Voice of America (6 page)

I spent too much sending Ngozi to the fattening room. I sent her there at my own expense so the women can teach her the ways to take care of her husband, and feed her, and fatten her up so she can be plump like a ripe melon. God forbid that a girl from a responsible family, like Ngozi, should be looking like dry
bonga
fish on her wedding day. Sending a bride-to-be to the fattening room costs a lot of money these days, because the women who run them are dying out and the younger generation consider it “bush.” The young prefer their women thin and dry like broomsticks. They seem not to know that men prefer to hold something ample when they reach out at night.

My son, do not make me a laughingstock. I beg of you not to let those who borrowed chewing sticks from me end up with brighter teeth and cleaner breath. I am sure you remember Odili’s son (you were in primary school together). He used to be the neighborhood rascal who smoked marijuana and pinched young girls on their buttocks, and can you imagine, that
efuefu,
that idler, woke up one day and announced that he was going to Europe by road! We all thought that marijuana had finally crossed two wires in his brain, but how wrong we were. He joined a truck carrying tomatoes to the north and boarded a bus from there to Mali, where he joined a caravan of camels across the Sahara desert. Some of those he was traveling with died of thirst in the desert, but he survived. He found work in a construction site in Morocco and saved enough money to pay the Tuaregs, who helped him to cross by boat into Spain. He
told the Spanish authorities he was a Liberian fleeing the Liberian war and was given a work permit. You should have been there the day he came back exactly five years later: he was loaded down with television sets, gold and trinkets, clothes, and lots of money, which he spent like water. For the few days that he was around, his father’s house was the place to be; it was where everyone went to eat and drink. In my heart I did not want to go there with the throng, but I did not want to be accused of not wishing him well. So I dragged my feet there and ate and drank and rejoiced with the family like everyone else. All eyes there upon me, and asking, “What about your son, when will he return with goodies, when will he invite us to come and eat and drink like the Odilis have done? You whose son flew to America. Look at Odili’s son who went on foot, he has come back with goodies.” Not that anyone said a word to me, but I could see it in their eyes. Their eyes never left me as I drank the Coca-Cola, and ate
jollof
rice and fried beef and danced foolishly like a headless chicken. The young man has gone back, by air this time, promising his father that when next he comes, he will demolish his father’s old house, and put up a mansion in its place.

I have been tempted to give your young bride Ngozi to your younger cousin Azuka so she can produce a baby for me to rock on my knees before they become too rusty. But Ngozi’s mother will not hear of it. She clapped her hands cynically and hissed like a snake and asked if her daughter was now a piece of beef on the butcher’s table that people tossed and weighed and tossed aside for the next person. She spat derisively at me, narrowly missing my face, and told me that if her daughter was going to marry again, she would look for a better family for her, a family where things grow and not an arid one like ours. Since that
incident, she has stopped attending the meetings of the Catholic Women’s League and hisses and crosses over to the other side of the street whenever she sees me coming toward her.

You really have no excuse for not sending money, because Western Union now has an office on our street. Daily, I see men and women who have caring children in America marching majestically into their offices and swaggering out with huge bundles of naira notes in large paper parcels. They wave with their free hands and clutch their parcels of money as if afraid I’m going to ask them to lend me some.

Do not imagine that my ears are not filled with all manner of suggestions from different people. After all, as our people say, “The day an elephant dies is the day you see all kinds of knives.” A native doctor once suggested to me that he could cast a spell on you over there in America that would make you abandon whatever you were doing and board the next flight back to Nigeria. He said the spell was so effective that even if there was no flight, you would board the nearest boat and return home. But you are my son, you came into this world from between my legs, and I will not do something that will harm you. Okolosi’s son was forced back from America by such a spell. He is back home now; he wears an old jacket and walks up and down the street frightening children on their way to school with his hyena laugh while reciting aloud to himself the names of the capital cities of America.

