by Sefi Atta
“A town,” I said. Her parents were from cities. Her father grew up in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta, and her mother was from Lagos, though she was raised in Tanzania and Cuba—her parents were in the diplomatic service.
“I sawed the picture of Africa,” Daniel said. “And the boy had no hair, and his belly was all swelled up, and he lived in a hut, with, um, no windows, and I don’t like Africa. Africa women have droopy boobies.”
Alali laughed. “Huh?!”
“My dad’s name is Daniel,” Daniel said, ignoring her. “That’s why I’m called Junior.” He paused as if contemplating a serious political issue.
“And my mom’s name is Pat,”Alali said, pushing her chest forward. “She’s a doctor, but she hasn’t got her papers, so she can’t work yet.”
I smiled so she wouldn’t be envious. Between them they would reveal all their family secrets.
Daniel shook his head. “My mom really wants her papers, because my dad is controlling.”
“Come on,” Mrs. Darego says. “Out of the tub, both of you, or someone is going to get smacked today.” She claps her hands as she leaves the bathroom. She never hits her children. She shouts at them, especially if they are reluctant to get out of the tub. “I’m not playing,” she warns from the corridor.
She is recovering from her call the night before. On a day like this, she has little patience for nonsense.
“You heard your mother,” I say. “You want trouble?”
Alali plants a big foam ball on Daniel Junior’s head.
“I’m telling,” he whines.
“So?” Alali retorts.
Daniel crosses his arms and turns his back on her. His bottom cheeks are clenched. In school they think he has Attention Deficit Disorder. He won’t listen; they want to medicate him. His mother says the teacher who suggested this must be on drugs herself. Cheap ones. Alali continues to gather foam with her bloated hands.
In my hometown we had rainbow-colored water. It tasted of the oil that leaked into our well. Bathing water we fetched from a creek. This smelled of dead crayfish. Our rivers were also dead. When rain fell, it rusted rooftops, shriveled plants. People who drank rainwater swore that it burned permanent holes in their stomachs. Our roads had potholes as big as cauldrons because of the rain. Only in the villages on the outskirts of town did we have one smooth road. The road ran straight from a flow station to Summit Oil’s terminal. The villages had perpetual daylight once the gas flaring started. The flare was where cassava farms used to be. Summit Oil bulldozed those farms and ran pipelines through them. The land was now sinking. The gas flare was as tall as a giant orange torch in the sky, as loud as a hundred incinerators. It sprayed soot over coconut trees. From the center of town we could smell burning mixed with petrol. People complained that their throats were as dry as if they swallowed swamp mahogany bark. Elders feared the gas flare was like hellfire. Children wanted to play. Sometimes they played near the flare. Their mothers cuffed their ears if ever they caught them. We’d all heard the story of one little rascal nicknamed Boy-Boy. Boy-Boy wore glasses that belonged to his dead grandfather. He was always with his homemade catapult trying to kill birds. He burned in a gas-flare fire. His family held a funeral for him. They had nothing but his ashes to bury. They buried them in a whitewashed wooden casket.
I help the children out of the tub after the bathwater runs out. Their bodies are warm and slippery. I throw towels over their heads to make them laugh.
“Oh, Auntie Eve,” Alali says, hugging me. “I’m so glad you’re staying. If you left, I would just die.”
She smells of raspberry bath wash. She hugs me too tight.
“My dear, don’t curse yourself,” I say into her ear.
She knows her mother is angry with her father again.
During the months I was out of work, I stopped at Summit Oil Clinic to see my friend Angelina. She too was a nurse, and she got her job because her aunt was the midwife there. I’d pass the line of patients sitting on benches in the admissions ward. There were the usual malaria cases and children with stomachs bloated from kwashiorkor. There were also patients with strange growths, chronic respiratory illnesses, terminal diarrhea, weeping sores, inexplicable bleeding. We had too many miscarriages in our town, stillbirths, babies dying in utero, women dying in labor. People blamed the gas flare. They came to the clinic and sat for hours. The nurses turned them away. There were not enough beds, so patients slept on raffia mats on the floor, even women in labor. New nurses were quick to develop lazy walks. If a patient called out for help, they snapped, “What?!”
