Kabu Kabu

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “But one day, he set up a trap for Joseph Okeke, a fat greedy lawyer known for swindling his clients. Long Juju Man dug a deep pit in front of Joseph’s doorstep during the night. He lined the bottom of the pit with feathers he had cast a spell on to make them stick to whoever they touched. Then he cast a spell on the pit to make it invisible. Nevertheless, when he was done, Long Juju Man laughed so hard at the thought of the lawyer falling in that he slipped and fell into the pit himself. The pit was deep and the layer of feathers too thin. The fall killed him.

  “But as a spirit, Long Juju Man still had things to do,” my grandfather said. “Even after death, Long Juju Man continues playing his terrible jokes. So you all watch out for him. Watch your step at the market. He likes to pretend he is a beggar sitting on the ground. But when you pass him by, he’ll stick his foot out and cause you to fall in front of everyone. If you are wearing your best Sunday church clothes, do not hold babies. Sometimes he will sneak up next to you and tickle the baby until it vomits with glee. And when you are bringing home a basket of eggs, make sure he doesn’t see them because he’ll break every single one!”

  I remembered this last warning as I looked at the eggs my mother had given me to take to my aunt. My heart was beating fast because I couldn’t believe I was actually seeing him, Long Juju Man, the ghostly genius joker. As my mother sent me out, she said, “Make sure you don’t break even one of those eggs.”

  I had grumbled about how she never trusted me to do the simplest things. I was a confident nine-year-old. I believed in myself. But now I wasn’t so sure. And I was terrified. As I stood there, his strong peppery scent wafted into my nose and I sneezed loudly. He turned around and his first reaction was to grin widely, as if he had a thousand teeth and he wanted to show every single one of them. I looked side to side. Should I run? I thought. A ghost could move faster than I could, especially on my short legs. No, I didn’t run.

  “Well, hello there,” he said, snickering. His laugh went “hee hee hee,” and if I weren’t so afraid, I would have giggled myself. “What’cha got there?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Don’t lie to me, little tiny girl,” he said, scowling. “You’re barely the size of a mushroom!”

  “It doesn’t matter, I’m not stupid.”

  “So you know who I am?” he asked.

  “You’re Long Juju Man,” I said, holding my head up to show that I was not afraid. “And I’m not stupid,” I said again. “I’m very very smart.”

  “No, you’re very arrogant,” he said, biting into a rotten mango. He closed his eyes, and savored the wonderful sweetness. When he opened them, they glowed bright blue. “Why do you travel alone?”

  “Because I am confident in my . . . ”

  “Arrogance is not like confidence,” he snapped, his nostrils flaring. I stepped back, afraid that he would pounce on me. Instead he snickered. “Do you not fear me? Do you not know what I am capable of?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “But I’m not . . . ”

  “Yes, you are,” he said grinning. “Look at you with your puff puff hair and short short legs. I could have been a jackal and gnawed at your ankles!”

  He melted into a blue haze and became a fox-like jackal with shaggy brown fur and pointy ears. He snarled at me and I shivered, but held strong.

  I shook my head. “No, there are no jackals in these forests.”

  “I could have been a bad bad man come to steal you away!” he said, his jackal body loudly exploding into sparkles and blue butterflies and coming back together as a tall, mean-looking man with hunched shoulders, a dome-like protruding forehead and shady shifty eyes.

  I shook my head again, “It is broad daylight and that is my uncle’s house right over there. He likes to garden and he would hear me shout.”

  Long Juju Man held up a knobby finger and melted from the bad bad man into a thick fog, so thick that I couldn’t see anything but blue smoke.

  “I could be confusion,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from everywhere. “I could make you lose your way!”

  For a third time, I shook my head, this time smiling, “I have a sense of direction like a bird,” I said. “I never lose my way.”

  Then I pointed north. “That way is north, toward my home.”

  Long Juju Man sucked his foggy self in and popped back to his original form. He stroked his beard, squinting at me, a smirk on his face. Then he nodded.

