“Just to look around.”
“Sightseeing?” Papa asked. He spoke English, while Aunty Ifeoma spoke Igbo.
“Eugene, let the children come out with us!” Aunty Ifeoma sounded irritated; her voice was slightly raised. “Is it not Christmas that we are celebrating, eh? The children have never really spent time with one another. Imakwa, my little one, Chima, does not even know Kambili’s name.”
Papa looked at me and then at Mama, searched our faces as if looking for letters beneath our noses, above our foreheads, on our lips, that would spell something he would not like. “Okay. They can go with you, but you know I do not want my children near anything ungodly. If you drive past mmuo, keep your windows up.”
“I have heard you, Eugene,” Aunty Ifeoma said, with an exaggerated formality.
“Why don’t we all have lunch on Christmas day?” Papa asked. “The children can spend time together then.”
“You know that the children and I spend Christmas day with their Papa-Nnukwu.”
“What do idol worshipers know about Christmas?”
“Eugene…” Aunty Ifeoma took a deep breath. “Okay, the children and I will come on Christmas day.”
Papa had gone back downstairs, and I was still sitting on the sofa, watching Aunty Ifeoma talk to Mama, when my cousins arrived. Amaka was a thinner, teenage copy of her mother. She walked and talked even faster and with more purpose than Aunty Ifeoma did. Only her eyes were different; they did not have the unconditional warmth of Aunty Ifeoma’s. They were quizzical eyes, eyes that asked many questions and did not accept many answers. Obiora was a year younger, very lightskinned, with honey-colored eyes behind thick glasses, and his mouth turned up at the sides in a perpetual smile. Chima had skin as dark as the bottom of a burnt pot of rice, and was tall for a boy of seven. They all laughed alike: throaty, cackling sounds pushed out with enthusiasm.
They greeted Papa, and when he gave them money for igba krismas, Amaka and Obiora thanked him, holding out the two thick wads of naira notes. Their eyes were politely surprised, to show that they were not presumptuous, that they had not expected money.
“You have satellite here, don’t you?” Amaka asked me. It was the first thing she said after we greeted each other. Her hair was cut short, higher at the front and gradually reducing in an arch until it got to the back of her head, where there was little hair.
“Yes.”
“Can we watch CNN?”
I forced a cough out of my throat; I hoped I would not stutter.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Amaka continued, “because right now I think we’re going to visit my dad’s family in Ukpo.”
“We don’t watch a lot of TV,” I said.
“Why?” Amaka asked. It was so unlikely that we were the same age, fifteen. She seemed so much older, or maybe it was her striking resemblance to Aunty Ifeoma or the way she stared me right in the eyes. “Because you’re bored with it? If only we all had satellite so everybody could be bored with it.”
I wanted to say I was sorry, that I did not want her to dislike us for not watching satellite. I wanted to tell her that although huge satellite dishes lounged on top of the houses in Enugu and here, we did not watch TV. Papa did not pencil in TV time on our schedules.
But Amaka had turned to her mother, who was sitting hunched with Mama. “Mom, if we are going to Ukpo, we should leave soon so we can get back before Papa-Nnukwu falls asleep.”
Aunty Ifeoma rose. “Yes, nne, we should leave.”
She held Chima’s hand as they all walked downstairs. Amaka said something, pointing at our banister, with its heavy handcarved detail, and Obiora laughed. She did not turn to say good-bye to me, although the boys did and Aunty Ifeoma waved and said, “I’ll see you and Jaja tomorrow.”
AUNTY IFEOMA DROVE into the compound just as we finished breakfast. When she barged into the dining room upstairs, I imagined a proud ancient forebear, walking miles to fetch water in homemade clay pots, nursing babies until they walked and talked, fighting wars with machetes sharpened on sun-warmed stone. She filled a room. “Are you ready, Jaja and Kambili?” she asked. “Nwunye m, will you not come with us?”
Mama shook her head. “You know Eugene likes me to stay around.”
“Kambili, I think you will be more comfortable in trousers,” Aunty Ifeoma said as we walked to the car.
