My third son was born with hoops of fat round his neck and his stomach. Such an appetite! I employed a pair of wet nurses and he drained them both. So I fed him myself. And what lungs! When he wanted me he screamed, his little body rigid with rage. My husband called him Lansana. But at other times, when I was alone with my son, I would brush my nose against his small one. ‘Okurgba!’ I would whisper. Little warrior! My name for him. Born with the spirit of a fighter. I laid my son on the hide of an unborn calf. I knew I had borne the child who would take care of me.
After each child my husband left me alone for a while. When in time he ventured near me I told him I was too tired. At that he offered to help me with my chores. I insisted I could manage. Whoever heard of such a thing? Gradually he left me alone more often, but never quite enough.
The next child came early and nearly killed me. The doctor at the clinic smelled of tree sap, of indigo dye and starched cloths. He asked me how many children I had. ‘Six,’ I replied, counting them all: the living and the dead and this one.
They put a needle in my arm and sent me to sleep. In my dreams I laughed and danced to flute music as they pulled the dead baby from inside me. I woke up and wished I could sleep to dream those dreams again. I never asked whether it was a girl or a boy. After two days I went home. The months passed and I did not conceive again. I soaked bitter roots and cooked our rice in the water, my husband and I dipping our fingers into the pot to eat together. The months came and went. My breasts and my belly remained flat. At my husband’s urging I went back to the clinic, to see if the doctor had other medicine, stronger than ours.
I remember how I stood and waited in front of the wooden desk while the nurse searched through the drawers for my records. Ah, yes, she said presently, pulling a brown envelope from among many others. She bent her head to read what was written there.
‘Tubal ligation.’ I didn’t even know what the words meant.
‘Your tubes have been tied. So you won’t have any more children. It says here you have six already.’ She pointed at the words on the paper. Six! The way she said it sounded like an accusation.
While I listened to flute music in my dreams, while they pulled the dead baby out. This is what they had done to me.
Oh, I know what you would have done in my place. You would have talked about rights and consent: small words with big meanings. But I did not know how to think that way. I did not even insist she call the doctor for me. I asked no questions. I nodded as though I knew this already, accepting her words. I turned around and went home. Who was I to argue? In my mind I thought the doctor, whose qualifications hung on the wall behind polished glass, must have known better than me.
I told myself I still had three children. I had Okurgba, my youngest. And when I told my husband, no more children, I was thinking that perhaps then he might leave me alone.
And so my life continued. It was not the life I had chosen for myself, not the life that should have been mine. But I lived it anyway.
One day I saw the woman who had my life. She passed me, followed by a servant girl carrying a stack of differently coloured cloths. She did not recognise me. Why should she? She didn’t know I existed or that I had once been betrothed to her husband. I followed her to the tailor’s shop where I watched the owner jump up from her seat to greet her. I stood in the shadows of the entrance, next to a pile of offcuts. I bowed my head and pretended to search among the scraps. But I need not have worried, for nobody came to serve me.
I watched how they attended to her, flattering, praising her taste, holding samples of embroidery under her chin. She ordered maybe six or seven gowns, I never heard the cost discussed once.
Above me a shelf held stacks of coloured threads. Music from a plastic radio buzzed like a swarm of bees around my head. The sound of the treadles drummed in my ears. I wanted to knock the radio and spools from the shelf, upturn the Singer sewing machines, tear up the paper patterns. I wanted to run away as far as I could. But I did none of these things.
Instead I watched this woman through the half-light of the tailor’s shop. This woman living the life I should have lived. I knew I was no beauty. But I was prettier than this one. Maybe you wouldn’t believe it to look at me now? But then I possessed a complexion so fresh and smooth that even a fingerprint showed upon it. I had dimples high in my cheeks, and above my elbows, in the hollow of my back above each buttock. My waist was slim, my back curved just the right amount. By contrast this woman was as black and shapeless as a midday shadow.
On her way out she passed close by me. I turned away, but still I smelled her. Cloying and sickly. I almost choked on the odour. Vanilla.
You know what people here sometimes say, that death makes saints of us all. I was thinking about that only the other day. After my mother died suddenly all her co-wives who had thought of nothing but how to usurp her began to say what a sweet tempered person she was, how kind, how generous.
When somebody dies, look at how all the women go to sit for hours in the family’s front room, offering words of comfort when only the day before they bad-mouthed the lot of them. Look at the men giving money to the widows, even though they spent the last year trying to put this same man out of business. Today everybody will tell you what a good man your grandfather was. How wise, how honest. But there was a time when these people turned on us and drove us from our home. And now they pretend as if it never happened.
Of course nobody likes to speak of that time now. What’s past is past, they say. Too quickly. Wanting to shut you up. Well let them try now. Because now you are here, you want to know. And now I will tell you.
It was soon after I stopped working for the European, Mr Blue.
