“Sounds like you barely slept,” said Angie, envious.
“You got that right! On the day the paper came out? Wednesdays? Shit, we did stay up all night, waiting ’til the delivery guy dropped the papers at the door, sometimes at like five in the morning, just so we could see Jide’s latest editorial. He never showed it to anyone beforehand.”
“Why not?”
“Because the shit was so hot! Searing! He wrote scathing editorials about the country’s so-called leaders. That brother was relentless. He did not share our optimism. He hadn’t gone abroad to be educated; he’d been in Nigeria the whole damn time and he’d seen a lot. He and the older, wiser cats knew the election was rigged from the start.”
“Shagari won, right?” she asked. “Ella wrote and told me that.”
“Yeah, voting took place that August, but nobody liked how it went down, nobody believed it had been fair. A lot of ballot tampering. Plus Shagari imposed these austerity measures and kicked out all the foreigners who supposedly were taking jobs from Nigerians. Half a million Ghanaians got deported. Crazy shit like that.”
Yes, that taxi driver had said as much on Angie’s first day in Lagos. That felt like eons ago. Light years.
Nigel’s voice sped up in excitement. “So Jide is writing about all this, taking no prisoners. Chris is railing on the economic front, writing these follow-the-dollar stories about all the cash the government has hoarded, how after all that oil money, the country was crying broke. And about the insanity of millions living in harsh poverty despite Nigeria’s natural resources, right? Such a fucking irony. Ella was railing against poor prenatal care for mothers, high infant mortality, no malaria nets, that kind of stuff. And I was doing stories about armed struggle in the countries on the continent.” He shrugged, his shoulders frozen upward before falling back down. “Eventually The Voice came under attack, mainly from the city’s other newspapers. They were all mouthpieces of the government, and they didn’t like how we were showing them up.”
Nigel squinted at the water. “One day, we were all in the office, working, when somebody threw a smoke bomb through the window.”
“Oh my God!” said Angie. “Did anyone get hurt?” She had an irrational thought: maybe this was the real way Ella died. She had another, guilty thought: she wished it had been. Being hit by a car wasn’t heroic in the same way.
“We were all OK,” said Nigel. “But after that, shit wasn’t fun anymore. The whole city felt, I don’t know, stressed out. Folks grumbling, services not working, blatant government thievery, and this sense that, just like Achebe wrote back in the day, things were falling apart. Big time.”
“Jide must have known it wasn’t safe anymore,” said Angie.
“He knew. But that brother was committed, God rest his soul. Brother Jide. No one like him.”
“What did you and Ella do after that, after the smoke bomb?”
“Me, I wanted to pull back from the whole political thing. Just relax, see the sights, chill out. It had been hot and heavy since the day we arrived, and after a few months of that intensity, after the disappointment of the elections, I was tired of the whole thing. I felt like, what’s the point? Ella and I argued about it. I told her I couldn’t be in that same little newsroom day after day, every day; but that didn’t bother her. She said she’d spent nearly every weekend of her life at the track with her father, for years, sometimes hours in one barn, so she was used to being in a confined space. I was not.
“Plus,” said Nigel, “Ella really believed in what she was doing, believed in holding Nigerians to a higher standard so the country could live up to its potential, really become a beacon of Africa, a genuine second-world country instead of a third-world one.
“It was noble, but fucking exhausting.” He stared at the rivulets weaving between the shoreline rocks. Angie stared at him. “Things with me and Ella started getting really out of whack,” he said. “For one thing, we handled being black American in Nigeria very differently. I wanted to hang out with other expats, really get into that scene, ‘cause folks from all over the world were living in Nigeria—you know, diplomats, UN folks, NGO workers, peace corps volunteers—and I found that interesting. She hated that scene. She just wanted to be with Nigerians. She felt it was more authentic.”
Angie’s crossed legs felt stiff, so she stretched them out in front of her. Nigel did the same.
“Things really blew up when we went to this party in Surulere, the three of us, me, Ella, and Jide,” he said. “I had shifted my tastes, tended not to like Nigerian house parties anymore. My choice was to hang out in some diplomat’s nice apartment, where they gave very fine parties. One dude had this huge space with a sweet view of the Gulf of New Guinea. You could just stand there for hours, drink in hand, watch the waves frothing up to the edge of Ikoyi Island.” He paused. “But Ella didn’t care about any of that. She preferred the locals, hands down. We’d go to these things and she’d be all dressed in her outfits made from native cloth and she’d make all these observations. ‘Have you ever noticed that no one in Lagos ever slouches?’ she said to me once. ‘Everyone has erect posture.’” He shook his head softly. “That’s how she was.”
Nigel became quiet, drifting in his own thoughts. Angie felt she had to keep him focused on the tale. “So, the party in Surulere,” she said.
“So the party in Surulere,” he repeated. “This one was a little different ‘cause it was at a nice house, with a megadi guarding the gate and a sweet little courtyard out front with flowers blooming. And folks were dressed in modern, Western clothes. Barely a native fabric in sight. “Beat It” was blasting through giant speakers. Everybody was dancing, enjoying themselves. The kitchen was well-stocked with liquor. I was digging the whole thing. Ella was just standing around talking about newspaper shit with Jide. Me, I decided to have a good time, so I grab this pretty girl I’d seen on national TV, and I’m doing my best Michael Jackson imitation on the dance floor, pretending not to watch Ella watch me out of the corner of her eye.”