One old man who was a regular, he came by canoe from a hamlet on the other side of our main creek. He lived in a bamboo hut near mangroves. In his youth he was a member of the Ekine Society, those masqueraders who paid tribute to Ekineba. Folklore said Ekineba was this beautiful Kalabari woman who was kidnapped by water spirits, and she returned to the land to teach the masquerade dance. People said this man was over a hundred years old, and his body was refusing to die. Some claimed his soul was possessed. He would sit on the admissions bench cursing and prophesying disasters. The land was our mother, he said, and we would suffer for allowing foreigners to violate her. One afternoon, I went to the clinic, and he was there again, naked from the waist up. His chest hairs were white, and his skin clung to his ribs.
“Nurse,” he said, to Angie, “I’m choking here, can’t you see?There is something terrible in the air. Our seasons are not as they were. Our ancestors are spiting us.” He held his hands towards us. “Deliver me.”
Angie whispered that we should get as far away from him as possible.
He stood up. “You turn your backs on me? Oil is a curse on the land, you hear? You will suffer for your complacency. Your fathers will cut off their penises to feed their sons. Disease will consume your mothers. Daughters will suckle their young with blood. Nurses! Prostitutes in white!” He spat with such force he staggered.
Angie and I rushed to his aid. We sat him on the bench.
“He’s senile,” Angie said with a smile. “Honestly, Eve, we all pray that he will die.”
The man’s bones were as strong as iron.
“For goodness’ sake, be quiet,” Mrs. Darego says for the second time during our drive. Daniel and Alali are asking if we are there yet.
“We’ll be there soon,” I say. “Alali, don’t put your hand out of the window.”
It is cool enough for us to drive with the windows down and the sunroof open. The jeep is as big as a hut, with three rows of leather seats and a DVD player. I’ve heard people on television complain that vehicles like these use up too much fuel. I wonder why they are built so large, considering Americans have such small families; why they are so sturdy when the streets I see are flat and wide. The critics on television say that people buy them for status. They have no idea what status is. Nigerians, given a chance, would drive jeeps as huge as mansions for show. But at least we have plenty of children; at least we have appalling roads.
Unfortunately, no one asks my opinion. Instead, I end up arguing with television pundits, after I get tired of the soap operas and their never-ending dilemmas; the talk shows with cheating lovers, cross-dressers and women who are miserable because they can’t stick to diets; reality shows; infomercials. Twenty-four hours of programs to entice me into one studio-produced existence or another. It is a struggle not to click on the television in the basement and be transported into a Hollywood movie. Fuel consumption is not the only indulgence in America, and at least the supply of fuel is limited.
The barbecue we’re going to is for a community of Nigerians who live in New Jersey, mostly doctors and their families. Mrs. Darego is in a yellow sundress. She wishes her stomach were flatter. She had both children by C-section. Today, they are in their usual coordinated Old Navy and Gap clothes. We stop at a traffic light. This part of New Jersey is all mountains and expressways. She taps the steering wheel.
“Eve,” she says, “you forgot to give me your passp
ort again.”
“Sorry.” But I didn’t forget.
Her nails are clipped for work. She is not wearing her wedding band.
“No, no,” she says, “don’t worry. I just need to send off your renewal by tomorrow, understand? Immigration is tough these days. Me, myself, when I came, I made the mistake of applying on my husband’s visa. Seven years, and I’m yet to see a green card. Everything is delayed since September 11.”
She has just started a pediatric residency program and needs me to be at home with her children. She is hoping to have my visa extended. I can’t tell her I am looking for a greencard sponsor now. I am ready to work as a nurse. What will she say to that after flying me over to America?
“I’ll give it to you today,” I say. Here in the land of free speech, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.
“You too talk, Eve,” Mama used to warn me. “You no see your friend Angelina how she quiet so? If Val marry you, make you no carry dat mouth go ‘im house, oh!”
