Say You're One of Them (Oprah's Book Club)

by Uwem Akpan

  “You beautiful!” I had told Maisha one night on Koinange Street, months before that fateful Ex-mas.

  “Ah, no, me am not.” She laughed, straightening her jean mini-skirt. “Stop lying.”

  “See your face?”

  “Kai, who sent you?”

  “And you bounce like models.”

  “Yah, yah, yah. Not tall. Nose? Too short and big. No lean face or full lips. No firsthand designer clothes. Not daring or beautiful like Naema. Perfume and mascara are not everything.”

  “Haki, you? Beautiful woman,” I said, snapping my fingers. “You will be tall tomorrow.”

  “You are asking me out?” she said in jest, and struck a pose. She made faces as if she were playing with the twins and said, “Be a man, do it the right way.”

  I shrugged and laughed.

  “Me, I have no shilling, big gal.”

  “I will discount you, guy.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, and pulled me into a hug.

  Giggling, we began walking, our strides softened by laughter. Everything became funny. We couldn’t stop laughing at ourselves, at the people around us. When my sides began to ache and I stopped, she tickled my ribs.

  We laughed at the gangs of street kids massed together in sound sleep. Some gangs slept in graded symmetry. Others slept freestyle. Some had a huge tarp above their piles to protect them from the elements. Others had nothing. We laughed at a group of city taxi drivers huddled together, warming themselves with cups of chai and fiery political banter while waiting for the Akamba buses to arrive with passengers from Tanzania and Uganda. Occasionally we’d see the anxious faces of these visitors in the old taxis, bracing for what would be the most dangerous twenty minutes of their twelve-hour journeys, fearful of being robbed whenever the taxis slowed down.

  We were not afraid of the city at night. It was our playground. At times like this, it was as if Maisha had forgotten her job, and all she wanted to do was laugh and playact.

  “You? Nice guy,” Maisha said.

  “Lie.”

  I pulled at her handbag.

  “You will be a big man tomorrow . . .”

  She dashed past me suddenly to wave down a chauffeured Volvo. It stopped right in front of her, the window rolling down. A man in the backseat inspected her and shook his bald head. He beckoned a taller girl from the cluster jostling behind her, trying to fit their faces in the window. Maisha ran to a silver Mercedes-Benz wagon, but the owner picked a shorter girl.

  “Someday, I must to find a real job,” Maisha said, sighing, when she came back.

  “What job, gal?”

  “I want to try fulltime.”

  “Wapi?”

  She shrugged. “Mombasa? Dar?”

  I shook my head. “Bad news, big gal. How long?”

  “I don’t know. Ni maisha yangu, guy, it’s my life. I’m thinking, full time will allow me to pay your fees and also save for myself. I will send money through the church for you. I’ll quit the brothel when I save a bit. I don’t want to stand on the road forever. Me myself must to go to school one day . . .”

  The words died in her throat. She pursed her lips, folded her hands across her chest, and rocked from side to side. She did not rush to any more cars.

  “We won’t see you again?” I said. “No, thanks. If you enter brothel, me I won’t go to school.”

  “Then I get to keep my money, ha-ha. Without you, they won’t see my shilling in that house. Never.” She saw my face, stopped suddenly, then burst into giggles. “I was kidding you, guy, about the brothel. Just kidding, OK?”

  She tickled me, pulling me toward Moi Avenue. I held her hand tightly. Prostitutes fluttered about under streetlights, dressed like winged termites.

  “Maisha, our parents—”

  She turned sharply, her fists balled.

  “Shut up! You shame me, you rat. Leave me alone. Me am not your mate. You can’t afford me!”

  Other girls turned and stared at us, giggling. Maisha strode away. It had been a mistake to mention our parents in front of the other girls, to let them know that we were related. And I shouldn’t have called her by her real name. I cried all the way home because I had hurt her. She ignored me for weeks.

  AFTER MAMA STOPPED CELEBRATING the end of our debt, she fished out two little waterproof Uchumi Supermarket bags from the carton and smoothed them out as if they were rumpled socks. She put them over her canvas shoes, tying the handles around her ankles in little bows. Then she walked out into the flood, her winged galoshes scooping the water like a duck’s feet. She started to untie our bag of utensils and food, which was leaning against the shop, her eyes searching for a dry spot to set up the stove, to warm some food for the twins. But the rain was coming down too heavily now, and after a while she gave up.

