Kabu Kabu

by Nnedi Okorafor

“Oh,” Zev said, his eyebrows rising. He was so excited that he could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He shook himself off and zipped up his pants. He didn’t bother flushing the toilet when he left the bathroom. Forget the camera. No time. He’d left the backdoor open, so he didn’t worry about scaring it away with the sound of the sliding door.

  Now all he had to do was walk slowly and quietly toward the bird. He knew he could do that. He was a pro at approaching birds. He believed that he had a special ability to mentally calm the birds with his presence, be it finch, parrot, secretary bird, or grackle. Very few birds ever fled from his presence. Even now, as he slowly walked across the yard, sweat pouring from his brow, breathing heavily with excitement, none of the birds at the feeder paid any attention to him. It was as if he was only partially there. He smiled to himself. No other ornithologist in his department would be able to touch him and all his past girlfriends had been too shallow to see how good he was at what he did.

  The dodo hadn’t moved as it watched Zev approach. All around him, the world was bright and alive. The air smelled of leaves, flowers, fertile earth soaked by the ocean. He could hear the cars and trucks driving by and people houses away having conversations. He paused for a moment and frowned. One of those voices sounded like his mother.

  He would call her today and tell her what he saw, then he’d tell his father, then he’d call that woman Sarafina and tell her if she hung up the phone, he’d call back and tell her again, he’d take pictures and show them to his department colleagues, his research and photos would appear in the top scientific journals, he’d make the cover of international magazines, he would be the expert on dodos, he was the expert. All this he thought about as he approached the staring robust bird.

  Five yards. Two yards. A yard and a half. Still, it didn’t move. It was beautiful. So beautiful that Zev felt weak with joy. Two feet away from the dodo, Zev knelt down on the ground and lay before the bird. He could now see that its eyes were black with flecks of gold and green.

  He was wheezing as he watched the bird slowly amble up to him. He could feel his heart laboring in its last throes, as the world around him grew more clear and pungent. Now all he could smell were flowers, oily with sweetness, not his lilacs, lilies, or roses. Some other types of blossoms. He rolled onto his side as the dodo spirit guide stepped up to him.

  “Do do?” it cooed again, softly. Zev smiled as the dodo bent its soft head and rested it on his cheek. Then Zev knew no more.

  The Winds of Harmattan

  Asuquo followed her nose and used her bird-like sense of direction. All around her were men selling yams and women selling cocoa yams. She always knew where to find the good ones; they had a starchier smell. Her mother didn’t believe her when she said she could smell specific vegetables in the market; but she could.

  Asuquo was about to jostle past a slow-moving man carrying a bunch of plantains on his shoulder when an old woman grabbed one of her seven locks. The woman sat on a wooden stool, a pyramid of eggs on a straw mat at her feet. Next to her, a man was selling very dried-up looking yams.

  “Yes, mama?” Asuquo said. She did not know the woman but she knew to always show respect to her elders. The woman smiled and let go of Asuquo’s hair.

  “You like the sky, wind girl?” she asked.

  Asuquo froze, feeling tears heat her eyes. How does she know? Asuquo thought. She will tell my mother. Asuquo’s strong sense of smell wasn’t the only thing her mother didn’t believe in, even when she saw it with her own eyes. Asuquo’s face still ached from the slap she’d received from her mother yesterday morning. But Asuquo couldn’t help what happened when she slept.

  The man selling yams brushed past her to hand a buyer his change of several cowries. He looked at her and then sneezed. Asuquo frowned and the old woman laughed.

  “Even your own father is probably allergic to you, wind girl,” she said in her phlegmy voice. Asuquo looked away, her hands fidgeting. “All except one. You watch for him. Don’t listen to what they all say. He’s your chi. All of your kind are born with one. You go out and find him.”

  “How much for ten eggs?” a young woman asked, stepping up to the old woman.

  “My chi?” Asuquo whispered, the old woman’s words bouncing about her mind. Asuquo didn’t move. She knew exactly whom the woman spoke of. Sometimes she dreamt about him. He could do what she could do. Maybe he could do it better.

