by Sefi Atta
Sheri was her grandmother’s true daughter. I once tried to explain the Tragic Mulatto syndrome to her. She said it was nonsense. All sorts of people tried to find their identity. Why was the mulatto tragic? There was nothing tragic about her. At the Miss World contest, a girl from Zimbabwe told her the word “half-caste” was derogatory; “colored” was what Sheri would be called in her own country. Sheri said she didn’t care what anyone called her. In the Yoruba- English dictionary there was a whole sentence to describe her: “the child of a black person and white person,” and it suited her fine.
It wasn’t always that clear to her. She was eight years old when, fed up with a boy at school who laughed at her features, she ran home one afternoon and cut off her hair, trimmed her lashes to stubs and rubbed brown shoe polish on her face. Her grandmother Alhaja found her standing before the mirror and ordered her back to the boy. He was singing that Yoruba song, “I married a yellow girl” when Sheri grabbed him. “I beat him up,” she said. “Then I emptied his school bag on his head and pushed him into the gutter. I will never forget his name. Wasiu Shittu.”
Like a proper Lagos Princess, nobility surfaced once you got in her way. A fist fight? A person would have to kill Sheri first before she let it rest. Drop an insult? Yes, she would, as fast as she was provoked. Chop a person down in three glances heads, torso, and legs. In no time, if they turned their noses up at her. And whoever they were, she was about to give them their life history: “From where are you coming? From where?”
Still she wouldn’t eat pork. And every morning when she said her prayers with a scarf wrapped around her head, she had a humble expression. The humblest she would have all day. Haughty and bored it would be from then on. The kind of haughtiness that came from being a favored child and the kind of boredom that came from not having enough to do.
I avoided her brigadier altogether, catching only the smell of his cigars and finding it strangely seductive. I imagined him according to the stereotype: dressed in a long white tunic with a Mao-style collar, gold cufflinks, fat diamond watch on his wrist. His hands would slip in a handshake. His trousers would flap around his ankles. His feet would be small in his leather slippers. Absolutely no conversation. He would not be used to talking to women. Not that way.
But I dared not say a word, not even about his drinking and smoking as a strict Moslem. I was living in his apartment, the very place I’d urged Sheri to move out of. Whenever he was visiting, I would go swimming at Ikoyi Club, and she was pleased. “Forget that stupid artist,” she said.
I swam regularly. My body pressed on. Then it seemed that my mind, which had been lagging behind, soon began to say, “Wait for me. Wait for me.”
I was swimming one evening when a tall man with legs like an Olympic swimmer joined me in the club pool. He dived in and paced himself fast. He made me feel slow and clumsy. Once or twice I crossed him in the middle of the pool, but most times we were at opposite ends. Soon I paused to rest in the shallow end. He came to a stop and rose from the water like something aquatic. “Hello,” he said.
His smile was the color of ivory. One side tooth popped out a little.
“You too,” I said.
He splashed water over his chest. “Would you mind if I told you something?”
“I would,” I said.
He tucked his chin in. “Why are you being rude?”
“Listen, I come here to swim.”
“So do I,” he said. “All I wanted to say was that you have mucus.”
“What?”
“Mucus. Hanging out of your nose.”
He pointed.
My hand clamped over my nose as he hoisted himself out of the pool. I shrugged and continued to swim. Fool, I thought.
I was walking up the stairs, two evenings later, from the changing rooms to the pool shower, wearing my swimsuit. He was walking down the stairs from the pool bar to the same shower.
“Sorry,” I said, in embarrassment.
I was usually alone in the pool in the evenings. The children, mostly expatriates, were gone. There were married couples at the pool bar, having soft drinks. Most of the activity was in the main club house, where beer and spirits were served, or in the squash courts full of the regular players. I never expected to see him again. He gestured like a cattle herder, I thought, to move me along.
“At least say thank you,” he said, when I didn’t.
“Why,” I answered.
I stepped under the faucet with my backside to him, didn’t even care if he saw my stretch marks. He wasn’t perfect either. Good legs maybe, startling height, weakish chin, and his stomach could be tighter.
He made a sound, “hm,” as my father would, like a warning. Not as women did, stretching the sound and turning their mouths downward. That was the sound I made in response.
“Any time,” he said, as I walked away.
We swam as if we were each alone in the pool that evening.
Again I bumped into him. This time, in the main club house, after swimming another evening.
“Miss Rudeness,” he announced.
“I’m not rude,” I said.
He walked past and I turned on a whim.
“Excuse me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“My manners are mine,” I said. “You don’t have to remind me of them, or my mucus for that matter. It has nothing to do with you. And whenever you see me, try not to say anything, if you really want to avoid an insult.”
