Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  The money, ten million naira, was the admiral’s share of the container’s worth, and he insisted on getting cash upfront. Pastor Samuel came to Father because he did not have that type of money. He offered to pay Father back the ten million plus 50 percent of the shipment. With such looming promise of profits, Father was convinced to secure a high-interest loan on our family home for the value of the proposed bribe. The home was conservatively valued at almost double that amount at this time; it was sitting on acreage that could support two other buildings. But being confident that once the shipment cleared and the money was shared, the mortgage would be paid in full, Father signed the loan papers. Mother noticed that the visits of Pastor Samuel were more frequent in this period, and the men’s discussions intense. She asked Father several times what they were up to. “God has remembered us, dear. Something big is on the way,” was all he said.

  She responded by being even more protective of Bibike and me, keeping us indoors as much as she could. Father was a changed man this season. He woke up with songs of praise every day: “Isn’t He good, isn’t He good, hasn’t He done all He said He would, faithful and true to me and you, isn’t He good?”

  His enthusiasm was easy to catch. Even Mother, who was usually cautious about his schemes, finally caught it, this exhilaration of faith. We the children were beyond excited. Every night, we sat in our fort and talked to one another about what would happen when the money Father was expecting arrived.

  “Father will buy me a BMX bicycle,” Andrew said.

  “Me, I want a Game Boy,” Peter replied.

  Bibike and I dreamed of buying brand-new clothes from Collectibles, jeans from Wrangler, clogs, and Lycra skirts. We were going to be again what we used to be, and did not know until we no longer were, the prettiest, best-dressed girls in the neighborhood.

  It would have been easier for Mother to handle if she had been aware of any of the particulars of the deal. Father said nothing to her about it until the day after he had handed over the money to Pastor Samuel. He waited all day for Pastor Samuel to bring over the bill of lading. Next, he went looking for Pastor Samuel in the New Church. Pastor David had no idea where Pastor Samuel was. In fact, no one could find him. It was almost as though he had never existed. The only proof was the Volkswagen bus the church had repainted blue and on which it had written EVANGELISM in block letters on both sides.

  I supposed this was another way that the New Church differed from the old one. The older churches taught of a God who was responsible for everything, both good and bad. Believers were encouraged to accept their fate with good cheer, trusting the God who would deliver if He chose to. The God of the New Church was a good God, but he was only good, and He was good all the time. He took credit for everything pleasant and the blame for evil was shared between the devil and his cohort of doubting Christians. Evil of any kind, from an injured toe to lung cancer, happened only to the unbelieving or those with feeble faith.

  This was the way the New Church handled our heartbreak. First, they christened it the work of the devil, asking us to pray harder than ever—expecting the Holy Spirit to bring Pastor Samuel back. Later, we were denounced as agents of Satan, concocting a scandal to bring disgrace to the church.

  In my heart, I knew it was just a temporary trial. Like Job, we were being tested of God. I gave myself to prayer and reading the Bible. I encouraged my brothers and sister as they wept themselves sore. God had not forgotten us. He would deliver us in His own time.

  That Friday night, after we got the “last and final warning” from Fountain Mortgage Bank’s lawyer posted on the front door, Mother woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me to help with tidying the boys’ room. She gave me two hundred naira right then, so I asked her no questions, I put the money in my pillowcase and followed her to their room. We stood in front of the blue chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, saying nothing as we rolled up Andrew’s socks one into the other and tied Peter’s in knots. It was a little glimpse of the type of mother she once was, the type of mother who was careful to do the little things you asked from her. She folded Andrew’s underwear into tiny squares, and Peter’s she rolled into short scrolls.

  We folded T-shirts, singlets, and trousers, and then we hung up all their church clothes in the wardrobe. My brothers slept soundly next to each other on a queen-size bed beneath a white mosquito net suspended with twine from nails in the ceiling. There was a ceiling fan that no longer worked. The windows of the room were wide open, letting in a misty draft. Peter coughed but didn’t wake up, Mother looked like she wanted to go to him, but then she turned around and asked me to shut the windows.