  “Give me five cowries,” the old woman said to her customer. She gave Asuquo a hard push back into the market crowd without a word and turned her attention to selling her eggs. Asuquo tried to look back, but there were too many people between her and the old woman now.

  After she’d bought her yams, she didn’t bother going back to find the old woman. But from that day on, she watched the sky.

  Asuquo was one of the last. It is whispered words, known as the “bush radio,” and the bitter grumblings of the trees that bring together her story. She was a Windseeker, one of the people who could fly; and a Windseeker’s life is dictated by more than the wind.

  Eleven years later, the year of her twentieth birthday, the Harmattan winds never came. Dry, dusty, and cool, these winds had formed over the Sahara and blown their fresh air all the way to the African coast from December to February since humans began walking the earth. Except for that year.

  That year, the cycle was disrupted, old ways poisoned. This story will tell you why . . .

  Asuquo was the fourth daughter of Chief Ibok’s third wife. Though she was not fat, she still possessed a sort of voluptuous beauty with her round hips and strong legs. But her hair crept down her back like ropes of black fungus. She was born this way, emerging from her mother’s womb with seven glistening locks of dada hair hanging from her head like seaweed. And women with dada hair were undesirable.

  They were thought to be the children of Mami Wata, and the water deity always claimed her children eventually, be it through kidnapping or an early death. Such a woman was not a good investment in the future. Asuquo’s mother didn’t bother taking her to the fattening hut to be secluded for weeks, stuffed with pounded yam and dried chameleons, and circumcised with a sharp sliver of coconut shell.

  Nevertheless, Asuquo was content in her village. She didn’t want to be bothered with all the preparations for marriage. She spent much of her time in the forest and rumors that she talked to the sky and did strange things with plants were not completely untrue.

  Nor were the murmurs of her running about with several young men. When she was twelve, she discovered she had a taste for them. The moment a young man from a nearby village named Okon saw her, however, standing behind her mother’s home, peeling bark from a tree and dropping it in her pocket, he fell madly in love. She’d been smiling at the tree, her teeth shiny white, her skin blue black and her callused hands long-fingered. When Okon approached her that day, she stood eye to eye with him; and he was tall himself.

  Okon’s father almost didn’t allow him to marry her.

  “How can you marry that kind of woman? She has never been to the fattening hut!” he’d bellowed. “She has dada hair! I’m telling you, she is a child of Mami Wata! She is likely to be barren!”

  My father is right, Okon thought, Asuquo is unclean. But something about her made him love her. Okon was a stubborn young man. He was also smart. And so he continued nagging his father about Asuquo, while also assuring him that he would marry a second well-born wife soon afterwards. His father eventually gave in.

  Asuquo did not want to marry Okon. Since the encounter with the strange old woman years ago, she had been watching the skies for her chi, her other half, the one she was supposed to go and find. She had been dreaming about her chi since she was six and every year the dreams grew more and more vivid.

  She knew his voice, his smile, and his dry leaf scent. Sometimes she’d even think she saw him in her peripheral vision. She could see that he was tall and dark like her and wore purple. But when she turned her head, he wasn’t there.

 
; She knew she would someday find him, or he would find her, the way a bird knows which way to migrate. But, at the time, he was not close and he was not thinking about her much. He was somewhere trying to live his life, just as she was. All in due time.

  Her parents, on the other hand, were so glad a man—any man—wanted to marry Asuquo that they ignored everything else. They ignored how she brought the wind with her wherever she went, her seven locks of thick hair bouncing against her back. And they certainly ignored the fact that, though she was shaky, she could fly a few inches off the ground when she really tried.

  One day, Asuquo had floated to the hut’s ceiling to crush a large spider. Her mother happened to walk in. She took one look at Asuquo and then quickly grabbed the basket she’d come for and left. She never mentioned it to Asuquo, nor the many other times she’d seen Asuquo levitate. Asuquo’s father was the same way.

  “Mama, I shouldn’t marry him,” Asuquo said. “You know I shouldn’t.”

  Her mother waved her hand at her words. And her father greedily held out his hands for the hefty dowry Okon paid to Asuquo’s family.

