Once upon a thinking-string-of-sighs, in the valley between the River Mono and
the River Volta, dancing gods from So pantheon like Hevioso, the killer whose
voice lives in thunder and Avleketi, the pretty shapeshifter from the sea who we
sometimes call Mami Wata, first peppered the land with beads as if they were hurl-
ing down a clock-bird’s currency.

Storytellers say nothing about women like Dovi, Grandma, whose will beat brass
and ground glass, who knew artistry is unthinkable without shadows. She passed
through Afa’s fire then came back to sit night after night, in the shallow arc of
yellow light spilled from a hurricane lamp to string-tie dzinyagba sighs and make
gold laugh in a forge lined with trays of termite clay and cassava stalks so that
she could pass on her womans-wealth to her daughters and her daughters’
daughters and their daughters.

Nothing either about women like Flore, Mama, who wore white ananu beads
claimed in victory for surviving childbirth and later, aglobo starbursts, green
chevrons for new bloom in bud. When her waters finally stopped, her hunting spir-
it stalked Aido-Hwedo, the rainbow snake, in saltwater for many days and then
she collected esui, coral glazed red like sacrificial animal blood to ensure her
daughter would live true to what she had named her.

Instead tales abound about those afli beads - bloodless bone or mere seeds, not
mosaic, akoso, millefiori or even the trade ones that cast out people across the
sahel and water. God-objects, insisted the chancer English explorer, gifted to him
in Dahomey from the Fon king’s treasure trove of thinking strings, made only by
women. Surely not by any Mino, those daughters of Africa, who swallowed enemy
blood swiped off machetes and shunned dancing beads bouncing at their loin
cloth lines.

I hear the great ancestral beads call through their holes to me, Azolia, their
many, many times daughter. This storyteller’s skin is tribal marked by ali dzonu,
her belly dimpled by vaseline waist beads meant only for the eyes of her lovers
and passed down from her mothers. Their fire things forge kin to Awoamefiadu-
lawo, to the footprints of women in Adafienu dancing the husago, to life and death
itself kindling the blood kin of my flesh.