There was a lot to pack, and Adamu came over from the gate to help Sunday and Kevin. The yams alone, wide tubers the size of young puppies, filled the boot of the Peugeot 505, and even the front seat of the Volvo had a bag of beans slanting across it, like a passenger who had fallen asleep. Kevin and Sunday drove off first, and we followed, so that if the soldiers at the roadblocks stopped them, he would see and stop, too.
Papa started the rosary before we drove out of our gated street. He stopped at the end of the first decade so Mama could continue with the next set of ten Hail Marys. Jaja led the next decade; then it was my turn. Papa took his time driving. The expressway was a single lane, and when we got behind a lorry he stayed put, muttering that the roads were unsafe, that the people in Abuja had stolen all the money meant for making the expressways dual-carriage. Many cars horned and overtook us; some were so full of Christmas yams and bags of rice and crates of soft drinks that their boots almost grazed the road.
At Ninth Mile, Papa stopped to buy bread and okpa. Hawkers descended on our car, pushing boiled eggs, roasted cashew nuts, bottled water, bread, okpa, agidi into every window of the car, chanting: “Buy from me, oh, I will sell well to you.” Or “Look at me, I am the one you are looking for.”
Although Papa bought only bread and okpa wrapped in hot banana leaves, he gave a twenty-naira note to each of the other hawkers, and their “Thank sir, God bless you” chants echoed in my ear as we drove off and approached Abba.
The green WELCOME TO ABBA TOWN sign that led off the expressway would have been easy to miss because it was so small. Papa turned onto the dirt road, and soon I heard the screech-screech-screech of the low underbelly of the Mercedes scraping the bumpy, sun-baked dirt road. As we drove past, people waved and called out Papa’s title: “Omelora!” Mudand-thatch huts stood close to three-story houses that nestled behind ornate metal gates. Naked and seminaked children played with limp footballs. Men sat on benches beneath trees, drinking palm wine from cow horns and cloudy glass mugs. The car was coated in dust by the time we got to the wide black gates of our country home. Three elderly men standing under the lone ukwa tree near our gates waved and shouted, “Nno nu! Nno nu! Have you come back? We will come in soon to say welcome!” Our gateman threw the gates open.
“Thank you, Lord, for journey mercies,” Papa said as he drove into the compound, crossing himself.
“Amen,” we said.
Our house still took my breath away, the four-story white majesty of it, with the spurting fountain in front and the coconut trees flanking it on both sides and the orange trees dotting the front yard. Three little boys rushed into the compound to greet Papa. They had been chasing our cars down the dirt road.
“Omelora! Good afun, sah!” they chorused. They wore only shorts, and each one’s belly button was the size of a small balloon.
“Kedu nu?” Papa gave them each ten naira from a wad of notes he pulled out of his hold-all. “Greet your parents, make sure you show them this money.”
“Yes sah! Tank sah!” They dashed out of the compound, laughing loudly.
Kevin and Sunday unpacked the foodstuffs while Jaja and I unpacked the suitcases from the Mercedes. Mama went to the backyard with Sisi to put away the cast iron cooking tripods. Our food would be cooked on the gas cooker inside the kitchen, but the metal tripods would balance the big pots that would cook rice and stews and soups for visitors. Some of the pots were big enough to fit a whole goat. Mama and Sisi hardly did any of that cooking; they simply stayed around and provided more salt, more Maggi cubes, more utensils, because the wives of the members of our umunna came over to do the cooking. They wanted Mama to rest, they said, after the stress of the city. And every year they took the leftovers—the fat pieces of meat, the rice and beans, the bottles of soft drink and maltina and beer—home with them afterward. We were always prepared to feed the whole village at Christmas, always prepared so that none of the people who came in would leave without eating and drinking to what Papa called a reasonable level of satisfaction. Papa’s title was omelora, after all, The One Who Does for the Community. But it was not only Papa who received visitors; the villagers trooped to every big house with a big gate, and sometimes they took plastic bowls with firm covers. It was Christmas.
