A group of girls are in dance formation. They have strips of aso oke tied across their chests. Longer ones cover their waists down to their knees. Girls are magic beings. They have to be not to die from itching, wearing scratchy aso oke next to their bare skin like that. They are singing in Yoruba:
We are here
We are here again
The eagle is the king of birds
The lion is the king of forest animals
We are greater than these by far
We are singers, dancers too
I am watching them but pretending not to do so. Soon they start to argue. One girl, the shortest, the one with blue stars drawn on her legs, wants the group to roar like a lion at the end of the first verse. Many disagree with her. As she talks, explaining her point, she keeps untying and retying her waist wrapper. It is a very womanly move and it makes me feel like my stomach is punching itself. It also makes me think of Mother. Mother once made us crowns out of her old gold aso oke. Peter and I hated it. We wanted store-bought crowns, like the other kids in the play.
As I watch the girls dance, I start to feel the feeling again. This time it is a different, more sure feeling. I am certain all of this has happened before. I have seen this before—little girls singing, dancing, smiling, one in the middle stopping occasionally to stare at me, saying nothing, just smiling. I feel like all I need to do is focus my brain and I will remember what I am remembering.
I notice a lizard running across the yard, it runs over my feet and then goes up the wall separating our house and Stanley’s. Once it gets to the middle of the wall it stops, still except for bobbing its little red head every few seconds. I have seen this before. Even this red-orange lizard crawling over the wall, nodding.
The girl looks at me again. This time I smile back. I blow a kiss. She spreads out five fingers, points them at me. “Your mother,” she screams.
Girls are crazy.
There is a concrete slab in the center of this backyard. It is a long rectangle that extends almost to the end of the east wall. It’s as if someone intended to cover the ground completely but ran out of concrete too early. The girls are dancing on one side of the slab. On the other, Stanley’s mother has spread out yellow maize and red guinea corn to dry on a raffia mat.
Some white pigeons circle around above. The girls love birds, they wave at them singing the leke leke song, Leke leke, give me white fingers, won’t you?
Sometimes the birds swoop down as fast as lightning. They pick bread crumbs or a smooth pebble or chicken feed. A couple of pigeons hover close to our heads then fly away. They want the maize, but they won’t land because we are here. There are too many of us.
One of the boys notices the pigeons and says something. The rest of them stop playing to look at the birds. Then someone says, “I have an idea. Let’s make a bird trap.” Another says, “I know how to build one.” They begin to argue about what is needed when Peter invites them to our house.
“We live next door. We have extra wood and nails. We are building a chicken coop,” he says.
They want to see what we are up to. They want pieces of wood to make a trap. And so we walk away, a small crowd of boys in two lines. If the girls notice us leaving, they don’t show it.
As we walk into our house, I see it the way they see it. Our moldy well has a pile of broken plastic buckets next to it. Our laundry is drying on the walls of the perimeter.
Solomon laughs when we get to the hole we have dug.
“Just look at this.” He is laughing. It is the second time he has spoken since we left his house.
“You don’t need this big hole, don’t you know?” a skinny tall boy says to me. He is wearing a white shirt. His dreadlocks are long and dusty. “You just need four small holes for your four-by-twos, then you pour in a little concrete and it stays.”
“We were going to fill the hole with stones,” Peter says.
He sounds like he is annoyed and impatient. He must be unhappy with me. This is our house, I should not just stand there like a fool while these boys laugh at us.
“Which is easier? Stones or concrete? Where will we get concrete from?” Peter continues. It is hard for him to say concrete, so he is making everything worse.
“Okay. Do you want to help with the bird trap, then, or are you still digging your nonsense hole?”
“Just shut up. With your scanty hair like an abandoned mop.”
Now everyone is laughing at tall-skinny-dreadlock guy. Peter just walks away, into the house. Not even glorying in delivering the perfect insult.
A gentle wind stirs in the cashew tree in the middle of our yard. It is becoming evening, the warm humidity is being replaced by the cool breeze. When the boys stop laughing to begin sorting through nails and wood pieces, I continue standing where I am, watching the wind make the leaves dance. I notice a lizard, I think it is the same one that was in Stanley’s yard, dash up the tree.
The boys have gathered wood pieces of different sizes. Some the length of a walking stick, others short as a pencil. Skinny-dreadlock guy sits under the cashew tree and gathers all the materials to himself. He starts to arrange them in a pyramid-like pile. When he figures out the arrangement of sticks that makes up a perfect pile he splits them up in pairs, giving one pair to each boy.
“Take. Look for stone. Knack these two together,” he says.
Peter comes out of the house but doesn’t speak to me. He walks right to skinny-dreadlock guy and sits next to him. I do not know what he says to him, but he looks like he is apologizing.
When Peter was younger, he was so slim (even slimmer than dreadlock guy), his head was huge, his legs were super short. I called him Mr. Big Head Small Body because he looked like those cartoons in the Sunday paper. He hated it, but I couldn’t stop. The more he protested, the more I enjoyed teasing him. One day, Father showed him a picture of a lion in a calendar and said: “That’s who you are, son, a lion. A son of a lion is a lion.”
