The Golden Lady couldn’t get up, so this was where the couple had to settle. For this reason, the flattened land she left was called Jwahir and those who lived there prospered. It was built long ago by some of the first Okekes to flee the West. The ancestors of Jwahirians were of a special breed, indeed.
Najeeba prayed that she’d never have to tell her strange daughter the story of her conception. But Najeeba was a realist, too. Life was not easy.
I could have killed someone after my mother told me this story.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “You’re so young. But I promised myself that the minute anything began happening to you, I would tell you this. Knowing may be of some use to you. What happened to you today . . . in that tree . . . it’s just the beginning, I think.”
I was shaking and sweating. My throat felt raw as I spoke. “I . . . I remember that first day,” I said, rubbing the sweat from my brow. “You chose that spot in the market to sell some cactus candy.” I paused, frowning as it came back to me. “And that bread seller forced us to move. He shouted at you. And he looked at me like . . .” I touched and pressed the tiny scar on my forehead. I’m going to burn my copy of the Great Book, I thought. It’s the cause of all this. I wanted to drop to my knees and beg Ani to burn the West to the ground.
I knew a little about sex. I was even a little curious about it . . . well, maybe more suspicious than curious. But I didn’t know about this—sex as violence, violence that produced children . . . produced me, that happened to my mother. I stifled an urge to vomit, and then an urge to tear at my skin. I wanted to hug my mother but at the same time I didn’t want to touch her. I was poison. I had no right. I couldn’t quite bring myself to grasp what that . . . man, that monster, had done to her. Not at eleven years old.
The man in the photo, the only man I’d ever seen for the first six years of my life, wasn’t my father. He wasn’t even a good person. Betraying bastard, I thought, tears stinging my eyes. If I ever find you, I’ll cut off your penis. I shuddered, thinking how I wanted to do worse to the man who’d raped my mother.
Up to this point, I’d thought I was Noah. Noahs had two Okeke parents, yet they were the color of sand. I’d ignored the fact that I didn’t have the usual red eyes and sensitivity to sunshine. And that aside from their skin color, Noahs basically looked Okeke. I ignored the fact that other Noahs had no problem making friends with “normal looking” children. They weren’t outcast as I was. And Noahs looked at me with the same fear and disgust as Okekes of a darker shade. Even to them, I was other. Why hadn’t my mother burned that picture of her husband Idris? He’d betrayed her to protect his stupid honor. She’d told me he died . . . he should have died—been KILLED—violently!
“Does Papa know?” I hated the sound of my voice. When I sing, I wondered, whose voice is she hearing? My biological father could also sing sweetly.
“Yes.”
Papa knew from the moment he saw me, I realized. Everyone knew but me.
“Ewu,” I said slowly. “This is what it means?” I’d never asked.
“Born of pain,” she said. “People believe the Ewu-born eventually become violent. They think that an act of violence can only beget more violence. I know this isn’t true, as you should.”
I looked at my mother. She seemed to know so much. “Mama,” I said. “Has anything like what happened to me in the tree ever happened to you?”
“My dear, you think too hard,” was all she said. “Come here.” She stood up and wrapped me in her arms. We cried and sobbed and wept and bled tears. But when we were finished, all we could do was continue living.
CHAPTER 4
Eleventh Year Rite
YES, THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF MY LIFE WAS ROUGH.
My body developed early, so by this time I had breasts, my monthlies, and a womanly figure. I also had to deal with stupid leering and grabbing by both men and boys. Then came that rainy day I mysteriously ended up naked in the iroko tree and my mother being so shaken that she felt it time to tell me the repulsive truth of my origins. A week later came the time for my Eleventh Rite. Life rarely let up for me.
The Eleventh Rite is a two thousand-year-old-tradition held on the first day of rainy season. It involves the year’s eleven-year-old girls. My mother felt the practice was primitive and useless. She didn’t want me to have anything to do with it. In her village, the practice of the Eleventh Rite had been banned years before she was born. So I grew up sure that all the circumcising would happen to the other girls, girls born in Jwahir.
