This is What I Tell My Daughter    

By Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

If my father hadn't scared me, I wouldn't be here.
I'd be somewhere down Jallah Town or Slip Way,
where the Mesurado dumps its junk by dark swamps.
I'd be carrying buckets full of dirt to turn
Monrovia's swamps into dry land. Or I'd be
somebody's wife, trying to be somebody's wife.
This is how I scare my daughter.

You wouldn't be here. You'd be somewhere
where babies wait in long lines to be born;
little babies with sore feet, waiting
in the unborn world, where food can't grow.
I would have had ten children before you were born.
You, there, standing in line, waiting to be born,
while I'd be in some overcrowded town,
some unknown city or village, with skinny
legged children, mucus noses, bare feet,

crying for food. I'd be there, one husband
each month, one room each month.
On Capital Bye Pass, where I grew up,
all the boys knew how to get a girl pregnant.
All sorts of men and boys, all sorts of people
lurking at windows, in doorways.
Plenty of men from Nigeria, from Sudan,
from far away villages in Liberia, from Mars.
This is what I tell my daughter.

The University, bringing the whole globe
with hurried feet on our street,
emptying its men in one room boarding houses
in our backyard. My father, a barbed-wire fence,
his needle-poking eyes, scaring boys away.
The boys called him "CIA chief."
The girls on Capital Bye Pass—with their perky,
brown cheeks, their smooth pretty skin,
their sophisticated steps.
My father called them gronna-girls,
bringing home sad trophies in teen arms.

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Source: Becoming Ebony by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley