I looked at Mama and said, “Mama, the Bible is full of stories. Maybe they’re all just allegories of something else.”
“Hush,” Mama said. “The Bible is the Bible and not to be questioned. What we read in it is what we are to take out of it.”
Earlier, Mama had risen mid-lesson to fetch us glasses of water. The glasses were now on the table, one for me and the other for her. We had not yet touched them.
I opened my mouth again to ask her if she knew what an allegory was. But this time she must have seen the moment when my mouth opened. She reached out to the table, shifted one of the glasses to me. “Here,” she said. “Drink some water.”
It occurred to me that I was indeed thirsty. I picked up the water and drank.
She watched me drink. When I was done, she said, “Good. We have no time to stop. We must continue. Osiso-osiso.” She took a hurried sip out of her glass, turned the pages of her Bible, and continued to read.
18
BIBLE STORIES AND thoughts of their potential as allegories were beginning to invade my mind. One night I lay on my bed, alone in my room, and thought about everything. If my mind were one of those old-fashioned scales, the scales of justice, with one metal pan measuring right and the other wrong, both sides would have been dead even. It was turning out that all that studying was not actually doing any good; if anything, it was making it a case between what I felt in my heart and what Mama and the grammar school teacher felt. The Bible was beginning to feel almost negligible, as it was seeming to me more and more impossible to know exactly what God could really have meant.
But I wanted to know. I rose from my bed and knelt by its edge, because it also seemed to me, rather suddenly, that maybe I could arrive at the answers if I tried again to pray to God on my own. Perhaps God would speak to me. Perhaps He would allow His voice to echo in me, providing me with the answers.
I had just come out of another one of my studies with Mama. My headscarf, which I always wore during the sessions, had come completely undone by now, and my braids hung loose, aimless around my shoulders. I was in the middle of gathering the braids together, of tying the scarf around them, when my mind circled back to Adam and Eve.
The thought occurred to me: Yes, it had been Adam and Eve. But so what if it was only the story of Adam and Eve that we got in the Bible? Why did that have to exclude the possibility of a certain Adam and Adam or a certain Eve and Eve? Just because the story happened to focus on a certain Adam and Eve did not mean that all other possibilities were forbidden. Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events, one specific history, why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads, all other histories? Woman was created for man, yes. But why did that mean that woman could not also have been created for another woman? Or man for another man? Infinite possibilities, and each one of them perfectly viable.
I wondered about the Bible as a whole. Maybe the entire thing was just a history of a certain culture, specific to that particular time and place, which made it hard for us now to understand, and which maybe even made it not applicable for us today. Like Exodus. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk. Deuteronomy said it too. But what did it mean? What did it mean back then? Was the boiling of the young goat in its mother’s milk a metaphor for insensitivity, for coldness of heart? Or did it refer to some ancient ritual that nobody performed anymore? But still, there it was in the Bible, open to whatever meaning people decided to give to it.
Also, what if Adam and Eve were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside of yourself? What if that was all it was? And why not? By now I knew enough that there were at least a few allegories in the Bible—those ones that were explicitly identified as such. So why should other stories in the Bible, like the story of Adam and Eve, not be conducive to allegorical treatment as well? After all, if it were to be taken so literally, whom, then, did Cain marry, if only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were in existence at the time? If it were to be read literally, whom, then, was God warning against taking vengeance on Cain? Who else would have been on earth to warn save Adam and Eve, Cain’s own parents, who, from all signs, had no intention of killing their son? Surely there must have been other sets of mankind, other possibilities of human existence, Adam and Eve being only one instance, a symbolic representation of them all.
I was excited by my thoughts. From the time our Bible studies began, I’d had the feeling of a person wandering lost and aimless and thirsty in the desert. But now I had stumbled upon a tap of water. The joy of my discovery washed over me. My first instinct was to go to Mama and present my case to her. It might result in a fit of argument, but she needed to know that there was more to the Bible than her interpretation of it. I ran from the side of my bed toward the door.
I had just reached the door when I realized I’d be better off not trying to present these theories to Mama. What good would arguing over it do? She might decide that I was being insubordinate to her and to God, and then maybe she would increase the lessons to two times a day.
