Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  “Andrew,” she pants, out of breath from her scramble to the phone. “Andrew?”

  “It’s me.”

  It’s only her mother.

  • • •

  Glory’s spirit was troubled waters—churning, uneasy—till she picked up the phone to call her daughter. She had long ago learned, then forgotten, to trust that small voice of God within herself. It was the same voice that whispered to her fifty years ago as she lay sleeping soundly in her mother’s hut on the night before she was to travel to America on scholarship for college. Arise, said the voice. She had tunneled deeper into her pallet and the warmth of her mother’s arms. Arise, the voice commanded. She opened an eye in time to see a serpent slithering across the packed earth floor of her mother’s hut. A sly, low-down dancer in the dirt. She screamed. Her mother had risen beside her, stepped on the snake, bashed its head in with the nearby pestle that had made a farewell meal earlier that evening. Her mother stood sentry, on guard the rest of the night. No serpents sent by venomous co-wives would keep her child from her breakthrough in a new promised land. That was a mother’s love. That was the last time, for a long time, that Glory heard the voice—in the quiet of that hut, before the white noise and the din called America.

  “It’s me,” she says again, voice high amid the clamor of Flatbush Avenue’s weekend masses. “Is everything all right?”

  There is a pause long enough to make her pull the phone from her ear and check its bars for reception. An artful dodger, she ducks past a man selling $1 subway swipes in front of the train station, past two women haggling over Gucci handbag knockoffs, into the quiet oasis of a small kiosk selling batteries, wristwatches, headphones, and incense.

  “Temperance?” she says.

  “Yes, Mother, what could be the matter?”

  This is her daughter’s legalese: answering a question with a question. Well, she knew her daughter long before the JD, when a stern look and the words I’m disappointed in you would send Temperance into tears. She tried again.

  “Apanga soh, I have no idea what would be the matter. That is why I am asking.” She tries her best to smile into her words, into the childhood nickname. “Eh, apanga soh. Tell your mama what’s wrong.”

  “Mom …”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing, it’s nothing.”

  “You sound tired and stressed. Are you on your way to the church?” She glances down at her watch, then shoos away the vendor approaching her with wristwatch in hand. “Maybe you should skip the workshop. I’m sure they can spare you at least one day. School. Church. That crazy schedule of yours—”

  “My schedule is fine, Mother.”

  From Mom to Mother, almost as bad as the legalese.

  “Besides,” Temperance continues, “my firm has a generous benefit plan. I’ll have plenty of time to rest on maternity leave after the baby is born.”

  “My grandbaby,” Glory says, marveling how the words taste of sweet koki corn, cling like eru to her tongue. “Aren’t you due for another checkup soon?”

  “In two weeks.”

  “Chey! So long? I can come with you, if you like—”

  “That’s okay, Mom. Andrew has been coming.”

  Glory hears the sound of something ponderous, then Temperance falls silent. Then, finally: “Thank you, Mom. Thanks for checking in.”

  “Anytime, apanga soh, anytime.”

  After the call ends, Glory begins a catchall prayer, infused with every blessing she has ever wanted for her only living child. But above all, she hopes her prayers will fortify her too-strong daughter whose voice—muttering “goodbye”—had been so breathy and fragile, one of wind chimes forlorn and tinkling in an airless room.

  • • •

  Hours later, Temperance is leading a “Mommyhood: The Christian Way” workshop for unwed mothers. She takes deep breaths, still trying to channel her mother’s certitude that this child was meant to be, ordained. The mothers around her are lollipop young, mainly from the projects, and chockablock with children. She can almost look at them now and not hurt. Before, her ovaries would ache just to be in this room with so many women who seemed to get pregnant if you so much as blew on them. Shanice begat Shanice Jr. begat Lativia begat LaRenée begat Jamelia begat Jameka. Begat, begetting, begotten.

  Temperance had shared these thorny thoughts with Andrew once—confession, allegedly good for the soul and all. She had whispered that night, but her grievances somehow echoed in the cloistered silence of their bedroom. Why, Andrew, why? Why would God bless them and not her? Hadn’t she done everything right, everything expected? Waited to get her JD, her MRS. Why was she still waiting on her happily ever after? Andrew knuckled tears from her cheeks, his eyes filled with such tender disappointment, as he reminded her she was better than that, a woman of God—above such petty, elitist notions. She bowed her head then. She listened as he prayed.

