Selected
Quotes
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Papa
always sat in the front pew for Mass, at the end beside the middle
aisle, with mama, Jaja, and me sitting next to him. He was
first to receive communion. Most people did not kneel to receive
communion at the marble altar, with the blond life-size Virgin Mary
mounted nearby, but Papa did. He would hold his eyes shut
so hard that his face tightened into a grimace, and then he would
stick his tongue out as far as it could go. Afterward, he
sat back on his seat and watched the rest of the congregation troop
to the altar, palms pressed together and extended, like a saucer
held sideways, just as Father Benedict had taught them to do.
Even though Father Benedict had been at St. Agnes for seven years,
people still referred to him as "our new priest."
Perhaps they would not have if he had not been white. He still
looked new. The colors of his face, the colors of condensed
milk and a cut-open soursop, had not tanned at all in the fierce
heat of seven Nigerian harmattans. And his British nose was
still as pinched and as narrow as it always was, the same nose that
had had me worried that he did not get enough air when he first
came to Enugu. Father Benedict had changed things in the parish,
such as insisting that the Credo and kyrie be recited only in Latin;
Igbo was not acceptable. Also, hand clapping was to be kept
at a minimum, lest the solemnity of Mass be compromised. But
he allowed offertory songs in Igbo; he called them native songs,
and when he said "native" his straight-line lips turned
down at the corners to form an inverted U. During his sermons,
Father Benedict usually referred to the pope, Papa, and Jesus in
that order. He used Papa to illustrate the gospels.
"When we let our light shine before men, we are reflecting
Christ's Triumphant Entry," he said that Palm Sunday.
"Look at Brother Eugene. He could have chosen to be like
other Big Men in this country, he could have decided to sit at home
and do nothing after the coup, to make sure the government did not
threaten his businesses. But no, he used the Standard
to speak the truth even though it meant the paper lost advertising.
Brother Eugene spoke out for freedom. How many of us have
stood up for the truth? How many of us have reflected the
Triumphant Entry?"
The congregation said
"Yes" or "God bless him" or "Amen,"
but not too loudly so they would not sound like the mushroom Pentecostal
churches; then they listened intently, quietly. Even the babies
stopped crying, as if they, too, were listening. On some Sundays,
the congregation listened closely even when Father Benedict talked
about things everybody already knew, about Papa making the biggest
donations to Peter's pence and St. Vincent de Paul. Or about
Papa paying for the cartons of communion wine, for the new wing
to St. Agnes Hospital where Father Benedict gave extreme unction.
And I would sit with my knees pressed together, next to Jaja, trying
hard to keep the pride from showing, because Papa said modesty was
very important.
Papa himself would have
a blank face when I looked at him, the kind of expression he had
in the photo when they did the big story on him after Amnesty
World gave him a human rights award. It was the only
time he allowed himself to be featured in the paper. His editor,
Ade Coker, had insisted on it, saying Papa deserved it, saying Papa
was too modest. Mama told me and Jaja; Papa did not tell us
such things. That blank look would remain on his face until
Father Benedict ended the sermon, until it was time for communion.
After Papa took communion, he sat back and watched the congregation
walk to the altar and, after Mass, reported to Father Benedict,
with concern, when a person missed communion on two successive Sundays.
He always encouraged Father Benedict to call and win that person
back into the fold; nothing but mortal sin would keep a person away
from communion two Sundays in a row.
So when Papa did not see
Jaja go to the altar that Palm Sunday when everything changed, he
banged his leatherbound missal, with the red and green ribbons peeking
out, down on the dining table when we got home. The table
was glass, heavy glass. It shook, as did the palm fronds on
it.
"Jaja, you did not
go to communion," Papa said quietly, almost a question.
Jaja stared at the missal
on the table as though he were addressing it. "The wafer
gives me bad breath."
I stared at Jaja.
Had something come loose in his head? Papa insisted we call
it the host because "host" came close to capturing the
essence, the sacredness, of Christ's body. "Wafer"
was too secular, wafer was what one of Papa's factories made - chocolate
wafer, banana wafer, what people bought their children to give them
a treat better than biscuits.
"And the priest keeps
touching my mouth and it nauseates me," Jaja said. He
knew I was looking at him, that my shocked eyes begged him to seal
his mouth, but he did not look at me.
"It is the body of
our Lord." Papa's voice was low, very low. His
face looked swollen already, with pus-tipped rashes spread across
every inch, but it seemed to be swelling even more. "You
cannot stop receiving the body of our Lord. It is death, you
know that."
"Then I will die."
Fear had darkened Jaja's eyes to the color of coal tar, but he looked
Papa in the face now. "Then I will die, Papa."
Papa looked around the
room quickly, as if searching for proof that something had fallen
from the high ceiling, something he had never thought would fall.
He picked up the missal and flung it across the room, toward Jaja.
It missed Jaja completely, but it hit the glass etagere which Mama
polished often. It cracked the top shelf, swept the beige,
finger-size ceramic figurines of ballet dancers in various contorted
postures to the hard floor and then landed after them. Or
rather it landed on their many pieces. It lay there, a huge
leatherbound missal that contained the readings for all three cycles
of the church year.
Jaja did not move.
Papa swayed from side to side. I stood at the door, watching
them. The ceiling fan spun round and round, and the light
bulbs attached to it clinked against one another. Then Mama
came in, her rubber slippers making slap-slap sounds on
the marble floor. She had changed from her sequined Sunday
wrapper and the blouse with puffy sleeves. Now she had a plain
tye-die wrapper tied loosely around her waist and that white T-shirt
she wore every other day. It was a souvenir from a spiritual
retreat she and Papa had attended; the words GOD IS LOVE crawled
over her sagging breasts. She stared at the figurine pieces
on the floor and then knelt and started to pick them up with her
bare hands.
The silence was broken
only by the whir of the ceiling fan as it sliced through the still
air. Although our spacious dining room gave way to an even
wider living room, I felt suffocated. The off-white walls
with the framed photos of Grandfather were narrowing, bearing down
on me. Even the glass dining table was moving toward me.
"Nge, mgwa.
Go and change," Mama said to me, startling me although
her Igbo words were low and calming. In the same breath, without
pausing, she said to Papa. "Your tea is getting cold,"
and to Jaja, "Come and help me, biko."
Papa sat down at the table
and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the
edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip,
as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared
the little things you loved with the people you loved. Have
a love sip, he would say, and Jaja would go first. Then I
would hold the cup with both hands and raise it to my lips.
One sip. The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue,
and if lunch was something peppery, my raw tongue suffered.
But it didn't matter, because I knew that when the tea burned my
tongue, it burned Papa's love into me. But Papa didn't say,
"Have a love sip"; he didn't say anything as I watched
him raise the cup to his lips.
Jaja knelt beside Mama,
flattened the church bulletin he held into a dustpan, and placed
a jagged ceramic piece on it. "Careful, Mama, or those
pieces will cut your fingers, " he said.
I pulled at one of the
cornrows underneath my black church scarf to make sure I was not
dreaming. Why were they acting so normal, Jaja and Mama, as
if they did not know what had just happened? And why was Papa
drinking his tea quietly, as if Jaja had not just talked back to
him? Slowly, I turned and headed upstairs to change out of
my red Sunday dress.
I sat at my bedroom window
after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out
and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-colored crisscross
of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily,
drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window's netting.
I heard Papa walk upstairs to his room for his afternoon siesta.
I closed my eyes, sat still, waiting to hear him call Jaja, to hear
Jaja go into his room. But after long, silent minutes, I opened
my eyes and pressed my forehead against the window louvers to look
outside. Our yard was wide enough to hold a hundred people
dancing atilogu, spacious enough for each dancer to do
the usual somersaults and land on the next dancer's shoulders.