  “Jigana, so did you see those Maisha’s ma men?” she asked.

  “There were three white men, plus driver. Tall, old men in knickers and tennis shoes. I shook hands with them. Beautiful-beautiful motorcar. . . . I even pinched that monkey.”

  “Motorcar? They had a motorcar? Imachine a motorcar to pick up my daughter.” She stretched forward and held my arms, smiling. “You mean my daughter is big like that?”

  Otieno woke up with a start. He stood groggily on the cushions, then he climbed over Mama’s legs, levered himself over me with his hand on my head, and landed in the flood outside the shack in a crouch. He began to lower thin spools of shit into the water, whiffs of heat unwrapping into the night, the cheeks of his buttocks rouged by the cold.

  When Otieno returned to the shack, he sat on Mama’s legs and brought out her breast and sucked noisily. With one hand, he grabbed a toy Maisha had bought for him, rattling its maracas on Mama’s bony face. She was still looking ragged and underweight, even though she’d stayed in the hospital to have her diet monitored after Baby graduated from the incubator.

  Mama took out our family Bible, which we had inherited from Baba’s father, to begin our Ex-mas worship. The front cover had peeled off, leaving a dirty page full of our relatives’ names, dead and living. She read them out. Baba’s late father had insisted that all the names of our family be included, in recognition of the instability of street life. She began with her father, who had been killed by cattle rustlers, before she ran away to Nairobi and started living with Baba. She called out Baba’s mother, who came to Nairobi when her village was razed because some politicians wanted to redraw tribal boundaries. One day she disappeared forever into the city with her walking stick. Mama invoked the names of our cousins Jackie and Solo, who settled in another village and wrote to us through our church, asking our parents to send them school fees. I looked forward to telling them about the lit parks and the beautiful cars of Nairobi as soon as my teachers taught me how to write letters. She called out her brother, Uncle Peter, who had shown me how to shower in the city fountains without being whipped by the officials. He was shot by the police in a case of mistaken identity; the mortuary gave his corpse to a medical school because we could not pay the bill. She called Baba’s second cousin Mercy, the only secondary school graduate among our folks. She had not written to us since she fell in love with a Honolulu tourist and eloped with him. Mama called Baba’s sister, Auntie Mama, who, until she died two years ago of a heart attack, had told us stories and taught us songs about our ancestral lands every evening, in a sweet, nostalgic voice.

  The sky rumbled.

  “Bwana, I hope Naema put clothes on Baby before she left,” Mama said to me, the middle of her sentence wobbling because Otieno had bitten her.

  “She put Baby in waterproof paper bags. Then sweater.”

  Otieno, having satisfied himself, woke up Atieno, who took over the other breast, for they had divided things up evenly between them. Atieno sucked until she slept again, and Mama placed her gently near Otieno and began to shake Baba until he opened one eye. His weak voice vibrated because his face was jammed into the wall: “Food.”

  “No
food, tarling,” Mama told him. “We must to finish to call the names of our people.”

  “You’ll be calling my name if I don’t eat.”

  “Here is food—New Suntan shoe kabire.” She reached out and collected the plastic bottle from me. “It can kill your stomach till next week.”

  “All the children are here?”

  “Baby and Naema still out. Last shift . . . and Maisha.”

  “Ah, there is hope. Maisha will bring Ex-mas feast for us.”

  “Ex-mas is school fees, remember?”

  Mama groped inside the carton again. She unearthed a dirty candle, pocked by grains of sand. She lit the candle and cemented it to the trunk with its wax. Taking the Bible, she began to read a psalm in Kiswahili, thanking God for the gift of Baby and the twins after two miscarriages. She praised God for blessing Maisha with white clients at Ex-mas. Then she prayed for Fuunny Eyes, the name we had given to the young Japanese volunteer who unfailingly dropped shillings in our begging plate. She wore Masai tire sandals and ekarawa necklaces that held her neck like a noose, and never replied to our greetings or let her eyes meet ours. Mama prayed for our former landlord in the Kibera slums, who evicted us but hadn’t seized anything when we could not pay the rent. Now she asked God to bless Simba with many puppies. “Christ, you Ex-mas son, give Jigana a big, intelligent head in school!” she concluded.

