On Black Sisters Street (17 page)

When the bus stopped at its Benin depot, the woman beside Ama finally ceased talking. Ama was grateful for the quiet. Perhaps now she could squeeze in some sleep before they drove into Lagos. But a young bald man joined the bus. He stood in front beside the driver, a traveler’s bag hanging from his shoulders, and began to preach. He reached into the bag and brought out a leather-bound King James Bible. His voice, even without a microphone, carried into the crevices of the bus so that it was difficult to escape. “If you love Jesus, raise your hands.” A few people raised their hands; the rest ignored him.

“I said, if you are not ashamed of Jesus, raise your hands. Hallelujah!” He got a stronger response this time. Ama’s neighbor woke up and raised up both hands, keen to show how extreme her love was. Ama shut her eyes. She had had enough of preachers and pastors. By the time the man opened his Bible and started to read a passage, he had lost Ama.

Yesterday still seemed surreal in the way that dreams sometimes did. But it happened. If it did not, she would not be in this bus, on her way to her mother’s cousin in Lagos, beside this woman who smelled of
akara
and stale clothes and camphor.

Ama still could not tell what had possessed her to talk to her father the way she did. Maybe it was her frustration at not passing her JAMB, the university entrance examination that would have enabled her to leave Enugu, to seek her future at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, where she had applied to study laboratory science. All her life she had dreamed of going to university, somewhere outside Enugu but not too far that she could not see her mother often. And then getting a job and cutting herself completely off from her father’s whiteness. She would still come home to visit her mother, no matter
where she lived. She sometimes felt sorry for her mother, the way she had to boil the clothes the assistant pastor on his way to becoming pastor had to wear so that his purity glowed, the way she walked with her back hunched when the clothes did not come out clean enough and Brother Cyril, who did not tolerate shortcomings and wanted them all “to make it to heaven,” expiated her sin with a beating. Ama wished there was a way she could free her mother and herself from the house in Enugu with the thirty-two steps leading up to heaven. Even though it had been years since he stole into her room, searching in the dark for her breasts that were not yet fully formed, the image still tormented her. He had stopped coming when she started her period at eleven. Although she hated the bloody discharge every month and the accompanying ache in her back, she was grateful for the respite from her father. It made the pain of her period worth it.

She had sat and passed her SSCEs two years ago, but two years in a row she had failed to score high enough on the JAMB examination to get a place at the university of her choice. If she had the money to pay someone to take the examination for her, she would have. Everyone was doing that. She knew people less deserving of a place at the university who had either bought examination papers from corrupt JAMB officials and practiced at home, or who had paid others to sit the examination for them. Ogonna, the dullest girl in her class, entered the university straight out of secondary school. Yet everyone knew that Ogonna could not even write her own name without misspelling it. It was not fair at all. Not after all the studying and the praying Ama had done. She had spent the entire morning locked up in her room, crying and cursing the world for its unfairness. In the afternoon her mother had persuaded her to eat some lunch, reminding her that she could always try again next year. “It’s not the end of the world.” But as her mother spoke, all Ama saw ahead of her was a one-way tunnel and her, stuck in the middle of it, going nowhere. It was the end of the world.

When her father came home from work to be confronted with the JAMB result, he had accused her of not studying hard enough. “If you had spent some time studying for your exams instead of floating around the house like a ghost, you’d have passed! You are just lazy. Plain lazy. Period!” He had thrown the white officious-looking paper at Ama and asked for his food. “Get out of my face, you lazybones, and help your mother in the kitchen. Idiot. You crawl around like a lizard,
ngwerre
, how do you expect to pass JAMB? You think passing JAMB is drinking
akamu
? Get out of my sight,
ka m fu uzo
, let me see the road.” He hissed and half pushed her away from where she stood, in front of him, as if there were really something behind her she was blocking from his sight.

Ama staggered back but found her balance almost immediately. Anger spasmed through her body and exploded from her mouth. “You call yourself my father?” Later, she would think it was the reference to her floating like a ghost that tipped her and spilled the words. “You call yourself my father? You call yourself a pastor? You disgust me!
I na-aso m oyi.
”

Her mother ran into the sitting room where they were. “Shut up, Ama! Shut up.
Mechie onu.
” She tried to drag Ama out of the room. The daughter resisted, pulling her wrist away from her mother’s hand. She was stronger and had no problem disengaging herself from the older woman.

