News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  “Do you have picnics for October 1st?” I ask.

  “It’s too cold in the fall,” she says.

  October 1st is our country’s Independence Day. It is hard to imagine America as a former British colony. That is, a country like mine, broken down and forever recovering from military coups.

  She takes off her sunshades. “Eve, I want to tell you something personal. Please, and I don’t want you to tell anyone else.”

  Everyone found out what happened between Val and me; that Val had a woman in the city, a woman who was pregnant by him, a woman who was older than him. At first he claimed it was a vicious rumor spread by those who resented his success. I forced him to confess, slapped his head as if he were my son. “Tell me the truth! Tell me the truth!” Then I cursed him and cursed the woman. I stopped short of cursing their child. Val lowered his head until I finished shouting. He was probably thinking, someone please get this lunatic away from me.

  I could not leave home for a while after we broke up. Whenever I did, people stopped me to give advice. “Go there and fight her, Eve.” “Sit on his doorstep and refuse to leave.” Cook him a good meal, one old woman said. There were people who blamed me for breaking up with Val. He was intelligent, so his head had to have been turned by this other woman. And I, to let a man like him go, a man with a job in an oil company, something had to be wrong with me.

  When I heard about the interview for the nanny job, I saw it as a way to escape our scandal. I went to the man who was hiring. He was Dr. Darego’s grand-uncle, the head of their family who lived in our town, but he had no money, and no one really respected him. He sat in his cement compound, on a varnished cane chair, cooled his face with a raffia fan. Behind him was his bungalow with a rusty corrugated-iron roof. The man was almost blind. He kept calling me Helen. “Are you spoken for, Helen?” “Do you have a clean reputation, Helen?” He said he chose me because I didn’t look like someone who would run wild in America and chase after men. I told him I was very grateful for his commendation. Some of my colleagues said it was below my qualifications to apply for such a job, a mere housegirl. I knew they were jealous. Angie hugged me, and then she burst out crying in the clinic. She said she could never leave her mother.

  Angie was her mother’s only child. The rest died as babies. Her father was killed in a motor accident on Mission Way. Her mother was always in church saying novenas. People said she was paying for the sins of her fathers.

  I couldn’t imagine such a burdensome love between mother and daughter. I was Mama’s last born, her only daughter. Mama said, “Go.You’re unhappy living here anyway. Everyone knows how Val disgraced you, and they won’t employ you at Summit Oil Clinic. Nanny is not what we sent you to school to study, but it’s not as if you’re going to Heaven and you can’t come back.”

  There was a time I thought going to America was as fantastic as going to Heaven. When I was a child and I used to sing that song, “Come and see American wonder. Come and see American wonder.” When I fell in love with Michael Jackson. I was twelve and walking around town saying I was going to be Mrs. Michael Jackson, and Mama would tell people, “Leave her alone. The Jackson family is coming to ask for her hand soon.” I had my white church glove, I had a poster of Michael with his glittery glove. I wrote to Neverland. The post office clerks used to laugh at me. I thought they were all mistaken. But accepting the job was a question of common sense. Dr. Darego offered me ten times the salary I would earn working as a nurse. Nothing else mattered, not missing my family, or standing in line at the American embassy in Lagos, being ordered to step forward, step back, answer only when I was spoken to. Certainly not being held up by a gap-toothed Nigeria airport official who was looking for a bribe: “Where you get dis? Dis passport is fake!” Least of all being inspected and questioned at Immigration and Customs at Newark Airport. “How long are you staying?” “May I check your baggage, ma’am?”

  “I’m moving into hospital accommodation,” Mrs. Darego says. “Yes. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. My commute is long. I’m in the hospital most of the time. Would you mind being alone in the house with the children and their father?”

  I say I’m not sure. Her voice is insistent.

  “It will only be for the next six months. I have to. I mean, you’re not going to be with us forever. I supported my husband when he was in residency. I stayed with the children, but now I’m Dr. Darego, too. He has to learn how to support me, see?” I saw.