Jaja and I were upstairs unpacking when Mama came in and said, “Ade Coker came by with his family to wish us a merry Christmas. They are on their way to Lagos. Come downstairs and greet them.”
Ade Coker was a small, round, laughing man. Every time I saw him, I tried to imagine him writing those editorials in the Standard; I tried to imagine him defying the soldiers. And I could not. He looked like a stuffed doll, and because he was always smiling, the deep dimples in his pillowy cheeks looked like permanent fixtures, as though someone had sunk a stick into his cheeks. Even his glasses looked dollish: they were thicker than window louvers, tinted a strange bluish shade, and framed in white plastic. He was throwing his baby, a perfectly round copy of himself, in the air when we came in. His little daughter was standing close to him, asking him to throw her in the air, too.
“Jaja, Kambili, how are you?” he said, and before we could reply, he laughed his tinkling laugh and, gesturing to the baby, said, “You know they say the higher you throw them when they’re young, the more likely they are to learn how to fly!” The baby gurgled, showing pink gums, and reached out for his father’s glasses. Ade Coker tilted his head back, threw the baby up again.
His wife, Yewande, hugged us, asked how we were, then slapped Ade Coker’s shoulder playfully and took the baby from him. I watched her and remembered her loud, choking cries to Papa.
“Do you like coming to the village?” Ade Coker asked us.
We looked at Papa at the same time; he was on the sofa, reading a Christmas card and smiling. “Yes,” we said.
“Eh? You like coming to this bush place?” His eyes widened theatrically. “Do you have friends here?”
“No,” we said.
“So what do you do in this back of beyond, then?” he teased. Jaja and I smiled and said nothing.
“They are always so quiet,” he said, turning to Papa. “So quiet.”
“They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God,” Papa said, and I was certain that it was pride that stretched Papa’s lips and lightened his eyes.
“Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet.” It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewanda. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.
THE RUSTLING OF THE coconut fronds woke me up. Outside our high gates, I could hear goats bleating and cocks crowing and people yelling greetings across mud compound walls.
“Gudu morni. Have you woken up, eh? Did you rise well?”
“Gudu morni. Did the people of your house rise well, oh?”
I reached out to slide open my bedroom window, to hear the sounds better and to let in the clean air tinged with goat droppings and ripening oranges. Jaja tapped on my door before he came into my room. Our rooms adjoined; back in Enugu, they were far apart.
“Are you up?” he asked. “Let’s go down for prayers before Papa calls us.”
I tied my wrapper, which I had used as a light cover in the warm night, over my nightdress, knotted it under my arm, and followed Jaja downstairs.
The wide passages made our house feel like a hotel, as did the impersonal smell of doors kept locked most of the year, of unused bathrooms and kitchens and toilets, of uninhabited rooms. We used only the ground floor and first floor; the other two were last used years ago, when Papa was made a chief and took his omelora title. The members of our umunna had urged him for so long, even when he was still a manager at Leventis and had not bought the first factory, to take a title. He was wealthy enough, they insisted; besides, nobody among our umunna had ever taken a title. So when Papa finally decided to, after extensive talks with the parish priest and insisting that all pagan undertones be removed from
his title-taking ceremony, it was like a mini New Yam festival. Cars had taken up every inch of the dirt road running through Abba. The third and fourth floors had swarmed with people. Now I went up there only when I wanted to see farther than the road just outside our compound walls.
“Papa is hosting a church council meeting today,” Jaja said. “I heard him telling Mama.”
“What time is the meeting?”
“Before noon.” And with his eyes he said, We can spend time together then.
In Abba, Jaja and I had no schedules. We talked more and sat alone in our rooms less, because Papa was too busy entertaining the endless stream of visitors and attending church council meetings at five in the morning and town council meetings until midnight. Or maybe it was because Abba was different, because people strolled into our compound at will, because the very air we breathed moved more slowly.
Papa and Mama were in one of the small living rooms that led off the main living room downstairs.
“Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Mama,” Jaja and I said.
“How are you both?” Papa asked.
“Fine,” we said.
