𝑃𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝐻𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑢𝑠

𝑺𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑾𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒖𝒓 𝑺𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒔²

『••✎••』

H

e opened the dining room door. Then we heard the front door open, heard
him say something to the gate man, Adamu.
“There’s blood on the floor,” Jaja said. “I’ll get the brush from the
bathroom.”
We cleaned up the trickle of blood, which trailed away as if someone had
carried a leaking jar of red watercolor all the way downstairs. Jaja scrubbed
while I wiped.
MAMA DID NOT COME home that night, and Jaja and I had dinner alone. We
did not talk about Mama. Instead, we talked about the three men who were
publicly executed two days before, for drug trafficking. Jaja had heard some
boys talking about it in school. It had been on television. The men were tied
to poles, and their bodies kept shuddering even after the bullets were no
longer being pumped into them. I told Jaja what a girl in my class had said:
that her mother turned their TV off, asking why she should watch fellow
human beings die, asking what was wrong with all those people who had
gathered at the execution ground.
After dinner, Jaja said grace, and at the end he added a short prayer for
Mama. Papa came home when we were in our rooms studying, according to
our schedules. I was drawing pregnant stick images on the inner flap of my
Introductory Agriculture for Junior Secondary Schools when he came into my
room. His eyes were swollen and red, and somehow that made him look
younger, more vulnerable.
“Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from
school. She will be fine,” he said.
“Yes, Papa.” I looked away from his face, back at my books.
He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions.
“Stand up,” he said. I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so
that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.
MAMA CAME HOME the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot
505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that
often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door,
close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she
got to it.
“Umu m,” she said, hugging us. “My children.” She wore the same whiteT-shirt with GOD IS LOVE written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower
than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her
eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the
roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their
life fragments inside.
“There was an accident, the baby is gone,” she said.
I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at
her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure the baby was gone? I was still
staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi’s cheekbones were so high they
gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you,
laughing at you, and you would never know why. “Good afternoon, Madam,
nno,” she said. “Will you eat now or after you bathe?” “Eh?” For a moment
Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. “Not now, Sisi,
not now. Get me water and a towel.”
Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the
glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel. The
étagère had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-
dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf
and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to
reach out and straighten her wrapper.
“Nne, this is your study time. Go upstairs,” she said.
“I want to stay here.”
She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs
raised high in the air, before she spoke. “Nne, go.”
I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type
blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright
red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama,
flowing from my eyes.
Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For
Mama’s forgiveness. And on Sunday, the first Sunday of Trinity, we stayed
back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with
holy water. Some of the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale
saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or me beginning to drift off at the
thirteenth recitation of the Plea to St. Jude, he suggested we start all over. We
had to get it right. I did not think, I did not even think to think, what Mama
needed to be forgiven for.The words in my textbooks kept turning into blood each time I read
them. Even as my first-term exams approached, even when we started to do
class reviews, the words still made no sense.
A few days before my first exam, I was in my room studying, trying to
focus on one word at a time, when the doorbell rang. It was Yewande Coker,
the wife of Papa’s editor. She was crying. I could hear her because my room
was directly above the living room and because I had never heard crying that
loud before.
“They have taken him! They have taken him!” she said, between throaty
sobs.
“Yewande, Yewande,” Papa said, his voice much lower than hers.
“What will I do, sir? I have three children! One is still sucking my
breast! How will I raise them alone?” I could hardly hear her words; instead,
what I heard clearly was the sound of something catching in her throat. Then
Papa said, “Yewande, don’t talk that way. Ade will be fine, I promise you.
Ade will be fine.”
I heard Jaja leave his room. He would walk downstairs and pretend that
he was going to the kitchen to drink water and stand close to the living room
door for a while, listening. When he came back up, he told me soldiers had
arrested Ade Coker as he drove out of the editorial offices of the Standard.
His car was abandoned on the roadside, the front door left open. I imagined
Ade Coker being pulled out of his car, being squashed into another car,
perhaps a black station wagon filled with soldiers, their guns hanging out of
the windows. I imagined his hands quivering with fear, a wet patch spreading
on his trousers.
I knew his arrest was because of the big cover story in the last Standard,
a story about how the Head of State and his wife had paid people to transport
heroin abroad, a story that questioned the recent execution of three men and
who the real drug barons were.
Jaja said that when he looked through the keyhole, Papa was holding
Yewande’s hand and praying, telling her to repeat “none of those who trust in
Him shall be left desolate.”
