"I don't know," Jaja said.
I sucked my tongue to unfreeze it, tasting the gritty dust. "Because Papa-Nnukwu is a pagan." Papa would be proud that I had said that.
"Your Papa-Nnukwu is not a pagan, Kambili, he is a traditionalist," Aunty Ifeoma said.
I stared at her. Pagan, traditionalist, what did it matter? He was not Catholic, that was all; he was not of the faith. He was one of the people whose conversion we prayed for so that they did not end in the everlasting torment of hellfire.
We sat silently until the gate swung open and Amaka came out, walking close enough to Papa-Nnukwu to support him if he needed it. The boys walked behind them. Papa-Nnukwu wore a loose print shirt and a pair of knee-length khaki shorts. I had never seen him in anything but the threadbare wrappers that were wound around his body when we visited him. "I got him those shorts," Aunty Ifeoma said, with a laugh. "See how he looks so youthful, who would believe he's eighty?"
Amaka helped Papa-Nnukwu get into the front seat, and then she got in the middle with us.
"Papa-Nnukwu, good afternoon sir," Jaja and I greeted.
"Kambili, Jaja, I see you again before you go back to the city? Ehye, it is a sign that I am going soon to meet the ancestors."
"Nna anyi, are you not tired of predicting your death?" Aunty Ifeoma said, starting the engine. "Let us hear something new!" She called him nna anyi, our father. I wondered if Papa used to call him that and what Papa would call him now if they spoke to each other.
"He likes to talk about dying soon," Amaka said, in amused English. "He thinks that will get us to do things for him."
"Dying soon indeed. He'll be here when we are as old as he is now," Obiora said, in equally amused English.
"What are those children saying, gbo, Ifeoma?" Papa Nnukwu asked. "Are they conspiring to share my gold and many lands? Will they not wait for me to go first?"
"If you had gold and lands, we would have killed you ourselves years ago," Aunty Ifeoma said. My cousins laughed, and Amaka glanced at Jaja and me, perhaps wondering why we did not laugh, too. I wanted smile, but we were driving past our house just then, and the sight of the looming black gates and white walls stiffened my lips.
"This is what our people say to the High God, the Chuktvu," papa-Nnukwu said. "Give me both wealth and a child, but if I must choose one, give me a child because when my child grows, so will my wealth."
Papa-Nnukwu stopped, turned to look back toward our house. "Nekenem, look at me. My son owns that house that can fit in every man in Abba, and yet many times I have nothing to put on my plate. I should not have let him follow those missionaries."
"Nna anyi," Aunty Ifeoma said. "It was not the missionaries. Did I not go to the missionary school, too?"
"But you are a woman. You do not count."
"Eh? So I don't count? Has Eugene ever asked about your aching leg? If I do not count, then I will stop asking if you rose well in the morning."
Papa-Nnukwu chuckled. "Then my spirit will haunt you when I join the ancestors."
"It will haunt Eugene first."
"I joke with you, nwa m. Where would I be today if my chi had not given me a daughter?" Papa Nnukwu paused. "My spirit will intercede for you, so that Chuktvu will send a good man to take care of you and the children."
"Let your spirit ask Chukwu to hasten my promotion to senior lecturer, that is all I ask," Aunty Ifeoma said.
Papa-Nnukwu did not reply for a while, and I wondered if the mix of high life music from the car radio and the rattling of the loose screws and the harmattan haze had eased him into sleep.
"Still, I say it was the missionaries that misled my son," said, startling me.
"We have heard this many times. Tell us something elsej Aunty Ifeoma said.
But Papa-Nnukwu kept talking as thoug he had not heard her. "I remember the first one that came to Abba, the one the called Fada John. His face was red like palm oil; they say our type of sun does not shine in the white man's land. He had a helper, a man from Nimo called Jude. In the afternoon they gathered the children under the ukwa tree in the mission and taught them their religion. I did not join them, kpa, but I went sometimes to see what they were doing. One day I said to them, Where is this god you worship? They said he was like Chuki that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father; equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad.' father and the son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see? That is why Eugene can disregard me, because he thinks we are equal."
