Voice of America (5 page)

The child sat by her mother and would sometimes pass salt and other items to her. The mother would leave her to go into the house, and people would come and buy
akara
and the girl
would collect their money and give them the correct change. This was very strange because the girl had not been to school, and even if she had, she was blind, so how could she distinguish between one currency note and another?

One day a little girl went missing in the village. Sometimes children would go missing, but they would normally be found within a few hours. This was different. Many hours had passed and the girl was still missing. When a child went missing, the mother of the child would tie her headscarf tightly around her waist and go around the village crying and asking, “Who has seen my child?” It was generally believed that by the time she lost her voice, the missing child would be found. By the second day the child was still missing. Even though the mother had lost her voice, the child was not yet found. When the mother walked past the women frying bean cakes, crying and screaming, “Who has seen my child?” the blind girl spoke for the first time.

“I know who stole the missing girl.”

“Be quiet and don’t get us both into trouble.”

“I saw him give the girl a piece of candy; he tied her mouth with a rag, and threw her into a jute bag and rode away on his motorcycle.”

The woman had never heard the child say that many words. Whenever the child chose to speak, she spoke in a whisper. Many people assumed she never spoke at all.

The mother called out to the woman. She said out loud what the child had said. The villagers gathered. There was only one man they knew who rode a motorcycle and had a jute bag: the man who bought cocoa beans from the villagers. They sent some young men after him. They caught him with the child two towns away. He had cut a hole in the bag through which he
fed the girl. He had kidnapped the child for juju moneymaking rituals. It was rumored that little virgin girls could be charmed and made to vomit money through juju. He cried and said the devil made him do it.

The parents of the kidnapped girl brought a gift for the blind girl and her mother. There was no attempt to explain how the girl had arrived at the knowledge she had. Some people said she must have heard something. They said her blindness had sharpened her ears. Her mother suspected something but said nothing.

One day the girl said softly to the mother, “Father is never coming back.”

“Why do you say that? I am not sure you remember your father, you were so tiny when he left.”

“He ran away with the catechist’s wife’s younger sister.”

“How do you know that?” the woman asked, puzzled and frightened.

“They were traveling to Mokwa. He was going to start a new life with her. The car in which they were traveling broke down on the way; all the passengers came down while the driver opened the bonnet to find out what was wrong. He was crossing to the other side of the road to urinate, when a car coming from the other side knocked him down.”

“Oh, my child, how do you know these things?” the woman asked.

“They buried him by the roadside, his grave is overgrown with weeds, he’s never coming back.”

The woman was quiet for a while. Everything about the story sounded true. She began to cry quietly to herself.

All things eventually come to light. People in the village sensed the girl’s true powers and began to come to her for answers.

“Will there be plenty of rain this year so I can plant cassava instead of yams?”

“My black sheep did not come home with the rest of my sheep last night. Where could it be?”

“My son who lives in the city has not come home for five years. Is he dead or in prison?”

“My son who died three years ago: Was his death a natural death, or did my husband’s other wife poison him while I was out of the house?”

“Is the price of cocoa going to rise or fall this year?”

“My husband has been sick for years now; do you think he will recover?”

The girl answered all their questions in a whisper, and she answered honestly. Her answers occasionally caused trouble, tore families apart. Her mother would sometimes speak to her by way of signs to be quiet, but she spoke up all the time. The answers flowed out of her mouth like a gentle stream. She said what she had to say and was quiet.

Prosperity began to come to the village because of her. People planted the right crops at the right time and got very rich harvests. Evil was rare. People stopped stealing because they knew she would find them out. More farmers bought motorcycles. Life had never been better.

The mother stopped frying
akara.
She made a comfortable living from the gifts the girl received. She was happy for once in all her life. She always felt the girl’s eyes on her and sometimes shivered slightly when she felt the girl was looking at her. The girl’s voice did not change, her breasts were small. The mother was happy when she began to bleed in tiny drops every month.
Thank goodness she is a woman,
she said to herself.

People said different things about the source of her power, but no one denied it.

“Her power is from the river goddess. When she speaks, it is the river goddess speaking.”

“It is the Holy Virgin that gives people such gifts, that is why she is called the voice of the dumb and the eyes of the sightless.”

“She is not Catholic, not even Christian—she does not mention the name of God.”

“God who took away her eyes gave her the gift of sight, and now she sees more than those of us with two eyes.”

People said all sorts of things but still came to her for answers. On occasion the mother would say the girl was tired and needed to rest, but the girl would come out of her room and provide answers to whomever needed them. People reminded the mother that she could now afford to take the child to the Baptist Missionary Hospital in the big city. The mother acted as if she did not hear them. She did not think it was wise to tamper with the will of God, she told those who were bold enough to ask her. Besides, if the girl thought it was such a good thing she would have said so. Quite a few agreed with the mother; after all, those of them who were not blind did not see as much as the girl did.

At about this time, the former American president Jimmy Carter launched his River Blindness Eradication Program. The program sent doctors and nurses to villages to distribute drugs for the prevention of river blindness. They did eye examinations and distributed glasses, which the villagers referred to as Anya Jimmy Carter—Jimmy Carter’s Eyes. The frames of the glasses were secondhand, gifts and donations from affluent Americans. This time around, though, it was going to be slightly different;
they were coming with eye surgeons to help remove cataracts. The bearer of this piece of news was the midwife. She told the villagers that she had made it happen, that the village was not originally in the plan for the cataract surgery; she had lobbied for them to be included.