“I’m fine, Aunty,” I said. I wondered why I did not tell her that all my skirts stopped well past my knees, that I did not own any trousers because it was sinful for a woman to wear trousers.
Her Peugeot 504 station wagon was white and rusted to an unpleasant brown at the fenders. Amaka was seated in the front; Obiora and Chima were in the back seat. Jaja and I climbed into the middle seats. Mama stood watching until the car disappeared from her sight. I knew because I felt her eyes, felt her presence. The car made rattling sounds as if some bolts had come loose and were shaking with every rise and fall of the bumpy road. There were gaping rectangular spaces on the dashboard instead of air-conditioner vents, so the windows were kept down. Dust sailed across my mouth, into my eyes and nose.
“We’re going to pick up Papa-Nnukwu, he will come with us,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
I felt a lurch in my stomach and I glanced at Jaja. His eyes met mine. What would we tell Papa? Jaja looked away; he did not have an answer.
Before Aunty Ifeoma stopped the engine in front of the mud-and-thatch-enclosed compound, Amaka had opened the front door and bounded out. “I’ll fetch Papa-Nnukwu!”
The boys climbed out of the car and followed Amaka past the small wooden gate.
“Don’t you want to come out?” Aunty Ifeoma asked, turning to Jaja and me.
I looked away. Jaja was sitting as still as I was.
“You don’t want to come into your Papa-Nnukwu’s compound? But didn’t you come to greet him two days ago?” Aunty Ifeoma widened her eyes to stare at us.
“We are not allowed to come here after we’ve greeted him,” Jaja said
“What kind of nonsense is that, eh?” Aunty Ifeoma stopped then, perhaps remembering that the rules were not ours. “Tell me, why do you think your father doesn’t want you here?”
“I don’t know,” Jaja said.
I sucked my tongue to unfreeze it, tasting the gritty dust. “Because Papa-Nnukwu is a pagan.” Papa would be proud that I had said that.
“Your Papa-Nnukwu is not a pagan, Kambili, he is a traditionalist,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
I stared at her. Pagan, traditionalist, what did it matter? He was not Catholic, that was all; he was not of the faith. He was one of the people whose conversion we prayed for so that they did not end in the everlasting torment of hellfire.
We sat silently until the gate swung open and Amaka came out, walking close enough to Papa-Nnukwu to support him if he needed it. The boys walked behind them. Papa-Nnukwu wore a loose print shirt and a pair of knee-length khaki shorts. I had never seen him in anything but the threadbare wrappers that were wound around his body when we visited him.
“I got him those shorts,” Aunty Ifeoma said, with a laugh. “See how he looks so youthful, who would believe he is eighty?”
Amaka helped Papa-Nnukwu get into the front seat, and then she got in the middle with us.
“Papa-Nnukwu, good afternoon sir,” Jaja and I greeted.
“Kambili, Jaja, I see you again before you go back to the city? Ehye, it is a sign that I am going soon to meet the ancestors.”
“Nna anyi, are you not tired of predicting your death?” Aunty Ifeoma said, starting the engine. “Let us hear something new!” She called him nna anyi, our father. I wondered if Papa used to call him that and what Papa would call him now if they spoke to each other.
“He likes to talk about dying soon,” Amaka said, in amused English. “He thinks that will get us to do things for him,”
“Dying soon indeed. He’ll be here when we are as old as he is now,” Obiora said, in equally amused English.
“What are those children saying, gbo, I
feoma?” Papa-Nnukwu asked. “Are they conspiring to share my gold and many lands? Will they not wait for me to go first?”
“If you had gold and lands, we would have killed you ourselves years ago,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
My cousins laughed, and Amaka glanced at Jaja and me, perhaps wondering why we did not laugh, too. I wanted to smile, but we were driving past our house just then, and the sight of the looming black gates and white walls stiffened my lips.
“This is what our people say to the High God, the Chukwu,” Papa-Nnukwu said. “Give me both wealth and a child, but if I must choose one, give me a child because when my child grows, so will my wealth.” Papa-Nnukwu stopped, turned to look back toward our house. “Nekenem, look at me. My son owns that house that can fit in every man in Abba, and yet many times I have nothing to put on my plate. I should not have let him follow those missionaries.”