“
Mba
. No. I will not shut up. Mama, do you know what he did to me when I was little? He raped me. Night after night. He would come into my room and force me to spread my legs for him. Remember when you always thought I had Apollo?”

Ama’s mother lifted a hand and slapped her on her mouth. “How dare you talk about your father like that? What has taken possession of you?
I fe o na-eme gi n’isi?
Have you gone mad?”

Brother Cyril’s voice cut into her mother’s, slashing off her words meant to be placating him, words meant to be asking him not to listen
to Ama, to ignore her. “No. Let her talk.
Ya kwube
. Let her spew her venom. See the kind of child you brought into my house? See?
I fugo ya nu?
In fact, open the windows so that our neighbors will hear. Let our
agbataobi
come and hear your child’s nonsense.”

“Mother, you have to believe me,” Ama begged. “I’m not lying. He raped me.
Eziokwu
, Papa raped me.”

“Do not call me that. Do not call me Papa. I am not your father, you stupid lying girl.” Each word, carefully enunciated, rolled out in claps of thunder.

“Not now, Brother Cyril. Please?” Ama’s mother was on the floor, kneeling, hands stretched out in front of her, palms outward: the same position she assumed when she prayed and called on her God to forgive her, a poor sinner. There was something deeply shaming in her posture, and Ama wanted to drag her up.

Brother Cyril laughed and unfolded himself from the chair he had been sitting on, waiting for his supper. He planted himself in front of Ama, his toes big and masculine, sneering at her from his leather sandals. “I am not your father. You hear that? I took in your mother, and this is all the thanks I get. All the thanks I get for saving you from being a bastard. All the years I raised you, fed you, this is all the thanks I get. You know what happens to children without fathers? Children who are born at home? Father unknown.
Ime mkpuke
. I want you out of my house. I want you out.
Tata
. Today! As God is my witness, you shall leave my house today!”

“Whatever your problems are, bring them to the Lord today. Hallelujah!”

“Amen,” the bus chorused.

Ama, lost in thought, was momentarily dragged back to her present. She had never been to Lagos. How would she survive there? It was the only place her mother had thought of sending her. It was far enough away from Enugu and the people they knew. Ama wondered how they would explain her absence to everyone. Would her mother
tell them she had gotten a job in a different city? Gained admission into a university? What? She could not believe that the circumstances surrounding her birth had been kept a secret from her all these years. How could they have done that? She had a father she knew nothing about. Last night she had felt relieved that Brother Cyril was not her real father. When she thought of it now, she felt gratitude, a thankful relief that her father was a better man than Brother Cyril. He had to be. She willed it. But the relief was short-lived. It was soon replaced by the nagging question of who her real father was. What did he look like? Where was he? What was his name? How tall was he? How short? Did he have a beard? A mustache? Did she have another family? Brothers? Sisters? What did they look like? Did they know about her? Questions grew wings and flew around in her head, knocking against her skull so that she soon developed a headache. She rubbed her temple. In an instant her life had crumbled. Her solid life had disintegrated, and she no longer knew who she was. It was like being thrown out of a cage only to land on a bed of thorns. She could not decide which was better, the claustrophobic cage or the scratchy thorns. At least, she thought after a while, she could get up from the thorns and walk away. Her thoughts returned often to her father, her biological father. It was impossible for her to imagine that her mother had ever been with someone else. That her mother, quiet and obedient, a Christian man’s wife, had actually had sex outside of marriage!

Back in her room, which had remained the same since she was a child, she had demanded that her mother tell her who her real father was, but her demand had been met with a lamentation that she was an ungrateful child. A wicked child whose sole aim in life was to ruin her mother’s life.

“I made a mistake. One mistake that could have destroyed me completely. Yet Brother Cyril took me in and married me. He saved me from a terrible life. How many men would marry a woman who was carrying a child for another man? Tell me, Ama, tell me. And
you throw all that in his face. What have I done to deserve this? Tell me, Ama, what have I ever done to deserve this? He could have sent both of us out tonight. Many men would. You know that. Yet, out of the goodness of his heart, he didn’t.”

Ama tried to tell her mother about the year she was eight. On the tip of her tongue, she tasted the fear of the nights he came into her room and yearned to spit it out. She started, but her mother cut her short.

