Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  Their first time was messy, feral even. They’d been lounging on the couch after supper, watching NTA TV as Chicken Little newscasters squawked on and on about yet another Nigerian airplane falling from the sky, the third in as many months. How irritatingly predictable, he’d thought, just as she turned to him, tears in her eyes. It was disconcerting and, and, stirring. Strange, altogether strange. Something moved through him, something unbidden. Unexpected. Unwanted? He stiffened. Gave her shoulders a glancing there-there-now pat. His was not a family given to grand gestures of affection, yet somehow, inexplicably, even to himself, when she responded by moving closer to him, muscling a tear-stained cheek into his crisply tailored shirtsleeve, he took her in. Something happened in his chest then, a sawing sensation only vaguely reminiscent of breathing. Heartbeat tapping a staccato code against his rib cage. She’d looked at him, knowingly. Her upturned face saying she’d deciphered its message. So he kissed her then. Then all was chaos: teeth at his nape, nails scratching his thighs, hands fisting her braids. Exhilarating.

  They fell for each other. The descent quick thereafter. He came to realize, quite quickly, how a man could utterly be held in sway by the tam-tam rhythm of a woman’s hips as she walked by. For her part, she came to love him, with a raw, singular intensity that he could never have anticipated—or purchased online. Yes, purchased, that’s right. He and Vicky heard the rumors later, the whispered asides of Cambridge neighbors when he’d brought her back home to the States. She must be a mail-order bride, wooed via keystroke. She was flesh trade goods from some chauvinist, male-fantasy site like Africanbeauty.com. Afrobride.com promised a selection of “elegant and lovely ladies” in a buffet of nationalities: Nigerian, Cameroonian, Ethiopian, Ivorian. Or perhaps her provenance was a sister site? One like foreignprincesses.com, where African women vied for Western Prince Charmings with international Cinderallas: Irina from Kiev, Naviya from Pattaya, Jun Li from Kunming. One day Elliot found Vicky browsing one such site, absorbed by the profile of “Sexy Kenyan Kitten,” twenty-one-year-old Nadine from Nairobi, smiling coquettishly over a shoulder tattoo and gushing about her willingness to “cater to my man.”

  “Cater to you, hmph,” Victoria said, sucking her teeth and jumping up from the computer in disgust. “Save that for an R&B song. Igbo women are warriors, don’t you dare laugh, Elliot.”

  He laughed, watching his diminutive wife scowl up at him, one hand poised on a cocked hip, the other sprouting a wagging finger. He turned around to hide his face. “I’m not laughing.” Why was she the only one who made him laugh? “I swear I’m not.”

  “Mm-hmm. You know, Elliot, when Igbo women feel disrespected, we make war on men.”

  He felt her grab the back of his favorite shirt, an umber guayabera, last reminder of the uniform he’d worn daily in the tropics.

  “What are you—? Vicky, this is linen. You know you’re buying me a new one, right?”

  He heard muffled chuckling. “See me this, fashionisto. When I met you, you had one-one shirt.” Tiny hands scaled up his neck. “Now keep quiet while I school you.” She hoisted herself fully onto his back. “I’m teaching you a history lesson. So listen up.”

  “I’m all ears, Teach,” he replied, clamping her thighs securely around him. Wondering if poor attention would earn him the ruler. Wanting it.

  Vicky began her piggybacked lecture.

  “In 1929, ten thousand Igbo women started ogu umunwanyi, the Women’s War. When men do wrong, we ‘sit on you.’ It’s part of our tradition, how we protest.”

  “You climbing on me. This is protest? Vicky—”

  “Shhh, I’m not done, as for climbing, well, let’s say I’m improvising. I could also burn your hut, but it’s a very nice hut, and I live in it, too.”

  As he walked them to the bedroom, she proceeded to school him about mass uprisings among Igbo women in villages across Eastern Nigeria. Women protesting in droves, as Britain’s colonial taxes handicapped their fledgling enterprises, the small goods and foodstuffs market that helped sustain their families. She spoke of women mobilizing, of war paint on faces, of war songs and rallying cries ringing out, of staring down enemies—the Brits, yes, but their colonial proxies, the warrant chiefs too, and local men these women knew: brothers, friends, and sometimes husbands who could be shamed. They sang, they chanted, they brought down the system.

  “And the moral of this story is?” he asked, placing her on the bed for her finale.

