were together, but when laughing in the kitchen their accents warped into another form of communication that blended words and laughter and shouting.

“But de boy say he not com panang-panang-ohhhhhh!” is what it sounded like to me while listening.  It was then followed by louder hoots and teary eyes from crying.

“Dey com to de house and can panang-panang??”

“Yeh panang-panang,” another added as her fists rested on her hips.

“What did you just say?” I made the mistake of asking once.

“Oh! De geh American geh now she can’t understand Liberian English so?  So-so series they can be speaking,” was the response I got.

“Series, or no series, you don’t ask grown woman what dey say, frisky!” Momma interjected.

“But de geh wih learn soon enough,” Aunty Rita smiled.

“Don’t put yor nose in grown woman business, yeh?” she said.  I was embarrassed that she had reprimanded me in front of my Aunties, particularly Aunty Jeannice who I had grown to love since she always smeared some of her lipstick onto my lips while she was getting ready to go out.  However I remained curious and listened closely, very closely, while they were laughing and shouting, even though I could not discern the words.

It was an electric stove that’s spirals became bright red when it was hot enough to burn a finger off.  I had not touched one since Caldwell, years before when my finger was blue for three weeks.  However, from where I sat, as the red heat snaked the coal colored metal, I wondered how hot it was and how it would feel against my skin.  Aunty Jeannice placed a white wooden chair directly beside the stove for my mother to sit.  I sat in front of Momma’s bulging stomach on a stool between her legs and held an opened can of Dax grease up in the air for her perusal.  Momma dipped her middle and pointer fingers inside of the green grease jar and pulled them out as the thick and sticky residue hung from them.  Her hand passed my nose and the potent smell of mineral oil and petrolatum raised the tiny coils of hair on the nape of my neck and behind my ears.

Usually Kula, my younger sister, was forced to forgo the procedure first, but we watched the bottom of her nightgown disappear into the bathroom as soon as Momma called her name.  She cleverly ran in for her wash when she noticed Aunty Jeannice pull the chair along the linoleum floor to the stove. Now she sat in Aunty Eileen’s lap at the kitchen table and watched as giant water balls followed my pupils to the ends of my face as my mother applied the grease to my hairline.  She lay it thick onto the sides of my face and neck, behind my ears and between the line she had just made in my virgin hair with a black fine tooth comb.

Momma grabbed the hot comb from the stove as smoke lifted from its teeth and disappeared into the ceiling.  She continued to blow and more heat came from it and ascended into the kitchen air, congregating with invisible remnants of jollof rice and collard greens, potato and yams and red palm oil soup.  After blowing on it, Momma wiped the hot comb with a towel on her lap and grabbed the thin row of my stubborn tight curls that awaited straightening.  As I felt the heat draw close to my back, my shoulders raised and I closed my eyes so tightly that blue and silver circles appeared on the insides of my lids.

“Relax,” Momma said nudging me with her thick thighs.

“Relax,” my older sister Wiande joked from the kitchen sink as she helped Aunty Jeannice wash the greens.

“Could you tell dem to be quiet?” I whined, almost crying.

“You next, yeh?” Momma’s eyes winced toward my sisters as Kula pushed her jaws together with two fingers to keep from laughing.  My anger did not faze them and the amusement they received by my fear of the hot comb.  As I tried to think of things to say to them while it was their turn, and imagined how fully and how hard I would laugh at their misery, Momma dug the teeth of the comb into my roots and pulled out and the grease hissed and sizzled as it burned.  When she lifted the comb into the air, my shoulders dropped.

“I don’t want to do this,” I whined.

This time Momma’s thigh made a slapping sound against my bare arm.

“Eh, you geh stop whinin’,” she said.

“Ay-yah,” Aunty Rita said from the table.

“Ay-yah,” Kula repeated.

Momma giggled with the other women before hissing her teeth through a smile.  Kula licked her lips as her eyes roamed the faces of the room.  Toward the bedroom hallway a distant and girlish moan broke up the laughter and smell of burning hair.

“You hear dat?” Momma said.  The voice came again, and this time Aunty Jeannice recognized the softness of her daughter’s voice as she slept.  Aunty Jeannice walked quickly out of the kitchen and shortly after returned with her two-year-old daughter, also named Jeannice, and Aunty Rita’s two-year-old Brittney on either hip.

