Mother and daughter walk a long way in silence on the narrow footpath through deep bush. The mother’s naked footfalls are quiet. The daughter behind her, in sandals, breathes hard.

The mother holds a man’s cutlass by the broad handle in one hand, a short hoe grasped midway along the shaft in the other hand. The daughter carries a long handled hoe across one shoulder, held steady in moist hands.

The daughter’s arms ache. Her neck and shoulders burn. Sharp scratches and insect bites itch and sting all over her skin. The hairy grass has teeth. Flower vines sheath thorns. Long leaves with sharp spines draw blood.

The twisting path splits at a crossroads. The daughter follows the mother around the bend up into darker bush. Ferns fan across the path. Elongated tree roots above ground are covered with shimmering green and blue mosses. There’s a strong vegetal smell. Serpentine vines bigger around than a grown man’s thighs fall like green storm waters from the ancient trees.

They walk on, a gradual ascent into the mountains until the narrowing path ends where the black rock sits. The burial ground is somewhere near.

The black rock stands at least twelve feet tall, wide like a termite mound. The black rock has a chiseled head. A woman’s face with a settled expression, calm, round eyes, and three neck rolls. Fat country plaits are grooved in rows to the crown of the head. Mother and daughter wear smoked palm fibers woven inside their braids in the same neat rows.

The daughter’s scalp crawls. The daughter remembers how the strands of her hair were carefully parted, the graze of the wooden comb carved with a woman’s face, the chant singing of the women while her thin, curly hair was held tight and joined to the long palm fibers.

Sunlight falls in slow, soft drips through the quiet roof of leaves. The daughter listens, for something. The rustle of raffia skirts. A masked Sowei dancer bursting out of the bush while someone else holds her down, cuts her, and marks her. The daughter hears her own heart thrum kpa-kpa-kpa-kpa through her body.

The mother sees the way to go. The white cloth.

The mother touches the daughter’s arm and points. The white cloth, tied around a tree limb under cobwebs floating like Fanti fishing nets hung out to dry.

The mother drops her hoe, wraps both hands around the curved handle of the cutlass, and raises the cutlass over her head for strength to break an opening to the white cloth tree. Once there the signs will show them where to dig the grave.

The daughter’s dry throat fills up. Sideways, she watches this mother she barely knows who has brought her here to bury what cannot be touched or seen. It is something the daughter carries. An ancient rot. For all of her fifteen years it has been her closest shadow.

The mother’s cutlass slices through vines that splatter a clear sticky liquid. One stubborn knot forces the mother to stop and catch her breath. Huge flowers spill over the tangled growth. The mother has come alone before. She’d left behind the heavy shovel, not knowing she’d return. This time she’d brought this heavy cutlass, a man’s tool, to clear the way with speed.

The mother loosens her dark blue lappa, takes out a kola nut tied up in one corner. She bites into the bitter pink nut for energy, chews slow, breathes deep, reties the cloth tight over her breasts. She faces the tangled bush and breathes to the rhythmic swing of the cutlass.

The daughter watches. Flower dust and leaves cling to the mother’s head and arms, powdering her feet, stuck on. The daughter’s fear weakens. Now the mother resembles a hybrid of woman and plant. Flower woman of the jungle. Open-mouthed, the daughter laughs. Her ears pop. Air, thin and light, pours into her ears and nose.

The mother crooks her fingers, clears her eyes of dripping sweat and turns her head. The mother’s hunger to hear the daughter’s voice is satisfied. The mother begins to laugh and the whorl of her laughter in that place is warm and sweet. It is a language between them saying plenty.

Saplings give way under the mother’s solid strokes. The daughter says, “Here the birds look like flowers and the flowers look like birds.”

Near the daughter’s eyes hang large, green balls covered with tiny cloud white blooms. Strange blossoms from a tree so tall, she cannot see the upper branches.

“Hmh.” The mother pauses to glance at the daughter’s idle hoe. She lifts her eyes to the daughter’s face.

The underbelly of the daughter’s agony is in the mother’s gaze. Fine hairs in cold bumps spring up along the daughter’s skin. That thing that happens to her with eyes happens again. Probing eyes. Eyes stabbing, worming into private places she shelters. Anger and fear flush through the daughter swift and hot.

The daughter squeezes her eyes tight until they throb. She wants to mewl, to kick, to bite, cut something up, rip something apart, fly out of her skin, her thoughts, the weight, the heaviness, the feeling of being stripped, scraped. She wants a mother she already knows! A mother she knows! She wants to flee from what she feels. That cry that comes from deep inside the belly reaches her heart.

The daughter opens her eyes, lets loose the lower lip bruised between her teeth. She leans her stiff neck back and looks along the trunks of centuries old trees to the dome of overlapping leaves blocking the sky. The daughter shivers in that womblike place.

The cry inside the daughter’s heart gathers power. She cannot hold it in. Her grip tightens around the smooth, long wooden pole in her hands.

The daughter lifts the hoe. Her back arches. Her arms swing in convulsive movements. She is no longer feigning obedience.

They have come to dig a grave to bury sorrow. She is ready to do it.

“Unh! Enh!”