Just as we approached the lunch hut, I turned to look back. The janitor and cook had worked their way around to the far side of the playground, moving toward the Quonset huts and then the firing squad amphitheater. The chain-link fence topped with razor wire would be their dead end.
Back inside at our desks waiting for the teachers to quit whispering in the hall, we could still hear the yelling and cursing of the janitor and cook, their howls of agony swirling around the dogonyaro tree, until they ran out of blood to shed.
I sat at my desk; my glossy red, white, and blue peace sign calabash stared at me, and I at it.
Tribal differences, Mrs. Nwoko explained. “My motherland is broken.” Again she adjusted her wig. “My people are still fighting the war.”
I wanted to be the little French girl with my face buried in Miss Abby’s patchwork skirt. Only I didn’t want it to be Miss Abby. I wanted it to be Mom—my only person left. I wanted to bury my face, to climb into the folds of the skirt, to wrap myself in the quilted cushions of padding, in soft, muffled fabric, in a cradle of peace.
I google “Biafran War.” My people started this war.
My people, the white missionaries, brought religions. Then the white man came back to take the oil. My people. The countries with red, white, and blue flags. American culture class—my motherland, my family. Entitlement, is it part of our culture? What culture do I belong to? Did I become initiated by birth or by experience?
The little blue and white Volkswagen school bus carted us kids who lived on Ikoyi Island to and from the gates of AIS. After the crazy day at school, I didn’t pay attention to the other kids on the bus as they were dropped off one by one. Instead I watched the afternoon thunderclouds building in the sky. Once the other kids finally had been dropped off, Samson, the driver, let me sit in the front passenger seat next to him, since I was the last stop. Dad always sat in the front seat with the driver when we rode in the oil company Mercedes Benzes or in taxis.
Samson and I sat alone in a traffic jam. The air along the road smelled of diesel and something especially rancid that should remain nameless but was probably a combination of defecation and decomposition.
Every day was a traffic jam, but today in particular something up ahead had the cars at a standstill, bumpers edging into spaces that weren’t theirs. Outside the minibus, the city was in chaos. Arms reached out car windows, shaking fists, or better yet, open palm shoved into the air, the Nigerian version of flipping someone off. Samson remained calm, probably as instructed by his Western bosses. I watched out my window as ladies walking along the sidewalk, up and down the curb, made their way through the cram-packed jumble. With baskets balanced on their heads, their bare breasts bounced against the orange and brown fabrics of their lappas wrapped around and around their ribs, the fabric flowing down around their floating feet. Inside the vehicle, I felt a muffled safety, but it was taking so long to get home to Mom that I thought she might be worried.
“A beggar run over in the road,” Samson said. I craned my neck to see, but there were so many cars, so many pedestrians, all trying to get around the mess, I couldn’t catch even so much as a dismemberment.
The VW bus coughed, and I tired of looking at the constant throng jostling to get through the jam. I switched my eyes to Samson instead. Samson never seemed to mind if you stared at him. Or at least he never told me to stop. His tribal status probably gave him an air of superiority that I wasn’t attuned to, but I stared because he had long, thick scars on his face. Three horizontal lines on each side. Long, deep, straight lines, like the skin was split open then healed. Which was exactly what was done; a knife was drawn across the cheek, then charcoal and coconut oil were rubbed in the skin to darken it. My dad used the word “cauterized” when he explained how it was done. The sound of that word, “cauterized,” captured my attention, the way it sounded like what it did. Nigeria was like a scratch-n-sniff National Geographic magazine come to life.
Originally, I learned, the markings were sliced because of the excessive communal wars and the slave trade. Families would get separated, and the scars were a way to identify one another. For those taken away as slaves, it was a way of holding family ties. The scars were a way to find their relations, no matter how long the family might have been separated. My family was separated, but would scars be enough to keep us in touch?
“Does it hurt when they do it?” I asked Samson since no one else was on the bus with us now.
