There it was.

Eight a.m. Saturday morning and my ears were roused by Miriam Makeba's "Pata Pata". I rolled my eyes and stretched my face above the covers to glance at the clock on my wall. Eight o'clock! Come now, MamaAfrika, surely you could've saved your hymns of the struggle for after lunch.

"Saguquga sathi bega nantsi Pata Pata," she teased me loudly."Saguquga sathi bega nantsi Pata Pata."

I heard my mother’s voice, full of life and laughter. I heard the banging of pots and pans, the opening and closing of kitchen cupboards. I tried at first to ignore the music, but the harder I tried, the louder the music became.

Downstairs, my brothers sat in front of the television for a game of Mario-Cart. On Saturdays my mother let them plug their video games into the big screen. They played the game on mute until about noon when my mother finished listening to her music, and was ready to go out with my dad to run errands. They too had energy unnatural to me for such an early hour in the morning. They laughed, pushing each other competitively on the living room floor in attempts at victory.

I walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. As usual, it was covered with bisquits, pancakes, fried and boiled eggs, cornbread, sausage, orange and apple juices, and milk.

“Saguquga sathis bega nantsi Pata Pata,” Makeba continued.

“How long is this song?” I asked my mother as my head slowly drooped onto the table.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” My mother said quickly, running towards me. “Don’t sleep at the table. If you want to sleep, go back upstairs.” Her accent was deeper on Saturday mornings than it was on the weekdays.

“But I can’t sleep with the music so loud,” I argued.

“Your sisters can,” she said playfully, stretching her eyebrows at me.

“My sisters are unnatural. You all are!” I joked.

My mother looked at me, face stern, body stiff. Suddenly she burst laughter; guffawed at my misery.

“You’re so dramatic,” she said, shrugging me off as she headed back to the kitchen.

I followed her. Her humor drew me, carried me along my rough mornings, and introduced me to days of rest.

“Is this a new CD?” I asked. She nodded.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Miriam Makeba,” she answered.

I nodded.

“She has a beautiful voice right? You should sing one of her songs at the school talent show. You never sing anything African. How about N’kosi Sikelel’i Africa?” she asked.

“How ‘bout no?” I laughed. The thought of belting out the African national anthem to a predominantly white school tickled me.

My mother shook her head, still smiling.

“What are you making now?” I asked watching her pour vegetable oil into a hot pan.

“Plantains,” she replied.

I laughed. Nodded. “Of course, Momma. Plantains and pancakes, right?”

“Right.”

She looked at me, confused at how I could possibly expect a breakfast table without plantains.

“I’m going to try and go back to sleep,” I told her walking towards the stairs.

“Alright, lazy girl,” she taunted me. “But don’t call me when your husband wants to leave you because you can’t cook!” she called up the stairs.

“I won’t,” I slurred, nearly sleepwalking. “Oh yeah, Momma?!” I called from halfway up the stairs.

“Yes?!” she yelled up.

“I’m going to have some friends over in a bit! Can you turn that music down?!” I asked.

There was a pause in her breath that I would’ve heard from a mile away. The plantain knife hit the cutting board and held still. I had also distracted my brothers from their game, since they both quickly glanced up at me.

“Sure, honey,” she answered. And when the friends came over, the music went off.

For the majority of my childhood and adolescence, I hid my heritage from the world outside. In the middle-class, predominantly white town of Spring, Texas, it was easy for my siblings and I to blend into the African-American population as just the big family down the street. Other than our names, there was little about us that provoked questions from our classmates and friends.

At four years old, I’d forgotten Vai, an indigenous Liberian language that my mother taught us as children. At eight I traded fufu platters for McDonald’s Happy Meals. At thirteen I folded my lappas and the kitenge garments, (which my aunts sent from overseas), for Express and NY & Co. jeans.

Unlike my father, whose pride and nationalist ideologies led long family lectures on appreciating our legacy, my mother realized that she had American children and tried sincerely and earnestly to raise us with that in mind.

She tried not to be so obvious, for our sake. As the years passed dishes like Cassava leaves and Jute leaves took a back seat to Spaghetti and Meatloaf when we had friends visiting. She struggled raising five bi-cultural children in a land that denied her culture, her history, and her beauty. During the week, when friends and teammates from little league teams, dance squads and basketball teams raided her house, she would come downstairs and speak, spend time listening to our stories or the laughter shared after games, and then she would go upstairs and rest.

Saturdays mornings, however, were hers. On Saturday mornings, we woke up to Miriam Makeba, Sunny Okosum, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. On Saturday mornings, she could finally use music, a form that could never be taken away from her, to teach her children about her home, and their history.

“Pata Pata”, one of Makeba’s most popular works, was only one of a collection of around fifty songs that embedded themselves into the mold of my childhood.

Every Saturday morning as I dragged my feet downstairs, I was accompanied by thick harmonies, bass drums, and cymbals that ricocheted the thin walls of our suburban homes and rocked the normalcy of our lives.