  “Always fight, never surrender,” she replied, then pulled him down to the bed and covered his body with her own.

  —

  Data Set Entry: March 25, 2006. Garland, Texas. Theophilus Ekoh Ojukwu, 46, from Enugwu-Agu, Ihe, in Awgu LGA, Enugu State, bludgeoned RN wife, Melvina Ojukwu, 36, from Umuanebe, also of Ihe, Awgu LGA, Enugu State, with hammer. The couple had four children, ages 4 through 9. Ojukwu was sentenced to life in prison.

  —

  “We just want to help you, son,” said the older detective, the stout one with the third button dangled loose, spilling into a coffee stain that trickled, grew girth, over the bell jar of his belly. McManus, was it? “We’re here for you. We’re here to listen.”

  “You listening?” asked McManus, giving his partner a look. “Maybe we’re due for a break. How ’bout some coffee, son?”

  Son. It was a word unfamiliar to Elliot. To Elliot Coffin Sr., he’d been “junior” or “the boy” all his life, as in The boy is too soft, Jillian—all that Chopin, Schubert nonsense you fill his head with. Boarding school will toughen him right up. You’ll see.

  At boarding school, he had mastered precisely three things: how to curse in flawless French—casse toi, sal espèce de salope—the entire hard-core rap oeuvre of Niggaz Wit Attitudes, and swindling in chess. He also learned, yet never quite perfected, the outsider art of beating a boy till you maimed him, body and soul.

  His own beatings had gone on for a full year by then. Dating back to his arrival at the academy as a puny freshman, drowning in his crested cardigan, fair game for a sadistic set of upperclassmen. Then the summer before tenth grade he shot up a foot, then another foot that fall. That spring, he found the ringleader, Scott Lasseter, smoking weed behind the grounds building after evening prayers. A southpaw, Elliot led with his left—a roundhouse punch that connected with bone and sinew. He felt the satisfying grind of teeth against his knuckles, and after that, a darkness embraced him, blind moments before he came to. Found himself standing, fists pulpy and throbbing, looking down at the ruins of the other boy’s face—eyes collapsed, mouth excavated. A part of him immediately remorseful: his stomach rolled once, turned again, bent him over, kneecapped him till he was sure he would puke, but it passed, and soon after, something else entirely gripped him, a chokehold of fierce euphoria. He felt invincible. And painfully alive.

  “Drink this, Junior.” Elliot’s father handed him a glass. After the fight, he’d been duly expelled. After school authorities informed his parents of “the incident,” he’d been sent for. Retrieved by his father’s people. Left to ponder his future on the long ride home. Returned home in disgrace, to sit there, in his father’s library, and wait on his final judgment. He was burning with newfound defiance, spoiling for a fight. The last thing he’d predicted was détente.

  He considered the shot of whiskey at hand. It was Glenfiddich, the good stuff, housed in a cherrywood liquor cabinet that had long stood sacrosanct in the Coffin household, spoken of in hushed tones, its spirits saved for his father’s solitary communions.

  Elliot gulped down the shot and felt his chest burn with a different, unholy fire.

  His father stood watchful, quietly sipping his own drink, while Elliot bore up under his stare. Finally, solemnly, his father spoke. “You’re a man now, son.”

  “Drink this, son,” said McManus, handing Elliot a foam cup.

  Son.

  It was too late to be reborn as anyone’s son. In the dim room, Elliot sipped bitter coffee, thought bitter thoughts. A cold light filtered th
rough a high window—its crocheted grating like some iron afghan thrown over the lap of the world. He felt a chilling apprehension. He knew he was trapped. He’d run through several variables in his head. Conclusion: stay put. He needed to be here, to cooperate, to answer questions and prepare himself to face whatever trumped-up charges these detectives dared to concoct.

  —

  Data Set Entry: June 16, 2010. Tampa, Florida. Olufemi Ademoye, 56, charged with second-degree murder in Florida for allegedly killing his wife, Juliet Oluwatoyin Ademoye, 52, over the paternity of the couple’s 17-year-old son.

  —

  They kept at him. What was your wife into? Any hobbies?

  Did your wife have any enemies, Mr. Coffin? No.

  Any new “special friends”? Yes.