A son of a foolish man who loses all his money to fraudsters is what? A son of a poor man whose wife leaves him is what? A son of a man who runs away, leaving his children with his mother, is what?
Father should see Peter now. He is no longer tiny. He is tall, almost as tall as I am. His head is bigger and harder. No one can tell him nothing.
I watch the two of them talking. Then skinny-dreadlock guy picks up three sticks, he sets them in position, he makes a shape like a small letter t. He starts to nail them together. Peter reaches out to steady the longer piece underneath. The nail goes through both pieces of wood and into the thin skin between Peter’s thumb and his forefinger.
“Oh my God.”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m so sorry.”
We are all scrambling. The nail, the t-shaped sticks, are stuck in Peter’s hand, like they are sprouting. We surround him. We hold him down and pull it out. There wasn’t blood before. Now there is a lot of it. There is a lot of blood. Someone wipes it with his shirt. Another grabs a fistful of sand, pours it over the wound. The blood stops rushing out. Someone tells Peter to shake his hand. As he shakes it sand and blood fall to the ground at his feet.
I see the lizard fall off the tree, race over to be next to Peter, lap droplets of blood as they fall to the ground. I look in its eyes and see myself the way it sees me. I am dark and dusty like a school blackboard, my head is bigger than the rest of my body, my hands are tiny, plastered to my side. The lizard stops to look at me. He is nodding again and again. I think the lizard is laughing at me. I am sure of it.
I AM SOMETHING
PETER
2000
I LIKED TO think that no matter what happened, my older brother, Andrew, and I would always be close. This was exactly the kind of thing I worried about, growing older, being on my own, my sisters leading happy, glamorous lives, my brother busy and distant.
Many times, it felt like Andrew and I were only one argument away from being enemies. Other times, we were the best brothers in all of Lagos. I made it my business
to try, to make sure we always were getting along, fun and happy. We were best friends only because I did everything he said to do, and I did not mind every time he ignored me to go play with Solomon, Babu, and Eric. Each time he said something mean, I tolerated it, pretending the pain was from something else, like a stomachache from food I did not enjoy, beans or something like that. I stored the hurt for a while in my belly, then I found a place to let it out. Other times, he was the nicest brother, taking care of me.
“I am something,” Andrew said that day, to distract me from the pain he was inflicting as he was massaging mentholated balm all over my swollen palm. “I am tall in the morning, short in the evening, even shorter at night. What am I?”
“You are an old man,” I said, after thinking about the riddle for a little while.
When he said that was the wrong answer, I did not argue. I watched him pour boiling hot water into the bowl we use for washing up before meals. He pulled out an old towel he had tucked in the back of his trousers and sat on the floor before me.
“The answer is a candle. I am a candle,” Andrew said.
A CANDLE IS long, an old man was tall now shrunken, I wanted to say but did not. I grabbed the handle of the chair I sat on with my left hand, steadying myself as he pressed the heat of the rag against my wound. I did not cry out. I did not want Grandmother waking up and looking too closely at my hand. Better for her to sleep, I thought. Better for us that she sleeps as long as she wants to because then when she wakes, it will be easier to talk to her about money for Panadol painkillers.
Andrew leaned in with the full weight of his grip, applying pressure to my swollen palm. As he did, bloody pus oozed out in a slow and steady drip.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I am something,” I said, interrupting his pity. “I am light as a feather, yet the strongest man in the world can’t hold on to me for more than ten minutes. What am I?”
“You are water,” Andrew said. “Am I right?”
“No. Not really.”
“What is the right answer?”
“It’s air. Actually. Breathing air. No one can hold his breath for up to ten minutes.”
The air around us was humid and difficult to endure without murmuring. My scalp was wet and sweat was going down my face, even into my ears. My shirt was soaked with sweat, but I could not take it off until Andrew was done cleaning my palm. It was early evening, and we were boiling a half yam for our night meal. I could hear the slices boiling in the pot a few feet away from us because Andrew used the wrong pot cover, so the heat was escaping, and floating bubbles were bursting and spilling all over the stove. That was just one more thing for Grandmother to be angry with us about when she woke up.
It was as if she considered us two children instead of four. Our sisters were one person, the girls, and Andrew and I were one person, the boys. Whatever he did, I was equally responsible for and there was nothing I could do to escape it.
Once, Andrew had dropped his undershorts in the hallway when he was taking his house clothes out back to wash. He did not notice them quickly enough. Grandmother found them and lifted them with a broken plastic hanger, waving them around like a flagpole.
“Do you see what I have to live with?” she asked, screaming in Yoruba at no one in particular as she walked around the house. “Dirty smelling children. Underwear smelling like the penises of dead male goats, in the middle of the house where I get up each morning to pray to my creator.”
“God, is this not too much for a little old woman? When did I become the palm nut in the middle of the street that even little boys are stepping on me so mercilessly?”
For days, she continued like that. She did not allow any of us to retrieve the underwear from the place she had mounted it, in the center of the living room right next to the pile of Father’s university textbooks. Andrew waited until she left one evening to sing with a funeral procession for one of the commercial bus drivers in the neighborhood who had been killed in an accident with a delivery truck. He waited until the voices singing “Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, whosoever comes to Him shall never die” were a distant hollow, then he picked up his underwear and threw it in the trash along with the plastic hanger.