“Do what, Small Sister?”
“Cut your face.”
“I was small boy, like your size. My mum says I was brave and did not cry. I was awake the whole time.” He held his head high, as though he thought he was very handsome. And he was. Traditionally the markings were also a sign of beauty. I wanted to touch them, see if they were as smooth as they looked.
“Why do they do it?”
“It is the sign of my tribe. My father is Yoruba chieftain. He wears the same sign. Now everyone know I am my father’s son because I have chieftain sign on my face.”
I was so glad my dad was just a geologist.
“Can’t they just paint them on?”
“No,” Samson explained, “scars are for life. I will always be my father’s son, and my son will have same markings.” He took his eyes off the struggling traffic for a moment and smiled at me. “Small Sister want my tribal markings too?”
“No thanks,” I wiggled in my seat.
Samson would always be his father’s son. Would I always be my father’s daughter? My mother’s daughter? My brother and sister’s annoying little sibling? I worried about Suzanne and Marty off to boarding school, my dad in the Niger Delta. We had no identifying marks to keep us in touch.
My family had no physical scars. I wanted a link. I desperately needed a link. I wanted to see, to feel, whom I belonged to. My solitude had only just begun.
Eventually we pushed through the diesel-fumed boulevards, crossed two concrete bridges, avoided more beggars and street vendors, and pulled up to the gates of the compound where I lived. Samson honked the horn long and hard. “James, Hausa Tribe. He open gates for chieftain’s son.”
I understood enough at this point to know that each tribe wanted to be the boss of the other tribes. This jostling for power, for government control in the former British colony, these boundaries are what caused the Biafran War just before we came to Lagos. The interior borders were drawn by Lord Mountbatten, the same fellow who did such a great job drawing boundaries between India and Pakistan and for Israel. Who doesn’t know that drawing a line is an instigator for aggression?
When we’d gotten the call from Dad, I asked my mom where the jungle was and whether we could we visit—I would write letters to my friends. But there would be no jungle visits in 1971. The Biafran War had just ended, and it was not safe to travel outside the city. This war, I knew as Mrs. Nwoko explained, was why the janitor and cook on our playground still fought.
“You’d think the civil war was still going on,” the adults would say at my folks’ cocktail parties where I liked to sit and watch them get potted on lime-green daiquiris. “Britain gave the Nigerians their independence, and then they fight among themselves. Why can’t they just be happy?”
The children we’d seen on the TV/stereo console’s snowy screen in Ely, the Igbo children with the extended bellies, the flies around their eyes, the reports of them dying every hour, that was the Biafran War I knew, but only through the television screen. I didn’t connect it to the Nigeria where I now lived.
As I’m retracing that memory, I research Biafra. How the Igbo territory in the South segregated from the rest of Nigeria. How the children were starving because the Hausa and Yoruba cut off the resources to Biafra, where the Igbo tribes lived. How oil was discovered. The United States, Britain, and France hadn’t wanted to help Biafra, but then they changed their minds when they wanted the oil. An American advertising agency created the propaganda ads about the pot-bellied children with flies crawling on their eyes to s
way the American public that we should go in and assist. We should go in and help get the oil. We should go in and help turn Nigeria into the most corrupt country in the world. Okay, the last part wasn’t part of the plan, just the detritus from the plan. The consequences.
Oil, my people’s blood.
But I was too young to think this. I was still just my father’s daughter.
James hurried to open the gates, but I knew it wasn’t because a Yoruba chieftain’s son wanted him to. It was because Small Sister had arrived. James was teaching me how to ride my bike since the training wheels broke in the shipment. We would have a lesson when I finished my after-school snack. The sticky plastic of the bus seat snapped at my thighs as I bounced in excitement and waved back at him.
Alice waited in front of our pink four o’clocks and greeted me as Samson drove to the back of the compound to drop me off.
“Today was a scary day at school,” I told Alice.