  I woke up late the next morning. It was nine thirty, and I was really angry with myself for accepting Mother’s bribe and ruining my sleep. I had woken up late and missed the first part of Cadbury’s breakfast television. It was a once-a-week, two-hour program on the Lagos state-owned television channel showing premium American television. They had, in the month before, begun showing Family Matters and A Different World. Cadbury’s breakfast television was the only interesting thing available to watch on Saturday—the rest of the day’s television stations devoted themselves to live soccer matches and replays.

  I loved Carl Winslow. He was the perfect father. He even looked like a father was supposed to look: balding, round-faced, and old. For a few necessary minutes every Saturday, I would watch Family Matters and pretend he was mine. But on this Saturday, the television was turned off. Father sat quietly in his armchair, his Dake Annotated Reference Bible between his thighs. There was no one else in the sitting room. Bibike was still asleep and the boys were sitting on the kitchen floor, whispering. The note, a sheet torn off a reporter’s notebook and placed slightly underneath the television, said:

  My dear children,

  I have gone to New York.

  There is nothing left here for me anymore.

  Peter, if God blesses me, I will send for you.

  Love,

  Your mother.

  In the end, our mother was just the first to leave. My family unraveled rapidly, in messy loose knots, hastening away from one another, shamefaced and lonesome, injured solitary animals in a happy world.

  HOW TO BUILD A CHICKEN COOP

  ANDREW

  2000

  WE ARE BUILDING a chicken coop.

  My brother, Peter, and I came up with this plan just last weekend. Already we have started working it out. We have no hens yet, but we know that Nonso’s mother’s hen always has eggs. When Nonso is over here trying his best to make our sister Ariyike smile, we will walk into their compound all majestic and what, go all the way to the poultry at the back, take as many eggs as we want, hope they hatch.

  We have wood, gravel, and leftover roofing sheets from the time the local government built a shed with a roof for the transformers down the road because electricity shocks killed some boy’s father during the last flood.

  We have old wood, nails, and sawdust, and we will find old plastic bowls no one uses anymore.

  All of Grandmother’s things are old. She still has those green Pyrex dishes, teacups, saucers. They are older than all of us grandchildren. She still wears the aso oke wrappers she wore when Sister Kehinde and Sister Taiwo were baptized. We will not use any of Grandmother’s things. She has given us the space at the back of the house for the chicken coop, and that’s just enough.

  We do not need a hammer. That’s what stones are for.

  We are digging the hole already. It’s ankle deep and is wide enough for us to stand back-to-back in it. Already we have a heap of sand-dirt. Grandmother says that chicken coops do not need a foundation. We both insist that they do. So we promise that we will spread the sand-dirt all over the back of the yard instead of leaving an unsightly heap.

  We do not have a phone. We are thinking of ways to get one.

  We are alone at home. Grandmother is out shopping. Our sisters are at work. We are big boys, eleven and nine, old enough to be by ourselves staying o
ut of trouble.

  We have walked all over the carpenters’ shed in the next street, picking as many old wood nails as we can find. We are sitting at the back of the house, straightening bent nails with a big stone. Sometimes we think we hear the gates opening, someone coming, but there is no one else here.

  The boys next door are playing table soccer in their backyard. We cannot hear the sound of bottle caps falling off the table or large suit buttons pushed into a goalpost made of paper. It is their happiness we can hear, the sounds of boys our age cheering and screaming. It sounds like it is coming from a galaxy far away.

  Last Saturday, we walked for fifty minutes till we got to Rita Lori Hotel in Ikeja. There was a wedding reception. We had two black shopping bags. We were going to pick up as many bottle caps as we could find, start our own league. I was going to take all the Coca-Cola covers; all the Fanta and Sprite covers were to be Peter’s. If we got more than enough to split evenly this way, we were going to scratch the covers till the names disappeared and write our player numbers with red ink.

