“Too bad Punch is an organ of propaganda for the government,” said Chris.
Lola shrugged. “Sometimes, you have to work within the system. I’m trying to do the most with what we have.”
“You can’t work within a system that is fundamentally corrupt,” said Chris. “We have to create organs of change or what is the point?”
“Here we go,” said Brenda.
“Listen, I loved The Voice as much as anyone, but you are fooling yourself if you think we’ll ever go back to how it was,” said Lola. “Those golden days of democratic votes and all of that. The heyday of the Second Republic.” She shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s over. Military rule is here to stay.”
“That’s a view I reject,” said Chris. “And I, for one, refuse to work for a newspaper where some oga arrives in the newsroom with a suitcase of money and poof! Suddenly a flattering profile of him appears in the paper, dominated by a photo of his smiling white teeth and giant belly.”
“Jide had the same uncompromising position and you see what happened to him,” said Lola. “We have to be cautious.”
“What exactly happened to him?” asked Angie. She’d wanted to ask that question for some time.
“The Lagos Voice’s office was raided,” explained Chris. “And since he was our editor-in-chief, they arrested Jide, claiming the paper was treasonous against the government. He died in police custody.”
“Where was Ella when that happened?” asked Angie. Only now did she realize that working for a newspaper in Lagos had put Ella at risk.
“She wasn’t there at the time, thank God,” said Chris. “None of the rest of the staff was there. We would have all been arrested, for sure. And worse.”
“And that was before military rule,” said Lola. “Now, with Ibrahim Babangida as president, imagine one’s fate for such a thing. Executed on Bar Beach like in the old days.”
“All I know is that these last four years in Nigeria have been nothing like the first four,” said Brenda. “Night and day.” She took a huge gulp of Cointreau. “I don’t think I can live here much longer under these conditions.”
“Things will improve,” said Chris.
“They better,” said Brenda. “Because if they don’t soon, it’s time to return home.”
“I am home,” said Chris.
Brenda eyed her husband, who threw his head back, drained his glass, then rose to get another drink.
Lola stepped into the tense silence. “So Angie, do you plan to follow in your sister’s footsteps? Become a journalist too?”
“I might,” she said. “I’m not sure. I haven’t decided.”
“It’s not burning inside you,” said Lola. “You’re different from Ella in that way. I can tell.”
Angie felt a hot flash of jealousy. Lola couldn’t be more than three or four years older than her, and already she was a women’s page editor, Angie’s own sister’s protégé. She tried not to think about the vast nothingness of career plans that awaited her back home.
“She’s not so different,” offered Chris. “I totally could see Angie staying in Lagos, doing what her sister did.”
Angie smiled at Chris with gratitude.
He smiled back. “She might even come work for The Voice when I get it back up and running.”
“Lord, I hope not,” said Brenda. She looked over quickly at Angie. “No offense. I mean, I hope you guys don’t start up that newspaper again.”
“You needn’t worry Brenda,” said Lola. “It’ll never happen.”
Chris lifted his drink and murmured, “I’ll remind you later that you said that,” before taking a loud sip.
“Everything doesn’t have to be about writing for a newspaper, you know,” said Brenda. “There are other ways Angie can honor her sister’s memory.”
Angie sensed the others waiting for her to say something. She was amazed how quickly her balloon of happiness had deflated. “I’m still trying to figure out what that means, exactly,” she said quietly. “Honoring her memory.”
“It’ll become clear soon enough,” said Chris.
Angie nodded, drained the glass of Cointreau, all eyes on her.
“You want another drink?” asked Brenda.
“No thanks,” said Angie. She just wanted to escape to her quarters, be alone. “I’ve actually had enough.”
That night, Chris stood in the doorway whispering, “Psst, Psst, Psst,” until she woke up. He entered, this time holding a flashlight.
She sat up abruptly. “Please don’t just appear like that,” she pleaded. “It scares the shit out of me.”
“Now you’re sounding like Ella. Feisty!”