I stood at my door for a moment, then turned and headed back to my bed.
19
WE HAD ARRIVED at the end of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi. Mama had just finished with the closing prayer. She was leaning on the center table, her elbows crossed above it. She was wearing an ugly expression on her face, like a frown, as if the sun, through the open panels of the louver windows, had somehow descended from the sky and was attacking her.
She looked away from me, all the while fiddling with the corners of her Bible. Finally she turned back to me and spoke. Her voice was a whisper, very calm. She said, “Do you still think of her?”
The question came as a surprise. I lowered my head, thinking of ways in which I could pretend not to have heard. But Mama would not let me pretend. She asked it again, and in more detail: “Do you still think of her in that way?”
The answer was simple: of course I still thought of Amina. And, yes, in that way. How could I force away memories of a person with whom I’d shared all that time? There were nights when I dreamed of her, dreams so vivid that when I woke it seemed that the waking was the dream, and the dream, my reality: Amina running errands with me, washing clothes and hanging them to dry, chopping wood, coming along with me to fetch kerosene.
Amina and I bathing together out by the tap, both of us looking into each other’s faces. Amina and I on the mattress we shared, our warm breaths intermingling in the small space between.
I did not have the presence of mind to say anything but the truth. I looked Mama in the eyes and nodded. “Yes, I still think of her,” I said. And, “Yes, I still think of her in that way.”
Suddenly Mama was rising from the floor, flailing her hands in the air, shouting about prayer and forgiveness. She pulled me up by the collar of my dress.
She screamed, “Get on your knees now! I say, get on your knees!”
I got on my knees as she demanded, but I remained silent, unable to speak. My mind was too busy for words—too busy retracing steps and settling on and mulling over the moment that I had made the gaffe. I stewed over my foolishness, over why I had not been more clever—far less forthcoming—about the answer that I had given.
“Pray!” she screamed. “You must ask God for the forgiveness of all your sins, but especially for that one particular sin in you. Did I not just tell you to pray? Why do I not see your lips moving? Why do I not hear any sound coming out of your mouth? Pray, I say! No child of mine will carry those sick, sick desires. The mere existence of them is a terrible disrespect to God and to me!”
She continued to scream in that fashion, and all the while I could only get myself to look wide-eyed at her. Finally I made to rise up, but she shouted at me to kneel back down. “Kneel!” she screamed, panting as if out of breath.
I did as I was told.
She placed her hands on
my head, put pressure on it so that I turned my face downward toward the center table.
“Only your own prayer will save you now. I have prayed all I can for you. Now you must pray for yourself! Only God can save you!”
I brought my hands to my face, shutting my eyes. I remained in that pose, still lost in my thoughts, still wishing that there were a way that I could go back in time and take back the answer that had led to this blowup.
“Pray!” she cried.
I could have prayed at this point. I did want to pray, even, if prayer would be what would calm things down. But my mind could not think up the words to begin. All of her screaming, all of her orders, were instead replaying themselves inside my head.
Kneel!
Pray!
Sinful!
Terrible disrespect!
Only God can save you!
It took me a while to register it when I was no longer hearing her voice. Only then did I open my eyes. Mama was nowhere to be seen.
I stayed kneeling for some time. I expected that she would soon return, but minutes passed, and when something like half an hour passed, I stood up, walked out the front door, across the veranda, around the house, and back into the kitchen through the back door. No sign of Mama.
I walked the path that led to the shop. The gate of the store was fastened with a metal chain. I knew that Mama could not be there.
I returned to the bungalow. I sat back on the floor where she had left me and waited.
Something like an hour went by.
The rattling came from the direction of the front door. The jingling of keys, the turning of the knob, smacks and whacks, objects bumping into the wall.
Mama entered with a decanter made of clay in her hand. It was a reddish flask with a dull finish, hand-painted in such a way that the red coloring appeared to drip in spots, something like trickling blood.
She approached until she towered above me. She got down on her knees. A scent of incense floated out of her. Her voice was weak, even a little apologetic, as she said: “I’ve been thinking. It’s not you.”
