Voice of America (9 page)

“Maikudi, take it that I am the one owing you. I will arrange to pay you somehow; you know I am not a rich man, but I will try.”

“I trust and respect you. Take your time and pay me any number of times you like. You are not the type who will owe me and make me fret whether you can pay or not.” He drank the remainder of his beer and left our house, belching.

After Maikudi’s visit, Uncle Dele moved out of our house and moved in with some friends of his who lived in Lagos Island. We hardly heard any news about him, but the little we heard confirmed that he was still working on going back to America. My dad kept saying that he would soon come to his senses and return home and follow his advice to enroll in the University of Lagos.

And then there was a coup, and two frowning generals took over the reins of government. They promulgated a new decree every day and launched what they called the War Against Indiscipline. Anyone caught spitting, urinating, or hawking on the street was arrested by members of the War Against Indiscipline Brigade, tried by a special mobile court, and given a long sentence of fifteen to twenty years. They promulgated a decree making it an offense punishable by death by firing squad to traffic in hard drugs, and made the decree retroactive.

We were watching television one evening and were shocked when we saw Uncle Dele and two other young men in handcuffs on the screen. The newscaster said that they had been caught at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport with many kilograms of a powdery substance suspected to be cocaine while trying to board a KLM flight to America. Mother gasped, and Dad screamed, “This boy has killed himself, oh my God, how am I going to explain to his father when I get to the land of the spirits that I tried my best for him?”

We managed to get a few details from Uncle Dele’s friends. They said that in his desperation to return to America, he had hooked up with some drug barons who promised him a visa in return for helping them carry a little parcel of cocaine into America. They assured him that they had contacts both at the Murtala Muhammed Airport and J. F. Kennedy Airport in New York. It was going to be a cakewalk, and besides, they would pay him seven thousand dollars for his efforts. What the drug barons and Uncle Dele did not know was that the previous day, the customs and excise officers at the airport had been changed and replaced by a new set of officers.

Dad made an effort to save Uncle Dele. He got him a very brave young lawyer and worked some of his contacts in the military, but was told that the new rulers had made up their minds to set an example with Uncle Dele and the other two people caught along with him. Dad moved from one newspaper editor to another and begged them to write about the draconian nature of the decree under which Uncle Dele was being tried. The editors were afraid. Some of them had had their offices raided by soldiers, and it was rumored that a new decree was in the works to muzzle the press.

Finally the trial commenced at the Bonny Camp Military
Barracks. When Dad came back on the first day of the trial and Mama asked him how it went, he said it was not looking good at all. The lawyer had told him that he was scared; a source had told him that if he put up too much of a vigorous defense, he would be charged with aiding and abetting the drug pushers. He said Uncle Dele looked scared and sickly and pleaded with Dad to save him, “I do not want to die, I do not want to die, my mind would be a terrible thing to waste, please help me.”

Uncle Dele was found guilty of trying to smuggle an illegal substance and sentenced to death by firing squad. He was executed one cold Harmattan morning in Kirikiri maximum-security prison.

After Uncle Dele’s death I tried to forget about going to study in America and began preparing for the national university entrance examinations. My mind was not in it, though. I would read the same lines over and over again, and sometimes the words on the page would run together like a stream in front of me. I did very poorly in the exams. My dad was very disappointed, even more so my mother. One day my mother called me into her room and began to question me.

“Why did you not do well in the entrance examinations, eh? Look at all the boys who you have always done better than. Some of them are going into the University of Lagos, even that blockhead Alaba is going into Yaba Polytechnic.”

“I can’t concentrate, Mama,” I said.

“Tell me what is disturbing you—is it Dele?”

“Yes,” I said.

I began telling Mama of how I would always see Uncle Dele in a corner of my room with a cigarette dangling from his lips whenever I was studying. On another occasion I had seen the
tip of his cigarette glowing in the dark as I made my way to the toilet in the backyard. There was a shocked look on my mother’s face. I was looking directly at her face and noticed it had turned a little ashen.

