The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (8 page)

N
INE YEARS AGO
, I came home from the farm to find Baba Segi sitting in my father’s hut. I was twenty-three years old, I remember. It was later in the year that my older brother declared that I was ripe for marriage. My mother did not tell him to mind his mouth. Instead, without raising her face from the heap of melon seeds, she added, “Truth be told, she is bordering on decay.” I cannot forget that day. Not because their words did not cause me sorrow but because I remember thinking how unjust it was that the gods had blessed
them
with such wondrous eyes. How was it that they could see the womanhood that I—on whose body it was plastered—could not? Within me, I was certain I was still a child. I thought like a child and enjoyed childish pleasures like pursuing ants as they carried away sugar lumps and scratching hardened scabs from the edge of my old wounds. I even conversed with friends that only I could see.

My father was from a long line of cassava farmers who learned to hoe cassava mounds before the age of three and hacked the brown nuggets from the soil until the day they too were planted in fertile land. Unlike most villages, ours did not have a school or electricity. The nearest school was six miles down the expressway. Elders scowled at the more eager pupils. The time it took to walk to school and back could be better spent, they said. By the time hair sprouted from the armpits, most children had their own cassava stalls on the edge of the highway. As for electricity, we didn’t send gifts to the local government chief like other villages. We were simple people: what the ground didn’t give, we didn’t yearn for.

Most people looked forward to the planting season but I hated it. I detested the hoeing and wished away the heavy watering cans. So when it was time for planting, I complained of backache. I lay groaning on my mat while my brothers and sisters unfastened their hoes from the nails that jutted out of the hut wall. As I rolled from side to side clutching my back, I dreamed of the day weeds would cluster around the cassava shoots. Weeding, I loved. I loved the feel of the small leaves, the strength of the stems. I loved shaking the soil from the roots and laying them in a row. Sometimes I liked to hawk them to my imaginary friends. Good fresh spinach! Buy your fresh spinach!

My father called me one day and asked when exactly I planned to finish weeding the family vegetable patch.

“Soon, Baba. And when I finish, I will start again,” I replied.

“Your age-mates are planting, grinding, drying and selling, but you creep around the farm, sweating over weeds until your shadow lengthens.”

“I am thorough, Baba. With weeding, you must be thorough.”

“My daughter, men want women who can work beside them on the farm, not behind them! Your younger sister has suitors who would climb a thousand trees to win her hand. Are you not concerned that no one has turned their mouths to talk of marrying you?”

“Maybe the men you speak of have not seen how thoroughly I can weed.”

“Have you not heard the words I have spoken?” He let out a long breath and seized his walking stick. Without another glance in my direction, he drew lines on the earthen floor: a cluster of strokes and then, about a yard apart, one stroke standing all by itself.

In those days, it was common for wealthy men who owned
gari
factories in Ibadan to dazzle village farmers with their big cars and big money talk. They leased farmland and paid the villagers to tend the crops that grew on it. Their goal was to reap the yield from crops that they had never nurtured. My brother said that was the way of the rich.

The year before, my father had been greatly pleased when he waved good-bye to two trucks full of hefty cassava tubers. He received more money than he had ever seen and he kept the wad of crisp notes in his trouser pocket for days, smiling every time his knuckles brushed against them. Baba Segi
had returned for another prosperous harvest the following year but he was met by fidgety fingers and eyes that darted downward, sideways, then upward to the gods. My father was afraid so he gave Baba Segi the news in full view of the entire village.

Sitting on a bench next to my father, Baba Segi looked like an insatiable demon. His skin was oily and supple whereas my father’s was flaky and dry like
orogbo
shells. Baba Segi’s shiny face didn’t show any reaction to the news but his toes flapped in leather slippers like the ears of a dog. Then, quite unexpectedly, he looked around and seized a boy by the arm. “Take me to the toilet,” he begged. Every eye watched Baba Segi as he barged through the door of the unroofed pit latrine. We heard every rumble, every gurgle, every fart and every splutter. When Baba Segi emerged, he reoccupied the space on the bench and told the dumbstruck villagers that everything happened for a reason and that he was thinking of a new business anyway. He added that the ways of the gods were mysterious.