Those were the words I said to myself as I took my exams the following
week. And I repeated them, too, as Kevin drove me home on the last day of
school, my report card tightly pressed to my chest. The Reverend Sisters gave
us our cards unsealed. I came second in my class. It was written in figures:“2/25.” My form mistress, Sister Clara, had written, “Kambili is intelligent
beyond her years, quiet and responsible.” The principal, Mother Lucy, wrote,
“A brilliant, obedient student and a daughter to be proud of.” But I knew Papa
would not be proud. He had often told Jaja and me that he did not spend so
much money on Daughters of the Immaculate Heart and St. Nicholas to have
us let other children come first. Nobody had spent money on his own
schooling, especially not his Godless father, our Papa-Nnukwu, yet he had
always come first. I wanted to make Papa proud, to do as well as he had done.
I needed him to touch the back of my neck and tell me that I was fulfilling
God’s purpose. I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is
given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit
up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was
stained by failure.
Mama opened the door even before Kevin stopped the car in the
driveway. She always waited by the front door on the last day of school, to
sing praise songs in Igbo and hug Jaja and me and caress our report cards in
her hands. It was the only time she sang aloud at home.
“O me mma, Chineke, o me mma…” Mama started her song and then
stopped when I greeted her.
“Good afternoon, Mama.”
“Nne, did it go well? Your face is not bright.” She stood aside to let me
pass.
“I came second.”
Mama paused. “Come and eat. Sisi cooked coconut rice.”
I was sitting at my study desk when Papa came home. He lumbered
upstairs, each heavy step creating turbulence in my head, and went into Jaja’s
room. He had come first, as usual, so Papa would be proud, would hug Jaja,
leave his arm resting around Jaja’s shoulders. He took a while in Jaja’s room,
though; I knew he was looking through each individual subject score,
checking to see if any had decreased by one or two marks since last term.
Something pushed fluids into my bladder, and I rushed to the toilet. Papa was
in my room when I came out.
“Good evening, Papa, nno.”
“Did school go well?”
I wanted to say I came second so that he would know immediately, so
that I would acknowledge my failure, but instead I said, “Yes,” and handedhim the report card. He seemed to take forever to open it and even longer to
read it. I tried to pace my breathing as I waited, knowing all the while that I
could not.
“Who came first?” Papa asked, finally.
“Chinwe Jideze.”
“Jideze? The girl who came second last term?”
“Yes,” I said. My stomach was making sounds, hollow rumbling sounds
that seemed too loud, that would not stop even when I sucked in my belly.
Papa looked at my report card for a while longer; then he said, “Come
down for dinner.”
I walked downstairs, my legs feeling joint-free, like long strips of wood.
Papa had come home with samples of a new biscuit, and he passed the green
packet around before we started dinner. I bit into the biscuit. “Very good,
Papa.”
Papa took a bite and chewed, then looked at Jaja.
“It has a fresh taste,” Jaja said.
“Very tasty,” Mama said.
“It should sell by God’s grace,” Papa said. “Our wafers lead the market
now and this should join them.”
I did not, could not, look at Papa’s face when he spoke. The boiled yam
and peppery greens refused to go down my throat; they clung to my mouth
like children clinging to their mothers’ hand at a nursery school entrance. I
downed glass after glass of water to push them down, and by the time Papa
started the grace, my stomach was swollen with water. When he was done,
Papa said, “Kambili, come upstairs.”
I followed him. As he climbed the stairs in his red silk pajamas, his
buttocks quivered and shook like akamu, properly made akamu, jellylike. The
cream decor in Papa’s bedroom was changed every year but always to a
slightly different shade of cream. The plush rug that sank in when you
stepped on it was plain cream; the curtains had only a little brown embroidery
at the edges; the cream leather armchairs were placed close together as if two
people were sitting in an intimate conversation. All that cream blended and
made the room seem wider, as if it never ended, as if you could not run even
if you wanted to, because there was nowhere to run to. When I had thought of
heaven as a child, I visualized Papa’s room, the softness, the creaminess, theendlessness. I would snuggle into Papa’s arms when harmattan thunderstorms
raged outside, flinging mangoes against the window netting and making the
electric wires hit each other and spark bright orange flames. Papa would lodge
me between his knees or wrap me in the cream blanket that smelled of safety.
I sat on a similar blanket now, on the edge of the bed. I slipped off my
slippers and sank my feet into the rug and decided to keep them sunk in so
that my toes would feel cushioned. So that a part of me would feel safe.
“Kambili,” Papa said, breathing deeply. “You didn’t put in your best this
term. You came second because you chose to.” His eyes were sad. Deep and
sad. I wanted to touch his face, to run my hand over his rubbery cheeks. There
were stories in his eyes that I would never know.