  But sometimes, Lord. Sometimes.

  The children are carousing in the nursery center with Sister Carol. Sister Angeline sits at the long meeting room table: assisting with welfare forms, extolling the virtues of the church’s free day care for members, and handing out sullenly palmed pocket New Testaments to visitors. For so many of the women in this ministry, their Heavenly Father—God, Jehovah, Yahweh—is a Tyrone, a Segun, a Raul. Another deadbeat dad, noted only for His absence in their children’s lives, for going down to that celestial corner store to buy cigarettes and never returning. They come for the food and for a few child-free moments. A state they believe is heaven, but Temperance knows can be purgatory. They usually come for her, for free family law counseling on navigating the court system for custody or getting that child support check. But today her line has whittled down, kindling-thin.

  Ten minutes, done, up and stretching her legs; she walks over to one of the girls from the neighborhood. The one with a line in her name: La—a (pronounced LaDasha, she reminds herself), who is bending to peruse the low-lying wall shelf that houses their pregnancy and motherhood library, books on breast-feeding and babywearing, prenatal yoga and hypnobirthing. The girl’s Dominican press’n’curl threatens to topple, doobie-wrapped high round her head in a ziggurat of hair, buttressed by spindly bobby pins. Two pins fall to the ground.

  “Here you go.” Temperance hands the girl her errant reinforcements.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Pastor Ealy. First Lady.” La—a’s eyes are narrowed, swinging low to stare, glare it seems, at Temperance’s belly.

  Temperance had noticed the girl in the parking lot earlier: hip cocked to the side, neck swerving with bravado among her friends. She had seen the girl, yet only now, looking into the clenched, mistrustful face, did she actually recognize La—a. Or rather, she remembered that look. First seen last year on a Saturday afternoon in the clammy underbelly of summer. Evening newscasts had been rife with reports of the elderly and infirm falling prey to heat stroke in their homes. Senior living high rises turned mausoleums as forgotten grannies were found entombed, amid dust motes and lace doilies. In a mission of mercy, the church had opened its doors to the community, offering air-conditioned sanctuary from the asphalt wilderness beyond. The activity rooms had been teeming: throngs gathered around hospitality tables heaped with sweating Dixie cups of iced sweet tea. Name tag stickers affixed to their chests as eager church staffers enlisted them in various ministries. “La-ah,” she said aloud to the young girl as she wrote on her clipboard.

  “Naw,” came the surly response. “You ain’t saying it right.”

  Pen poised in the air, Temperance waited for the correct spelling. She’d heard them all in their diverse congregation: from Watermelondrea to Ireoluwasimikolakawe. The girl continued to glare.

  “Here.” Temperance handed off the pen and paper. Helpfully, she’d thought. “Feel free to fill out the rest of the form as you like.”

  The girl stared at the pen like it was a snake in the grass.

  “I’ll do it.” Her companion, name-tagged Niecy, pushed forward to take the clipboard f
rom her. “Already finished mine.” Stabbing the pen nib into the intake form.

  “Sadiddy bitch,” they whispered as they sauntered off. It was only later that another church staffer, who headed up their GED program, clued her in. The girl was functionally illiterate, reading at the same fourth-grade level as B.J.—her ten-year-old son—now churched up and reading up, self-betterment for her babies.

  • • •

  Temperance leaves the motherhood library to find succor. Stealing away to a quiet Sunday school room. She dandles another woman’s baby in the crook of her arm, fanning herself and the child with a Singles Ministry flyer. He fusses. She loosens the tight swaddle, freeing quilted bunnies to hop along patchwork furrows. The cottony hush is broken only by the thump of a small heartbeat as a peace like salvation comes upon her. Her eyes flutter shut. The confection-sugar lightness of baby powder fills her lungs as a tiny dimpled fist curls into the cotton of her sundress. She rocks. Back. Forward. Back. Forward.

