finished, she raised the Bible up over her head—one of Pastor Tom’s patent gestures. “Praise God. Praise Him for sending His only son, Jesus Christ, to save us all.” Two hundred pairs of eyes looked up at the book. When she lowered it, they fastened on her, clinging with an almost tactile pressure that evaporated her terror and summoned out of hiding the confident girl who years ago stood to recite and didn’t beg or call for her classmates’ attention but seized it effortlessly. “Jesus Christ proclaims your liberty”—pause—“He has opened your prison.” She told them that the river of Christ’s abiding love had flowed into the hearts of schoolchildren on the other side of the world; it made them care about the sufferings of people they had never seen, moved them to bring those sufferings to an end. She didn’t have to search for the words or think about them, but heard them with her inner ear and then uttered them, as though she were reading from a teleprompter scrolling in her brain. A rapture filled her. She felt powerful and commanding and absolutely sure that every word was right.
“That will never happen to you again.” She pointed at an adolescent boy with scars balled up into an ugly knot on one shoulder; and as Manute converted her declaration into Dinka, she waded into the crowd without a second’s forethought, lifted the boy by the arm, and led him to the front so all could see. Somehow she knew that this too was right, exactly the right move to make. “This will never happen to any of you again”—pause—“That’s what it means to be free.” Taking a step forward, she picked up the woman in the blue scarf, the one who had hissed, and turned her around to face the assemblage. “And this will never happen to any of you, ever again.” She laid her finger on the mark beneath the woman’s eye. “You will never be beaten, ever again. You will never be branded, ever again. You will never be made to tend the Arabs’ cattle, ever again.” She was really cooking now, an electric current surging through her and out of her, seeming to sweep over her audience. “You women will never be raped, ever again. You boys will not have your hands and feet cut off, ever again.” Manute, struggling to keep pace with her outpouring, seemed to catch her fervor and threw up his arms with the last repetitions of “ever again.”
“You are free!” Quinette cried out, and spread her own arms wide.
Someone made a soft clicking noise. It was echoed by another, and another, and in a moment, every tongue was making it so that it became like the crickets and frogs she’d heard last night, a single sheet of sound.
“The Dinka way of saying they like what they have heard,” Manute explained, grinning from beneath the bill of his baseball cap.
Applause! And it sounded to her ears like a standing ovation. A woman began to sing; high clear notes rose out of the chorus of clicks. The other women answered in unison, and the boys took up a contrapuntal melody and beat their hands against their thighs, all swaying to the rhythm. It was a jubilant song but not a lively one, with an undertone of sorrow, and it was haunting and lovely, that slow beat, that smooth, rich flow of voices, there under the mahogany tree. Quinette never imagined she could touch people as she just had, breaking the seal to the rejoicing she’d known was in them, setting it free.
“What is it you do for a living?” Jim asked, and his voice had the same effect as an alarm clock.
“The Gap. Salesperson.”
She almost grimaced, it sounded so banal.
“Missed your calling.”
Ten minutes ago she would have feasted on the compliment, but it seemed meager fare after the banquet of approval laid out for her by all those people. Yet it wasn’t their approval that satisfied her most, but her ability to bring them some measure of joy. Looking at the faces before her, listening to their song, she felt the craftsman’s gratification, beholding his creation; and that was a pleasure she’d never experienced in her daily life, retailing commodities she’d had no hand in making.
MY NAME IS Aluet Akuoc Wiere. I am twenty-five years old. I was captured four years ago. The Arabs attacked our village in the early morning—
“Manute, her village,” Ken interrupted. He was sitting with his laptop in the