Purple hibiscus

by Чимаманда Нгози Адичи

  "We are going to publish underground now," Papa said. "It is no longer safe for my staff."

  I knew that publishing underground meant that the newspaper would be published from a secret location. Yet I imagined Ade Coker and the rest of the staff in an office beneath the ground, a fluorescent lamp flooding the dark damp room, the men bent over their desks, writing the truth.

  That night, when Papa prayed, he added longer passages urging God to bring about the downfall of the Godless men ruling our country, and he intoned over and over, "Our Lady Shield of the Nigerian People, pray for us."

  The school break was short, only two weeks, and the Saturday before school resumed, Mama took Jaja and me to the market to get new sandals and bags. We didn't need them; our bags and brown leather sandals were still new, only a term old. But it was the only ritual that was ours alone, going to the market before the start of each new term, rolling the car window down as Kevin drove us there without having to ask permission from Papa. In the outskirts of the market, we let our eyes dwell on the half-naked mad people near the rubbish dumps, on the men who casually stopped to unzip their trousers and urinate at corners, on the women who seemed to be haggling loudly with mounds of green vegetables until the head of the trader peeked out from behind. Inside the market, we shrugged off traders who pulled us along the dark passages, saying, "I have what you want," or "Come with me, it's here," even though they had no idea what we wanted. We scrunched up our noses at the smells of bloody fresh meat and musty dried fish, and lowered our heads from the bees that buzzed in thick clouds over the sheds of the honey sellers. As we left the markets with our sandals and some fabric Mama had bought, we saw a small crowd gathered around the vegetable stalls we had passed earlier, the ones lining the road. Soldiers were milling around. Market women were shouting, and many had both hands placed on their heads, in the way that people do to show despair or shock. A woman lay in the dirt, wailing, tearing at her short afro. Her wrapper had come undone and her white underwear showed.

  "Hurry up," Mama said, moving closer to Jaja and me, and I felt that she wanted to shield us from seeing the soldiers and the women. As we hurried past, I saw a woman spit at a soldier, I saw the soldier raise a whip in the air. The whip was long. It curled in the air before it landed on the woman's shoulder. Another soldier was kicking down trays of fruits, squashing papayas with his boots and laughing.

  When we got into the car, Kevin told Mama that the soldiers had been ordered to demolish the vegetable stalls because they were illegal structures. Mama said nothing; she was looking out of the window, as though she wanted to catch the last sight of those women.

  I thought about the woman lying in the dirt as we drove home. I had not seen her face, but I felt that I knew her, that I had always known her. I wished I could have gone over and helped her up, cleaned the red mud from her wrapper.

  I thought about her, too, on Monday, as Papa drove me to school. He slowed down on Ogui Road to fling some crisp naira notes at a beggar sprawled by the roadside, near some children hawking peeled oranges. The beggar stared at the note, then stood up and waved after us, clapping and jumping. I had assumed he was lame. I watched him in the rearview mirror, my eyes steadily on him, until he disappeared from sight. He reminded me of the market woman in the dirt. There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman's despair.

  The walls that surrounded Daughters of the Immaculate Heart Secondary School were very high, similar to our compound walls, but instead of coiled electrified wires, they were topped by jagged pieces of green glass with sharp edges jutting out. Papa said the walls had swayed his decision when I finished elementary school. Discipline was important, he said. You could not have youngsters scaling walls to go into town and go wild, the way they did at the federal government colleges.

  "These people cannot drive," Papa muttered when we got to the school gates, where cars nosed up to each other, horning. "There is no prize for being first to get into the school compound."

  Hawkers, girls much younger than I, defied the school gate men, edging closer and closer to the cars to offer peeled oranges and bananas and groundnuts, their moth-eaten blouses slipping off their shoulders.

  Papa finally eased the car into the wide school compound and parked near the volleyball court, beyond the stretch of manicured lawn. "Where is your class?" he asked.

  I pointed to the building by the group of mango trees. Papa came out of the car with me and I wondered what he was doing, why he was here, why he had driven me to school and asked Kevin to take Jaja.

