“Everything. Leave Lagos for America,” I replied.
Mother stopped to talk with the girl who had the fruit tray. She bought most of the sliced pineapple on the tray. She let the girl keep the change.
“Now go home and get some sleep,” Mother said to her.
“In America, that little darling would be taken away from her parents. Given to people who know better than to let a girl that young roam these dangerous streets selling stuff,” she said to me as we watched the girl go away.
I did not really expect her to answer my question about regrets. Just like I needed to ask, she needed to not answer. She did not seem to remember who she was before she ran to America in hopes for a better life. I did not know anything but the mother she used to be. That comparing and contrasting was my burden. I did not pay the price that she did, so America was not at all beautiful to me. What is the value of a thing but the price a buyer pays for it? How can I expect someone who went to prison for a chance to live in a country not to be excited when she got that chance? I did not really hate my mother, I did not even hate America. How can you hate something you do not know? America will always be, to me, the country that stole my mother and sent back something unrecognizable in her place. I will not call that country beautiful, or its people beloved.
The bus we rode home filled with passengers in less than five minutes. When the driver tried to start the engine, it sputtered and coughed several times but failed to start. As if on cue, with no words spoken, I and every other male on the bus got out and began to push. We were seven men trotting behind a bus. As I pushed, I noticed the girl with the fruit tray emerge from behind one of the shops in the market. Her tray was full again and she was looking around the crowd like a trained scout.
I smiled to myself as she ran to a tall, light-skinned woman dressed in a black skirt suit, a lawyer’s white bib hanging around her neck.
“Fine auntie, please buy my fruits, so I can go home. It’s night. Please.” The girl was shouting. Her voice sounded like she had been crying.
The tall lady said something I could not hear and handed the girl some money, taking none of her fruit.
The bus sputtered and came to life. One after the other, all us men ran after the moving bus, jumping in, finding our seats.
4
THIS OLD HOUSE
BIBIKE
2012
IN THE HOUSE where my daughter, Abike, is born, my grandmother, her great-grandmother, sits with my daughter in her arms. My grandmother’s legs are stretched out straight before her. Her back is curved in a perfect half circle, bent like the handle of a teacup. She is singing the oriki to my daughter.
Abike for whom kings have gathered.
Abike, her skin shines bright as palm oil.
We ask her for meat, she gives the herd.
We ask her for light, she brings the sun down.
Sometimes my grandmother lifts my daughter’s feet to her mouth, gently biting off her overgrown toenails. I tell her I have a baby kit with steady-grip nail clippers and a soft hairbrush and even a nasal aspirator. My grandmother laughs at me.
“Abike is my mother returned to the land again. I will not let you offend her with this imported nonsense,” she says.
There is something about a new baby that makes older people think of all those who have passed. Each day of my fourteen-day postpartum hibernation, and many days after that, Grandmother tells me a new story about her own childhood.
“When I was a young girl, maybe just seven or eight years old, my father killed an elephant when he was out hunting by himself in Idanre Forest. Of course, no one believed him because he could not carry it back to the village.
“Then he went to Oshamolu, the native healer, and asked for a transporting spell for two beings. Oshamolu told him he could only transport two live beings at once or two dead beings, so he could not transport a dead elephant and a living hunter.
“My father then went to Father James, the white priest in town, to ask him if he could raise him from the dead, since the priests were always talking about Jesus, who raised people from the dead.”
I cannot tell which parts of her story are exaggerated and which ones are real, but I love them so much that I record everything. I have a little voice recorder that records all of her stories and songs. When Abike is grown, I want her to hear it all from my grandmother’s mouth. I want to cover my daughter with Grandmother’s Yoruba, in the pure softness of her Ondo dialect, baptizing her with every sentence sounding like birdsong when she speaks.
The first thing you see when you walk into my grandmother’s living room is the large brown rattan dual reclining daybed with white cushions. It is the kind of set you’d find on a patio in a different country; in Lagos, we keep our expensive furniture indoors. We—my twin sister, Ariyike, and I—got the set for our grandmother after she hurt herself in the kitchen. Now Grandmother spends most of her time sitting in the living room, watching television. A young woman, a daughter of an old friend, comes over three times a week to help with cooking and cleaning.
In this house we grew up in, sometimes I sit next to my grandmother in her recliner, listening to Ariyike preach the gospel of Jesus Christ on national television. It is all still surreal to me, how easily my sister slipped into this role of pastor’s wife, women’s leader, television minister. Everywhere I go in Lagos, her face is on posters and billboards, right next to Pastor David’s, welcoming people to church. In these pictures, she is smiling. She seems comfortable and happy. It is almost as though she has prepared her whole life for this role. How is it possible that I missed that? We are twins, identical. I once believed we were exactly the same. I did not even know she really believed in Jesus.
Often, Grandmother watches Ariyike on television with me, shaking her head as she does this, complaining loud and clear.
“I really wish your Taiwo did not join those people,” she says.
“It is a job like any other,” I’d answer.