Papa looked bright-eyed; he must have been awake for hours. He was flipping through his Bible, the Catholic version with the deuterocanonical books, bound in shiny black leather. Mama looked sleepy. She rubbed her crusty eyes as she asked if we had slept well. I could hear voices from the main living room. Guests arrived with dawn here. When we had made the sign of the cross and gotten down on our knees, around the table, someone knocked on the door. A middle-aged man in a threadbare T-shirt peeked in.
“Omelora!” the man said in the forceful tone people used when they called others by their titles. “I am leaving now. I want to see if I can buy a few Christmas things for my children at Oye Abagana.” He spoke English with an Igbo accent so strong it decorated even the shortest words with extra vowels. Papa liked it when the villagers made an effort to speak English around him. He said it showed they had good sense.
“Ogbunambala!” Papa said. “Wait for me, I am praying with my family. I want to give you a little something for the children. You will also share my tea and bread with me.”
“Hei! Omelora! Thank sir. I have not drank milk this year.” The man still hovered at the door. Perhaps he imagined that leaving would make Papa’s promise of tea with milk disappear.
“Ogbunambala! Go and sit down and wait for me.”
The man retreated. Papa read from the psalms before saying the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the Apostles Creed. Although we spoke aloud after Papa said the first few words alone, an outer silence enveloped us all, shrouding us. But when he said, “We will now pray to the spirit in our own words, for the spirit intercedes for us in accordance with His will,” the silence was broken. Our voices sounded loud, discordant. Mama started with a prayer for peace and for the rulers of our country. Jaja prayed for priests and for the religious. I prayed for the Pope. Finally, for twenty minutes, Papa prayed for our protection from ungodly people and forces, for Nigeria and the Godless men ruling it, and for us to continue to grow in righteousness. Finally, he prayed for the conversion of our Papa-Nnukwu, so that Papa-Nnukwu would be saved from hell. Papa spent some time describing hell, as if God did not know that the flames were eternal and raging and fierce. At the end we raised our voices and said, “Amen!”
Papa closed the Bible. “Kambili and Jaja, you will go this afternoon to your grandfather’s house and greet him. Kevin will take you. Remember, don’t touch any food, don’t drink anything. And, as usual, you will stay not longer than fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, Papa.” We had heard this every Christmas for the past few years, ever since we had started to visit Papa-Nnukwu. Papa-Nnukwu had called an umunna meeting to complain to the extended family that he did not know his grandchildren and that we did not know him. Papa-Nnukwu had told Jaja and me this, as Papa did not tell us such things. Papa-Nnukwu had told the umunna how Papa had offered to build him a house, buy him a car, and hire him a driver, as long as he converted and threw away the chi in the thatch shrine in his yard. Papa-Nnukwu laughed and said he simply wanted to see his grandchildren when he could. He would not throw away his chi; he had already told Papa this many times. The members of our umunna sided with Papa, they always did, but they urged him to let us visit Papa-Nnukwu, to greet him, because every man who was old enough to be called grandfather deserved to be greeted by his grandchildren. Papa himself never greeted Papa-Nnukwu, never visited him, but he sent slim wads of naira through Kevin or through one of our umunna members, slimmer wads than he gave Kevin as a Christmas bonus.
“I don’t like to send you to the home of a heathen, but God will protect you,” Papa said. He put the Bible in a drawer and then pulled Jaja and me to his side, gently rubbed the sides of our arms.
“Yes, Papa.”
He went into the large living room. I could hear more voices, more people coming in to say “Nno nu” and complain about how hard life was, how they could not buy new clothes for their children this Christmas.
“You and Jaja can have breakfast upstairs. I will bring the things up. Your father will eat with the guests,” Mama said.
“Let me help you,” I offered.
“No, nne, go upstairs. Stay with your brother.”
I watched Mama walk toward the kitchen, in her limping gait. Her braided hair was piled into a net that tapered to a golf-ball-like lump at the end, like a Father Christmas hat. She looked tired.
