GraceLand

by Chris Abani

  “Dis your friend is a lucky man. The Colonel has killed people for dis kind of disrespect,” Jimoh said.

  “But I did nothing,” Elvis protested.

  Redemption and the soldiers laughed.

  “Dis your friend is a hothead. He did not learn his lesson, I see,” Jimoh said.

  “What lesson?” Elvis asked.

  “Dat dere is no right or wrong with soldier. Just what we want,” Jimoh replied.

  “Who is the Colonel, anyway? Do you really think he would have shot me in a crowded nightclub?”

  “Where did you find dis man?” the soldiers asked, laughing. “You better get him out of here.”

  Redemption nodded and pulled Elvis along. “Come,” he said.

  Elvis followed silently as they kept to the side streets and alleys.

  “It is better we are not stopped by army patrol, eh? One problem with army people is enough for one night,” Redemption explained.

  Their route showed the city to be as untidy as the remnants on a half-eaten plate of food. Elvis mused at how personal it seemed, specifically adapting itself to meet each circumstance. On his way to the club, the streets he had traveled singed straight and proud, like a rope burn or a cane’s welt. Now every alley with its crumbling walls, wrought-iron gates, puddles of putrefying water and piss and garlands of dead rats was just as unique. Yet, though each square inch was distinctive, the city remained as general as an insult shouted on a crowded street.

  Finally they arrived at Redemption’s place.

  “I think you should spend de night here.”

  “Sure,” Elvis said.

  He lay on Redemption’s couch smoking until late, the thick smoke from his cheap cigarettes mixing with the fog from the mosquito repellent burning in the corner. Nothing about his evening made any sense. And though he had felt the sharp edge of danger, the full enormity of how close he had come to being shot eluded him. It seemed too surreal. The only thing he could hold on to was the fact that Redemption had risked a lot to save him. Why? He couldn’t figure it out. Absently he wondered how Redemption knew the Colonel, but was afraid to ask in case he found out. Since the night they wrapped the cocaine, Elvis had come face-to-face with just how dangerous Redemption might be. For the second time that night, he thought of the King of the Beggars and his warning.

  “Elvis.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sleep—your ciga is keeping me awake.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Redemption?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sleep.”

  FROM MABEL THE SWEET HONEY THAT POURED AWAY

  My Sweet Honey,

  No tongue can speak what I have suffered this afternoon. Despite the fact that we were disturbed, the way you delayed and teased me, while I suffered and burned like a flame inside me, it was so painful Oh! I don’t think I can forgive you.

  Look I promise you everyting you can choose to ask of me. Even I will give you my life willingly, provided you first let me before I die. What are you afraid of? I have sworn that you won’t have any trouble.

  Please my honey, I am coming down there by seven this evening and as your mother is away we can go out and see a picture or to another hotel or even walk about and back.

  Please reply this letter through the bearer.

  I am longing terribly for you.

  Gilbert

  My Sugar,

  You think you are suffering more than I do. But you are wrong. The thing is this: my heart is strong for you, but my body is weak.

  I love you three times more than you love me. But there is one thing wrong. I do not know how we shall do that thing. You know it will be my first time and that is why I don’t know how to start.

  That afternoon I wanted it more than you but I was very much afraid. Don’t blame me for what you say you suffered for I was not free from agony.

  I wait for you.

  Your Sweet Honey,

  Mabel

  TWELVE

  These people are true Kings and Queens: makers, breakers, saviors, devils.

  Sorcerers, dibias, are born with dreadlocks, or dada. Several rites have evolved to allow parents to shave off the natty locks and hide the truth of their child from itself and the world. The power they hold is feared, as it is believed they can unmake the universe and remold it to their own designs.

  Afikpo, 1979

  He fetched water from the tap in the yard for his evening bath, whistling the theme song from Casablanca. Aunt Felicia cleared her throat loudly and, when he didn’t stop whistling, spoke.

  “Elvis, stop dat! You know it is taboo to whistle at night. You will attract a spirit.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Afraid that the gathering shadows were now full of spirits and ghosts, he washed hurriedly, out in the yard, as close as possible to where she polished storm lanterns, soaking the air with the scent of kerosene.

  “Wash behind your ears and scrub dose muddy feet,” she called out without looking up from her work.

  “I have,” he replied.

  But a stern look from her soon had him doing as he was told. Drying quickly, he scampered toward the house.

  “Bucket!”

  How did she always know? And without even looking, he mumbled to himself. Retracing his steps, he noticed a movement in the bush and his breath caught in his throat. There it was again, a ghostly movement from behind the outhouse, where the generator was kept. He willed the scream to erupt, but just before it did, the generator thumped crankily into life. The shadow waved. It was Macaulay, the electrician.

  Back inside, Elvis began to shiver in the slight chill of Harmattan. Aunt Felicia, not knocking, marched in on his nakedness, and he hastily stuffed a towel in front of him.

  “A thimble would have sufficed. Here, let me help you rub lotion,” she said, grabbing the jar of yellow pomade and pulling the unresisting Elvis toward her.