“Yes, always scare,” she said with a big hug, as if she already knew what I must have seen. Did she know, or did she discern that any day could be dangerous? “Tomorrow is new day.” She lifted my chin with her finger, wiped at my runny nose.
“I have a cold,” I told her, embarrassed by my mucousy upper lip.
“You don’t feel cold,” she said, putting her hand to my cheek. Her interpretation of English wasn’t always the same as mine, so I didn’t know if she was being literal or if she was just being silly. I laughed because either way, inside the compound, inside Alice’s embrace, I was somebody’s.
One Without the Other
“‘Poor little monkey!’ she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie’s childhood. She was abandoned to her fate.”
—What Maisie Knew, Henry James
My mother is who called us “hideous.” But my mother was far from hideous physically. She is petite and blonde. Well into her seventies she wore stiletto heels, the most stylish cocktail attire, and always had her hair and nails done immaculately. I was very proud of her wide smile that showed her gums, her straight teeth, and her well-coiffed hair in the latest style—shag, flip, or French twist.
My mother’s talent for piccolo reached such great heights in high school that she was awarded a music scholarship to Southwest Texas Junior College. She had been on her way to becoming a concert flutist. She loved us, but oh, what could have been, she reminded me often, if she had never gotten married and had children. The fact that I wouldn’t have existed if she had really gone that route never occurred to me. The fact that that route probably never could have existed for a woman in 1952 was never mentioned. My mother and her dreams were all that mattered. “I raised all of you to be independent so that you wouldn’t make the same mistakes I did,” she tells me to this day. All of this, I suppose, is why I played the flute in junior high band, even though secretly all I ever wanted was piano lessons. I thought it best to be like my mother. Then she could love me completely.
When my second-grade teacher at AIS, Mrs. Lavigne, asked my mom to be Room Mother, my mom replied that she had already done her time as a Room Mother with her two older children ten years ago. Mrs. Lavigne said, “Oh, Mrs. Wallen, you definitely don’t look old enough to have children ten years older than Amy.” People were always saying that to my mom, not just teachers trying to sway her to bake cupcakes. Somehow that statement made me feel like she didn’t fully belong to me. That our relationship was tenuous if she got a better offer—concert flutist, another more elegant life. A less hideous family.
“I am a petunia in an onion patch,” my mother once told me. She, the petunia, her family, the onion patch. It was becoming clear to me that I couldn’t be like her—I was never petite, I had no musical inclinations, and I wasn’t even sure what a petunia or piccolo was.
Moving to Africa may not have been my mother’s idea, and from her point of view, she may have had no choice in the matter, but she seemed to fit into the social scene just fine. She threw daiquiri parties that rivaled all the other oil company expat fetes. She knew instinctively how to dress the part, as though we’d always been high society, dressing in tailor-made clothes and having barefoot servants who passed canapés on silver trays.
The slipcovered garage sale couch and coffee-can and plastic daisy lampshade in Nevada—long forgotten.
After we moved to Lagos, and SwissAir had flown off with Suzanne and Marty, and the houseboat on the Niger Delta was Daddy’s home away, my mom and I did everything together. This was just fine with me. I wanted more than anything to live up to her expectations, and this was my chance to watch her closely, examine her ways and learn how to become like her.
Visitors didn’t knock on our front door; instead they walked up to the sliding glass windows along the living room wall, placed their hands on either side of their face and their nose up to the glass to peer inside, then tapped on the pane. Either of us might be sitting in the living room reading and then sense someone was staring at us, or we’d hear the slap, slap, slap of leather sandals echoing an approach in the carport. But if we didn’t realize someone was peering at us, they’d rap, rap, rap on the glass.
If a trader came, they’d want to see Mom. “Tell Madam I have new thorn carvings. Momma with baby on back, the way she likes.”
