The walls of our classroom were without paint. Nadia reached over my head and sketched a sumo wrestler on the wall, writing below it this caption: ANDREW IS THE MICHELIN MAN.
“That is a terrible drawing. It looks like an amoeba,” I said.
She laughed a loud, hearty laugh, and just like that, my arms stopped hurting.
We were both facing the wall, backs turned to the blackboard, when our social studies teacher walked into the class.
“The two of you standing at the back. Husband and wife,” she screamed, startling us. “Come to the front. Now tell the whole class what is so funny.”
We spent the rest of that class in a corner, standing next to each other, heads bowed in the perfunctory performance of shame. The teacher interrupted her class to mock us. Other times, she asked us pointed questions, trying to show us as ignorant.
“Which deposed king was allowed to return from exile when the British annexed Lagos?” she asked.
“King Kosoko,” Nadia said.
“What year did this take place?” she asked me.
I did not know. I was bad with dates. I was terrible with all things involving the remembering and reorganizing of numbers.
“In 1840,” I said.
“Wrong as expected. It was 1861. Keep playing with the beautiful girls instead of facing your studies. I am sure you can get a job as her driver when she marries a rich man,” the teacher said.
Everyone in our class laughed out loud. My ears burned. I imagined running into the crowd of them with Ricky’s two-pronged whip, slashing this way and that all over their smiling faces.
It was exactly the kind of day that made me wish I could go back home, but Nadia saved me. She was the kind of girl to make you smile on the worst day of your life. For a long time after that, we sat next to each other at the back of the class, never getting in trouble but barely participating. She was always smiling, always happy, shiny and bright in the way a few girls are, like a pink lollipop.
THERE IS A little Valentine’s Day card with petals of a dried rose I still have somewhere in the house. It says:
To Andrew, who will grow up to be badder
than Tuface and Shaggy combined.
Never forget me.
The card does not tell the story of Nadia. Her face was round and pleasant from having a father who stopped by every other weekend to visit her, who loaded her with cookies, fruits, noodles in a care package. Her family had built her up with good fruitful words like:
“You are God’s example to the world of godliness.”
“You are the salt of the earth.”
“You are the light of the world.”
Her father visited her regularly without fail. Even in the bad weeks, those last two weeks when all the students had run out of provisions and no parents were visiting because it was almost time for the school term to end.
THE DAY NADIA asked me to meet her in the shade of the trees beside the girls’ dorm to exchange Valentine’s Day gifts, I showered twice. The first time, I thought I was ready to leave but then Father Ricky appeared in my dorm room, handing over to me his brown pair of boots to shine because he wanted to look good for his own Valentine’s Day plans.
The second time, after I was done polishing and shining those shoes, I got dressed in the boys’ bathroom and ran all the way to the girls’ dorm, where Nadia waited. When I stepped outside, I could see several girls emerging from their dormitories with gift bags and identical white teddy bears with tiny red hearts. I held the single rose and the single bar of Kit Kat I had purchased with two weeks’ allowance and ran to her.
My feet were fast and fluid and free. It felt like I was floating in the air. Nadia was there waiting. She was my dream, sitting on an abandoned granite heap, sipping from a can of Sprite and looking in the direction of the boys’ dorm as though she wondered whether I was coming.
When I got to her side, I called Nadia the most beautiful girl in the world. Even though her hair was braided back in S-shaped cornrows and I could see the shine of her scalp, she was beautiful.
I TOLD NADIA that her mouth was the warmest mouth in the world, that inside it was soft and cozy like a nest, that I was settling in there. I said she smelled like lilies in the springtime field, and she laughed because she knew I had never smelled lilies or seen them spring. She made words fill my mouth and I poured them out and over her, without thinking.
We heard the last bell for the night ring, but we did not leave for our dorm room. Every time I tried to pull away, she asked for five more minutes.
“Kiss me again,” she said.
I kissed her again.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. It’s from the Bible, words of Jesus, one of my father’s favorite scriptures,” she said.
EVERY TIME SHE spoke of her father, I tried to change the subject. She did not like her father. He pressured her to be the perfect Christian girl. He was stern, demanding, and overprotective. He was brutal in his discipline. His regular visits were really inspections, as he looked over her class notes, her clothes, nails, hairdo. Her hatred of him was like black soot over her shiny soul, like a scar on her face, swallowing up her beauty.
“Do you know what my father will do if he finds out I have a boyfriend?” she asked me once.
I had almost smiled, because it appeared to me that she had formalized our relationship.
“What?” I asked instead. “Who is telling him anything, anyway?”
“He will beat me worse than Ricky beat you, a lot worse, then burn my feet with fire so I imagine the terrors of hell anytime I am tempted to fornicate,” she said.
Even though I was thinking about the terrors of hell and her father’s words, I let my hands travel down to her breasts and she did not stop me. Instead, she wrapped her hands around my neck and drew me closer to her. The school was as quiet as a cemetery when we finally decided to pull away and head back to our dorms.
Nadia stood at the top of the heap, buttoning her shirt, muttering the words to “Lucky” by Britney Spears. She was facing me and therefore did not see in good enough time to run away the bright flashlight and the two people who walked toward us.