  “Do you think you can manage?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She taps my shoulder. “What you’ve done for my family, I cannot tell you. The children are so fond of you. It puts my mind at eas’e when I’m at work.”

  Please, I want to say. Don’t sweet-talk me today.

  One evening, I took a shower after the children went to bed. Mrs. Darego was on call and Dr. Darego was out. I was sitting on the sofa in the basement with nothing but a towel wrapped around my body. I was rubbing Vaseline on my elbows and knees. The kitchen door opened, and I heard footsteps on the stairs to the basement. I stood up and held my towel tight. It was Dr. Darego. He had shoulders like a football player, and his head was shaved. At first I was angry he didn’t seem embarrassed. Bastard, I thought, in fluent silence, and my expression must have given me away. He walked down the stairs without saying a word, searched behind the sofa bed and found a magazine. He rolled the magazine up like a baton and walked back up the stairs. As if I wasn’t there. He lost favor with me after that, even though he never did it again.

  “You yourself,” Mrs. Darego says. “You seem quiet today.”

  “My mind is at home.”

  “The demonstrations?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you heard from your people?”

  “No.”

  She pats my back. “Don’t worry. At least women are involved this time. The world is focused on their cause. No one can harm them with this much media attention.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Definitely not,” she says. “And it is good that women are involved this time. Women, we are always the first affected and the last heard.”

  Who knew the women’s union would start with Madam Queen? Madam Queen, the drunk who talked too much. I used to pass her house on my way home from school. She was one of those we called half-castes. Madam Queen’s mother was Kalabari and Italian. Madam Queen herself, her father was German. She was the color of beach sand and over six feet tall. She couldn’t find shoes to fit, so she wore men’s sneakers. Divorced and no children, and she drank like a man. People said that had to come from her foreign blood. I was always a little scared of her. She had bluish eyes, black hair down her back. In the afternoons, she sat on her veranda with her wrapper pulled up to her knees. Her varicose veins were thick. She couldn’t bear the heat. Sometimes a few women gathered in her compound like disciples.

  Madam Queen told folklore, and I found such stories boring, so I never really stopped to listen. The first time I did, I was coming back from school and heard her booming voice: “Hurrah! Congratulations! We celebrate when someone we know gets a job at Summit Oil Clinic. We hope they will bring us into the fold. We forget about what the company is doing to our land. Kalabari people, we are not like that. We come together. We don’t allow foreigners to rule us by dividing us, or we are no better than those who sold their own for bounty when the Niger Delta was the Slave Coast...”

  I thought she had to be drunk to talk like that. I stayed to hear more.

  “The oil companies,” she said, “they drill our fathers’ farms and they don’t give we, their children, jobs. We eat okra, cassava, grown in other parts of the country. We use their yam, plantain and palm oil to cook our onunu. There are no fish in our rivers, no bushrats left in our forest. We don’t use natural gas in our homes and yet we have gas flares in our backyards. We can’t find kerosene to buy and we have pipelines running through our land. Some of us don’t have electricity. Some of us don’t even have candles to burn
. Are you listening, women?

  “Young men are kidnapping expatriate employees and demanding ransoms. They are locked up. We call them thugs. Young girls are turning to prostitution to service expatriate employees. They are locked up, too. We shun them. We say they bring AIDS. Meanwhile, the oil companies spill oil on our land, leak oil into our rivers. They won’t clean up their mess. All they do is pay small fines, if they pay at all. Our community leaders write petition letters to their directors and they don’t give us the courtesy of replying. When they do, they call us liars. We protest because they continue to breach regulations and they call security forces to handle us. Women, listen to me. I’m telling you this, as we speak we are dying. We are dying of our air, we are dying of our water. We are dying from oil. We are not benefiting from it. Must we continue to stand by in silence and wait for men to fight our battles?”

