Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “Don’t worry,” she said. And then she added: “Love you, OK?”

  “Angie, wait a minute—”

  “Bye, Denise.”

  “Angie! Wait!”

  She hung up. As soon as she did, the phone rang. She put her hand on the receiver, felt the vibration as the phone rang and rang. She counted fifteen rings before Denise gave up. She put her hand to her cheek; it was warm from the heat generated by the ringing phone. She kept it there as she sat on the sofa, looking around the living room, taking it in. Her eyes landed on Denise’s watercolor painting that hung above the sofa, a rendering of their father’s prized horse, Thumbsucker. She sat for a long time, staring at the dark beauty, at the exuberant brush strokes of swishing tail and elegant, bent legs.

  Then she got up and called a taxi.

  IKEJA

  NINE

  The first thing Angie noticed about Africa was the smell. The air was redolent with the scent of damp, fresh-turned earth. Tropical, and as far away from Detroit as you could get. She walked down the steps of the plane, her first sight of the continent a stretch of tarmac, and beyond that a massive glass and stone building—the gleaming, elegant Murtala Muhammed International Airport. A crew of Nigerian workers whizzed by in a dizzying array of bold-patterned shirts, hurling luggage from the belly of the plane onto waiting carts. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the verdant air. Exhaling, she promised herself she’d never forget this moment.

  Inside, the terminal was teeming with people of myriad hues. Erect men stood in long dashikis beside women in matching lace head wraps and skirts; children scattered throughout, running toward outstretched hands. Two Nigerian pilots passed by, their uniforms crisp and imposing. Angie had never seen a black pilot in her life, certainly not two. Everywhere she looked, behind ticket counters, at the customs desks, within waiting areas, she saw black men and women nonchalantly in charge. Even though she knew she was headed to an African country, she hadn’t been prepared for this, for dark-skinned men and women moving through a public space with ease and grace. Instantly, she understood Ella’s devotion to the Pan-African movement. This was what it was all about—black people in charge, running their own country. She felt like a girl who’d landed in a scene from The Wiz, its Afro-Oz long hidden from view. And now she’d found it.

  Angie was exhausted yet alert; her senses overloaded. She tried not to look confused, but the myriad lines and official-looking men in uniform daunted her. She’d never traveled internationally before, couldn’t really count Canada. She gripped the new shoulder bag—at the shop in JFK Airport she’d been told it was a “reporter’s bag”—and now slung it across her body. The Nigerian man she’d sat beside on the plane had warned Angie about men trying to rip her off, had told her to not let go of her passport, to hold on tight to her luggage. Her mother would have warned her of the same, yet Ella hadn’t complained about such things. Only then did it dawn on Angie that Ella hadn’t been a woman traveling alone. Both times, she’d been with others—a US delegation, and then Nigel. Angie had almost forgotten she was traveling alone, so caught up in following Ella’s path, until the talkative Nigerian on the plane reminded her of that fact.

  The flight had been long and she’d come to rely on the nice man’s lilting voice as he regaled her with details about his “beautiful country,” singing its name and making her love its four-syllable, strong-vowel lyricism: Nigeeeria. She’d grown attached to the cocoon of economy class, where she’d shared oxygen and movies and meals with the same people over the last seventeen hours, her family of air-travel strangers, faces grown familiar. She’d felt at home among the strewn pages of The London Guardian, tossed scratchy British Airways blankets and crumpled white pillows.

  Yet, as the plane descended toward Lagos, she looked out her window at the archipelago of small islands jutting into the ocean, how its narrow, crowded land rushed to meet the wide arms of the Atlantic, and she felt elated.

  Now she was here, in Africa.

  Miraculously, a kind-faced man approached, sporting an airport badge and reminding her of Solo. He called her “sistah” and asked if she needed help. Just in the way he’d said that word “sister,” she felt a belonging that had eluded her forever, it seemed. Maybe, she thought, I’ve found my people. He helped her get through the long queue at customs and retrieve her luggage. She tipped him a lot, still unfamiliar with the currency—lovely naira bills the color of translucent red wine, profile of a black president at their center—exchanged at Heathrow during the layover.