  “Have mercy on us,” I said.

  “Holy Mary, Mama Ex-mas . . .”

  “Pray for us.”

  IT WAS DRIZZLING AGAIN when Naema returned with Baby. He was asleep. Naema’s jeans, mutumba loafers, and braided hair dribbled water, her big eyes red from crying. Usually she sauntered in singing a Brenda Fassie song, but tonight she plodded in deflated.

  She handed the money over to Mama, who quickly banked it in her purse. She also gave Mama a packet of pasteurized milk. It was half full, and Naema explained that she’d had to buy it to keep Baby from crying. Mama nodded. The milk pack was soggy and looked as if it would disintegrate. Mama took it carefully in her hands, like one receiving a diploma. When Naema brought out a half-eaten turkey drumstick, Mama grabbed her ears, thinking that she had bought it with the money she’d earned begging. Naema quickly explained that her new boyfriend had given it to her. This boy was a big shot in the street gang that controlled our area, a dreaded figure. Maisha and I detested him, but he loved Naema like his own tongue.

  Now Naema wriggled and fitted her lithe frame into the tangle on the floor and began to weep silently. Mama pulled the blanket from the others and covered the girl’s feet, which had become wrinkled in the rain.

  “Maisha is moving out tomorrow,” Naema said. “Full time.”

  Mama’s face froze. No matter how rootless and cheap street life might be, you could still be broken by departures. I went outside and lay on the row of empty paint containers we had lined up along the shop’s wall, hiding my face in the crook of my arm.

  Guilt began to build in my gut. Maybe if I had joined a street gang, Maisha would not have wanted to leave. I wouldn’t have needed money for school fees, and perhaps there would have been peace between Maisha and my parents. But my anger was directed at the musungu men, for they were the visible faces of my sister’s temptation. I wished I were as powerful as Naema’s boyfriend or that I could recruit him. We could burn their Jaguar. We could tie them up and give them the beating of their lives and take away all their papers. We could strip those musungu naked, as I had seen Naema’s friend do to someone who had hurt a member of his gang. Or we could at least kill and eat that monkey or just cut off his mboro so he could never fuck anybody’s sister again. I removed my knife from my pocket and examined the blade carefully. The fact that it was very blunt and had dents did not worry me. I knew that if I stabbed with all my energy, I would draw blood.

  After a while, my plans began to unravel. I realized that I would never be able to enlist Naema’s boyfriend. Naema herself would block the plan. In fact, until that night she had been taunting Maisha to move out, saying that if she were as old as Maisha she would have left home long ago. Besides, even if I fled to the Kibera slums, as soon as we touched the tourists, the police would come and arrest my parents and dismantle our shack. They would take away Maisha’s trunk and steal her treasures.

  BABA STARTED AWAKE, AS if a loud noise had hit him.

  “Is that Maisha?” he asked, closing his eyes again.

  “No, Maisha is working,” Mama said. “My Maisha commands musungu and motorcars!” she said, her good mood returning.

  “What? What musungu, tarling?” Baba asked, sitting up immediately, rubbing sleep and hunger from his eyes with the base of his palms.

  “White tourists,” Mama said.

  “Uh? They must to pay ma-dollar or euros. Me am family head. You hear me, woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no Honolulu business. What kind of motorcar were they driving?”

  “Jaguar,” I answered. “With driver. Baba, we should not allow Maisha to leave—”

  “Nobody is leaving, nobody. And shut up your animal mouth! You have wounded my wife! Until I break your teeth tomorrow, no opinion from you. No nothing. Did you thank the ma men for me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Aiiee! Jigana, where are your manners? Did you ask where they were going? Motorcar number?”

  “No, Baba.”

  “So if they take her to Honolulu, what do I do? Maybe we should send you to a street gang. Boy, have you not learned to grab opportunities? Is this how you will waste school fees in January? Poor Maisha.”

  He squinted incredulously, and lines of doubt kinked up his massive forehead. He pursed his lips, and anger quickened his breath. But that night I stood my ground.

  “I don’t want school anymore, Baba,” I said.

