People began to gather as Chidera’s painting took shape.
She waited till Saturday morning to start and worked all of that day.
“I want you to draw me music,” Mama Ugo said. “When I was a young woman, I had the sweetest voice anyone had ever heard. I still do, it is just that people see that I’m old and no one asks me to sing anymore. Humph, people can be so simple-minded.”
Chidera agreed.
“Will you…I would like to…can you really sing?” Chidera asked.
Mama Ugo smiled and sang a song that reminded Chidera of honey and ripe cashew fruit. The song did not have any words and it took only a moment for Chidera to recognize it. She wasn’t surprised to see several tiny birds fly onto the windowsill to listen. It was the very song that Osisi Uli was singing that day in the forest.
“That’s the same song I heard! Are you…?”
Mama Ugo waved a hand at Chidera as she shook her head, “No, no, no. I’m just an old woman with a sweet voice. But I know of her. She was the one who taught me that song.”
Mama Ugo said no more about who ‘she’ was and Chidera didn’t ask.
“Do you know what you’ll draw now?” Mama Ugo asked.
Chidera shook her head, “Not yet but it will come, I think.”
She went outside and stood in front of Mama Ugo’s house staring at the wall, her worn out sandals covered with the red dirt that swirled around her ankles. She wore a long orange skirt that was too big for her narrow hips (her mother said she would eventually grow into it) and a yellow short sleeve shirt. It was a hot dry day and the sun beat down on her back. She was glad she hadn’t worn anything darker.
Mama Ugo’s wonderful voice echoed in her head. Chidera thought about what it would look like if the sound took physical shape. Behind her cars passed by on the road. Dust rose high into the air like a faint red ghost. From nearby, someone played highlife and someone else was laughing. A bird chirped and a grasshopper zoomed by. All these things helped her to paint a picture in her mind of music. The world around her was filled with moving sound.
An hour later, after she had gathered all of her many colors of homemade
paints and had several sticks she had sharpened, she began to paint. She started with the indigo paint she’d made from the crushed uli berries. She drew bold zigzags and musical notes and swirls and circles and soft shapes.
And all these uli figures revolved around a circle with a symbol that looked like a square with all its sides caved in to make a sort of four-point star. Mama Ugo had told her that the strange star was the sign for the kola nut and the kola nut had always stood for someone of high honour. The circle around it Chidera imagined to represent the fact that Mama Ugo was a woman.
As Chidera drew, cars and people passing by on their way to the market and other places began to slow down, curious about what she was doing. Soon people were actually coming to stand there and take a good look. Chidera’s drawing of what she thought music looked like was indeed eye catching. She was so focused, she did not even notice that her audience was growing bigger and bigger each day.
Mama Ugo lives only a few seconds away from me. As I sat on my porch watching people pass by, I watched this girl, transform the front of Mama Ugo’s house into a work of art. This little girl, who was not very tall and not very short, who wore her hair in a short afro, who had only recently begun smiling and had never owned any earrings. This little girl brightened up the entire village. I myself went over to look at what she was doing.
