Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  Once, before Mother lost her job, a street magician visited Fadeyi. All of us children paid five naira per head to watch his act. I watched the magician swallow a whole python alive, only to vomit it up five minutes later. It was an unforgettable sight. Pastor David reminded me of that magician. The difference was that he was teaching me, teaching all of us his congregants, how to do all the same glorious things he did.

  I had first met Pastor David six months after Father sold the car. It happened in my school principal’s office. I was there that day because Mrs. Modele the math teacher had reported me for copying my test answers from Bibike. I was walking up the stairs past the courtyard when I saw him approaching. He was smiling directly at my face. I pretended not to notice him looking, but I walked even more slowly, waiting to see where he was headed.

  When I got to the principal’s office, after stopping to drink water in the teachers’ lounge, he was already there. Before the principal could say anything, he was sitting and saying, “Please attend to your student, sir. I can wait.”

  Then the principal, determined to embarrass me, started bringing up unrelated stuff, eye makeup, short skirts, and the pack of Benson & Hedges from months ago.

  Pastor David seemed to fight back an amused, puzzled look, and when the principal was done, he said: “If you don’t mind, can I pray for this little girl?”

  Then the principal said, “Of course, she needs it. I don’t think it will help. This one is already a lost cause.”

  Then Pastor David held my right hand gently and said, “Loving God Abba Father, reveal Your love to her,” and then I felt like my brain was expanding and my heart heating up at the same time.

  I later learned he had come to ask to use the assembly grounds for midweek church services, and so I started to attend his services. I was hoping to be friends, but joining the church made me see how big he was, and how small I am. Whenever he caught my eye from the pulpit during services each Sunday, I wondered if he could tell how much I loved him.

  We exchanged gifts. Just before Christmas, it was the annual love feast, and Pastor David picked my name out of the Christmas partner names bucket, right in the middle of service, and everyone cheered. He gave me a bracelet and a note that was just a long list of Bible verses selected “For the Godly Woman You Are Becoming, My Darling.”

  We exchanged even more notes after that. Mine were my meditations on the Bible verses I studied each day. I was trying to read the entire Bible in a year. His notes were more mercurial. Once, he wrote several lines describing the hills in Jos when he’d visited for an evangelical outreach. Other times, it was lyrics to worship songs, in full, name of songwriter included. At the bottom of one note he wrote:

  Everything softens when I worship.

  HE LOVES TO sing. He cannot sing. Singing, he sounds like a bush baby crying for his lamp and lantern. He says that people who are not broken by God will be broken by life. I do not know what that means but I think it means tears. Cry when you sing worship songs.

  He loves Lagos. He once said that people who haven’t visited Lagos have yet to meet their country. He said that Lagos is a mini–Nigeria, only much better. I thought then that maybe he was talking to me alone, trying to make me feel not so bad for knowing only Lagos. Someday soon, I will travel. I want to see the Mambila Plateau.

  My sister, Bibike, is less yielded than I am. She comes with me to church sometimes, especially Thanksgiving Sunday, when rice is served. First time she came, Pastor David didn’t know it wasn’t me; I was folding prayer clothes behind the altar curtain, she was talking to someone from the choir. They were standing in front of the altar. He said, “Madam dancer, I saw you digging it during praise and worship, keep it up.” She laughed her laugh and said thank you. I was angry at her for smiling at him, so I walked into their midst and said, “Pastor, hi, this is my twin, Bibike, the One Who Doesn’t Believe in Jesus.”

  And so that day, the day Mother was speaking to us about comportment, abstaining from all that sex music, the importance of respect, self-respect, and respecting others—I was crying and pretending to listen. I was really wondering, wondering whether maybe this house, Lagos, maybe even the world, was melting away and I was the only one who could remember how things used to be.

  I wanted to answer her with the thoughts I was thinking, but I could not form a complete sentence. My thoughts were choking me, draining me. I wanted to ask how she could have no faith in Father. But I could not say what I wanted to say. She was stern and angry, pitiful. She looked old to me, like one of those women who sold tomatoes at Sabo night market.

  Yet, after that occasion, whenever Father’s friends came by she was well dressed, commanding, funny. Mother was funny when she wanted to be, she would speak in the military president’s voice, making solemn announcements: Fellow Nigerians, I Am Announcing the Suspension of Milk Subsidy with Immediate Effect.

  I saw that Father enjoyed her new attitude. He stayed home longer, started going out only in the evenings. He was talking about starting a business of his own, being an entrepreneur. One of his friends had recently been deported from Germany. It was this friend, Mr. Gary, who had all these big ideas about what they could do for money. They were becoming motivational speakers for hire. Gary had the interesting accent, my father had the looks, together they booked deals in colleges and universities, speaking to graduating students about the job market. But their partnership lasted less than a year, ending things quickly. They argued about splitting profits and separated. Then Father became a recruitment consultant. After that failed to work out, he started a business magazine with some other friends.

  “What’s this?” Mother asked him when he brought home the galley copy.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like another stupid way you’re wasting my money.”

  “I am a businessman. This is what I do,” he said.