“You doing a Michael Jackson imitation?” Angie interjected. “I cannot see that!”
“Yeah, you didn’t want to see it.”
She laughed, grateful for the excuse. She could feel the story was headed in a not-so-funny direction.
At one point during the party, Jide approached the DJ. “Can you please play some Nigerian piece for a change?” he asked.
“Wha?” said the DJ.
“Some Nigerian music!” Jide yelled over the din.
The DJ’s eyes opened wide. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You wanna spoil the party?”
A guy standing nearby heard the exchange and burst out laughing.
Jide screamed, “What’s so goddamn funny?”
By now others had gathered around.
“I been doing this for three years and I ain’t never heard such shit,” said the DJ. “What century have you returned from?”
“You’re telling me it would hurt the party for you to play just one Nigerian record?” asked Jide.
“I’m telling you this ain’t the Dark Ages!” said the DJ. “I haven’t got one single Nigerian record here.”
“How can you call yourself a DJ!” yelled Jide.
Ella, who’d been at Jide’s side throughout, chimed in. “Yeah, how could you?”
Nigel moved toward them, grabbed Ella’s arm to pull her back, but she shrugged him off, stayed next to Jide. Now the music had stopped completely and everyone was staring at them. Nigel was pissed.
“Not one?” pressed Jide, incredulous. “No Oyelana, no Oriental Brothers, Mbarga? No Fela?”
Suddenly, the hostess, Pat, walked up to the small group gathered around the DJ. A young, modern Nigerian woman, she wore a sleek black dress with padded shoulders and a dropped back. She said to Jide, “It’s not that kind of party.”
“What kind of party does it have to be
to play Nigerian records?” said Jide. “Isn’t it bad enough that our airports and bars and radio all play American music, eh? What’s wrong with you people?”
Pat moved in, inches from Jide’s face, and yelled, “It’s my party, you hear!” She stepped back, looked him up and down. “Who invited you anyway, old man?”
The DJ dropped “Billie Jean” onto the turntable, and the TV girl took Nigel’s hand and pulled him back on the dance floor. Jide and Ella came over to them and Jide, fuming, said, “Let’s go, my brother. Let’s get out of here.”
Nigel kept dancing, thinking, Why should he tell me when to leave a fucking party? “I’m not going,” he said.
“Well I am,” said Ella.
Nigel stopped dancing. He reached for Ella. “Stay here with me.”
“Just come with us,” she insisted.
“OK, after this dance.”
Ella rolled her eyes, stalked off with Jide. Nigel resumed dancing, could see Ella consoling Jide, trying to calm him down as he complained loudly to no one in particular, her hand on his arm. The TV girl said, “I’m thirsty.”
Nigel didn’t like how buddy-buddy those two were. He followed TV Girl to the kitchen, drank two lagers fast as she drank one. He was thinking Ella saw me, she’ll come in here, but she didn’t come, didn’t come, and he worried about that a bit, but he was a little drunk, and the next thing he knew, he and TV Girl were upstairs in one of the bedrooms.
When Nigel came back down, Ella and Jide were gone.
It was dark now, only light coming from office windows of the administrative building. Nigel stood. “My butt’s sore. Let’s get off the ground.”
They moved over to a large stone bench.
“So did you go after her?” asked Angie. “After you fooled around with TV Girl?”
Nigel winced. “No, I didn’t. I figured I’d see her back at Chris and Brenda’s, but when I got there, she wasn’t there. I wasn’t really worried. We’d had fights before and we always got through it.” He paused. “But she didn’t return for two days.”
His face was in profile, barely visible in the dark. “Go on,” said Angie.
“Turns out,” he said, “Ella had stayed at Jide’s that whole time. We argued about it. I accused her of having some kinda Daddy fixation, because Jide was older than us, like forty. Not even that old, but it seemed old at the time. I told her Jide had turned us into sitting ducks, and the best thing we could do was just cut out of Nigeria, go back home. ‘Go if you want to,’ she said. ‘I’m staying.’”
“You would never have left her here,” said Angie. “Would you?”
“Of course not. But I did start taking these small trips to places like Togo and Ghana and Benin. Started traveling with this group of foreign correspondents covering West Africa. I liked it, liked the idea of doing stories about Africa for the Western press. Busting myths that way. Mostly, it was just good to get out of Lagos. I kept trying to get Ella to come with me, but she wouldn’t.”
Angie was trying to connect Nigel’s story to the letters Ella wrote her, but she couldn’t follow the timeline.