  I went home feeling like I’d fallen under her spell. Superstitious people said Madam Queen had such a sweet mouth that she could hypnotize her listeners. At home I saw Mama and Papa sitting under the framed poster of Jesus. Jesus was nailed to a wooden cross and his eyes were raised heavenward. Around the frame Mama had stuck photos of my brothers, Solomon, Benjamin and Ezekiel, to protect them because they’d left home. Papa was in his cane chair, taking a pinch from his snuffbox. Mama was sitting on the chair next to his. She wore her hair in a neat plait. She thought untidy hair was a sign of inner turmoil.

  “I listened to Madam Queen today,” I said.

  Mama frowned. “Queen?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She is speaking against the oil companies.”

  “That old drunk?” Mama said.

  Papa raised his pinch of snuff. “Yes, indeed, Queen does that. She speaks the truth about the foreigners on our land. She has their blood and she detests them. She is fearless, that woman.” He sniffed and sneezed. “Just like a man.”

  Mama pouted. “That’s why she can’t keep a man. Please, Eve, don’t listen to Madam Queen again. She is trying to get people killed. Remember what happened to the Ogoni people?”

  Papa and his pronouncements. My brothers laughed at him behind his back. He was short, with a nervous twitch from the Civil War where he narrowly escaped a detonating landmine, but no one dared challenge him.

  Mama, whose idea of a major fight with Papa was to make his onunu extra lumpy, so that he might ask, “Ah? My wife, your onunu is not smooth today. What have I done to deserve this?”

  They actually argued that day. Papa gave his usual proverb about natives sleeping with one eye open. Mama said she would rather trust a foreigner than an Igbo, knowing full well Papa’s mother was Igbo.

  “My good customer Mr. Obrigado,” she said. “He’s never done any wrong to me. He’s perfectly charming.”

  She didn’t know his real name. He was a journalist with the biggest nose I’d ever seen on a white man. Sometimes he said “obrigado.”

  “Foreigners,” Papa muttered. “They can’t keep their hands off our women.”

  “Obrigado doesn’t stray,” Mama said.

  “He strays to our town center,” Papa said. “He’s lucky no one hijacks him. He should speak to the Americans at Summit Oil and find out why they keep away from us.”

  “Obrigado comes here to take photographs,” Mama said.

  “What for?” Papa asked. “How would he like it if a group of us went to his country to take photographs?”

  “Obrigado thinks it’s unfair that our government attacks us,” Mama said. “He thinks our government should do more to protect our land.”

  “Obrigado should clear off our land!” Papa shouted. “Is he deaf and blind?! Isn’t it the oil companies who arm our government? Now, every useless man in uniform has the gall to attack us! I must not see that foolish fellow in your shop again!”

  Yes, I heard about the Ogoni people, how they protested against Shell. Security forces came and shot at them, burned down their homes, beat up women and children. Ken Saro-Wiwa and others who led the movement were tried by a secret military tribunal and hanged in Port Harcourt. I was in nursing school when General Sani Abacha detained oil and gas union officials after the strikes. In Port Harcourt people queued for days to fill their car tanks. Students from Val’s university marched to the governor’s house and threw petrol bombs through his windows. Kill-and-Go police came and opened fire on them. Eight were struck, five were killed. One had a bullet through his forehead. The governor shut down the university and our nursing school for public safety. Val and I returned to town. No kerosene to buy, was all we heard. Women from the gas-flare village tapped a burst pipeline one morning. There was an explosion. The women, all seventy-three of them, perished. The villagers refused to accept the mass grave Summit Oil offered. They blocked access to the flow station in protest. Summit Oil called in soldiers. The soldiers threw tear gas at the protesters, butted their heads with rifles, kicked a pregnant woman in her belly until she miscarried, beat up one old man until he was comatose. The government said the reports were grossly exaggerated, the dead people were illegal scavengers and lawless rioters, ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew. I’d never demonstrated in my life. Why would I?

  “We should go home soon,” Mrs. Darego says.