  The baby stirs. She dips her hand to his cheeks—soft and fluffy as chocolate pudding. She smiles at the pink, puckering O of his mouth rooting for mother’s milk. A maternal song sweeps through her like a gospel, a revelation. In that instant, she knows what is required. This certainty she feels is familiar. It is what she sees in her mother’s eyes even as she turns her own face away. She knows what must be done. Temperance casts a scant glance back at the barely open door. The quiet corridor beyond. On a sigh, she slips her breast free. Places a swelling nipple to the baby’s eager suckle. Shudders with the rapturous joy of it. The rightness. She is replete.

  The baby draws deep from the well of her again and again, but grows fretful. Whimpers at her dry teat. Teeth scrape tender skin. Temperance cries out. Recoils. Hands shaking as she soothes the child. Of a sudden, terror smites her. Nearly dropping her to her knees.

  Good God, did I just? How could I? What if someone saw …

  “Mrs. Ealy,” a voice calls from the door.

  She turns to face her judgment.

  It’s La—a once more.

  But had she seen?

  “My cousin Niecy told me you had Dante.” The girl clambers over to her, arms crossed over a jutting, bullet-shaped belly. She stops short. Seems to sniff the air as she peers into Temperance’s flushed face. Her eyes narrow.

  “He-here,” Temperance stutters. “He’s all yours.”

  The girl is still and mute before glaring down at Temperance’s stomach.

  “Congratulations, Mizzz Temperance. Heard ’bout yo baby. Me, I got three kids,” she says, placing a hand on her hip as she throws down the last bit like a mic at a rap battle, like she won something.

  And Temperance supposes she has. In the fertility race she has ever been the tortoise to La—a’s fast-tailed hare. She swallows. This tension she feels with La—a is familiar. It’s the anger she sometimes inexplicably channels at her mother when life infuriates her. She smiles uncertainly, tries again to connect: “I know them. Dante, Michael Jr., and B.J., right?”

  “Yup, all boys plus this one.” She pats herself proudly. “Whatchu havin’?”

  Boy. Girl. Andrew hadn’t wanted to know either way. As long as it’s healthy, he’d proclaimed, foiling her girlfriends’ gleeful plans for a gender-reveal cake at her baby shower. A suspenseful knife slice away from that revelatory inner filling in pink or blue. But that morning, listening to Dr. Ravins’s revelations: talk of posterior nuchal skin folds and nonossified nasal bones, of her significant risk factor age, then the faux hopefulness of further testing and findings inconclusive, after more blood draws and procedure scheduling, she needed an answer. She couldn’t yet know if her baby had Down syndrome, so she had wanted to know something, one thing, for sure. Temperance hesitates, clears her throat.

  “It’s a boy,” she says, out loud, for the first time, to anyone. Her chin lifts, her French-manicured hand is on her hip, now. “A boy.”

  • • •

  “Good morning, Mrs. Ngassa,” says Mary Teforlack, secretary of Staffing Soulutions, LLC, palming the mouth of a phone receiver like a psalter, whispering, “It’s Marjorie, Marjorie Winstead on line one.”

  Glory sighs. Staffing issues at this hour? At 8:00 a.m., on a Monday. The Devil never rests. In her office the phone line blinks spasmodically. A thing possessed. But as she sets down the heft of her bag, shrugs out of her coat, and turns on her computer, she is thinking of another phone call, of her daughter, the cipher: full of secret compartments and neatly tucked-by thoughts.

  Thirty-five years as a social worker. Fifteen as a small-business owner. She built this business from the ground up. It put her daughter through college. Through law school. Her nurses, her aides, their patients, their loved ones, all had come to rely on her, their rock of Gibraltar, their steadfast counselor. Yes, let’s revisit Mrs. Taylor’s Pain Management Plan, she’s definitely getting worse post-fall. Yes, your daughter’s last days will be peaceful ones. At Staffing Soulutions, we pride ourselves in meeting our clients’ physical and spiritual needs.

  Forty-two years a mother and she can’t get her daughter to confide a thing.

