Chapter 18

# Chapter 18

I told her about the plantain.

I don't know why I started there. There were larger things to say—school reports, friendships, the slow, uneven process of a girl learning to inhabit a life that did not hurt her. But what came out of my mouth first was the plantain. How Nneka ate it. The way she cut each piece into precise halves before she put it in her mouth, the knife held firmly, the cuts deliberate, as though the act of eating required a methodology. How in the first months she ate so carefully that I thought she was dieting—a London assumption, the kind of explanation that belongs to a world where girls restrict food because of magazines, not because of memory. How I learned, much later, that the precision was not about control but about practice, the rehearsed discipline of a child who had been taught that taking too much was dangerous and that hunger, visible hunger, was a provocation.