  There was no guard at the gate, so we walked in. We searched for covers but there were none. We were too late; the hall had been cleaned up. We went outside to the dumpster behind the hotel. The guard was there smoking cigarettes. He offered them to us. I refused, and he chased us away.

  When our hens are grown, they will lay eggs of their own. Then we will sell them for money. We will buy a crate of soda, and drink as often as we like. We will have our own teams and players.

  Peter is unhappy with this work. He is focused on the nail in front of him, squinting like the sun is in his eyes even though we are in the shade of the cashew tree, straightening nails as he is supposed to, bottom first then the top, over and over. There is an interesting melody in this repeated banging, easy to get swept up in, gbam gbam gbam, shake your head, gbam gbam gbam, from side to side.

  He is sitting with his legs crossed under him like he is in a mosque about to pray.

  “Andrew? Are you hungry?” he asks. Looking up at me.

  He is just like Mother, staring and squinting like that. I do not mention that. Instead I say, “Let us go and search for something to eat.”

  We leave our pile of nails there and go looking for our friend. His name is Solomon, but everyone calls him If You See My Mama. He is a good dancer. He dances all the time. Anytime there’s loud music. Especially when there’s a ready audience, like people gathered at the beer parlor or at Rosetta’s snooker joint. People sometimes give him money. Most give him food.

  I can do what he does, dance galala like Daddy Showkey, but I have no plans to dance for food. To dance for food, you have to be able both to dance and to eat anything. I don’t like stew without pepper. I cannot stand vegetable soup with crayfish in it. Peter can’t eat eggs or beans.

  Solomon lives with his mother in the house where the TV repairman Uncle George lives. There is a pile of broken televisions on the veranda outside their house. There is a big one with a brown wood-paneled back, the TV like a long rectangle lying on its side. Sometimes, the littler kids sit in it and pretend to be newscasters reading the evening news.

  I am Frank Olize

  And I am Abike Dabiri

  This is NTA Newsline

  Today there is no one sitting inside the TV. We go into the house and find Solomon’s mother’s room. It is the third on the left. The one with a charismatic renewal sticker on the door.

  It says HONORING MARY, NEVER WORSHIPPING. I have no idea what it means.

  Solomon is inside. He opens the door only when he hears my voice.

  “Andy dudu.” He calls me by the nickname I hate. His room smells like freshly cooked egusi soup, so I let it go.

  “If You See My Mama,” I sing out loud.

  “Tell am say I dey for Lagos,” he replies.

  “I no get trouble.” Peter supplies this last part. Solomon and I laugh at him because he still makes r sound like w.

  “Sit down,” Solomon says as he laughs. “I wan turn garri. You go chop?”

  “What type of soup do you have?” I ask.

  “Egusi,” he says.

  “Nice,” Peter says.

  Peter and I sit on the floor. There is a curtain with little blue fish and yellow bubbles demarcating the bed from the rest of the room. Solomon kneels by the bed and pulls out a tiny stove and an old Mobil tin gallon out from under it. He opens the door and places the stove and keg outside. As he pours kerosene into the stove, I tell him what we are up to.

  “We are building a chicken coop.”

  “Since when?” he asks.

  “A few days now,” I reply.

  “For sell or for choppin?”

  “Both,” I say.

  “For selling,” Peter says.

  Solomon comes back into the room, picking up a kettle and a box of matches. There is a covered plastic drum at the foot of the bed. He opens it, puts a cup in it, and fills the kettle with water.

  “This is the perfect time for chicken business,” he says to us. “It will be almost Christmas by the time the chickens are big, then you can sell them for even more money because of Christmas rush.”

  We did not think it would take that long to raise chickens.

  “Let me tell you where you can get maize for free.” Solomon puts the kettle to boil and comes to sit on a stool next to us.

  “What for?” Peter asks.

  “Where?” I ask at the same time.