“This woman is pushing me to the wall. I am going to deal with her very soon,” he said that day to me, his eyes cloudy with not-shed tears.
Andrew was not massaging my arm fast enough to stop the cramping in my back. My face felt hotter and hotter, so I asked him to stop.
“Do you feel better yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I am just hungry.”
Andrew stood up off the floor. He had the bowl and the towel with him. I let go of the chair and wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“The food should be ready now,” he said. He was looking in the direction of the kitchen, nodding toward it. “Do you need my help to get up?”
I did not. I was dehydrated, hot, and my throat ached, but I did not need his help. But Andrew must have misheard me, I thought, for he reached out his hand and pulled me up out of the chair. I stood up, my legs burning and my steps shaky, taking off my shirt and walking into the house in nothing but my undershorts.
The palm oil came out in thick droplets as Andrew shook the bottle over the plated yams. The heat of the yams melted the droplets immediately on contact till there was a small puddle of oil around the yams. Andrew sprinkled a small pinch of salt over the plate.
“My neck does not feel so good,” I said.
“Just eat this. Then I will go out to buy you Panadol Extra,” Andrew said.
“Just Panadol. Panadol Extra is for adults only,” I said.
“Panadol Extra is for stubborn pain. Children can have stubborn pain, too, you know,” Andrew said.
He had made the yams soft, just how I liked to eat them. I squished them with my fingers into the body of oil, watching steaming white yam take on the red of palm oil. I took a little piece of yam then molded it into a tiny ball and put it in my mouth. This is how I knew how sick I had become, because Andrew did not complain about the mess I was making.
Back when I was younger, back when we had Father and Mother, Andrew twisted my shortest finger so hard it came close to snapping because I was playing with our food. Mother screamed at him for hours after that and she stopped serving us in the same bowls, even though Father told her that it was perfectly normal for brothers to fight over such things. Rough play does not kill boys, it makes them stronger, Father said to Mother. You should have seen what my cousins and I got into growing up.
That was before they were gone, before it became so hard to remember what they looked like. Sometimes when I watched Nigerian movies, I looked out for ones with actors and actresses that were around my parents’ age. I did not remember them and so I imagined. It was easy to imagine Mother in a thick coat shivering in the London cold, her makeup bright and irreverent like Gloria Anozie in that movie. It was easier to imagine Father with a group of men arguing politics, his beard uncombed, short and thick like Sam Dede in any of his movies. I wondered about my ability to identify them in a crowd of people. I suspected that I would have been unable to pick them out, unable to remember any distinguishing fact about either of them.
“PETER?” ANDREW SAID my name. I opened my eyes.
“Yes? I am not sleeping,” I said.
“I am going to get you medicine now,” he said.
“Okay. Thank you,” I said.
He went into Grandmother’s room, where she was still asleep, and brought out one of her old duvets, covering my feet with them.
“I found some money,” he said. “I will be back right away.”
When he was gone, the house began making those empty-house sounds, the ones you hear only because everything else is quiet—water dropping from wet clothes recently hung on the line, a fly sizzling after contact with the metal body of the kerosene lantern, the curtains dancing in the breeze, the wooden doors shifting on loose metal hinges.
&nb
sp; In the early evening quiet, our tiny house felt like a large expanse of forest with sounds from unseen sources I had to decipher to keep from being frightened and overwhelmed. In my little corner of the forest, I was like a squirrel in a hollow hole in a tall tree, all the outside sound first filtered, then condensed and magnified. I had to try to guess, to know and explain to myself what each sound was, to keep from being afraid of it.
When you’re the youngest in the family, everyone tries to protect you. They lie to you, they cover for you. You learn to do your own investigating. You have to be both persistent and invisible. Sometimes it seemed like there was a duvet of silence over all the important stuff about our family. There was no one willing to lift it up for me, to let me see for myself what it was all about.
When we first moved to Grandmother’s house, it took me three months to figure out that Father was not just job searching in Abuja.
When we walked around the streets, I liked to walk behind Andrew. He had no idea I was being slow on purpose. I hid it well. I stopped to pick up stones or write on dirty cars or hurl stuff at stray cats. But what I was really doing was waiting for Andrew to go ahead of me, so I could walk behind him, keeping him in my sights.
If he walked away from me, at least I would have seen him leaving. I wouldn’t have been left to wonder if someone had snatched him and made him a houseboy. Or if he stepped on a charm and dissolved into liquid or picked up money off the floor and became a tuber of yam.
Andrew returned with the painkillers and a small bag of roasted groundnuts with the skins still on. He smashed the pills into a stony powder then stirred it into a thick mix, adding about two teaspoons of water. It tasted like drops from the stalk of the bitter leaf dipped into classroom chalk. When I was done swallowing the medicine, he sat next to me eating his groundnuts.
“Here,” he said. “Take some.” He was stretching out a fistful of nuts to me.
“Take that away from me. My mouth is too bitter.” I said. “I may never eat again.”
Black Sunday Page 5