While I or Philip, our steward, went to get Mom, they’d lay out their display of wares on a big piece of greasy fabric in our empty carport. Thorn carvings, mahogany furniture, ivory tusks carved into faces, all of which they’d transported on their heads. Mom always bought something. She could never say no. “They went to so much work,” she’d say, “to show me everything, to lay out all their art.”
But the traders always wanted her to buy more.
The diesel fumes from Omo Osagie Street wafted to our carport where Isaiah had laid out his wares in front of our door. Rows of masks, animal statues, thorn carvings like tiny Nigerian action figures (dentists drilling on a patient, coconut harvesters climbing a palm tree, and tiny buses with miniature figures spilling out of windows just like the jam-packed to overflowing buses on Awolowo Road), and ebony jewelry boxes with ivory inlay. “This one, Madam,” Isaiah said, grabbing the ebony mask she had picked up but rejected. “You buy today. Tell me price, Madam.”
“No, no,” she replied. “This statue is all I want.” She pulled out her cream-colored American-made billfold with the brass clasp.
While she pulled out the right money, I examined the remaining artwork. I liked the thorn carvings the best, the intricately detailed, two- to four-inch images of Yoruba men and women in daily tasks, such as dyeing yarn or mashing yams for fufu. Each image was carved out of the light buff and dark brown thorns of the ata tree and the pink thorns of the egun egun tree.
Over the weeks, she bought the canoes carrying several passengers with baggage and jugs of palm wine, a nativity set complete with black baby Jesus the size of a bead, and a chess set for my dad and Marty to play when both of them came home, whenever that may be.
I loved the ebony pieces too, the black surface polished like a marble wood.
“Please, Madam,” Isaiah pleaded. “I need to sell more today.”
“But this is all I can afford,” Mom said, setting the mahogany antelope statue at her feet, then pulling pound notes from her billfold.
“No, Madam,” Isaiah held up his hand to stop her. “You are rich lady. You can buy ebony face.” And he held the mask closer to her.
“Isaiah,” Mom shook her head. “I am not rich.”
“Madam not rich?” Isaiah acted shocked. He was teasing her, but he knew something more. To Isaiah, Mom was lying, which she did sometimes, like when she wanted me to get ready for school quicker so she’d flub the time. But rich? To me, rich meant Uncle Nick, vice president of a Houston GM car dealership. But his house in Houston was smaller than our two-story with umbrella trees, fruit bats, and bumblebees. Rich meant swimming pools, and we swam at the Ikoyi Club. Were we rich? “Madam,” Isaiah said, his forehead creased, “you
are very rich.” The black dirt around his pink nail beds accented the cracked calluses across the tips of his fingers. “You can buy all my carvings.” He knelt next to his display and now fanned his empty black-stained palm across his wares.
“Isaiah, that’s just not true.”
“Madam, please do not tease me.” He looked down at his chest. That, I thought, was putting it on a bit heavy. His baggy crepe pants had worn through at the pocket. The wad of Nigerian pound notes he carried poked through, revealing the Nigerian face on the bill: a man, machete held overhead, hard at work.
Nigerians often called us rich. I wondered what it would be like for the traders, Isaiah or Justus or Friday, if Mom did buy all their artwork in one day. Would they feel rich that day? Could they buy the solid yellow mangoes at the market and not the small dented brown ones? But when I mentioned it to my mom, she said that if she bought everything, then they wouldn’t have anything to sell to anyone else. She looked at me sideways. “What would they do?” she said. I thought maybe they could take the day off, rest, or maybe they had more stuff at home they could sell. But I didn’t say anything more, because apparently my idea was dumb.
Isaiah stacked all his statues and other wares in the middle of the cloth then pulled up the corners into a big knot. With one big heave, he hoisted the whole bundle onto his head, the sides sagging around his ears like the bottom of a giant pumpkin. Even with the load balanced, he still managed a small bow, then ambled down the drive and out the front gates.
When We Were Ghouls Page 6