I am not threatening you, but please do not force my hand. You were born the year the Americans landed on the moon and returned with that strange eye disease called
Apollo.
I still remember everyone’s eyes turning red and dripping water like a tap as soon as the men came back from the moon. It was said
that the disease was God’s punishment to the people of the earth for peering too closely into his eyes and leaving an imprint of their feet on his face. It did not surprise me, therefore, when you said you were leaving for America to study. Even as a little boy watching
Bonanza
on our old black-and-white television, you were always taking on new names every week. One week you were Dan Blocker, Purnell Roberts the next, down to Michael Landon and Lorne Green. As a child you would wear a cowboy hat, put a dry piece of wood in your mouth, pretending it was a cigar, curl your lips, and speak through your nose like the actors on television. It did not surprise me when you said you were leaving for America, because you were born the year the American flag was planted on the moon. During moonlight play, while other children saw the man in the moon, you always ran back home to tell me that you saw the American flag waving to you.

And now I want to share a family secret with you. In the early 1940s your father secured a place at Howard University. Your grandfather sold his entire rubber plantation to the United African Company to raise the funds for your father’s boat trip via the Elder Dempster Lines. Your grandmother sold her gold ornaments too. When your father got to the Lagos wharf, he fell into the hands of con men, who convinced him they could double his money. The con men were soldiers of the West African Frontier Force, recently discharged from the army after fighting in Burma. They spent their days idling around the wharf looking for gullible bumpkins like your father. Your father reasoned that if they doubled his money he could send half back to his family and travel with the other half to America. The con men collected his money and handed a black wooden box to him,
telling him not to open it till the next day. On opening it, he discovered it was filled with neat rows of newspapers cut to the size of pound notes. He was distraught and was about to throw himself into the Atlantic when a woman selling bean cakes by the wharf stopped him and took him home. He got a teaching job in a private school and managed to save enough money to travel to Sierra Leone in search of better opportunities. His family back home assumed he was studying in America. He was in Sierra Leone when his father, your grandfather, became sick. As the first son, he was expected to be there to lay his father’s hands across his chest when he breathed his last. The elders conferred and decided to consult a medicine man to cast a spell on your father to bring him back home. It was this spell that brought your dad back from Sierra Leone. By the time he arrived, your grandfather had breathed his last, but not before placing a curse on his son who had broken his heart. He said that just as your father had disappointed him, your father’s own children would in turn do the same to him.

Do you still recall the birds that migrated all the way from Australia to our village to nestle in the rice farms? They wore shiny gold bangles around their feet, embossed with the words “Melbourne Zoological Gardens.” You must remember going to watch them play and sing all day, as they pecked at rice seeds and bathed in the pools of water by the rice paddies. They were large colorful birds with feathers that looked as if they had been painted with a hand brush. The farmers didn’t bother them; they looked like royal visitors and behaved as such, never being overly destructive, unlike the local
kwela
birds, and only pecked at the rice seeds that fell on the ground. As soon as it was time to harvest the rice, they gathered themselves together, conferred
for a few minutes as if praying for journey mercies for the trip ahead, and flew off together as a group.

But one year, one of the visiting birds stayed back. While the other birds gathered together, limbering up, preparing for takeoff, it sat on the ground pecking without concern. The departing birds made signs at it and spoke to it in their shrieking bird language, but it did not pay them any heed. Discouraged, the other birds left it behind. When the farmers came the next day, they tried to drive it away and persuade it with signs to fly away and return to its homeland, but it just stayed there pecking at rice seeds. After some time, it flew slowly toward a group of local
kwela
birds and joined them in their destructive scattering of the unharvested rice. The farmers said to themselves that the bird no longer comported itself like a visitor, and decided to do to it what they did to the local birds. They shot it with an arrow and used its meat to prepare rice stew. My son, I hope you have not become like that strange Australian bird that forgot its homeland.