After a girl goes through her Eleventh Rite, she’s worthy of being spoken to as an adult. Boys don’t get this privilege until they’re thirteen. So the ages between eleven and sixteen are happiest for a girl because she’s both child and adult. Information about the rite wasn’t withheld. There were plenty of books about the process in the school’s book house. Still, no one was required or encouraged to read them.
So us girls knew that a piece of flesh was cut from between our legs and that circumcision didn’t literally change who we were or make us better people. But we didn’t know what that piece of flesh did. And because it was an old practice, no one really remembered why it was done. So the tradition was accepted, anticipated, and performed.
I didn’t want to do it. No numbing medicine was used. That was part of the ritual. I had seen two freshly circumcised girls the previous year and I remembered how they walked. And I didn’t like the idea of cutting off a part of my body. I didn’t even like cutting my hair, thus my long braids. And I certainly wasn’t one to do anything for the sake of tradition. I didn’t come from that kind of background.
But as I sat on the floor staring into space, I knew something had changed in me last week when I ended up in that tree. Whatever it was caused a slight shake to my step that only I noticed. I’d heard more from my mother than the story of my conception. She’d said nothing about the hope she had in me. The hope that I would avenge her suffering. She hadn’t been detailed about the rape, either. All of this was between her words.
I had many questions that couldn’t be answered. But when it came to my Eleventh Year Rite, I knew what I had to do. That year there were only four of us who were eleven years old and girls. There were fifteen boys. The three girls in my group would no doubt tell everyone how I wasn’t present at the rite. In Jwahir, to be uncircumcised past eleven brought bad luck and shame to your family. No one cared if you weren’t born in Jwahir. You, the girl growing up in Jwahir, were expected to have it done.
I brought dishonor to my mother by existing. I brought scandal to Papa by entering his life. Where before he had been a respected and eligible widower, now people laughingly said he was bewitched by an Okeke woman from the bloody West, a woman who’d been used by a Nuru man. My parents carried enough shame.
On top of all this, at eleven, I still had hopes. I believed that I could be normal. That I could be made normal. The Eleventh Rite was old and it was respected. It was powerful. The rite would put a stop to the strangeness happening to me. The next day, before school, I went to the home of the Ada, the priestess who would perform the Eleventh Rite.
“Good morning, Ada-m,” I respectfully said when she opened the door.
She met my eyes with a frown. She might have been a decade older than my mother, maybe two. I stood almost her height. Her long green dress was elegant and her short Afro was perfectly shaped. She smelled of incense. “What is it, Ewu?”
I winced at the word. “I’m sorry,” I said, stepping back. “Am I disturbing you?”
“I’ll decide that,” she said, crossing her arms over her small chest. “Come in.”
I stepped in, briefly noting that I’d be late for school. I’m really going to do this, I thought.
On the outside, her house was a small sand brick dwelling and inside it remained small. Yet somehow it was able to harbor a work of art that was gigantic in visual power. The mural that splashed over the walls was unfinished, but the room already looked as if it we
re submerged in one of the Seven Rivers. Painted near the door was a human-sized fish-man with a strikingly lifelike face. His ancient eyes were full of primordial wisdom.
Books told of huge bodies of water. But I’d never seen a drawing of one, let alone a giant colorful painting. This can’t really exist, I thought. So much water. And in it were silvery insects, turtles with green flat legs and shells, water plants, gold, black, and red . . . fish. I stared around and around. The room smelled of wet paint. The Ada’s hands were stained with it, too. I had interrupted her.
“You like it?” she asked.
“Never seen anything like it,” I said quietly, staring.
“My favorite kind of reaction,” she said, looking genuinely pleased.
I sat down and she sat across from me, waiting. “I . . . I’d like to put my name on the list, Ada-m,” I said. I bit my lip. To speak this request made it true, especially when spoken to this woman.