  “You are a lazy man,” she replied. “Get a job.”

  When Business Insights magazine failed—they kept at it far longer than they should have—Father’s group of friends disbanded. They had run out of courage and enthusiasm, each person moving on to independent pursuits. Father was keen to start something new. He wanted to convert the lower part of our home into a business-services support center. With a couple of computers and printers, some old photocopiers, the business would provide services to other businesses in the neighborhood, ones still dependent on traditional typewriters.

  “I would rather convert it to a flat and rent it out,” Mother replied when he told her his idea. “The Soweres next door paid two years’ rent in advance; how much can a business center bring in?”

  We were sitting at dinner while they argued. Peter was making a mess: okra soup spilled from his plate, forming a tiny puddle on the table. He was putting his fingers in it, handwriting shit fuck on the walls. They did not notice.

  Bibike and I had visited the Soweres the day before. Their daughter, Titi, was a year older than we were. Her parents were home early from work. I was impressed by how basic and transactional their conversation that afternoon was.

  “Did you put on the water-pumping machine?” Titi’s mother had asked.

  “Do we still have yellow garri?” Titi’s father asked.

  “What time will you be back tomorrow?” Titi asked.

  It was nothing like our house. In our home, everything was at stake. Nothing was inconsequential. Even the way you said good morning could set them off. The house we lived in was a wedding gift from Mother’s father. Whenever they argued about Father’s idea, Mother said, “I will do what I like with my father’s house,” and Father said, “Do what you like, endanger our children because of your being stubborn.”

  After a few months, the arguments were no longer as loud as they had been. Father was resigned, quiet. Mother was eating less and less, drinking schnapps and agbo, laughing even when nothing was funny. We entertained ourselves by dressing up with Mother’s makeup and hanging out in filling station tuck shops. I
am great at meeting new people; Bibike just went everywhere I did. We made plans to run away, to leave the country. Move to Ghana, make our own money, get our brothers, Andrew and Peter, into better schools. Bibike was to sing in a live band. I would work as a waitress in the bar.

  We even met a man who promised to get us ECOWAS travel booklets. We wouldn’t need visas to travel anywhere in West Africa. It was such a simple plan, really. He just wanted to take pictures of us in swimsuits, which was silly because we had already told him we did not know how to swim.

  Mother announced one day at dinner that the school where she was teaching was closing in the middle of the school year. She said the owner had sold the property it was built on. The new owner was tearing down the school to build an apartment complex.

  It was March of ’98, and Mother was without a job again. We, all of us, went to visit Mother’s boss, the proprietor of Oguntade school. He hadn’t paid Mother any salary for the last three months before the school closed, and it was her idea to take the whole family to his house.

  “I know that man made millions when he sold the school. Yet he refuses to pay me my arrears. If my pleas have not moved him, let him look into the eyes of the children he is starving,” she said before we left our house. And so, the six of us got in a bus and went to his house.

  It did not work.

  “I will pay you as soon as I get the money, madam,” the proprietor had said. “I cannot turn myself to money for you. My children are also hungry.”

  “So, will you now consider trying out my idea?” Father asked.

  We were sitting in the back, the very last row of the danfo bus, when they were talking about this. Mother was whispering. The quietness made her voice sound like she was about to cry.

  “It’s not like I have a choice,” Mother answered.

  LATER THAT MONTH, our parents asked me what I thought of their business plans. I promised to work in the business center as often as possible. They had taken to including Bibike and me in every discussion about the family’s finances. We did not give any opinions, we just listened and tried to look sad. Father’s plan was all we had left. Money for the business center came from selling our parents’ wedding bands and Nestlé PLC shares, the only other thing (apart from the house) Mother had inherited from her deceased parents. The money bought two used photocopiers, one desktop computer, one scanner, one laminator, and one printer. Father was excited to finally get his chance. He promised his business would bring in, every other day, what Mother had made in a month as a teacher.

  The trouble with his new business started early. Our photocopy machines were temperamental and unreliable. They made faint and unreadable copies, they leaked ink all over the place, they consumed way too much electricity and even more petrol whenever there were power cuts. Our patrons were infrequent and often needed services rendered on credit.

  It was during this season of hopelessness, when we were learning to wait for whatever money was to be made from the business center, to know whether there would be food to eat the next day, that an old work colleague, visiting the neighborhood and seeing Mother manning the typesetting business, had advised her, face contorting with the exaggerated sympathy usually reserved for victims of hit and run accidents, to attend Pastor David’s church.

  My sista! Please attend this meeting. You will receive a breakthrough. Your life will change.

  I was so happy when Father and Mother told me they had heard wonderful things about my Pastor David and were going to see for themselves. They attended a Wednesday miracle night the week after. Bibike and I stayed home with our brothers. Later that night at dinner, they spoke of all they had seen and heard. Stories of people who had been worse off than they could ever dream of being who experienced great change through the church. There was the illiterate taxi driver who found favor with an expatriate and became his personal assistant, earning a salary in dollars. And the man who won the visa lottery after he was prayed for and who was leaving for America soon. And another, a man once so poor he sewed boxer shorts out of his wife’s old wrappers, who, after prayers at church, won a government tender and made so much money, he bought three brand-new cars in one day.

