Sunny looked around and walked faster. “This is so creepy,” she muttered. She hadn’t planned to come out today at all, but Chichi’s mother only made Afang soup once in a while, and she wanted some while it was fresh. She stopped for a moment to look in her Tupperware container of soup. She sniffed it and grinned. So rich in perfectly chopped and cooked water leaves, shrimp, and hot spices. Chichi’s mother still used palm oil, unlike her mother, who’d replaced it with healthier, less tasty olive oil. She closed the container, coming back to herself, remembering it wasn’t a good time to be outside. She rushed on.
It was the middle of the day, yet the streets were empty. The markets, banks, and schools were all closed. There was a big pro-Biafra demonstration today, highlighting the day the Igbo people declared the region its own country, the Republic of Biafra, remembering Biafran soldiers and civilians who died during the resulting civil war and protesting the fact that discrimination against Igbo people was still happening decades later. There were large pro-Biafra secessionist gatherings in the town square. Local authorities had warned against street violence, and security forces were on patrol.
Before entering her gate, Sunny turned to look at the quiet street one more time. There was not a soul outside, not a vehicle on the road. “So apocalyptic,” she said. She squinted at a shadowy alley between two houses across the street. For a moment, she thought she saw something in the shadows. She shuddered and quickly went inside. When she opened the door, her mother peeked from the living room, her phone in hand. “Oh, thank God you’re back. Did you see your father out there?”
“No. Why is—”
“Did you hear anything?”
“It’s a ghost town out there, Mom,” Sunny said. “Not even cars on the road.”
“That’s not what I’m seeing on Twitter,” her mother said, looking at her phone and scrolling.
Sunny wasn’t on Twitter much. She had an account, but she barely had any followers, and she only followed an account that liked to post about masquerades, a few media sources, Chichi’s father, her parents, and the singer Rihanna. Being a Leopard Person put social media to such shame; there was just no contest between a virtual world of smoke and mirrors and working real juju, encountering actual spirits, exploring a world bigger than . . . the world! Sunny barely cared about anything she saw online anymore. Still, social media had its uses, like keeping her up to date on what was happening around the Lamb world and at home.
“It’s getting scary,” her mother said, going back into the living room, where the TV blared. Sunny followed her in.
“Today’s peaceful demonstrations seem to have deteriorated into riots,” the newscaster was saying. She was a safe distance away, but even from there you could hear the chaos and the crackle of gunfire.
“Oh my God, where is your father?” Sunny’s mother shouted, throwing her phone on the couch. Sunny looked at her own phone, suddenly very anxious. She clicked onto her Instagram account. She’d never posted there, but it was good for quietly stalking her brother Chukwu. All he’d posted today was a video of himself bouncing his huge pectoral muscles as he smirked into the camera and drawled “Thug Life.”
“Ugonna didn’t go, right?” Sunny asked.
“No, he’s in his room with his friends playing video games,” her mother said. She sat on the couch, staring at the TV. Sunny sat beside her, stiff and worried, too.
When the front door opened a half hour later, they both jumped up. Her father and his brother Chibuzo were covered in dust and smelled like smoke. “Lock it!” her father shouted. “Lock it!” Chibuzo fumbled with the door as her father sat right there on the hallway floor, coughing and coughing. Her brother came rushing out of his bedroom with his friends and they stood there staring.
“Ugonna, get us some beer!” her father said. When he looked up, Sunny gasped. His still-tearing eyes were so bloodshot they looked as if they were bleeding. “They threw tear gas!”
Uncle Chibuzo sat down beside him, also coughing. He rubbed his hands over his hair and dust and dirt flew everywhere, pebbles clattering on the tiles. He looked at Sunny’s mother. “I don’t know who gave the order or when, just—” He coughed and hacked. “Everything, chaos. Kai!” Cough. “Beating, kicking, men, women, their feet found whomever they could reach.” Cough. “They don’t treat us like citizens, why fight so hard to keep us as citizens?” He hacked loudly, pounding on his chest.
“Here, here!” her mother said, taking the beer and towels from Ugonna and handing them to her father.
He opened the beer bottle with his teeth and drank deeply. Uncle Chibuzo was wildly wiping his face, his eyes flooded with tears. “Nnaemeka! They shot and beat him, o! And they shot three other men! They didn’t even care! Like we were animals!”