  “You are a smart smart girl. That is good. I will be nice and not break your eggs. But I must give you a lesson before I let you go. Are you listening?”

  I nodded, excited. I would certainly have a story to tell my friends when I got home. I would brag about how I outsmarted the craftiest ghost in all of history!

  “You sure you are listening?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  “Yes, I am listening,” I said.

  “Good. Here is the lesson: What an old woman sees while lying down, a girl can never see even when she climbs up in a tree,” he said. “It is only because I like you that I do not smash every last egg you carry. You should always be humble in your confidence and intelligence.”

  Then there was a popping sound and he disappeared in a shower of blue flowers that melted before they hit the ground. I quickly ran to my auntie’s house, clutching the basket of eggs. When I got there, I was sweating from running and the strain of holding in a great story.

  I knocked on the door, still out of breath. I heard the footsteps as my auntie approached the door but I heard something else, too. It was a crunching, cracking sound. I gasped when I looked down at the eggs just as auntie opened the door.

  “Ngoli, my child,” auntie said, smiling and smooching me on the cheek.

  Then she looked at the eggs in the basket and gasped.

  All of the eggs had hatched into fuzzy yellow chicks, cheeping and looking about in confusion. Wouldn’t you be confused if you hadn’t expected to hatch?

  From somewhere, I heard Long Juju Man’s snickers, “Hee hee heeee!”

  The Carpet

  My sister and I didn’t go to the market with the intention of buying a carpet for the new house. All we really wanted were some souvenirs to bring back to Chicago. We did buy a few ebony masks, some bead necklaces, a bronze statuette of the mermaid goddess Mami Wata, stuff like that. But those were insignificant in the grand scheme of things. How differently things would have gone at the new house had we not bought that . . . thing.

  We were in Nigeria to visit our relatives. Our dad was sick so our mom stayed behind to care for him. I was fifteen and Zuma was sixteen. It was our first time visiting Nigeria without our parents. So, though we’d been there many times, it felt new, different, darker. No, those are the wrong words . . . more mysterious.

  We spent the first few days of our trip with relatives in Abuja, which is a city in the central, drier, Muslim-dominated part of the country. On the third day, after we’d recovered from our jetlag, we went with our cousin Chinyere to the market. By the time we got back to the house, someone had picked my pocket of the few naira I carried, a group of Muslim men had shouted obscenities at my sister for wearing shorts, and two men threatened to smash my video camera because I had the nerve to record people at the market. This was a normal day.

  On the fifth day, we were getting ready to travel to my father’s village. It would be an eight-hour drive south. My parents had a house built in my father’s village and my sister and I were to spend three days there before moving on to my mother’s village. We went with our cousin Chinyere to the market one last time in search of a few more souvenirs.

  “Just ignore this man,” Chinyere said as we walked through the market and approached a really extravagant-looking booth. The man sitting at it was short and old, his potbelly pushing his long white caftan forward.

  “Why?” I asked. My hands were shoved in my pockets to protect my money.

  “The Junk Man lost his mind a long time ago,” she said. “Everyone knows it.”


  If he’s crazy then why is his booth packed with people checking his stuff out? I wondered. But I kept my mouth shut; I knew it would annoy Chinyere.

  My sister, Zuma, was a few steps ahead. She hadn’t heard Chinyere. Within moments, she had spotted something interesting and she too was drawn to the Junk Man’s stuff. Chinyere groaned and rolled her eyes.

  “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure!” the Junk Man announced, looking Chinyere right in the eye, as if challenging her. He turned to my sister Zuma. “Have a look-see, but none of it’s free.”

  “Look at all his . . . things,” I whispered to Zuma.

  “I know, man,” Zuma said, grinning.

  “Just junk,” Chinyere snapped, thoroughly annoyed.

  The Junk Man’s booth was the same size as everyone else’s, about twenty feet across, separated from the utensil shop to his right and the basket shop to his left by wooden dividers. But all that was exposed of his twenty feet was a narrow path that led in a semi-circle through his “junk.”

