by Uwem Akpan
Better still, Molly sent another text saying Liam had just agreed to lunch on November 17, a week before Thanksgiving, if I was free. When I called her, she was euphoric that she was able to wrangle our lunch date. Of course I said I was free and told her to thank Liam for me.
In excitement, I spontaneously began to whistle “Ikworo Ino,” an Annang folk song. But Ujai insisted I must sing it out so she and her mother could help with the chorus.
Ikworo ino o
Ikworo ino
Ikworo ino o
Ikworo ino
Iko Awasi anem akan ajen
Ikworo ino
Tutu ndikpa ndikpongke enye
Ikworo ino
Ikworo ino o
Ikworo ino
Ikworo ino o
Ikworo ino
Iko Awasi anem akan udia
Ikworo ino …
As I finished helping Ofonime slice up the mangoes and oranges for dessert, she tried to quietly resurrect her embassy abuses in Annang. But, once the daughter heard embassy and visa, she protested, “Nope, guys, no embassy or visa horror stories in any language, mbok! Tell me about the lady visa touts and our village masqueraders. Or let’s sing ‘Ikworo Ino’ again.” We reached a compromise: I retold the story of the nice touts who gave me their pamphlet and showed her the moves of the embassy dancer who dressed like a masquerader.
ONCE USEN RETURNED and we sat down to eat, Ujai and I got our cans of Dr Pepper. Then Usen toasted me with red wine for being made the managing director of Mkpouto, before he and Ofonime set about mixing Guinness stout with palm wine. They told me this meal was the foretaste of my big Thanksgiving reception.
Ofonime apologized that the yam was a bit overcooked. But that was exactly how I liked it. Tender, it melted on my tongue like butter, not some Food Emporium thing masquerading as yam. In fact, it was like I had missed our yams for decades. Usen stood up to put on Uko Akpan Cultural Group, to move the celebration to another level altogether, and soon the musician’s nkwed voice took to the air, the drumming guarded eminently by the pounding of the slit-log drum. The apartment’s wraparound music system made it quite an experience, like we were in our village’s masquerade square with its raised banks surrounded by palm trees, on the other side of the valley. It was so immediate, so real, a Mmanamo Festival day away from home. I felt homesick, as though, at any moment, the child masqueraders would jump out to seize the colorful masks from the wall and slip them on and explode in the somersault dance of ekpo-ntokeyen.
I was on my third helping—like I had a secret grudge to settle with Angela and Jack for insulting my food—when a fish bone slashed the tip of my left thumb. The cut was as clean as a surgeon’s blade, and in no time an oval ball of bright blood grew on it, then exploded down my nail. I stoppered it with my fingers and held it away from the table as the others scrambled for their first-aid box. After the wound was bathed in iodine, the bleeding stopped. I insisted on covering it up with multiple wrappings of cotton bandage, and then my thumb looked like a drumstick. Usen said I had become a weakling since I had left Ikot Ituno-Ekanem; Ofonime asked whether the fish bone had also cut my ear, leading to my ministrations there; Ujai was laughing at me. But I did not want any open wound near my people, as the CityMD had advised. I put my injured hand on my lap and did not allow anyone to make contact with it, as we went on to talk about old times and carried the girl along as best as we could.
Ujai was dozing off. But, when the parents asked her to go get ready for bed, she quickly sat up and insisted she did not want to sleep before I left. She got up and started wriggling to the Annang beats. The father took one look at my full stomach and told his daughter I was spending the night. He handed Ofonime the toddler, who had just woken up, to feed. Ofonime plopped him back in Usen’s lap, grumbling that the husband had done the same in my apartment and that some of our men were more rigid in America than back home. I avoided his embarrassed face as he fed the kid.
“Ekong, ira ika-a evening Mass in the African American parish,” Ofonime said, forking another wedge of yam onto my plate, burying it under two scoops of beans, then fish, like a funny sandwich. “We’ve not been to the Black parish for a while now.”
“Well, I’ll be there to have my fill of Negro spirituals for the year!” Usen moaned.
