Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “Those are all Fela’s wives,” said Nigel, leaning into her ear. “His quote unquote queens.”

  She wondered: Which ones took care of Ella?

  As Fela walked onto the stage, several backup singers behind him, the crowd roared. Nigel grabbed Angie’s hand and pulled her to the front. Dressed in matching white pants and shirt adorned with Adinkra symbols, Fela stood spread eagle on stage and puffed a fat joint between his fingers before handing it to a dancer. Oddly, he looked smaller than he had when she saw him perform at the Fox.

  He grabbed a bottle of Gordon’s and poured some onto the stage floor. He turned to face the crowd, held out both arms. “I am the chief priest, the chosen one!” he yelled. As a dancer took away the gin bottle, Fela gripped his sax and blew. Behind him, the horn section blew in unison as the backup singers leaned into their mikes and sang along. But the music wasn’t what Angie had anticipated. She’d expected the wonderful call-and-response songs she’d heard at the Fox, was ready to say “Yeah, Yeah” following Fela’s instruction. Instead, he played “Beast of No Nation,” the song he’d performed for his finale at the Detroit concert, and kept interrupting himself to describe his prison experience.

  “I mean, they beat the shit out of me, man,” Fela was saying. “But you see, they cannot hurt me, dis Fela sef. I am the chosen one, I am telling you.”

  He played only the one song, stopping to talk about the abuse, blowing his horn, talking about the abuse, blowing his horn. To Angie it was so harrowing and funereal. It upset her. When a giant blunt passing around made its way to her, she took it gratefully, put it to her lips, wanting to enter another, heightened zone, feel something profound in this Africa Shrine.

  Nigel snatched the joint from her. “What the hell is wrong with you?! You don’t know what’s in that shit!” He passed the marijuana to a guy standing nearby.

  His vehemence startled her. “You don’t have to scream,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke over the music. “It’s just that Fela is known for lacing his weed with shit! Bad shit!” He glared at her, accusatory. “And I had no idea you get high.”

  “I don’t. Not really,” she said sheepishly.

  “Well I don’t want you starting on my watch,” snapped Nigel.

  Her mind flashed back to their basement, her child’s hand reaching for a joint offered to Ella, Nigel’s big hand coming in, slapping hers, him saying, little girl, you do not want that.

  “So you don’t ever get high anymore?” she asked Nigel.

  “No.”

  “How can you be around all this and not be tempted?”

  “Because. I’m done with all that.”

  It moved her, his resolve, and she saw him as a protective barrier against herself and bad choices. She felt stunned yet again that she’d found him. As bodies squeezed in around them, making it hard to move, she leaned hers against his.

  “Yo, I need some air!” he yelled. “Let’s get something to drink!”

  She’d liked the feeling of their bodies touching, but it was over now as she followed him through the crowd; they made their way to the makeshift bar in the back of the club, where bottles sat in a small refrigerator. Nigel got a lager and Angie decided to try a Shandy. She drank it fast.

  “Hey, slow down. That thing is only half lemonade,” warned Nigel. “The other half is beer.”

  “Whatever, it’s delicious!”

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  It seemed so long ago that she and Regina and Nigel had eaten the dodo. “Starving.”

  He led Angie over to a table where thin slices of meat sat on skewers under a heat lamp. He bought three from the vendor, gave her one of the little kabob-like sticks.

  “This is suya,” he said. “As the Nigerians say, let’s chop-chop!”

  She tore into the meat, which was deliciously spiced and sweet at the same time. He handed her another one and she ate that one with gusto too, finishing her Shandy before they returned to the main room, just as Fela paused from playing. He raised his hand to stop the music. “I am here to speak truth to you,” he told the crowd. “You must learn to hear the truth.”

  He told the audience how he’d just returned from a trip to Burkina Faso, how that country’s president had been the only leader in all of Africa to embrace him and his music.

  “IBB with his zombie men, he cannot stop me, O!” he roared. “I am Fela, one who is great. I am Anikulapo, he who carries death in his pouch. I am Kuti, one who cannot be killed by man.”

  He suddenly ripped open his shirt and revealed a chest full of lesions, each one a red or festering or scabbed sore. Everyone gasped in unified shock.

  “Shit!” yelled Nigel.

  Angie didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see Fela that way. Yet, she couldn’t stop herself from staring.

  “You are hearing rumors about me, and I am telling you my brodas and sistahs, I am becoming a new man!” he roared. “I am changing skin. That is what you see. The spiritual guides have assured me that I am transforming with the help of my Yoruba gods. Do not worry, O! I am Kuti, the one who cannot be killed by man!”

  He left his shirt open, stood spread eagle, and smiled, so beguiling that the crowd roared with love. “And so my brodas and sistahs, I must tell it to you like it is,” he said. “I must sing it to you plain.”