  Sister Margaret saw him as we walked to my class. She waved gaily, from the midst of students and a few parents, then quickly waddled over to us. Her words flew generously out of her mouth: how was Papa doing, was he happy with my progress at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart, would he be at the reception for the bishop next week?

  Papa changed his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did when he spoke to Father Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he always assumed with the religious, especially with the white religious. As gracious as when he presented the check for refurbishing the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart library. He said he had just come to see my class, and Sister Margaret told him to let her know if he needed anything.

  "Where is Chinwe Jideze?" Papa asked, when we got to the front of my class.

  A group of girls stood at the door, talking. I looked around, feeling a weight around my temples. What would Papa do? Chinwe's light-skinned face was at the center of the group, as usual.

  "She is the girl in the middle," I said. Was Papa going to talk to her? Yank at her ears for coming first? I wanted the ground to open up and swallow the whole compound.

  "Look at her," Papa said. "How many heads does she have?"

  "One/' I did not need to look at her to know that, but I looked at her, anyway.

  Papa pulled a small mirror, the size of a powder compact, from his pocket. "Look in the mirror."

  I stared at him.

  "Look in the mirror."

  I took the mirror, peered at it.

  "How many heads do you have, gbo?" Papa asked, speaking Igbo for the first time.

  "One."

  "The girl has one head, too, she does not have two. So why did you let her come first?"

  "It will not happen again, Papa."

  A light dust lkuku was blowing, in brown spirals like uncoiling springs, and I could taste the sand that settled on my lips.

  "Why do you think I work so hard to give you and Jaja the best? You have to do something with all these privileges. Because God has given you much, he expects much from you. He expects perfection. I didn't have a father who sent me to the best schools. My father spent his time worshiping gods of wood and stone. I would be nothing today but for the priests and sisters at the mission. I was a houseboy for the parish priest for two years. Yes, a houseboy. Nobody dropped me off at school. I walked eight miles every day to Nimo until I finished elementary school. I was a gardener for the priests while I attended St. Gregorys Secondary School."

  I had heard this all before, how hard he had worked, how much the missionary Reverend Sisters and priests had taught him, things he would never have learned from his idol worshiping father, my Papa-Nnukwu. But I nodded and looked alert. I hoped my class girls were not wondering why my father and I had chosen to come to school to have a long conversation in front of the classroom building.

  Finally, Papa stopped talking and took the mirror back. "Kevin will be here to pick you up," he said.

  "Yes, Papa."

  "Bye. Read well." He hugged me, a brief side hug.

  "Bye, Papa."

  I was watching him walk down the path bordered by flowerless green bushes when the assembly bell rang. Assembly was raucous, and Mother Lucy had to say, "Now, girls, may we have silence!" a few times. I stood in the front of the line as always, because the back was for the girls who belonged to cliques, girls who giggled and whispered to one another,
shielded from the teachers. The teachers stood on an elevated podium, tall statues in their white-and-blue habits.

  After we sang a welcoming song from the Catholic Hymnal, Mother Lucy read Matthew chapter five up to verse eleven, and then we sang the national anthem. Singing the national anthem was relatively new at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart… It had started last year, because some parents were concerned that their children did not know the national anthem or the pledge. I watched the sisters as we sang. Only the Nigerian Reverend Sisters sang, teeth flashing against their dark skins. The white Reverend Sisters stood with arms folded, or lightly touching the glass rosary beads that dangled at their waists, carefully watching to see that every student's lips moved.

  Afterward, Mother Lucy narrowed her eyes behind her thick lenses and scanned the lines. She always picked one student to start the pledge before the others joined in. "Kambili Achike, please start the pledge," she said.

  Mother Lucy had never chosen me before. I opened my mouth, but the words would not come out.

  "Kambili Achike?" Mother Lucy and the rest of the school had turned to stare at me. I cleared my throat, willed the words to come. I knew them, thought them. But they would not come. The sweat was warm and wet under my arms.

  "Kambili?" Finally, stuttering, I said, "I pledge to Nigeria, my country / To be faithful, loyal, and honest…" The rest of the school joined in, and while I mouthed along, I tried to slow my breathing.