The truth was that the rains had punished the village of Borode by refusing to fall and the sun had dealt mercilessly with the cassava shoots. Instead of standing high and cooling the soil with their broad green leaves, they stooped and coiled until they were toasted like bristles. The ground hardened and split from the heat, forcing anxious villagers to journey to the forest in search of water to moisten the soil. Even my father, with his bent back, followed the trail of water fetchers. He got on his knees and scooped sand until his fingers touched water.
I
was frustrated too. No water meant no weeds. Since the sun denied me my joy that year, I hid under the pile of mats at home, as far away from its wrath as possible. It was only when I heard the wind carrying voices home from the forest path that I abandoned my hiding place to help them ease calabashes off their heads. My father’s wives sneered at my helpfulness and my mother hid her face behind her wrapper.

On the day Baba Segi was to cart off his bad harvest, my father sat on a stool outside his hut and stared at the miserable baskets, six in number. His legs were stretched out in front of him and his chin rested on his walking stick. When I surfaced from my mother’s hut to slice okra, I greeted him. He didn’t respond but followed me with his eyes. He made me feel so self-conscious that I took my okra back into my mother’s hut. Soon afterward, Baba Segi’s pickup appeared at the end of the dusty road. My father shouted my name and instructed me to turn out a large mound of
amala
to be accompanied by
efo
made from the freshest spinach leaves I could find. My father didn’t wait for Baba Segi’s feet to touch the ground; he scooped him out of the pickup and into the darkness of his hut.

It did not take me any time to prepare the meal so when I finished, I joined my mother and her co-wives in the shade of palm fronds. My siblings sat there too, slapping off gnats that perched on their bare shoulders. I found it strange that they were being so quiet. They normally talked with their mouths, their arms, their necks, their eyes and their lips. They talked about everything from the texture of snake meat to the oval guavas by the riverbed. Sitting in the middle of this strange,
heavy silence, I wondered whether I should seize the opportunity to say something. It didn’t look like they’d cut me short and take over my voice the way they usually did.

Just when the sun began its journey into the treetops, my father summoned me. I was surprised to find him and Baba Segi sitting so close together, their arms touching as they drained the bottle of schnapps that was normally only sipped at weddings and funerals. My father told me to bring the food in and I returned with a wide tray but as I stooped at the door frame, the men stopped talking. Baba Segi inspected me as I placed the plates on a low stool and fetched cool water from the earthen pot. He examined my face as I poured it into two plastic cups. My father watched him watching me.

“She is not a great beauty,” I heard my father saying as I closed the door. His discretion had dwindled with the schnapps. “But she is as strong as three donkeys. And thorough too. What she loses in wit, she gains in meticulousness. This is a great virtue in a woman. I have three wives so I speak from experience.”

Even a child would have worked out why my father was extolling qualities that had previously vexed him; I was compensation for the failed crops. I was just like the tubers of cassava in the basket. Maybe something even less, something strange—a tuber with eyes, a nose, arms and two legs. Without fanfare or elaborate farewells, I packed my bags. I didn’t weep for my mother or my father, or even my siblings. It was the weeds I didn’t get the chance to uproot that year that bothered me. I should have known something unusual
would happen that year. The drought did something to my ears: whenever I spoke to my spirit friends, their words were muffled, as if spoken from a plot on a faraway land.

Taju threw my belongings in the back: two plastic bags and two tubers of yam. I sat between the two men in the pickup and stared ahead at roads I had never traveled before. So this was Ibadan—the big city where all our secondhand clothes enjoyed their first outings, the place where cars honked, engines roared and bus conductors screamed. I covered my ears. Everything was so urgent, most unlike the leisurely pace at which things bumbled along in the village.

In the middle of all this noise, Baba Segi asked me if I was happy about being his wife. I couldn’t utter a single word. I wanted to say something. I should have said something but I couldn’t. It has always been hard for me to speak my feelings. Even now, when I try to say things, my mouth opens and closes like a fish waiting for a hook. I choke on words, I swallow them. I didn’t have to worry about this in the village because my family could read my mind. Just before I left, I went to my father’s hut and stood by the door. I didn’t need to say anything, the same way he didn’t need to look at me. “I have made my decision and it’s final,” he said.