“Nna anyi,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “It was not the missionaries. Did I not go to the missionary school, too?”
“But you are a woman. You do not count.”
“Eh? So I don’t count? Has Eugene ever asked about your aching leg? If I do not count, then I will stop asking if you rose well in the morning.”
Papa-Nnukwu chuckled. “Then my spirit will haunt you when I join the ancestors.”
“It will haunt Eugene first.”
“I joke with you, nwa m. Where would I be today if my chi had not given me a daughter?” Papa Nnukwu paused. “My spirit will intercede for you, so that Chukwu will send a good man to take care of you and the children.”
“Let your spirit ask Chukwu to hasten my promotion to senior lecturer, that is all I ask,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
Papa-Nnukwu did not reply for a while, and I wondered if the mix of high life music from the car radio and the rattling of the loose screws and the harmattan haze had eased him into sleep.
“Still, I say it was the missionaries that misled my son,” he said, startling me.
“We have heard this many times. Tell us something else,” Aunty Ifeoma said. But Papa-Nnukwu kept talking as though he had not heard her.
“I remember the first one that came to Abba, the one they called Fada John. His face was red like palm oil; they say our type of sun does not shine in the white man’s land. He had a helper, a man from Nimo called Jude. In the afternoon they gathered the children under the ukwa tree in the mission and taught them their religion. I did not join them, kpa, but I went sometimes to see what they were doing. One day I said to them, Where is this god you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and the son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see? That is why Eugene can disregard me, because he thinks we are equal.”
My cousins chuckled. So did Aunty Ifeoma, who soon stopped and said to Papa-Nnukwu, “It is enough, close your mouth and rest. We are almost there and you will need your energy to tell the children about the mmuo.”
“Papa-Nnukwu, are you comfortable?” Amaka asked, leaning across toward the front seat. “Do you want me to adjust your seat, to make more room for you?”
“No, I am fine. I am an old man now and my height is gone. I would not have fit in this car in my prime. In those days, I plucked icheku from the trees by just reaching out high; I did not need to climb.”
“Of course,” Aunty Ifeoma said, laughing again. “And could you not reach out and touch the sky, too?”
She laughed so easily, so often. They all did, even little Chima.
When we got to Ezi Icheke, cars lined the road almost bumper to bumper. The crowds that pressed around the cars were so dense there was no space between people and they blended into one another, wrappers blended into T-shirts, trousers into skirts, dresses into shirts. Aunty Ifeoma finally found a spot and eased the station wagon in. The mmuo had started to walk past, and often a long line of cars waited for an mmuo to walk past so they could drive on. Hawkers were at every corner, with glass-enclosed cases of akara and suya and browned chicken drumsticks, with trays of peeled oranges, with coolers the size of bathtubs full of Walls banana ice cream. It was like a vibrant painting that had come alive. I had never been to see mmuo, to sit in a stationary car alongside thousands of people who had all come to watch. Papa had driven us past the crowds at Ezi Icheke once, some years ago, and he muttered about ignorant people participating in the ritual of pagan masquerades. He said that the stories about mmuo, that they were spirits who had climbed out of ant holes, that they could make chairs run and baskets hold water, were all devilish folklore. Devilish Folklore. It sounded dangerous the way Papa said it.
“Look at this,” Papa-Nnukwu said. “This is a woman spirit, and the women mmuo are harmless. They do not even go near the big ones at the festival.” The mmuo he pointed to was small; its carved wooden face had angular, pretty features and rouged lips. It stopped often to dance, wiggling this way and that, so that the string of beads around its waist swayed and rippled. The crowds nearby cheered, and some people threw money toward it. Little boys—the followers of the mmuo who were playing music with metal ogenes and wooden ichakas—picked up the crumpled naira notes. They had hardly passed us when Papa Nnukwu shouted, “Look away! Women cannot look at this one!”
The mmuo making its way down the road was surrounded by a few elderly men who rang a shrill bell as the mmuo walked. Its mask was a real, grimacing human skull with sunken eye sockets. A squirming tortoise was tied to its forehead. A snake and three dead chickens hung from its grass-covered body, swinging as the mmuo walked. The crowds near the road moved back quickly, fearfully. A few women turned and dashed into nearby compounds.
