MARIE KNOCKED on his study door and came in with a tray of rice and fried plantains. He ate slowly. He put in a Fela CD and then started to write the e-mail on his computer; his BlackBerry keyboard would cramp his fingers and his mind. He had introduced Ifemelu to Fela at university. She had, before then, thought of Fela as the mad weed-smoker who wore underwear at his concerts, but she had come to love the Afrobeat sound and they would lie on his mattress in Nsukka and listen to it and then she would leap up and make swift, vulgar movements with her hips when the run-run-run chorus came on. He wondered if she remembered that. He wondered if she remembered how his cousin had sent mix tapes from abroad, and how he made copies for her at the famous electronics shop in the market where music blared all day long, ringing in your ears even after you had left. He had wanted her to have the music he had. She had never really been interested in Biggie and Warren G and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg but Fela was different. On Fela, they had agreed.
He wrote and rewrote the e-mail, not mentioning his wife or using the first person plural, trying for a balance between earnest and funny. He did not want to alienate her. He wanted to make sure she would reply this time. He clicked Send and then minutes later checked to see if she had replied. He was tired. It was not a physical fatigue—he went to the gym regularly and felt better than he had in years—but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind. He got up and went out to the verandah; the sudden hot air, the roar of his neighbor’s generator, the smell of diesel exhaust fumes brought a lightness to his head. Frantic winged insects flitted around the electric bulb. He felt, looking out at the muggy darkness farther away, as if he could float, and all he needed to do was to let himself go.
Part 2
CHAPTER 3
Mariama finished her customer’s hair, sprayed it with sheen, and, after the customer left, she said, “I’m going to get Chinese.”
Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted—General Tso’s Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken—with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day.
“You want anything?” Mariama asked Ifemelu.
“No, thanks,” Ifemelu said.
“Your hair take long. You need food,” Aisha said.
“I’m fine. I have a granola bar,” Ifemelu said. She had some baby carrots in a Ziploc, too, although all she had snacked on so far was her melted chocolate.
“What bar?” Aisha asked.
Ifemelu showed her the bar, organic, one hundred percent whole grain with real fruit.
“That not food!” Halima scoffed, looking away from the television.
“She here fifteen years, Halima,” Aisha said, as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu’s eating of a granola bar.
“Fifteen? Long time,” Halima said.
Aisha waited until Mariama left before pulling out her cell phone from her pocket. “Sorry, I make quick call,” she said, and stepped outside. Her face had brightened when she came back; there was a smiling, even-featured prettiness, drawn out by that phone call, that Ifemelu had not earlier seen.
“Emeka work late today. So only Chijioke come to see you, before we finish,” she said, as if she and Ifemelu had planned it all together.
“Look, you don’t have to ask them to come. I won’t even know what to tell them,” Ifemelu said.
“Tell Chijioke Igbo can marry not Igbo.”
“Aisha, I can’t tell him to marry you. He will marry you if he wants to.”
“They want marry me. But I am not Igbo!” Aisha’s eyes glittered; the woman had to be a little mentally unstable.
“Is that what they told you?” Ifemelu asked.
“Emeka say his mother tell him if he marry American, she kill herself,” Aisha said.
“That’s not good.”
“But me, I am African.”
“So maybe she won’t kill herself if he marries you.”
Aisha looked blankly at her. “Your boyfriend mother want him to marry you?”
Ifemelu thought first of Blaine, then she realized that Aisha, of course, meant her make-believe boyfriend.
“Yes. She keeps asking us when we will get married.” She was amazed by her own fluidness, it was as if she had convinced even herself that she was not living on memories mildewed by thirteen years. But it could have been true; Obinze’s mother had liked her, after all.
“Ah!” Aisha said, in well-meaning envy.
A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale.
“No, no, no,” Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something.
“You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you,” Aisha said. “You talk Igbo?”
“Of course I speak Igbo,” Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. “Take it easy!” she added, because Aisha had pulled a tiny-toothed comb through a section of her hair.
“Your hair hard,” Aisha said.
“It is not hard,” Ifemelu said firmly. “You are using the wrong comb.” And she pulled the comb from Aisha’s hand and put it down on the table.
IFEMELU HAD GROWN UP in the shadow of her mother’s hair. It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory. “Is it your real hair?” strangers would ask, and then reach out to touch it reverently. Others would say “Are you from Jamaica?” as though only foreign blood could explain such bounteous hair that did not thin at the temples. Through the years of childhood, Ifemelu would often look in the mirror and pull at her own hair, separate the coils, will it to become like her mother’s, but it remained bristly and grew reluctantly; braiders said it cut them like a knife.