  With that, he launched into an old song with renewed force. Zombie-O, Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go, he sang. Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop. Here was the song she knew well from Ella’s cassette tapes and yet why didn’t it satisfy her to hear it sung in Lagos, at the Shrine? The dancers kept grinding, the band kept playing, Fela kept singing, the backup girls kept harmonizing, and the smoke kept rising; but Angie couldn’t absorb any of it. This had gone all wrong. She’d wanted to feel Ella’s presence here, be transformed by this experience, and instead she felt just horrible. She’d wanted to see this man ‘live’ at his own club, this man who’d been so larger-than-life to Ella, whose wives had nursed and protected her in her final days. But he looked frail to Angie, vulnerable. And crazy. Her head spun from the Shandy. The sight of his crusted-over lesions was too deeply disturbing. Why didn’t he just close his damn shirt?

  “I have to get out of here,” she said to Nigel. “Now.”

  In the taxi, she held Nigel’s hand until they’d left the dark, scary roads of Ikeja and had made it back to the gated campus in Yaba. As they walked up the stairs to his flat, she became convinced of her own misjudgment. She’d been going places Ella had been, when in fact she needed to go where her sister hadn’t gotten a chance to go, to carry out Ella’s last wishes.

  They entered Nigel’s flat. “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “You mean Lagos?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah, maybe it’s time for you to go home.”

  “No, I mean I’m leaving to go to Kano.”

  He didn’t say anything, just sighed heavily.

  “I want to see those dye pits.”

  “I guess I should’ve known that was coming.”

  “I’m not asking you to come with me.”

  Nigel shook his head, smiling. “And you know I’m not letting your ass go there alone.”

  KANO

  SEVENTEEN

  At the departure gate, they waited for the same plane that had just left for Kano to return, deplane passengers, refuel, and get cleaned in order to fly back to Kano. “Danfo in the sky!” said a kufi-wearing man sitting next to Nigel and Angie. Nigel chuckled. “Yeah, the Nigerian factor.”

  When they’d returned the night before, Nigel had given Angie his flat and gone to be with Regina in her dorm room, where she’d waved her open return ticket in Nigel’s face and assured him that if he stayed too long in Kano, she’d be back in Baltimore by the time he returned.

  “Are you worried?” Angie
now asked Nigel.

  “Not yet.”

  “She doesn’t think there’s something between us, does she?”

  Nigel shrugged. “She doesn’t know what to think. I tried to explain, but it’s not like all this makes a lot of sense.”

  “She had to know what Ella meant to you.” Angie wanted to say, She has you. Ella is dead. What’s she worried about?

  “I’m not going to Kano with Ella.”

  Embarrassed, Angie turned her face away from his. She stared out the massive picture window at the airbus humming on the tarmac, gleaming green letters on its side spelling out Nigeria Airways. She hadn’t slept much the night before. Lying in Nigel’s bed, alone, as the hours of insomnia piled up, she’d become more and more anxious. With this trip, she’d get to complete a goal Ella had wanted to accomplish. But why was she so nervous? Wasn’t that what her whole life had been about these past four years?

  She turned back to face him. “Do you think about what might’ve happened if you and Ella had gotten to go to Kano together, like you planned?”

  He looked out the giant window as if searching for words on the runway. “I like to think I would’ve convinced her to come back home with me.” He looked over at Angie. “But who knows?”

  “I think you would have,” she said. “I think you two would still be together right now.”

  Nigel smiled. “It’s a nice thought.”

  Angie was relieved to see him smile. It was so rare.

  When a voice over the PA system finally announced boarding, in a scratchy and unclear garble, everyone rose and ran in a stampede to the departure door.

  “Why are they running?” she asked.

  Nigel rose. “To get seats on the plane.”

  She rose too. “There are no seat assignments?”

  “First come, first served.” He grabbed their bags. “I usually fly British Airways when I travel in Africa, but intra-country travel usually means flying on the national airline.” He took her hand. “Needless to say, this one is run like the rest of Nigerian government.”

  They ran and made their way through the thicket of people clogging the entryway, and onto the tarmac. The throng of bodies pushed them along and up the metal stairs of the plane. Inside the cabin, people shoved giant bags and tied-up boxes into the overhead compartment. Several seats were saved with passengers’ possessions, staked out for travel companions. They walked toward the back of the plane, found two seats together. He offered her the window.

  As the plane lifted off and roared through the sky, Angie felt she was finally honoring her sister’s memory in a real way. She looked over at Nigel and a new wave of gratitude engulfed her.

  When the plane reached a cruising altitude, a few passengers pulled out their own food, making the cabin smell like a meat parlor. The flight attendants, stylish young Nigerian women in chic green skirts and white blouses, served drinks. A veiled woman reached out, grabbed a flight attendant’s arm. “Heat up this soup for me now, dearie,” said the woman as she handed over a greasy paper bag. Angie thought about the difference between now and just two weeks ago, when she was on the plane en route to Nigeria. It was astonishing how different everything was now, how different she was. It had only been fourteen days and yet she felt she’d outrun that old Angie, finally left her behind for good back in Lagos. That Angie was lost to her.