“When you come to my room in the middle of the night, Brenda has to know that you’re gone.”
“I am a night crawler. She knows this about me.”
“Why are you here?”
“To ask you a question.”
“Is it urgent?”
“Let’s just say it’s personal.”
She braced herself. “OK?”
“He put his flashlight on the little nightstand. “Did Ella write to you about us?”
“No.” Angie paused. “What about you and her?”
He sat on the bed beside her. “We had something.”
His words made no sense to Angie. “She and Nigel were together.”
“Oh, those two. They broke up every month.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Ask Brenda. She’ll tell you.”
“Should I ask her about you and Ella too?”
“She knows.”
“What exactly does she know?”
“She knows that if Ella had lived, we would’ve been together.”
“As a couple?”
“Yes.”
“What about Brenda?”
“In our culture a man can have more than one wife.”
Angie shook her head, as if this were a dream. “I’m sorry, this is a bit much. You’re telling me that Ella would’ve become your, like, second wife?”
“I’m surprised you find that so hard to believe. Or did you really know your sister?”
Angie’s body stiffened. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You were talking about honoring her memory, her legacy if you will. I am part of that.”
“In what way?”
“I just told you.”
“I’m confused. What are you suggesting?”
Chris put his hand near her thigh, atop the thin chenille blanket. “I would’ve been a big part of her life, and now I can be a big part of yours. It’s the African way.” Chris rose. “I’m sure you agree with me.”
Before she could respond, he grabbed his flashlight, turned and moved through the doorway, fluttering the curtain.
Angie lay awake for hours, trying to figure out her next move.
For the next two days, she hung out with Brenda, trying to find the right moment. It wasn’t when they shopped together in the market for the Asian hair she needed for her braids, nor when they drove to the school where Brenda volunteered; and it wasn’t en route to a meeting of the Ikeja Women’s Auxiliary. Finally, as they were bringing groceries into the house on the third morning. Angie asked, as nonchalantly as she could, “Did Nigel and Ella break up a lot?”
Brenda turned to her. “Where did you hear that?”
“I was just wondering. That’s all.”
She locked eyes with Angie. “He loved her. She loved him. That’s what you should know. That’s the main thing. And that’s everything.”
Saturday morning, Godwin’s teenage wife Theresa led Angie along a muddy road. Theresa carried her baby high on her back, while her unborn child strained against the cloth wrapped tautly around her. Angie held the ponytail of hair that Brenda had helped her buy. The sun was high; Brenda
had predicted they had about three hours before the rains returned.
Theresa offered to walk her to meet the hair-braider, felt the walk would do her good, help the baby to come. Angie had a flash of terror that Theresa might go into labor while on this walk. She hated that she wasn’t like Ella in that way, couldn’t imagine saving a life.
They walked slowly as Theresa was so big she could just manage to waddle forward. They passed plots of land where houses were under construction. Mounds of wet, red earth piled high next to hills of gravel. A backhoe stood idle. They arrived at a construction site where the entire frame of a house had been built, standing naked in the hot sun. A slab of concrete had been poured around the base. In the middle of the concrete—what would one day be the house’s front porch perhaps—sat a tin-roofed shanty. Theresa took twenty naira from Angie and moved toward the lean-to. Angie followed, but at its threshold Theresa stopped her with a raised hand. “Come out,” she said.
Angie waited as Theresa entered. Two minutes later Godwin’s wife stepped back outside, transaction complete. She waved goodbye, slowly began to waddle away. Angie hoped she’d make it back home safely.
Suddenly a woman stepped out of the shanty, shrouded in a sheer fabric covering her head, and a faded wrapper tied across her waist. She moved toward Angie. Her face was all but hidden, a thin scar snaking across her forehead and a tiny ruby sparkling in her aquiline nose. The shrouded woman stared at her with startled almond eyes and let out a high-pitched scream. Angie dropped the Asian hair.
“Ah! Ah! Come back!” the woman called out to Theresa. “Too much, too much!”