My cousins chuckled. So did Aunty Ifeoma, who soon stopped and said to Papa-Nnukwu, "It is enough, close your mouth; rest. We are almost there and you will need your energy to te the children about the mmuo."
"Papa-Nnukwu, are you comfortable?" Amaka asked, leaning across toward the front seat. "Do you want me to adjust your seat, to make more room for you?"
"No, I am fine. I am an old man now and my height is gone. I would not have fit in this car in my prime. In those days, I plucked icheku from the trees by just reaching out high; I did not need to climb."
"Of course," Aunty Ifeoma said, laughing again. "And could you not reach out and touch the sky, too?" She laughed so easily, so often. They all did, even little Chima.
When we got to Ezi Icheke, cars lined the road almost bumper to bumper. The crowds that pressed around the cars were so dense there was no space between people and they blended into one another, wrappers blended into Tshirts, trousers into skirts, dresses into shirts. Aunty Ifeoma finally found a spot and eased the station wagon in. The mmuo had started to walk past, and often a long line of cars waited for an mmuo to walk past so they could drive on. Hawkers were at every corner, with glass-enclosed cases of akara and suya and browned chicken drumsticks, with trays of peeled oranges, with coolers the size of bathtubs full of Walls banana ice cream. It was like a vibrant painting that had come alive. I had never been to see mmuo, to sit in a stationary car alongside thousands of people who had all come to watch. Papa had driven us past the crowds at Ezi Icheke once, some years ago, and he muttered about ignorant people participating in the ritual of pagan masquerades. He said that the stories about mmuo, that they were spirits who had climbed out of ant holes, that they could make chairs run and baskets hold water, were all devilish folklore. Devilish Folklore. It sounded dangerous the way Papa said it.
"Look at this," Papa-Nnukwu said. "This is a woman spirit, and the women mmuo are harmless. They do not even go near the big ones at the festival."
The mmuo he pointed to was small; its carved wooden face had angular, pretty features and rouged lips. It stopped often to dance, wiggling this way and that, so that the string of beads around its waist swayed and rippled. The crowds nearby cheered, and some people threw money toward it. Little boys-the followers of the mmuo who were playing music with metal ogenes and wooden ichakas-5j picked up the crumpled naira notes. They had hardly passed us when Papa Nnukwu shouted, "Look away! Women cannot look at this one!"
The mmuo making its way down the road was surrounded by a few elderly men who rang a shrill bell as the mmuo walked. Its mask was a real, grimacing human skull with sunken eye sockets. A squirming tortoise was tied to its forehead. A snake and three dead chickens hung from its grass-covered body, swinging as the mmuo walked. The crowds near the road moved back quickly, fearfully. A few women turned and dashed into nearby compounds.
Aunty Ifeoma looked amused, but she turned her head away. "Don't look, girls. Let's humor your grandfather," she said in English. Amaka had already looked away. I looked away, too, toward the crowd of people that pressed around the car. It was sinful, deferring to a heathen masquerade. But at least I had looked at it very briefly, so maybe it would technically not be deferring to a heathen masquerade.
"That is our agwonatumbe," Papa-Nnukwu said, proudly, after the mmuo had walked past. "It is the most powerful mrral in our parts, and all the neighboring villages fear Abba because of
it. At last year's Aro festival, agwonatumbe raised a staff and all the other mmuo turned and ran! They didn't even wait to see what would happen!"
"Look!" Obiora pointed at another mmuo moving down the road. It was like a floating white cloth, flat, taller than the huji avocado tree in our yard in Enugu.
Papa-Nnukwu grunted as the mmuo went by. It was eerie, watching it, and I thought then of chairs running, their four legs knocking together, of water being held in a basket, of human forms climbing out of ant holes. "How do they do that, Papa-Nnukwu? How do people get inside that one?" Jaja asked.
"Shh! These are mmuo, spirits! Don't speak like a woman!" Papa-Nnukwu snapped, turning to glare at Jaja.
Aunty Ifeoma laughed and spoke in English. "Jaja, you're not supposed to say there are people in there. Didn't you know that?"
"No," Jaja said.
She was watching Jaja. "You didn't do the ima mmuo, did you? Obiora did it two years ago in his father's hometown."
"No, I didn't," Jaja mumbled.