“Was he smiling when you saw him?” my mother asked. She was standing so close to me that I could see the giant goose bumps that had materialized on her skin.

“He looked sad each time I saw him; he would shake his head from side to side and walk away from me.”

“Oh, my Maker, help me. And you did not think you should tell either me or your father? That is how he would have taken you with him to the land of the spirits, and my enemies would have had the victory over me.”

I think she must have relayed our conversation to my dad, because it was not too long thereafter that Dad began to make contacts with some officials in Kirikiri Prison to have Uncle Dele’s body exhumed so that he could be properly buried. Mama told me that she suspected Uncle Dele’s spirit was wandering because his life had been cut short, and the only way his spirit could rest was if he was buried properly. On my part, I imagined that it was more likely that even in death, he still wanted to go back to America. Dad had to bribe a lot of people, and they even had to put the decaying bones of another dead prisoner in his grave, as the warden told Dad, “You cannot be too careful with the military boys.”

Uncle Dele’s partly decomposed body was brought back secretly and buried in the dead of night in a corner of our large compound.

E
go married a certified nursing assistant who claimed to be a medical doctor. He sent her glossy, smiling pictures of himself in a lab coat. When he came to pay her bride price that December in Lagos, she was the envy of friends and neighbors. Everyone referred to him respectfully as “Doctor.” Her parents were very proud of her achievement. She recalled her mother telling her friends that it took a patient fisherman to hook a big fish. Her new husband appeared humble, and people talked about his levelheadedness.

“Imagine, a big medical doctor who worked in one of America’s best hospitals coming back to Nigeria to marry a wife,” their guests whispered in reverential tones. “He left all the beautiful girls in America and came back home to Nigeria to marry a local girl; now tell me, if that isn’t humility, then what is?”

She joined him a few months later in America and discovered that he had not been anywhere near a medical school. He worked at Duyn Home, a retirement home for the elderly. He came back home every day smelling of the aged, and complained about the
ninety-eight-year-old Rose Kelly, who grabbed him by his shirt each time he tidied her and whispered into his ears, “Tell me about lions, did you ride a cub like Tarzan back in Africa?”

She did not know how she survived those early days—their cramped apartment building, where fifty other tenants shared a common laundry room in the basement; the mice and roaches in the apartment, the paper-thin walls that separated them from their neighbor, whose piping voice she heard every night screaming at her partner, “Fuck me like a whore.” She felt rage, disappointment, anger, shame, and finally numbness. The kind of numbness that made everything seem like a dream from which she would soon wake up, with her husband reassuring her that it had all been a game devised by him to test her, to find out if she really loved him. Reassuring her that he was indeed a doctor and had only been pretending otherwise to see if she loved him for him and not for his title.

She did not recall at what point she began telling lies to her folks back in Nigeria about him. “Yes, he is really a doctor,” she told her mother. “He works in one of the largest and most respected hospitals in America. He is the only Nigerian working there. No, he is indeed the only black person working there.” And what about the promises he had made to her parents, the plot of land he had promised to buy for her father in the old part of Ikoyi, and the duplex he promised to build for him, facing the Atlantic Ocean? What about her younger brothers and sisters he had promised to see through college, what about the car he had promised to ship to her father as soon as he got back? She had made excuses. He was attending a course, a specialist course at Harvard Medical School; as soon as he was done, he would take care of all the things he had promised to her parents.

Soon, she no longer answered those odd-hour calls that came from Nigeria, calls that did not recognize the six-hour time difference. In time, she too trained as a certified nursing assistant. She called home and told her mother that she too was now in medical school. Her mother clapped and screamed with joy and told her she had made her proud and that she could now meet her maker in peace. How many families in Nigeria had sons-in-law who were doctors married to daughters who would soon qualify as doctors themselves? her mother asked.

