Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  Father explained these facts to us in short, straight-to-the-point sentences.

  “The ex-minister is in hiding. Some say he is in America.”

  “Many people were also let go. It was not only your mother.”

  As much as he tried, he did not help me understand how anything that happened was our mother’s fault. Until that day I’d thought her job as an assistant was limited to serving the minister and his guests tea and smelling nice as she did this. Even though I was confused, I was not surprised. In Lagos bad things happened all the time.

  My sister’s dangling foot tapped the leg of the armchair over and over, a little loud, but no one told her to stop doing that. Father reached over and patted me on the center of my head, ta, ta, ta, harmonizing with the tidi, tidi, tidi my sister was making with her foot against the wooden chair leg. He patted me on the head several times, until it started to hurt. I started trying to think of something to say, something reassuring, sensing that Father had planned a more confident rendering of this tale, but he now sat quiet and absentminded, forgetting the words he planned to say or why he was convinced they would help.

  I MAKE A pillow fort for Andrew and Peter under our dining table. I have modified a simple nighttime ritual. Every night, I sit on a stool in the boys’ room. I tell my younger brothers stories before bed.

  Today, Mother and Father are locked in their room yelling at each other again. So we sit in our dining room fort, talking and laughing. The dining room is right next to our parents’ bedroom, there is only a thin wall between us, we are close enough to know when the first punch lands, close enough to scream if it continues. Peter sits next to me, his elbows are on the floor, his round face is nestled in the curve of both palms. His hair smells like Blue Band margarine. Sometimes after eating, he wipes his hands on the living room curtains, other times he wipes them on his hair when he thinks no one is looking. His face is oily, shining like a lamp in a dark room.

  “Can you tell us a story?” he asks me. “You do not have to make it up. It can be one of Father’s or Mother’s stories, but nothing with a tortoise or a monkey in it.”

  “Should it have a song?” I ask.

  “Yes,” my brothers answer at the same time.

  “But only if you really want to,” Andrew adds quickly. He is the older brother, he does not want to appear too interested in childish stories.

  “Way back before the rebellion, when animals and people could talk to and understand one another, a woman buys two hens on her way home from the market. They cost only half a penny each and so she buys them even though she really does not need any more hens. The woman soon gets tired of carrying her basket on her head and holding hens in both hands, so she throws one of them away, right into the forest, and thinks nothing of it. And a few months later when she is walking down the same road after a market day, she sees her hen walking along the path. Only this time, the hen has several chicks walking in a straight line behind her.”

  “How did she know it was hers?” Peter asks.

  “Because, back then when you bought poultry, you cut a tiny piece off the edge of your wrapper and tied it around the legs of your hen. The rope was still there,” I reply.

  “People still do that today,” Andrew says.

  “The woman is excited,” I say. “She chases after the hen, but the hen refuses to be caught. It scratches her a couple of times and then runs to the palace of the king.

  “The hen gets to talk to the king, but decides to sing instead. She tells her story, the hen does, with singing. How the woman bought her for half a penny and threw her in the forest and how the lord of the forest fed her with corn husks and water from a well. The hen says she is now a mother of many children: her first son is called the Warrior Prevails, the second is called Finger of the Truth—”

  “How many children did she have?” Andrew asks.

  “What did the king decide?” Peter asks.

  “The song says they were six or three,” I reply. “I don’t really know, meta and mefa sound the same, especially in a song.”

  We are singing the story’s song, “Iya Elediye eyen ye kuye,” whispering the words now because Mother is crying in the bedroom. Loud crying and hiccupping. And Father is shouting at her to stop.

  “The king said the woman could take the first chick with her, and the hen was free to go back to the forest with the rest of her children.”

  “And that is how it ends?” says Andrew. “You should have just told us the one about the tortoise and the hyena.”

  Peter laughs because Andrew said hyena, he is laughing and laughing, and then Andrew and I also start laughing. Peter’s giggle is laughter at its best, light and loud, floating around then resting on you, making you woozy and hopeful. Andrew already has a man’s laugh.

  Something breaks in our parents’ room. We stop laughing to listen. Everything is quiet, Mother is no longer crying, and Father is saying nothing. Then Father comes out of the room. We watch his feet walk past the dining table, along the hallway, and down the stairs. We listen to the sounds he makes in the kitchen. A clank of metal, a swish, water splashing on a face. We watch him walk back to the room. There is a tumbler filled with cold water in his hand. When he opens the door to their room, we hear Mother whisper, “Thank you, dear.”

  It is hot here in our fort. Peter is sitting close to me with his knees folded to his chin. He is sweating, his forehead covered in shiny droplets of sweat.

  “Tell us about that time you saw them burn a robber in Fashoro,” Andrew says to me. “Or about that time armed robbers came to the beer parlor and shot a man’s ear off.”

  “I was going to buy pepper in Fashoro when I saw a boy running with a small generator on his head. Suddenly, one woman started running after him shouting, Ole ole ole, another woman came out of her shop and joined the other woman shouting. Then I saw the tailor who made your Easter suits come out of his shop. He started running after the boy. It was now that the stupid boy decided to drop the generator and run as fast as he could. The tailor was almost losing him, so he bent down and picked a giant stone and threw it at the boy. It landed right in the middle of his back. The boy fell down flat. Plenty of people now surrounded him. Iya Togo even came and said, Is this not Gbenga, the one who stole my pot of beans while it was still on the fire?”

