The Wife Who Could Not Work

The next installment of bedtime stories from Children of Wax: African Folk Tales concerns marital relations and division of labor.

So a rich man goes adventuring and in one village, he spots the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She is a serious catch. He approaches her father to ask for her hand in marriage and her father says he can marry her for 50 cows (a lot of cattle, in this story). The rich man agrees to pay her father 50 cows and they shake on it, after which the father says, oh, by the way, you should know--a girl as beautiful as this one is not able to work. She is too delicate. And the rich man says, no problem.

The man takes his new wife back to his village where everybody ooohs and aaaahs over her beauty. Since he travels often, he installs new wife in his house and she sits in the shade every day. After a time, the other women in the village grow weary of this and they think, seriously, there is lots of work to do: she needs to pitch in. They wait until a time when the husband is out of town and then approach her about helping with an easy task: fetch water in a jug from the river. And she's like, sure! The beautiful woman takes the jug to the river, fills it with water, and on the way back she is caught in quicksand, weighed down by her cargo, and sinks below the surface.

After they realize she is missing, the other women in the village FREAK OUT and make up a lie about how she was eaten by a lion. But the husband, upon his return, is not deceived by this story, and he goes to the local wise man to figure out how to find his wife. The wise man tells him to go to the riverbank and get a fat woman (I am not making this up) to jump up and down in the sand. Husband does this, and slowly but surely the wife emerges from the sand and everyone apologizes and promises to never make her work again.

Moral of the story? Well, that's a weighted question, now, isn't it?

If you ask me, beautiful people should surely be revered and consulted with and not forced to toil, as we have this unfortunate habit of stepping into quicksand.

On the other hand, combine a beautiful person with a control freak and she's like, "I'm cool!" even as she's sinking.

Perhaps we are all the beautiful wife, and perhaps we are all the rich man, and the fat woman. We are all too delicate for this world, and we work anyway, and we guard our possessions, and we strive for social justice.

And if we have any sense at all, when we find ourselves in quicksand we drop the jug of water and fight for our lives to get out.