U
ZO MARRIED TWO
men. That was the way she phrased it whenever she was talking about her situation to other Nigerian women in Maryland. Her husband already had a seventeen-year-old son from a previous marriage to an African American woman, a seventeen-year-old with the strange name Jequante. Her husband said it was an African name. Her husband had brought the boy to live with them two weeks after she joined him from Nigeria. Jequante was over six feet tall, a footballer with strapping muscles, and she was barely over five feet tall. The boy never called her by name but referred to her as
she.
The boy never said good morning to her. The boy never washed the dishes with which he ate. She had been brought up by her mother to believe that the kitchen was a woman’s domain. She had never seen her father enter the kitchen. Jequante would ransack her pot of
ogbono
soup and stew and eat all the fish and meat. He ate ravenously, and when he was not eating he would be in the basement sleeping and letting out huge snores and farts that reverberated through the house. He would be on the phone for hours and would tell those calling to speak with
her that she was not home. Of course, never referring to her by name, always saying
she
is not here right now,
she
cannot take your call,
she
stepped out.

Jequante, who she once overheard telling someone on the phone that he was going to kick her ass. When she reported this to her husband, he told her that it was a mere figure of speech, it was the way African Americans spoke. Jequante, who would carry his schoolbag as if he was going off to school and wait till her husband left for work and come back to eat and tie up the phone with unending calls. Jequante, who had been thrown out of a dozen schools and had been warned that if he got thrown out of his present one, it would be his last chance. The same Jequante whose father, her husband, had bought him a bike. He had sold off the bike and used the money to fund his marijuana habit. She had smelled a strange odor coming out of the basement and had walked in to see Jequante finishing the remains of a stick of marijuana. She had stared at him, and he had stared back at her, taking a final drag from the weed and walking past her to the kitchen to pour himself a tall glass of milk, which he drained in one gulp, leaving the glass on the stovetop for her to wash. She could not hide her shock when she told her husband about it later that night. Back in Nigeria, she had been told that marijuana was a leading cause of insanity, and it was smoked largely by motor park touts and street miscreants. Her husband had reassured her that it was no big deal here. He told her marijuana was like cigarettes here in America, that most kids dabbled with it in high school, and that it was not addictive. It was then she realized the explanation for Jequante’s huge appetite and unending naps.

Jequante, who began dating a woman twice his age, a woman with a gravelly voice who once called the house and, when Uzo
picked up the phone, asked her who she was, and when she told the woman that she should be the one asking her who she was, the woman had angrily dropped the phone. She had reported the incident to her husband, and this was one time she had seen him concerned. He had picked up the phone and called the woman.

“Do you know that boy is just a kid? He is only seventeen,” her husband had told the woman on the phone.

The woman had laughingly told her husband, “Jequante ain’t no kid, he’s a real man, my man.”

Her husband had threatened to call the cops and child services, and the woman had told him to go ahead and do whatever he wished to. At that point Jequante had stepped in and told Uzo’s husband to leave the lady alone, that she was only a friend, actually, the mother of a friend from school.

Jequante, who she had never seen open a book, who she had never seen doing any homework; the six notebooks in his backpack were as blank and clean and virginal as they had been the day they were bought.

And then one day her husband had pretended to go to work. He wanted to confirm that Jequante was skipping school. He came back after an hour and met Jequante on the phone, smoking a cigarette and watching porn on their cable television. They had screamed at each other. She was in the bedroom when she heard Jequante telling her husband not to lay hands on him. She had heard shoving and grunts and had run downstairs and met them both in the kitchen. There was blood on both of them. Her husband was holding a knife. Oh, my God, he has killed his son, was the thought that ran through her mind. They had left each other, and her husband had called the cops. Actually no one had stabbed the other. Her husband had a boil on his left arm, and it
had burst while they were struggling. The cops had advised her husband to send Jequante back to his mother in Texas. In the two weeks after Jequante left, her husband had become morose and would not talk to her. He sat in the basement drinking E&J brandy and hissing and holding his head. She was the one who begged him to bring Jequante back, if that was the only thing that would make him start talking to her again. Jequante would soon be on his way back and she would be married to two men yet again.