The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

by Lola Shoneyin

  I never came off the roller coaster. Instead, I opened my eyes to find Segun holding me down with all his body weight, his chest on top of mine. From the corner of my eye, I could see the midwife wiping down the steel beak-like instrument with cotton wool and bloodied water. Tears ran down my face and into my ears. My heart raced and I was unbearably thirsty.

  When I tried to sit up, I expected my arms to be buckled to the examining table but they were as they always were: free. There were drops of diluted blood everywhere. The nurse had stuffed a clump of cotton wool into my underwear; it looked like white pubic hair. Segun helped me into the back of the Honda his father had bought him for his twenty-first birthday. He propped my head up with the packet of sanitary towels we’d bought on our way to the nurse. “Stay down so no one sees you. I will drive to a quiet spot so you can rest for about an hour. There isn’t much time. Your mother will soon be back from work. Remember, I can only drop you at the junction; you will have to walk home by yourself.”

  AT THE DIAGNOSTIC LAB, the nurse deposited my blood into the labeled vials. Tears made the back of my eyes ache but I was determined to shed them in the safety of my bedroom. They escaped as soon as the sun warmed the top of my head. How could I hold it together when my destiny hung before me like the proverbial mangoes? “Hear me,” the king pronounced, “the flesh of these big yellow mangoes gives eternal life. But beware! The tree has roots of poison. Only the strong and the brave can eat the mangoes and live.” But could anyone boast of strength and bravery before they’d eaten the mangoes and lived?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  IYA FEMI

  YOUR FATHER AND YOUR mother are gone.” The man whose lips mouthed these words was my uncle, my father’s only sibling. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen. He had lived with us for as long as I could remember. When my father went into the deep forest to hunt bush meat, it was he who watched over me and my mother. My mother didn’t need watching over. Whenever my father stepped out of the house, she sat on the porch and wove baskets until he returned. Many said their dying together was God’s mercy.

  “Gone where?” I asked. My parents didn’t go anywhere without telling me. My tears demanded it.

  “They are dead.” My uncle shook me by the shoulders as if to ensure that the words he’d spoken sank into my belly. I fought off his fingers. I leaped into air, aiming for the wall with my forehead. It took three grown men to hold me down.

  Somebody must have put a curse on them. People in our village didn’t like to see others doing well. “Why else would a log slip from a lorry and crush them on a road they traveled every day?” This was the question I asked the perplexed mourners who came to pay their respects. My parents were good people, hard workers. Our house was built from concrete blocks; my father always said we deserved to live like royalty.

  They were buried on the day they died, the Muslim way. I was their only child but I was not allowed to see them. The men did their best to hide their corpses from me but I saw red streaks on the white cloths they were bound with. Blood leaked from their broken heads as they were lowered into the ground. Kai! What a terrible appetite this ground we tread has! It eats blood and bones heartily, no matter how good they are.

  “We have found work for you in Ibadan.” My uncle did not have the courage to say this to my face, so instead he sent the ugly witch he was courting. My mother despised her; she said the woman had the disease of the eye: everything she saw, she wanted.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay in Oke’gbo where my parents are buried. This is my home.”

  “Wipe your eyes,” she said, passing me a rag. “It has been a month since your parents died. This is not your home and it will never be. A girl cannot inherit her father’s house because it is everyone’s prayer that she will marry and make her husband’s home her own. This house and everything in it now belongs to your uncle. That is the way things are.”

  “Everything belongs to my uncle?” It was as if the witch had rammed a fist through my chest. If I had a knife at that moment, believe me, I would have sliced her belly wide open.

  “Yes, your uncle. What will you do with this house anyway? You cannot live here alone. Even your grandmother has said it is better for you to go.”

  She was lying. I’d seen my father’s mother on her way to the market. She was half-blind. From the way she was walking, gingerly greeting passersby, it was obvious she hadn’t been told of her son’s death. It would have killed her and another funeral would have been expensive.