“No, it is not. Cooking is a job. Nursing is a job. Typing is a job. This thing, this telling people what God thinks they should do, is not a job. I have said it many times. I will say it again, but I am just an old lady and no one listens to me anymore.”
Grandmother herself was a Christian once. She has told me many stories over and over. As a young girl, she was even baptized in the church. At her catechism, her name was changed from Olanike to Stella Maris. This happened in the fifties, when fewer Yoruba were going to the Catholic church. The Roman Catholics taught in English and sometimes Spanish, but the Anglican churches already had Bibles and hymnbooks in Yoruba. Grandmother went to school during the day and worked in the priest’s quarters at night. She insists she was just a hard worker. She insists that she wasn’t particularly clever or literary and was always nervous around new people, but that soon enough, all that reading and writing in English paid off and she was hired by A. G. Leventis in Lagos. I do not agree with her assessment of herself. She is the most intelligent person I know.
When my grandmother talks about growing up in the village, her voice is bland and steady, completely devoid of nostalgia. She does not speak ill of her village or speak of her youth with longing or wanting. Whenever I try to ask more questions about her life after she left the village for Lagos, about the grandfather I never met, she evades with Yoruba proverbs like:
“No one has to show a squirrel the way to the stream.”
“No one sits by the river and argues about soap suds.”
It is easy to get tired of proverbs. They contain a certain specificity of wisdom, a peculiar scale of right and wrong. Sometimes that scale is ineffective in the modern world. I am learning to create my own values. If, for example, I consider it sensible to sit by the river and argue about soap suds—which I think means that trivialities aren’t worth discussing—I will very well do that.
I hope to be the kind of mother who answers all the questions my daughter has. I hope when she tries to talk with me about important stuff,
she doesn’t always feel like she is prying a periwinkle out of its shell.
“Let me tell you why I stopped going to church,” Grandmother says to me one day, with no prior warning.
I am in the kitchen doing dishes when she wakes up from her nap. Immediately, I wipe my hands, walking to the living room, where she is seated. Abike, my baby girl, is asleep in a cot in the corner.
“Kehinde, are you hearing me?” she asks before she says anything else.
“Yes. I am here, Maami,” I answer.
“Are you going anywhere today?” Grandmother asks.
“No.” I said. “I will go out on Friday. I am taking Abike to get vaccinated.”
GRANDMOTHER RESPONDS WITH her often repeated suspicions about vaccinations. She knows she is old, but she has seen things and the government is poisoning children with all those injections.
SHE SAYS SHE had a dream about her old priest and in spite of it all, it was a great dream, she was a girl again, that is, until she woke up and her legs were disappointingly wrinkly, long and skinny.
I laugh when she says this, disagreeing with her. I tell her that she has hot legs, full, fresh, and fair, that any young girl with sense would envy them. She says the world is a weird and cruel place and only the wise survive. I respond by agreeing with her and praying to Olodumare for the blessings of a wise head. It is part of the family lexicon to acknowledge with prayers Grandmother’s opinion of the world. We know all the right ways to respond to her.
Her last day in church was when the priest told the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and said that God destroyed the cities because of panshaga. I laugh every time she says panshaga because it is the umbrella Yoruba word for sex between unmarried people, and it is funny as heck to say out loud. Grandmother interrupts my laughing to correct me. She thinks I am laughing at the idea that she was fighting for the right of young people to fornicate. Only the priests fornicated in those days, she tells me. As a young girl, she was more terrified of her parents’ curse than anything a priest said.
“I went home that day and read the book of Genesis by myself. You should remember, we only had paraffin lamps and paraffin was too expensive to be using for that type of stuff,” she says.
I laugh again. Abike rouses at the sound of my laughter. I pick her up.
“Do you realize that in the same chapter where angels destroy the cities, the daughters of Lot are forced to sleep with their own father and have children by him?” she asks.
“Yes, I know that, Maami,” I answer.
“Why did God not destroy them and their children? Did they not do worse than the people in those cities?” Grandmother asks.
“Well, I have heard that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality specifically,” I answer.
It is my grandmother’s turn to laugh.
“Thank God those priests never said that type of stuff, the village people would have stoned them for that type of hypocrisy,” she said.
“So what do you think the reason was?” I ask her when she is done laughing. Abike is waking up again. My daughter is drawn to laughter like edible termites are drawn to bright lights.
“Well, in the earlier chapters, God himself tells Abraham that the outcry against the cities is so much. It seems obvious that it was an unjust city and the people were always doing wrong to people who could do nothing but call on God.” She picks up the remote and turns on the television. “Anyway, those priests said I was being heretic when I said that the next time in church, so I said goodbye to their nonsense and I have never been in a church again,” she says.
“I think that you actually have to believe that the Bible is true to come to those conclusions in the first place, Maami,” I say after a few minutes. “It is full of all these types of incompatibilities.”
“That is why I believe it,” Grandmother says. “It is lies that are neat and straightforward.”