On that morning I woke up to the sound of singing. Not the joyful sound of a wedding party. No, something angry in the distance. I stepped out of the door of our house. All around me were people running, throwing sand on the cooking fires, slamming shutters. A child was standing by the well, wailing at all the uproar. A woman ran and grasped her by the arm, dragging her along the ground, causing the child to cry even louder. She pushed the child inside the door of her house and ran off in search of her other children.
The wind was blowing in great gusts that day. It raced through the village like an omen: whipping up whorls of red dust, scattering the grain drying in the sun, rolling balls of chicken feathers down the street.
Inside the big house Ya Namina was shouting orders to the servants. One of my small brothers stood at the open back door. My father pushed a box into his hands. The box was wrapped in tattered cloths, so I knew it must be very ancient. Out of the back of the house, I watched my brother dart into fields, his legs spinning like wheels. Then suddenly he tripped. I caught my breath as I watched him stumble for a few paces until he righted himself. My father looked around, saw me standing there.
‘Hawa, go with him. Help him! Run! Run!’
Out of the open door, through the banana groves, into the dappled shadows of the trees. I ran silently, not daring to shout to my brother. Just past the silk cotton tree, I caught him up. For a few seconds we ran abreast, like a pair of panicked animals. Then we turned off the path, out of sight, and dropped to the ground.
We waited. Catching our breath again. Then we climbed up to our old lookout at the top of the sapele tree from where we could see the houses. From there we watched the people marching through the village, up to our compound and the steps of my father’s house. The wind picked up their voices and threw them like echoes across the treetops. To this day I remember the words:
‘We have spoken. Who so denies us, he is lost.’
Then the singing turned into shouting, the shouting into a great howling. The wind joined in, shaking the branches of the tree, threatening to send us hurtling to the ground. We were frightened and slid back down the tree trunk to the forest floor.
Later in the day we waited with our backs against the tree. My brother complained he was hungry, but I did not have time for that kind of talk. I tol
d him to dig the crickets out of their holes in the earth. He wandered around scratching at the ground and came back with a bundle wrapped up in his shirt. But we were too afraid to light a fire to roast them and so we waited with hunger growing in our bellies until we ate them raw and fell asleep.
Sometime in the night I woke abruptly. Somebody close by. I held my breath. A pangolin was watching us from a short distance away, weaving her head from side to side. Her den must have been close by. I sat up, the pangolin backed off. I could hear the caw of night birds. The air carried the smell of night blooms and rotting leaves. Somewhere close by a pod fell off a tree and split open, scattering seeds with giant-sized sounds, causing me to start. The fear settled in my bowels. I stood up, walked some small distance, propelled into the darkness by a sudden urgency.
How I wished to be at home! Safely asleep on my bed. How long we were supposed to stay out there in the forest, I had no idea.
Without realising it I was heading in the direction of the houses. Suddenly I heard voices, fleeing footfalls in the darkness. I pressed my back against a tree. The blood rushed around my head. I stood still, listening to the thud of my own heart, like the beating of a thousand bats’ wings. I pushed the heel of my hand against my chest to still the sound.
Shapes. Shadows. They passed me so close I could have reached out my hand and touched them. Bodies gleaming in the moonlight. I turned and pressed my face against the tree. I stayed that way for I don’t know how long, feeling the smooth bark against my cheek, wishing it was my mother’s skin. I whispered her name. The wish turned into a dream. For a moment I was in her arms. Then just as quickly the dream lost its colour, and turned back into a wish. Try as I might to hold on to the comforting feeling, it slipped away. I was alone and afraid again.
The moon shone like a blind man’s eye. In the dim light I saw the form of a man, coming towards me through the trees. He drew close, saw me and stopped. We stood still, gazing at each other through the grey. As I looked at him I had a strange feeling, like a scent that carries the memory of a touch, or a taste that brings a glimpse of something past. I had seen this man before. I felt sure of it. I did not move. I stood there as fleeting images formed behind my eyes. I saw the bolted gates of the miners’ compound. The men standing silently beyond. The police. Twists of smoke coming out of the barrels of the guns. Red and pink stains blossoming like flowers on the wet ground. And as the memories formed and dissolved I saw him staring at me, making up his mind what to do.
You see, I believed this man was dead. The same man who even before that was once mixed up in some trouble with one of the younger wives.
So now I made up my mind that this was no mortal man but a falang, come back to settle old scores against the people who had murdered him. I didn’t try to run away. For some reason I felt no fear. I was certain the time had come to die. In the pale light I could just make out the mark on his lip, the stain like a splash. He stepped towards me. My legs went weak. I closed my eyelids to shut out the darkness crowding in. When next I opened them I was alone again in the forest.
The rest of the night I spent with my body wrapped around the box of sacred objects entrusted to my father. I slept with my cheek resting on the lid. Inside the box was the skull of the obai who went before. We grow up and we are told a chief never dies. Instead his spirit flies out of the old body and into the new one. The elders keep the head of the last chief to bury with the body of the next. So the line goes on unbroken.
We slept and woke up damp with fright and dew. And when we woke up the rule of the new chief was already over.
