We made ourself big and strong for the Ada, we tried to, because she was solidifying into something lost and bereft. We were still very weak, as newborns often are, but we were determined to spring into sentience, to drag ourself upright, clawing grips into the sides of her mind. We could not have done it if she was not the type of child that she was, ready to believe in anything.
Saul and Saachi had allowed the Ada to have a childhood that was, in a town full of death, unusually innocent. They didn’t believe in interfering with the child’s imagination, and so when the Ada finished one of her many books and decided that she could talk to animals, no one corrected her. “It did no harm to let her believe that,” Saul said, and the Ada continued to believe wildly, in Yshwa and fairies and pixies living in the flame of the forest blossoms. She believed that the top of the plumeria tree in their backyard could be a portal to another world, and that all magic was stored outside in leaves and bark and grass and flowers. These things that she believed in meant that, although she did not know it yet, she could believe in us.
And so we were strengthened, because belief, for beings like us, is the colostrum of existence. After Saachi left, the Ada sank even more into her books, by instinct, separating herself from this world and disappearing into others. She read everywhere: on the toilet, at the dining table, in the library before school assembly each morning. It is not clear how much saving these books were capable of.
Meanwhile, Ala continued to watch her child. After all, the Ada was her hatchling, her bloodthirsty little sun, covered in translucent scales. We were learning that to be embodied was to be the altar and the flesh and the knife. Sometimes the gods just want to see what you are going to do.
Let us give you an example. When the Ada was seventeen, she was living in America, in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains. Saachi had moved her there for university and the Ada would have been alone, except that we were with her, we were always with her.
One night, we woke up with our body’s heart racing, the air ricocheting with noise. It took us a moment to remember where we were, that we did not live in Aba anymore, that we were somewhere new. Our body was lying on a twin bed in a shared room, and a lean, dark, muscled boy was springing out of it, leaving us alone in his sheets. He answered the frantic knocking at the door and turned on the light, filling the room in yellow. His roommate looked over at our body, at the Ada, all the way from his bed against the other wall. He was the color of butter and his eyes were sour and hungry. There was an Eastern European girl at the door, one of the cross-country runners, tight spandex seized to her body. She had been splashed up and down with generous streaks of blood. Some of it was drying on her face, beside her dilated eyes, and she was telling the dark boy about another runner who had penetrated a window with his arm. The glass had penetrated him back, which explained her lavish coloring. The sour boy jumped down from his bed and we watched both of them pull shirts over their carved chests. The Ada slid down too, and we followed them out of the room and downstairs, our eyes tracing the drops of blood that were scattered down each step, then along the corridor. The runners kept talking and we slowed down until they had left us behind, then we turned and ran back up the stairs—drop drop drop, splatter on the wall—past the room we came out of, up the next staircase—drop drop, stain. On the second step, we found it—a puddle, a pool, a mirror, a small cloak. Deep like loss.
We looked around to make sure that we were alone, that no one was watching, but it was only the Ada and us and old banisters and worn carpet. We bent our knees and our breath was shallow, adrenaline coursing quickly; we reached out the Ada’s hand until our fingertip brushed the surface of the pool, of the stale, exposed blood with its calm skin. It was already changing its mind about being liquid, cooling now that it was no longer merrily bouncing through the boy’s blood vessels. We skimmed our fingers across the tight top of it, then the Ada stood up and we walked away, away from the terrifying rush of how much we wanted more of it, much more.
The problem with having gods like us wake up inside of you is that our hunger rises as well and someone, you see, has to feed us. Before the university, the Ada had begun the sacrifices that were necessary to keep us quiet, to stop us from driving her mad. She was only twelve then, and she sat at the back of her classroom and laid her hand on her desk, her palm flat. “Look,” she said to her classmates, and they turned, vaguely interested. “Look what I can do.” She raised the blade that she had taken from Saul’s shaving supplies, that double-edged song wrapped in wax paper, and she dropped it on the skin of the back of her hand, in a stroke that whimpered. The skin sighed apart and there was a thin line of white before it blushed into furious red wetness.
She has no memory of her classmates’ faces once that happened, because we filled her up utterly, expanding in glee, rewarding her for carving herself for us. She would spend another twelve years trying to be the torn feathers in a clay doorway, the sting of gin soaking the threshold. At sixteen, breaking a mirror to dig into her flesh with the glass. At twenty, when she was in veterinary school, after spending long hours separating skin from cadaver muscle and lifting delicate sheets of fascia, she would return to her room and use a fresh scalpel on her scarred left arm. Anything, you see, that would make that pale secret flesh sing that bright mother color.
Earlier, when we said she went mad, we lied. She has always been sane. It’s just that she was contaminated with us, a godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind. Everyone knows the stories of hungry gods, ignored gods, bitter, scorned, and vengeful gods. First duty, feed your gods. If they live (like we do) inside your body, find a way, get creative, show them the red of your faith, of your flesh; quiet the voices with the lullaby of the altar. It’s not as if you can escape us—where would you run to?