“Then Nigeria had its Independence Day celebration,” continued Nigel. “And it was a big overwrought extravaganza in Tafawa Balewa Square. The whole staff went, ostensibly to cover it, to be critical. But we enjoyed it more than we expected and standing there, watching the whole thing felt nice, almost like the closing ceremony at FESTAC. And there were lots of horses, which mesmerized Ella of course. I turned to her and said, ‘Hey, whatever grand democratic experiment Nigeria tried has failed. Let’s make this our last memory of the country and just go home.’ But she said she wasn’t leaving yet. I said, ‘Give me a date, because my ass is ready to go.’ ‘You know, I want to see the North,’ she said. ‘Where they dye those beautiful cloths from indigo.’ She’d heard the pits were over five hundred years old, that they still dyed fabric the traditional way, and that got her all jazzed. ‘I want to see old Africa, the way it was before the colonizers arrived,’ she said. ‘I want to see something on this continent that’s centuries old. Then we can go home.’ I didn’t really want to bother, but she pointed out that everyone had been telling us you hadn’t seen Nigeria until you’d seen the North. So I said, ‘OK, we’ll go.’”
Nigel spread his arms across the back of the bench. Angie leaned back, and he let his fingers rest on her shoulder.
“That changed things between us, just having an exit plan. She even went to some expat stuff with me, enjoyed herself. We stopped talking about politics, and she let herself miss a few days in the newsroom. We found out from folks that Kano was the place to see, that the best dye pits were there; we booked our flight. We were getting out of Lagos! I was so fucking relieved.”
“She mentioned those dye pits in one of her letters to me,” said Angie, grateful for the touchstone.
Nigel shook his head as if the next memory was hard to fathom. “But then one day we’re sitting at Museum Café, and she’s reading the International Herald Tribune. We’re having coffee and I’m digging the whole scene, right? It feels continental. The weather is nice, it’s actually not raining for a change. This is how our lives here should be, I’m thinking. But all of a sudden she goes, “Wow” and then she’s silent. Like, radio silence. I’m thinking she’s reading about some famous person who died. But then she reads out loud to me, ‘Cheryl White, the first African-American female jockey, just became the first female jockey to win five Thoroughbred races in one day at a major track.’ She looks up and I see this look on her face I’ve never seen before. Like deep regret or something. She says, ‘That was supposed to be me.’”
Angie could see the Jet magazine in her mind’s eye, its cover photo of the teenage Cheryl White taped to Ella’s bedroom wall.
“After that, she got obsessive again,” said Nigel. “Went right back to staying long crazy hours in the newsroom, sleeping there again; so I started hanging out more and more on Vic Island, crashing for nights on end at folks’ cribs.”
“Did you ever get to Kano?”
“She wouldn’t even talk about the trip to Kano.”
Angie felt acute disappointment, as if she’d missed seeing the North.
“Anyway, as the weeks passed, I was getting more and more homesick,” said Nigel. “I stopped going to the newsroom altogether, just out of resentment really. I was convinced that Jide and Ella were involved, and my pride was bruised pretty badly. I didn’t want to see their asses together. I guess I felt abandoned by her, I don’t know.” His chest heaved. “I started spending more time with Brenda. Her ass was lonely too, and she liked being able to talk to someone from the States. We sat around, complaining together—about the shitty food and the shitty roads and the shitty TV.” Here, Nigel started talking faster. “Then she started confiding in me, started telling me how Chris was having an affair with some woman, how there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it, it was just the Nigerian way, how it was an open secret, how they didn’t like her anyway because she was black American; she said his people told him he should’ve married a white woman. Preferably British. She even told me she’d caught him looking at Ella.”
Angie closed her eyes against what was coming.
“One night Brenda and I are sitting around and we realize it’s Thanksgiving Day, right? She says she never gets to celebrate the holiday because it means nothing to Chris; and so we go in the kitchen and start cooking some pathetic little scrawny chicken and try to dress it up like a turkey and she makes yams and greens and we’re having fun and drinking a lot of brandy; and at some point after we eat, she confides in me that she’s never been with a black American man, that Chris had been her first, that she’d gotten with him her freshman year, and she really regrets what she missed.”
Angie put her hands to her ears.
“I don’t know how it happened,” said Nigel. “It just did. She started crying, saying how sh
e was homesick for Virginia, how Chris demanded that she have a baby but she wasn’t ready, how she felt pressure from his family; she talked about the whole cultural-difference thing, his haughty attitude toward black Americans, blah, blah, blah. She’s crying, I’m consoling her and one thing leads to another.” He paused. “It happened. One time.”
Angie felt hurt, on Ella’s behalf. “So you and Brenda betrayed her too. She couldn’t trust anyone.”
Nigel frowned. “We decide not to tell anybody. Just act like it never happened.” He sighed. “But a couple weeks later, Brenda tells Chris. She wants to get back at him, make him jealous I guess. Of course all hell breaks loose, and Chris kicks my ass out of the house. Ella is equally pissed, doesn’t want to have anything to do with Brenda. She leaves too.”
“Chris tried to force himself on me,” said Angie.
Nigel jumped up from the bench. “What? I will fuck up that motherfucker!”
“I’m OK now,” said Angie.
“Is that what happened to your face? And all those marks on your arms and legs?”
“No.” The scars had all but healed. “That was something else.”
“Something else? Something else?” He sat back down. “I’m gonna shut up now, and let you talk. Start from the beginning.”
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