  Everything was arranged. Some items were on tables, most on the ground, or hanging from nails on the wooden dividers. Knives, ebony statues, bronze statues, rings, necklaces and anklets of various metals, piles of colorful stones and crystals, ancient looking coins, brown, white, and black cowry shells of all sizes, some the size of my pinky fingernail, others larger than my head, scary and smiling ceremonial masks, an eight foot tall ebony statue of a large breasted stern looking goddess, a jar of gold powder, a pile of bejeweled and rusted daggers, baskets and bags of colored feathers.

  “What you look for, ladies?” Junk Man asked us in his gruff voice, after helping a customer. The stool he sat on creaked as he shifted. He motioned to all his wares like a proud dragon. “Junk or jewels, I sell it to you at a good price.”

  “Do you mind if I look at . . . ” Zuma pointed to the rolled-up carpet on one of his tables. It had golden tassels on its sides. That must have been what caught her eye. Zuma always loved anything that looked like something Scheherazade would own.

  “Go ahead. Don’t be shy,” Junk Man said. “That’s what all this is here for. But don’t touch the things you don’t think you should. And especially, don’t touch those parrot feathers over there.” He pointed to a bowl full of gorgeous green fluffy feathers. The things were practically begging to be touched. I frowned.

  “For some reason, people don’t know better,” Junk Man said with a smirk. “Then they get home and wonder why all they want to do is chatter about nonsense.”

  Behind us, Chinyere sucked her teeth loudly and muttered, “See? Told you.” Zuma and I looked at each other, uncomfortable. The man was either crazy or, seeing that we were American-born, he was trying to lay the mystery on thick. He thought we were like those stupid tourists who bought stuff because they thought it was “magical,” like those people I saw buying fake voodoo dolls in New Orleans. Little did he know we’d been coming to Nigeria since we were five and six years old. The country was more like a second home, than the “dark continent” to us.

  “Ooookay,” Zuma said. “I’m gonna just look over here.” As she moved through all his junk, she kept her hands close to her sides. The Junk Man chuckled and turned back to me.

  “American?”

  I nodded.

  “Sisters?”

  “Yeah,” Zuma said as she looked at an ebony mask.

  “Who’s older? You?” he asked, pointing at me.

  “No,” I said. “She’s a year older.”

  “Nah, that ain’t older, you’re practically twins,” he said. “And you’re the older one. Your sister hasn’t been around as many times.”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, trying not to look him in his wrinkly nearly black face.

  “Parents born here?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” we both said.

  “Then you from here.”

  I laughed hard. “If you say so.”

  I heard Chinyere loudly suck her teeth with irritation.

  “You interested in that carpet?” he asked my sister.

  “Sort of,” Zuma said, putting down a large cowry shell and returning to the carpet.

  He nodded. “Go ahead and unroll it.” He snickered again. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Zuma dragged the rolled carpet to Chinyere and me.

  “This will be a good finishing touch to the house,” she said. “A good house warming gift.”

  “I dunno,” I said.

  From what we’d been told, the house was already fully furnished. I wasn’t sure if there would be room for it.

  “It’ll make the perfect gift, yes,” the Junk Man said. Then he laughed again. The three of us ignored him and unrolled the carpet. People passing behind us kept getting annoyed, sucking their teeth and grumbling with impatience because the carpet took up part of the market path.

  “Oh,” I said, blinking with surprise. “It’s really pretty.”

  “Yeah,” Chinyere said quietly, all grins.

  The carpet was a bright periwinkle color stitched with intricate symmetric geometrical winding designs of thick black threads. I could stare at it for hours. It was a nice piece of artwork, and the gold tassels were beautiful, too. Zuma quickly rolled it back up and said, “I want to buy this, sir. For . . . two thousand naira.” That was about twenty dollars.

  The Junk Man paused, looking intently at Zuma. Then he smiled. “Okay, let me wrap it up for you. Come on, bring it here.”

  Zuma grinned, surprised. But I felt a little annoyed. If a seller agreed quickly, then you’d proposed too high a price. But I know I would have also made the same mistake with such a beautiful carpet. Even Chinyere was surprised.

