On the day I left, a cold harmattan morning in January, Nnabuzo was the only one who came to say goodbye. I dressed in the dark, half-listening to my half-sister, Nkemdilim, as she slept on the other side of the bed, sucking her tongue noisily as she was wont to do, the sound going thu thu thu rhythmically.
When I stepped out, I shivered from the cold. Nnabuzo took my hand and drew me to him. I hugged him tightly. He put a few naira notes in my hands. I curled my fingers closely to hide the money from Mama Nkemdilim, who would snatch it away if she had any idea.
‘Ezechitoke will take care of you,’ he said, referring to the God of all the earth. ‘Remember your father. Remember where you come from. We do not steal. We do not lie, nor do we cheat. We are content with what we have, be it big or small. Do not shame us.’ I nodded solemnly. Later, I would remember hugging Nnabuzo, holding on tight, memorising his thin frame and the tobacco-snuff smell of him, before Mama Nkemdilim pulled me away, saying that we had a long way to go to get to the bus. It was the last time I ever saw him.
Looking back at him as we left in the dark that day, the first tears of uncertainty had run down my cheeks, leaving white marks that the large-hipped woman beside me in the bus later wiped off with her fingers, moistened with spit. In the two years that had gone by since Papa’s death, Uncle Nnabuzo had tried his best to play the role of father to me. It was he who told me stories of my father and my mother, stories of my birth, stories he said I must not forget because my father would want me to remember. He was the one who told me how Papa, his elder and only brother, had come to name me ‘Nwabulu’ after my mother died while pushing me out into the world.
A child was still profitable, Nnabuzo said he told his brother, who was beside himself with grief at the death of the wife he loved deeply. Even if her mother had died pushing her out into the world, a child was still gain – the supreme prize. Why did men marry and procreate? To have children. Why did a father toil from sunup till sundown? For children. Why did a woman marry? To bear children. Why did she stay even if her husband was lazy, or a wife-beater? For the children.
So, my father, exhausted from grief, unanticipated burial expenses, and unforeseen single fatherhood, chose the name from his brother’s words, Nwabulu. And I was truly gain, my uncle told me, a benefit to the world, bearing my mother’s beauty – that beauty that had made my father swim seven seas, climb seven mountains, fight off seven monsters in seven evil forests to marry her.
My father’s dearest wish was that I would go to school and perhaps become a nurse or teacher. Some of the nurses he saw during the war had been sent by God, Ezechitoke himself, he told me. Teaching was good too, he said. As soon as I was old enough, he put me in the village school. Every morning, he would wake me up and we would walk to the school, one of the few houses in the village built with cement and a good roof. Every evening, he would ask what I had learnt that day. And I would recite the ABCs and sing ‘A is for apple, B is for ball, C is for cat …’ to him. He would nod and smile happily.
He would take me to the river to swim sometimes. It was our special thing. There, he would become the man my mother married – a light would come into his eyes, and his slightly sunken cheeks would rise into a smile. There, he would show me the spot where he first saw my mother. She had been swimming with her friends. He never failed to say that she rose up like Mammy Water, a mermaid, beautiful like no woman he had ever seen before, enebe eje olu, a woman you could admire all day, for whom you could miss going to work just to gaze at her. He always added that I looked very much like her, and that I would be just as beautiful when I grew up. In these times, it seemed to me that my mother came to the stream too and we were a family again. Until Mama Nkemdilim came along.
People would often tell my father that he needed a new wife, a woman who would be a mother to me and give him a son. One day, he listened to them and brought Mama Nkemdilim home. From that day, the peace and joy of our home moved somewhere else; peace and joy could not stay in the same room as Mama Nkemdilim’s jealousy. And, after she had a son, her feet became firm on the soil of our home, and her evil began to grow.
I was eight when my father died. He had not been sick a long time, just a few weeks. He had not even seemed seriously ill: a fever and a cough. Not ill enough to die. Nnabuzo was sure that he had been poisoned by enemies of our family. Mama Nkemdilim, with the same degree of certitude, knew that I was the one who had killed him.