The phone rang then; it had been ringing more often since Ade Coker
was arrested. Papa answered it and spoke in low tones. I sat waiting for him
until he looked up and waved me away. He did not call me the next day, or the
day after, to talk about my report card, to decide how I would be punished. I
wondered if he was too preoccupied with Ade Coker’s case, but even after he
got him out of jail a week later, he did not talk about my report card. He did
not talk about getting Ade Coker out of jail, either; we simply saw his
editorial back in the Standard, where he wrote about the value of freedom,
about how his pen would not, could not, stop writing the truth. But he did not
mention where he had been detained or who had arrested him or what had
been done to him. There was a postscript in italics where he thanked his
publisher: “a man of integrity, the bravest man I know.” I was sitting next to
Mama on the couch, during family time, and I read that line over and over and
then closed my eyes, felt a surge run through me, the same feeling I got when
Father Benedict talked about Papa at Mass, the same feeling I got after I
sneezed: a clear, tingling sensation.
“Thank God Ade is safe,” Mama said, running her hands over the
newspaper.
“They put out cigarettes on his back,” Papa said, shaking his head. “They
put out so many cigarettes on his back.”
“They will receive their due, but not on this earth, mba,” Mama said.
Although Papa did not smile at her—he looked too sad to smile—I wished I
had thought to say that, before Mama did. I knew Papa liked her having said
that.
“We are going to publish underground now,” Papa said. “It is no longer
safe for my staff.”I knew that publishing underground meant that the newspaper would be
published from a secret location. Yet I imagined Ade Coker and the rest of the
staff in an office beneath the ground, a fluorescent lamp flooding the dark
damp room, the men bent over their desks, writing the truth.
That night, when Papa prayed, he added longer passages urging God to
bring about the downfall of the Godless men ruling our country, and he
intoned over and over, “Our Lady Shield of the Nigerian People, pray for us.”
THE SCHOOL BREAK was short, only two weeks, and the Saturday before
school resumed, Mama took Jaja and me to the market to get new sandals and
bags. We didn’t need them; our bags and brown leather sandals were still new,
only a term old. But it was the only ritual that was ours alone, going to the
market before the start of each new term, rolling the car window down as
Kevin drove us there without having to ask permission from Papa. In the
outskirts of the market, we let our eyes dwell on the half-naked mad people
near the rubbish dumps, on the men who casually stopped to unzip their
trousers and urinate at corners, on the women who seemed to be haggling
loudly with mounds of green vegetables until the head of the trader peeked
out from behind.
Inside the market, we shrugged off traders who pulled us along the dark
passages, saying, “I have what you want,” or “Come with me, it’s here,” even
though they had no idea what we wanted. We scrunched up our noses at the
smells of bloody fresh meat and musty dried fish, and lowered our heads from
the bees that buzzed in thick clouds over the sheds of the honey sellers.
As we left the markets with our sandals and some fabric Mama had
bought, we saw a small crowd gathered around the vegetable stalls we had
passed earlier, the ones lining the road. Soldiers were milling around. Market
women were shouting, and many had both hands placed on their heads, in the
way that people do to show despair or shock. A woman lay in the dirt,
wailing, tearing at her short afro. Her wrapper had come undone and her
white underwear showed.
“Hurry up,” Mama said, moving closer to Jaja and me, and I felt that she
wanted to shield us from seeing the soldiers and the women. As we hurried
past, I saw a woman spit at a soldier, I saw the soldier raise a whip in the air.
The whip was long. It curled in the air before it landed on the woman’s
shoulder. Another soldier was kicking down trays of fruits, squashing papayas
with his boots and laughing. When we got into the car, Kevin told Mama that
the soldiers had been ordered to demolish the vegetable stalls because theywere illegal structures. Mama said nothing; she was looking out of the
window, as though she wanted to catch the last sight of those women.
I thought about the woman lying in the dirt as we drove home. I had not
seen her face, but I felt that I knew her, that I had always known her. I wished
I could have gone over and helped her up, cleaned the red mud from her
wrapper.
I thought about her, too, on Monday, as Papa drove me to school. He
slowed down on Ogui Road to fling some crisp naira notes at a beggar
sprawled by the roadside, near some children hawking peeled oranges. The
beggar stared at the note, then stood up and waved after us, clapping and
jumping. I had assumed he was lame. I watched him in the rearview mirror,
my eyes steadily on him, until he disappeared from sight. He reminded me of
the market woman in the dirt. There was a helplessness to his joy, the same
kind of helplessness as in that woman’s despair.
The walls that surrounded Daughters of the Immaculate Heart Secondary
School were very high, similar to our compound walls, but instead of coiled
electrified wires, they were topped by jagged pieces of green glass with sharp
edges jutting out. Papa said the walls had swayed his decision when I finished
elementary school. Discipline was important, he said. You could not have
youngsters scaling walls to go into town and go wild, the way they did at the
federal government colleges.
