Seeds of Plenty (25 page)
Abike also planted shea trees as part of the rural women’s cooperative, founded by a local Nigerian woman, a new leader in development. Using traditional methods of extracting the shea butter by hand and without the use of chemicals, the co-op made pure skin care products, much in demand in the West.
Her husband had killed himself many years ago, but Abike had used Winston’s money to send all her children to school. Her eldest son would be graduating next year from the University of Ife with a degree in accounting.
Next to their village there had once been a plantation owned by a government official. He had long since lost favor and fled to London to become a corner shopkeeper in Brixton. The plantation land had since been abandoned. The women in the co-op reclaimed the land by replanting local trees on the razed and barren farmland. The trees grew fast, the foliage hiding the metal carcass of an abandoned tractor. All that remained were the broken headlights, peering out of the bush.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHORJennifer Juo is Chinese-American but was born and raised in Nigeria, West Africa. She attended boarding school in England, and moved to America at the age of seventeen. She has lived in San Francisco and Seattle for the past seventeen years. She currently lives in Singapore with her husband and two sons.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThank you to Julie Mosow, my editor who worked and reworked the manuscript and story with me until it was ready to be in print. I am greatly indebted to my writers group, friends, and family in Seattle who spent years with me as I wrote and researched this novel. I appreciate your constant feedback and reading and rereading of my manuscript. So much gratitude to my writers group—Nancy Brenner, Elizabeth Coulter, Karen Heileson, Laura Swindlehurst, Lori Whittaker, and our dear friend, Kathy Medak, who we lost to cancer. Thanks also to my other writer colleagues, good friends, and family who endured reading drafts as well: Diane Owens, Joe Richardson, Margaret Rodenberg, Ingrid Olsen, Alicia Trochalakis, Jodi Nishioka, Melissa Sebastien, Krista Lewis, Melissa Tarun, Cam Bradley, Jasmine Juo, Peter Juo, my mother, Rosalind Juo and my University of Washington instructor Scott Driscoll. Finally, special thanks to my husband, Garth Bradley, for all his support and love on this project.
I did extensive research to write this novel. In particular, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb’s book,
The Afterlife is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa,
inspired many rich details about the spirit world and village life. Thank you also to David Sewell and Stan Claassen, colleagues of my father. My father and his colleagues dedicated their life’s work to agricultural aid in Africa. Stan provided clarifications on some of the agricultural details and David, a pilot, kindly hosted me in Nigeria in 2007 but recently lost his life when his plane crashed in the African bush. Finally, this novel is dedicated to my late father Anthony Juo who showed me the world and gave me the perspective to write about it.