  When turbulence hit, she squeezed Nigel’s arm and he patted her thigh reassuringly. The pilot spoke to the control tower, his voice caught on the loudspeaker, “I have one hundred and twelve souls on board, including six crew,” he said. The choppiness subsided and right away, Angie relaxed. Try as she might she couldn’t keep her eyes open. As she nodded out, bobbing and catching herself, Nigel gently guided her head to his shoulder, and she slept for the rest of the flight. When the plane made its harsh landing—a hard, bumpy touchdown, she abruptly awoke to a brief shock of desire between her legs, which startled her. Everyone was clapping loudly. “Thanks be to Allah!” yelled one man.

  “Thanks be to the goddamn pilot,” said Nigel.

  Angie laughed. It felt so good to open her mouth wide and do that.

  An hour later, Nigel sat beside Angie in a battered Datsun as the driver cruised along a major road of modern Kano, with its numerous banks and low-slung businesses. As they approached the Old City, before them stood a tall, reddish-brown wall winding its way in a circular path, stretching for miles. It reached so high that when Angie craned her neck to look up, she couldn’t see the top from her backseat view.

  Nigel whistled. “Brother, how tall is that wall?”

  “Twelve miles long and more that fifty feet high,” said the driver. His name was Emeka, their de facto tour guide. “In the local language, we call it the badala.”

  As they got closer to the wall, it dominated the view from their windows. Angie felt slightly claustrophobic, as though moving through an endless tunnel.

  “How old is it?” she asked.

  “This wall was built in the fifteenth century,” said Emeka. “But the original one was built in the twelfth century. Inside is the Old City of Kano.”

  She stared at the structure, couldn’t fathom anything that old still standing. “What was the whole purpose of the wall?” she asked. “I mean, why build an entire wall around a city?”

  “To protect the people of Kano from invaders of course.”

  “Ah, the first gated communities,” said Nigel. “Who knew?”

  “People are supposed to protect you,” said Angie. “Not walls.”

  “It is not so much for protection now,” explained Emeka. “It’s now where the majority of Hausa Muslims live. And the southern Christians mostly live in the Sabon Gari, the new city.”

  As they drove ahead, a mountain came into view, framing the sky like a huge humpbacked camel, its tan beauty stark in contrast to the dark, crumbling wall.

  “That’s Dala Hill,” noted Emeka.

  “Is it hard to climb?” she asked.

  “Not at all. There are steps. And at the top, quite a view.”

  “Wow, I’d love to climb it!” said Angie, excited to be a tourist.

  “We can do that in the morning,” said Nigel. The driver turned to navigate a tiny alleyway, causing the mountainous hill to disappear. Soon they pulled up to the small hotel he’d suggested. The late-afternoon heat hit Angie with force as she stepped out of the car. “Feels like it’s a hundred degrees,” she said.

  “You are coming from Lagos,” said Emeka. “We are much closer to the Sahara here, so the weather is hotter. But you’ve come at a good time. The rain helps. Just this morning we had thunderstorms.”

  Out front, a man sat atop a gold Vespa moped. Nigel began chatting with him about the motorbike, kept saying how cool it was.

  “You can rent it, my broda,” said the man. “I am Bola. I will give you a good price.”

  “I just might do that,” said Nigel. “Later, man.”

  Angie’s room was sparse, but charming. She had a low-lying bed on a wood frame, a porcelain sink with its own mirror and to her delight, a tiny balcony. She opened the shutters and was greeted with a distant call to prayer. She leaned out and saw a few people walking along a street, the women veiled. A motorcycle taxi with two men riding together sped by. Gone was the frenetic pace of Lagos. She liked the contrast.

  Angie lay across her bed. Her body hummed. The shock of desire she’d experienced on the plane was back. She’d never felt this before, a kind of rogue turn-on. She’d had only one real boyfriend in her life, and sex had been pretty good. With Romare hovering above, she could rouse desire, sure, but this was something else, like a little beast in her belly, coiled and waiting, making her restless, sweaty.

  She undressed, stepped into the white rectangular tub and turned on the shower nozzle. She was grateful for the cold water. As she soaped her body, she ran her hands over her h
ips and belly, her breasts. She’d hoped to fill out by coming to Nigeria, had hoped that all the rice and stews would have their way with her, and she’d add a few well-placed pounds. She’d always longed for more voluptuousness, always wished she’d been a “brick house,” like the woman The Commodores sang about. But her sick days at Funke’s had thwarted that plan.

  She put on the tie-dyed caftan that had been Ella’s and headed to the slim lobby, waited for Nigel.

  He stopped when he saw her, a flicker of recognition in his eyes. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, the coiled beast heavy inside.

  They walked to a Lebanese restaurant just up the road. The place was charming, with a giant thatched roof supported by bamboo poles and wooden tables adorned with coconut shells holding bougainvillea flowers. Straw covered the floor, except for a large, shiny square set aside for dancing, its disco ball glowing overhead. A DJ played highlife music. The place was filled with many foreign businessmen and southern Nigerians, their broad noses distinguishing them from the long-nosed northerners and Lebanese waiters.