“Dey up,” Aunty Jeannice said.  Kula climbed out of Aunty Rita’s lap and joined Wiande at the sink.  Brittney lay in Aunty Rita’s lap and pressed her head against her mother’s chest.  She was the spitting image of Aunty Rita, except in the middle of her face was a nose explicitly characteristic of Daddy’s side of the family.  Aunty Eileen extended her hands for Jeannice, who rubbed her eyes as she shook her head, opting to stay on her mother’s hip.

“Ouch!” I flinched as the hot comb burned through the oil of my scalp to redden my bare skin.

“Nah-mah,” Momma said and took more grease from the Dax can and rubbed it on the burn.

“Mam, whatever happen to Blamah panang-panang?” Aunty Eileen asked.

“I’n hear dat name for lon, de geh panang-nang ohhhhh.”

“WHEN?!” Aunty Jeannice and Rita asked simultaneously.  Aunty Jeannice bent down and tried handing her daughter to Aunty Eileen again so that she could continue washing the greens.  This time she willingly fell into Aunty Eileen’s arms.

“And you hear PANANG-NAG!” Aunty Eileen said taking Jeannice.

“What panang-panang?” Kula asked softly.

“Nothin’ you geh. Dat grown woman business,” Aunty Eileen responded.

My mother and aunties joined her laughing and Aunty Jeannice walked back to the sink where Wiande continued to wash the greens from a stool.   Kula shrugged her shoulders and tiptoed over to the sink to see what they were doing.

“Why now?” Momma asked.

“No! De peking got all dat mess goin’ on, what you wan pananag-nang small small.”

“PANANG-ohhhhhh!” Momma shook behind me.  I grew nervous, remembering that the hot comb waited in her hand.

“WHAT?!” Aunty Rita exclaimed.

“An-nen wife an Blamah-panang-wicked-I tell you!” Momma said.

“But he foolish panang- panang,” Aunty Jeannice said leaning back in mirth.

This time my mother and Aunties laughed so loudly and fully that my sisters and cousins joined them, although I knew that they too were having problems understanding what was being said.  Their voices were so swallowed by the pigeon that we could not understand the ongoing scandal.

“Ouch!” I said turning around to Momma, making sure she saw the disapproval of her inattentiveness on my face.

“Nah-mah,” she said again, wiping her eyes of the tears from their apparently hilarious conversation and the boiling soup.  Aunty Jeannice came to where we sat from the sink and looked down at my head.

“You almost done,” she said with a sigh, also getting over her laughter.  She ran her slender fingers through my pressed hair, the oiliness of which she rubbed on her jeans before walking back to the sink.

“She’s done,” I said pleading a release from the small stool since I suspected that even though what they could see of my hair was now completely straight, they planned on also combing the small hairs behind my ears and along my hairline with the hot comb.  I fidgeted in hopes that Momma would remember that she had just repeatedly burned my scalp with the comb and graciously send me to the bathroom to wash.

“Sit still,” she said tapping my shoulder, and the sticky inner surface of her fingers worked their way over from my forehead to the right side of my face.  Behind my ear the curled balls of stiff hair shook and sweat emerged from their roots, reluctant to blend into the dormant grease.

“You know what dey told me one day? You know, yeh?” Aunty Eileen refueled the conversation.

“I finish. I don’t want know,” Momma said chuckling.

“The geh panang-phenang-pening two men!” She said.

“Oh!” Momma shouted abruptly in astonishment.

“Yeh,oh,” Aunty Eileen confirmed.

“But why?” Aunty Jeannice asked as her joyful expression weakened.

“Hold yor ear,” Momma said nudging me with her thigh.  I turned around and saw the hot comb waiting for me in the air.

“Really?” I said with wet eyes.

“Yeh, hold yor ear for true,” Aunty Rita murmured through a wide grin. “Dat grown woman talk.”

Steam rose from the comb and Momma set her eyes on the last of the belligerent baby twists behind my ear.

“Hold yor ear,” Kula said giggling at the sink.  “Panang,” she tried imitating them, smirking as though she knew something that I did not.

“Don’t say dat!” Momma said pointing the comb toward Kula.

I winced at the raised hotcomb and lifted my tremulous hand to my ear.  I bended the upper lobe downward so that Momma could see the hair hiding behind it.  The warmth of the comb approached my skin and my shoulders and upper back rose and became stiff, overwrought with tension.  The room remained silent as the women and girls, my mother and aunties and sisters and cousins, slowly leaned their torsos toward me.  Aunty Eileen held her breath and did not continue the story until the grease hissed through the comb and she was certain that I had not been burned.

Copyright © Wayétu Moore