  “It’s worth over five thousand naira, I’d think. Even after bargaining down,” Chinyere quietly told me. “He really is crazy.”

  Uncle Ralph drove us in his blue Mercedes. The eight-hour drive was long, grueling, and hot. We spent the last two hours on red dirt roads pock-marked with deep holes from the rainy season. Dusty and tired, we arrived in my father’s village, our relatives running out and hugging, kissing, and inspecting us. The house was enormous and lovely, a white adobe mansion in rural Nigeria. However, when we went inside, we learned that the house was also completely and utterly unfurnished! Empty as hell! Apparently, over the last year, since buying the furniture and placing it in the house, relatives had gone in and taken everything. Piece by piece. Nice.

  Beds, couches, dressers, tables, chairs, rugs, a refrigerator, all gone. The house also had no electricity or running water. To make matters worse, it was ridiculously dusty from being locked for months. It seemed massive house spiders dwelled in every corner, proud and fat as Shelob from Lord of the Rings. Then there were the pink wall geckos that scurried across the ceilings. These were okay because they were cute and ate the mosquitoes and small spiders; I doubted that they could eat the Shelobs. I also saw a pile of larger droppings upstairs in one of the rooms. Not a good sign.

  After getting a tour of the house, we both stood there in what was called the Yoruba Room. Our Aunt Mary and Uncle Daniel stood behind us, quiet. Everyone else who had run out to greet us when we arrived had mysteriously disappeared as we walked into the house. The Yoruba Room was the largest in the house, with high ceilings and a lovely, though dusty, tiled mosaic of frolicking fish on the floor.

  “But I thought . . . didn’t you say that everything was here?” was all I could ask.

  “Auntie, uncle,” Zuma said, angry. “What happened?”

  Uncle Daniel sighed and shook his head. “No one could stop them,” he said. “No shame.”

  Zuma could barely contain herself. “Why didn’t you tell . . . ”

  “We thought your parents would come with you,” their aunt said. “We didn’t think they’d come if they knew.”

  When people travel to Nigeria, they don’t usually disclose who is traveling or when. You give as little detail as possible, or risk armed robbers waiting for your arrival or unscrupulous relatives from heaven
and earth coming by to ask for this and that. Best to catch people off guard. People knew my father was sick, but they did not know the extent. That he would be having heart surgery soon. I pushed thoughts of my father’s illness out of my mind.

  “Well . . . ” Zuma said. She turned and looked out the window at the sky. Then she said, “We’re going to stay here tonight.”

  I gasped and said, “Zuma, I don’t think . . . ”

  She gave me one of her icy big sister looks. I immediately shut up.

  “This is our parent’s house and we are their daughters. And we’re in dad’s village. We stay here,” she said, her voice shaky with emotion and her fists clenched. I understood. Our relatives knew our father was sick, yet they took his furniture. This was his house and they robbed it. His home in his homeland. We would honor our father before all of them by staying in the house he and my mother built.

  “You don’t have to,” my aunt said, looking worried. She motioned to the house next door. “Please, you will stay with us . . . ”

  “No,” Zuma firmly said. “We stay here.”

  And that is how we found ourselves in a dusty, creepy, empty but lovely house in the middle of semi-rural southeastern Nigeria with no running water or electricity, the only furniture being a bed my aunt had had carried in and the carpet Zuma bought. We were to stay there for three days.

  The village was made up of the gigantic and not so gigantic houses of our relatives but it was also surrounded by lush forest that used to be farmed for yams and other crops back in the day. This meant there were probably all sort of creatures living in that house.

  In the evening, after pleading with us one more time, my aunt had a group of girls bring us a tray of red stew, rice, fried plantain, and two bottles of orange Fanta for dinner. We were so hungry and exhausted that it was the most delicious food we’d ever tasted. The girls also brought a barrel of well water for bathing. Even after washing in the dirty bathtub with cups of freezing water, it was still sweltering hot in the room we’d locked ourselves in.