Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  “Why? Why are you offering me this?” I asked.

  He came over to where I was sitting and settled into the other chair, shifting his weight now and again to better fit the chair and extend his hand to clasp mine. I watched him do all of this but said nothing, waiting for his reply.

  “You need this. And I like you. I want to help you,” he said.

  “I am not a fan of Pentecostalism. I am not sure I want to be a part of this,” I said.

  “Let me help you. This is the only way I can help you. And you will be good at it. Just now, you taught me Scripture without trying,” he said.

  If the church was coming again into my life as an answer, it was okay for me to be weary, but it was stupid for me to say no. Dexter was right. I needed a job. My whole family needed it.

  “I will do it. Thank you so much, I am sorry for overthinking it.” I turned, facing him so that our faces were right in front of each other. He was smiling at me.

  “You are most definitely welcome,” he said.

  Still smiling at me, he clasped both of his hands around my neck, pulling my face closer to him. He kissed me. At first, it was a gentle kiss. His lips against mine felt weak and beggarly. Just when I was about to pull away, irritated by his hesitation, he got out of the chair, pulling me up with him.

  “Is this okay? Can I continue?” he asked.

  I looked at his face, still smiling his dimpled smile, and down at his jeans, his unbuckled belt, and his bare feet. His hands followed my eyes, his face contorted in a small groan. The smile never left his eyes. He placed my hand on the bulge of him.

  “I am ready for you, can’t you see?” he said.

  I was about to begin another bout of hysterical laughter when he lifted me and in three quick steps placed me on the single bed. As he stood at the foot, hurriedly stepping out of his jeans, I wondered about the bed, about how many other desperate dreaming girls like me had inevitably ended up on it, despite their initial hesitation.

  Dexter got up on the bed, kneeling and crouching over me so that, in the moment, I was overwhelmed by his calm confidence, by the sheer size of him, the smell of him, the width of him. I surprised myself by thinking about our father in that moment. I was thinking that since the day my father left, I had yet to smell this stench of maleness up close, this sweat and lust and cologne.

  “Hey, Keke. Stay with me. Why are you so quiet?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “Do you know what you want me to do?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  A strange calm had fallen upon us. I told myself to stop wondering how much was planned, or whether or not I could trust him to keep his word to me. It was possible, after all, that even the Gospel show was a hoax, a part of this seduction plan.

  “Do you like what I am doing?” He was kissing my breasts all over, rapid wet kisses that did nothing for me.

  “You should maybe kiss my nipples,” I said. “Slowly. Please.”

  Somehow in the middle of my clumsiness and his eagerness, we found a way to move right. We had not turned on any lamps in this room, so the dark of night had engulfed us. I could see nothing but the brightness of his eyes. It felt like I was remembering a past life, like I had stored up a peculiar specificity of desire for that moment with Dexter. I was filled to the full measure of it and in every place he kissed me slowly, more desire poured until I could not recognize the words pouring out of my own mouth, their need or their satiation.

  WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT GIRLS

  ANDREW

  2005

  I WAS A Ju-boy that year. My school father was Ricky, the sanitation prefect. Ricky had six other school sons from all three junior classes. Each of us had been assigned specific duties. I washed and ironed all Ricky’s clothes. Every day after lunch, right before siesta, I went to his room to check in his laundry basket for whatever clothes were there. I returned them handwashed, ironed, and folded in twenty-four hours or less.

  Ju-boys. This was what we called the younger boys in junior classes 1 to 3. Ju-boys were identifiable by their uniforms, white shirts worn over blue shorts instead of the full-length trousers all boys in the senior classes wore. The Ju-boys were the nobodies.

  ORDINARY BOYS. THIS was what we called the older boys in senior classes 1 to 2. The ordinary boys were almost nobodies or nearly somebodies, it depended on how you considered their situation. Ordinary boys were greater than Ju-boys but less than the ordinary men. Ju-boys ran every conceivable errand for ordinary boys, but they were not assigned to serve them.

  The ordinary men were the senior boys in class 3 who were not appointed prefects. The prefects were the senior boys in class 3 who ruled Odogolu secondary school.

  All ordinary men and prefects had Ju-boys assigned to serve them each year. On the first day of the new term, the head prefect posted a list of Ju-boys and their school fathers on the dormitory’s central notice board. It was normal to see boys, their faces fat, full, and fresh from the joys of vacation, burst out weeping after learning they had been assigned to serve someone with a reputation for cruelty.

  We called them our school fathers. A school father was the ordinary man or prefect a ju-boy was assigned to. A school son was the Ju-boy assigned to a school father.

  I WAS ONE of the luckier Ju-boys. It would have been beyond me to oversee Ricky’s food, water, or bedding, because most of the time you had to spend your own money doing things for your school father. I would have been terrible at cuddling or singing him to sleep like my school brother Teddy, the round-faced boy with a girl’s voice, who had all the nighttime duties. Fortunately, all I needed was soap, and I had lots of that. My sisters sent us to boarding school with more than a dozen bars of soap; they wanted Peter and me to have more than enough for ourselves and to give away.