My nickname at home was Tower of Babel because my legs grew long before my torso. I was never mouthy; I just wasn’t fluent in silence like most women I knew. I envied them, the way they expressed their opinions and emotions clearly, without opening their mouths. Elderly women especially, they terrified me with their shrugs and side glances. I thought they were dishonest. Why couldn’t they just say exactly what they were thinking? I felt compelled to explain myself with words. I couldn’t trust people to understand me otherwise.
I never told Mama the source of my vexation, though, which was Val. He was my boyfriend from secondary school, tall and fine, except for his pointy ears, and brilliant. The whole town celebrated when Val was accepted at the University of Port Harcourt. He never returned to town after his graduation. He stayed in Port Harcourt and got a job with Summit Oil as a public relations clerk. He moved into his uncle’s servants’ quarters to save on rent money, kept telling me about the man’s Spanish-style villa, the man’s Benz, the man’s golf-club membership, yacht and trips to Europe. What was my concern? Was the man willing to hire me as his private nurse? I attended nursing school in Port Harcourt or PH, as people called it, or Garden City. Val was my shadow there. We rocked to the days of jazz funk. We disvirgined each other. I cried when I couldn’t find a job and had to return to our boring town. All we had was a bungalow ambitiously called the Grand Hotel, one main road called Mission Way, a marketplace, Summit Oil Clinic, and one of the oldest Catholic churches in our country. Val never asked me to visit him after I left Port Harcourt, much less talk of marriage. We argued whenever he bothered to come to town to see me. Yes, I provoked him. Sometimes I wondered why he chose me and not Angelina. They were friends from church. Angelina was the sort of person who smiled at everyone, and everyone loved her for her dimples. She would have made him a perfect wife: the quiet, graceful sort of woman who was praised for the peace she brought into a man’s home. The sort of woman my mouth would not allow me to be.
The barbecue is in a park. People have set up picnics in separate territories the way folk in America socialize within their communities. We find our group under a tree.
Nigerians don’t appreciate the sun beating down on them. Next to us is an African-American family all wearing the same yellow T-shirts saying, “Knight Family Reunion.” There is also a Hispanic family, and their music sounds like the music we call highlife at home. I seesaw my shoulders to the rhythm of salsa and observe our small gathering. We are homogenized in our T-shirts, baseball caps and sneakers. What gives us away as Nigerians is the way we barbecue our hotdogs and hamburgers. Women are manning the grill. Nigerian men have their limits to being Americanized. Some have not quite mastered their wannas, gonnas, shouldas. Everyone laughs loudly and talks as if they haven’t been out in years. They are lonely people, I think.
In the Daregos’ house, friends rarely drop by. When they do, they telephone first. Dr. Darego once said that the fewer guests he has, the better anyway: Nigerians gossip too much and wish bad on others. He complains about Americans the same way, saying how rude they are, how arrogant and prejudiced. I’ve heard him call the Indian and Filipino doctors he works with a bunch of ass-kissers. My father would have said to him, “Young man! Check your own stinky armpits before you walk into a room full of people and begin to complain about foul odors!”
Dr. Darego works all week and moonlights in his spare time to pay for his dream home. He is too tired for his family. He has no intention of returning to Nigeria. The place is a jungle, he says. But does he like America, the land and people? He loves his children, and they are American. He loves his dream home in America, but America the place is nothing more than a giant mall and workplace to him.
Will living here be different for me? Sometimes a shop assistant follows me in a store, and I want to turn and scream, “If not for the havoc your people have wreaked in my country, would I be here taking shit from you?!” Then, on a day like this, I think of the guerrilla politicos in my country, petroleum hawkers, who treat the land and people of the Niger Delta like waste matter. I look around the park, see trees I can’t name, clear skies, smell the clean air in New Jersey that is supposedly polluted, and think, “Well, Gawd bless America.”
Alali is teaching Daniel Junior the pledge. “I pledge allegiance,” she says, with her hand over her heart. “To the flag. Of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible—”
“I’m bored,” Daniel says and runs off.