  “Was it Brother Gbenga?” Peter asks.

  “No jare, did we not still see Brother Gbenga yesterday?” Andrew replies.

  I am listening for sounds from our parents’ room, but I hear nothing now.

  “Then many other people came and started accusing the boy of stealing from them,” I say. “He was crying, saying he was not the one, but your tailor kept slapping him. Then somebody brought a tire and put it on the boy’s neck. He was screaming and begging. Someone else opened the tank of the generator and poured out the petrol. They poured it on his face and on the tire and then they set it on fire. He got up and started running but that just made the fire worse, then he fell on the floor and someone took a big brick and smashed it on his head.”

  “Did he die for real?” Peter asks me. He is yawning, so at first I think he asks did he die for free.

  “Of course he did. He died, and several vultures came to eat his eyes,” Andrew says.

  “Don’t listen to him, Peter. Nothing like that happened,” I reply.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Peter asks again.

  “He went to heaven,” I tell him. Someone must tell him about these things. “He went to a special heaven where only dead children go. And God gave him a room full of jean jackets that never get dirty and candy that gets sweeter while in your mouth—”

  “And video games?”

  “Yes, Peter, and video games, and TVs as wide as the walls of this house.”

  WHEN ANDREW AND Peter finally go to their room, I go to our room.

  Ariyike is awake and listening to the sounds from our parents’ room. I sit next to her on her bed and tell her this same story even though
she has heard it all before. I tell her everything from the beginning—how the first time I saw the boy, I smiled at him. I told him I liked his FUBU shirt. He winked at me and walked away. And the end—that I saw the thief’s mother run to where his dead body was still burning, take off her cloth wrapper, wrap it around his body to try to carry his body home, and fail. All she did was separate burnt clothing from skin, skin from bones. She stood there crying, “My daughter. My daughter. I warned you not to dress like a boy. Now see what you have done to yourself.”

  I told Ariyike that all the women who stood there earlier, accusing him of stealing food, laundry drying on the line, generators and coolers, came to the mother, pulling her away from the body, crying with her. That one of them gave her another wrapper to wear but she rejected it. Instead she stood there in her little green slip, crying and screaming, saying that they had stripped her naked in the streets and she would now be naked for the rest of her life.

  I told Ariyike all the things I saw and heard, and she was as quiet as a mouse until I was done.

  “He was just a stupid girl, Bibi, just a stupid girl,” she said.

  Then she put her arms around me and cried with me, and this was how I knew that she felt all the things that I felt, and we did not sleep at all that night because we were the same sad the same angry the same afraid.

  NEW CHURCH

  ARIYIKE

  1998–1999

  WE WERE SITTING at the back of the house, peeling the skin off black-eyed beans we had soaked in water for hours. The water was dark and particulate, black eyes and brown skins slid off the beans, away from our grasp, floating around the kitchen bowl. The skins reminded me of those newly hatched little tadpoles swimming in the drains out in the street. We could hear Jennifer Lopez playing from speakers in the neighbor’s house. My sister was singing along, quietly because she did not want the neighbor to hear her enjoying it and turn it off.

  “Jesus is coming soon, Bibike,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said and continued singing.

  “You can’t be singing these types of songs. Do you want to be left behind?”

  She was ignoring me. She continued singing along. She grabbed a handful of beans and swirled it quickly several times in the bowl, troubling the water until it moved around and around on its own, dark and misty, like a dirty whirlpool.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Jesus is coming really soon. Like before the end of this year.”

  “Okay. You know this how?” she said.

  “I saw it. No. Pastor David told us. But he prayed our eyes open and I saw, too.”

  My twin sister, Bibike, started laughing at me. She kissed her teeth, letting out a short but loud sound. She laughed hard, shaking her head, cackling. She is the one everyone calls quiet, so all the noise she was making was a surprise.

  “Stop laughing at me. You are being annoying and rude,” I said.

  She did not stop. Her laughter made me think of water in the canal and how we loved to go there when we were younger. The canal water was usually calm and still. I hated it when it was like that. I used to throw rocks in the water just to disturb it. First, I’d cause a small ripple, which would create a larger one, and then another ripple, and then it was no longer calm undisturbed water but a series of unending circles. That’s how laughter poured out of her, in waves and ripples. When I thought she was done, she only paused to laugh even harder.

  “Are you done laughing?” I asked.

  “Are you done saying stupid things?” she answered.

  “Have you finished?” I asked again.

  She did not answer. She just wiped her eyes with the back of her dress.

  “These are the last days,” I continued. “Everything the Bible talked about so far has happened. Wars, pestilences, rebellions. The only thing left is the Rapture. God told Pastor David that it’s happening really soon.”

  “Ariyike, even if that is true, God won’t tell anyone. Especially not Pastor David.”

  “Why won’t he?” I said.