  “So you and my uncle will live here and use all my father’s belongings?” My uncle had worn my father’s hat to the burial.

  “Go and pack. The people you will work for are coming to collect you this evening.”

  “I cannot believe my uncle would do this when he knows how much my father wanted me to go to school! He wanted me to be educated. Baba, can you hear me? What kind of misfortune is this that has befallen me?” I placed my hands on my head and invoked my father’s spirit.

  “Listen to the words coming from your mouth. Your parents have spoiled you. Maggots crawl beneath your skin. Your uncle has found you a household where they have promised to send you to school if you behave, yet all you can talk about is the misfortune that has befallen you. Many people who are older than you have not tasted the sweet life you have enjoyed since birth. Your parents should be ashamed!”

  I do not know when and how my teeth found her ear but they refused to unclench, even as blood dripped from her lobe into my mouth. My uncle heard the wailing from where he was hiding and ran to her rescue but I was knotted around her. The hand pestle my uncle used to knock my mouth open broke one of my front teeth. I didn’t care. What is half a tooth to half an ear? She would think twice before speaking ill of my parents again.

  When the woman who came to collect me arrived, they eagerly told her that I was an untamed animal. They told her to watch me lest my madness drive me to bite the bark off neighborhood trees.

  “There aren’t many trees where we live,” the woman said. “And if there were, she would be too busy sweeping the leaves under them.”

  As they drove me away, I glared at my uncle through the rear window and licked my lips. He should have known I would return one day, but that is the problem with evildoers. They forget that the world turns, like the people in it. I was indeed pampered but I was not spoiled. And although my mother washed all my clothes for me, there were no compromises when it came to cooking. She knocked me over the head with the wooden spoon if my amala was either too soft or too dense so I spent many nights nursing an aching forehead. It was at the Adeigbes’ household that I learned how soda bites the finger and hardens the palm.

  As soon as we got to Ibadan, the woman snatched my bag, pressed two check dresses into my hands and told me I was to call her Grandma. She said only her children called her Mummy and I was too lowly to emulate them. “Here,” she said, “the house girls wear uniforms.” She showed me a tiny space under the stairs and pointed to a mat that was wedged beneath three wooden planks. “This is where you will sleep. Let me warn you, I don’t want to see any signs that someone slept here when I come downstairs in the morning. I will burn anything that is out of place. If that means you’ll walk around naked, then so be it.”

  I served the Adeigbe family for fifteen years. I served Grandma and her husband; I served their children and then their children’s children. From the day I got there, I was a house girl and my status did not change. They pillaged the most fruitful years of my life, all the time treating me as if they’d found me in a pit latrine. Grandma slapped me if a drop of oil fell from the ladle to the cooker. If I didn’t answer the first time she yelled my name, she shaved every strand of hair on my head. If I ever overslept, she would cut me all over with a blade and rub chili powder into the wounds. Once, when she saw me speaking to the gateman, she stripped me naked, rubbed chili between my thighs and locked me out of the house for a whole day. She did not even remember that I was eighteen years
old with a chest full of breasts and thighs full of hair. All I could do was weep with shame.

  It was Tunde, Grandma’s first son, who first climbed between my legs. I was not allowed to retire for the night until everyone who lived in the household was within its walls, so I would doze on the stairs while I waited. On this particular night, he came in drunk as usual. He said he’d had a bad night and I should have mercy and let him fuck me. I didn’t scream like Grandma’s daughters did when they brought men home on hot afternoons; I lay down quietly and hid the pain beneath my skin. When he had finished, he embraced me and told me my body was worth paying for.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said as he washed himself in the kitchen sink. He emptied a handful of detergent onto his palm and scrubbed his penis with his fingertips. Then he patted his pubic hair with a dishcloth. “You’re not going to serve my family for the rest of your life, are you?”