He has two boys his age to play with. Alali watches her new friend who looks like a giant Bratz doll. Such a pout on this new friend, and she seems to know all the hip-hop dances. She dips, rolls her head and pumps her skinny arms. Her jeans are riding low, her navel is exposed, and her fingernails are sparkly blue. I know Alali will demand a bottle of that as soon as we get home: “Aw, I wanna have nail polish!” Her mother will certainly say no. Mrs. Darego believes girls should not be little women.
There was a girl who lived on my street; her name was Amen. Amen was Teacher’s daughter. She was sixteen and in secondary school. She bought Coca-Cola from Mama and looked like a bottle of it: small, shapely, slim and dark. Amen liked to style her friends’ hair. She wanted to be a hairdresser. Her father was against that. He asked me to encourage her to apply to nursing school. Amen said, “But look at you, Eve. Since you graduated, you have no job.”
I used to watch her whenever she passed our house. She wore jeans and funky fake imported T-shirts: Calvin Klein, Fruit of the Loom. She giggled and showed off her pretty dark gums. Towards the end of her school year, I noticed how Amen started walking on her own. She relaxed her hair and started wearing it in a tight ponytail. She shaved her eyebrows and painted her nails bright pink.
“Something is going on with Amen,” Mama said after she’d sold her a bottle of Coca-Cola. “She’s just growing up,” I kept saying. I thought Mama was being critical like other women in town. “No,” she insisted. “Something is going on with Amen, I tell you. She is looking too advanced.” We argued over this. I told Mama she should leave the girl alone. Did she expect her to be sweet sixteen forever?
Then one day I passed Amen on our street. She turned her face away from me and started to cross over to the other side. “Amen, you can’t greet somebody?” I asked, jokingly. Perhaps she was expecting another lecture from me about nursing school. She eyed me. “You yourself, can’t you greet somebody?” I stood there with my mouth open as Amen strutted off.
Mama was the one who told me. Amen ran away from home and her father thought that she’d been kidnapped or murdered. He rushed to the police headquarters in Port Harcourt to file a missing person’s report. There, he learned that Amen was one of the girls arrested by the Naval Police off Bonny Island, where the Liquefied Natural Gas project was based. Amen was now a resident of Better Life Brothel in Port Harcourt. Amen’s father came back to town without her.
Teacher was a skinny man and he stood with his hands behind his back
. His shoes had holes, and yet people called him a dignified scholar because he spoke big English. Whenever someone asked, “Teacher, where is Amen?” he answered, “Amen? Amen expired. Most unfortunate. Ah, yes, it was unanticipated. A great loss to our family. A tragedy of calamitous proportions.”
Amen should have gone to nursing school. She ended up hanging around the port, edging local customers, looking like smoked fish. Prostitutes with college educations had better chances of finding expatriate customers who would keep them.
Mrs. Darego has her sunshades on. I can tell her eyes are wandering.
“You’re upset about something,” I say.
“Me?” she says. “I’m just thinking. Why?”
“You’re not mixing much.”
She raises her brows. “Me? I came because of the children. They need to play. I want them to meet other Nigerians. In this country it’s so easy to forget your identity.”
I’ve been to birthday parties with both children at places like McDonald’s, KidZone and Chuck E. Cheese’s, places with contraptions to distract them. They have soccer practices, ballet lessons, and karate lessons after school. Their mother says they have no time to play.
I dust sand from my sandals. “Everyone is so excited to be here.”
She shrugs. “These people, they are my husband’s friends, not mine. Most of them I would never have met in Nigeria.”
She is someone I would never have met in Nigeria, a diplomat’s daughter. Back home, for the amount she’s paying me, she would have a housegirl for each child, a cook, a washerman for her laundry, a driver to take her to work. Here, she worries about who will look after her children while she’s in a hospital taking care of other people’s children.
Mrs. Darego is a “butter-eater.” I know this because she eyes her husband when he crunches on chicken bones. He grinds them to the marrow, flexes his jaws, spits the pulp on his plate. She watches him as if she would like to punch him in the mouth. Dr. Darego won’t clear the table, load the dishwasher, cook, or bathe his children. One day she joked that he should add these initials to his medical qualifications: B.U.S.H.M.A.N.