  “Because it will be unfair.” She got up as she said this, pouring the beans out from the bowl and into a large sieve, washing them under running water, splashing everywhere, on her dress, running down her legs, settling around her feet in a small puddle. “He will have to tell everyone or tell no one at all. God should be fair. Treat everyone the same. Like sunlight—”

  “You’re getting drenched,” I said, interrupting her.

  “I know. I will change before Mother gets back.”

  MOTHER HAD A new job. She was teaching business studies, shorthand writing, and typing at Oguntade Secondary. It was a private school, two streets away from us. She was offered a discount to enroll two children, but she didn’t take it. We were enrolled in the neighborhood public school. She complained about her job every day.

  “These children are so terrifyingly lazy.”

  “This proprietor is the most miserly man I have ever met. He is making us pay for tissue paper in the teachers’ lounge, can you imagine it?”

  “The parents want you to give their children marks they haven’t earned; not me, let the other teachers cater to these nincompoops.”

  Mother was unsuited for this position. I felt sorry for her students. She was taking out her disappointments on them, I was sure. I hoped they knew that when she called them stupid or insolent, it was not because they were exceptionally incompetent. She just did not expect to be herding other people’s children at this stage in her life.

  Bibike and I were making moimoi. Mother sold moimoi wrapped in clear plastic bags to kids at her school during lunch. Lately we also had moimoi for lunch every day. We half joked to Mother as we cooked, “Can we eat something else? Peas will soon start growing from our ears o.”

  But her reply was: “You’d better be grateful you have any food to eat.” She said this like it was the most normal thing to say to your own children.

  Since she’d lost her job, Mother had been different, always angry, always tired, always looking for something to criticize us over. The boys, though, could do nothing wrong. One Friday, Andrew stayed out late. He was playing football at the stadium. Mother did not even notice he was not home. Or if she did, she said nothing. Bibike and I would never have tried something like that.

  Father noticed everything but said nothing. It was harder for him, I assumed, because when Mother lost her job, he lost his inside connections and could no longer get printing contracts from the government. Father had never had a regular job. This was why he was our favorite parent; he had the time to do things with us. Before Mother lost her job and we all became poor, Father drove us to school every day. The first car I remember was a yellow ’88 Mitsubishi Galant, but then he had it repainted to a brash red-wine color, because people in Lagos always thought it was a cab. They sold that car when Bibike and I were in primary 6, to buy a white Volkswagen Jetta. I loved that Jetta so much. Father washed it by himself every single day and it always had a fresh clean smell like a baby’s bathwater.

  Ever since selling the Jetta, Father had been home all the time. He had no connections, no car, and nothing to do. He spent most of his time indoors reading old newspapers, using a blue pen to mark them up. Other times, he was outside the house, “spending time with friends,” “making money moves,” “cultivating new business relationships.”

  “They are nothing but a bunch of time wasters,” Mother said once, the day after Father’s new group of friends visited him at home for the first time. “Time wasters. Roaming about looking for whom to devour.”

  We were all in the living room when she said it. She was standing by the dining table folding laundry. Father was sitting in his armchair, Andrew and Peter sat on the floor, Bibike and I lay on the purple couch. I could feel my face swelling with anger. Bibike was patting me on my back, calming me down without words. How could Mother think it was okay to talk about Father like that—and in front of him? All he was doing was trying. Trying to make something happen.

  Sh
e would have continued like that, going on and on, if I hadn’t jumped off the couch and started singing, out of nowhere, the reggae dancehall song “Murder She Wrote.” Peter joined in singing, and soon we were dancing, swaying this way and that, flinging imaginary dreadlocks right, left, and right again. Andrew was providing the beat and shouting, in his imitation Jamaican accent, “Mderation Man,” over and over, and Mother was saying, “Stop making noise,” but no one was listening anymore to anything she had to say. She walked away, into our room, with a pile of folded clothes to put in our chest of drawers. Then Father said, “Stop making that racket. I want to watch the news.

  Afterward, Mother spoke to Bibike and me yet again about the dangers of worldly music, that it was the devil’s mascot, leading young girls to bad things, like boys and drugs, and how we had to be better examples for our brothers. And in this moment, I wanted worldly music more than I ever had. Nothing Mother was saying was new. I had heard it all in church already

  I listened to Mother repentant now. I started crying not because of what she was saying but because I was afraid. I was afraid of failing God. My pastor, David Shamonka, the reason I knew Jesus was coming soon, had been in university studying medicine when God called him to win souls. He left medical school, he left his parents and siblings, he left everything to start his ministry. If God called me like he did him, what is worldly music that I couldn’t give it up?

  I hoped that God could tell that my heart wanted him more than it wanted worldly music, or anything else. I could sense that the world was changing, that big things were about to happen. Of course, I could not say for certain that it was the end of the world, the Rapture or the Second Coming or anything like Pastor David said—Bibike’s mocking made it hard for me to believe everything he said—but I felt something.

  On some days, right after I said my night prayer, when I focused hard enough, I could hear the voice of God in the evening breeze. It sounded like an old man speaking softly in the distance. I did not know, in the way Pastor David apparently did, how to decipher what the voice was saying. But I believed that someday I, too, would understand His voice. I think I love Pastor David.