  Victoria was a whirligig. There were tons of new friends and new activities since the move to Cambridge. Freed from the shackles of her elder cousin’s arbitrary curfews and assorted Lagos transportation constraints, she went everywhere. With everyone but him it seemed. There was pottery on Mondays with Kurt—Nkem, darling, don’t worry, he’s gay—or Saturday-morning Pilates with Karen—You know her, Elliot, the neighbor in the house with the yellow shutters, yes, the ones you hate. But it was never the neighborhood friends and work friends that caused the panicky, angry burn in the pit of his stomach that he slowly came to recognize as jealousy. It was her coins, or rather, their bestowers.

  Back in Lagos, she’d been a collector, had a cache of currency gifted to her by the globe-trotting clients Chibuzo ferried across the sprawling city. She had coins, and only coins, since her cousin made a habit of seizing the banknotes as his so-called commission. They weren’t particularly old or valuable, more aged by pocket grime than time, but it was the sentimental value she placed on them that gave him pause. There was a coppery ¥0.5 piece embossed with a lotus flower given to her by Yen—a Shanghai businessman who called her little lotus blossom in his frequent emails. A Sacagawea from a Texan engineer that she claimed to love because Lewis and Clark’s Shoshone guide was memorialized toting a baby on her back à la Igbo. But she was cradling it in her hand one day and he swore he heard her whisper “Howdy.”

  “You’re going away? Again?” he’d asked over dinner one night. Quiet as she’d rattled off her schedule for the upcoming weeks.

  “The trip’s in two weeks, Elliot. And it’s only for one day, a spa day.”

  He fell silent. It was only a day, to be sure, only a day. One of few he could spare from work, a day better spent together, walking along the Charles or playing chess in the Square.

  “Biko, Elliot, please. You know I didn’t come all the way to America, all the way to obodo oyibo, to sit in the house all day.” She was up then, clearing the plates, leaving him there, at the table alone, clutching a steak knife in his hand, all but forgotten, till he came to and saw blood.

  He went out into a starless night. Wrapped a bandage around his blooded skin in the privacy of their wraparound porch. He knew there’d be no sleeping tonight, his mind damned to replay their dinner’s fallout, dragging him through hell and back, then unto wakefulness, his palms itchy and reaching out, rooting blindly for the comfort of his sleeping wife’s skin, as he’d done so many a night, now second nature, surprised to feel fingers, his fingers, landing, then curling slowly, around the nape of her supple neck.

  The darkness embraced him.

  On the porch, hands clenched, his fingers curled around the clink-clink clatter of metal. When had he picked up her coins? Those tokens of other men’s affections. One day would he too be part of her bygone collection? Chibuzo had implied as much, told Elliot he was just an onye ocha meal ticket. Cursed him for never giving kola, paying bride price for Vicky’s hand. Elliot was no fool, he knew some women on the continent used “bottom power,” used the currency of their bodies to acquire jobs, status, and the all-protective power of being “Mrs. So-and-So” in a patriarchal society. But Vicky was different. She was his. Wasn’t she?

  The coins clink-clinked answers. Conspiring in his hand.

  He wanted to hurl them.

  Wanted to skip them like rocks on currents of night air.

  He wanted to show his mettle.

  To prove what he was worth.

  So he did.

  —

  Data Set Entry: August 7, 2010. Exeter Township, Pennsylvania. Chukwudubem Okafor killed himself after murdering his wife, Cheryl, 37. The couple had four school-age children.

  —

  “We found some interesting stuff on your hard drive, Professor.”

  Professor. The taller detective—Murray, was it? Yes, Murray—had taken to calling him “professor.” Said in the same sneering tone used for words like Barnie or liberal elite. He was an economist at a respected and renowned think tank, but as the first hour in the box segued into the fifth, frustration had worn down the veneer of politesse afforded him, worn thin the illusion that they considered him a grieving spouse and not a person of interest.

  They slammed manila folders and reams of printouts down on the table before him. Their eyes accusatory. Their twisted lips damning. He knew what they had—his files, his raw data: the obituaries, court case briefs, blog forum transcripts, newspaper clippings (Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Bay Times)—and his own meticulous notations and graphs about uxoricide, wife killings. Nigerian wives, to be precise. His notes dispassionately appraised a couple’s age, income, occupational and educational disparities to predict the probability of homicide. In the mid-aughts there had been a rash of these murders and manslaughter cases across the United States. These crimes well noted in his wife’s diaspora community. Several message boards decried the lack of media coverage, more evidence of MWWS—Missing White Woman Syndrome. None of these murdered women had ever raised a pom-pom. None had swishy blond names like Becky or Mindy. Instead, they were nurses, with long medicinal names one had to purse one’s lips to pronounce. Names as convoluted and polysyllabic as the generic drugs they dispensed at care centers, served with applesauce and Ensure.