  As Angie stepped out of the airport into the early evening, the rainy season introduced itself—a humidity that prickled her scalp and caused her cotton blouse to cling. She watched as travelers slipped into waiting Mercedes taxis; all around her men and women stood beside bulging suitcases wrapped with rope, their first-word acquisitions nearly bursting through.

  “My sistah, how are you?” said a man who approached, lunging for her luggage. Awed by that word again, she almost let him take her duffel bag. Then she remembered the man from the plane’s warnings, held on tight. “Wait!”

  As though her voice had attracted them, a swarm of touts appeared, and jostled for the chance to grab her bag and rush her into one of many cars parked at the curb. A shoving match broke out, more startling than frightening, and she worried that her luggage would burst open in the midst of the tug-of-war. Finally the first man who’d approached yanked her bag free. And the touts, still yelling at one another, rushed on to the new arrival coming through the automatic doors, a European man in a business suit; they lunged at his suitcase, pushing one another and squawking like chickens after the last bit of corn. Angie marveled at the overt aggression.

  Meanwhile, the taxi driver had rushed to a Peugeot parked at the curb, and tossed her bag into the trunk. He beckoned to Angie. “Enta!”

  She quickly got into the backseat as he slid behind the wheel. He stepped on the gas, tore away from the curb. She swerved to one side and they thundered forward. The car radio blasted highlife, a drumming dance music that she’d soon hear pouring from speakers all over Lagos.

  “I’m going to the Bristol Hotel, please.” She gripped the door handle.

  “Yes, yes, Lagos Island,” said the driver. They entered a highway, passing by a skyline of high-rises and skyscrapers, some only half-built carcasses of expectation; a giant red sign lit the sky, proclaiming, “Things go Better with Coke.” As the driver flew along the expressway, Angie was awed by its multilane expanse. This was the modernity that Ella had raved about.

  Traffic clogged. The Peugeot inched forward. Horns blew incessantly—long, urgent howls sliced by short, staccato beeps—as the driver shouted back with his own horn. It was chaotic and wild and smelled strongly of gas fumes.

  When the traffic finally opened up, the driver accelerated, lurching forward. Angie suddenly saw two people run across the expressway, darting past oncoming cars. She gasped, an awareness piercing her heart.

  “Aren’t there overpasses or something?” she asked.

  “Flyovers, yes, but people don’t use them.”

  “Why not?”

  The driver shrugged. “This is Nigeria.”

  “Well, people shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” she said, incredulous. “Someone could get seriously hurt.”

  The driver eyed her through his rearview mirror. “So you are akata, eh?”

  She made contact with his reflection. “A what?”

  “You are a black American?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Welcome to my country!” He told her his cousin drove a taxi in New York. “He is making a lot of money,” he explained, and caught her eye again in the rearview mirror. “I am good driver, you see? I can be doing this in New York. Maybe you can help me get my papers to come to America, yes?”

  “I’d be happy to help!” she said, wanting to make a difference in a Nigerian’s li
fe, even though she had no idea what that entailed.

  “You will give me your address and I will write to you,” he said. “And then you will help me.”

  “Sure!” She pulled out her journal from the reporter’s bag, and jotted down her home address as best she could in the fast-moving car. Maybe this man and she would become pen pals, stay in touch the way Ella had stayed in touch with the people she met during her first visit here. Already, Angie felt herself expanding, blooming in sophistication and knowing.

  They approached the Eko Bridge and traffic slowed again. “Ah, ah!” exclaimed the driver. “Not this sheet!”

  Angie craned her neck, saw that up ahead, a man with a large rifle slung across his chest stood guard, halting cars. “What’s going on?” she asked. She’d never bothered to check the State Department’s list of hot spots. Was Nigeria on it?