“Come on!” my mother would call, sometimes dancing along to the rhythm of the brick beats and wailing solos.
She would move her feet and hips as though she were a part of the music, as though she had penned the song herself. She moved through the thumping core, her hums as thorough as though she had written the lyrics herself. Once in a while I danced along. Daddy would come downstairs sometimes to join her, and as my sisters, brothers, and I watched them, each step brought us closer to their stories, their glories, and the Africa that we had never really known.

Along with my parent’s history and stories of Liberian liberation and scandals, we learned of Makeba’s life, and how her voice rang all about Africa as a way to freedom-- calm and steady in a fierce and chaotic world. Daddy taught us of her touring in South Africa with the Manhattan Brothers that gained the initial attention that brought her to the states; her affiliation with Harry Belafonte and marriage to Hugh Masekela; her exile from South Africa in the 60’s because of the political message of anti-apartheid in her music; the skepticism received from the US because of her marriage to Stokely Carmichael; and her dedication to black rights and human rights throughout the world.

“MamaAfrika,” Daddy said they called her.

She sang to me every Saturday morning and as I searched her, I searched myself. I grew, I learned my history, I lived, and slowly began to love who I was. Or so I thought.

One night, a night in which I have lost the context and reason; a night that I will remember for the rest of my life, my mother and I stormed into the house and the front door slammed behind us. We were fighting over something she had said, which I now don’t remember, but it was something that set her apart and made her look different from the other mothers at the PTA meeting that we’d just come home from.

“What was so wrong with that?!” she asked me, obviously blended with offense and annoyance.

“You just don’t say things like that!” I screamed.

“But what was so wrong with it?! If I don’t agree with something, then I’m going to say it!” she asserted.

“But it’s just the way that you sounded, Momma!!” Tears broke.

“How?! How did I sound?! Different?! African?! Open your eyes, Wayetu! I am different!”

“But you don’t have to…”

“And so are you!!” she interrupted. I stopped when I heard her voice crack. “Are you ashamed of me?!” she yelled. I shook my head.

“Look at me! And answer me!”

“No, no I’m not,” I answered.

“Good!” she interrupted again. “Because if you’re ashamed of me, then you’re ashamed of yourself!”

I was embarrassed. I had overreacted. What was wrong with me? Why did I care so much? We were taught in school to embrace difference. To tolerate it. But not this kind. Not my kind of different.

“You’re African, Wayetu,” she said as tears streamed down her high russet cheekbones. The words hurt more than I’d imagined. I had never heard them. They hurt, however. And I didn’t know why.

“You hear me? You’re African,” she finished. And she left me standing there with the echo of her words and the scent of her tears.

That night, Makeba sang to my mother and I both. Suliram, a song she recorded in 1960, is an Indonesian lullaby that means “Go to sleep”. Shortly after I got out of the shower, the song floated through the walls of my home, upstairs, and through me. I lay in bed looking up at the ceiling.

My mother pressed play.

“Suliram, ram, ram,” Makeba sang, “Suliram yang manis.” The cry of her voice, the soft vibrato of her struggle and existence sang to me in the night. I swallowed what felt like bricks into my stomach. They sank and weighed me down into the bed. “Go to sleep,” she sang. But how could I?

Africa had done everything that she could to protect me. And when Africa needed me the most, I denied her.

Oh, Miriam, MamaAfrika, sing us back together again. Sing flesh, bones, and blood, back to where a stiff and hollow rock has formed. Sing me back to Africa with your glistening eyes. Sing me to her with your fearlessness. Suliram, she sang, she taunted.

But I cannot sleep tonight.

I arose from my bed, nearly a woman now underneath my thin nightgown; and through my blindness of tears, I found my way across the hall back to Africa. I opened her door and there she sat, waiting for me. I ran into her arms, and like a prodigal son, she received me, rocked me, as if I had done nothing wrong. I had found Africa, and through her story, with the music she imposed on me every Saturday morning, I loved her. And I finally loved myself.

Outside they taught me of her; taught me to scold her savagery and to betray her high cheeks and deep mahogany tone. Outside they taught me that she was uncivilized, faithless, aimless, and ruined. Outside they coaxed me to turn the music down. But each day when I opened my front door and saw Africa; when I opened my front door and saw her singing with Miriam; she sang through her so that their stories merged, twisted, and sculpted the woman that I am today. When I opened the door I was abruptly struck by Africa’s beauty; a beauty that now glistened from the deep tone of her skin as the tears hung down. I opened the door and I cried in her arms because now I know the Truth. Now I know myself.

Oh, MamaAfrika, sing her my apologies. Sing to her that I was only misguided to the denial of her skin, her hair, her food, her music. Sing her my miseducation in your high note! Tell her that I am sorry. That I love her. And that I will never stop the music again.