And afterwards we heard how the rioters sang the same song all over the land. In town the pink and anxious Assistant to District Commissioner Silk gave the order to fire upon a crowd gathered around his office. Some fell. Those who didn’t took off through the chiefdoms, marching upon the compounds and houses of the chiefs, lighting bonfires of paper money, throwing radios and refrigerators from the windows, chasing the chiefs’ wives into the banana groves.
For days the ash and soot floated down like black rain. And that awful smell. Years later, even to make a cup of coffee for the man I was married to made my stomach churn.
The colonials held a Commission of Inquiry and blamed the disturbances on the chiefs. So they curtailed the powers of some, and others they deposed. Nobody could understand how this could be, since a chief is a chief for ever. Others said it was right. And yet others asked who had given the chiefs such power they were able to rule in defiance of their people?
Of course, the pothos were no fools. They knew better than to stay too long afterwards. They packed their bags, gave us back our country and whoosh — like the wind they were gone.
I met Khalil under my father’s roof, where he had come to live with my family as a ward. Nearly ten years had passed since the rebellion against the chiefs. My father no longer attended court. He lived in his house in town. The day I first saw Khalil I arrived struggling with my son in my arms. Okurgba escaped and jumped in a puddle, scattering some ducklings. Khalil ran down the steps and caught him for me. After that I would see him often; sometimes as soon as I turned the corner and came into view of the house, Khalil would appear and walk alongside me.
Later people said things about me. How could I, a married woman? And him so much younger than me. Still a schoolboy. Well, that was true. Ah, but he had a way about him, I don’t know. He knew things. In many ways it was as if he was the older of the two of us.
You see, I didn’t know anybody who had been to school. Mariama, yes. She was sent to the missionaries because nobody knew what to do with her. Your Aunt Serah, well she was born later than me. By then things were different.
How could you possibly understand? You would jump on an aeroplane sooner than you would ride in a poda poda. I had never left my home. I had never even seen the sea.
Khalil described the oceans for me. Told me of lands covered in snow. Of red deserts where nothing existed but sand and rock. The sun was a great orb of burning gas, he said. The moon was the size of the earth and only looked small because it was many miles away. Even the stars, though they might look like holes in the sky, were really planets whose light reached us years after some of them had already died.
One day I came back from the market with a package of oxtail. I had left some at my own house — by that time I had a girl to help me with the cooking and the children. The remainder I brought with me.
Khalil teased me, saying oxtail was his favourite: ‘I hope there’s enough for me.’ Of course he was only a ward, he would have to wait until my father and others had eaten.
I smiled and spoke with the same laughing tone. I wagged my finger at him: ‘You wait until I count up what’s left,’ I said.
‘How many did you get?’
I told him thirty. But then I had left two each for everybody at home. I remembered then I had forgotten about the girl, doubtless she would want to eat.
Khalil stopped walking and asked: ‘So how many are left?’
I told him I would count them.
It’s so simple for you. Of course I could count. But to add, subtract, multiply. To play with numbers the way you juggle balls. How do you know how to do these things unless somebody shows you? Khalil was the one who taught me. At first I was slow, embarrassed by my ignorance. But he persisted. Every day we drew numbers in the dust, subtracting, adding, then multiplying, dividing: heaps of beans, grains of rice, bowls of oranges, even the stars in the sky. And by the time we had finished I counted the number of times I thought about him in the space of an hour, I multiplied that by the number of hours in the day. And I realised I had fallen in love.
Step by step I moved into my family home. I found reasons to visit, reasons to stay over, reasons not to go home. I sent trays of food over to my husband to keep him from complaining. But I could not stop the rumours from reaching him. And when he finally sat up and looked around him, he realised that I had left.
After the rebellion a change
had come over my father. Slowly at first. For days at a time he stayed shuttered up against the sun. In the darkness of his room his skin stretched until it was thin and dry as paper. The flesh moulded itself to his bones. His voice faded to a whisper.
When he had accepted my bride price my father knew he was marrying me to a man who was beneath me. The amount was so little. Like I was worthless, the last item left behind at an auction. And yet all the time I was growing up I had listened to the stories of Asana’s bride price, seen the listeners’ eyes grow as big as coins as the figure rolled out. She who hadn’t even held on to her man.
So one day I went to ask him to pay back this small amount of money, to free me from my marriage. My face burned as I stood there in that closed, dark room, listening to him tell me of the disgrace I was bringing upon the family. I remembered how it had been when I was a child and my mother made me sing for him. The terror I had of him then. Now I listened to my father talk to me as though I were that very child. I bowed my head, reached out and touched his feet.
But at the same time as I begged my father not to disown me, different thoughts began to enter my mind. I was thinking that my father was stuck with his head in the past. Oh, yes, perhaps he had been a big man, son of a chief’s daughter and a warrior, and all that. But that time was distant now. Peasants had set fire to his plantation. Dragged him from his house and set him on top of the rubbish heap, pelted him with jibes and taunts. Yes, these were the things that had happened. Never to be undone.
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