I looked at Jaja and wondered if the dimness in his eyes was shame. I suddenly wished, for him, that he had done the ima mmuo, the initiation into the spirit world. I knew very little about it; women were not supposed to know anything at all, since it was the first step toward the initiation to manhood. But Jaja once told me that he heard that boys were flogged and made to bathe in the presence of a taunting crowd. The only time Papa had talked about ima mmuo was to say that the Christians who let their sons do it were confused, that they would end up in hellfire.
We left Ezi Icheke soon afterward. Aunty Ifeoma dropped off a sleepy Papa-Nnukwu first; his good eye was half closed while his going-blind eye stayed open, the film covering it looked thicker now, like concentrated milk. When Aunty Ifeoma stopped inside our compound, she asked her children if the wanted to come into the house, and Amaka said no, in a low voice that seemed to prompt her brothers to say the same. Aunty Ifeoma took us in, waved to Papa, who was in the middle of a meeting, and hugged Jaja and me in her tight way before leaving.
That night, I dreamed that I was laughing, but it did not sound like my laughter, although I was not sure what laughter sounded like. It was cackling and throaty and enthusiastic, like Aunty Ifeoma's.
Papa drove us to Christmas Mass at St. Pauls.
Aunty Ifeoma and her children were climbing into their station wagon as we drove into the sprawling church compound. They waited for Papa to stop the Mercedes and then came over to greet us. Aunty Ifeoma said they had gone to the early Mass and they would see us at lunchtime. She looked taller, even more fearless, in a red wrapper and high heels. Amaka wore the same bright red lipstick as her mother; it made her teeth seem whiter when she smiled and said, "Merry Christmas."
Although I tried to concentrate on Mass, I kept thinking of Amaka's lipstick, wondering what it felt like to run color over your lips. It was even harder to keep my mind on Mass because the priest, who spoke Igbo throughout, did not talk about the gospel during the sermon. Instead he talked about zinc and cement. "You people think I ate the money for the zinc, okwia?" he shouted, gesticulating, pointing accusingly at the congregation. "After all, how many of you give to church, gbo? How can we build the house if you don't give? Do you think zinc and cement cost a mere ten kobo?"
Papa wished the priest would talk about something else, something about the birth in the manger, about the shepher and the guiding star; I knew from the way Papa held his missal too tight, the way he shifted often on the pew. We were sitting in the first pew. An usher wearing a Blessed Virgin Mary medal on her white cotton dress had rushed forward to seat us, telling Papa in loud, urgent whispers that the front pews were reserved for the important people; Chief Umeadi, the only man in Abba whose house was bigger than ours, sat on our left, and His Royal Highness, the Igwe, was on our right. The lЈ came over to shake Papa's hand during Peace and Love, he said, "Nno nu, I will stop by later, so we can greet property tsofl.
After Mass, we accompanied Papa to a fund-raising in the multipurpose hall next to the church building. It was for the priest's new house. An usher with a scarf tied tight across his forehead passed out pamphlets with pictures of the priest's house, uncertain arrows pointing at where the roof leaked, where termites had eaten up the door frames. Papa wrote a check and handed it to the usher, telling her he did not want to make a speech. When the M.C. announced the amount, the priest got up and started to dance, jerking his behind this way and that, and the crowd rose up and cheered so loudly it was like the rumblings of thunder at the end of the rainy season.
"Let's go," Papa said, when the M.C. finally moved on to announce a new donation. He led the way out of the hall, waving at the many hands that reached out to grasp his white tunic as if touching him would heal them of an illness.
When we got home, all the couches and sofas in the living room were full; some people were perched on the side tables. The men and women all rose when Papa came in, and chants of "Omelora!" filled the air. Papa went about shaking hands and hugging and saying "Merry Christmas" and "God bless you." Somebody had left the door that led to the backyard open, and the blue-gray firewood smoke that hung heavy in the living room blurred the facial features of the guests. I could hear the wives of the umunna, chattering in the backyard, scooping soup and stew from the huge pots on the fire into bowls that would be taken to serve the people.
"Come and greet the wives of our umunna" Mama said to Jaja and me.