“Just shut up. Shut up, Ama, before I am thrown out of my husband’s house because of you.
Mechie onu kita.
” There was a strange hardness to her voice that silenced Ama. “Just pack your things. Pack your things. First thing tomorrow morning,
ututu echi
, you shall be on the bus to Lagos. I have called Mama Eko. She knows to expect you.” Her mother threw some crumpled naira notes on the bed. “That’s for your fare and for food on the road. You will not have time for breakfast in the morning.”

Ama did not pick up the money until her mother, shoulders drooped, backed out of her room with the incongruous dignity of a disgraced masquerade.

The next morning she let herself out of the house in which she had grown up. Neither Brother Cyril nor her mother had come out to see her off.

MAMA EKO WAS AMA’S MOTHER’S COUSIN. SHE RAN A BUKA IN IKEJA, VERY
close to the Diamond Bank on Ezekiel Avenue. She had the sort of face that many people would describe as jolly: dimpled and full. Before coming to Lagos, Ama had seen her only once, when she came to Enugu on a two-day visit. Ama remembered that Mama Eko complained about Enugu. She said it was too small. Too dead. Too quiet. She said, “People here walk as if they are on their way to their graves.”
Even Lagos at Christmas, when everybody went to their villages, was not as deserted, she said.

“Lagos is the place to be! Lagos
bu ebe ano
. The happening city.” This was at breakfast the next morning, her bangled wrists waving over the plates of fried eggs and toast, so that they produced a sound like the clang of a distant gong, prompting Brother Cyril to mutter loud enough for her to hear that perhaps those to whom Lagos was the beginning and the end of their world should not bother to leave it. Ama was not sure if it was that comment that made Mama Eko leave the next morning or if she had planned all along to spend only two days.

Mama Eko was one of the first faces Ama saw as soon as the bus drove into its depot in Lagos. Her dimpled smile when she spied Ama in the bus relieved the latter. It was an open smile that Ama knew was at once genuine and pleased. Ama half ran into her outstretched arms, gratefully letting herself into the space between for a hug. “Good afternoon, Mama Eko. Thank you for coming.”

To which the woman simply replied, “Your father is a difficult man to live with. Nno. Welcome to Lagos.”

Mama Eko’s house was smaller than Ama had imagined. Somehow she had thought that a woman as large and as flamboyant as Mama Eko would live in more opulent surroundings. Mama Eko lived in the ground-floor flat of a three-story building.

“This is my mansion.” She chuckled as she turned the key in the lock of a grimy leaf-green door that led directly to a living room choking on furniture. Mama Eko’s bulk filled the room. There was a huge beige sofa running down one side of the room’s mud-brown wall, behind it a dining table. A blue velvet love seat and two rattan dining chairs faced the sofa. And, in the middle, a wide, low table with a glass top and massive marble legs shaped like a man’s. On the table was a brown vase, the same shade as the walls, filled with yellow, purple, and red artificial flowers. The flowers were clean, as if they had
been recently dusted and cleaned with a damp cloth. To the left of the table, on the side of the love seat, was a three-tiered oak-paneled TV stand with a twenty-one-inch Samsung color TV, and below it a stereo set, and under that a video player. Squeezed in between the TV stand and the glass-topped table was a narrow vitrine containing a large selection of CDs. The most Ama had ever seen in any one person’s collection. She scanned the names on the CD covers, muttering them to herself: Marvin Gaye. ABBA. Victor Uwaifo. Peter Tosh. Onyeka Onwenu. Dora Ifudu. Nina Simone. Barry White. She picked up one and turned it over and stared, entranced, at the titles of the tracks. “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” “Love’s Been Good to Me,” “I Loves You Porgy,” “Falling in Love Again,” “Alone Again.” All irreverent titles that stood out in luscious contrast to the pious titles of those by the Voices of the Cross. And when Mama Eko let out a swear word when she switched on the fan and the blades did not turn, Ama knew that she would make this place home. She smiled a long blissful smile. She could never use a swear word at home. She repeated the word Mama Eko had just let loose to herself and enjoyed its impiety on her tongue, relishing its very profanity, which tasted like nothing she had ever had. She felt treacherously happy. The happiest she had been in as long as she could remember. She had a feeling that her whole life before now had been spent waiting for this moment, that every other time she had felt she was happy was in preparation for today. “Nice collection,” she said to Mama Eko, who had just come out of a room, rubber slippers on her feet.