  Our school was a mixed boarding school. This meant we had girls all around us. There were so many girls, there were even more girls than boys. In our school, girls did everything differently. They served nobody. They had a different set of rules. Girls had their own prefects, called aunties. Our prefects could not punish them. When they got in trouble, they were made to write book reports or apology letters. They did not have to do chores around the school grounds like clearing the lawns or trimming shrubs. They had their own hostels with running water flowing inside their washrooms.

  We had chapel with girls. We had classes with girls. We had meals with girls. All the places you would think we needed focus and concentration, girls waddled in, pretty in their purple-and-yellow checkered dresses and white socks with tiny bows.

  We were obsessed with girls. All of us were. Ju-boys had games where we wrote down names of girls on pieces of paper, which we then all drew from and dared one another to go ask out. We never did. We were Ju-boys; we knew our place.

  Senior boys were obsessed with sex. They all were.

  As a matter of fact, I was not even supposed to be a junior boy. When Sister Ariyike got her job and decided we had to go back to school, on account of my age, I was going to be in senior class 1 and Peter in junior class 2. But we had been out of school so long, I had not taken the junior secondary certificate examination. The school principal was only following administrative policy by requiring me to enroll in junior class 3.

  “It can’t be helped,” he said to our sister. “I have been a principal for almost eight years. If there was something I could do, surely, I will do it for you. Especially because it’s you.”

  Sister Ariyike was some kind of celebrity in those days because of her radio job. Everyone, strangers included, was nice to her. Once in a supermarket, an older man recognized her voice and paid for all the stuff we had in our shopping basket. Our sister did not even have to pretend to be interested in dating him or take his business card. He just said, “I am so proud of the work you do, praising God every day with your pretty voice,” and walked away.

  A bagger is what you were called if you could not handle your school father’
s business as well as all your chores and schoolwork without falling apart. A bloody bagger is what you were called if your incompetence was so glaringly bad that your school father had to report you to other prefects for reprimand.

  Community murder is what a bloody bagger got. A small crowd of ordinary men and prefects made a circle around the erring Ju-boy, shouting punishments.

  “Bloody bagger. Roll in the dirt.”

  “Dirty stinky bloody bagger. Now let me see you do five hundred frog jumps.”

  Ordinary men and prefects were fully grown men, unlike the rest of us. They shaved every day, they walked around smelling like cologne and Irish Spring bath soap. When they slapped your face or the center of your back, you wondered how it was possible that something that hurt so bad was not fatal.

  There was a hard-won peace between ordinary men and ordinary boys. This was on account of soccer. Before Friday evening soccer became a regular thing at Odogolu Secondary, clashes between ordinary men and ordinary boys were said to have been so frequent, the school sick bay had to get a second full-time nurse in charge of deep wounds.

  They brawled about everything; everything escalated easily into fracas. A tussle between a small-for-his-age ordinary man and a bigger-than-normal ordinary boy over seats on the school bus trip to the village market resulted in the Great Destruction of 2003. This was before we arrived, so everything we heard about it was hearsay. There are many versions of the story. The most consistent facts are that the ordinary man tried to take a seat in the bus the ordinary boy had reserved for his girlfriend. The ordinary boy refused to give up the seat. The smaller but older ordinary man, who had a reputation for wild anger—he was overcompensating for what he lacked in height—slashed the ordinary boy’s cheek with a razor. The bleeding boy punched the man, knocking him out. Other ordinary men attacked the bleeding boy in a bid to subdue him. The bleeding boy’s classmates and friends tried to help him. Soon no one cared how it had started, it was ordinary men vs. ordinary boys. According to the legend, the resulting free-for-all lasted hours.

  It is, however, unquestioned that the police descended upon the school with antiriot gear, batons, and tear gas. They arrested at least twenty students that day. There was a noticeboard at the entrance of the teachers’ lounge with the names as well as passport photographs of all thirteen boys expelled from school after the incident. We were in awe of all of them. We called them the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

  Every Saturday, my school father, Ricky, assembled us all, the seven of us school sons, in a straight line at the foot of his single bed in the prefects’ dorm.

  They were only six boys in the room, which loomed large, imposing because I shared a room of the same size with about sixty other junior boys. Our walls did not have the same fresh coat of paint nor the full-length posters of Aaliyah and TLC, of Britney Spears. We did not have a wall dedicated to bras, thongs, and whatever else the prefects could produce as proof of conquest.

  Every Saturday, Ricky assigned us tasks for the week.

  “Andrew, make my whites sparkle, my trousers sharp.”

  “Temirin, I need warm water for my bath. Warm, not room temperature.”

  “Tarfa, I am the sanitation prefect, not the garbage truck handler. Polish my fucking shoes.”

  After the tasks were assigned, Ricky asked about our classes. We were required to show him results from any tests and any written reprimands from teachers or, worse, other prefects.

  He certainly could have gotten away with not caring about any aspect of our lives, but Ricky liked the idea that he was fathering us. He enjoyed the neatness of that description. A couple of prefects would walk over to his bed and say something like, “Ricky, your Ju-boys are having a blast. See how freely they are speaking with you.”

