I OPEN MY EYES. THE OIL LAMP IS TURNED LOW, BUT I am able to make out an outline in the doorway. I recognize my father’s wiry silhouette as sleep flees from my eyes. He walks into the room I share with Machebe and settles on the only stool. He asks me to get a pen and a notebook and to write down what he says. I don’t know if it is a coincidence or if my father has chosen a night my brother is absent from our room. Machebe has gone to help his master with the funeral of his mother. He will be spending a few nights there. It is a relief that he will be away and off my back for some time. I don’t have the strength to fight him. He seems less full of vinegar since I passed my exam, but he still says things that glance off my past mistakes. It is around one in the morning when I check the time.
“The legend I want to pass on to you I am passing on because I have seen new signs of maturity in you. You have grown more mellow, enough to succeed with your exam. My father only passed this legend on to me when I had come of age; such an age when I understood things better. You may have heard scraps of it elsewhere or even from your mother. Women are not very good at keeping secrets from their children. It is a story that has the potential to erode your self-confidence or even provoke unnecessary aggression in you; hence, I forbade her from discussing it at home.”
I do as my father says and reach for a pen and an exercise book, worried by the somberness in his voice. I am sitting on a back chair, hunched over a small table. I am writing from the light of the oil lamp, in the singlet and boxers I sleep in. My father speaks in a low, clear voice. He is bare around his skinny upper half, his left palm cupping snuff, which he lifts into his nose with his right forefinger in measured quantities. He refills from a box kept handy. He fills the pauses in his clear, deliberate, and often-repeated sentences with snorts and sneezes. Once in a while a cock’s crow tears through the silence of a fast-approaching dawn, which is how long his story lasts, the tale of how our community is named after one of the few men who was left after it fell to the slaving and intercommunal warring activities of stronger enemy neighbours. The territory had remained a slave route even after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, with internal slave raiders terrorizing the community. Captives were sold at the internal market, and many were forced into exile as the community broke up and scattered. The few survivors, who had set about rebuilding the village, went in search of protection and returned with a powerful protective medicine, Ezenwanyi, to safeguard them from total annihilation.
“That is the story of your ancestry,” he says at the end of the story of Onoyima, who renamed himself Gbaghalu, and his wife, Obochi. “Now you know why people have called you names. You know now who you are. You know why I was not crowned the village head, because it is forbidden for a man like me, an outcast and a foreigner in the land of Ishiayanashi, to touch the arua staff with my taboo hands.” He pauses. “And perhaps you should also know that your aunt Okike did not just drown: she committed suicide.”
I shoot my father a wide, puzzled look, shocked by this disclosure.
“She committed suicide because Inyinya, the village choirmaster, got her pregnant and rejected her. Inyinya and Okike were lovers. They had been secret lovers for some time. Inyinya would sneak to this house and spend long hours chatting with us, eating with us, and laughing furtively with us. He was liked by everyone in the family. He was a likable young man, famous in the village. He was doing well as a schoolteacher, the toast of every maiden in the village. Our family had been waiting for the day he would fulfill the promise he had made to Okike to take her as a wife. But then Okike became pregnant by him, and a date was fixed for the wedding. Everything had to be rushed before the church found out about Okike’s pregnancy; that way, Inyinya would not lose his position as choirmaster for committing the sin of fornication. But on the eve of the wedding, Inyinya sent word to the family saying he had backed out of their marriage plan.”
I absorb the shock. “Why?” I can hardly hear my own voice.
“That maggot.” My father spits a curse at Inyinya. “He was not man enough to take up his responsibility. He thinks us dirty, but he is filth itself, o ruruunyi.”
I feel myself drowning with my father’s revelation, the knowledge that Okike killed herself, and that the man for whom she died, Inyinya, still lives. I think of him walking to church with his hymn book tucked under his arm, a sweet song always taking a slow, melodious flight from his soft and treacherous mouth. He is married to a woman who has borne him children. I can feel my anger collecting at the far corners of my mouth like soapsuds.
“I was born into this caste just like you,” my father says. “I watched my father talk in whispers and walk in sidles. I watched bullies snatch our pot of dinner from the fire while my father stood by and watched, while my mother wept and watched us go to bed hungry, and I hated my father for his weakness. I have observed you watch me with the same eyes that ask questions. I see hatred in your eyes for me. You think I am weak, and that I should have fought to reclaim what’s my right. Like you, I determined to succeed where my father had failed. I determined to be strong where he was weak. I took on the most dangerous wrestlers in the land, the most dreaded of all, that people avoided for their ruthlessness, their talent for dislocating the opponent’s waist. I did all that to prove a point, that I am not a weakling like my father, and to ensure that our village had pride of place in the community. The competition gave me my first hip injury. I did not get it from moulding bricks.”
This comes as a surprise, too.
“My exploits as wrestler and masker made me popular in the village. I gained the confidence of the elders, commanded the admiration of young men, and became a great favourite of maidens who respected my talents, my stature, and my smile. At least I thought so.” He laughs mischievously. “Nkwo was a pretty maiden I admired in the community. I fell in love with her for a sneer that never left her face, a sneer that would linger a little around her mouth, and then it moved up into her eyes. Somehow the sneer gave her the kind of no-nonsense look I liked in my woman. Because I was not a very confident person, I needed a woman who could balance that impairment.”
