Geneva and Abeni continued on, farther away from the coastline, and headed into a forest. Geneva wished she could have brought the guard along, simply because he could speak Yoruba and she couldn't. She wanted to learn this language, but there were no books on it for her to read, and it wasn't related to Greek or Latin. She couldn't speak to Abeni for long using only hand signals.
Geneva let go of Abeni's hand and grabbed a stick and proceeded to draw rather frustratedly in the mud. She drew a simplistic house, and pointed to Abeni. She hoped this made sense. It didn't really seem to at first. Abeni only looked at the drawing with confusion, and tried to speak in Yoruba to her, but Geneva only shook her head. This was very frustrating.
Abeni took to quieting her baby, which had only just begun to cry. She had very little clothing on, save for a thin shirt of sorts and a ragged skirt, which had probably seen better days. She was small, but had a wide frame, for she had recently given birth, and she had short hair that barely peeked out on the sides of a dirtied white cloth which covered her head. The front of her shirt was open so that she could breastfeed her child, and Abeni didn't seem the least bit embarrassed to have her breasts exposed at all. Geneva had never seen such a thing in a person before, but she had never seen such a place or such a practice either. This world was very different from the ones of Ireland and Europe, and was very primitive. Yet, there was some kind of beauty in the simplicity in which Abeni held herself: the way she stood and the way she walked, the way she cradled her child and willingly walked barefoot through the muddy earth, the way that she didn't bother covering her exposed chest, for she had more humble pride in her child than her own body.
Geneva looked at the stick in her hand again and smeared the drawing of the house away with her boot. She drew people and then a village as best as she could. She drew a woman with a baby and she drew herself next to them. Once she had finished, she pointed to Abeni, and then to the drawing of the woman with the baby. She did the same for herself in order to signify that the two people represented them, and once Abeni had understood that, she drew an arrow toward the little village that she had drawn, indicating that they should travel to Abeni's village. Geneva wanted to go there. She wanted to learn from Abeni and learn her language and her culture. It was so different from anything she'd ever known, and absolutely nothing like what the books in the European libraries described.
At first, Abeni didn't understand. Geneva didn't know how to make this any more clear. She started drawing things that toddlers would draw in their pictures of home. She didn't know what Abeni's home looked like. She drew trees and grass and birds. She drew happy people. She didn't know what else to draw, so she drew a sun rising in the background. That was when Abeni became ecstatic. She spoke quickly, and grabbed Geneva by the hand, pulling her through the forest, repeating quickly and often the word "ile," which Geneva could only hope to assume meant one thing: home.