“Nside Negro spirituals?” I asked.
“Heavy, ultra-sad songs about slavery!” she said. “It’s like the African Americans have to steel their spirits every Sunday for one more week in slavery. Though we sing a few of them during Lent and Stations of the Cross in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem, these folks sing them all year around, all their lives.”
“For us, it’s an overdose,” he said. “It kills off your week before it even begins. And, since we’re not descendants of slaves, it gets to you after a while, unwanga? And then I really hate the side talk at the after-Mass coffee reception in the basement about us taking their jobs and college admission quotas and movie roles.”
Ujai said she preferred to attend the Black church to any church Tuesday went to. “Uncle Ekong, he’s too biased against African Americans, like a bigot,” she whined. Usen reprimanded her that it was a slippery slope to insist on whom to worship with.
WHEN THE CHILDREN had gone to bed, we stayed up late to roll back the years, until the conversation got to how sixteen-year-old Usen stabbed our Biafran high school classmate who kept painting the Biafran flag in class in 1984, fourteen years after the war. Usen said uneasily: “Once my father told me how Biafra pinned Grandpa down and forced him to drink cow urine, I couldn’t control myself the next time I saw the Igbo kid painting the flag.” Ofonime quickly said he had since learned how to control his anger, rubbing his shoulder nervously. She said even Tuesday was very impressed that Usen was standing godfather to Biafran kids around the Bronx.
“I’m not sure our esteemed editor knows the whole story of what actually happened to Tuesday,” Usen said, uncomfortably moving the conversation away from our high school days. “I mean during that more brutal 1968 second invasion of our minority lands.”
“Yes, sabo, I don’t know the full story,” I told him.
“Six months after your dad’s death—I’m sorry, Ekong …!” He paused, stood up to bring out a bottle of vodka, which he opened and poured into three glasses. I turned down the drink as they sipped it dry, like we drank our kai kai back home.
“Please, continue the story,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Ofonime said uncomfortably. “This is why Usen and I and all people of goodwill have been patient with Father Kiobel for keeping mum about his war experience. Who can blame him for not wanting to revisit such a childhood? What if his childhood was worse than the part of Tuesday’s we knew? I don’t want to hear about wars tonight.”
“Listen, sabo, it’s okay to talk about my father,” I said as she gulped her drink. But she shook her head and told her husband it was not right for them to betray Tuesday’s confidence, to tell me what Biafra did to Tuesday in the valley. As he considered her point, she drank even more alcohol. Seeing how agitated she was, I told Usen to listen to her. Nobody knew what had transpired in the valley.
As Usen talked about his super work and Ofonime her schooling, what the village already knew of Tuesday’s ordeal played in my mind: the ten-year-old had to be hidden by his parents under the bed days on end, to avoid Biafra recruiting him into the Biafran army during the brutal second invasion of our land in 1968. Everybody knew Tuesday’s mother had to put cups of squeezed lime under the bed for her only child to inhale, to avoid sneezing from the dust.
But one day Mrs. Ita had told their Igbo neighbors to go to hell when they boasted they were the owners of Biafra. The quarrel deteriorated when she lashed out that “ewa annisi kpoi nyien, ekpe aseata, the dog that barks at me is usually devoured by the lion,” meaning bigger bullies—the Yorubas and Hausa-Fulanis—were coming for them. The neighbors tipped off Biafran patrols that the Itas were hiding their son in the house.
One rainy aftern
oon, as Usen’s father was visiting with Tuesday’s parents to play Ludo, the Biafran patrols arrived. The Itas refused to hand over their only child. So the soldiers riddled the ceiling of the living room with bullet holes, perhaps thinking Tuesday was hiding up there. However, when they asked the stoic parents whether the raindrops leaking into the living room looked like their son’s blood and then commanded them one last time to produce Tuesday or else they would spray-bullet everywhere, she broke down. “Oh no, crybaby,” the patrols mocked her. “Why don’t you tell us why you’re going around calling Biafrans dogs and Nigerians lions?”
