No Longer at Ease

by Chinua Achebe

  A letter came to me the other day.

  I said to Mosisi: “Read my letter for me.”

  Mosisi said to me: “I do not know how to read.”

  I went to Innocenti and asked him to read my letters.

  Innocenti said to me: “I do not know how to read.”

  I asked Simonu to read for me. Simonu said:

  “This is what the letter has asked me to tell you:

  He that has a brother must hold him to his heart,

  For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market,

  Neither is a brother bought with money.”

  Is everyone here?

  (Hele ee he ee he)

  Are you all here?

  (Hele ee he ee he)

  The letter said

  That money cannot buy a kinsman,

  (Hele ee he ee he)

  That he who has brothers

  Has more than riches can buy.

  (Hele ee he ee he)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Obi’s serious talks with his father began after the family had prayed and all but the two of them had gone to bed. The prayers had taken place in Mother’s room because she was again feeling very weak, and whenever she was unable to join the others in the parlor her husband conducted prayers in her room.

  The devil and his works featured prominently in that night’s prayers. Obi had a shrewd suspicion that his affair with Clara was one of the works. But it was only a suspicion; there was nothing yet to show that his parents had actually heard of it.

  Mr. Okonkwo’s easy capitulation in the afternoon on the matter of heathen singing was quite clearly a tactical move. He let the enemy gain ground in a minor skirmish while he prepared his forces for a great offensive.

  He said to Obi after prayers: “I know you must be tired after the great distance you have traveled. There is something important we must talk about, but it can wait until tomorrow, till you have had time to rest.”

  “We can talk now,” said Obi. “I am not too tired. We get used to driving long distances.”

  “Come to my room, then,” said his father, leading the way with the ancient hurricane lamp. There was a small table in the middle of the room. Obi remembered when it was bought. Carpenter Moses had built it and offered it to the church at harvest. It was put up for auction after the Harvest Service and sold. He could not now remember how much his father had paid for it, eleven and three-pence perhaps.

  “I don’t think there is kerosene in this lamp,” said his father, shaking the lamp near his ear. It sounded quite empty. He brought half a bottle of kerosene from his cupboard and poured a little into the lamp. His hands were no longer very steady and he spilt some of the kerosene. Obi did not offer to do it for him because he knew his father would never dream of letting children pour kerosene into his lamp; they would not know how to do it properly.

  “How were all our people in Lagos when you left them?” he asked. He sat on his wooden bed while Obi sat on a low stool facing him, drawing lines with his finger on the dusty top of the Harvest table.

  “Lagos is a very big place. You can travel the distance from here to Abame and still be in Lagos.”

  “So they said. But you have a meeting of Umuofia people?” It was half-question, half-statement.

  “Yes. We have a meeting. But it is only once a month.” And he added: “It is not always that one finds time to attend.” The fact was he had not attended since November.

  “True,” said his father. “But in a strange land one should always move near one’s kinsmen.” Obi was silent, signing his name in the dust on the table. “You wrote to me some time ago about a girl you had seen. How does the matter stand now?”

  “That is one reason why I came. I want us to go and meet her people and start negotiations. I have no money now, but at least we can begin to talk.” Obi had decided that it would be fatal to sound apologetic or hesitant.

  “Yes,” said his father. “That is the best way.” He thought a little and again said yes, it was the best way. Then a new thought seemed to occur to him. “Do we know who this girl is and where she comes from?” Obi hesitated just enough for his father to ask the question again in a different way. “What is her name?”

  “She is the daughter of Okeke, a native of Mbaino.”

  “Which Okeke? I know about three. One is a retired teacher, but it would not be that one.”

  “That is the one,” said Obi.

  “Josiah Okeke?”

  Obi said, yes, that was his name.

  His father laughed. It was the kind of laughter one sometimes heard from a masked ancestral spirit. He would salute you by name and ask you if you knew who he was. You would reply with one hand humbly touching the ground that you did not, that he was beyond human knowledge. Then he might laugh as if through a throat of metal. And the meaning of that laughter was clear: “I did not really think you would know, you miserable human worm!”

  Obi’s father’s laughter vanished as it had come—without warning, leaving no footprints.

  “You cannot marry the girl,” he said quite simply.

  “Eh?”

  “I said you cannot marry the girl.”

  “But why, Father?”

  “Why? I shall tell you why. But first tell me this. Did you find out or try to find out anything about this girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “That they are osu.”

  “You mean to tell me that you knew, and you ask me why?”

  “I don’t think it matters. We are Christians.” This had some effect, nothing startling though. Only a little pause and a slightly softer tone.

  “We are Christians,” he said. “But that is no reason to marry an osu.”

  “The Bible says that in Christ there are no bond or free.”

  “My son,” said Okonkwo, “I understand what you say. But this thing is deeper than you think.”

  “What is this thing? Our fathers in their darkness and ignorance called an innocent man osu, a thing given to idols, and thereafter he became an outcast, and his children, and his children’s children forever. But have we not seen the light of the Gospel?” Obi used the very words that his father might have used in talking to his heathen kinsmen.