She nodded. “I wondered when you would come.”
The Ada knew what was happening with everyone in Jwahir. She was the one who made sure the proper traditions were performed for deaths, births, menstrual celebrations, the party thrown when a boy’s voice drops, the Eleventh Year Rite, the Thirteenth Year Rite, all of life’s markers. She’d planned my parents’ wedding and I’d hidden from her whenever she came by. I hoped she didn’t remember me.
“I’ll add your name. The list will be submitted to the Osugbo,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Be here at two a.m. a week from today. Wear old clothes. Come alone.” She looked me over. “Your hair—unbraid it, brush it out and rebraid it loosely.”
A week later, I snuck out of my bedroom window at twenty minutes to two in the morning.
The door to the Ada’s house was open when I arrived. I slowly stepped inside. The living room was decorated with candles, all the furniture cleared away. The Ada’s mural, mostly finished, looked more alive than ever in the candlelight.
The three other girls were already there. I quickly joined them. They looked at me with surprise, and some relief. I was one more person to share their fear. We didn’t speak, not even a greeting, but we stood close together.
Besides the Ada, there were five other women present. One of them was my great-aunt, Abeo Ogundimu. She’d never liked me. If she realized I was here without the consent of Papa, her nephew, I’d be in real trouble. I didn’t know the other four women, but one of them was very old and her presence demanded respect. I shivered with guilt, suddenly unsure of whether I should be there.
I glanced at a small table in the center of the room. Set on it were gauze, bottles of alcohol, iodine, four scalpels, and other items I didn’t recognize. My stomach rolled with nausea. A minute later, the Ada began. They must have been waiting for me.
“We are the women of the Eleventh Rite,” the Ada said. “We six guard the crossroads between womanhood and girlhood. Only through us can you move freely between the two. I am the Ada.”
“I am Lady Abadie, the town healer,” the short woman next to her said. Her hands were pressed closely to her flowing yellow dress.
“I am Ochi Naka,” another said. She was very dark skinned and had a voluptuous figure that she showed off with her stylish purple dress. “Market seamstress.”
“I am Zuni Whan,” the other said. Under her loose blue midlevel dress, she wore pants, something women rarely wore in Jwahir. “Architect.”
“I am Abeo Ogundimu,” my great-aunt said with a smirk. “Mother of fifteen.”
The women laughed. We all did. A mother to fifteen was a busy career indeed.
“And I am Nana the Wise,” the imposing old old woman said, looking at each of us through her one good eye, her hunched back forever pushing her forward. My great-aunt was old, but she was young compared to this woman. Nana the Wise’s voice was clear and dry. She held my eyes longer than she did the other girls’. “Now what are your names, so that we are well met?” she said.
“Luyu Chiki,” the girl next to me said.
“Diti Goitsemedime.”
“Binta Keita.”
“Onyesonwu Ubaid-Ogundimu.”
“This one,” Nana the Wise said, pointing at me. I held my breath.
“Step forward,” the Ada said.
I’d spent too much time mentally preparing for this day. All week, I’d had trouble eating, sleeping, fearing the pain and blood. By this point, I’d finally come to terms with it all. Now the old woman would bar my way.
Nana the Wise looked me up and down. Slowly she stepped around me, peering up with her one eye, like a tortoise from its shell. She grunted. “Unbraid that hair,” she said. I was the only one with hair long enough to braid. Jwahir women wore their hair stylishly short, another difference between my mother’s village and Jwahir. “This is her day. She must be unhindered.”
I was flush with relief. As I undid my loose braid, the Ada spoke. “Who comes here untouched?”
Only I raised my hand. I heard the one named Luyu snicker. She quickly shut up when the Ada spoke again. “Who, Diti?”
Diti let out a tiny uncomfortable laugh. “A . . . schoolmate,” she said quietly.
“His name?”
“Fanasi.”
“Did you have intercourse?”
I quietly gasped. I couldn’t imagine it. We were so young.