One day, the year Ifemelu turned ten, her mother came home from work looking different. Her clothes were the same, a brown dress belted at the waist, but her face was flushed, her eyes unfocused. “Where is the big scissors?” she asked, and when Ifemelu brought it to her, she raised it to her head and, handful by handful, chopped off all her hair. Ifemelu stared, stunned. The hair lay on the floor like dead grass. “Bring me a big bag,” her mother said. Ifemelu obeyed, feeling herself in a trance, with things happening that she did not understand. She watched her mother walk around their flat, collecting all the Catholic objects, the crucifixes hung on walls, the rosaries nested in drawers, the missals propped on shelves. Her mother put them all in the polyethylene bag, which she carried to the backyard, her steps quick, her faraway look unwavering. She made a fire near the rubbish dump, at the same spot where she burned her used sanitary pads, and first she threw in her hair, wrapped in old newspaper, and then, one after the other, the objects of faith. Dark gray smoke curled up into the air. From the verandah, Ifemelu began to cry because she sensed that something had happened, and the woman standing by the fire, splashing in more kerosene as it dimmed and stepping back as it flared, the woman who was bald and blank, was not her mother, could not be her mother.
When her mother came back inside, Ifemelu backed away, but her mother hugged her close.
“I am saved,” she said. “Mrs. Ojo ministered to me this afternoon during the children’s break and I received Christ. Old things have passed away and all things have become new. Praise God. On Sunday we will start going to Revival Saints. It is a Bible-believing church and a living church, not like St. Dominic’s.” Her mother’s words were not hers. She spoke them too rigidly, with a demeanor that belonged to someone else. Even her voice, usually high-pitched and feminine, had deepened and curdled. That afternoon, Ifemelu watched her mother’s essence take flight. Before, her mother said the rosary once in a while, crossed herself before she ate, wore pr
etty images of saints around her neck, sang Latin songs and laughed when Ifemelu’s father teased her about her terrible pronunciation. She laughed, too, whenever he said, “I am an agnostic respecter of religion,” and she would tell him how lucky he was to be married to her, because even though he went to church only for weddings and funerals, he would get into heaven on the wings of her faith. But, after that afternoon, her God changed. He became exacting. Relaxed hair offended Him. Dancing offended Him. She bartered with Him, offering starvation in exchange for prosperity, for a job promotion, for good health. She fasted herself bone-thin: dry fasts on weekends, and on weekdays, only water until evening. Ifemelu’s father followed her with anxious eyes, urging her to eat a little more, to fast a little less, and he always spoke carefully, so that she would not call him the devil’s agent and ignore him, as she had done with a cousin who was staying with them. “I am fasting for your father’s conversion,” she told Ifemelu often. For months, the air in their flat was like cracked glass. Everyone tiptoed around her mother, who had become a stranger, thin and knuckly and severe. Ifemelu worried that she would, one day, simply snap into two and die.
Then, on Easter Saturday, a dour day, the first quiet Easter Saturday in Ifemelu’s life, her mother ran out of the kitchen and said, “I saw an angel!” Before, there would have been cooking and bustling, many pots in the kitchen and many relatives in the flat, and Ifemelu and her mother would have gone to night mass, and held up lit candles, singing in a sea of flickering flames, and then come home to continue cooking the big Easter lunch. But the flat was silent. Their relatives had kept away and lunch would be the usual rice and stew. Ifemelu was in the living room with her father, and when her mother said “I saw an angel!” Ifemelu saw exasperation in his eyes, a brief glimpse before it disappeared.
“What happened?” he asked, in the placating tone used for a child, as if humoring his wife’s madness would make it go away quickly.
Her mother told them of a vision she had just had, a blazing appearance near the gas cooker of an angel holding a book trimmed in red thread, telling her to leave Revival Saints because the pastor was a wizard who attended nightly demonic meetings under the sea.
“You should listen to the angel,” her father said.
And so her mother left the church and began to let her hair grow again, but stopped wearing necklaces and earrings because jewelry, according to the pastor at Miracle Spring, was ungodly, unbefitting a woman of virtue. Shortly afterwards, on the same day as the failed coup, while the traders who lived downstairs were crying because the coup would have saved Nigeria and market women would have been given cabinet positions, her mother saw another vision. This time, the angel appeared in her bedroom, above the wardrobe, and told her to leave Miracle Spring and join Guiding Assembly. Halfway through the first service Ifemelu attended with her mother, in a marble-floored convention hall, surrounded by perfumed people and the ricochet of rich voices, Ifemelu looked at her mother and saw that she was crying and laughing at the same time. In this church of surging hope, of thumping and clapping, where Ifemelu imagined a swirl of affluent angels above, her mother’s spirit had found a home. It was a church full of the newly wealthy; her mother’s small car, in the parking lot, was the oldest, with its dull paint and many scratches. If she worshipped with the prosperous, she said, then God would bless her as He had blessed them. She began to wear jewelry again, to drink her Guinness stout; she fasted only once a week and often said “My God tells me” and “My Bible says,” as though other people’s were not just different but misguided. Her response to a “Good morning” or a “Good afternoon” was a cheerful “God bless you!” Her God became genial and did not mind being commanded. Every morning, she woke the household up for prayers, and they would kneel on the scratchy carpet of the living room, singing, clapping, covering the day ahead with the blood of Jesus, and her mother’s words would pierce the stillness of dawn: “God, my heavenly father, I command you to fill this day with blessings and prove to me that you are God! Lord, I am waiting on you for my prosperity! Do not let the evil one win, do not let my enemies triumph over me!” Ifemelu’s father once said the prayers were delusional battles with imaginary traducers, yet he insisted that Ifemelu always wake up early to pray. “It keeps your mother happy,” he told her.