Tuesday himself had jumped out of hiding, throwing the soldiers into guffaws. Usen’s father said the boy’s body was stiff like a rod as he held on to his mother, his totally defiant and unblinking eyes fixed on the soldiers’ faces. “This naughty brat is even insulting us with his eyes!” sneered one of the soldiers. His father covered Tuesday’s eyes with his hands as the family huddled together and the rain beat them like they were outside. Well, despite the parents begging the skinny thing to follow the soldiers, Tuesday was said to have insisted he would rather die than join the Igbo-thing. But, with the sass of folks who had already won the war, the soldiers ordered Usen’s father to leave as they dragged the seats to the corner, where they had not shredded the roof, to continue to play Ludo.
Nobody back home knew what happened after Usen’s father had left the Itas’. The next thing the village remembered was Father Walsh quarreling with the Biafrans in the valley to spare the Itas’ lives. And Tuesday’s parents had died of starvation and disease before war’s end. Tuesday himself had not visited home since 1975.
WHEN I WOKE UP on the air mattress in the living room, Ujai was waiting quietly on the couch, like a friendly dog. It was 9:43 a.m. Before I could say hello, she indicated she had something very important to tell me, springing to her full height, all nervous and stuttering, like she was forced to do an impromptu recitation. Ofonime said she had stopped her from waking me up at 7 a.m. when she got up.
The girl wanted me to follow her parents to her school during parents’ week, because she had been boasting to her class about governors competing to build hospitals in our village. She thought hearing this from someone who had just arrived from there would boost her position. “You don’t even know your so-called village!” she said they had told her, to shut her up. “It’s not even on the internet.”
I promptly agreed to go but told her I never said the governors were building hospitals in our village but in their separate states.
“You don’t understand my school,” she said, her large eyes dilating with fire.
“Okay, I shall explain everything to them.”
“But if you change the story, they’ll never believe me again, and then they’ll call me Real Miss Liar of New York, and my friends would be Team Liars … Could you just say they built a hospital?”
“What about renovating Our Lady of Guadalupe High School, which is what Governor Akpabio actually did?”
“No, hospital …!”
“He built a clinic in the nearby village.”
“It won’t cut it. It’s got to be Ikot Ituno-Ekanem. Okay, in place of clinic, we must say a small hospital. They used to tease me nonstop about wars in Africa, till one day I solved that problem by saying I’d just discovered only very noisy dogs died in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem’s wars. When they didn’t know what to say, because they couldn’t find the place on the internet, I added that we buried them in the dog cemetery by the river in our beautiful valley! The bullies scrammed.”
“Dog cemetery, huh?”
“Yes, they need to know we take good care of animals, dead or alive.”
I nodded and kept quiet while her parents ignored us. They moved about the house talking in Annang, like people who had successfully passed on their problem to another person—parents on vacation. “Uncle, you have to always be ready, woke, for even your friends will make mistakes. Do you not push back at Andrew & Thompson?”
“Wow, you even know my publisher.”
“Mr. Ekong O. Udousoro comma Andrew & Thompson and Co. comma Manhattan comma New York 10020. We’re learning addresses in school, so Mommy used yours to help me in my homework. She says I personally write good letters, but I really love the group letter-writing challenge our class teacher assigns us. We’ve already written a really long and comforting letter to the uncle of one of our friends who was deported by ICE. Uncle, it’s really difficult to write or edit as a group.”
“Ha, your teacher is great!”
“She is, but we’re woke because things are complex. As I said yesterday, I really know what’s going on. See, Daddy and Mommy have already told me how to behave around the police: I shouldn’t trust them but must act like I do. They tell me what to do in case of arrest or being shot. Yep, they say this every month, like a fire drill. But the whole thing is messed up big-time because our teacher insists we trust the cops. Me and my friends know what boxes to tick to pass our tests. We’ve seen stuff on TV.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I’m going to teach my bro everything as soon as he begins kindergarten, because they say Black men are targeted … When you sent my parents the cop selfie, they deleted it right away, afraid I might mistake cops for friends. I had wanted to give it to my Indian American classmates.”