  There was a long silence. The lamp was now burning too brightly. Obi’s father turned down the wick a little and then resumed his silence. After what seemed ages he said: “I know Josiah Okeke very well.” He was looking steadily in front of him. His voice sounded tired. “I know him and I know his wife. He is a good man and a great Christian. But he is osu. Naaman, captain of the host of Syria, was a great man and honorable, he was also a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.” He paused so that this great and felicitous analogy might sink in with all its heavy and dreadful weight.

  “Osu is like leprosy in the minds of our people. I beg of you, my son, not to bring the mark of shame and of leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generations will curse your memory. It is not for myself I speak, my days are few. You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? Think of that, my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters.”

  “But all that is going to change. In ten years things will be quite different to what they are now.”

  The old man shook his head sadly but said no more. Obi repeated his points again. What made an osu different from other men and women? Nothing but the ignorance of their forefathers. Why should they, who had seen the light of the Gospel, remain in that ignorance?

  He slept very little that night. His father had not appeared as difficult as he had expected. He had not been won over yet, but he had clearly weakened. Obi felt strangely happy and excited. He had not been through anything quite like this before. He was used to speaking to his mother like an equal, even from his childhood, but his father had always been different. He was not exactl
y remote from his family, but there was something about him that made one think of the patriarchs, those giants hewn from granite. Obi’s strange happiness sprang not only from the little ground he had won in the argument, but from the direct human contact he had made with his father for the first time in his twenty-six years.

  As soon as he woke up in the morning he went to see his mother. It was six o’clock by his watch, but still very dark. He groped his way to her room. She was awake, for she asked who it was as soon as he entered the room. He went and sat on her bed and felt her temperature with his palm. She had not slept much on account of the pain in her stomach. She said she had now lost faith in the European medicine and would like to try a native doctor.

  At that moment Obi’s father rang his little bell to summon the family to morning prayers. He was surprised when he came in with the lamp and saw Obi already there. Eunice came in wrapped up in her loincloth. She was the last of the children and the only one at home. That was what the world had come to. Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one’s hands with spittle.

  Behind Eunice came Joy and Mercy, distant relations who had been sent by their parents to be trained in housekeeping by Mrs. Okonkwo.

  Afterwards, when they were alone again, she listened silently and patiently to the end. Then she raised herself up and said: “I dreamt a bad dream, a very bad dream one night. I was lying on a bed spread with white cloth and I felt something creepy against my skin. I looked down on the bed and found that a swarm of white termites had eaten it up, and the mat and the white cloth. Yes, termites had eaten up the bed right under me.”

  A strange feeling like cold dew descended on Obi’s head.

  “I did not tell anybody about that dream in the morning. I carried it in my heart wondering what it was. I took down my Bible and read the portion for the day. It gave me some strength, but my heart was still not at rest. In the afternoon your father came in with a letter from Joseph to tell us that you were going to marry an osu. I saw the meaning of my death in the dream. Then I told your father about it.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “I have nothing to tell you in this matter except one thing. If you want to marry this girl, you must wait until I am no more. If God hears my prayers, you will not wait long.” She stopped again. Obi was terrified by the change that had come over her. She looked strange as if she had suddenly gone off her head.

  “Mother!” he called, as if she was going away. She held up her hand for silence.

  “But if you do the thing while I am alive, you will have my blood on your head, because I shall kill myself.” She sank down completely exhausted.

  Obi kept to his room throughout that day. Occasionally he fell asleep for a few minutes. Then he would be woken up by the voices of neighbors and acquaintances who came to see him. But he refused to see anybody. He told Eunice to say that he was unwell from long traveling. He knew that it was a particularly bad excuse. If he was unwell, then surely that was all the more reason why he should be seen. Anyway, he refused to be seen, and the neighbors and acquaintances felt wounded. Some of them spoke their mind there and then, others managed to sound as if nothing had happened. One old woman even prescribed a cure for the illness, even though she had not seen the patient. Long journeys, she said, were very troublesome. The thing to do was to take strong purgative medicine to wash out all the odds and ends in the belly.

  Obi did not appear for evening prayers. He heard his father’s voice as if from a great distance, going on for a very long time. Whenever it appeared to have finished, his voice rose again. At last Obi heard several voices saying the Lord’s Prayer. But everything sounded far away, as voices and the cries of insects sound to a man in a fever.

  His father came into his room with his hurricane lamp and asked how he felt. Then he sat down on the only chair in the room, took up his lamp again and shook it for kerosene. It sounded satisfactory and he turned the wick down, until the flame was practically swallowed up in the lamp’s belly. Obi lay perfectly still on his back, looking up at the bamboo ceiling, the way he had been told as a child not to sleep. For it was said if he slept on his back and a spider crossed the ceiling above him he would have bad dreams.