  When anyone said this, most of the time, right in the middle of him calling one of us a fucking bastard of a bagger for failing a mathematics test, Ricky looked up at his colleagues and smiled in his wide, clueless way.

  “My guy, someone has to raise these bastards.”

  He called all of us bastards. It hurt me more than most on account of Father leaving me for God knows where, but I learned to hide it. Ricky could smell weakness and despair like a hungry leopard.

  ON ONE OF those Saturday mornings when we were gathered together in the prefects’ dorm room, I looked out the window behind Ricky’s bed and noticed a senior girl walking up the courtyard. While Ricky berated someone for something that meant nothing, I nodded intermittently, faking attentiveness. I was watching the senior girl hide behind a tree; she seemed to be waiting for someone. She was crouching behind a stack of recently cut branches, her back to the dorm. From the distance, it appeared as if she had been trying to hold on to something for balance with one hand, and with the other was spreading a crumpled old newspaper so she could sit.

  It took me too long to realize that she had actually been hiding behind the tree, unwrapping the newspaper as soundlessly as possible, so she could shit without anyone noticing. By the time I screamed, she had already begun flinging freshly released poop into the prefects’ dorm through the open windows.

  “Stupid muthafuckers, smelling bastards, mad men will fuck your mother’s pussy raw,” she was screaming, marching toward Ricky’s window.

  “I curse all of you demons,” she said. “Every single one of you spreading lies about me. You will fail your final exams. No universities will accept you. You will die in roadside accidents. No one will claim your rotten bodies.”

  As though collectively released from a spell, most of the dorm emptied out, running toward the screaming female issuing death curses. We were terrified of the death curse. One of the prefects, the only one brave enough, grabbed her, attempting to restrain her by twisting her hands behind her in a lock. She fought him off successfully, slapping him all over his face with the leftover poop pebbles, wiping her hands on his shirt. A small crowd of laughing boys had gathered. No one tried to do anything, learning quickly the folly of interrupting this strange display of rage. It was easy to imagine what had happened. The senior girl had learned that one or more of the ordinary men and prefects had bragged about sleeping with her. It could have been even more vulgar; they might have included an aborted pregnancy or claimed she was a lesbian.

  They were monsters, all of them, ordinary men and boys, iron sharpening iron to destruction. It would be a mistake to try to infer a logic or science to their taunts. They were just boys being teenage boys, drunk on power and lust, unguided and free.

  ON THE MORNING of the day the girl, Nadia, the girl whom we really have to talk about, first spoke to me, I had burned Father Ricky’s school uniform trousers while ironing them. Instead of owning up to the accident, I had pulled someone else’s trousers off the clothesline, ironed those ones, and given them to him. Just when I had begun thinking I’d got away with the switch, Father Ricky found me on the class line in the assembly hall and began whipping me with his leather belt.

  “You useless Ju-boy. What did you do with my trousers? Can you see what I look like in this trash? They don’t fuckin fit right!” He was screaming and whipping and screaming and whipping.

  The other boys in line made no attempts to hide their laughter. The boy nearest to me laughed so loudly, Ricky paused the whipping to shut him up.

  “Shut up, you fuckin bastard. Am I now a fuckin clown to you fuckin Ju-boys?”

  I could not bear to look at the girls. It would have been too much to turn around and see their disgust, or worse, their pity. When his rage was spent, he walked away. He wore those replacements till the end of the year. For the next week, welts the shape of his leather belt lined my face, neck, and arms like stripes on a flag. I considered it a fair trade.

  We were in class, later that day. It was the end of English period. We were waiting for the social studies teacher to arrive. Nadia walked to where I sat by myself at the back of the class and asked to see my stripes.

  “No,” I said. I folded my arms across my ches
t to create a distance between us, realizing too late that it only made my stripes evident to her.

  “You think you always have to act so tough, don’t you?” she said, as she tried to unfold my arms.

  “I am tough. I do not have to pretend,” I said.

  She was standing before me, wearing ankle socks, so when I looked away from her face because it made me feel warm, I was staring instead at her legs, bare and long like prize yams.

  “You should report him to the principal. He will get in trouble,” she said.

  “I hear you,” I said.

  I did not want to talk about it anymore. Nadia did not understand that things in our school worked differently for boys. She could not see the thing that was right under her nose; no girl would ever have been whipped like that. So could she be expected to understand how particularly different things were for me? I was not like the other Ju-boys. I was older, I was taller, I was meaner, and I was convinced that I could have beaten Ricky to a stupor if I had been allowed to fight back.

  NADIA WAS THE most beautiful junior girl. It was not because her skin was brown and clear like still water, or because her eyes were huge and bright like a mirror, or that her hair was reddish brown without dyes. Nadia had breasts, full, round, grown woman breasts.

  The story the junior boys told about Nadia was that she was full of herself. The story the junior girls told of Nadia was that she was the uglier sister. It was said that her older sister, who graduated the year before I enrolled, was even more beautiful, but I could not imagine a more beautiful girl.

  I had seen Nadia’s father walk around the school with her a couple of times. He was an older Anglican reverend, an albino who had married one of his parishioners later in life. This is one of the reasons Nadia had such pale beautiful skin; she was almost an albino, but she wasn’t.