  I remember this conversation because I was twenty-one years old at the time, yet it had never occurred to me that I could leave. Although the prospect of freedom excited me, the thought of escaping made my heart pound. In my childishness, I decided to give Grandma a chance to redeem herself, so I reminded her that I would like to go to school one day. She cursed me for my ingratitude and took away my mat for three days. The floor was so cold that I never mentioned it again. Although Tunde’s words often came to my mind, I tried to forget the possibility of a future, a marriage, a family or a home of my own. I became convinced that laundering other people’s clothes, cooking three separate dishes every mealtime and comforting babies (that weren’t mine) was my life. I was a fool to think Grandma would be interested in giving me the opportunity to improve my lot.

  It wasn’t until the day Grandma sent me to the market to buy two cans of sweet corn that the impulse to flee returned. Grandma had had me chopping, roasting and frying since three A.M. that morning. It was one of her grandsons’ birthdays and birthdays were a grand affair. I suffered from fatigue after every one. My limbs would ache and my head would boil for days and there were times when it took me a week to recover. I never let Grandma know this. If she saw me resting, she’d punish me.

  It was surprising that she even allowed me to go by myself because she preferred to do all her grocery shopping herself. I normally walked two steps behind and struggled with the carrier bags. And although it was her memory that had failed her the day before (she’d stupidly ticked sweet corn off her shopping list even though she hadn’t bought it), I was the one who was sent into the hot sun. She didn’t even permit her driver to take me; she said such luxuries would make me aspire to a status that was beyond me. I was on the verge of collapse when I got to the market. The top of my head was baking and I could feel the warm sand through the holes in my flip-flops.

  Anyway, there I was, propped up by one of the walls at Bodija market, when a man asked me if I knew Jesus. From the little time I’d spent in primary school when my parents were alive, I knew that Jesus belonged to the Christians. Since I wasn’t allowed to go to church with Grandma and her family, He was indeed a stranger, so I answered, “No.”

  The man shook his head, looked up to the skies and then at me.

  “I was born a Muslim.” I hadn’t asked for his sympathy.

  “Then let me buy you a Coke and tell you what happens to those who die without confessing Jesus as their Lord and Savior.” He had a Bible wedged in his armpit. His shirt was faded and his trousers were at least two inches short. He himself looked like he could do with Jesus’s blessings so I was suspicious of his eagerness to save me yet moved by his generosity. I drank my first full bottle of Coke in fourteen years and it bubbled in my stomach. Its sweetness spread to my feet and my fingertips. The preacher spoke of love and all its virtues but I just watched his mouth twitching from side to side. Perhaps he sensed that this idea of universal love was ridiculous to me or maybe I just wasn’t responding to his words the way he’d hoped, because his tone suddenly changed. It became firm and no-nonsense. His eyes bulged when he warned that I would go to hell if heaven rejected me.

  “But why would God reject me when I haven’t done anything wrong?” I thought perhaps I had fallen for the charms of a lunatic.

  “We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” he said.

  “But what about people who sin every day? What about the rich who take and destroy?” I was curious to see if his God would be partial to Grandma because she was wealthy.

  “Hellfire!”

  “Are you sure of this?”

  “Sister, all sinners will burn.” His eyes flared on the word “burn.”

  His intention was to put the fear of God in me, but instead the thought of Grandma burning excited me. In my mind’s eye, I saw images of hell: flames, melting faces, singed limbs. When he asked me to repeat the Sinner’s Prayer after him, the sound of Grandma’s wailing and gnashing of teeth drowned his voice. I imagined my uncle and his woman sizzling in a bonfire of my father’s possessions. That was a particularly exciting thought.

  “Congratulations!” he shouted. “You are now born again. Now you too must spread the gospel of good news. For saving another soul, God has just added another room to my heavenly mansion.” He drew a map of his church on the back of a tract and handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said as I walked away. I was glad he got something out of it too and tucked the paper into my bra.