People were excited about this piece of good news. One of the old men in the village said the former president was kind because he had been a groundnut farmer before he became a president. Most of the villagers were farmers.

The doctors had already been to the nearby village and had sent a notice to the chiefs that they were coming. The midwife said they would be moving from house to house.

At first everyone looked forward to the visit, until the woman mentioned that this would be an opportunity for her daughter to have the scar tissue covering her eyes removed. It was free, and the girl was bleeding; she was now a woman and needed to get married. She only said this to a few people. It soon got round the village that the girl was going to undergo surgery. There was anger, there were complaints, there was resentment, and then people began to complain loudly.

“This program is not for people like her, it is for people losing their sight to river blindness.”

“She lost her eyes due to her mother’s carelessness. Her mother should bear the cost of her surgery in a proper hospital.”

“What guarantee is there that she will see again? Even if the skin is lifted, I hear the eyeballs are dead and blank. Please, no one should make the poor child suffer for nothing.”

“They say her mother wants a husband for the girl. I know many men that will gladly marry her the way she is, she is a bag of wealth.”

“It is the mother that needs a husband. Why did she never remarry after her husband ran away? As we all know the husband is dead, the girl said it herself.”

“The girl belongs to the entire village now, not to her mother alone. She ceased being the mother’s property as soon as she received her gift.”

“You are right, you know—if the gift was for her alone, she would have stopped at telling her mother about her father’s disappearance.”

“You are right, she sees things for everyone, she was sent to prosper the village.”

“Why are the Americans sending the eye doctors to us? Do they mean to tell us they have cured all the blind people in America?”

“The elders should meet and tell the woman what to do, just in case she does not know.”

Words got to the ears of the elders, and they, being people who acted in the interest of the inhabitants of the village, decided to prevail on the mother of the girl to do the right thing. They made their points—they told her that her daughter’s gift was for the good of all, that if it was for her mother alone she would have been seeing things for the mother alone. They spoke to the woman for a very long time. The woman told them that the girl was already bleeding and was a woman. She wanted her to marry and have children. Mid came along with the elders. She explained the difference between a cataract and the girl’s condition. It was very possible that the girl would not recover her sight after the surgery; this might traumatize the girl, and she might even lose the gift of speech, which would be a double tragedy.
They talked to the woman for a long time. The elders told her that they would gladly marry the girl off to any of their sons. She cried, and then she nodded and agreed with them.

On the day the American eye doctors came, the woman and her daughter locked their doors and remained inside till the eye doctors left. Some people got new glasses; some had surgery. Everyone was happy. The girl and her mother were referred to as heroes who had put the interest of the town above their own interest.

When the planting season began, people came to the girl with their questions, but alas, she had no answers. The stream had dried up.

“It was not our fault. We should not blame ourselves for it,” one of the villagers said.

“Whatever has a beginning must have an end; even the deepest ocean has a bottom. She was bound to stop seeing things one day anyway.”

“It is the white man’s strong juju that did it, or don’t you know that white people are powerful?”

“The blind girl and her mother should consider themselves lucky—if it were in some other village, they would have stoned them to death for possessing witchery powers.”

And so life returned to normal in the village, and everybody’s conscience was at peace. Occasionally when a sheep went missing, the owner would be heard to bite his fingers and mutter, “If only that blind girl still had her powers.”

M
y Dear Son,

Why have you not been sending money through Western Union like other good Nigerian children in America do? You have also not visited home. Have you married a white woman? Do not forget that I have already found a wife for you. Her name is Ngozi. Her parents are good Christians and her mother belongs to the Catholic Women’s League like me. Please do not spoil the good relationship I have built over the years with Ngozi’s family.

I beg of you not to become like Kaka’s son who was sent to America with the community’s funds, only to come back with a white woman, and would not let his parents visit him in his white man’s living quarters in the Lagos government reserved area. He has large dogs and his white wife treats the dogs like her children. The only time he visited his family, he refused to sleep in his father’s old house, complaining that it was dirty, and took his wife to pass the night in a hotel. He stretched out his
hands to shake the hands of the elders of the community and would not prostrate on the ground like a well-brought-up child.

Or don’t you consider Ngozi beautiful enough from the picture I sent to you of her dressed in a long gown, holding a hibiscus flower? She attended the Catholic Women’s Teacher’s College and comes from a lineage of women who bear strong sons.

Ogaga’s son who went to Germany only a few years ago has sent his father a big black BMW and has already completed a twenty-room mansion and is laying the foundation for a hotel. I am already in the evening of my days and want to rock my grandchildren on my tired knees before I go to heaven to live in the many mansions that God has prepared for me. I have become the laughingstock of the village because I sold my only stall in Oyingbo Market to raise money to send you, my only son, to America, and now I have no stall in the market and am forced to hawk my wares on a tray like a housemaid.

Remember your promise to buy me a car and get me a driver, so I can proudly sit in the owner’s corner like the wife of a top civil servant.

I am sure you remember Obi’s daughter. She went to Italy to work as a prostitute after you left for America. Just last year she came back with lots of goodies for her parents and has even married a boy from a responsible family. They had their wedding in the church and the priest said that though her sins were like scarlet she has been washed clean by the blood of Jesus (after she made a huge donation for the repair of the church roof). She has gone on to bear a son and now nobody remembers that she was once a prostitute in Italy.

Do you associate with other Africans so you can still
remember your roots? Do you still find African foods to eat? Because I fear the white man’s food will make you reason in the white man’s ways. My son, reconsider your ways and retrace your steps like the prodigal son, so I can bless you before I die.