Voice of America

by E. C. Osondu

  “Come, baby, let me roll you some real good grass, it will help you step down.”

  We would hear them light up, and the smell of marijuana and incense would float out of their room like the Harmattan haze. A few minutes later we would hear them making love very loudly.

  The men on the street with dirty towels tied round their waists and holding toothbrushes and cups of water pretending to be brushing their teeth, who had all the while been listening and enjoying the exchange, then would launch into a discussion about the lovers.

  “White people know how to love their women, jare. If it is our own people, he would have taught her a lesson with a few strong slaps and kicks, but I hear that white people, once they are in love, they are in love. They don’t believe in marrying many wives like we do.”

  “It is true, my brother, I worked with one of them, Engineer Kennedy, when I was a driver with Exxon Mobil, before I was retrenched. Him and the wife, they were always kissing, every minute they kissed, when the man was going to work they kissed, when he returned from work they kissed again, after eating they kissed, and they were kissing right before my very two eyes. And do you know they had no children? The woman had a small white dog that sat on her lap from morning till night like her baby while she smoked long American cigarettes.”

  “Someone told me that Mark used to work with a bank but was sacked because he spent all his time with club girls and would go to work late after drinking through the night. Sometimes he would not come to work at all. I hear the bank sacked him because he was running up huge tabs in the nightclubs, and club girls would come to look for him in the bank and would sit in the banking hall with their heavily made-up faces, smoking cigarettes.”

  “Just imagine a white man living with a club girl on this, our dirty street,” one of them said. “All the white people I know, they live in big houses in the European quarters. The streets there are well paved, and they don’t suffer power outages like we do here. The street names in the part of Lagos where they live are beautiful: McIver, McPherson, Bourdillon, Boygues, not like our own streets that have rough-sounding names like Ajangbadi, Okoko-maiko, and Dadakoada.”

  “But why can’t the man find a job? He is not like us, he should be able to get another job, the white people like themselves, they are not like us, who do not like anyone who is not of our tribe.”

  The men would talk till they got tired. One of them would then bring up the story they had heard on the radio about a politician caught in London with bags of stolen state funds. Once again the conversation would become animated. At this point one of them would recall that he had somewhere important to go, and the men would then disperse.

  At about midday we saw Beauty going to the corner store to buy some bottles of beer and packets of pasta. She swayed her hips from side to side; the men looked at her and scratched their jaws while the women looked away and hissed. She came back to the house and brought out her cassette player and her stove and began to prepare her pasta sauce. She was dancing to the music from the radio as she cooked. It was the music of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti—one of his more obscene songs, in which he sings about what a man and a woman do behind closed doors and how their six-spring bed creaks noisily. Her neighbors blocked the ears of their children with their fingers and dragged them into their rooms. Mark sat on a low bench, rolling a marijuana cigarette while reading a fat novel. His hands were stained a dark brown from the marijuana. Beauty was dancing for him.Twice she snatched the book from his hands while telling him to watch a sexy sway she was executing. It was said that white people did not like pepper in their food, but Mark was an exception. He ate the same spicy foods that we ate and would on occasion go with a bowl to the roadside food vendor, Mamaput. The people on the street said that any white man who eats pepper would never leave Lagos. This seemed to be true for Mark.

  And then one day, Beauty threw out Mark’s things. She was coming back from down the road where she had gone to buy marijuana when she saw Mark talking with a girl who lived on the same street. Her name was Bridget, and she was an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. They had been discussing one of the novels Mark was reading. He was always reading fat books that were sold cheaply on Lagos sidewalks. They were still talking when Beauty stumbled on them. She pulled up her trousers, clapped her hands, and screamed, “Come and see this small girl prostitute husband snatcher that wants to take my man.”

  “Come on, Beauty, we were only talking about books,” Mark said, trying to placate her.

  “You shut up your dirty mouth there, I will face you later, let me finish with this small ashewo first! So you and your mother have been planning on how you will steal my man, you people are no longer satisfied with calling me names behind my back and whispering when I pass, you have shown your hands, me, I will show you people today.”

  She grabbed Bridget by the front of her dress and tore the dress, exposing her breasts. The girl began to cry. People in the compound came out and forcefully pried her hands off the girl, but not before she had left a bleeding mark with her nails on the girl’s face.

  She went inside the room and started throwing out Mark’s things, beginning with his cheap paperback novels and his sneakers and his faded New York Yankees baseball cap and his faded jeans and his checkerboard. She dumped them outside, screaming while she tossed them out, cursing her neighbors for being backbiters, husband snatchers, witches, and wizards.

  Some of the people who had lived on the street for a long time swore that Mark was going to come back. They said they had seen it happen so many times in the past, and Mark always came back in the middle of the night.