  From that day, I prayed early every morning and late into the night. I created an altar beneath the stairs and laid the map of New Beginnings Church on it. A Jehovah’s Witness booklet with images of heaven on the front cover sat next to it. Whenever Grandma slapped me for being absentminded, it was comforting to remember that I would be welcomed into the new Eden while she was banished from the glorious gates and condemned to hell. Praise God!

  About two months after I received Jesus, Grandma scorched me with the iron because I’d burned a hole in one of her silk blouses. As I spread a film of Vaseline over the naked flesh, I decided that it was simply not enough to edify myself with thoughts of her body crackling in hell. Something more drastic needed to be done. For hours every night, I would chant: God, send Grandma and her family to hell but spare Tunde, her son. Tunde was still slipping money between the folds in my mat. I wasn’t sure if he was paying me for the sex we now had frequently or if he was just petrified that I would confess our trysts to his mother. I had no time for telling tales when there was so much praying to be done.

  After seven days of fervent prayers, Grandma slipped in the bathtub and broke her leg. My initial joy was shattered when I realized that she used her immobility to find me more work. She became an invalid: I had to bathe her and towel her dry as well as everything else. Was Jesus punishing me? Or was he pushing me to use the reins he’d handed me? I chose the latter and started stirring urine and then a few drops of toilet water into Grandma’s goblet. It wasn’t long before she was admitted into the hospital for terrible diarrhea. How weak are the stomachs of the wicked! All the time I lived there, I was only allowed to drink tap water. Grandma said it was wasteful for me to drink from the family supply that I boiled and filtered every morning.

  Since the day my uncle had sold me, this was the first time Grandma hadn’t been able to send me on errands. I soon began to believe that I too had dropped from between a woman’s legs! While her husband and children spent their days by her side in a private hospital, I wandered beyond our fence. There was a new house being built across the road and that is where I met Baba Segi. He was supplying the plumbing materials and he looked powerful yet kind in his yellow safety helmet. I offered him Grandma’s precious boiled water. He accepted it and thanked me. The next day he brought me a basket of oranges. It was Taju who delivered them. I didn’t waste time in telling Taju I was looking for a man to marry me. I was desperate; I didn’t want Grandma to come back and find me.

  “Baba Segi is the one who has enough money to marry many women,” Taju advised me. “The one I have c
omplains every day.”

  “Then make him marry me. Convince him and put me in your debt forever. I have no relatives so there is no one for him to pay homage to.”

  “Did you drop from the sky?”

  “Even farther up than the sky! Wait here and I will bring you something.” I divided the money I had stolen over the years into two and forced one half into Taju’s hand.

  I don’t know what he told Baba Segi but he did his job well. Less than a week later, Taju came alone in the pickup and parked across the road. It was midmorning and the house was empty so I had time to pack everything I wanted. Before I drove away with him, I rubbed shit into every pillow in the house except for Tunde’s. My journey with him hadn’t ended yet.

  THE FIRST THINGS THAT STRUCK ME about Baba Segi’s house were the soiled curtains. The layer of dust on them was so thick that Grandma would have sliced the veins in my neck if she ever came home to find hers looking like that. Except her imported voile curtains wouldn’t have been that way; the house girl would have washed them as soon as she felt the pinch of the red harmattan winds!

  The walls of Baba Segi’s house were stained too. Everything was grubby but the wives were the worst of all—the aging toad and the shameless goat! One ruled the pond, the other played with its shadow all day! And how they stank! If I’d really wanted to punish them, I would have turned round and returned to Grandma’s house immediately, but I decided to show mercy, especially after Baba Segi showed me my room. I was twenty-three yet I’d never had my own room before; I’d slept between my parents until the day they died. I looked at the double bed and tested the softness of the mattress with both palms. I would have been a fool not to lie on it, even if it was for just one night. I now know why rich people sleep longer than paupers. When I woke up the next morning, I felt like I was suspended in midair. It was as if I had reached my heaven. Not even God himself could have made me leave Baba Segi’s house after that.