We followed her out to the backyard. The women clapped and hooted when Jaja and I said, "Nno nu." Welcome. They all looked alike, in ill-fitting blouses, threadbare wrappers, and scarves tied around their heads. They all had the same wide smile, the same chalk-colored teeth, the same sun dried skin the color and texture of groundnut husks.
"Nekene, see the boy that will inherit his father's riches!" one woman said, hooting even more loudly, her mouth shaped like a narrow tunnel.
"If we did not have the same blood in our veins, I would sell you my daughter," another said to Jaja. She was squatting near the fire, arranging the firewood underneath the tripod.
The others laughed. "The girl is a ripe agbogho! Very soon a strong young man will bring us palm wine!" another said. Her dirty wrapper was not knotted properly, and one end trailed in the dirt as she walked, carrying a tray mounded with bits of fried beef.
"Go up and change," Mama said, holding Jaja and me around the shoulders. "Your aunty and cousins will be here soon."
Upstairs, Sisi had set eight places at the dining table, with wide plates the color of caramel and matching napkins ironed into crisp triangles. Aunty Ifeoma and her children arrived while I was still changing out of my church clothes. I heard her loud laughter, and it echoed and went on for a while. I did not realize it was my cousins' laughter, the sound reflecting their mother's, until I went out to the living room. Mama, who was still in the pink, heavily sequined wrapper she had worn to church, sat next to Aunty Ifeoma on a couch. Jaja was talking to Amaka and Obiora near the etagere. I went over to join them, starting to pace my breathing so that I would not stutter.
"That's a stereo, isn't it? Why don't you play some music? Or are you bored with the stereo, too?" Amaka asked, her plac eyes darting from Jaja to me.
"Yes, it's a stereo," Jaja said. He did not say that we never played it, that we never even thought to, that all we listened to was the news on Papa's radio during family time.
Amaka went over and pulled out the LP drawer. Obiora joined her. "No wonder you don't play the stereo, everything in here is so dull!" she said.
"They're not that dull," Obiora said, looking through the LPs. He had a habit of pushing his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally he put one on, an Irish church choir singing "O Come All Ye Faithful." He seemed fascinated with the stereo player and, as the song played, stood watching it as if he would learn the secrets of its chrome entrails by staring hard at it.
Chima came into the room. "The toilet here is so nice, Mommy. It has big mirrors and creams in glass bottles
."
"I hope you didn't break anything," Aunty Ifeoma said.
"I didn't," Chima said. "Can we put the TV on?"
"No," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Your Uncle Eugene is coming up soon so we can have lunch."
Sisi came into the room, smelling of food and spices, to tell Mama that the Igwe had arrived, that Papa wanted us all to come down and greet him. Mama rose, tightened her wrapper, and then waited for Aunty Ifeoma to lead the way.
"I thought the Igwe was supposed to stay at his palace and receive guests. I didn't know he visits people's homes," Amaka said, as we went downstairs. "I guess that's because your father is a Big Man."
I wished she had said "Uncle Eugene" instead of "your father." She did not even look at me as she spoke. I felt, looking at her, that I was helplessly watching precious flaxen sand slip away between my fingers.
The Igwe's palace was a few minutes from our house. We had visited him once, some years back. We never visited him again, though, because Papa said that although the Igwe had converted, he still let his pagan relatives carry out sacrifices in his palace. Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an lЈ.
So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awl< I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler.
"Good afternoon, sir, nno," I said to the Igwe when I got downstairs.
The hairs that peeked out of his wide nose quivered as he smiled at me and said, "Our daughter, kedu?"
One of the smaller sitting rooms had been cleared for him and his wife and four assistants, one of whom was fanning him with a gilded fan although the air conditioner was on. Another was fanning his wife, a woman with yellow skin and rows and rows of jewelry hanging round her neck, gold pendants, beads and corals. The scarf wound around her head flared over in front, wide like a banana leaf and so high that I imagined the person sitting behind her in church having to stand up to see the altar. I watched Aunty Ifeoma sink to one knee and say, "Igwe," in the raised voice of a respectful salute, watched him pat her back. The gold sequins that covered his tunic glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Amaka bowed deeply before him. Mama, Jaja, and Obiora shook hands with him, respectfully enclosing his hand in both of theirs.
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