Purple Hibiscus Read online

  “I’m not sure I will come back to school when we reopen. I want to have a baby first. I don’t want dim to think that he married me to have an empty home,” she said, with a high, girlish laugh. Before she left, she copied Aunty Ifeoma’s address down, so she could send an invitation card.

  Aunty Ifeoma stood looking at the door. “She was never particularly bright, so I shouldn’t be sad,” she said thoughtfully, and Amaka laughed and said, “Mom!”

  The chicken squawked. It was lying on its side because its legs were tied together.

  “Obiora, please kill this chicken and put it in the freezer before it loses weight, since there’s nothing to feed it,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  “They have been taking the light too often the past week. I say we eat the whole chicken today,” Obiora said.

  “How about we eat half and put the other half in the freezer and pray NEPA brings back the light so it doesn’t spoil,” Amaka said.

  “Okay,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  “I’ll kill it,” Jaja said, and we all turned to stare at him.

  “Nna m, you have never killed a chicken, have you?” Aunty Ifeoma asked.

  “No. But I can kill it.”

  “Okay,” Aunty Ifeoma said, and I turned to stare, startled at how easily she had said that. Was she absentminded because she was thinking about her student? Did she really think Jaja could kill a chicken?

  I followed Jaja out to the backyard, watched him hold the wings down under his foot. He bent the chicken’s head back. The knife glinted, meeting with the sun rays to give off sparks. The chicken had stopped squawking; perhaps it had decided to accept the inevitable. I did not look as Jaja slit its feathery neck, but I watched the chicken dance to the frenzied tunes of death. It flapped its gray wings in the red mud, twisting and flailing. Finally, it lay in a puff of sullied feathers. Jaja picked it up and dunked it in the basin of hot water that Amaka brought. There was a precision in Jaja, a singlemindedness that was cold, clinical. He started to pluck the feathers off quickly, and he did not speak until the chicken had been reduced to a slim form covered with white-yellow skin. I did not realize how long a chicken’s neck is until it was plucked.

  “If Aunty Ifeoma leaves, then I want to leave with them, too,” he said.

  I said nothing. There was so much I wanted to say and so much I did not want to say. Two vultures hovered overhead and then landed on the ground, close enough that I could have grabbed them if I had jumped fast. Their bald necks glistened in the early-morning sun.

  “See how close the vultures come now?” Obiora asked. He and Amaka had come to stand by the back door. “They are getting hungrier and hungrier. Nobody kills chickens these days, and so there are less entrails for them to eat.” He picked up a stone and threw it at the vultures. They flew up and perched on the branches of the mango tree only a little distance away.

  “Papa-Nnukwu used to say that the vultures have lost their prestige,” Amaka said. “In the old days, people liked them because when they came down to eat the entrails of animals used in sacrifice, it meant the gods were happy.”

  “In these new days, they should have the good sense to wait for us to be done killing the chicken before they descend,” Obiora said.

  Father Amadi came after Jaja had cut up the chicken and Amaka had put half of it in a plastic bag for the freezer. Aunty Ifeoma smiled when Father Amadi told her he was taking me to get my hair done. “You are doing my job for me, Father, thank you,” she said. “Greet Mama Joe. Tell her I will come soon to plait my hair for Easter.”

  MAMA J>OE’S SHED IN Ogige market just barely fit the high stool where she sat and the smaller stool in front of her. I sat on the smaller stool. Father Amadi stood outside, beside the wheelbarrows and pigs and people and chickens that went past, because his broad-shouldered form could not fit in the shed. Mama Joe wore a wool hat even though sweat had made yellow patches under the sleeves of her blouse. Women and children worked in the neighboring sheds, twisting hair, weaving hair, plaiting hair with thread. Wooden boards with lopsided print leaned on broken chairs in front of the sheds. The closest ones read MAMA CHINEDU SPECIAL HAIR STYLIST and MAMA BOMBOY INTERNATIONAL HAIR. The women and children called out to every female who walked past. “Let us plait your hair!” “Let us make you beautiful!” “I will plait it well for you!” Mostly, the women shrugged off their pulling hands and walked on.