  It was Victoria who showed him the data. Of Isatu Omorogieva, Monireti Abeni Akeredolu, Melvina Ojukwu, Chidiebere Omenihu Ochulo, Uchenna Ezimora, Anthonia Iheme, all wives slaughtered, a slew of others shot, knifed, beaten, yet somehow escaping with their lives, if not their souls, intact.

  “Look at this, Elliot,” she said, from her perch at his desk. “These stories are crazy. These poor women. Why aren’t people talking about this?”

  “Not enough cases,” he replied, unthinking. “Statistically negligible.”

  She swore at him in Igbo then, something muttered, lowing. “You have to look beyond that, Elliot. Stop crunching the numbers!”

  Too late now, he understood. Only now after he had loved her and lost her. Of course, his data sets could never capture the horror of a seven-year-old daughter watching her father bludgeon her mother to death with a hammer. No histogram could model the motives that drove a man to commit such an act. He knew the stories by heart. Tales of men who had harvested brides from the village, imported them to America, offering education and elevation only to later be outgrown by That Wife. That Wife: she once was respectful, knew her place, now she fancied herself his oga. That Wife: she knew chapter and verse of the oyibo family law that thiefed his three children, his Lexus, his suburban duplex during the divorce. That Wife: she went to school on his naira, then his dollars, his three dirty jobs financed her studies. Now she had a salary and she alone clutched the purse strings. That Wife he plucked from a hovel. That Wife he handsomely paid five goats and four jugs of palm wine for. That Wife was too mouthy. That Wife had unmanned him. Madness. Elliot knew how Ekwensu’s trickster spirit could worm into a man, leave a mind full of maggots. Leave you bleary-eyed and hollow with blood on your hands wondering how and why and when. He understood these men’s dark longings. Understood how a husband could want to own his wife’s thoughts, own her very footsteps.

  This is when she came to him. Vicky
, somehow there in the box, smile seeming all too real, laughing and joking that Asasaba, ferryman to the Igbo afterlife, was running late as any danfo driver. Teasing him about the fine mess he’d gotten himself into, some oyibo palava. O te aka o di njo, emesie o ga-adi mma. She gave him a kiss and an orange to make it better. Then she was gone.

  • • •

  Elliot Coffin Jr. made his living in a field mistrusted by many. Statistics was filled with vaguely sinister terminology like abnormal obsolescence and abuse of dominant position. Working in econometrics, he dealt in numerical data and facts, the quantifiable. He knew the average price of grain in the Midwest or the number of tires sold to foreign car manufacturers. Armed with facts and figures, he had once considered himself a man of pure logic. He knew how his charts and graphs would look to a jury. So when the detectives asked him why there were no signs of forced entry, why he was the last person to see “the deceased”—he knew what they were really asking was, Why did you kill your wife, Mr. Coffin?

  Elliot once clung to numbers, data, facts, and figures; but in this matter, they betrayed him.

  —

  Fact: In the United States, 33 percent of murders are intimate partner homicides—perpetrators determined to be spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends.

  Fact: The percentage of intimate homicides doubles when the gender of the victim is female.

  Fact: Elliot Coffin Jr. maintained that he did not kill his wife; but he would be the first to admit that, statistically speaking, he could have.

  Dance the Fiya Dance

  Tuesday, Feb. 22

  Belinda is teasing me about keeping a “diary” again. And despite the lack of a gold-tone lock or the unicorn-fetish cover of my 5th grade diary, she might just be right. I’ve been calling this a journal but even that holdover term from my Anthro training seems too imprecise. Inside these pages are field notes, yes—page upon page of my scrawling on the phonological truncations and morphological hybridizations of broken English—yet interwoven with these entries are my personal ramblings, half-remembered recipes, sickening poems about my ex, and never-ending to-do lists. This book—diary or journal—is my mind uncensored. As much as I love my cousin, my family, my flesh and blood, theirs is a meddlesome love. In these pages I place my confidence and confidences, thoughts so private, I long for that tiny gold lock, once more.