“Papa-Nnukwu lives close by, we can walk there in five minutes, we don’t need Kevin to take us,” Jaja said, as we went back upstairs. He said that every year, but we always climbed into the car so that Kevin could take us, so that he could watch us.
As Kevin drove us out of the compound later that morning, I turned to allow my eyes to stroke, once again, the gleaming white walls and pillars of our house, the perfect silver-colored water arch the fountain made. Papa-Nnukwu had never set foot in it, because when Papa had decreed that heathens were not allowed in his compound, he had not made an exception for his father.
“Your father said you are to stay fifteen minutes,” Kevin said, as he parked on the roadside, near Papa-Nnukwu’s thatchenclosed compound. I stared at the scar on Kevin’s neck before I got out of the car. He had fallen from a palm tree in his hometown in the Niger Delta area, a few years ago while on vacation. The scar ran from the center of his head to the nape of his neck. It was shaped like a dagger.
“We know,” Jaja said.
Jaja swung open Papa-Nnukwu’s creaking wooden gate, which was so narrow that Papa might have to enter sideways if he ever were to visit. The compound was barely a quarter of the size of our backyard in Enugu. Two goats and a few chickens sauntered around, nibbling and pecking at drying stems of grass. The house that stood in the middle of the compound was small, compact like dice, and it was hard to imagine Papa and Aunty Ifeoma growing up here. It looked just like the pictures of houses I used to draw in kindergarten: a square house with a square door at the center and two square windows on each side. The only difference was that Papa-Nnukwu’s house had a verandah, which was bounded by rusty metal bars. The first time Jaja and I visited, I had walked in looking for the bathroom, and Papa-Nnukwu had laughed and pointed at the outhouse, a closet-size building of unpainted cement blocks with a mat of entwined palm fronds pulled across the gaping entrance. I had examined him that day, too, looking away when his eyes met mine, for signs of difference, of Godlessness. I didn’t see any, but I was sure they were there somewhere. They had to be.
Papa-Nnukwu was sitting on a low stool on the verandah, bowls of food on a raffia mat before him. He rose as we came in. A wrapper was slung across his body and tied behind his neck, over a once white singlet now browned by age and yellowed at the armpits.
“Neke! Neke! Neke! Kambili and Jaja have come to greet their old father!” he said. Although he was stooped with age, it was easy to see how tall he once had been. He shook Jaja’s han
d and hugged me. I pressed myself to him just a moment longer, gently, holding my breath because of the strong, unpleasant smell of cassava that clung to him.
“Come and eat,” he said, gesturing to the raffia mat. The enamel bowls contained flaky fufu and watery soup bereft of chunks of fish or meat. It was custom to ask, but Papa-Nnukwu expected us to say no—his eyes twinkled with mischief.
“No, thank sir,” we said. We sat on the wood bench next to him. I leaned back and rested my head on the wooden window shutters, which had parallel openings running across them.
“I hear that you came in yesterday,” he said. His lower lip quivered, as did his voice, and sometimes I understood him a moment or two after he spoke because his dialect was ancient; his speech had none of the anglicized inflections that ours had.
“Yes,” Jaja said.
“Kambili, you are so grown up now, a ripe agbogho. Soon the suitors will start to come,” he said, teasing. His left eye was going blind and was covered by a film the color and consistency of diluted milk. I smiled as he stretched out to pat my shoulder; the age spots that dotted his hand stood out because they were so much lighter than his soil-colored complexion.
“Papa-Nnukwu, are you well? How is your body?” Jaja asked.
Papa-Nnukwu shrugged as if to say there was a lot that was wrong but he had no choice. “I am well, my son. What can an old man do but be well until he joins his ancestors?” He paused to mold a lump of fufu with his fingers. I watched him, the smile on his face, the easy way he threw the molded morsel out toward the garden, where parched herbs swayed in the light breeze, asking Ani, the god of the land, to eat with him. “My legs ache often. Your Aunty Ifeoma brings me medicine when she can put the money together. But I am an old man; if it is not my legs that ache, it will be my hands.”
“Will Aunty Ifeoma and her children come back this year?” I asked.
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