“The two of you, stop right there,” screamed one.
“Ju-boy and junior girl, I can see who you are. Run and get expelled,” the other screamed.
They kept their flashlights in our faces, blinding us. I could hear Nadia’s heart beating wildly. She tried to hold my hand, but I let the grip wane; I did not want to give the teachers who had just caught us together after our bedtime more to be angry about.
“We are really sorry,” Nadia said. “We just slept off. We did not hear the lights-out bell ring.”
One of the men laughed a loud laugh that reverberated in the emptiness around us.
“So what were you doing before you slept off?” the other man asked.
“We were just talking. About classwork. That is all. I swear to God,” I said.
The man who asked me a question slapped me so hard I fell forward. That was how I was sure that he was not a student. It was one of the teachers; his palm was as large as my entire head.
Nadia began to cry. I sat back on the heap rubbing my face. The men stood at our sides, shouting at us, calling us disgusting perverts, telling us how we had to stand before the whole school and be punished for our crimes. It was hard to tell how long we stayed there, the night getting colder around us, when the man closest to Nadia, the man who had slapped me, pulled her to him, hugging her like a father would.
“It is okay. Stop crying. It will be okay, come with me,” he said.
I tried to turn my neck to watch as they walked a little distance away from me, but the man standing before me screamed vile words at me.
“No looking. You will wish you were dead when we are done with you tonight, stupid boy,” he screamed
.
“Please, sir, I cannot do that, sir,” I heard Nadia plead in the distance.
“Well, I am not going to force you. No one wants you to scream and bring the whole school here,” the man replied.
“Please stop this. I beg you in the name of God,” I heard Nadia say.
She soon began gagging and choking. Every time it sounded like she was about to stop, it started over again. I turned to look in spite of myself. Nadia was on her knees before the man, and he was leaning over her and moving his hips back and forth. Nadia was pulling her head away and he was pushing her head back onto him.
The contents of my stomach rushed out of my mouth with the speed of running water. It was a lumpy mess of chocolate and bread and sardines. In that instant, the man by my side forgot to shine his torch in my face. Instead, he pointed it downward, checking to see if any of my vomit had spilled on his shoes. As my eyes traveled to those shoes, I realized that they were the same ones I had cleaned and shined earlier. I stilled my stomach, but another rush of vomit exploded all over the place.
It was past midnight. The clouds over us had merged into one big lump of gray, covering the moon. The air was dry and there was nothing to be heard but Nadia’s gagging and my retching. The smell traveled far. The smell of that night, vomit and shoe polish and fear, surrounded the school.
Ricky, my school father, hunched over. I flinched because I had assumed he was about to hit me again.
“Run and don’t look back,” he said instead. I ran. My legs ran before my head could convince them to stay. The smell of sorrow stayed with me. I took my shirt off and wiped my mouth as I ran. I was crying like a little boy. I turned around as soon as I could hide in the cover of the night. The shape of two bodies huddled over one lying-down girl swelled over the granite heap like the orange of a large traffic cone. Then their hold broke. I watched her try and fail to pull herself up. Her legs were kicking up granite dust, writhing weakly like an injured snake.
“Andrew, please, please, help me.”
I turned toward the path. I continued running. The door to my dorm seemed like a faraway mirage, like a gateway to another world.
Everyone was asleep like it was any other night. I ran on. I found my brother half asleep in his own bed. He made space for me and asked no questions, even though we were both in trouble if we got caught sharing a bed. I could not sleep. Around me, several cone shadows danced. My ears were ringing from being slapped so hard. My mouth tasted of blood and granite. Then my heart began to rise to meet the shadows, to demand they cease their dancing and move away from my brother’s bed. But it was a shadow of fathers. My father and Nadia’s father and Ricky were all dancing in the room. I opened my mouth, but no sound poured out. I had forgotten how to talk to fathers. The dancing fathers stared me down, and the angrier I was, the better they danced. I shooed them away with my hands, but they did not leave. They danced and laughed and danced some more, and no matter what I did, no matter how angry I got, the fathers did not stop dancing and I could not bring my mouth to say the words, “Go away, fathers.”
HOW TO BE THE TEACHER’S PET
PETER
2006
SHE WAS HIRED to teach you English and elocution because your last teacher, Mr. Atogun, had died after being attacked by a horde of bees in the yam farm he kept behind the school fence. You all attended his burial service. Seventeen government buses had taken all students living in the boarding house to Atanda cemetery that Saturday in November. You treated that bus ride to the cemetery like any other school trip to the city, singing Tuface songs out loud in the bus, shouting hoarse cusswords at people driving past in fancy cars, the better the cars, the nastier your insults. When a taxicab driver drove close enough to the bus, you yelled with all the other boys, “Oko ashawo”—husband to prostitutes—“watch where you are going.”
The Monday morning after the burial, Miss Abigail was there in your junior secondary class, teaching English language and literature. She was dressed like those women in old English textbooks, her natural hair pulled up high over her head, her blouse wide with big, fluffy sleeves, her skirt—well, she always wore skirts.