W
hen we were living in Fur, whenever my sister Nur and I did something Mother disliked, she would frighten us by invoking the name of the Janjaweed. If we whispered to ourselves in the dark as we lay on our mat at night—our same mat that smelled faintly of urine no matter how often it was put out in the sun to dry—her harsh whisper would carry into our room.

“Are you girls not going to sleep? You had better stop your whispering lest the Janjaweed hear you and carry you away on their horses and make you their wives.”

Nur and I would laugh quietly to ourselves in the dark and stop our whispering. Shortly Nur would startle me with her wall-shaking snores. I would prod her on the ribs with my elbow. The snores would temporarily cease and then start again, and I would prod her once more. I would prod and prod her and would not know when I fell asleep.

I recall one occasion when Nur was chasing me around the house. We were screaming and laughing and making so much noise, Mother shouted at us to stop.

“Have you people forgotten that you are girls? Good girls do not run around screeching, feet pounding
gidim, gidim, gidim
like the hooves of Janjaweed horses. Both of you had better go and sit down quietly in some corner before I marry you off to some Janjaweed so you can spend all your lives brewing tea.”

Nur turned to me and said, “I do not mind brewing tea. It sounds much easier compared to gathering firewood and all the grinding and pounding of sorghum and corn on mortar and the unending trips to the water well that we have to do every day.”

“God forbid,” I said. “How can you say that, or don’t you know that the Janjaweed are djinns riding on horses, and if they pick you as their wife, any day you do not brew their tea fast enough they will pluck out and eat your heart like wicked djinns are wont to do?”

“You have never seen a Janjaweed with your two eyes—or have you?”

“No, but that is because they are spirits, and spirits are invisible. The day you see one you will suddenly grow giant goose bumps, catch cold, and begin to shiver. Your teeth will start to chatter, and then you die and become a spirit yourself.”

“God forbid,” Nur said to me, her voice quivering. I thought I saw little goose bumps on her dark skin and realized that I might have frightened her. I held her hand as we both walked into the house.

We met Father sitting with his head in his hands. When he raised his head, the whites of his eyes looked as if they were covered with a thin film of blood. He looked tired, and his dark face looked even darker. Mama gestured to us with her eyes to go to our room. We ran into our room quickly, crouched behind the door, listened, and tried to hold our breaths at the same time so
they would not hear us breathing fast. Father’s voice sounded painful like a sore.

“Their cattle trampled our crops…. We thought it was a mistake, but they said … they called us slaves, sons of dogs…. It is the same news from different districts…. Shouk, Krindid,” he hissed, and was quiet.

T
HE NIGHT THEY
came, I thought I was having one of my malaria dreams. In my “malaria dreams,” as Mother called them, I was always being pursued by either someone or something. Sometimes it was a man with a machete, or a big black animal with two heads, or a big, dark, fiery-eyed dog snapping at my heels. Usually at the point in the dream in which the machete was about to cut my head off or the animal with two heads was about to bite off both of my legs, one in each mouth, or when I felt the dog’s hot, fetid breath behind my legs, I would rub my eyes and wake up. Mama would be standing in front of me holding a lantern and looking worried and scared and telling me in a kind voice to go back to sleep. This night was different, though. There was fire and pounding of hooves and what appeared to be floating fire and screaming. Mama swept Nur and me into her arms, and Father screamed for us to run behind the house and hide. From the side of my eyes I glimpsed the Janjaweed for the first time. So they were real? They actually had horses, and their horses emitted fire through every pore. Their eyes were the color of fire, and balls of fire flew out of the guns they carried. Everywhere they pointed caught fire. Our faces, our house, turned the color of fire. Father stood in front of the house. I looked at him and saw that he was no longer black; he, too, had become the
color of fire. The evil ones were cursing and laughing and speaking in fast Arabic. I could hear the words they spoke: “Throw the dark-skinned slaves in the fire; let the fire lighten their skins; they are no better than firewood.”