“We walked and walked until we made it to a small house, made out of woven grass, and a clearing. There was a pole in the middle, and tens of people sitting and standing, laughing, talking, greeting one another. There were maybe five or six children younger than me, awake that late, on their mothers’ laps or riding their older sisters’ hips. There were old people and young. A few women and men in white shirts, and white scarfs tied to their heads. Torches all around to illuminate their faces. It did not look like any kind of solemn ceremony. It looked more like what a picnic did back in America, except it was happening in the middle of the night in a clearing, with someone’s dog running happily back and forth and in among the people. Someone was even passing around slices of fruit. When we got there, Ti Me had us squat down on the ground alongside some other children our age. It was only as I looked at them more closely in the light from the torches that I saw how many pairs of twins were there. Boy twins. Girl twins. A few that were boys and girls, I guessed, like me and Ella. We sat and waited.

“We had left the house probably at midnight. By the moon in the sky, I would guess we sat and waited for another hour or so. I began to yawn, and Ti Me reached out her arm, so I could lie against her shoulder.

“Then the music began—you haven’t heard it yet. It’s like the drums of heaven.”

“There are no drums in heaven,” I said.

“You’re wrong, Libertie.” Emmanuel still was not looking at me. He still was speaking to the sky.

“I saw the men and women in white walk in a circle around the pole, swaying in time, the women each holding a lighted candle. Sometimes, in their march, they would stop to twirl. Sometimes, a man would come up to them and press his forehead to theirs, and then both, man and woman, would twist around each other, only their brows touching.

“I watched it all,” he said, “but Ella hid her face.”

“They had a brown-skinned kid goat and a speckled hen. They slit the throats of both and then cooked them, and then put them in a jug with three mouths and offered it to the Marasa. These are the spirits of twins.

“When the spirits had eaten, a woman came and gathered up the meal and put it in a wooden basin. She balanced the basin on the top of her head and walked around the pole three times. Then she took the basin off her head and showed it to each of us, to all the children sitting around. She kept asking us, ‘Èske li bon?’ When she got to me and Ella, I nodded.