With his death came changes. Some things stopped immediately. Like school. Mama Nkemdilim did not see the point when she herself had not gone to school and had still been able to marry a good man. She had not gone to school and yet knew how to do all that a woman of Nwokenta could do – clean, cook, fetch firewood, make a fire, make palm oil, farm, buy, sell, and bear children.
Other changes took a little more time. Like going to swim at Amata. More than school even, it was being unable to swim in the river that reminded me that, when one’s father dies, things change. Things that told me that love was not just food and shelter.
Mama Nkemdilim gave me a little food and shelter. In the morning, my broom went up and down our compound, creating neat lines on the red earth while Mama Nkemdilim’s children slept. My head bore pots of water from the stream. Then I warmed last night’s soup over the firewood I had fetched the day before. I went with her to the farm and we worked until she was tired or the children began to scream from the heat of the sun. I could do everything – peel egwusi, pound palm nuts for oil, fry garri. She made delicious, moist, palm-oil-reddened okpa and I sold them at Eke Nwokenta. Sometimes, when I had sold the okpa fast, I would stay and play oga with some of my friends at the market. Mama Nkemdilim did not like this, and if she found out, she sometimes made me go without food.
In the beginning, after my father died, I dreamt about him often. He came to me and took me to our river. But when the chores began to grow like storeyed buildings, one on top of the other, I would sleep as soon as my head touched my mat and stay dead to the world until Mama Nkemdilim shook me awake, calling me Amosu and asking me to come back from blood-sucking journeys. I mourned the loss of my dreams as I went about my duties, sometimes chanting my ABCs so as not to forget them.
But this was all before I went to Lagos. As I sat in the shaky bus, jingling this way then that way like an ichaka, I tried not to be too excited. Yet excitement took up residence in my heart; living in the city could not be worse than living with Mama Nkemdilim, I thought. My belly threatened to pour its contents on my neighbours – on the woman who wiped my dried tears with her spit, and the dry-looking man who slept most of the way, his mouth wide open, dripping saliva. Even that could not blunt the edge of my excitement.
Things were not as I imagined they would be in Lagos. Papa Emma and his family lived in a flat in Apapa, and they had neighbours from all the parts of Nigeria who spoke different languages – Edo, Yoruba, Itsekiri, and pidgin. Living with them was different and yet it was the same. They did not send me to school, as Mama Nkemdilim had led me to believe they would. I worked as hard as I had when I’d lived with Mama Nkemdilim. I was cleaning, cooking, washing, and helping Mama Emma at her shop in the market. But I did not have the relief of laughing with other children at the stream, or singing to my baby sister, or playing oga in the market after selling okpa as I’d had back home. Despite the fact that we were from the same village and that Papa Emma was my stepmother’s relative, Mama Emma insisted I call them Oga and Madam. To emphasise the distance between us – them at the top, me at the bottom.
The tension between Papa Emma and his wife, palpable and constant, overshadowed the home from morning to evening. In the beginning, when I first started to work there, I felt sorry for Papa Emma. He worked all day at their shop in the market and was welcomed home by Madam’s thundering bellow. Like a lion, she roared at him often, spewing reminders and threats, her generous neck, arms, and buttocks jiggling. In the midst of my endless chores, I pitied the quiet, hulking man, whose lot seemed little better tha
n mine. His shame was pitiable, shown only in a jaw clenched tight, wide eyes that looked upon the world in barely suppressed anger, and an uncomfortable quietness of being. In the compound, Adaku, the other Igbo housemaid – a rude, large-breasted girl from Anambra – called Papa Emma ‘ewu’, a goat, because he stared mindlessly at everyone. ‘Maaaaaaaa,’ she would bleat, and I would laugh as we drew water from the well. We would stop our laughter quickly and chorus, ‘Good morning, sir’, when he passed by, still staring. Yet, when I brought his food to the side table in the sitting room, where he often sat by himself after work while his wife sat counting her money at the dining table, he murmured ‘dalu’ without looking at me. Adaku told me that the shop was Madam’s, provided by her rich family.