He smiled. “Let it go. Let it go.”
“What go?”
“Bitterness,” he said. “It eats you up.”
I looked him up and down. “I see your mouth is sharp.”
“So they tell me.”
“What do you know about me? You know nothing about me. All I’m saying is, stop passing comments whenever you see me.”
“Let it go.”
We were both smiling now, except he was making fun of me. There was no need to be angry with him, I thought. He was a big fool.
“What’s laughing you laugh?” I said.
He continued to smile and I wanted to shock him.
“Would you like to have a drink?” I asked.
He cupped his ear.
“I said would you like to have a drink?”
“I come here to swim,” he said.
“After you swim,” I said.
I pulled a face behind his back. I’m not afraid, I thought. Of any of you. If I want a drink, I will have one.
He joined me in the club house. We sat at the bar, while the bartender gave me disapproving looks.
Niyi Franco. He was a lawyer, though he was now a manager in an insurance company. His grandfather was a lawyer. His father and four brothers were lawyers. His mother retired from nursing the year he was born. He swam for Lagos State, and thought he would do so for the rest of his life. Then he cracked his head on a diving board, and his parents banned him from entering a pool for life.
“Africans can’t swim,” I joked.
“I’m a Brazilian descendant,” he said, lifting his chin.
“My friend,” I said. “You’re African.”
I told him about my recent experiences in court, saying little about my family. We walked to our cars together and it was hard to keep up with him because he took such long strides. This time we were talking about lawyer’s wigs and gowns. There was much debate in the press about changing the uniform to reflect our heritage.
“We’ll never change it,” he assured me.
“I hope we will,” I said. “Those wigs look terrible.”
“Thank God I don’t have to wear one.”
“When was the last time you did?” I asked.
“A year after I graduated,” he said.
“When did you graduate?”
“77.”
I stepped back. “No.”
“Yes,” he said.
That was the year of the Festival of Arts and Culture we called Festac. Stevie Wonder came to play at our national theat
er, Mariam Makeba, Osibisa, every African person in the world represented in Lagos. I thought I would die because I was in boarding school in England. We had color television for the first time in our country, and everyone was growing vegetables in their back yards in support of the government’s Operation Feed the Nation. My mother grew an okra patch, my father said the whole regime, its Operation Feed the Nation and Festival of Arts, was all nonsense.
“See my eyes,” he said. “I never lie. I have a six-year-old son.”
My mouth fell open. “You’re married?”
“Divorced,” he said.
“You’re married,” I said.
As far as I was concerned.
“Well,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”
“You too,” he said.
“I’d better get home.”
“I’ve enjoyed talking to you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, without thinking.
I almost curtseyed. How old was I in 1977? Seventeen.
I was determined to find out about his wife the next time we met. This time, we sat in the drinks lounge.
“You must miss your son,” I said, as we waited for our beers to arrive.
“Yes.”
“You get to spend time with him, I’m sure.”
“No,” he said.
“That is a pity,” I said.
I thought I should give up prying. It was not my business.
“He’s in England with his mother,” he said.
“Your wife’s in England?”
“She’s not my wife.”
Our waiter arrived with the beers. Niyi immediately reached for his wallet and paid. The waiter obscured his face for an instant.
“You drove the poor woman to England?” I said.
I reached for my bottle.
“She left,” he said. “I was twenty-three. Let me see... she was pregnant, still in medical school. I was working for my father. My parents are strict Catholics, but I didn’t get married because of that. My father was not an easy man to get along with. He kept threatening to sack me. One day I said, ‘I’ve had enough’ and walked out. That was the beginning of our troubles.
“I found a new job, but it was hard. She was working in the teaching hospital, we were living in Festac Village. My son is an asthmatic. One day her car was stolen, this, that, you can imagine. But she had this group of friends. Like rats those women, shoe-and-bag girls. They were always wearing something, traveling somewhere. She wanted all of that. One day her parents gave her a ticket and she took off. She went to England with my son. She didn’t even call until she found a job then she phoned crying and asking me to come and join her.”
“What did you say?”
“I had a job here. I wasn’t qualified over there. What was I going to do? Who would employ me? She was a doctor, and I would be what? All the time we were in Lagos, she was telling everybody I couldn’t provide. Now she wanted me to go to another country and take an odd job?”
“That would have been difficult.”
“I could have gone, for my son.”
“Would she have done the same for you?” I asked.
As he drank his beer, I watched him. Every movement he made was large.
“No,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “She knew exactly what she wanted. She always knew what she wanted. She wanted to get married. She wanted to travel. She wanted to work in England. She just wouldn’t admit it. Women do that, you know.”