  “For feeding your chickens na.” He looks at Peter like a fly is on his nose. He turns to me and asks, “You know where the bakery is?”

  “Not really.” This time I am not ashamed of not knowing. Solomon has lived here since he was five years old. Father brought us here this year to live with his mother, our grandmother. We do not know where our father lives now.

  “It is bit far. I don’t know how to describe it. There is the borehole with three huge water tanks right next to it,” Solomon says.

  “Our sisters will know,” Peter says.

  “Every morning when my mother goes to buy bread for sale from the bakery,” Solomon continues, “there’s always fresh maize in a calabash. She says people leave it there as offerings to spirits.”

  We will take maize offered to spirits for our hens.

  When Solomon is done, he brings the food in two bowls, one for garri, the other for soup. He sets it right in the middle of the room. Peter and I sit next to each other, Solomon sits on the opposite side facing us. I have a feeling that I have been here before. That all this has happened already, and I am just now remembering it.

  “You better don’t touch my meat,” Solomon says to Peter.

  “Sorry. It was a mistake,” Peter says, and the feeling is now stronger than it has ever been. I force myself to eat but I can no longer do it. I am searching inside my brain to know what I remember, what happens after this. There’s nothing. My mouth is bitter, my stomach feels like I drank cement mix.

  Solomon says something to me, but I don’t hear it. Peter laughs and replies.

  “—he say he wan free money.”

  They finish the food, but we do not get up. We are talking in this room, a multipurpose room where I can see everything Solomon’s mother has got—plates, pots, and pans poking out of old moving boxes, a pile of old clothes in a brown leather box with a broken handle. There is a black-and-white TV with a wire antenna on top of it.

  We are sitting on a scratchy faded green rug with spots of candle wax all over it.

  We are talking about new music. We all agree not to like musicians who start their choruses with names of girls. (“Sade” by Remedies is a stupid song; “Omode Meta n Sere” is the greatest song of all time.) I am thinking about Mother and Father. Mother hates worldly music. Father hates it but smiles anytime our sister Bibike sings.

  As we sit here talking, a short man I do not know walks in. He does not knock, he just pushes the door open like that.

  “Welcome,” Solomon says to him as he motions for us to get up, leave.<
br />
  “Sit down and continue your enjoyment.” The man speaks to us, smiling a wide white smile that brightens his face. His lips look too wide for such a small face. The man has dark blotched skin. His face is a perfect round shape. His eyes are swollen and red. He looks like Raphael the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle without the green. The man sits on the bed behind us and starts taking off his clothes. Solomon springs up.

  “We are leaving. My friends have to be home before their grandma comes back.”

  “They don’t have to leave. Okay. Take this money. Let the small one stay. The two of you go and buy something to eat—” The man is still talking. I get up. I pull Peter onto his feet. The man is still smiling, softer now, hopeful even. He is sweaty even though he has taken off everything but his undershorts. I do not know what he sees in my face but he stops smiling immediately. His transformation is instant, almost funny.

  “Get out of here, foolish children. Shut the door,” he screams. “And Solomon, you better not come back till your mother comes home this night.”

  We rush down the hallway, to the veranda of TVs and into the streets. Peter is humming. We are walking slower now, still saying nothing. Peter stops in front of a dusty Datsun that looks like it’s been there for ten years and starts to write on the windscreen, “Wash me please.”

  We walk in silence until we get to our home. The boys next door are still playing a game. We can also hear some girls singing.

  “Let’s go see Stanley.” Solomon does not wait for me to respond. He walks to their house, opening the gate.

  Peter and I look at each other, then we go in with him. Their house looks just like ours—cracked plaster walls, a moldy well to the left at the entrance, a veranda made with red brick paving stones.

  At the back of the house, the boys are playing table soccer in one corner. Stanley is winning. Their table is huge. They have taped a linoleum rug over the wooden top. The bottle covers just glide over it. Peter and I will never be able to make a table like that on our own. I must become friends with Stanley.