‘Why is this only nine naira?’ Madam wanted to know one day in the kitchen, waving the money he had passed to her in front of him. Her voice was low, dangerous. I flinched a little where I stood before the sink, washing plates.
‘Em …’ He fumbled for words to explain monies missing at the shop, his long arms trembling beside his big, tall body.
I was looking down into the dirty dishwater when a loud crack came to my ears. I glanced up. His hand held his cheek, his face turned away from his children and me. Why did he allow this, I wondered. Was he not a man?
He kept his face turned away from me, as if he did not want to acknowledge I could see his shame. That is, until months into living with them, when he began to come into my bed at night to pass that shame to me.
The day it began, the children had been playing, I had been massaging Madam’s back, and Oga had just returned from work. Where had he been when she called this afternoon? Madam had demanded. The slight pause as he foraged through the day’s doings for an answer had earned him an angry slap. His hand had again gone up to his cheek. And his eyes, glancing away from his wife, had this time fallen on my face. What had he seen there?
That night, Oga crept into the store where I slept amid yam tubers and bags of rice and beans. He pounced with the force of the three-storey house that had fallen in on itself down the street. He clasped my neck with one hand, fumbling with his zipper with the other, and whispered threats when I tried to shout, to struggle, to move my not-quite-eleven-year-old body from beneath him. Madam would kill me, I thought, gritting my teeth, biting down the pain. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he ordered.
Who could I tell? The two young children? Adaku in the other flat, whose ears had never heard anything that she could keep from the rest of the world? Or perhaps the new neighbour, a young woman who taught in the primary school nearby – the one I should have been going to – who had stopped to help me carry one of the gallons of water upstairs last week? That had annoyed Madam. Why had I spoken to the neighbour, she had asked, punctuating each word with a slap. Was I too hungry slap, too tired slap, to carry a gallon? Slap. I dared tell no one that the night had become my enemy, just as it used to be a friend longed for amid the day’s endless chores.
Hurry, I often thought as he knelt down. I lay quietly, trembling, my heart beating into my eardrums, thinking that he grunted like a he-goat, and smelt like one too. I no longer pitied him.
One night, I lay still on the mat, as usual, as Oga pulled down his trousers. My stepmother said she had sent me to Lagos to go to school to learn new things, I thought, as Oga grunted away. Was this one of those things? That thought had no sooner come than Oga yelped loudly. He rolled away, and there stood Madam, a kitchen knife in her hand, her face contorted with rage, looking not at Oga but me.
She advanced towards me and struck my shoulder, slicing into it like the neck of a Christmas chicken, red blood spurting onto my wrapper. The knife went up and down quickly, striking, slashing at my arms and hands. I shrieked and Oga moved belatedly, catching hold of Madam’s hand mid-air. Unutterable hate shone through Madam’s eyes, almost as terrifying as the slashing knife. It electrified my nerveless legs and sent me half-naked to the door.
Even as I fled down the steps of our flat, escaping certain death, my screams reverberating through dark long houses in which our neighbours slept peacefully, I knew that I would never return there. Even if I had to go back to my stepmother.
A kind neighbour, the fat madam in the flat downstairs – the one Mama Emma often called a husband-snatcher on account of the men who came at all hours to see her – opened her door to me. She drew me in and only asked questions after she had put some iodine on the gashes. I yelled out loud at the burning of the iodine, the shame of what Papa Emma had done to me, and the fieriness of Mama Emma’s fury.
Fat Madam, alias Husband-Snatcher, gave me food, a bed to sleep on, and, in the morning, went upstairs to talk to Mama Emma. She did not tell me what Mama Emma said but I was sure that Mama Emma did not want me back in her house. Nor did I want to go back there.
When the gashes Mama Emma had given me had healed a bit, Madam Clara – that was my benefactor’s name – made arrangements to send me back to Nwokenta on another long bus. I had not even lived a full year in Lagos.