You were not happy at the quickness with which there was a replacement teacher. You imagined that for a couple of weeks at the minimum, you would spend your English and literature class periods sleeping, eating, and talking with friends.
There was nothing lazy about wanting free, unregulated time in a Lagos boarding school. Every single moment of your waking life was regulated by the bell—which was technically just a rusty wheel from an abandoned lorry—hanging in the center of your school. At six a.m. and every thirty minutes after until your nine p.m. bedtime, some person unlucky enough to be appointed timekeeping prefect rang the bell, telling you all it was time to do something else.
Catching all the junior boys, and some of the junior girls, giving her tired, annoyed looks that first day in your class, Miss Abigail assumed you all were upset to see her because you all missed your old teacher. She decided to begin your class that morning by saying prayers for the safe repose of Mr. Atogun’s departed soul. Unfortunately for her, she called on—with no clue of how bad an idea it was—Adebayo, the tallest boy in your class and the most incorrigible class clown, to say this prayer.
Adebayo began in his best attempt at invoking reverence, his voice hoarse from early puberty, projecting as far as he could:
“Dear Lord, we are nothing but stories written in pencil by your hand. When you bring your giant eraser in the sky, you wipe us away, no one will remember us.
Do not wipe us away, Lord.
Do not erase us, Daddy Jesus.
Do not remove us, Jehovah.
Do not delete us, Almighty God—”
The class erupted first in giggles and then, as he continued praying in that manner, outright laughter. You all laughed with glee at his audacity. You, Peter, laughed especially because Miss Abigail stood there before the blackboard, her eyes wide with shock, her lips thin from restrained anger.
The new teacher allowed him to go on like that for at least five minutes, then interrupted him with her calm, “In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”
Later, Miss Abigail, after you had become the teacher’s pet, would tell you she knew that Adebayo was making a mockery of prayer. “I have been a teacher for a long time,” she said to you. “I can tell who the mischievous children are just by watching how the class reacts to them.”
The rumors began spreading a few weeks after Miss Abigail joined the school. First, it was said that by being a stickler for rules, promoting to higher classes only those students who had a 60 percent average, she had made enemies in her former school, the all-girls school in the city. They said this was her last chance to teach in a government school.
Later, it was modified to include a story where she had quit because the teacher she loved had jilted her without warning, marrying some other lady. She discovered his deceit by stumbling upon his village wedding photos while cleaning up after him in his off-campus apartment.
You did not often believe things just because of the number of times you heard them repeated. You needed to see with your own eyes, this cruelty, this naivete. This was why you watched her closely, any chance you got. You sometimes saw Miss Abigail talking to herself as she walked the path to her apartment in staff housing. Sometimes she held in her hands a pile of books. Other times it was a grocery bag filled with fresh fruits. Once you watched her eat a bunch of tangerines. She peeled the skin off each one and then, instead of littering the path like anyone else would have, she wrapped the skins in a white handkerchief, tucking them back into her grocery bag.
Miss Abigail had a way of talking about the world that made her different from all your other teachers. Before she became your teacher, English literature class was the one place where you struggled to stay awake. You had no interest in dead or almost dead white men writing about springtime and snow. You definitely had no interest in memorizing lines from Shakespearean play
s so that, like Mr. Atogun, you could say things like “Yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays,” laughing at your own little joke.
She was hired to teach English literature from books written by the English, but she taught you about the fall of Rhodesia, the fight for black freedom in South Africa, and black dignity in America.
She was asked to teach poetry, but all she did was ask her students questions like, “If you are in prison or separated from your family because you have to flee an oppressive government, will you write poetry? Is writing or reading poetry an appropriate response to pain?”
You all laughed. You all said you would not have time for poetry, but for forgetting your sorrow or remembering the good in the past or imagining a better future. But you were beginning to understand what she meant. Poems are tears of the soul. You had never imagined that poems could help a person survive. Then you read “Nightfall in Soweto” by Oswald Mtshali, then you read “Letter to Martha” by Dennis Brutus. Then you read.
After you first arrived at your grandmother’s house, after Father left you one evening with nothing but clothes in your backpack, telling you he was going after a job lead in Abuja, you spent the first few weeks waiting with patience for his return. You sat on the veranda looking out into the street from the moment you woke up. You were there early enough that it was before the women hawking bread and beans began their rounds and before tricycles overcrowded with schoolchildren hobbled down the street. You were still there when nighttime arrived, when the entire neighborhood began to shut down in a dependable rhythm. First, the giant lights of the gas station went out, then the generators of the beer parlor got turned off, and finally the small kiosk owners turned off their candle and kerosene lamps and locked up their stalls.
MOST OF THE time your grandmother left you alone with your watching. Sometimes she even let you sleep out there on the veranda without waking you. She never said anything about it to you. You were not even sure she noticed or even cared. Then one day, when she thought you were sleeping, you heard her crying. She was standing over you, covering your feet with a blanket, mumbling to herself, Ibanuje ka ori agba ko odo ki la fe se ti omode.
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