We had chosen the currency the Ada would pay us with back on the tar of Okigwe Road, in the maw of Añuli’s leg, and she paid it quickly. Once there was blood, we subsided, temporarily sated. None of this had been easy for us, existing like this, entangled in two worlds. We did not mean to hurt the Ada, but we had made an oath and our brothersisters were pulling at us, shouting at us to come back. The gates were all wrong, everything was all wrong, we were not dying yet. But they kept pulling us, they made us scream, and we battered against the Ada’s marble mind until she fed us and that thick red offering sounded almost like our mother—slowly, slowly, nwere nwayọ, take it slowly.
The Ada was just a child when these sacrifices began. She broke skin without fully knowing why; the intricacies of self-worship were lost on her. She did only what she had to and thought little of it. But she believed in us. Saachi brought back empty journals from Saudi Arabia and the Ada filled them up with blue ink. It was in them that she named us, titling us for the first time. Our forms were young and indistinct, but this naming was a second birth, it sorted us into something she could see. The first of us, Smoke, was a complicated gray, swirled layers and depths, barely held together in a vaguely human shape. We lifted our fogged arms, clumsy fingers exploring a blank and drifting face. The second of us, Shadow, was a deep black, pressed malevolently against a wall, hints of other colors (mother color eyes, yellowed teeth) that never made it past the fullness of the night. The Ada made us and continued to feed us.
Blood and belief. This is how the second madness began.
Chapter Five
Can you pray into your own ear?
We
After she named us in that second birth, we felt even closer to the Ada. This is not normal for beings like us; our brothersisters tend to have little or no affiliation to the bodies they pass through. The Ada should have been nothing more than a pawn, a construct of bone and blood and muscle, a weapon against her mother. But we had a loyalty to her, our little container. If we had been asked to take a piece of chalk and draw where she stops and where we start, it would have been hard. We did not know then how much of a betrayal this was to our brothersisters.
Our third
birth happened in Virginia, after the Ada had moved to America. There was a song that followed us there, into the mountains, into the next split. It started in Sweden, and then it was flattened into a CD and bought in Germany, packed into the cool of a suitcase and carried into the humidity of Nigeria. Lisa unpacked it there and slid it into a CD player in her house in Aba, next door to her father’s hospital where Añuli had been operated on. Lisa and the Ada listened to the song over and over again. The singer was a girl called Emilia and her voice went through the air of Lisa’s room like a wing. When the Ada moved, she brought the song in a suitcase and she played it out loud in Virginia.
In another world, our third birth would have happened in Louisiana, among those swampy spirits, in the mouth of an alligator. There was a school there that gave the Ada a full scholarship, but Saachi diverted us from that path, swerving to avoid a cemetery, and she sent the Ada to Virginia instead. It was a smaller school, it would be quieter, and she thought the girl would be safer there. When she was making these choices, Saachi had tried to sit down with Saul in their dining room, under the painting of a grief-eyed christ, to plan the future of their children, which programs they would go to, which countries they would be lost to. But Saul had turned his back a long time ago—we could have told Saachi that.
“Why are you not interested in making college plans for them?” Saachi asked, hurt and frustration seeping out of the cracks in her voice. She wanted to include Saul; she was tired, ripped from her family, and she wanted him to care, to help. But Saul was an unforgiving man.
“What for?” he said. “I don’t have the money.” It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn’t even have to go anywhere in order to leave her.
Saachi had been in Saudi for seven years by then—seven years of leaving her children, seven years alone. In all that time, Saul had never called her. Saachi would watch as the other women she worked with picked up their phones and broke into smiles at their husbands’ voices, then she would leave quietly and cry to herself in her bedroom, before picking up the phone to call back home because she had not forgotten her children were still there, sacrificed and sad. She made their university plans alone, moving Chima to Malaysia to stay with her family there, then returning two years later to collect the Ada. They traveled to America together, stopping over in Addis Ababa. The Ada was excited because she knew Saachi always flew through Ethiopia—it was part of the human mother’s other life, where she ate grapes reclining on embroidered cushions, acid-washed denim hidden under her abaya by yards of black cloth. When Saachi and the Ada flew through Addis, however, they spent only a few hours in the airport and it meant nothing, it felt like nothing. We were not surprised—many things are like this.
The Ada went to Virginia, to the slopes of grass and the marrow-red buildings of the school, heavy doors and creaking heaters throughout. It was winter when we arrived with Saachi and our body. There is a photograph of them, of Saachi and the Ada standing on a gentle incline with a church settled behind them and the ground suffocated in snow. Saachi’s arms are lost in a black leather jacket and an oatmeal turtleneck wraps her neck like a large fist. Her hand is resting on the Ada’s shoulder and they are both tightening their eyes against the sun. The Ada’s legs stretch out from underneath an oversized fleece, dull mint green slinking over her wrists, and her hair is sticking out in tufts from under her woolen hat.
She is only sixteen, and the way she smiles, you can’t tell we’re in her, that we’re puzzled by the snow and the cold and the damp roaring ocean between us and the red mud we came from, the drifts of white sand, that one palm tree that feels generations old, the one that wavers on the side of the road when you drive down from Ubakala Junction, before you pass all the seven villages, like sliding down the gullet of our mother, past the screaming gates of her teeth. It’s not the first time we’ve been away, but it’s the first time we don’t know when we’re coming back. We had no idea then that the song had followed us.
It was later, years later, when everything had changed, or before or right around, that the Ada lay in a narrow dorm bed in Hodges Hall next to a boy from Denmark and they both looked up at the ceiling. It was springtime and the room was quiet as the boy sang Emilia’s song into the silence, the first two lines of the chorus. I’m a big big girl in a big big world. The Ada didn’t pause, not a beat, and she sang the next two lines softly. It’s not a big big thing if you leeeaave me. The boy sat up on his elbow, pleasantly surprised that she knew the song, asking her how, when, where. The Ada smiled at his delight and told him about Lisa’s house and the pop CD from Germany, and yes, now we recall, this was before it all went rotten. It was only later, much later, that we discovered the staggering breadth of things this boy would do to the Ada. The first few weeks of America were cold and the snow fell thickly, like it was being shoveled out of the sky. It was the Ada’s first winter and she made a snow angel because that’s what she’d waited for, to lie with her arms flung and her legs wide, to flap and fly until sainthood spread beneath her. Saachi stayed for two weeks before she flew to see Chima, before returning to Saudi, again with a stopover in Addis, leaving the Ada more alone than she had ever been.
We felt just like she did, the most alone we could remember, torn from the place of our first and second births: taken on a plane across an ocean, given no return date. Let us tell you, our mother’s children began to cherish another great anger against us then. This was a side effect of being in a body, the fact that the humans had a human life. It was inevitable that the Ada would go to university, that her life would continue moving in a way that had nothing to do with us. She was majoring in biology; she wanted to be a veterinarian because she loved animals. We did not care. We were hungry inside her, raging against this useless mortality, as if we could rage right back to the world we came from. We raged at the displacement of a new country.
After all, were we not ọgbanje? It was an insult to be subject to the decisions made around what was just a vessel. To be carried away like cargo, to be deposited in the land of the corrupters, inside this child simmering with emotions, searching for us because she was uprooted and alone, and we, always we, having to fix it, well, you miss your father—why we don’t know, the man was just a man, and you miss the amen and that yellow girl you used to run around with, and you have work to do, work to do, and no time to shatter any further, and you hide in a lecture hall and cry and cry as if you have something to cry about? Very well, we will do you this one thing, because it was always you and us together, and you named us the shadow that eats things and the smoke that hides the mother color from our teeth, and you have granted us dominion over this marble room that you call your mind, so here is the place where you miss that man and the girls and the road you used to run down, it is soft and fleshy, a bulb of feeling, and here we are like a useful edge and here is the cut, here is the fall, here is the empty that follows it all.
Here is the empty that follows it all.
After that, it was simple; the Ada stopped missing Saul and the amen and Lisa. We were still angry; gods are not appeased that easily, so we bubbled violently through her arms. She threw lamps and cafeteria cups across the small room she shared with a white girl on the honors floor, shattered glass following her like a lost dog. She met the American girls who had come from Miami and Atlanta and Chicago, Black girls with slick, straight hair. They fluttered at the state of hers, which was a confused mix of textures and lengths, thick and awkward. When the Ada was a child, it had been a beast leaping from her scalp and gnawing at her small shoulders. Saachi bought relaxers to subdue it, to stop it from rising into the sky; not to make it straight but to calm it down so at least a comb could be teased through. It was washed every Sunday in its full greatness, combed through every morning before school, tugged into two plaits while the Ada ate Nasco cornflakes and winced.
Saachi was in Saudi the day that they cut it, but she spoke of that day as if she was there, telling everyone how the Ada cried. In the months before lea
ving for America, the Ada had let her hair grow back out, braided it into synthetic twists for her secondary school graduation, then taken those out before flying to Virginia. The American girls sat her down firmly in front of a television and relaxed her hair, blow-drying and flat-ironing it until it was decided and bone-straight. The girl holding the flatiron sang along to the advertisements on TV and the Ada laughed, looking up at her sideways.
“How do you know all the songs?” she asked.
The girl laughed back at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “By the time you’re here for a while, you’ll be singing all the commercials too.” She ran a wide-tooth comb through the Ada’s hair, admiring how all the curls had gone. The other girls came to check it out, to give their approval, and then they took her around to meet the other Black kids on campus, because the Ada was now one of them, welcome to America. We watched, fascinated. Humans are so ritualistic. When they met her, the Black boys sidled up, grinning. Most of them were track runners, tight and almost feline in how they moved.
“Hey girl,” they drawled. “Where you from?”
It wasn’t a question we were used to, not yet. “Nigeria,” the Ada replied, smiling politely, wondering if it sounded strange. We never had to say that when we lived there.
“Oh, word? That’s cool.”
The girls who were showing her around leaned against the walls and flipped their silked-up hair. “Watch out now,” they said, smirking. “She’s only sixteen.”
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