“What?”
“Dribble past you and score. Phoosch! Mental football.”
I smiled. “You generalize.”
“You’re not like that?”
“I’m not perfect.”
“Tell me your faults,” he said, smiling.
“I trust too fast,” I said. “I don’t forgive easily. I’m terrible, terrible with that, and I’m scared of death.”
“Yours?”
“Mine, and others.”
“That’s not a fault.”
I pictured myself as a drunken woman, ramming my head into a wall, thinking I would eventually walk through. I was always hopeful about men.
“I’m hopeful,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said, taking another drink.
I glanced at his hands.
“Do you play the piano?”
He studied them, looking pleased. “How come you know?”
I brought my glass to my lips.
“How did you know?” he said. “You must be a mammy- water, hanging around pools, looking for men to entice and wagging that ass of yours.”
My beer went down the wrong way.
Sheri was sitting on her bed. I stood before her mirror, wearing work clothes: a black skirt suit that always needed to be coaxed down.
“You can’t go out like that,” she said.
I checked my lipstick. “Why not?”
“To the Bagatelle? People dress up to go there. Your suit looks un-ironed.”
“Who’s looking?”
She walked to her wardrobe and began to sift through.
“You’ll never find anything in there for me,” I said.
“Wait and see,” she said.
“I won’t like it, Sheri. I know I won’t, and I’m not going to change to please you.”
Always. She asked if I’d eaten. She fixed my hair as I walked out of her door, made me iron my clothes. I told her she had an old woman’s soul. She said that was why she was wiser. She pulled out a black gown with a large gold print. It was narrow and the neckline was a little wide, Senegalese style.
“Tell me you don’t like it,” she said.
I wore it. Niyi arrived early. I thought he would have made an effort, but he was wearing work clothes. Sheri was looking forward to meeting him, and he ended up not staying. We were running late, he claimed, then he later confessed he was hungry.
“How long has she been living here?” he asked as we drove out of the apartment complex.
“Two years,” I said.
“She’s come far,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
We approached the junction leading to the main road.
“Living here and no job,” he murmured.
I watched one car whiz past, then another. I was about to answer when he whistled. His gaze followed a red car which looked like a miniature space ship on the antiquated road. The car slowed by the gates of the large apartment complex across the road. “What?” I asked.
“The new BM,” he said.
“BM what?” I asked.
“W,” he explained.
He stared at the red brake lights. The gates opened and the car rolled in.
“Em, can we go, now?” I asked.
The main road was clear. He gave it a cursory look before coming out.
I sniffed. “So materialistic.”
He looked me up and down. “You don’t like good things, Madam Socialist?”
I turned my face to the window.
He patted my knee. “It is good to see that your politics doesn’t affect your dressing. You look nice in your black and gold. ”
I kept my face to the window. I did not want him to see me smile. How the man annoyed me.
But I knew he joked because he thought he was flawed. Not flawed the way most people were, secretly, for their own self-obsession, but flawed publicly, so that everyone could see: a wife who had walked out on him, a son he was not raising. Anywhere else in the world it would be hard to deal with, more so here. A woman was used to humiliation by the time she reached adulthood. She could wear it like a crown, tilt it for effect even, and dare anyone to question her. A man would wear his like an oversized cloak.
“Move your broken down car,” he shouted.
He drove terribly, as if we were rushing to the airport for the last flight out of Lagos, and accused other drivers of sleeping.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t crash us.”
The Bagatelle was one of the oldest and best run restaurants in Lagos, owned by a Leb
anese family. Throughout dinner I was laughing. Niyi ordered falafel as lafa-lafa. When it arrived, he said it would give him gas. I asked if any food pleased him. He said home cooking.
“I’m sorry, I don’t cook,” I said.
“Serious?”
He contemplated my confession for a moment then thumped the table.
“I’ll marry you, anyway.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said, holding my head. If I did, I would be in trouble.
“Eat up,” he said.
“I’m full,” I said.
“You’re wasting good food,” he said. “I thought you were a socialist.”
“You’ve been calling me names since you met me.”
“Eat up, o-girl.”
“Please, let me digest.”
How the man annoyed me. He had a wicked mouth, even to kiss.
I was surprised to find Sheri’s door ajar when I returned. I pushed it open and peered into the living room. There was a pot on her sofa, overturned. I slipped and realized there was okra on the floor.
“Sheri,” I said, placing my hand to my chest.
I walked around the sofa, found more stew on the floor. In the kitchen, I saw a bag of yam flour lying half empty on the floor.
“Sheri!” I said.
Her voice came from her room. I hurried there and found her lying on her bed.
“What happened?”