When we arrived at Baba Segi’s house, he pushed me toward Iya Segi and warned me that I should show her great respect. He said I should be grateful that I was in such good hands. Iya Segi smiled, but I could see her chest thumping beneath her
buba
. Her neck had a scarf of skin wrapped around it. She squinted at the lacy dress my mother told me to wear
for the journey. It was more suited to a fifteen-year-old but I liked the way it rustled when I walked. Her eyes swept across the tiny fruits on my chest, which had never been groped or suckled. If not for fists drawn like daggers at her sides, it would have been impossible to tell what she was hiding behind the creased eyes and set smile. She was not happy to see me and by the time her husband finished the introductions, the lamps in her eyes were dead.

“Come to my room,” she said. “I have good soap that you can wash yourself with. I will also give you clothes to wear. Your rags cannot stay in this house.” All the time her lips moved, her dead eyes were fixed on Baba Segi so he wouldn’t miss a word. Then, slinging her son onto her hip, she admonished me for my silence. “You are a wife now, not a child. Say thank you to your husband and follow me.”

Several months after, she knocked on my door in the middle of the night. She must have crawled out from under Baba Segi because back then it was just the two of us. She had Baba Segi four times a week and I had him thrice. I would have happily given up
my
nights as well. There were weeks I ached so much I could hardly sit.

“Get pregnant quickly or he will soon start to force-feed you bitter concoctions from medicine men until your belly rumbles in your sleep,” she said.

For many weeks, her words kept me awake at night. Then, one day, as she had predicted, Baba Segi asked me what was wrong with my womb. “If your father has sold me a rotten fruit, it will be returned to him.”
His
words bothered me even
more than Iya Segi’s. I didn’t want to go back to the village; in Baba Segi’s house, I did not have to plant and harvest cassava. Apart from the daily chores Iya Segi allotted me, all I did was plait and play with Segi’s hair. Her hair was jet black, every strand stubborn and strong. Combing it was like weeding; it took time and nimble fingers but the results were beautiful.

I will not mention the name of the man I met because I am ashamed. All I’ll say is that he was the meat seller Iya Segi sent me to every Wednesday. Although his meat was always tasty, I still asked him whether the cow that was opened up on the table was killed on the day. He replied that his meat was always fresh and scraped some orange marrow into his mouth to prove it. He smiled. His teeth were not white but they looked like they could crack many bones. His tongue was pink and his eyebrows met above his nose. He was from Iwo; I could tell from the incisions that darkened his cheeks. He nodded and cut five hundred naira worth of meat into small cubes, all the time listening to another butcher’s anecdote with one ear.

It was not until I untied my wrapper that I realized that the money wasn’t where I’d knotted it. What grown woman throws away money her father does not have like that? I felt like a child again. For a while, he watched me scramble and search the muddy ground. Then—I think when he was sure I was not pretending—he asked me to stop troubling myself. Markets are dangerous places and women were often disgraced for such misdeeds, so I was lucky. I offered to leave the meat and return later with the money but he insisted that
I take it with me. He said he would be at his stall until four o’clock.

I gathered all the money Baba Segi had given me over the months and quickly explained what had happened to Iya Segi. “Make sure something worthwhile comes out of all this foolishness,” she murmured. “The days are passing quickly and your village calls you!” She emptied the diced beef into the kitchen sink and waved me away. I caressed Segi’s hair for a few seconds and left.

He was already scraping his table down with a knife when I got there. “I did not doubt for a minute that you would come,” he said.

I let him see that I had brought more than I owed and pressed the money into his hand. I held it there and took his eyes into mine. At first, he looked surprised, but then he closed his fingers around the money and told me to sit and wait for him to finish his cleaning. My heart rejoiced. So there were other people on this earth who could tell what was on my mind! He led me to his home and took me. I will never forget that day or any other that I spent with him. He made my body sing. He made me howl when he bent me over; he made me whimper when he sat me on his belly. And when he took me standing up, it was as if there was a frog inside me, puffing out its throat, blowing, blowing and blowing until
whoosh
—all the warm air escaped through my limbs.