  It is getting cloudy. The sun has disappeared and there is a cool breeze. I call out to the children, “Alali! Daniel! Time to go!”

  “Aw, man,” Alali says and stamps her foot.

  “I don’t wanna go,” Daniel whines.

  They never want to. The word “go” sounds as terrible as “die” to them.

  “Not now,” I say. “Soon.”

  A white man and his son are flying their multicolored kite. The son laughs and twirls.

  We arrive home early in the evening. Alali and Junior have to stop their Harry Potter DVD, and as we drive into the garage, they complain that they are bored.

  “I work all night,” their mother says, yanking her car key out. “I go to a... a picnic on my day off because of you. You can’t even say thank you, and now you’re bored because you can’t see the end of Harry Potter? Get out of my car. Get. Out.”

  Her voice is too low to trust that she won’t smack them. I make them apologize. They scamper. Their pupils are dilated from a DVD overdose.

  Dr. Darego opens the door. “Hey,” he says. “What’s going on here?”

  Alali jumps on him. “Daddy! We went to a park! You should have come!”

  “Hi, Dad,” Daniel says and hugs his knees.

  Mrs. Darego and I walk past carrying the empty cooler and tray. She is still not speaking to her husband. Me, I avoid looking at him; I don’t want trouble. We reach her kitchen and she says, “Eve, please don’t forget your passport.”

  We hear Dr. Darego laughing with the children. Sometimes I believe every child needs two mothers: one who gives birth, and another who can easily forgive fickleness.

  The sliding doors in the basement are shut. I search my suitcase for my passport and find Angie’s letter first. I’ve read it many times before.

  Dearest Eve,

  I hope this finds you in good spirits. If so, splendid. We miss you terribly here. Your parents send their greetings. My mother sends her greetings. We are all fine, but unfortunately I don’t have good news for you. You won’t believe it, Val was sacked from his job shortly after you left. That woman he thought was carrying his baby was well-known for target-ing men at Summit Oil and feeding them the same story about being pregnant. She was going with Val’s direct boss, a married man. The man found out about Val and wrote him such a bad appraisal that Summit Oil sacked Val. He came back to town.

  He was bitter, Eve. He talked about revenge. He said Summit Oil’s terminal is like Hollywood. They have a clinic, cafeteria, video games, watch television from overseas. He said that not one person on the senior staff in Summit Oil headquarters is from the Niger Delta and from day one he was treated as an outsider. Now, he’s missing. The police have charged him as an accessory in a kidnap case involving an expatriate employee.
They arrested him and no one knows where he is. We are all waiting for news. I hope you’ve forgiven him. He made a mistake and he’s paid a huge price.

  I go to meetings at Madam Queen’s house regularly now. I’ve even recruited my mother because of what happened to Val. Madam Queen says we will get him released. She may drink but the woman is a force. She says we should not be afraid. She is rallying as many of us as she can to join other women of the Delta to demonstrate at Summit Oil’s terminal. We will block their airstrip, jetty, helicopter pad and storage depot. We will demand that they give us electricity, clean water, better roads, schools, clinics, jobs. Pregnant women, too, and mothers with babies on their backs. She said Summit Oil may send the security forces to stop us, but we will not be stopped. We will carry nothing but palm leaves in our hands and respond to their threats with songs.

  Eve, you can’t come back. There is nothing here for you. You must take your nursing exams while you’re there. I hear they need nurses over there in America. You can always come home to visit. A nurse here told me of her friend called Charity. Call Charity. Her number is...

  Charity lived in the Mississippi Delta. I called her the day I received Angie’s letter. “Who sent you to me?” she demanded. She was angry that I had her telephone number. Then she said parts of the Mississippi Delta were as bad as the Niger Delta, but there was a strong possibility of finding work there and getting a sponsor. She advised that I kept my plans secret from Mrs. Darego meanwhile. “Who knows? You know how women can be. She might frustrate your career to further hers. Study in private, take the exams. Once you find work, take off without giving her notice.”