  Asuquo had been taught to respect her elders. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew her duty as a woman. So, in the end, Asuquo agreed to the marriage, ignoring, denying, and pushing away her thoughts and sightings of her chi. And Asuquo could not help but feel pleased at the satisfied look in her father’s eyes and the proud swell of her mother’s chest. For so long they had been looks of dismissal and shame.

  The wedding was most peculiar. Five bulls and several goats were slaughtered. For a village where meat was only eaten on special occasions, this was wonderful. However, birds, large and small, kept stealing hunks of the meat and mouthfuls of spicy rice from the feast. On top of that, high winds swept people’s cloths about during the ceremony. Asuquo laughed and laughed, her brightly colored lapa swirling about her ankles and the collarette of beads and cowry shells around her neck clicking. She knew several of the birds personally, especially the owl who took off with an entire goat leg.

  After their wedding night, Asuquo knew Okon would not look at another woman. Once in their hut Asuquo had undressed him and taken him in with her eyes for a long time. Then she nodded, satisfied with what she saw. Okon had strong, veined hands, rich brown skin,a nd a long neck. That night Asuquo had her way with him in ways that left his body tingling and sore and helpless, though she’d have preferred to be outside under the sky.

  As he lay, exhausted, he told her that the women he’d slept with before had succumbed to him with sad faces and lain like fallen trees. Asuquo laughed and said, “It’s because those women felt as if they had lost their honor.” She smiled to herself, thinking about all her other lovers and how none of them had behaved as if they were dead or fallen.

  That morning Okon learned exactly what kind of woman he had married. Asuquo was not beside him when he awoke. His eyes grew wide when he looked up.

  “What is this?” he screeched, trying to scramble out of bed and falling on the floor instead, his big left foot in the air. He quickly rolled to the side and knelt low, staring up at his wife, his mouth agape. Her green lapa and hair hung down, as she hovered horizontally above the bed. Okon noticed that there was something gentle about how she floated. He could feel a soft breeze circulating around her. He sniffed. It smelled like the arid winds during Harmattan. He sneezed three times and had to wipe his nose.

  Asuquo slowly opened her eyes, awakened by Okon’s noise. She chuckled and softly floated back onto the bed. She felt particularly good because when she’d awoken, she hadn’t automatically fallen as she usually did.

  That afternoon they had a long talk where Asuquo laughed and smiled and Okon mostly just stared at her and asked “Why” and “How?” Their discussion didn’t get beyond the obvious. But by night-time, she had him forgetting that she, the woman he had just married, had the ability to fly.

  For a while, it was as if Asuquo lived under a pleasantly overcast sky. Her dreams of her chi stopped and she no longer glimpsed him in the corner of her eye. She wondered if the old woman had been wrong, because she was very happy with Okon.

  She planted a garden behind their hut. When she was not cooking, washing, or sewing, she was in the garden, cultivating. There were many different types of plants, including sage, kola nut, wild yam root, parsley, garlic, pleurisy root, nettles, cayenne. She grew cassava melons, yam, cocoa yams, beans, and many, many flowers. She sold her produce at the market. She always came home with her money purse full of cowries. She liked to tie it around her waist because she enjoyed the rhythmic clinking it made as she walked.

  When she became pregnant, she didn’t have to soak a bag of wheat or barley in her urine to know that she would give birth to a boy. But she knew if she did so, the bag of wheat would sprout and the bag of barley would remain dormant, a sure sign of a male child. The same went with her second pregnancy a year later. She loved her two babies, Hogan and Bassey, dearly, and her heart was full. For a while.

  Okon was so in love with Asuquo that he quietly accepted the fact that she could fly. As long as the rest of the village doesn’t know, especially father, what is the harm? he thought. He let her do whatever she wanted; providing that she maintained the house, cooked for him, and warmed his bed at night.

  He also enjoyed the company of Asuquo’s mother, who sometimes visited. Though she and Asuquo did not talk much, Asuquo’s mother and Okon laughed and conversed well into the night. Neither spoke of Asuquo’s flying ability.

