On Black Sisters Street (15 page)

The women played Ping-Pong with their stories of thievingsnoopingstickyfingered domestic help.

The house girl who stole perfume from her mistress. “Wonders shall never cease. A common house girl. What gave her the guts?”

“The devil!”

Then the one who seduced and slept with the husband of the woman who had employed her.

“How could she?”

“The devil.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should not get male help,” Ama’s mother said, prompting a heated discussion on the pros and cons of houseboys.

They were stronger than girls and therefore better workers.

They got clothes cleaner.

Fetched more buckets of water.

But.

Wait.

What if they turned against you and raped you?

Or raped your daughters? It had been known to happen.

You could get a small boy, but small boys were generally less disposed to housework than small girls.

But.

Wait.

Ama was not listening anymore. She was too excited to stay focused on the multiple merits of a houseboy, which one of the women had started expounding on, her hands flailing every which way as if she were a conductor guiding the choir through Sunday-service music, do re mi fa so laaaaa, houseboys are definitely better!

Everything was perfect.
Today was a perfect, perfect day
, Ama
thought, not paying much attention to the cartoon playing on Channel 8, either. It was a day from one of her picture books, in which the sky was always clear and blue, an even watercolor-blue blanket without any tears in it. She got up and went to the bathroom. She stood on the tips of her toes and looked into the mirror hanging above the sink. She touched her hair. Her mother had straightened it with a hot comb. That was agony! The comb coming off the gas cooker and digging deep into her hair to unravel the knots, her mother grumbling all the while that there was absolutely no difference between Ama’s hair and sisal.
Now
, she thought as she touched her hair, parted in the middle and held in two by pink ribbons,
I have proper
oyibo
hair!
The hair would go very well with her party dress, which was laid out on her bed. A pink dress with a satin bow in the front. “Cinderella dress,” her father had told her when he gave it to her. “A dress for my princess.” It was the most beautiful dress Ama had ever seen, and she was sure she would want to wear it every day. But after what would happen that night, she would never wear it again. Her mother had instructed that she was to wear the dress only when the guests started to arrive and not a minute before. Ama wondered how much longer it would take. Oh, why did time not go nearly fast enough when she wanted it to? Later, she would want to go back to this moment, when the sky was blue and her dress was new and her life was
sam-sam
perfect.

Her father always called her his princess, drawing out the I; Priiiincess! His lips tight, so that it seemed like he was not the one talking. When Ama learned the word “ventriloquist,” it made her think of her father, of the way he spoke with his lips set in a thin tight line, a pencil drawing, hardly opening to let sounds out.

There was music playing on the turntable beside the TV. The two men from Voices of the Cross whined out melancholic tunes about sin and hellfire and a perpetual gnashing of teeth. God and Satan tussling for souls. God with a big book with names of the saved. The
devil with a pitchfork pricking evil souls. Deliverance and flying into heaven for the righteous. Ama thought the two men looked lithe enough to fly, but not so her father—whom everybody called Brother Cyril because he was a Christian and belonged to a church where everyone was Sister and Brother. He could hardly climb the stairs to their second-story flat without losing his breath, already panting by the time he got to the twelfth step, twenty steps from the front door. He would go to heaven because he was righteous, but Ama supposed he would have to be carried there. Strong, muscled angels would have to carry him, and when Ama dreamed of it she saw a huge piece of reclining flesh being heaved into the skies. Ama did not really like the voices of the men who made up the Voices of the Cross band. She preferred to listen to something else. And her desire for another kind of music sharpened her hearing so finely that music from the record store across the street blared into the house. Loud, happy voices that trembled the house, making her want to tap and dance. But her father would have none of those. “They are the devil’s music,” he said. “They do not edify the things of our Lord. They are the devil’s music. The devil shakes his waist and sways his horns when he hears music like that. He claps his hands and stokes his fire for the many souls that he’s winning.” He was an assistant pastor of the Church of the Twelve Apostles of the Almighty Yahweh, Jehovah El Shaddai, Jehovah Jireh, one of the biggest churches in the city. The devil did not belong anywhere near the house of which he was the head. So instead of the kind of music she heard from across the street, Ama’s house was infused with music from Voices of the Cross, the Calvary Sisters, Jesus Is Savior Band,
Ndi Umuazi Jesu
. Voices that grated on her nerves. She never thought of telling her father that the voices irritated her. She knew what would happen if she did. The things of the Lord were not to be abused. Nor slighted. Nor ridiculed. She knew that her father would put her across his knees and, with her mother watching in a corner, tear into her with a treated
koboko
, the cow-hide cane that
he nicknamed Discipline. There was nothing Ama feared more than Discipline cutting a rawness into her skin that hurt for many days after. Discipline also always showed its face when Ama disobeyed her parents, because her father was a great believer in “Sparing the rod spoils the child.” He even had a wooden tablet with the Bible passages alluding to that inscribed in a flourish on it and hung up on the door of Ama’s room. “So that you’ll never forget.”

The music of the world was to be kept in the world, away from the confines of the house. As were alcoholic drinks. And cigarettes. And magazines with lewd pictures. And bad language. Their house was a house of holiness. And if Brother Cyril had his way, he would have had the entire house painted white for its sanctity. But the harmattan wind that graced Enugu from November to around August made such an undertaking impossible. Not only did it carry debris from one part of the town to the other, it turned grass to rust and sprayed dust over houses so that a white house was entirely out of the question. “If we had faith as small as a mustard seed,” Brother Cyril often lamented, “we could tell the harmattan wind to pass over our houses, and it would.” To which Pastor Ishmael, if within earshot, was sure to reply with a determined “We have faith enough. But God still has to do His work, Brother Cyril. The harmattan wind is the hand of God passing by. We cannot stall it! We are, after all, but His servants. And nothing more.” Every word of the pastor’s had the authority of a pronouncement. And Brother Cyril would nod in agreement. But the regret on his face, that he could not paint his green house white, remained.
He also probably regretted that he wasn’t the pastor. That he didn’t fucking have the last word
.

Everyone in sleepy Enugu knew Brother Cyril. Two years after he joined the church, he had risen in rank to assistant pastor, only one set of ears away from God. This was due mainly to his moral uprightness and the holiness that shone off his stiff white collar. The sins of the world curdled on his forehead, causing furrows, five or six lines that lay like lax S’s, one on top of the other. The furrows got worse—little brown worms squeezing together—whenever he saw a female in clothes that did not cover her knees. The sight always threw Brother Cyril into a righteous coughing fit, coughing out curses on “the daughters of Eve who destroy the reputation of women,” and always ended with him calling for his wife, “a woman fit for Christian eyes,” to soothe him and get him a glass of water.

His wife was tall, nearly as tall as he was. Everyone said his holiness had rubbed off on her, giving a sheen to her face as if she had just rubbed on Vaseline. Her cheeks shone, reflecting the light of purity trapped in them. Brother Cyril always introduced her as “my Rose whom I married a virgin.” And many of the male members of the Church of the Twelve Apostles of the Almighty Yahweh, Jehovah El Shaddai, Jehovah Jireh, said to Brother Cyril that if every woman were as Christian as his Rose whom he had married a virgin, God would never destroy the earth. Brother Cyril would always smile at this, accepting it as his due that “God always provides for His people.” He had been given Rose, a Christian wife, “to ease my journey in this world.” It was expected that Ama would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a model wife for a good Christian man someday.

Brother Cyril, in standing with his status, wore a white robe to church. White for holiness. His whiteness rivaled the pastor’s, and when they stood together at the altar, the congregation was hard-pressed to decide whose robe was purer.

Brother Cyril wore white at home, too. White safari suits and
white dashikis that did not tolerate stains, and which his wife had to boil in a huge pot of water before washing to ensure that the whiteness glowed in holiness. She would not entrust its care to the housemaid. “You have to be prepared to meet the Lord at any given moment,” Brother Cyril always said, so that Ama used to wonder if the Lord did not permit Himself to be met in any other color. For Ama’s big party, her father, predictably, wore one of his white safari suits. After Ama had blown out the candles on the cake and the cake had been eaten and the clown had made the children laugh and the cameraman had captured all the joy and laughter on video, after the guests had gone and Ama had been sent to bed certain that this was the happiest day of her entire life, her father floated into her dark room in his white safari suit. Ama thought he was a ghost and would have screamed if he had not preempted her by covering her mouth with one broad palm and smothering the scream in her throat. With the other hand, he fumbled under her nightdress, a cotton lavender gown with the print of a huge grinning bear.

That was the first time it happened. The next morning, unsure whether she had dreamed it or not, Ama spoke to the pink walls.

The next night he floated into her room again. Ama told the walls how he held her nipple between his fingers and squeezed. She told the walls of the pain of the squeezing and the coldness of her father’s hands.

Over the next days the walls heard how he ignored her when she said that he was hurting her inside. They heard of how she tried to push him away when he lay on top of her, but he was a mountain and she did not have the strength in her to move a mountain. She told of the grunting and the sticky whiteness like pap that gushed out of him. “It’s warm and yucky,” she complained to her walls. “I’ll never eat pap again!”

The walls could sketch her stories. They could tell how she wished she could melt into the bed. Become one with it. She would
hold her body stiff, muscles tense, as if that would make her wish come true. When she did this, her father would demand, “What’s the Fifth Commandment?” “Honor thy father and thy mother,” she would reply, her voice muffled by the collar of her nightgown in her mouth. And then she would relax her muscles, let him in, and imagine that she was flying high above the room. Sometimes she saw herself on the ceiling, looking down at a man who looked like her father and a girl who looked like her. When the pain made this difficult, she bit on her lower lip until it became numb.

Afterward she always fell asleep sitting up in her bed, her back to the door and her face to the window, waiting for something, someone, to come and rescue her. To take her away, far away, from her father and his grunts. She did that last night, and when she woke up she was sure she had been crying, even though her eyes were dry and she could not remember crying.

Her eyes hurt, and when her mother looked at her in the morning and worried that she had Apollo because her eyes were so red, she did not say otherwise. She even let her mother put some eyedrops into her eyes. She knew without being told that she must never share what her father did to her with anyone else. Not even her mother. The walls were different. They did not count.

Every night her father came, and as time passed she came to expect it, her palms clammy and her mouth dry. Sometimes she tried to get out of it. She told her mother she did not want to sleep alone, she was afraid of the darkness, but her mother would always tell her not to be silly, she was eight years old, old enough to sleep alone, and did she not know how lucky she was to have her own room? How many children her age had their own bedrooms? “
Eeh nne
? A beautiful bedroom all to yourself, and you want to sleep in my bed!”

When Ama got older and wiser, she would think that her mother walked around in a deliberate state of blindness. Otherwise she would
have seen into her heart and asked her, “
Nwa m
, my daughter, what is the matter?” She wished her mother would ask her so that she could tell her, but she never asked, choosing instead to complain about Ama’s hair being as tough as sisal. And of children not being as obedient as they were in her youth. And of
otapiapia
not being as effective as it used to be in killing mice. And of their housemaid stealing cups of rice from the huge sack in the kitchen. And of NEPA doing a shoddy job of providing electricity. And of Ama being ungrateful because she would not eat her pap, and did she know how many children there were who had no food to eat? And since when did she stop eating pap, anyway? When did this nonsense start?

Ama told the walls she wanted to go abroad. When she slept, she saw herself, hair long and silky, in a city very far away, where her father’s whiteness did not stifle her. No one she knew had been abroad, but every night when she prayed she asked God for a miracle, whispering her prayer furiously, hoping it bypassed her father’s ears and the pastor’s ears, that it pierced heaven to land gently beside God’s right ear.