  It was the very best day of my life. Even though I wished they had joined because they loved Jesus, I was happy that the rest of my family had finally come to the New Church. We were desperate for better things, feverish with expectation that church was the missing link.

  Andrew and Peter missed our old church, All Saints Anglican Cathedral. They were chubby, round-faced boys who had been doted on by most of the elderly congregants of the old church. Andrew had been nicknamed the King Himself, for his portrayal of King Herod at the Christmas play in ’94, and Peter delighted everyone with his recital of the First Psalm in English and Yoruba. It was something they did every year after that, until we left: Andrew was always the lead in church plays; Peter always recited long Bible passages from memory.

  My mother still struggled with being poor and needy. The women of the New Church discomfited her for this reason. They were, in many ways, unlike the women who attended the old church. Women from our old church, like my mother, had been raised as privileged Lagos girls, attended competitive all girls’ schools like Anglican Girls or Queens College, lived in London for a year, perhaps taking Cambridge A levels, or perfecting their typing and shorthand skills, then returned to steady careers and marriages. Most of the New Church women usually had little or no education. They came to Lagos from their villages for the first time as adults, courtesy of born-in-the-village husbands who had found work here. They were very dependent on these husbands and other male relatives in a way that our mother found annoying in the beginning, but later began to envy.

  Whenever they gathered together for prayer meetings in our business center, they generally had the same kind of conversations. Gossip, grievances, and barely concealed guile masking as prayer requests. “I asked my husband for money for food shopping and he did not give me.” “My brother in Germany has forgotten the family.” “My neighbor needs to come to the Lord. Her husband won’t stop beating her till she becomes a praying wife.” When they were around, Mother made a show of being a model Christian woman. Behind their backs, though, Mother mocked and mimicked these women. Bibike and I were glad to have Mother’s attention again, and so we laughed aloud each time she did. We were fakers, but we were happy.

  Pastor David’s church was growing. The New Church moved out of the public school into a new, purpose-built church building. For the first time, there was a separate youth church, called the Burning Citadel, and it was one of the first youth churches in Lagos to attempt being simultaneously cool and godly. Sunday services were called “hangout sessions” and midweek services were called “meet-up gigs.” There was an effusive worship band with electric guitars and large drums, which made Ron Kenoly and Don Moen songs sound super cool. The band took the music from “Malaika,” made famous by Miriam Makeba, and turned it into a song of Christian dedication. We sang, “My lifetime, I give Jesus my lifetime,” with contrite hearts. I no longer saw Pastor David and I did not care that much. I had Jesus, I had my family.

  Father found himself a new group of henchmen, similarly smooth-talking, broke men with big dreams and loud voices. They congregated almost daily in our business center. The business was getting better at this time, and Mother had even expanded it to include wholesale office materials and beverages.

  They were like Father’s earlier group of men. Loud, noisy dreamers. These dreamers, though, said bless you instead of good morning, and “I am a winner” when you asked, “How is your day going, sir?”

  One of Father’s closest friends was a young man named Pastor Samuel. He was one of the assistant pastors and was always in a suit no matter how hot the weather. He came to the house, to our business center, almost every day. He always bought a bottle of Coke, first wiping the rim clean with a white handkerchief he kept in his shirt pocket. Then he told stories of all the business deals he was abou
t to strike. The stories he told Father were rivaled only by the ones he told as testimonies in church. He spoke of connections with military administrators in various states of the republic. One Sunday, Pastor Samuel presented to the church a “sacrificial thanksgiving seed” of an imported fourteen-seater bus. He announced that he was thanking God for connecting him with the highest-ranking military men in the state. We were so happy for Pastor Sam’s newest blessings. Especially because, like oil on Aaron’s head, they were sure to trickle down to us.

  Most days when Pastor Samuel visited Father at home, he paid special attention to us girls, dashing Bibike and me money. He was nice and friendly. He sat with us and talked with us, wanting to know what books we were reading, what music we liked, whether we had boyfriends. Mother hated the attention Pastor Samuel gave us and one day, after she walked in on him giving Bibike a foot massage, asked us to never speak to him again unless it was in church. Father agreed with her and began sending us upstairs whenever Pastor Samuel came to visit.

  When the military president died in June of ’98, things fell apart all over the nation. The chaos was particularly intense in Lagos. As commercial capital of the republic, the unexpected changes in political leadership led to panicked trading activity among the ruling class. People were hoarding food—rice, garri, yams. Gas stations shut down. Electronics stores moved their goods into more secure warehouses, fearing a riot.

  IT WAS DURING this time that Pastor Sam approached Father about a deal. He told Father that one of his connections, a top admiral in the navy, was in possession of a shipment containing foreign currency that the deceased military president had been taking out of the country. The admiral needed money to transfer ownership of the shipping containers to someone outside the military. The reasoning was a new government in the impending democracy would most likely investigate all past military personnel for corrupt practices.