  He watched her unscrew the lid slowly, the sickly smell of the cheap pomade making him lightheaded. Deliberately, she scooped the thick yellow goop into her palm, fixing him with a look that made him catch his breath sharply. The chirping cicadas outside seemed to shrink the room around them. She rubbed the pomade between her palms, smiling when she saw him lick his lower lip.

  “Why are you licking your lips? Are you hungry?”

  He shook his head, not taking his eyes off her nipples, which had hardened through the thin fabric of her blouse.

  “Come closer,” she said, parting her legs, skirt riding up her thighs.

  He shuffled toward her.

  “Closer.”

  He was standing in the V between her thighs—so close, her knees brushed the sides of his legs slightly. He shivered: the way he did when he had gone for an inoculation and the nurse brushed his buttock with a sterile swab before pushing the needle home. Even the sharp jab of it had not made the tightness go away. He felt the same now.

  She ran her hands over his arms, torso, head and legs, leaving a thin film of grease and goose bumps rashing across his body. Somewhere in the night, a bird called loudly. As he turned to the sound, his towel slipped off and his erection stood swaying between them with the weight of its wrong and the need of it. She ignored it until his whole body was gleaming like a gladiator ready for battle, then, with a gentle stroke, oiled his penis from root to tip.

  “Naughty boy,” she chided with her breathy laugh, and left him to the sweetness of his agony.

  AGERATUM CONYZOIDES L.

  (Igbo: Akwukwo-nwosinaka)

  This branched herb is hairy, scented and very common to old farmlands and open spots in the forest. Its oval leaves have sawtoothed edges that grow from the hairy stalk. When it does have flowers, they are violet and crowded in cluster heads at the end of the stem.

  A decoction of this plant is used as a lotion for scabies and drunk as a remedy for fever. The leaves are juiced and the juice used to cure eye inflammations. The leaves,
crushed and mixed with water, are used as an emetic for poison.

  Every dibia knows that with the right words, the purpose of any medicine can be changed, so when the right words are spoken over the emetic solution, it causes one to vomit up bad luck and other things such as charms implanted deep inside the body by evil sorcerers and enemies. These charms take many shapes: odd coins, nails, pins, razor blades, small bottles with murky decoctions, even locked padlocks.

  The right words spoken over the juice before it is dropped into the eyes will open one’s psychic sight. This is to be used with care, for if one sees things others do not and speaks carelessly, or without the office of the dibia, he or she may be considered insane.

  THIRTEEN

  They are sorcerers beyond power. They are the star’s end; the star’s beginning.

  Great care is taken not to provoke these children, because their angry words have real consequences. There is a ritual to circumscribe this power, called the clipping of the tongue, and parents of these children are advised to perform it as soon as possible, preferably hours after birth.

  Lagos, 1983

  Sunday looked up suspiciously as Elvis set a small keg of palm wine down at his feet. Elvis had slept in and had only left Redemption’s place an hour before. It had given him plenty of time to consider the incident with the Colonel the night before. He was still a little surprised that he had not known about the Colonel’s existence, even as a rumor. Redemption explained that there were many things about Lagos, and in fact Nigeria, that most of the people who lived here were blithely ignorant about. Still, Elvis argued, it was odd.

  The two things that stayed with him most about the night before were the fact that he could have died and that Redemption had risked his life to help him. “For friendship, dat’s all,” Redemption explained this morning. Armed with this new sense of mortality, Elvis decided he should try and talk to his father, mend things, before it was too late. By the time he set off for home, however, it was already late afternoon and night was not far off. Just outside Redemption’s house he saw a palm wine seller who had fresh palm wine, so he bought some as a gift for his father.

  “What is dis?” Sunday demanded.

  “A son can’t buy his own father a drink?”

  “Since when?”

  Elvis did not reply. Instead he reached for his father’s empty glass tankard. He filled it and passed it to him without saying a word. Blowing specks of tree sediment off, Sunday took a deep draught and sighed happily.

  “It is fresh,” he said, surprised.

  “I bought it straight from the tapper an hour ago,” Elvis replied, lighting a cigarette.

  “Must you?” Sunday asked, nodding toward the cigarette.

  “I must.”

  Sunday emptied his tankard and filled it up again. Without a word he passed it to Elvis, who took it, blew the head off and took a deep drink. The alcohol tasted cool and sweet, like a yeast drink. He could see how easy it was to become hooked on this wine.

  He remembered how, when he was a child, his father would send him to buy wine fresh from the tappers. He would scamper into the forest of palm trees, the money clutched tightly in his sweating palm, feeling important. He would watch the wine tappers climb trees three, sometimes four stories high with nothing more than a creaky vine harness, to fill their gallon jugs from clay pots tied to the trees’ jugulars, where they collected the wine slowly. It was a dangerous job, and when the tappers fell, as they invariably did, they sometimes died.

  Waiting at the bottom of the trees with his jug, Elvis would watch the tappers come down, choosing whom to buy from by playing rock, paper, scissors with himself. Having chosen, he would give them the money and wait for them to fill up his jug from theirs. But they would always pour a little wine into the drinking gourds they carried tied to their waistbands first.