  Asuquo made plenty of money at the market. And when he came back from fishing, there was nothing Okon loved more than to watch his wife in her garden, his sons scrambling about her feet.

  Regardless of their contentment, the village’s bush radio was alive with chatter, snaking its mischievous roots under their hut, its stems through their window, holding its flower to their lips like microphones, following Asuquo with the stealth of a grapevine. The bush radio thrived from the rain of gossip.

  Women said that Asuquo worked juju on her husband to keep him from looking at any other woman. That she carried a purse around her waist hidden in her lapa that her husband could never touch. That she carried all sorts of strange things in it, like nails, her husband’s hair, dead lizards, odd stones, sugar, and salt. That there were also items folded, wrapped, tied, sewn into cloth in this purse. Had she not been born with the locked hair of a witch? they asked. And look at how wildly her garden grows in the back. And what are those useless plants she grows alongside her yams and cassava?

  “When do you plan to do as you promised?” Okon’s father asked.

  “When I am ready,” Okon said. “When, ah . . . when Hogan and Bassey are older.”

  “Has that woman made you crazy?” his father asked. “What kind of household is this with just one wife? This kind of woman?”

  “It is my house, papa,” Okon said. He broke eye contact with his father. “And it is happy and productive. In time I will get another woman. But not yet.”

  The men often talked about Asuquo’s frequent disappearances into the forest and the way she was always climbing things.

  “I often see her climbing her hut to go on the roof when her chickens fly up there,” one man said. “What is a woman doing climbing trees and roofs?”

  “She moves about like a bird,” they said.

  “Or bat,” one man said, narrowing his eyes.

  For a while men quietly went about slapping at bats with switches when they could, waiting to see if Asuquo came out of her hut limping.

  A long time ago, things would have been different for Asuquo. There was a time when Windseekers in the skies were as common as tree frogs in the trees. Then came the centuries of the foreigners with their huge boats, sweet words, weapons, and chains. After that, Windseeker sightings grew scarce. Storytellers forgot much of the myth and magic of the past and turned what they remembered into evil, dark things. It was no surprise that the village was so resistant to Asuquo.

  B
oth the men and women liked to talk about Hogan and Bassey. They couldn’t say that the two boys weren’t Okon’s children. Hogan looked like a miniature version of his father with his arrow-shaped nose and bushy eyebrows. And Bassey had his father’s careful mannerisms when he ate and crawled about the floor.

  But people were very suspicious about how healthy the two little boys were. The boys consumed as much as any normal child of the village, eating little meat and much fruit. Hogan was more partial to udara fruits, while Bassey liked to slowly suck mangos to the seed. Still, the shiny-skinned boys grew as if they ate goat meat every day. The villagers told each other, “She must be doing something to them. Something evil. No child should grow like that.”

  “I see her coming from the forest some days,” one woman said. “She brings back oddly shaped fruits and roots to feed her children.” Once again, the word “witch” was whispered, as discreet fingers pointed Asuquo’s way.

  Regardless of the chatter, women often went to Asuquo when she was stooping over the plants in her garden. Their faces would be pleasant and one would never guess that only an hour ago, they had spoken ill of the very woman from whom they sought help.

  They would ask if she could spare a yam or some bitter leaf for egusi soup. But they really wanted to know if Asuquo could do something for a child who was coughing up mucus. Or if she could make something to soothe a husband’s toothache. Some wanted sweet-smelling oils to keep their skin soft in the sun. Others sought a reason why their healthy gardens had begun to wither after a fight with a friend.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Asuquo would answer, putting a hand on the woman’s back, escorting her inside. And she could always do something.

  Asuquo was too preoccupied with her own issues to tune into the gossip of the bush radio.

  She’d begun to feel the tug deep in the back of her throat again. He was close, her chi, her other half, the one who liked to wear purple. And as she was, he was all grown up, his thoughts now focused on her. At times she choked and hacked but the hook only dug deeper. When her sons were no longer crawling she began to make trips to the forest more frequently, so that she could assuage her growing impatience. Once the path grew narrow and the sound of voices dwindled, she slowly took to the air.