Aunty Ifeoma looked amused, but she turned her head away. “Don’t look, girls. Let’s humor your grandfather,” she said in English. Amaka had already looked away. I looked away, too, toward the crowd of people that pressed around the car. It was sinful, deferring to a heathen masquerade. But at least I had looked at it very briefly, so maybe it would technically not be deferring to a heathen masquerade.
“That is our agwonatumbe,” Papa-Nnukwu said, proudly, after the mmuo had walked past. “It is the most powerful mmuo in our parts, and all the neighboring villages fear Abba because of it. At last year’s Aro festival, agwonatumbe raised a staff and all the other mmuo turned and ran! They didn’t even wait to see what would happen!”
“Look!” Obiora pointed at another mmuo moving down the road. It was like a floating white cloth, flat, taller than the huge avocado tree in our yard in Enugu. Papa-Nnukwu grunted as the mmuo went by. It was eerie, watching it, and I thought then of chairs running, their four legs knocking together, of water being held in a basket, of human forms climbing out of ant holes.
“How do they do that, Papa-Nnukwu? How do people get inside that one?” Jaja asked.
“Shh! These are mmuo, spirits! Don’t speak like a woman!” Papa-Nnukwu snapped, turning to glare at Jaja.
Aunty Ifeoma laughed and spoke in English. “Jaja, you’re not supposed to say there are people in there. Didn’t you know that?”
“No,” Jaja said.
She was watching Jaja. “You didn’t do the ima mmuo, did you? Obiora did it two years ago in his father’s hometown.”
“No, I didn’t,” Jaja mumbled.
I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire.
We left Ezi Icheke soon afterward. Aunty Ifeoma dropped off a
sleepy Papa-Nnukwu first; his good eye was half closed while his going-blind eye stayed open, the film covering it looked thicker now, like concentrated milk. When Aunty Ifeoma stopped inside our compound, she asked her children if they wanted to come into the house, and Amaka said no, in a loud voice that seemed to prompt her brothers to say the same. Aunty Ifeoma took us in, waved to Papa, who was in the middle of a meeting, and hugged Jaja and me in her tight way before leaving.
That night, I dreamed that I was laughing, but it did not sound like my laughter, although I was not sure what my laughter sounded like. It was cackling and throaty and enthusiastic, like Aunty Ifeoma’s.
Papa drove us to Christmas Mass at St. Paul’s. Aunty Ifeoma and her children were climbing into their station wagon as we drove into the sprawling church compound. They waited for Papa to stop the Mercedes and then came over to greet us. Aunty Ifeoma said they had gone to the early Mass and they would see us at lunchtime. She looked taller, even more fearless, in a red wrapper and high heels. Amaka wore the same bright red lipstick as her mother; it made her teeth seem whiter when she smiled and said, “Merry Christmas.”
Although I tried to concentrate on Mass, I kept thinking of Amaka’s lipstick, wondering what it felt like to run color over your lips. It was even harder to keep my mind on Mass because the priest, who spoke Igbo throughout, did not talk about the gospel during the sermon. Instead he talked about zinc and cement. “You people think I ate the money for the zinc, okwia?” he shouted, gesticulating, pointing accusingly at the congregation. “After all, how many of you give to this church, gbo? How can we build the house if you don’t give? Do you think zinc and cement cost a mere ten kobo?”
Papa wished the priest would talk about something else, something about the birth in the manger, about the shepherds and the guiding star; I knew from the way Papa held his missal too tight, the way he shifted often on the pew. We were sitting in the first pew. An usher wearing a Blessed Virgin Mary medal on her white cotton dress had rushed forward to seat us, telling Papa in loud, urgent whispers that the front pews were reserved for the important people; Chief Umeadi, the only man in Abba whose house was bigger than ours, sat on our left, and His Royal Highness, the Igwe, was on our right. The Igwe came over to shake Papa’s hand during Peace and Love, and he said, “Nno nu, I will stop by later, so we can greet properly.”
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