Angie’s hair, no longer wrangled into a gel-slicked ponytail, had been washed and air-dried into its true self—thick, kinky, unruly. She was used to this woman’s reaction, had seen it at high-end salons and basement shops alike: women who insisted that her hair was too much to handle. Hair-washers who begged not to be given the task of combing it out. Stylists who charged extra for the added labor. Shop owners who closed down while a poor hairdresser worked on her hair until long after darkness fell. She, tipping extravagantly by way of apology.
Theresa turned around. “Aunty. Abeg.” Her baby started to cry.
The woman glared at Theresa, so swollen, bulbous. Finally, she nodded.
“It is fine,” said Theresa, who again turned to leave. Angie bent down and picked up the fallen hair.
The woman entered her shanty, came out carrying a straw mat, pillows, scissors, a comb, and a jar. She placed the mat in one corner of the yard, put a pillow on it, and instructed Angie to sit. She did, noticing the beauty of the mat and wishing she could have one as a souvenir. The woman took a plastic can, flipped it over, placed the other pillow on top and sat hovering over Angie. An Afro pick lay idly in the dirt nearby and beside it a jagged piece of mirror. The woman investigated Angie’s hair with her fingers, as if searching through tall grass for a precious object.
She showed Angie how to pull apart small sections of the bought hair and hand them to her. She parted Angie’s hair with the fine-toothed comb, gathered a section, braided it, gathered another, braided it. The woman’s hands conveyed competence, experience—knuckles bumping against scalp, fingers pulling hair from root. She gave the woman a mental name: Missy.
As they worked, she eyed Missy’s bare feet, which stuck out on either side of her in full view. They were small, dirty, cracked. Yet they looked strong as shoes. As Angie handed her sections of hair, Missy sometimes told her too big or small-small and she’d adjust a piece of hair before handing it back. The sun sat high overhead, heating her face and arms. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the rhythm of her slightly bobbing head as it moved back and forth under the guidance of the woman’s push and pull. She liked the feel of hands in her hair. Missy and Angie worked together for an hour in silence. Angie mastered her task of handing hair to Missy, anticipating when she’d need the next piece. Missy paused from braiding to dip a fingertip into the jar of coconut oil, run it down the exposed parts. The lubrication was startling and cool and sensual. Angie could feel her scalp drinking it in, refreshed against the beating sun.
When a gust of wind blew across and the hair flew from Angie’s lap, Missy ran to get it. Within minutes, it blew away again. Angie held on tighter this time, but the wind was harsh.
“Too much,” said Missy, who got up and moved the materials to the opposite side of the yard. Angie helped carry the mat and pillows. “Quick-quick” said the woman. “Rain soon.”
They set up shop again and just as they’d settled back into a rhythm, Angie heard someone approaching from behind. Her back was to the shanty, so she couldn’t see who it was. But she noted the softness in Missy’s voice as she spoke. She twisted around to see a skinny little sandy-haired girl rubbing sleep from her eyes. She approached Missy, who spoke to her in a lilting language as she wiped the child’s face clean with her hand. She was dressed in a mini version of her mother’s attire—a wrapper tied at the chest, sun-beaten shroud covering her head, locks of hair sticking out. Angie also gave the girl a name in her head: Red.
Red and her mother spoke in more loving tones before the girl ducked back into the shanty. When she returned she was carrying a piece of cardboard, a nail and a rope. She jabbed holes in the cardboard with the nail and pulled the rope through the holes, busying herself with this game for several minutes as she played in the penumbra of her mother’s gaze. Red ducked into the shanty again and came out carrying a boxy tape recorder and a cassette. She popped in the tape and pushed a button and music dominated by flutes and horns poured out of the little built-in speaker. Red and her mother sang together to the music, as light and airy as the Hausa language they spoke. The sun hummed behind overcast clouds. Near Angie’s foot, a lizard nibbled on a corncob. The minutes peeled away. When Red ran off to play, Missy noticed tiny red mosquito bites covering Angie’s arms. She put her finger on one spot. “Sorry-O!” she said softly, then put her finger on another. “Sorry-O.” And yet another: “Sorry-O.”