  “Coward, shut up. That one is a finished matter.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean by no? You want to be a pocket thief like me, . . . my son? My first son? You can’t be useless as the gals. Wallai!”

  “Me, I don’t want school.”

  “Your mind is too young to think. As we say, ‘The teeth that come first are not used in chewing.’ As long as you live here, your Baba says school.”

  “La hasha.”

  “You telling me never? Jigana!” He looked at Mama. “He doesn’t want school? Saint Jude Thaddaeus!”

  “Bwana, this boy has grown strong-head,” Mama said. “See how he is looking at our eyes. Insult!”

  Baba stood up suddenly, his hands shaking. I didn’t cover my cheeks with my hands to protect myself from his slap or spittle, as I usually did when he was angry. I was ready for him to kill me. My family was breaking up because of me. He stood there, trembling with anger, confused.

  Mama patted his shoulders to calm him down. He brushed her aside and went out to cool off. I monitored him through a hole in the wall. Soon he was cursing himself aloud for drinking too much and sleeping through Ex-mas Day and missing the chance to meet the tourists. As his mind turned to Maisha’s good fortune, he began to sing “A Jaguar is a Jaguar is a Jaguar” to the night, leaping from stone to stone, tracing the loose cobbles that studded the floodwater like the heads of stalking crocodiles in a river. In the sky, some of the tall city buildings were branded by lights left on by forgetful employees, and a few shopping centers wore the glitter of Ex-mas; flashing lights ascended and descended like angels on Jacob’s dream ladder. The long city buses, Baba’s hunting grounds, had stopped for the night. As the streets became emptier, cars drove faster through the floods, kicking up walls of water, which collapsed on our shack.

  Back inside, Baba plucked his half-used miraa stick from the rafter and started chewing. He fixed his eyes on the trunk. A mysterious smile dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. Eventually, the long stick of miraa subsided into a formless sponge. His spitting was sharp and arced across the room and out the door. Suddenly, his face brightened. “Hakuna matata! ” he said. Then he dipped into the carton a
nd came up with a roll of wire and started lashing the wheels of the trunk to the props of our shack. For a moment, it seemed he might be able to stop Maisha from going away.

  Mama tried to discourage him from tying down the trunk. “Bwanaaa . . . stop it! She will leave if she finds you manga-mangaring with her things.”

  “Woman, leave this business to me,” he said, rebuking her. “I’m not going to sit here and let any Honolulus run away with our daughter. They must marry her properly.”

  “You should talk,” Mama said. “Did you come to my father’s house for my hand?”

  “Nobody pays for trouble,” Baba said. “You’re trouble. If I just touch you, you get pregnant. If I even look at you—twins, just like that. Too, too ripe.”

  “Me am always the problem,” Mama said, her voice rising.

  “All me am saying is we must to treat the tourist well.”

  Atieno was shivering; her hand was poking out of the shack. Baba yanked it back in and stuck her head through the biggest hole in the middle of our blanket. That was our way of ensuring that the family member who most needed warmth maintained his place in the center of the blanket. Baba grabbed Otieno’s legs and pushed them through two holes on the fringe. “Children of Jaguar,” he whispered into their ears. “Ex-mas ya Jag-uar.” He tried to tuck Atieno and Otieno properly into the blanket, turning them this way and that, without success. Then he became impatient and rolled them toward each other like a badly wrapped meat roll, their feet in each other’s face, their knees folded and tucked into each other’s body—a blanket womb.

  Mama reminded him to wedge the door, but he refused. He wanted us to wait for Maisha. He winked at me as if I were the cosentry of our fortune. Mama handed Baby to me and lay down. I sat there sniffing kabire until I became drunk. My head swelled, and the roof relaxed and shook, then melted into the sky.

  I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night, their counter-currents running into each other, and, in a flash of sparks, I was hanging on the door of the city bus, going to school. I hid my uniform in my bag so that I could ride free, like other street children. Numbers and letters of the alphabet jumped at me, scurrying across the page as if they had something to say. The flares came faster and faster, blackboards burned brighter and brighter. In the beams of sunlight leaking through the holes in the school roof, I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches on the blackboard like a skillful matatu driver threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads. Then I raced down our bald, lopsided field with an orange for a rugby ball, jumping the gullies and breaking tackles. I was already the oldest kid in my class.