  Not too long after that, we saw Mark on television and on movie posters. When Beauty threw Mark out, he had gone to a popular hangout for artistes near the National Theatre called Abe Igi to see if he could locate some old friends from his banking days who drank there. An actor informed Mark that a movie producer who specialized in shooting quick movies with video cameras that were sold in Lagos traffic was looking for a white man to play the role of a colonial missionary in an upcoming movie titled The Cross and the Pagans. Prior to this time, the filmmakers had cast albinos wearing wigs in the roles of white men. This time, they wanted to use a real white person. Though Mark had no formal training as an actor, he got the role and played it well. The producers of the movie invested a lot of money promoting the movie on radio and television and also plastered every available space on major streets with posters.

  That same week Beauty walked into the street brandishing the movie poster with Mark’s photo on it. She slapped her thighs and held up the poster.

  “Was it not you people of this street that said my man was an idler? Come and see him now, he has become James Bond, go to Scala Cinema tomorrow and see my man in action. Those of you who are rejoicing that he has left me, our love is still strong, let me tell you, he will walk back to me with his two legs.”

  People on the street pretended not to be listening, but we were all ears. Some of the men and women were making comments in whispers.

  “Some women have bad luck,” a woman called Sisi Yellow because of her skin color said. “They will suffer with a man for a long time so tey, but as soon as they tell themselves they cannot take the suffering anymore and move out of his house, the man’s luck changes. When I was living on the other side at Ajangbadi it happened to a woman I knew. She had seven children and was drinking garri and wearing the same brown cloth every day, but the day after she left her husband, he won five hundred thousand naira from Face-to-Face Pools.”

  “Beauty may be lucky; the man loves her. White people’s love is forever. Once they love, they love.”

  “Not in this case. Do not forget she threw the man out gabadaya, she even tossed his slippers out, and in our culture it means she no longer wants to see his two legs in the house. And she also swept her house after he left; it means she is done with him.”

  “That will be too bad, I mean after all they went through together. Remember the
time the man nearly died of typhoid fever right before our eyes, and she could not afford to take him to the hospital, and he was drinking boiled traditional roots and

  herbs?”

  “The man is not going to remember that. Men do not remember the good that women did for them. But do one bad thing to them, and they will not forget it, that is what they will be saying each time you quarrel.”

  Beauty must have overheard some of the comments because she began to sing a popular Fuji song, “Let my enemies live long and see what I will become in future.”

  The film was a success. It was so successful the cast toured the entire country. The film was shown in schools and was commended by the military head of state as a great work with cultural authenticity.

  Beauty told people on the street that Mark was going to come back to her when he returned from his tour. She even said he had sent her a message through another actor.

  The tour ended, and Mark did not return. We heard he was on location shooting another film on the slave trade and was playing the role of the evil and notorious slave dealer Captain Wilberforce Bomberbilly. It was also said that he had commenced a relationship with an actress and had even moved in with her.

  Beauty told anyone that cared to listen that Mark visited her in her dreams every night and had reassured her that he was coming back for her with gifts of gold and lace and high-heeled shoes. Her business was not going too well either, because each time she met a man at the nightclub, she began to tell him about her white boyfriend turned popular actor Mark. Her stories made the men yawn, and the other girls began spreading rumors that she had lost her mind. This was after they saw her standing alone in the dark talking aloud to herself: “Come to me, my lover, why did you leave me, come let me show my new style of bedmatics, come to me, my lover. I have always known you will come back to me.” A few of the girls laughed at her, but one of them went to her, took her by the hand, and led her back to her house.

  One morning she came back with a taxi and crammed her things inside, cursed out everybody on the street as witches, wizards, wasters, rumormongers, bad luck people, and gossipers. And then she left and never came back again.

  As for Mark, he actually married the actress and took her to America, but we heard they got divorced after a few months. Mark came back. People on the street said they were not surprised. Any white man that eats pepper must return to Lagos.

  Jimmy Carter’s Eyes

  When she was three, the girl accidentally upturned the boiling pan with which her mother was frying bean cakes on herself. The hot oil left two thick lumps of scar tissue across her eyes, blinding her. Her mother had told everyone who came to sympathize with her that she believed that a nurse had said they’d cut off the scar tissue in the hospital and the girl would be able to see again. Actually, she had been told this not by a real nurse but by a doll-baby nurse. This was the name given to auxiliary nurses in the general hospital where she had stayed with the child for three months, watching the eyes covered by gauze and gentian violet.

  No one blamed her for what happened to the child. No women in the village spent all their days watching their children. A woman had thousands of chores—fetching water and firewood, washing clothes, cooking for the family—and looking after the children somehow fitted itself around these activities. She had left the child by the boiling oil and had run inside to fetch her salt container. She needed to sprinkle a pinch of salt into the boiling oil to know if it was time to dunk the ground beans into it. By the time she ran back out, the little girl had grabbed the boiling pan of oil. She screamed, and a crowd gathered quickly. As is traditional in the village when such things happen, many took a look at the child and ran back to their homes to bring different medications, some useful but most useless. Some came with an expired bottle of gentian violet, another came with a smelly black bottle filled with the fat from the boa constrictor killed five years back. One came with a lump of wet cassava that she said would cool the skin and leave no scars. All these were dumped on the girl’s face. Someone screamed for the midwife. The Mid ran the village dispensary. She did more than deliver babies: she wrote prescriptions, sold drugs, and gave injections. Mid took a look at the child and ordered that she be taken to the general hospital in the local government headquarters, which was a good ten miles away. A commercial motorcycle taxi was called, and the woman, holding the child close to her, rode away to the hospital. The crowd gathered around the fire, which had grown cold, and began to talk about the incident.