  “Moto cop,” said the driver. “Don’t worry sistah, I am hand­ling it.”

  The cop held his hand out like a stop sign as they approached then put his head into the passenger side of the car, glared at her. “What is your business?”

  “She is an American visitor,” said the driver. “I have gathered her from the airport, Suh, and am depositing her at a hotel downtown.”

  “Your country paper!” barked the cop.

  Angie didn’t understand, looked desperately at the driver.

  “Give him your passport,” said the driver.

  She quickly pulled out her passport, handed it to the cop, fear rising in her. What if he kept it? What would she do? What if he made her get out of the car, dragged her to some remote jail? When Ella was in the last, worst vestiges of her addiction, Angie and her mother often escaped to the movies; one February afternoon they saw the Jack Lemmon film Missing, about an American journalist who disappeared in the aftermath of the Chilean coup. It was haunting and disturbing and afterward her mother said, “So much for thinking your American passport protects you.”

  The moto cop looked over her passport with his flashlight for longer than he needed to. Finally he tossed it back at her.

  “Open the boot!” he ordered the driver.

  The driver got out and followed the cop to the taxi’s trunk.

  She watched through the back windshield as the cop ran his flashlight over the contents of the open trunk, then gruffly ordered the driver to close it. Again panic as she thought: What will I do if he takes him away? But they returned to the front of the car and the driver slid back behind the wheel. The cop thrust his hand into the window, palm up. It was rough, calloused.

  “Drop, drop,” he said.

  The driver pulled crumbled bills from his pocket and handed them to the officer, who calmly waved the taxi through the roadblock, his flashlight arcing across the dusk. As they left the moto cop behind, Angie stared out the back window, feeling a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. Glad to be safe, yes, but wishing she’d been bolder somehow.

  “These ones with their big eye,” said the driver. “Bodi dey inside cloth and they want take from me.”

  “What did you say?”

  The driver didn’t answer.

  She pressed, wanting to understand. “So what was he checking for?”

  The driver sucked his teeth. “Nigeria expelled many foreigners and the police are saying they are checking to make sure the undesirables do not creep back into our country.”

  “What do they do with these uh, these people they don’t want here?” she asked.

  “These Nigerian policeman, they do whatever they want, O. If they want to kill a man, they do it, just like that.”

  “Just like that?” she repeated, Fela’s song on her mind.

  He turned to face Angie. “You are having these checkpoints in America?”

  “Nobody stands on the highway with a machine gun, checking cars, no.”

  “I will come to America,” he said. But his energy zapped, he drove quietly after that, bobbing his head to the radio’s highlife, with its chaotic, tossed-up sounds; its forced exuberance reminded Angie that she was indeed a visitor to a strange land.

  They crossed the bridge, its ribbon of concrete looping above the Lagos Lagoon. As they passed over the harbor’s black waters, Angie eyed wooden shacks built on stilts, hovering above the lagoon.

  “People live down there?” she asked.

  “They do,” said the driver. “And when someone falls in, they are so covered in oil they are too slippery to save.”

  The dissonance of desperate living beneath a sprawling, modern construction disturbed Angie, fractured her senses. Plus, once off the mainland, moving through town without the expanse of highway, the driver lurched forward, right up to the car in front, then slammed on his brakes, lurched forward, slammed, lurched. Angie’s body jerked back and forth as she held on tighter to the door handle; she tried to take in the sights, but it was now dark and everything took on a shadowy, shaky outline.

  Bristol Hotel

  8 Martins Street

  Lagos Island, Lagos

  July 6, 1983

  Dear Angie,

  Nigel and I have now been here a couple weeks and wow! It’s great to be back, although a lot has changed! For one, everywhere we turn, they’re playing Michael Jackson. When I hear “Billie Jean,” I think of us all gathered in front of the TV, watching him do that moonwalk, flipping that hat. Almost makes me miss you guys (smile).