The compound walls, topped by coiled electric wires, were so high
I could not see the cars driving by on our street. It was
early rainy season, and the frangipani trees planted next to the
walls already filled the yard with the sickly-sweet scent of their
flowers. A row of purple bougainvillea, cut smooth and straight
as a buffet table, separated the gnarled trees from the driveway.
Closer to the house, vibrant bushes of hibiscus reached out and
touched one another as if they were exchanging their petals.
The purple plants had started to push out sleepy buds, but most
of the flowers were still on the red ones. They seemed to
bloom so fast, those red hibiscuses, considering how often Mama
cut them to decorate the church altar and how often visitors plucked
them as they walked past to their parked cars.
It was mostly Mama's prayer group
members who plucked flowers; a woman tucked one behind her ear once
- I saw her clearly from my window. But even the government
agents, two men in black jackets who came some time ago, yanked
at the hibiscus as they left. They came in a pickup truck
with Federal Government plates and parked close to the hibiscus
bushes. They didn't stay long. Later, Jaja said they
came to bribe Papa, that he had heard them say that their pickup
was full of dollars. I was not sure Jaja had heard correctly.
But even now I thought about it sometimes. I imagined the
truck full of stacks and stacks of foreign money, wondered if they
had put the money in many cartons or in one huge carton, the size
our fridge came in.
I was still at the window
when Mama came into my room. Every Sunday before lunch, in
between telling Sisi to put a little more palm oil in the soup,
a little less curry in the coconut rice, and while Papa took his
siesta, Mama plaited my hair. She would sit on an armchair
near the kitchen door and I on the floor with my head cradled between
her thighs. Although the kitchen was airy, with the windows
always open, my hair would still manage to absorb the spices, and
afterward, when I brought the end of a braid to my nose, I would
smell egusi soup, utazi, curry. But Mama did not come into
my room with the bag that held combs and hair oils and ask me to
come downstairs. Instead she said, "Lunch is ready, nne."
I meant to say I am sorry
Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, "I'm
sorry your figurines broke, Mama."
She nodded quickly, then
shook her head to show that the figurines did not matter.
They did, though. Years ago, before I understood, I used to
wonder why she polished them each time I heard the sounds from their
room, like something being banged against the door. Her rubber
slippers never made a sound on the stairs, but I knew she went downstairs
when I heard the dining room door open. I would go down to
see her standing by the etagere with a kitchen towel soaked in soapy
water. She spent at least a quarter of an hour on each ballet-dancing
figurine. THere were never tears on her face. The last
time, only two weeks ago, when her swollen eye was still the black-purple
of an overripe avocado, she had rearranged them after she polished
them.
"I will plait your
hair after lunch," she said, turning to leave.
"Yes, Mama."
I followed her downstairs.
She limped slightly, as though one leg were shorter than the other,
a gait that made her seem even smaller than she was. The stairs
curved elegantly in an S-shape, and I was halfway down when I saw
Jaja standing in the hallway. Usually he went to his room
to read before lunch, but he had not come upstairs today; he had
been in the kitchen the whole time, with Mama and Sisi.
"Ke kwanu?"
I asked, although I did not need to ask how he was doing.
I had only to look at him. His seventeen-year-old face had
grown lines; they zigzagged across his forehead, and inside each
line a dark tension had crawled in. I reached out and clasped
his hand shortly before we went into the dining room. Papa
and Mama were already seated, and Papa was washing his hands in
the bowl of water Sisi held before him. He waited until Jaja
and I sat down opposite him, and started the grace. For twenty
minutes he asked God to bless the food. Afterward, he intoned
the Blessed Virgin in several different titles while we responded,
"Pray for us." His favorite title was Our Lady,
Shield of the Nigerian People. He had made it up himself.
If only people would use it every day, he told us, Nigeria would
not totter like a Big Man with the spindly legs of a child.
Lunch was fufu and onugbu
soup. The fufu was smooth and fluffy. Sisi made it well;
she pounded the yam energetically, adding drops of water into the
mortar, her cheeks contracting with the thump-thump-thump
of the pestle. The soup was thick with chunks of boiled beef
and dried fish and dark green onugbu leaves. We ate silently.