  “It is always money, money, money for the young women nowadays. In my time this would not have happened.”

  “It was not her fault. She has to take care of herself and the baby. You know her husband simply woke up one morning and walked away.”

  “I have seen worse burns in my time. She is young, and the skin will heal very nicely. You’ll be shocked when you see the same child many years hence. There will be no single blemish on her skin.”

  “My boa oil can heal anything. They need not have taken her to the hospital—just a drop of the oil on the burn every morning and she would heal perfectly.”

  “Oh, the oil from the boa constrictor that was killed years back, I remember it was so big people thought it was a log of wood that had fallen across the road. From the black marks on its back you could tell it had lived for close to forty years.”

  “I have a bottle of the oil myself. I simply forgot to bring it.”

  “I wonder why Mid told her to take the child to the general hospital. With the different medications we have applied, even if the skin was burned by the fires of purgatory she should heal.”

  “You know she is the eyes and ears of the government among us here. Her job is more than giving babies with running stomach salt and sugar solution to drink. They sent her here to speak as the voice of the government. If you disobey her, you could get into trouble.”

  “You know, since she got here, the tax collectors now know the best days to come, they now come on days when everyone is at home. Who do you think tells them?”

  People in the crowd looked at each other as if they had spoken too much and began to disperse. Toward evening, the driver of the motorcycle taxi came to tell the woman’s neighbors that she had asked that they bring a few of her clothes to the hospital. She also told them to search under her sleeping mat and bring all the money there to the hospital.

  The people in the village gathered and drew up a roster of people who would take food to her in the hospital. Some volunteered to go pass a night with her in the hospital but were told not to bother by the woman. The hospitals were overcrowded, and families of patients slept on the open veranda of the hospital. Those who had gone to the hospital said the place stank of carbolic acid and death. They said that because of frequent power outages, the ice melted from the bodies of the corpses in the mortuary and the corpses stank like decomposed frozen mackerel. They said the doctors and nurses had their own private clinics and preferred that patients came to consult them there rather than in the general hospital. They said the child’s eyes were covered with gauze and that she could not swallow and had to be fed through a straw.

  The woman and her daughter stayed in the hospital for a long time. Longer than people stayed in the hospital when they went to have their hernias removed. No one followed the roster anymore; the villagers became busy with planting their crops. Another woman began to fry akara by the roadside, and people began to buy from her. Occasionally people spoke of the woman and her daughter and then looked away embarrassedly.

  One day the woman returned with the little girl, who had by now grown a bit. Two thick layers of scar tissue now covered the girl’s eyes. She was blind, which was rather odd. A blind little girl was unheard of. In the village, people became blind when they grew old. They said everyone chooses the part of his body that would age more than the other parts. Some chose their ears and became deaf as they grew old. Others chose to age in their teeth and lost all of them.

  The girl’s mother smi
led and did not say much. She did not complain that she had been abandoned in the hospital. She soon went back to her business of frying akara by the side of the road. There was no animosity between her and the other woman who had also started frying akara. She said the sky was wide enough for many birds to roam without their wings touching each other.

  The child sat by her mother and would sometimes pass salt and other items to her. The mother would leave her to go into the house, and people would come and buy akara and the girl would collect their money and give them the correct change. This was very strange because the girl had not been to school, and even if she had, she was blind, so how could she distinguish between one currency note and another?

  One day a little girl went missing in the village. Sometimes children would go missing, but they would normally be found within a few hours. This was different. Many hours had passed and the girl was still missing. When a child went missing, the mother of the child would tie her headscarf tightly around her waist and go around the village crying and asking, “Who has seen my child?” It was generally believed that by the time she lost her voice, the missing child would be found. By the second day the child was still missing. Even though the mother had lost her voice, the child was not yet found. When the mother walked past the women frying bean cakes, crying and screaming, “Who has seen my child?” the blind girl spoke for the first time.

  “I know who stole the missing girl.”

  “Be quiet and don’t get us both into trouble.”

  “I saw him give the girl a piece of candy; he tied her mouth with a rag, and threw her into a jute bag and rode away on his motorcycle.”

  The woman had never heard the child say that many words. Whenever the child chose to speak, she spoke in a whisper. Many people assumed she never spoke at all.

  The mother called out to the woman. She said out loud what the child had said. The villagers gathered. There was only one man they knew who rode a motorcycle and had a jute bag: the man who bought cocoa beans from the villagers. They sent some young men after him. They caught him with the child two towns away. He had cut a hole in the bag through which he fed the girl. He had kidnapped the child for juju moneymaking rituals. It was rumored that little virgin girls could be charmed and made to vomit money through juju. He cried and said the devil made him do it.