I am standing on the platform of a London tube station, I’m back in the city where I lived for 30 years, before making my home in the United States. “ I wondered why, if what girls had between their legs needed to be so closely guarded, we were the ones to wear skirts.”Ģ017. I didn’t want to be a boy I wanted the freedom I saw belonged to boys but not girls. Yet in my tomboy/cross-dresser days, which lasted until I was around 14, I had already begun to understand viscerally something I couldn’t articulate. The enclosed worlds of compound life and British boarding school left me unprepared for the streets of the capital, the act of walking, specifically of walking alone and female down a street. I went to boarding school at 6 and left at 18 for university in London. I was on my way to his house with my haul of newspapers when I passed the three men.

I generally came in later on the weekend and the street was already busy with people. One of my tasks was to pick up the broadsheets each morning, and in those pre-Internet days I would leaf through them and clip and file any articles on the stories he was covering. My final year at university and I had a part-time job working for an American foreign correspondent. The third one leans into my face and breathes: “Nigger!” The first man, as he passes, looks me in the eye and says: “You’re a pretty girl.” The second one smirks, but says nothing.

They are white, dressed in tight jeans and cap-sleeve T-shirts. Three men are coming towards me they are clearly together, though the foot traffic on the pavement requires each to walk a half pace behind the other. I am walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea in London. OL5957952W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 90.12 Pages 346 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0747584729 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:32:15 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA142519 Boxid_2 CH106301 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorīostonpubliclibrary Edition 1st American ed.

Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna