𝑃𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐻𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠

𝑩𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒈𝒐𝒅𝒔

『••✎••』

Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not
go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke
the figurines on the étagère. We had just returned from church. Mama placed
the fresh palm fronds, which were wet with holy water, on the dining table
and then went upstairs to change. Later, she would knot the palm fronds into
sagging cross shapes and hang them on the wall beside our gold-framed
family photo. They would stay there until next Ash Wednesday, when we
would take the fronds to church, to have them burned for ash. Papa, wearing a
long, gray robe like the rest of the oblates, helped distribute ash every year.
His line moved the slowest because he pressed hard on each forehead to make
a perfect cross with his ash-covered thumb and slowly, meaningfully
enunciated every word of “dust and unto dust you shall return.”
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 lifesize 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 ovens
at the convent where the Reverend Sisters baked the host, 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 my face
blank, 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 étagerè, 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 leather-bound 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 tie-dye 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 glassdining table was moving toward me.
“Nne, ngwa. 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, vibrantbushes 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 étagère 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
color 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 in 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 thatdangled above the table on a transparent wire from the ceiling, and Sisi
appeared.
“Yes, Madam?”
“Bring two bottles of the drink they brought from the factory.”
“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.”
THAT EVENING, I STAYED in bed and did not have dinner with the family. I
developed a cough, and my cheeks burned the back of my hand. Inside my
head, thousands of monsters played a painful game of catch, but instead of a
ball, it was a brown leather-bound missal that they threw to each other. Papa
came into my room; my mattress sank in when he sat and smoothed my
cheeks and asked if I wanted anything else. Mama was already making me
ofe nsala. I said no, and we sat silently, our hands clasped for a long time.
Papa’s breathing was always noisy, but now he panted as if he were out of
breath, and I wondered what he was thinking, if perhaps he was running in his
mind, running away from something. I did not look at his face because I did
not want to see the rashes that spread across every inch of it, so many, so
evenly spread that they made his skin look bloated.Mama brought some ofe nsala up for me a little later, but the aromatic
soup only made me nauseated. After I vomited in the bathroom, I asked
Mama where Jaja was. He had not come in to see me since after lunch.
“In his room. He did not come down for dinner.” She was caressing my
cornrows; she liked to do that, to trace the way strands of hair from different
parts of my scalp meshed and held together. She would keep off plaiting it
until next week. My hair was too thick; it always tightened back into a dense
bunch right after she ran a comb through it. Trying to comb it now would
enrage the monsters already in my head.
“Will you replace the figurines?” I asked. I could smell the chalky
deodorant under her arms. Her brown face, flawless but for the recent jagged
scar on her forehead, was expressionless.
“Kpa,” she said. “I will not replace them.”
Maybe Mama had realized that she would not need the figurines
anymore; that when Papa threw the missal at Jaja, it was not just the figurines
that came tumbling down, it was everything. I was only now realizing it, only
just letting myself think it.
I lay in bed after Mama left and let my mind rake through the past,
through the years when Jaja and Mama and I spoke more with our spirits than
with our lips. Until Nsukka. Nsukka started it all; Aunty Ifeoma’s little garden
next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja’s
defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple
hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of
freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government
Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.
But my memories did not start at Nsukka. They started before, when all
the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red.

『••✎••』