Diti shook her head and said, “No.” The Ada moved on.
“Who, Luyu?” she asked.
When Luyu only stared back with defiant eyes, the Ada strode forward so quickly that I was sure she was going to slap Luyu across the face. Luyu didn’t budge. She held her chin higher, daring the Ada. I was impressed. I noticed Luyu’s clothes. They were made from the finest textiles. They were bright; they’d never been washed. Luyu came from money and she obviously didn’t feel that she had to answer to even the Ada.
“I don’t know his name,” Luyu finally said.
“Nothing leaves this place,” the Ada said. But I sensed a threat in her voice. Luyu must have, too.
“Wokike.”
“Did you have intercourse?”
Luyu said nothing. Then she looked at the fish man on the wall and said, “Yes.”
My jaw dropped.
“How often?”
“Many times.”
“Why?”
Luyu glowered. “I don’t know.”
The Ada gave her a harsh look. “After tonight, you’ll refrain until you’re married. After tonight, you should know better.” She moved on to Binta, who’d been crying the entire time. “Who?”
Binta’s shoulders curled more. She cried harder.
“Binta, who?” the Ada asked again. Then she looked toward the five women and they moved in close to Binta, so close that Luyu, Diti, and I had to tilt our heads to see her. She was the smallest of the four of us. “You’re safe here,” the Ada said.
The other women touched Binta’s shoulders, cheeks, neck, and softly chanted, “You are safe, you are safe, you are safe here.”
Nana the Wise put her hand on Binta’s cheek. “After tonight, all in this room will be bound,” she said in her dry voice. “You, Diti, Onyesonwu, and Luyu will protect each other, even after marriage. And we, the Old Ones, will protect you all. But truth is the only thing that will secure this bond tonight.”
“Who?” the Ada asked for the third time.
Binta sunk to the floor and leaned her head against one of the women’s thighs, “My father.”
Luyu, Diti, and I gasped. The other women didn’t seem surprised at all.
“Was there intercourse?” Nana the Wise asked, her face hardened.
“Yes,” Binta whispered.
Several of the women cursed and sucked their teeth and muttered angrily. I shut my eyes and rubbed my temples. Binta’s pain was like my mother’s.
“How often?” Nana the Wise asked.
“Many times,” Binta said, her voice growing stronger. Then she blurted, “I-I-I want to kill him.” Then she clapp
ed her hands over her mouth. “I’m sorry!” she said, her words muffled by her hands.
Nana the Wise removed Binta’s hands. “You’re safe here,” she said. She looked disgusted and shook her head, “Now we can finally do something about it.”
In fact, this group of women had known of Binta’s father’s behavior for a while. They were powerless to intervene until Binta went through her Eleventh Rite.
Binta vigorously shook her head. “No. They will take him away and . . .”
The women hissed and sucked their teeth. “Don’t worry,” Nana the Wise said. “We’ll protect you and your happiness.”
“My mother won’t . . .”
“Shhh,” Nana the Wise said. “You may still be a child but after tonight you’ll also be an adult. Your words will finally matter.”
The Ada and Nana the Wise barely glanced my way. No questions for me.
“Today,” the Ada said to us all. “You’ll become child and adult. You will be powerless and powerful. You will be ignored and heard. Do you accept?”
“Yes,” we all said.
“You are not to scream,” the healer said.
“You are not to kick,” the seamstress said.
“You are to bleed,” the architect said.
“Ani is great,” my great-aunt said.
“You have already taken the first step into adulthood by leaving your homes and entering the dangerous night alone,” the Ada said. “You’ll each get a small sack of herbs, gauze, iodine, and body salts. You’ll return home alone. In three nights, you’re to take a long bath.”
We were told to remove our clothing and handed pieces of red cloth to wrap around ourselves. Our tops would be taken to the back and burned. We’d each be given a new white shirt and veil, the symbols of our new adulthood. We were to wear our rapas home; they were symbols of our childhood.
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