I imagine what opportunities would have opened up for a woman like my grandmother if she had lived a different life. I imagine her with a robe and a wig, a Justice of the Supreme Court or a professor in a university. I will never know why she did not pursue more education or get married.
“Make sure you get a priest to pray Viaticum when I am dying,” Grandmother says, interrupting my thinking. Viaticum sticks out of her Yoruba like a strange word from an alien language.
“Maami, you will be with us for a very long time, stop that type of talk,” I say.
“Amen,” she says.
I pause the video player and begin singing the Yoruba prayer made famous by a local musician.
Mommy o, e ma pe laye.
Mommy o, e ma jeun omo.
Eni ba ni ko ni ri be
A fo lo ju.
My mother, you will live long
My mother, you will eat food from your children
Anyone who refutes this
Will go blind.
She laughs and laughs. Abike wakes up and laughs along.
In this house my grandmother built, there is a framed picture of my father at his second wedding. A young woman I have never met, her face as round as a full moon, is in a white sleeveless dress at his side, smiling directly at the camera. There is a second picture, of her twin boys on their first birthday, their heads still too big for their frames, their faces oily with party food. I wonder about the trip these pictures have made to this house.
A photographer, invited to a wedding, a birthday party, stands in the background seeking a perfect shot. Later, the couple, the parents, look at a screen then select from several shots which ones to order prints for. Next, they order copies, then mail those copies to friends and family, then they order more copies. Did my father and his new wife even stop to wonder if those photographs hurt more than they helped?
When she received them, Grandmother had her young helper buy wooden frames and hang the pictures right in the living room. When I look at those pictures, I wonder how she does not see them as a cruel testament to her abandonment, this smiling, happy, procreating photographed face.
THE MORNING MY father came back, his mother, my grandmother, had stubbed her toe on the edge of her recliner. Immediately, she clicked her fingers, circling them around her head over and over, saying in Yoruba, “My head turns all evil away. Evil will be far from me.”
Later that afternoon, he was standing in the doorway wearing all white, like the Eyo masquerade. He had the same wide, happy face in the wedding picture. He was as tall as he has always been, but it shocked me seeing him again, big-boned and happy. I was reminded instantly of how it felt as a little girl, to sit on his broad shoulders and touch the ceilings of rooms. I hoped that the boys, my brothers, Andrew and Peter, still had a chance to grow into this height and manliness despite the years of poor nutrition and hardship. I imagined them standing next to him and feeling like poor copies of a glorious original.
Grandmother screamed a long noiseless scream when she saw him. Father lay prostrate before her on the floor in the customary Yoruba greeting. I heard her inhale then hold her breath for the longest time, exhaling only after he got up off the floor.
“Why did you not send a message to let me know you were coming, Bankole?” she asked, hugging him. “We would have cleaned up, we would have made you something special to eat.”
My father responded with a surprising glibness. He said he was in Lagos for a meeting that ended earlier than expected. It was a last-minute decision to stop by. Only his business partner, who was in the car outside waiting, knew he was here visiting her.
When I left the room to give them some privacy, he had not yet acknowledged my presence or my daughter’s. He had taken a seat on one half of Grandmother’s recliner and begun whispering to her. The turned-off television displayed their distorted reflection. From the entrance of my room, I watched him whisper. He was cuddling Grandmother with one hand. With the other, he made several frantic hand gestures.
I smelled his eager, brash male cologne. It was an interesting aquatic, synthetic smell that
reminded me of resident doctors at the hospital where I worked as a teenager. There was a specific brand of ambition I had unknowingly come to attach to that smell. I did not know why, but at that moment, I was overwhelmed and terrified.
A few moments later, another man walked into the living room without knocking.
“Maami, this is the business partner I told you about,” my father said, introducing the stranger to my grandmother.
“Feel free to take a look around,” Father said to the visiting man.
I said nothing. I stood at the door to my room and silently hoped the man would come that way. He did not. He walked straight through the living room to the backyard.
“We are more interested in the space itself, to be honest,” the male visitor said to Father. “This structure is rather old.”
It was then obvious to me that this visit was not accidental. If Grandmother could tell, she did not show it. She clasped my father’s hands in one hand and held them up to her face over and over again.
“Bankole, so this is your hand, Bankole, is it really you?” she repeated again and again. “Is it really you? Have you been eating well? Have you been getting enough sleep?” She placed the back of her hand on his face and neck like one would do to feel for the temperature of a sick child.
My father responded with exaggerated warmth. He kissed her forehead. He apologized that it had been so long since his last visit. He promised to bring his little boys to visit next week. His wife was pregnant again, did she know that? The doctor tells him it is another boy, isn’t it all so wonderful?
The visitor looked uncomfortable with the display. He stood right by the door, running his hands along the wall above the door frame. When Grandmother embraced her son in another full hug, asking a new set of similar questions, the stranger made a loud throat-clearing sound. When that failed to get the expected attention, he knocked on the walls with his knuckles several times in quick succession.
Black Sunday Page 17