  Glory picks up the phone. Her best Peds nurse, Marjorie Winstead, is trying to “quit.” In reality that means absconding with the lucrative Hallstead account: a Presbyterian family with two young boys, both suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, both requiring long-term home care. Winstead speaks breezily of changing commitments and flex time, all the while holding the truth under her tongue like an SL tablet: I am trying to steal your clients, Glory, to see them on the side for some tax-free money. It’s been a great ten-year run, Glory, sorry about your commission.

  This is not going to happen. As Glory picks up the phone, scenarios—assignment roster shuffles, shift switches—scroll through her thoughts like images in a picture wheel. Click. Toggle. Click. That case closer to Marjorie’s daughters’ day care is suddenly available, and wouldn’t you know, it pays a bit more money, and sure, it’s only a short-term rehab contract right now but the mother had personally assured her that she would need some help down the line. These things can be so overwhelming, you know how it is, Marjorie. You do, don’t you? Thank you for your professionalism and dedication. Did I mention you were nominated for Nurse of the Year?

  Later that evening, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she picks up a phone again. She calls her prayer line, gets a busy signal, calls again in five minutes, then ten. She is determined in a way that would have surprised her younger self. That young woman had never been particularly devout, had mouthed prayers mechanically during morning devotions at her all-girl secondary school. The young women of Saker Baptist College were groomed to be good, God-fearing girls. Their heavens-blue uniforms as prim as nuns’ habits, their pleats as straight as church pews. They knew they were blessed. Glory had had her own truth. She knew if any blessings were to be had, they were those of education and access, the chance to learn “book” at the newly founded missionary school, one of only two that were educating girls back then. So when the missionaries came round to Kings’ dorm to inspect their charges’ trunks, she had no qualms about hiding her hellfire-red lipstick in a crooked wall crack. When they came to cut the girls’ hair down to less sin-inspiring lengths, she tamped down her curls with coconut oil and water, till they got wise, began barbering with a scraping, toothsome comb and a ruler, measuring manes to within a millimeter of the scalp. Glory had always been a millimeter past defiant.

  But things change. Life happened, she suspects. At age sixty-five, she knows there is much she had overcome: defied headmistresses who tried to steal her academic scholarship, survived what that Bafut man did to her in the bush, and learned to manage the rages of a once-mild husband, long dead now, who collapsed under the clawing misery of burying their only son.

  She has always been a fighter, a woman who rose to her feet again after the TKO of losing a son and a husband. Yet she is older now, she is winded. In the final rounds of her life it feels good, feels right and righteous,
to have Jesus as her cornerman.

  • • •

  They say some men are called to ministry. Others just went. The Called: men seized by a burning desire to serve, to fashion themselves into tools for His work, to be the balm that heals a wounded and bludgeoned world. The Others: their hubris, their showman’s need to be spotlit, center stage wielding the Word to their liking. They preach a prosperity gospel, instruct eager congregants to sow to a prophet’s rewards: their bank accounts, their homes, and their wives’ baubles are sizeable, flush.

  It is Sunday morning, mid-May. From the front row, center aisle, Temperance has a direct sight line to the pulpit. No obstructed-view seating for the First Lady—peering beyond geles and frou-frou fascinators. Temperance cannot hide. She fists her hands to mask their trembling in her lap, wincing as the sting of her wedding band’s diamond cuts into her flesh—ungiving, millstone-heavy. Was her husband called or clay-footed? He had come to preaching later in life. I-banker turned self-taught theologian, a man whose authoritative messages bespoke insider dealings, a special in with the Lord. But was he called?

  Praise dancers make calligraphic twirls in the air with a rainbow of arcing ribbons. The dreadlocked bass guitarist in the church’s fifteen-man band strums a fevered rock rendition of a popular gospel number. Every man, woman, child, and even some of the seniors, in the thousand-person-capacity main sanctuary, are up on their feet singing with the Grammy-winning choir. Now, Andrew strides to the stage. All along her row, people ready pen and pencil to take notes in the two pages earmarked in the church bulletins. His special Mother’s Day sermon is titled “A Worthy Woman.” Parishioners scribbling furiously, as if prepping for a pop quiz by Saint Peter at the pearly gates.

  Andrew reads from Proverbs 31, speaks of a mother’s wisdom to her son, King Lemuel: