The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

by Lola Shoneyin

  “Iya Segi, forget about Iya Tope! Let us take care of this matter ourselves. We have the wisdom and the strength. Between the two of us, we can restore this home to what it was.”

  “You have spoken well, Iya Femi. You have spoken the truth.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TRADE

  THE BLOOD THAT RUNS through the daughters that Iya Tope brought into this home of mine is dirty. Her children are sickly. Not long after Bolanle arrived, Iya Tope sat in the sitting room looking for pity. She likes to sit around the house plaiting her daughters’ hair like a beggar in the marketplace. Motun had a fever that morning and Baba Segi insisted that she stay at home. When the other girls heard that they would be separated from their sister, they sobbed and wept. The middle one, Afolake, strained and wriggled in her seat. Tope begged to stay at home so she could look after her sisters. I do not tolerate such rubbish so I told the older two I would whip them all the way to their classrooms if they did not get into the bus.

  “I don’t understand these children of yours,” I told Iya Tope. “The affection they have for each other has become unhealthy. They are like forsaken triplets lost in a forest. Kruuk. Each unable to survive without the others. They want to eat from the same plate, wear the same hairstyle, speak with the same voice! Will they marry the same husband?”

  After dropping the children at school, I returned home to find Iya Tope in the sitting room. As I stepped onto the veranda outside, I heard Bolanle asking Iya Tope if the child was better.

  “Much better, thank you. I swathed her in a wet cloth for about ten minutes. My children do not cope well without sleep. They scratch their heads all night. Look!”

  As I entered, Iya Tope was parting her daughter’s hair with the wooden comb to reveal a line of scalp that was scabby in parts and freshly clawed in others.

  “I have hair cream that is good for dandruff. Let me get some for you,” Bolanle suggested.

  “Iya Tope, why are you begging for hair cream?” I asked. “Are you not satisfied with what your husband gives you that you now have to scrounge? You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  “I offered,” Bolanle said.

  “I am the one you should come to when you are in need! In fact, I think Baba Segi should hear of this ingratitude!”

  “I did not ask for hair cream so there is nothing to tell Baba Segi.” Iya Tope reached behind her daughter and produced a container with nothing more than a smidgen of cream in it.

  Iya Tope shifted a fraction of an angle in her seat; it was clear she was no longer receptive to Bolanle’s company, or her conversation. She busied herself with her daughter’s hair and said nothing. Bolanle noticed it and left the room.

  It is important that the wives know their place in this house. They must know what they can and cannot do. They must remember that I am the only one who can do business, not that they’ve shown a desire to—Iya Femi has sworn never to do another day’s work in her life and Iya Tope doesn’t have a head for trade. What am I saying? She doesn’t have a head for reasoning!

  I had to use all my wisdom to force Baba Segi’s hand. After giving birth to Akin, my second child, a son for that matter, I knew the ache in Baba Segi’s balls would subside. That’s when I made his head spin with worry.

  It started with the sighing. I would lie next to him in bed and sigh. He didn’t seem to take notice so I’d sigh, sit up and shake my head hopelessly. I had to do this on several occasions before it finally occurred to Baba Segi that he may not be a perfect husband if his wife is saddened. Men are like that. They think they sit in the center and the world turns around them.

  When he inquired what was causing my distress, I told him it was nothing and blew my nose into my wrapper. After a few weeks of this, I took to crying. I thought thinking sad thoughts would bring tears to my eyes but I found I couldn’t evoke any. It was as if my mind had decided that my life had been without adversity. I had to use onions—my hands always smelled of them anyway. One night after Baba Segi had climbed off me, I smeared my eyeballs with onion juice. Baba Segi couldn’t take my sniveling; he sat up and turned on the light. “What is it that has twisted your insides, my wife?” There was both weariness and earnestness in his voice.

  “It is nothing, my lord.” The time was not exactly right.

  “That is all you say! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Yet you weep like a mourner!”

  “It’s nothing.” I cried silently so I would not wake my children in their cots.

  “Is it the house?”

  I shook my head. Almost.

  “Is it me? Is there something you want to do?”

  “My lord, my hands itch for work.”

  “Work? Are your hands not full with the children you are taking care of?”

  I dropped to my knees and told him of my wish to have a small stall where I could sell sweets wholesale, interact with other women and learn of new recipes, the best household detergents on the market, better ways to please a husband. I slipped it in when I noticed each blink weighed down his eyelids longer than the one before. “I also want to attend driving school.”

  He raised both eyebrows and widened his eyes.

  “I will be able to take my children to day care without them sweltering in the heat like poverty-stricken orphans.”

  Shutting his eyes tight, he stretched up his arms and yawned. He lay back down, slid his bottom down the bed and covered himself with a sheet. When he’d sufficiently burrowed into his pillow with the back of his head, he asked, “If I permit you to do these things, will a man be able to sleep in his own house?”

  “Long and soundly, my lord. Long and soundly.”

  Within months, I informed him that wholesale sweets were no longer lucrative and that a wise woman had advised me to try selling cement. A few weeks later, this same mysterious woman (who lived her life for her husband) advised me to extend my stall and build a proper shop. Before the year had run out, I was talking of a second shop, but only so I could be nearer to the children. Men are so simple. They will believe anything.

  “Does your friend approve of this?” Baba Segi asked as he undressed one night.

  “Which one?” I asked before thinking, but corrected myself quickly. “You mean my friend from the market? Did I not I tell you that she died?”

  “Died?”

  “Yes, just like that. She just…er…slumped and died. The lucky woman has departed this world of sin and strife.”

  “This is very unfortunate. Did you attend the funeral?”

  “You forget that I have two children and a husband to look after. She was a Muslim so they buried her the day after. Let us pray the wind that carries her soul to heaven will be a gentle one so that the journey will be without turbulence.”

  That is how I started my business. And that is how I learned to drive. Men are like yam. You cut them how you like.

  One day, about three months after Bolanle arrived, I was in the sitting room, counting my money. I wouldn’t usually be at home at this time of morning but I wanted to rent a new shop space, and the previous owner demanded payment that afternoon. I had shops in most of the major markets—Mokola, Dugbe, Eleyele, Sango—but I wanted to have one in Ojoo, too. Rather than rush to the bank and endure hours in the queues, I decided to take from the stash I hid under my mattress at home, to save time.

  The banknotes were old, crumpled and dirty but that has never bothered me. I sat in one of the armchairs and crammed a stool into the little small space between my knees. I handle money with great affection. I like the feel of it on my palm so I turned each note meticulously until I could see the man in all of them.

  I didn’t know that our stray hen had brought friends until I heard them rattling down the corridor. I pulled my skirt over the stool. They greeted me and I greeted them back. “I hope we will see you again soon,” I said. I meant to address both visitors but I couldn’t stop my gaze from returning to Yemisi. As soon as the door closed behind them, I jumped out of my armchair and looked through a
hole in my clenched fist so I could see Yemisi’s perfect form. Ah, if only desire didn’t always carry trouble on its back. Now is not the time, I told myself. There is a time for everything.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IYA TOPE

  NINE YEARS AGO, I came home from the farm to find Baba Segi sitting in my father’s hut. I was twenty-three years old, I remember. It was later in the year that my older brother declared that I was ripe for marriage. My mother did not tell him to mind his mouth. Instead, without raising her face from the heap of melon seeds, she added, “Truth be told, she is bordering on decay.” I cannot forget that day. Not because their words did not cause me sorrow but because I remember thinking how unjust it was that the gods had blessed them with such wondrous eyes. How was it that they could see the womanhood that I—on whose body it was plastered—could not? Within me, I was certain I was still a child. I thought like a child and enjoyed childish pleasures like pursuing ants as they carried away sugar lumps and scratching hardened scabs from the edge of my old wounds. I even conversed with friends that only I could see.

  My father was from a long line of cassava farmers who learned to hoe cassava mounds before the age of three and hacked the brown nuggets from the soil until the day they too were planted in fertile land. Unlike most villages, ours did not have a school or electricity. The nearest school was six miles down the expressway. Elders scowled at the more eager pupils. The time it took to walk to school and back could be better spent, they said. By the time hair sprouted from the armpits, most children had their own cassava stalls on the edge of the highway. As for electricity, we didn’t send gifts to the local government chief like other villages. We were simple people: what the ground didn’t give, we didn’t yearn for.

  Most people looked forward to the planting season but I hated it. I detested the hoeing and wished away the heavy watering cans. So when it was time for planting, I complained of backache. I lay groaning on my mat while my brothers and sisters unfastened their hoes from the nails that jutted out of the hut wall. As I rolled from side to side clutching my back, I dreamed of the day weeds would cluster around the cassava shoots. Weeding, I loved. I loved the feel of the small leaves, the strength of the stems. I loved shaking the soil from the roots and laying them in a row. Sometimes I liked to hawk them to my imaginary friends. Good fresh spinach! Buy your fresh spinach!

  My father called me one day and asked when exactly I planned to finish weeding the family vegetable patch.

  “Soon, Baba. And when I finish, I will start again,” I replied.

  “Your age-mates are planting, grinding, drying and selling, but you creep around the farm, sweating over weeds until your shadow lengthens.”

  “I am thorough, Baba. With weeding, you must be thorough.”

  “My daughter, men want women who can work beside them on the farm, not behind them! Your younger sister has suitors who would climb a thousand trees to win her hand. Are you not concerned that no one has turned their mouths to talk of marrying you?”

  “Maybe the men you speak of have not seen how thoroughly I can weed.”

  “Have you not heard the words I have spoken?” He let out a long breath and seized his walking stick. Without another glance in my direction, he drew lines on the earthen floor: a cluster of strokes and then, about a yard apart, one stroke standing all by itself.

  In those days, it was common for wealthy men who owned gari factories in Ibadan to dazzle village farmers with their big cars and big money talk. They leased farmland and paid the villagers to tend the crops that grew on it. Their goal was to reap the yield from crops that they had never nurtured. My brother said that was the way of the rich.

  The year before, my father had been greatly pleased when he waved good-bye to two trucks full of hefty cassava tubers. He received more money than he had ever seen and he kept the wad of crisp notes in his trouser pocket for days, smiling every time his knuckles brushed against them. Baba Segi had returned for another prosperous harvest the following year but he was met by fidgety fingers and eyes that darted downward, sideways, then upward to the gods. My father was afraid so he gave Baba Segi the news in full view of the entire village.

  Sitting on a bench next to my father, Baba Segi looked like an insatiable demon. His skin was oily and supple whereas my father’s was flaky and dry like orogbo shells. Baba Segi’s shiny face didn’t show any reaction to the news but his toes flapped in leather slippers like the ears of a dog. Then, quite unexpectedly, he looked around and seized a boy by the arm. “Take me to the toilet,” he begged. Every eye watched Baba Segi as he barged through the door of the unroofed pit latrine. We heard every rumble, every gurgle, every fart and every splutter. When Baba Segi emerged, he reoccupied the space on the bench and told the dumbstruck villagers that everything happened for a reason and that he was thinking of a new business anyway. He added that the ways of the gods were mysterious.

  The truth was that the rains had punished the village of Borode by refusing to fall and the sun had dealt mercilessly with the cassava shoots. Instead of standing high and cooling the soil with their broad green leaves, they stooped and coiled until they were toasted like bristles. The ground hardened and split from the heat, forcing anxious villagers to journey to the forest in search of water to moisten the soil. Even my father, with his bent back, followed the trail of water fetchers. He got on his knees and scooped sand until his fingers touched water. I was frustrated too. No water meant no weeds. Since the sun denied me my joy that year, I hid under the pile of mats at home, as far away from its wrath as possible. It was only when I heard the wind carrying voices home from the forest path that I abandoned my hiding place to help them ease calabashes off their heads. My father’s wives sneered at my helpfulness and my mother hid her face behind her wrapper.

  On the day Baba Segi was to cart off his bad harvest, my father sat on a stool outside his hut and stared at the miserable baskets, six in number. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his chin rested on his walking stick. When I surfaced from my mother’s hut to slice okra, I greeted him. He didn’t respond but followed me with his eyes. He made me feel so self-conscious that I took my okra back into my mother’s hut. Soon afterward, Baba Segi’s pickup appeared at the end of the dusty road. My father shouted my name and instructed me to turn out a large mound of amala to be accompanied by efo made from the freshest spinach leaves I could find. My father didn’t wait for Baba Segi’s feet to touch the ground; he scooped him out of the pickup and into the darkness of his hut.

  It did not take me any time to prepare the meal so when I finished, I joined my mother and her co-wives in the shade of palm fronds. My siblings sat there too, slapping off gnats that perched on their bare shoulders. I found it strange that they were being so quiet. They normally talked with their mouths, their arms, their necks, their eyes and their lips. They talked about everything from the texture of snake meat to the oval guavas by the riverbed. Sitting in the middle of this strange, heavy silence, I wondered whether I should seize the opportunity to say something. It didn’t look like they’d cut me short and take over my voice the way they usually did.

  Just when the sun began its journey into the treetops, my father summoned me. I was surprised to find him and Baba Segi sitting so close together, their arms touching as they drained the bottle of schnapps that was normally only sipped at weddings and funerals. My father told me to bring the food in and I returned with a wide tray but as I stooped at the door frame, the men stopped talking. Baba Segi inspected me as I placed the plates on a low stool and fetched cool water from the earthen pot. He examined my face as I poured it into two plastic cups. My father watched him watching me.

  “She is not a great beauty,” I heard my father saying as I closed the door. His discretion had dwindled with the schnapps. “But she is as strong as three donkeys. And thorough too. What she loses in wit, she gains in meticulousness. This is a great virtue in a woman. I have three wives so I speak from experience.”

  Even
a child would have worked out why my father was extolling qualities that had previously vexed him; I was compensation for the failed crops. I was just like the tubers of cassava in the basket. Maybe something even less, something strange—a tuber with eyes, a nose, arms and two legs. Without fanfare or elaborate farewells, I packed my bags. I didn’t weep for my mother or my father, or even my siblings. It was the weeds I didn’t get the chance to uproot that year that bothered me. I should have known something unusual would happen that year. The drought did something to my ears: whenever I spoke to my spirit friends, their words were muffled, as if spoken from a plot on a faraway land.

  Taju threw my belongings in the back: two plastic bags and two tubers of yam. I sat between the two men in the pickup and stared ahead at roads I had never traveled before. So this was Ibadan—the big city where all our secondhand clothes enjoyed their first outings, the place where cars honked, engines roared and bus conductors screamed. I covered my ears. Everything was so urgent, most unlike the leisurely pace at which things bumbled along in the village.

  In the middle of all this noise, Baba Segi asked me if I was happy about being his wife. I couldn’t utter a single word. I wanted to say something. I should have said something but I couldn’t. It has always been hard for me to speak my feelings. Even now, when I try to say things, my mouth opens and closes like a fish waiting for a hook. I choke on words, I swallow them. I didn’t have to worry about this in the village because my family could read my mind. Just before I left, I went to my father’s hut and stood by the door. I didn’t need to say anything, the same way he didn’t need to look at me. “I have made my decision and it’s final,” he said.