  “Drink, little man, otherwise you will sour our market,” they would say.

  At first he resisted, because the wine made him feel queasy, but his father explained that the tappers believed that if their first customer did not drink some of the wine, they would not be able to sell it and it would go sour. With time, Elvis found the wine easier to tolerate, until it became enjoyable, and a part of the errand that he looked forward to.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sunday asked.

  Elvis told him and Sunday laughed.

  “Finish your drink. I want de cup,” he said.

  Elvis drained the tankard and shook the dregs out onto the ground with one fluid snapping motion. He passed the empty tankard to his father and lit up another cigarette.

  “Dere was a time you respected me enough to not smoke in my presence,” Sunday said.

  “Feared.”

  “What?”

  “Feared, not respected. I was afraid you would beat me. I never really learned to respect you.”

  “You think I can’t beat you now?”

  “Please, don’t start,” Elvis said.

  Sunday emptied the contents of his tankard and the keg onto the swamp. Elvis watched him impassively, drawing deeply on his cigarette.

  “I cannot drink de drink of a man who does not respect me.”

  “Your loss,” Elvis said

  “Why are you even here?”

  “I live here.”

  “No, I mean, why are you here, now, with me, de wine, why?”

  “Your wife asked me to speak to you. To be a son to you.”

  “Your mother spoke to you?”

  Elvis laughed at the hope in his father’s voice. “No. Comfort, your wife.”

  Sunday did not speak. He looked at the puddle of wine as though he regretted spilling it.

  “She said she was afraid you were drinking yourself to death,” Elvis continued. “To be with my mother.”

  Sunday still said nothing, though Elvis noticed his hands were trembling—whether from anger or something else, he couldn’t tell.

  “Talk to me,” Elvis said. “Dad,” he added, almost as an afterthought. It was the first time he had referred to his father as Dad. Ever.

  If Sunday noticed, he showed no sign. “Talk to you? Talk to you?! Who do you think you are? Do you think you are a man now, because you have begun to earn some money? Do you think dat is what being a man is? Talk to you. Why? You never listen. You have never listened. All your life I have told you things dat will help you find your way in dis world and you did de exact opposite. You don’t listen. I have tried for you, Elvis. But now I am tired. Tired, you hear?! I wash my hands of you, like Pilate. Before I used to think it was your fault, dat you were just hardheaded. But now I don’t blame you. Everything for us fell apart when your mother died. I blame de death dat took her. Talk to you? How could you understand my pain? My shame? Do you think dis is who Sunday Oke is? Wanted to be? Do you think dis is how I planned my life? Get out of here, stupid, arrogant child. De day I talk to you is de day death claims me. Get lost! Go!”

  Elvis sat silently through Sunday’s tirade, flinching at each word. He had spent so much time hating his father that he had forgotten how easy it was to be hurt by him. Standing up, he walked to the edge of the veranda and flicked the stub of his cigarette into the darkness.

  “I will go,” he said. His voice scared him. It sounded final. Empty and final.

  Sunday said nothing. He simply turned his chair around so that he had his back to Elvis.

  “I will go,” Elvis said again. This time his voice had died to a whisper.

  He took a few steps forward to where Sunday sat. Gently he laid his hand on the wooden backrest of the chair, the tips of his fingers, like an undecided breeze, barely grazing his father’s shoulder. His tears surprised him. Wiping his face furiously, he walked into his room and closed the door behind him. As he leaned against it, he heard his father’s chair scrape around.

  “So where are we going exactly?” Elvis asked.

  “You need an alternative to de world dat Redemption is showing you,” the King replied.

  “Tha
t doesn’t answer my question. Besides, you don’t know the world Redemption shows me.”

  “Well, dis one is different, and better.”

  “But where is it? We have been walking for over an hour,” Elvis said.

  “De new Rex cinema.”

  Elvis stopped mid-stride.

  “The cinema?”

  “Yes, de new Rex. It is nice O! Air condition, cushioned seat. Very nice.”

  “I have not been to the cinema in years, but even given that, I don’t think it qualifies as an alternative world. I know all about the cinema. Believe me.”

  “You speak too much English for a high-school dropout,” the King said. “Well, Mr. Know-It-All, how many European film have you seen?”

  “They make films in Europe?”

  “See how you foolish? I learn about dis from one man dat use to teach us night school one time. He say dat film with subtitle will help us learn good English. Anyway, follow me. Dis film will open your eye.”

  “What is it called?”

  “Love Film, by one Yugoslavian like dat.”

  “Not the type, the name.”

  “Love Film.”

  “Well, I only see action films,” Elvis sneered.

  The King of the Beggars set off at a fast trot.

  “Den consider dis a new education,” he threw over his shoulder at Elvis, who was struggling to keep up.

  “How can you educate me?!” Elvis muttered under his breath.

  “I heard dat!”

  It was useless arguing further. It was clear the King had his heart set on it, and he could see the theater’s neon sign ahead. It might be fun, Elvis thought. He hadn’t been to a film since he arrived in Lagos. There never seemed to be any time or spare money.

  “Two ticket for Love Film,” the King said, counting out dirty one-naira notes.