“These people cannot drive,” Papa muttered when we got to the school
gates, where cars nosed up to each other, horning. “There is no prize for being
first to get into the school compound.”
Hawkers, girls much younger than I, defied the school gate men, edging
closer and closer to the cars to offer peeled oranges and bananas and
groundnuts, their moth-eaten blouses slipping off their shoulders. Papa finally
eased the car into the wide school compound and parked near the volleyball
court, beyond the stretch of manicured lawn.
“Where is your class?” he asked.
I pointed to the building by the group of mango trees. Papa came out of
the car with me and I wondered what he was doing, why he was here, why he
had driven me to school and asked Kevin to take Jaja.
Sister Margaret saw him as we walked to my class. She waved gaily,
from the midst of students and a few parents, then quickly waddled over to us.
Her words flew generously out of her mouth: how was Papa doing, was he
happy with my progress at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart, would he be atthe reception for the bishop next week?
Papa changed his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did
when he spoke to Father Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please
way that he always assumed with the religious, especially with the white
religious. As gracious as when he presented the check for refurbishing the
Daughters of the Immaculate Heart library. He said he had just come to see
my class, and Sister Margaret told him to let her know if he needed anything.
“Where is Chinwe Jideze?” Papa asked, when we got to the front of my
class. A group of girls stood at the door, talking. I looked around, feeling a
weight around my temples. What would Papa do? Chinwe’s light-skinned
face was at the center of the group, as usual.
“She is the girl in the middle,” I said. Was Papa going to talk to her?
Yank at her ears for coming first? I wanted the ground to open up and
swallow the whole compound.
“Look at her,” Papa said. “How many heads does she have?”
“One.” I did not need to look at her to know that, but I looked at her,
anyway.
Papa pulled a small mirror, the size of a powder compact, from his
pocket. “Look in the mirror.”
I stared at him.
“Look in the mirror.”
I took the mirror, peered at it.
“How many heads do you have, gbo?” Papa asked, speaking Igbo for the
first time.
“One.”
“The girl has one head, too, she does not have two. So why did you let
her come first?”
“It will not happen again, Papa.” A light dust lkuku was blowing, in
brown spirals like uncoiling springs, and I could taste the sand that settled on
my lips.
“Why do you think I work so hard to give you and Jaja the best? You
have to do something with all these privileges. Because God has given you
much, he expects much from you. He expects perfection. I didn’t have a
father who sent me to the best schools. My father spent his time worshipinggods of wood and stone. I would be nothing today but for the priests and
sisters at the mission. I was a houseboy for the parish priest for two years.
Yes, a houseboy. Nobody dropped me off at school. I walked eight miles
every day to Nimo until I finished elementary school. I was a gardener for the
priests while I attended St. Gregory’s Secondary School.”
I had heard this all before, how hard he had worked, how much the
missionary Reverend Sisters and priests had taught him, things he would
never have learned from his idol-worshiping father, my Papa-Nnukwu. But I
nodded and looked alert. I hoped my class girls were not wondering why my
father and I had chosen to come to school to have a long conversation in front
of the classroom building. Finally, Papa stopped talking and took the mirror
back.
“Kevin will be here to pick you up,” he said.
“Yes, Papa.”
“Bye. Read well.” He hugged me, a brief side hug.
“Bye, Papa.” I was watching him walk down the path bordered by
flowerless green bushes when the assembly bell rang.
Assembly was raucous, and Mother Lucy had to say, “Now, girls, may
we have silence!” a few times. I stood in the front of the line as always,
because the back was for the girls who belonged to cliques, girls who giggled
and whispered to one another, shielded from the teachers. The teachers stood
on an elevated podium, tall statues in their white-and-blue habits. After we
sang a welcoming song from the Catholic Hymnal, Mother Lucy read
Matthew chapter five up to verse eleven, and then we sang the national
anthem. Singing the national anthem was relatively new at Daughters of the
Immaculate Heart. It had started last year, because some parents were
concerned that their children did not know the national anthem or the pledge.
I watched the sisters as we sang. Only the Nigerian Reverend Sisters sang,
teeth flashing against their dark skins. The white Reverend Sisters stood with
arms folded, or lightly touching the glass rosary beads that dangled at their
waists, carefully watching to see that every student’s lips moved. Afterward,
Mother Lucy narrowed her eyes behind her thick lenses and scanned the lines.
She always picked one student to start the pledge before the others joined in.
“Kambili Achike, please start the pledge,” she said.
Mother Lucy had never chosen me before. I opened my mouth, but the
words would not come out.

『••✎••』