In church, at testimony time, her mother was first to hurry to the altar. “I had catarrh this morning,” she would start. “But as Pastor Gideon started to pray, it cleared. Now it is gone. Praise God!” The congregation would shout “Alleluia!” and other testimonies would follow. I did not study because I was sick and yet I passed my exams with flying colors! I had malaria and prayed over it and was cured! My cough disappeared as Pastor started praying! But always her mother went first, gliding and smiling, enclosed in salvation’s glow. Later in the service, when Pastor Gideon would leap out in his sharp-shouldered suit and pointy shoes, and say, “Our God is not a poor God, amen? It is our portion to prosper, amen?” Ifemelu’s mother would raise her arm high, heavenward, as she said, “Amen, Father Lord, amen.”
Ifemelu did not think that God had given Pastor Gideon the big house and all those cars, he had of course bought them with money from the three collections at each service, and she did not think that God would do for all as He had done for Pastor Gideon, because it was impossible, but she liked that her mother ate regularly now. The warmth in her mother’s eyes was back, and there was a new joy in her bearing, and she once again lingered at the dining table with her father after meals, and sang loudly while taking a bath. Her new church absorbed her but did not destroy her. It made her predictable and easy to lie to. “I am going to Bible study” and “I am going to Fellowship” were the easiest ways for Ifemelu to go out unquestioned during her teenage years. Ifemelu was uninterested in church, indifferent about making any religious effort, perhaps because her mother already made so much. Yet her mother’s faith comforted her; it was, in her mind, a white cloud that moved benignly above her as she moved. Until The General came into their lives.
EVERY MORNING, Ifemelu’s mother prayed for The General. She would say, “Heavenly father, I command you to bless Uju’s mentor. May his enemies never triumph over him!” Or she would say, “We cover Uju’s mentor with the precious blood of Jesus!” And Ifemelu would mumble something nonsensical instead of saying “Amen.” Her mother said the word “mentor” defiantly, a thickness in her tone, as though the force of her delivery would truly turn The General into a mentor, and also remake the world into a place where young doctors could afford Aunty Uju’s new Mazda, that green, glossy, intimidatingly streamlined car.
Chetachi, who lived upstairs, asked Ifemelu, “Your mom said Aunty Uju’s mentor also gave her a loan for the car?”
“Yes.”
“Eh! Aunty Uju is lucky o!” Chetachi said.
Ifemelu did not miss the knowing smirk on her face. Chetachi and her mother must have already gossiped about the car; they were envious, chattering people who visited only to see what others had, to size up new furniture or new electronics.
“God should bless the man o. Me I hope I will also meet a mentor when I graduate,” Chetachi said. Ifemelu bristled at Chetachi’s goading. Still, it was her mother’s fault, to so eagerly tell the neighbors her mentor story. She should not have; it was nobody’s business what Aunty Uju did. Ifemelu had overheard her telling somebody in the backyard, “You see, The General wanted to be a doctor when he was young, and so now he helps young doctors, God is really using him in people’s lives.” And she sounded sincere, cheerful, convincing. She believed her own words. Ifemelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality. When Aunty Uju first told them about her new job—“The hospital has no doctor vacancy but The General made them create one for me” were her words—Ifemelu’s mother promptly said, “This is a miracle!”
Aunty Uju smiled, a quiet smile that held its peace; she did not, of course, think it was a miracl
e, but would not say so. Or maybe there was something of a miracle in her new job as consultant at the military hospital in Victoria Island, and her new house in Dolphin Estate, the cluster of duplexes that wore a fresh foreignness, some painted pink, others the blue of a warm sky, hemmed by a park with grass lush as a new rug and benches where people could sit—a rarity even on The Island. Only weeks before, she had been a new graduate and all her classmates were talking about going abroad to take the American medical exams or the British exams, because the other choice was to tumble into a parched wasteland of joblessness. The country was starved of hope, cars stuck for days in long, sweaty petrol lines, pensioners raising wilting placards demanding their pay, lecturers gathering to announce yet one more strike. But Aunty Uju did not want to leave; she had, for as long as Ifemelu could remember, dreamed of owning a private clinic, and she held that dream in a tight clasp.
“Nigeria will not be like this forever, I’m sure I will find part-time work and it will be tough, yes, but one day I will start my clinic, and on The Island!” Aunty Uju had told Ifemelu. Then she went to a friend’s wedding. The bride’s father was an air vice marshal, it was rumored that the Head of State might attend, and Aunty Uju joked about asking him to make her medical officer at Aso Rock. He did not attend, but many of his generals did, and one of them asked his ADC to call Aunty Uju, to ask her to come to his car in the parking lot after the reception, and when she went to the dark Peugeot with a small flag flying from its front, and said, “Good afternoon, sir,” to the man in the back, he told her, “I like you. I want to take care of you.” Maybe there was a kind of miracle in those words, I like you, I want to take care of you, Ifemelu thought, but not in the way her mother meant it. “A miracle! God is faithful!” her mother said that day, eyes liquid with faith.
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