I molded my fufu into small balls with my fingers, dipped it into
the soup, making sure to scoop up fish chunks, and then brought
it to my mouth. I was certain the soup was good, but I did
not taste it, could not taste it. My tongue felt like paper.
"Pass the salt, please,"
Papa said.
We all reached for the
salt at the same time. Jaja and I touched the crystal shaker,
my finger brushed his gently, then he let go. I passed it
to Papa. The silence stretched out even longer.
"They brought the
cashew juice this afternoon. It tastes good. I am sure
it will sell," Mama finally said.
"Ask that girl to
bring it," Papa said.
Mama pressed the ringer
that dangled above the table on a transparent wire from the ceiling,
and Sisi appeared.
"Yes, Madam?"
I wished Sisi had said,
"What bottles, Madam?" or "Where are they, Madam?"
Just something to keep her and Mama talking, to veil the nervous
movements of Jaja molding his fufu. Sisi was back shortly
and placed the bottles next to Papa. They had the same faded-looking
labels as every other thing Papa's factories made - the wafers and
cream biscuits and bottled juice and banana chips. Papa poured
the yellow juice for everyone. I reached out quickly for my
glass and took a sip. It tasted watery. I wanted to
seem eager; maybe if I talked about how good it tasted, Papa might
forget that he had not yet punished Jaja.
"It's very good,
Papa," I said.
Papa swirled it around
his bulging cheeks. "Yes, yes."
"It tastes like fresh
cashew," Mama said.
Say something, please, I wanted to say to Jaja. He was supposed
to say something now, to contribute, to compliment Papa's new product.
We always did, each time an employee from one of his factories brought
a product sample for us.
"Just like white
wine," Mama added. She was nervous, I could tell - not
just because a fresh cashew tasted nothing like white wine but also
because her voice was lower than usual. "White wine,"
Mama said again, closing her eyes to better savor the taste.
"Fruity white wine."
"Yes, " I said.
A ball of fufu slipped from my fingers and into the soup.
Papa was staring pointedly
at Jaja. "Jaja, have you not shared a drink with us,
gbo? Have you no words in your mouth?" he asked,
entirely in Igbo. A bad sign. He hardly spoke Igbo,
and although Jaja and I spoke it with Mama at home, he did not like
us to speak it in public. We had to sound civilized in public,
he told us; we had to speak English. Papa's sister, Aunty
Ifeoma, said once that Papa was too much of a colonial product.
She had said this about Papa in a mild, forgiving way, as if it
were not Papa's fault, as one would talk about a person who was
shouting gibberish from a severe case of malaria.
"Have you nothing
to say, gbo, Jaja?" Papa asked again.
"Mba, there
are no words in my mouth," Jaja replied.
"What?" There
was a shadow clouding Papa's eyes, a shadow that had been in Jaja's
eyes. Fear. It had left Jaja's eyes and entered Papa's.
"I have nothing to
say," Jaja said.
"The juice is good
- " Mama started to say.
Jaja pushed his chair
back. "Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Papa.
Thank you, Mama."
I turned to stare at him.
At least he was saying thanks the right way, the way we always did
after a meal. But he was also doing what we never did; he
was leaving the table before Papa had said the prayer after meals.
"Jaja!" Papa
said. The shadow grew, enveloping the whites of Papa's eyes.
Jaja was walking out of the dining room with his plate. Papa
made to get up and then slumped back on his seat. His cheeks
drooped, bulldoglike.
I reached for my glass
and stared at the juice, watery yellow, like urine. I poured
all of it down my throat, in one gulp. I didn't know what
else to do. This had never happened before in my entire life,
never. The compound walls would crumble, I was sure, and squash
the frangipani trees. The sky would cave in. The Persian
rugs on the stretches of gleaming marble floor would shrink.
Something would happen. But the only thing that happened was
my choking. My body shook from the coughing. Papa and
Mama rushed over. Papa thumped my back while Mama rubbed my
shoulders and said, "O zugo. Stop coughing."
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