Red returned with a bottle cap filled with water. Gingerly, she held it out to Angie. “Tea?” she asked.
Her mother laughed. It was a waterfall of a laugh, clarion and cascading. Angie smiled and the girl skipped away.
Just as the clouds gathered with ominous weight, nearly four hours after she’d arrived, Angie felt the final tug of Missy’s strong fingers. She glided more coconut oil down Angie’s scalp, then with scissors in hand, cut the bottom of the braids, one at a time. Angie had a panicky thought: Does she know where the extensions end and my own hair begins? Missy gave her the jagged mirror and Angie took in the extensions, which fell to her chest. It felt odd to have hair longer than her own. Is this how Ella had worn hers? She doubted it. “Too long,” she said, pointing to the braids.
“Ah, Ah! Not too long. Is good!” Missy’s ruby nose ring sparkled. Thunder cracked. “Is very good!”
“OK, OK,” said Angie, both tired out from the sun, and afraid of getting caught in the approaching storm.
Just then a high-toned voice sang out, “Ahooooooh!” and a woman came toward them, her head covered in a faded sheer fabric. She was taller and perhaps thinner than Missy, with kohl-rimmed eyes. She and Missy greeted one another and the woman plopped down on the ground, talking easily with Missy. Missy soon called out to Red, who appeared with a candle and matches, handed them to her mother. She lit the candle and began burning the ends of Angie’s braids. The smell of candle wax mixed with burning hair, coupled with the women’s chatter, conjured a memory. When she was in ninth grade, Angie joined her mother on her biweekly visits to see Mabel, the woman who did hair in her basement. There, Mabel would wash then press her mother’s hair with a hot comb. Angie could remember waiting her turn as she sat on a nearby couch, head bowed over a worn paperback of Flowers in the Attic. Back then, she carried Ella’s copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in her purse everywhere—feeling she should read it bu
t not doing so. Ella was never in any shape to discuss books with her, besides. In a way, she carried Marquez’s novel as a talisman against Ella’s further decline. One day we’ll talk about it. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Angie enjoyed the distraction of children held captive by a notoriously abusive grandmother. The smell of frying hair aloft, she’d listen to the women talk as they ignored her presence. Those were some of her favorite memories, witnessing her mother forget briefly that she had a daughter on drugs, chatting about money and men and making a way. Angie soaked in the ease and casualness in her mother’s voice—such a rare sound. Out here in this open-air beauty shop on a concrete patch in Lagos, listening to the lilting inflections of these women’s voices was like hearing the instrumental version of a song whose lyrics she knew by heart.
Seeing Angie’s completed hair, Missy’s friend lowered her headscarf and showed off her own fat, brown plaits hanging down her back. The woman’s hair looked like hers—the same texture and volume and soft kinkiness. In fact, Angie resembled both of these women. Casually, the woman picked up the abandoned Afro pick, examined it for dirt, and raked it through one of her braids before re-plaiting her hair. Angie had put little stock in coming to Africa to find her roots; it hadn’t been her goal. She secretly feared there was little African left in her. She resembled no one in her family—not her father nor her mother nor Denise nor Ella. Not even the aunties or the photos of grandparents. When she dressed up for Heritage Day in fifth grade, she’d worn an American Indian costume—complete with fringed moccasins and a feathered headband. Her mother had said that her great grandmother had “a bit of Indian blood” in her, and she felt a child’s pride in being related to the people who showed the pilgrims how to prepare the first Thanksgiving dinner. Angie won the Heritage Day award for best costume that day, and ever since she’d secretly harbored the desire to see her face on someone else, someone with “a bit of Indian blood” perhaps. It surprised yet pleased her to find here in Nigeria, nomadic gypsy women with both her features and her hair. Solo had told the truth; she could be Fulani.
When Angie got back to the Olapades’, Brenda was waiting for her. “It looks good, O!” she exclaimed.
Into the Go Slow Page 17