  After assembly, we filed to our classrooms. My class went through the routine of settling down, scraping chairs, dusting desks, copying the new term timetable written on the board. "How was your holiday, Kambili?" Ezinne leaned over and asked.

  "Fine."

  "Did you travel abroad?"

  "No," I said. I didn't know what else to say, but I wanted Ezinne to know that I appreciated that she was always nice to me even though I was awkward and tongue-tied. I wanted to say thank you for not laughing at me and calling me a "backyard snob" the way the rest of the girls did, but the words that came out were, "Did you travel?"

  Ezinne laughed. "Me? O di egivu. It's people like you and Gabriella and Chinwe who travel, people with rich parents. I just went to the village to visit my grandmother."

  "Oh," I said.

  "Why did your father come this morning?"

  "I… I…" I stopped to take a breath because I knew I would stutter even more if I didn't. "He wanted to see my class."

  "You look a lot like him. I mean, you're not big, but the features and the complexion are the same," Ezinne said.

  "Yes."

  "I heard Chinwe took the first position from you last term. Abi?"

  I remained a backyard snob to most of my class girls until the end of term. But I did not worry too much about that because I carried a bigger load — the worry of making sure I came first this term. It was like balancing a sack of gravel on my head every day at school and not being allowed to steady it with my hand. I still saw the print in my textbooks as a red blur, still saw my baby brother's spirit strung together by narrow lines of blood. I memorized what the teachers said because I knew my textbooks would not make sense if I tried to study later. After every test, a tough lump like poorly made fufu formed in my throat and stayed there until our exercise books came back.

  School closed for Christmas break in early December. I peered into my report card while Kevin was driving me home and saw 1/25, written in a hand so slanted I had to study it to make sure it was not 7/25. That night, I fell asleep hugging close the image of Papas face lit up, the sound of Papa's voice telling me how proud of me he was, how I had fulfilled God's purpose for me.

  Dust-laden winds of harmattan came with December. They brought the scent of the Sahara and Christmas, and yanked the slender, ovate leaves down from the frangipani and the needlelike leaves from the whistling pines, covering everything in a film of brown. We spent every Christmas in our hometown. Sister Veronica called it the yearly migration of the Igbo. She did not understand, she said in that Irish accent that rolled her words across her tongue, why many Igbo people built huge houses in their hometowns, where they spent only a week or two in December, yet were content to live in cramped quarters in the city the rest of the year. I often wondered why Sister Veronica needed to understand it, when it was simply the way things were done. The morning winds were swift on the day we left, pulling and pushing the whistling pine trees so that they bent and twisted, as if bowing to a dusty god, their leaves and branches making the same sound as a football referee's whistle. The cars were parked in the driveway, doors and boots open, waiting to be loaded. Papa would drive the Mercedes, with Mama in the front seat and Jaja and me in the back. Kevin would drive the factory car behind us with Sisi, and the factory driver, Sunday, who usually stood in when Kevin took his yearly one-week leave, would drive the Volvo. Papa stood by the hibiscuses, giving directions, one hand sunk in the pocket of his white tunic while the other pointed from item to car. "The suitcases go in the Mercedes, and those vegetables also. The yams will go in the Peugeot 505, with the! cases of Remy Martin and cartons of juice. See if the stacks of okporoko will fit in, too. The bags of rice and garri and beans; and the plantains go in the Volvo."

  There was a lot to pack, and Adamu came over from the gate to help Sunday and Kevin. The yams alone, wide tube the size of young puppies, filled the boot of the Peugeot 505 and even the front seat of the Volvo had a bag of beans slanting across it, like a passenger who had fallen asleep.

  Kevin and Sunday drove off first, and we followed, so that if the soldiers at the roadblocks stopped them, he would see and stop, too. Papa started the rosary before we drove out of our gate street. He stopped at the end of the first decade so Mama could continue with the next set of ten Hail Marys. Jaja led the next decade; then it was my turn.