My head snapped up in her direction.
She continued. “No, it’s not you at all. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s the devil causing you to be this way.”
She placed the items in her hand on the floor by the table.
“Ngwa, get down on your knees,” she said in a far more composed manner than earlier.
I got down on my knees.
“Lower your head and close your eyes,” she said, still calmly.
I lowered my head, and I closed my eyes.
She placed her open hands on my head.
“In the name of God the Almighty, I order you to come out of her,” she said. Her voice was progressively louder each time she repeated it, but still controlled: “In the name of the Almighty God, I order you to leave my child alone.”
I felt droplets of liquid on my neck and a little on my face.
Her voice came out piercing, almost like a wail, causing shivers down my back. “Lagha chi azu! Lagha chi azu!” she cried.
The droplets continued to wet the skin on my neck and face and even my arms. I felt lightheaded, as if the blood had drained out of me. She was speaking to the devil, crying for him to turn back and leave me alone. “I order you to leave. I order you to leave her alone. Lagha chi azu! Lagha chi azu! Asi m gi, Lagha chi azu!”
Finally she let out a lengthy sigh of exhaustion. Everything grew quiet. I no longer felt the droplets on me. I opened my eyes slowly. Mama was sitting on the floor by my side, her face tear-stained. Her hands dangled aimlessly at her sides. The decanter lay nearby, in the little space between her one hand and the couch.
“It’s my fault,” she said, weakly now. Her throat was hoarse.
I moved closer to her, leaned my head against her shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Mama.”
We stayed quiet.
“It’s my fault,” she repeated in a thin voice.
“No, Mama. It’s not anybody’s fault.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course it’s my fault.” She went on to recount that day out on the veranda when I begged to follow her to Aba. Maybe she should have allowed me to go with her, she said. What kind of mother sent her daughter off to be a housegirl for someone else, and for all that time? And beyond that, to send off a child who had just seen her father’s corpse lying in all that blood. To send off a child under those circumstances when she should have done anything to keep her close.
Up to this moment, I had still been holding a grudge against Mama for abandoning me at the grammar school teacher’s. But now, hearing how much she herself had been thinking about it, how much she was still tormenting herself over it, all my grudge melted away. “Mama,” I said, “you’re not the only person who sent your daughter out to be a housegirl.” I knew of other families who had also kept housegirls. The girls’ parents must have been the ones who sent them to work in that way. I said, “You’re not the only one. There are many others too.”
She nodded. “It was for your own good,” she said softly.
I nodded.
“For your safety, for your well-being.”
I nodded again.
“He and his wife were kind to you the entire time?”
“Yes, Mama. They were nothing but kind to me.”
“You know, some people leave just to have the benefit of coming back home.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said.
She placed her palms on my cheeks, held my face tightly. Her hands were wet. The air was stuffy, thick. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “There’s no sin so bad that it can’t be forgiven, no wrongdoing so terrible that it can’t be repented of. You will repent and you will be forgiven by the glory and the power of God.”
There was silence.
She said, “You will be cured by the glory and power of God.”
I remained silent.
“Say it!”
“I will be cured by the glory and power of God.”
She took the decanter from where it was sitting, tilted it until more water poured into her cupped hand. She sprinkled the water over my head.
“Amen,” she said.
“Amen,” I replied.
We moved on to the New Testament and made our way quickly to Revelation. Six months had passed since our studies began. It was approaching the time for me to start secondary school.
The last day of our Bible study, Mama called me to the parlor, and I appeared to find her holding a list, handwritten by her on posterboard. It was a summary—and a reminder—of what she decided were the important points, the highlights from the Old and the New Testaments. She stood in the front area of the parlor and asked me to sit on the couch. She began to read like a schoolteacher lecturing a class:
LEVITICUS 18:22
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
LEVITICUS 19:19
Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee.
LEVITICUS 20:13
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
MARK 10:6–9
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
ROMANS 1:26–32
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as
they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
1 CORINTHIANS 6:9–11
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
1 CORINTHIANS 7:2
Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.
1 TIMOTHY 1:10–11
For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for men-stealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.
Under the Udala Trees Page 8