To have to learn so early on in life not to trust the police brought back Emily’s painful imagery of African Americans learning of racism from the cradle. I sent my helpless eyes in search of the parents. They suddenly smarted up to warn her unapologetically never to copy me. They said they had managed to instill in her a sense of African pride. They said it was a different thing two years before when she cried daily from being bullied at school. “Look, the kids were vicious,” they said. “Once she introduced herself as African and not African American, they resorted to Africa-this-Africa-that taunts to isolate her … and can you imagine some African American kids joined in?”
Bewildered, I got up, had a shower, and ate a brunch of leftover beans and akamu lightened with milk. When the itches hit, I visited the restroom three times in twenty minutes—flushing and washing my hands each time for cover. Usen said they had Imodium for bowel problems. I said, instead of the antidiarrheal, I needed to go home immediately. He pulled me aside to convince me to take the Imodium, arguing the subway ride was too long for a leaky ass, and that, by the way, too many stations had since changed their restrooms into storage spaces or newsstands, and that even the functioning ones might not be clean.
“Ekong, please, pace yourself,” he said. “You’ve lost too much weight already and look shit-tired.” I took the Imodium to placate him. I said goodbye to everyone with a one-handed hug because of my thumb, and, amid the children bawling, went home.
CHAPTER 11
We’ve got your back
ON MONDAY, WHEN THE CITYMD SAID I NEEDED TO come in, I left work like one going forth to see the hangman. In the consulting room, the nurse did not meet my eyes, as though I were a criminal. Then he offered me a seat with a gesture and left. The doctor came in and gave me something to sign and told me I was HIV-positive. I did not know what to say. She said it again and I nodded. But some man bashed in and dragged her away, without saying anything to me.
How would I break the news to Caro? Do that from here or wait till I get home? … The door swung open again, and they walked back in to say there was a mix-up.
“Mr. Udousoro, you have neither HIV nor AIDS,” the man announced.
“What … you said I had w-what?” I stammered.
“Nothing. You’re negative!” the doctor said, her eyes unshifting like she was watching an experiment in a petri dish. “There was a mistake.”
I asked whether I needed a second test to confirm, offering my arm for another blood sample. They said it was not necessary. They said someone called me from the wrong list. “But do you know this someone who called me from the wrong list?” I asked.
“We should all be gratefu
l we spotted it on time!” the doctor said, and showed me the result.
Seeing that I was never going to get an apology from these folks, in a flash I got off the seat and out of the room. I ripped through the cocoon on my thumb and tossed it in a trash can. Carefully, I took the plaster off my ear, too. It was like my life had been reset, given to me anew.
In the streets, I called Caro right away. But she did not answer, so I ran back inside and politely asked them for a signed and dated copy of the result, in case my wife wanted something concrete. It took an eternity to get even this. Since my stomach suddenly remembered to be hungry, I went out and bought a flatbread vegetarian Subway and Code Red Mountain Dew and went to eat at Starbucks. Bryan Adam’s “Heaven” featuring Jason Aldean was playing.
Strolling back, I stopped at a liquor store to get a bottle of wine—because I just had to have a glass of wine, to mark the end of my fears, to celebrate my health. Then I came back to the CityMD and waited some more. When I got the result, signed and stamped, it was too late to return to work, so I strutted home, whistling under the gray skies. Though the temperature had dropped, I felt so warm inside. I was floating, my nose picking up the wonderful smells from Indian, Thai, and Dominican restaurants. I even stopped to watch construction work on Tenth Avenue, taking in the scene lazily, as drillers cut into concrete, sending up a cloud of dust, white and heavy.
I called the Bronx to thank the Umohs again for the weekend but could not reach them. I started returning the calls I had ignored from home. I shouted like they needed to hear me directly from across the Atlantic. I stamped my way to the piers, my screams sounding more distinct as the throng of people thinned, feeling more and more celebratory as I set eyes on the water. My homesickness pressed on my heart as though now I could see my callers waving to me from the beaches of Ibeno or Calabar or Lagos.