  Papa took his time driving. The expressway was a single lane, and when we got behind a lorry he stayed put, muttering that the roads were unsafe, that the people in Abuja had stolen all the money meant for making the expressways dual-carriage. Many cars horned and overtook us, and some were so full of Christmas yams and bags of rice and crates of soft drinks that their boots almost grazed the road.

  At Ninth Mile, Papa stopped to buy bread and okpa. Hawkers descended on our car, pushing boiled eggs, roasted cashew nuts, bottled water, bread, okpa, agidi into every window the car, chanting: "Buy from me, oh, I will sell well to you." "Look at me, I am the one you are looking for." Although Papa bought only bread and okpa wrapped in banana leaves, he gave a twenty-naira note to each of the other hawkers, and their "Thank sir, God bless you" chants echoed in my ear as we drove off and approached Abba.

  The green welcome to abba town sign that led off the expressway would have been easy to miss because it was so small. Papa turned onto the dirt road, and soon I heard the screech-screech-screech of the low underbelly of the Mercedes scraping the bumpy, sun-baked dirt road. As we drove past, people waved and called out Papa's title: "Omelora!" Mud and thatch huts stood close to three-story houses that nestled behind ornate metal gates. Naked and seminaked children played with limp footballs. Men sat on benches beneath trees, drinking palm wine from cow horns and cloudy glass mugs.

  The car was coated in dust by the time we got to the wide black gates of our country home. Three elderly men standing under the lone ukwa tree near our gates waved and shouted, "Nno nu! Nno nu! Have you come back? We will come in soon to say welcome!"

  Our gateman threw the gates open. "Thank you, Lord, for journey mercies," Papa said as he drove into the compound, crossing himself.

  "Amen," we said. Our house still took my breath away, the four-story white majesty of it, with the spurting fountain in front and the coconut trees flanking it on both sides and the orange trees dotting the front yard.

  Three little boys rushed into the compound to greet Papa. They had been chasing our cars down the dirt road. "Omelora! Good afun, sah!" they chorused. They wore only shorts, and each one's belly button was the size of a small balloon. "Kedu nu?" Papa
gave them each ten naira from a wad of notes he pulled out of his hold-all. "Greet your parents, make sure you show them this money."

  "Yes sah! Tank sah!" They dashed out of the compound, laughing loudly.

  Kevin and Sunday unpacked the foodstuffs while Jaja and I unpacked the suitcases from the Mercedes. Mama went to the backyard with Sisi to put away the cast iron cooking tripods. Our food would be cooked on the gas cooker inside the kitchen, but the metal tripods would balance the big pots that would cook rice and stews and soups for visitors. Some of the pots were big enough to fit a whole goat. Mama and Sisi hardly did any of that cooking; they simply stayed around and provided more salt, more Maggi cubes, more utensils, because the wives of the members of our umunna came over to do the cooking. They wanted Mama to rest, they said, after the stress of the city. And every year they took the leftovers-the fat pieces of meat, the rice and beans, the bottles of soft drink and maltii and beer-home with them afterward. We were always prepared to feed the whole village at Christmas, always prepared so that none of the people who came in would leave without eating and drinking to what Papa called a reasonable level of satisfaction. Papa's title was omelora, after all, The One Who Does for the Community.

  But it was not only Papa who received visitors; the villagers trooped to every big house with a big gate, and sometimes they took plastic bowls with firm covers. It was Christmas.

  Jaja and I were upstairs unpacking when Mama came in and said, "Ade Coker came by with his family to wish us a merry Christmas. They are on their way to Lagos. Come downstair and greet them."

  Ade Coker was a small, round, laughing man. Every time I saw him, I tried to imagine him writing those editorials in the Standard; I tried to imagine him defying the soldiers. And I could not. He looked like a stuffed doll, and because he was always smiling, the deep dimples in his pillowy cheeks looked like permanent fixtures, as though someone had sunk a stick into his cheeks. Even his glasses looked dollish: they were thicker than window louvers, tinted a strange bluish shade, and framed in white plastic. He was throwing his baby, a perfectly round copy of himself, in the air when we came in. His little daughter was standing close to him, asking him to throw her in the air, too.