  Mama Joe welcomed me as though she had been plaiting my hair all my life. If I was Aunty Ifeoma’s niece, then I was special. She wanted to know how Aunty Ifeoma was doing. “I have not seen that good woman in almost a month. I would be naked but for your aunty, who gives me her old clothes. I know she doesn’t have that much, either. Trying so hard to raise those children well. Kpau! A strong woman,” Mama Joe said. Her Igbo dialect came out sounding strange, with words dropped; it was difficult to understand. She told Father Amadi that she would be done in an hour. He bought a bottle of Coke and placed it at the foot of my stool before he left.

  “Is he your brother?” Mama Joe asked, looking after him.

  “No. He’s a priest.” I wanted to add that he was the one whose voice dictated my dreams.

  “Did you say he is a fada?”

  “Yes.”

  “A real Catholic fada?”

  “Yes.” I wondered if there were any unreal Catholic priests.

  “All that maleness wasted,” she said, combing my thick hair gently. She put the comb down and untangled some ends with her fingers. It felt strange, because Mama had always plaited my hair. “Do you see the way he looks at you? It means something, I tell you.”

  “Oh,” I said, because I did not know what Mama Joe expected me to say. But she was already shouting something to Mama Bomboy across the aisle. While she turned my hair into tight cornrows, she chattered nonstop to Mama Bomboy and to Mama Caro, whose voice I heard but whom I could not see because she was a few sheds away. The covered basket at the entrance of Mama Joe’s shed moved. A brown spiraled shell crawled out from underneath. I nearly jumped—I did not know the basket was full of live snails that Mama Joe sold. She stood up and retrieved the snail and put it back in. “God take power from the devil,” she muttered. She was on the last corn row when a woman walked up to her shed and asked to see the snails. Mama Joe took the covering basket off.

  “They are big,” she said. “My sister’s children picked them today at dawn near Adada lake.”

  The woman picked up the basket and shook it, searching for tiny shells hidden among the big ones. Finally, she said they were not that big anyway and left. Mama Joe shouted after the woman, “People who have bad stomachs should not spread their bad will to others! You will not find snails this size anywhere else in the market!”

  She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, “God take power from the devil.” I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free.

  Mama Joe finished my hair before Father Amadi came back. She gave me a red mirror, neatly broken in half, so that I saw my new hairstyle in fractions.

  “Thank you. It’s nice,” I said.

  She reached out to straighten a cornrow that did not need to be straightened. “A man does not bring a young girl to dress her hair unless he loves that young girl, I am telling you. It does not happen,” she said. And I nodded because again I did not know what to say.

  “It doesn’t happen,” Mama Joe repeated, as if I had disagreed. A cockroach ran out from behind her stool, and she stepped on it with her bare foot. “God take power from the devil.”

  She spit into her palm, rubbed her hands together, drew the basket closer, and started to rearrange the snails. I wondered if she had spit in her hand before she started on my hair. A woman in a blue wrapper with a bag tucked under her armpit bought the whole basketful of snails just before Father Amadi came to pick me up. Mama Joe called
her “nwanyi oma,” although she was not pretty at all, and I imagined the snails fried to a crisp, warped corpses floating in the woman’s soup pot.

  “Thank you,” I said to Father Amadi, as we walked to the car. He had paid Mama Joe so well that she protested, weakly, and said she should not take so much for plaiting the hair of Aunty Ifeoma’s niece.

  Father Amadi brushed my gratitude aside in the goodnatured way of someone who had done what was his duty. “O maka, it brings out your face,” he said, looking at me. “You know, we still don’t have anybody playing Our Lady in our play. You should try out. When I was in the juniorate, the prettiest girl in the junior convent always played Our Lady.”

  I took a deep breath and prayed I would not stutter. “I can’t act. I’ve never acted.”