I ponder the absurdity of my father’s choice, wondering if my mother has such a quality.
“Nkwo was very beautiful: dark, shapely, and strong-looking. So, when my mother, your grandmother, started to talk about marriage, when she became obsessed with it, I told her about Nkwo. But my mother objected to my choice of a wife. She was not able to offer me a satisfactory reason why I should not marry her. So I insisted, but Nkwo’s father turned me down. He humiliated me, telling me I was the descendant of a man who was cast away as punishment for a crime he committed, therefore not meant to enjoy full status as a member of the human race. That was the first time I became acutely aware of our caste.”
He pauses to stretch himself, yawning and reknotting the wrappa tied around his thin waist.
“Today I have a son like you who is getting education,” he says proudly. “I am pleased with myself, and with everyone. I am pleased with my compound—this mud-brick, crumbling four-roomed house and its rusty tin roof. I am pleased with the entire village, its red, fertile soil and tall trees with bright green foliage; its colourful, high-flying birds and stainless blue skies. I am pleased with everything in spite of the injustices done to me despite my contributions. However, I have one regret: that my family is divided in their faith. Have we not seen enough signs to make us realize that our rebellion against Ezenwanyi is why we are having some of these challenges?”
My father leans out the window to blow his nose, sullying the early morning air with the smell of tobacco. And then he talks about his sisters, who wandered off after a series of marital frustrations.
“They never returned, but it is possible they are alive and married with families wherever they are, and do not wish to come home in order to protect the secret of their caste from their spouses. It is also possible that they are dead. You are aware that Ogbom, your aunt, is separated, but you may not know that she made the mistake of loving a man from the other side. Her marriage was predestined to fail; it was against the wish of his family. She returned childless, forced to flee from the man by untold pressure from his family, even before he completed her marriage rites.” My father clears the remains of his snuff with a few quick sniffs to his left palm. He rises and spits through the window. “I hope that you find your path in life, and, in doing so, also find your faith. It’s my ultimate wish that we rediscover our faith as a family, and as a community.”
I walk outside to stretch myself at the end of it all. It feels like a dead weight has been lifted. The village is clothed in silver. I sit on the tomb and gaze up at the bright and endless savannah of the sky. There are hills in the round yellow face of the moon. I can see their rugged outlines as clearly as I can see why my cousin Beatrice is an agaracha in Lagos. As clearly as I know that I was the fear that lurked somewhere in the heart of a woman, the undesirable seed that was sowed a long time ago at a shrine. And as clearly as I know why my father is a poor sharecropper. We are Ezenwanyi’s outcasts. We are ohu ma. A cursed, minority caste. My aunt Okike tried to transcend her fate and paid the ultimate price.
The day finally unfurls itself, patches of shadows melting away, unveiling my mother’s poultry clucking outside. Ihebube, a broom in hand, still half-drunk with sleep, is grudgingly sweeping the compound. Ebube is feeding the goats in their pen, two young nanny goats sent to my father by his son-in-law to nurture a new livestock. Usonwa is kindling a fire that sends smoke curling over the kitchen. My mother is standing at the mouth of the kitchen. She is shooing a troublesome rooster away from a cluster of chickens feeding on a handful of grains she has thrown out. The bully beaks a grey-feathered hen into a squawking flight.
How many more bullies are lurking out there? I compare my father’s story—the story of my ancestry—with the story of the woman we buried in Anukwu, and I see their sameness. Mama Obodo had told me that Elizabeth-Marie founded Jehovah Kingdom Mission with Aaron, her husband, in 1981. “They died childless, as outcasts, and that’s why you were hired to bury the woman. Only foreigners could bury her without repercussions.”
When I asked Mama Obodo what would happen to their children, assuming they had any, she explained that they would inherit the status of outcasts, unless they agreed to perform rituals to cleanse themselves.
From what I later learned from my mother, it was not entirely Inyinya’s wish to reject Okike, but he was up against unfamiliar forces, something my father had warned Okike about. According to him, neither Inyinya nor anyone in his family had offered an explanation when he suddenly backed out of the marriage. Just as no one had offered any explanation when my father was not made village head. The success of the act had been in the unspoken word. It drew its strength from the conspiracy of silence, and from superstition. You can’t hold a man who prefers to remain closemouthed responsible for what he hasn’t said. On our path, no one had dared to ask questions. The message was cryptically passed, and clearly understood in the same mood.
One thing had been palpable. In the midst of the hocus-pocus—my father’s deep grunting, my mother’s silent toiling, and the intense hate people who have no reason to dislike me visited on me—was a secret in the form of a family legend. It was hidden from me and my siblings for as long as our parents could conveniently manage it. But when your father is denied his right to the village patrimony, and your aunt impregnated and rejected by a man who beguiles her with the promise of marriage, you don’t really need a family legend to put things in their proper perspective. I picture Inyinya conducting the choir, good-looking and multitalented, writer of beautiful hymns, arms moving with fluidity, carrying the choir gracefully on broad shoulders, and enjoying the admiration of a thrilled congregation. And I despise him with a skin-crawling loathing.