Linguistist

1 October 2026

What Hawa Is Owed

Hawa sells fish at King Jimmy. Not inside the new market they are building over the old one, the one on the sign with glass and cold air and a picture of a woman who is not from here smiling at tilapia. Hawa sells on the ground beside it, where the market has been since before there was a sign, since a Temne king called Jimmy watered his horses there and later burned the town down.

Nineteen years. She can tell the tide by the smell before she sees the water.

She keeps a school exercise book, green cover, multiplication table on the back. In it she writes the names of people who owe her. Name, what they took, how much, the date. When someone pays she draws one line through the name and does not tear the page. The page stays. The line is enough.

There is a man in the book, Sorie. He owes her for a full month of fish. Her daughter says, ask him. He is working. He has money for other things. Hawa says, I know.

Then why do you let it stand.

Because the book is not for him.

For who, then.

For me. A debt you keep is a door you can still walk through. Drop it and it is just a story you tell about being cheated. She does not write his name to make him pay. She writes it so that what happened stays a thing between two people and not a thing that happened to her alone.

Here is the part she does not say out loud. Nobody keeps a book of what Hawa owes. She owes the fisherman who brings the barracuda, she owes the woman who wholesales her the smoked bonga, she owes her sister the money from when the boy was sick, she owes the rent, she owes her knee a doctor, she owes the years. Nobody writes any of it under her name in green ink. She is the one holding the book. They are the ones without one. She has decided that is the whole difference between a debt and a loss, and she decided it on her feet, in the sun, with a knife in her hand and scales on her apron, and she is right.

Praise is free. She knew that before she could write her own name. Somebody can tell you your fish is the best on the whole coast and then walk off with your fish. The words cost them nothing and cost her a fish. So she learned the other thing early: what a person owes you has to be written somewhere, or it never happened.

She keeps a stub of pencil in the spine of the book. It gets shorter every month. Some mornings she thinks it will not reach the bottom of the next name, and it always does, and she does not take that as a promise. She takes it as one more entry, posted.