  “You can try,” he said. He turned the key in the ignition, and the car started with a squeaky shudder. Before he eased it onto the crowded market road, he looked at me and said, “You can do anything you want, Kambili.”

  As he drove, we sang Igbo choruses. I lifted my voice until it was smooth and melodious like his.

  The green sign outside the church was lit with white lights. The words ST. PETER’S CATHOLIC CHAPLAINCY, UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA seemed to twinkle as Amaka and I walked into the incense-scented church. I sat with her in the front pew, our thighs touching. We had come alone; Aunty Ifeoma had gone to the morning service with the others.

  St. Peter’s did not have the huge candles or the ornate marble altar of St. Agnes. The women did not tie their scarves properly around their heads, to cover as much hair as possible. I watched them as they came up for offertory. Some just draped see-through black veils over their hair; others wore trousers, even jeans. Papa would be scandalized. A woman’s hair must be covered in the house of God, and a woman must not wear a man’s clothes, especially in the house of God, he would say.

  I imagined the plain wooden crucifix above the altar swinging back and forth as Father Amadi raised the host at consecration. His eyes were shut, and I knew that he was no longer behind the altar draped in white cotton, that he was somewhere else that only he and God knew about. He gave me communion and when his finger grazed my tongue, I wanted to fall at his feet. But the thunderous singing from the choir propped me up and strengthened me to walk back to my seat.

  After we said the Lord’s Prayer, Father Amadi did not say, “Offer to each other the sign of peace.” He broke into an Igbo song instead.

  “Ekene nke udo—ezigbo nwanne m nye m aka gi.” “The greeting of peace—my dear sister, dear brother, give me your hand.”

  People clasped hands and hugged. Amaka hugged me, then turned to exchange brief hugs with the family seated behind. Father Amadi smiled right at me from the altar, his lips moving. I was not sure what he said, but I knew I would think about it over and over. I was still thinking about it, wondering what it was he had said, as he drove Amaka and me home after Mass.

  He told Amaka that he still had not received her confirmation name. He needed to get all the names together and have the chaplain look at them by the next day, Saturday. Amaka said she was not interested in choosing an English name, and Father Amadi laughed and said he would help her choose a name if she wanted. I looked out the window as we drove. There was no power, and so the campus looked as though a giant blue-black blanket had covered it. The streets we drove past were like tunnels darkened by the hedges on each side. Gold-yellow lights of kerosene lamps flickered from behind windows and on verandahs of homes, like the eyes of hundreds of wild cats.

  Aunty Ifeoma was sitting on a stool on the verandah, across from a friend of hers. Obiora was on the mat, seated between the two kerosene lamps. Both were turned low, filling the verandah with shadows. Amaka and I greeted Aunty Ifeoma’s friend, who wore a bright tie-dye boubou and her short hair natural. She smiled and said, “Kedu?”

  “Father Amadi said to greet you, Mom. He couldn’t stay, he has people coming to see him at the chaplaincy house,” Amaka said. She made to take one kerosene lamp.

  “Keep the lamp. Jaja and Chima have a lit candle inside. Close the door so the insects don’t follow you in,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  I pulled my scarf off and sat down next to Aunty Ifeoma, watching the insects crowd around the lamps. There were many tiny beetles with something sticking out at their backs, as if they had forgotten to tuck in their wings properly. They were not as active as the small yellow flies that sometimes flew away from the lamp and too close to my eyes. Aunty Ifeoma was recounting how the security agents had come to the flat. The dim light blurred her features. She paused often, to add dramatic urgency to her story, and even though her friend kept saying “Gini mezia?”—What happened next?—Aunty Ifeoma said “Chelu nu”—wait—and took her time.

  Her friend was silent a long time after Aunty Ifeoma finished her story. The crickets seemed to take up the conversation then; their loud shrilling seemed so close, although they well might have been miles away.

  “Did you hear what happened to Professor Okafor’s son?” Aunty Ifeoma’s friend finally asked. She spoke more Igbo than English, but all her English words came out with a consistent British accent, not like Papa’s, which came on only when he was with white people and sometimes skipped a few words so that half a sentence sounded Nigerian and the other half British.