  He was amazed at the irrelevant thoughts that passed through his mind at this the greatest crisis in his life. He waited for his father to speak that he might put up another fight to justify himself. His mind was troubled not only by what had happened but also by the discovery that there was nothing in him with which to challenge it honestly. All day he had striven to rouse his anger and his conviction, but he was honest enough with himself to realize that the response he got, no matter how violent it sometimes appeared, was not genuine. It came from the periphery, and not the center, like the jerk in the leg of a dead frog when a current is applied to it. But he could not accept the present state of his mind as final, so he searched desperately for something that would trigger off the inevitable reaction. Perhaps another argument with his father, more violent than the first; for it was true what the Ibos say, that when a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight. He had discovered he could beat his father.

  But Obi’s father sat in silence, declining to fight. Obi turned on his side and drew a deep breath. But still his father said nothing.

  “I shall return to Lagos the day after tomorrow,” Obi said finally.

  “Did you not say you had a week to spend with us?”

  “Yes, but I think it will be better if I return earlier.”

  After this there was another long silence. Then his father spoke, but not about the thing that was on their minds. He began slowly and quietly, so quietly that his words were barely audible. It seemed as if he was not really speaking to Obi. His face was turned sideways so that Obi saw it in vague profile.

  “I was no more than a boy when I left my father’s house and went with the missionaries. He placed a curse on me. I was not there but my brothers told me it was true. When a man curses his own child it is a terrible thing. And I was his first son.”

  Obi had never heard about the curse. In broad daylight and in happier circumstances he would not have attached any importance to it. But that night he felt strangely moved with pity for his father.

  “When they brought me word that he had hanged himself I told them that those who live by the sword must perish by the sword. Mr. Braddeley, the white man who was our teacher, said it was not the right thing to say and told me to go home for the burial. I refused to go. Mr. Braddeley thought I spoke about the white man’s messenger whom my father killed. He did not know I spoke about Ikemefuna, with whom I grew up in my mother’s hut until the day came when my father killed him with his own hands.” He paused to collect his thoughts, turned in his chair, and faced the bed on which Obi lay. “I tell you all this so that you may know what it was in those days to become a Christian. I left my father’s house, and he placed a curse on me. I went through fire to become a Christian. Because I suffered I understand Christianity—more than you will ever do.” He stopped rather abruptly. Obi thought it was a pause, but he had finished.

  Obi knew the sad story of Ikemefuna who was given to Umuofia by her neighbors in appeasement. Obi’s father and Ikemefuna became inseparable. But one day the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves decreed that the boy should be killed. Obi’s grandfather loved the boy. But when the moment came it was his matchet that cut him down. Even in those days some elders said it was a great wrong that a man should raise his hands against a child that called him father.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Obi did the 500-odd miles between Umuofia and Lagos in a kind of daze. He had not even stopped for lunch at Akure, which was the normal halfway house for travelers from Eastern Nigeria to Lagos, but had driven numbly, mile after mile, from morning till evening. Only once did the journey come alive, just before Ibadan. He had taken a sharp corner at speed and come face to face
with two mammy-wagons, one attempting to overtake the other. Less than half a second lay between Obi and a total smash. In that half-second he swerved his car into the bush on the left.

  One of the lorries stopped, but the other went on its way. The driver and passengers of the good lorry rushed to see what had happened to him. He himself did not know yet whether anything had happened to him. They helped him push his car out, much to the joy of the women passengers who were already crying and holding their breasts. It was only after Obi had been pushed back to the road that he began to tremble.

  “You very lucky-o,” said the driver and his passengers, some in English and others in Yoruba. “Dese reckless drivers,” he said shaking his head sadly. “Olorun!” He left the matter in the hands of God. “But you lucky-o as no big tree de for dis side of road. When you reach home make you tank your God.”

  Obi examined his car and found no damage except one or two little dents.

  “Na Lagos you de go?” asked the driver. Obi nodded, still unable to talk.

  “Make you take am jeje. Too much devil de for dis road. If you see one accident way we see for Abeokuta side—Olorun!” The women talked excitedly, with their arms folded across their breasts, gazing at Obi as if he was a miracle. One of them repeated in broken English that Obi must thank God. A man agreed with her. “Na only by God of power na him make you still de talk.” Actually Obi wasn’t talking, but the point was cogent nonetheless.

  “Dese drivers! Na waya for dem.”

  “No be all drivers de reckless,” said the good driver. “Dat one na foolish somebody. I give am signal make him no overtake but he just come fiam.” The last word, combined with a certain movement of the arm meant excessive speed.

  The rest of the journey had passed without incident. It was getting dark when Obi arrived in Lagos. The big signboard which welcomes motorists to the federal territory of Lagos woke in him a feeling of panic. During the last night he spent at home he had worked out how he was going to tell Clara. He would not go to his flat first and then return to tell her. It would be better to stop on his way and take her with him. But when he got to Yaba where she lived he decided that it was better to get home first and then return. So he passed.