Mama Nkemdilim welcomed my return to the village with anger and curses.
‘Amosu,’ she addressed me, in front of her friend Mama Odinkemma, ‘did I not say, is it not clear to anyone who is not blind or deaf, that you would come to no good?’ Then, turning to her friend, feigning wonder, she said, ‘How many people … how many people, I ask you, have been to Lagos?’
‘Not me,’ her friend said.
‘Nor me, my sister. Nor my children. How many people had anyone there – anyone who would give them a chance at success?’
‘Not many. Not many at all,’ Mama Odinkemma obliged.
It was the answer Mama Nkemdilim was waiting for. She pounced on me, pulling my ears and dragging me around the backyard. I grunted in pain. ‘And here I send this goat, this sheep, this wild animal to Lagos, where the lights shine gloriously in the sky, and yet here she is, having chewed that opportunity with her dog’s teeth and spat it right out.’ She paused for breath. ‘Can a child who kills her mother be expected to live at peace with the world?’ she shouted at no one in particular, her veins standing out in her neck.
My story about what had happened did not fetch me anything other than, ‘That is what happens when you try to take another woman’s husband.’
‘But look at her,’ I heard her say to her friend one day, months later, ‘she is as flat as my daughter, Nkemdilim, though she is all of twelve years. What can a man see in that?’ Her friend assured her that some men ran that way. That was my only inkling that she might have believed my story.
I went back to life as it was before Lagos – chores, curses, hunger, shouting, sleeping, waking up, and doing the same thing all over again.
Several months passed before another job came along. This time it was a family in Enugu. Hyacinth, a man from our village, approached Mama Nkemdilim. He worked as a civil servant in Enugu and found housemaids from the village for the rich in that city. He said a family needed a good girl who would do chores and who might even be sent to school. They were prepared to give a sum of money to Mama Nkemdilim, which he told Mama Nkemdilim would be helpful to her in raising the other children.
Mama Nkemdilim was more interested in hearing about this part, this money that would touch her palms, than the possibility that I might go to school there. It would also be one mouth fewer to feed, she said to him. My uncle Nnabuzo was not there to inspect this new prospect or to say no. He had died while I was in Lagos and his family was struggling even worse than ours. This time, unlike when I left for Lagos, I went to Enugu with apprehension. I went in dread and fear. But good things happened to me there – I went to school, I learnt to read, and I fell in love with Urenna.
CHAPTER TWO
When I arrived in Enugu with Hyacinth, I had my interview in an expansive sitting room, with a red carpet into which your foot sank when you took a step. Just that room was bigger than our entire house in Nwokenta. The brown shelves held expensive-looking hardcover books with gold letterin
g. But, for me, the very definition of luxury lay in the dark brown velvet-covered sofas and cushions.
Hyacinth stood respectfully by the door after the owners let us in. I stood beside him, holding on tightly to the slight black polythene bag with my clothes. They exchanged greetings with Hyacinth and invited us to sit. We sat down on those soft seats and faced them. That first week, when I found myself alone, I would sit on the sofa and cross my legs as I imagined rich people did.
Hyacinth chatted with them, telling them that my stepmother was happy to let me work for them. In exchange, she only requested that I be sent to school and treated well. He spoke with some deference. This surprised me: Hyacinth was well respected in the village; he was known to do olu oyibo – he was a civil servant in Enugu township. Later, I would learn that Hyacinth was only a messenger in Daddy’s office.
‘Are you clean?’ the man, whom I would eventually call ‘Sir’ and ‘Daddy’, asked me. His slender face had ears that poked out of his head and looked like they had been stuck on as an afterthought. He had a too-wide mouth, bordered by deep grooves on either side. It was his stern, piercing eyes, however, that made me anxious. They searched my face now. He would see any lie before I told it, a voice in my head said.
‘Did you have a shower this morning? Do you have a shower every day?’
I answered ‘Yes, sir’ to these questions and then was rewarded with ‘Here you wash your hands every time you use the toilet.
‘Do you tell lies?
The Son of the House Page 2