  “Which Okafor?” Aunty Ifeoma asked.

  “Okafor who lives on Fulton Avenue. His son, Chidifu.”

  “The one who is Obiora’s friend?”

  “Yes, that one. He stole his father’s exam papers and sold them to his father’s students.”

  “Ekwuzina! That small boy?”

  “Yes. Now that the university is closed, the students came to the house, to harass the boy for the money. Of course he had spent it. Okafor beat his son’s front tooth out yesterday. Yet this is the same Okafor who will not speak out about what is going wrong in this university, who will do anything to win favor with the Big Men in Abuja. He is the one who makes the list of lecturers who are disloyal. I hear he included my name and yours.”

  “I heard that, too. Mana, what does it have to do with Chidifu?”

  “Do you try to treat cancer sores or the cancer itself? We cannot afford to give pocket money to our children. We cannot afford to eat meat. We cannot afford bread. So your child steals and you turn to him in surprise? You must try to heal the cancer because the sores will keep coming back.”

  “Mba, Chiaku. You cannot justify theft.”

  “I do not justify it. What I am saying is that Okafor should not be surprised and should not waste his energy breaking a stick on his poor son’s body. It is what happens when you sit back and do nothing about tyranny. Your child becomes what you cannot recognize.”

  Aunty Ifeoma sighed heavily and looked at Obiora, perhaps wondering if he, too, could turn into something she would not recognize. “I talked to Phillipa the other day,” she said.

  “Oh? How is she, how is oyinbo land treating her?”

  “She is well.”

  “And life as a second-class citizen in America?”

  “Chiaku, your sarcasm is unbecoming.”

  “But it is true. All my years in Cambridge, I was a monkey who had developed the ability to reason.”

  “It is not that bad now.”

  “That is what they tell you. Every day our doctors go there and end up washing plates for oyinbo because oyinbo does not think we study medicine right. Our lawyers go and drive taxis because oyinbo does not trust how we train them in law.”

  Aunty Ifeoma cut in, quickly, interrupting her friend. “I sent my CV to Phillipa.”

  Her friend brought the ends of her boubou together and tucked them in, between her stretched-out legs. She looked out into the dark night, her eyes narrowed, either in thought or maybe in an attempt to figure exactly how far away the crickets were. “So you, too, Ifeoma,” she finally said.

  “It is not about me, Chiaku.” Aunty Ifeoma paused. “Who will teach Amaka and Obiora in university?”
r />   “The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”

  “That is simply unrealistic pep-rally nonsense, Aunty Chiaku,” Obiora said.

  I saw the tension fall from the sky and envelop us all. A child’s crying upstairs interrupted the silence.

  “Go into my room and wait for me, Obiora,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  Obiora stood up and left. He looked grave, as if he had only just realized what he had done. Aunty Ifeoma apologized to her friend. But it was different after that. The insult of a child—a fourteen year old—hung between them, made their tongues heavy so that speech became a labor. Her friend left soon afterward, and Aunty Ifeoma stormed inside, nearly knocking a lamp over. I heard the thud of a slap and then her raised voice. “I do not quarrel with your disagreeing with my friend. I quarrel with how you have disagreed. I do not raise disrespectful children in this house, do you hear me? You are not the only child who has skipped a class in school. I will not tolerate this rubbish from you! I na-anu?” She lowered her voice then. I heard the click of her bedroom door closing.

  “I always got the stick on my palm,” Amaka said, joining me on the verandah. “And Obiora got his on his buttocks. I think Mom felt giving it to me on my buttocks would somehow affect me and maybe I would end up not growing breasts or something. I preferred the stick to her slaps, though, because her hand is made of metal, ezi okwum.” Amaka laughed. “Afterward we would talk about it for hours. I hated that. Just give me the lashes and let me out. But no, she explained why you had been flogged, what she expected you to do not to get flogged again. That’s what she’s doing with Obiora.”