  We’ve been staying at this cool hotel right on Lagos Island, in the middle of everything. I swear, Lagos has got to be the most colorful place in the world! Everybody’s dressed in loud prints, houses are painted pink and blue and yellow, street vendors sell big orange and red and green fruit. My favorite sights are the ogas or “big men”—self-important Nigerian men, girl—who wear these long, robe-like garments in pretty pastel shades, and the most amazing indigo blue I’ve ever seen. “Agbadas” they’re called. As you can see, I’ve learned a few words in Yoruba. This pidgin they speak is something else—still working on that!

  We’ve been walking around a lot, under giant umbrellas. Everything looks magical when you see it through a sheet of constant rain. Shimmery and new. I love it!

  That’s all for now. Hope you’re well. I’ll write again soon.

  Luv,

  Ella

  The driver screeched to a halt in front of the hotel. “You will come down here, sistah.”

  Angie climbed out of the backseat; she had the sensation of still moving. Her head hurt from all the slamming of brakes, and the sticky air was as thick as a steam room. He grabbed her duffel from the trunk, carried it into the hotel’s lobby.

  The man behind the desk knew the driver, as they greeted one another boisterously. Angie thanked the driver and paid him with the last of her wine-colored bills. She also gave him the piece of paper she’d written her address on.

  “I will write to you and then I will come to your country!” he said, waving goodbye.

  “OK!” she said, imagining a letter from him arriving months from now, out of the blue.

  The desk clerk smiled at Angie. He had a gold front tooth. “You would like a room for how many nights, please?”

  “Just one,” she said. “For now.”

  The transistor radio on the desk was softly playing “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” Whitney Houston’s powerful voice filling the small lobby. Ella and Nigel had once been in this same lobby, she thought. Maybe standing in this very spot, maybe even talking to this same guy. It amazed her.

  The desk clerk was studying a sheet attached to a clipboard; he flipped a couple pages and finally looked up. “Yes, we have a single room for you. Very, very nice room. The fifth floor.”

  “Great!” She was amazed that she’d managed to pull this off, to get herself across the world and make it to the exact same place her sister had been. Still, she couldn’t feel Ella’s presence in the tight lobby.r />
  “That will be sixty naira,” said the desk clerk.

  She was startled. “For one night?”

  “Yes. Please pay now.”

  She hesitated. That didn’t seem right. But at this point, she had no choice. It was dark, late. This was the hotel. She sighed. “Will you accept American dollars?”

  He grinned. “Of course! One hundred twenty dollars please.”

  “One hundred and twenty dollars? Are you sure?”

  “I am sure.” His smile stayed in place.

  “But the dollar is worth twice the naira, right?” She’d checked the exchange rate and was certain that was true.

  “That is the exchange rate here,” he said, holding her gaze.

  Reluctantly, she pulled out her American Express travelers cheques, and handed $120 to the clerk. He handed her a key.

  Angie took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Do you think you could give me naira for this?”

  The clerk eyed the American money. “Yes, yes, of course.” He took the twenty, pulled out a weathered, lizard-skinned wallet, picked out ten worn single naira bills, and handed them to Angie. So I’m being totally ripped off, she thought. I’m being treated like a dumb American tourist.

  The desk clerk beckoned to an aged man dressed in khaki pants and shirt, sitting quietly in the corner, beside a planted tree. Angie had not noticed him when she entered.

  “Help this lady with her luggage!” barked the clerk. The bellhop jumped up, grabbed Angie’s bag.

  “Welcome to Nigeria,” said the desk clerk, gold tooth shining.

  Angie headed toward the elevator, but the bellhop stopped her.

  “No nepa today,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Power is out,” he explained.

  Together they walked up the five flights. The stairwell was suffocating. Angie noticed how dusty the man’s feet were inside his lizard sandals. They walked down the short hall to room 576. Angie opened the door to a modest room with a twin bed. The light came on magically, without her touching a switch. She turned to the bellhop.