“Nnaemeka?” Sunny said. “Orlu’s uncle?”
Her father glanced at Sunny. He looked at her mother, who said nothing. “Yes,” he said, coughing. “He’s dead.”
Sunny felt dizzy. Orlu had told her he was going with his father, too. “Was . . . was Orlu—”
“Sunny, go and soak two washcloths in milk,” her mother quickly said. “They need to get this poison out of their eyes now.” She pushed Sunny up the hallway. Sunny stumbled, but reluctantly rushed to the closet to get the towels. By the time she returned with the milk-soaked washcloths, four more of her father’s friends had entered the house, and there was no chance to ask her question again. Sunny felt she would go mad with worry. By sundown, the house was packed with her father’s friends and their wives and girlfriends who had been at the demonstrations, too. Sunny slipped out the back of the house, skirted around all the parked cars in the driveway, through the compound gate, and up the street. She moved swiftly, not giving even a glance to the alley across the street or anywhere else someone might hide or be waiting for her.
“Oh, thank goodness!” she gasped, rushing to Orlu. He was where she’d hoped with all her heart he’d be, on the steps of the front door of his house. And his eyes were red, too.
“Sunny,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you okay?” she asked, slowly sitting beside him. He smelled like smoke.
He shook his head and stared blankly at the ground. She put an arm around him and they sat like that for a while.
“Today is a bad, bad, bad day,” he finally said. “It was a good day on May thirtieth, 1967.” He looked at Sunny and waited.
“I know,” she said. “May thirtieth, 1967, was the day General Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra. The Igbo people had their own country, were free of Nigeria . . . for a little while. I know my history, too.”
Satisfied, Orlu gave a small smile and shrugged. “Can’t blame me for wondering how much you knew.”
“Nigerian Americans have Nigerian parents and grandparents who talk about the Biafran Civil War,” she said. “I read up on it all myself because I got sick of not understanding the context of stuff.”
Orlu nodded. Then the smile dropped from his face and he sighed. “Today it was bad.”
“What . . . what happened?”
“I was there,” he said.
“I know.” He’d told her he was going. Orlu’s grandfather and several of his granduncles and aunts on his Lamb side of the family had died in the Biafran Civil War. Igbo people had suffered discrimination in Nigeria since. It was a phenomenon that permeated the very political, social, and economic systems of the country. Over the last year, Orlu had grown more and more into a supporter of the pro-Biafran movement.
“My father had me work a protective juju around me. I was annoyed at the time; you can’t really feel part of the crowd that way, you know?”
Sunny nodded. Protective jujus kept people a foot away at all times. It must have felt weird to Orlu, standing in the crowd.
“We were chanting ‘The zoo must fall!’ and ‘No Biafra, no peace!’ We all felt so strong and confident.” He paused, frowning, clenching his fist. “The police were there, but they couldn’t do anything. We faced them, shouted at them. There was a woman I see all the time; she sells pure water on the street, so quiet. She was even shouting!” He smiled, remembering. “Then . . . then I don’t know what happened or who started it. There was pushing first. People bouncing off me like they’d hit a wall. I stood my ground. Then the tear gas and then shooting! No one could see who was doing what; that’s why they could shoot! I . . . saw my uncle Nnaemeka, he was right in front of me. He had a handkerchief and he used it to pick up a smoking can of tear gas and throw it back at the—” He gasped, wringing his hands. He got up and started pacing. Then he stopped and looked at Sunny, his red eyes wide.
“They shot him,” Sunny whispered.
Orlu nodded. “And rushed him and started beating him when he fell. They dragged him off like a sack of garbage . . .”
His uncle hadn’t just been shot and dragged off; his uncle was dead. Her father had said so. Sunny wasn’t about to tell Orlu. He would find out soon enough, let him have these last few minutes of not knowing. Orlu hit a fist to his leg. “It’s wrong! The way they treat us is wrong. The ways they’ve been treating us. There is a Leopard faction of IPOB and my uncles are part of it.”
Sunny grimaced. “Oh no.” The IPOB, Indigenous People of Biafra, was the political group leading the protests. It was very active and very aggressive. Sunny appreciated their movement, but they often pushed to violence.
“Oh yes,” Orlu said, a dark look on his face. “Leopard Igbos can do a lot to obtain the Biafra we all seek.”
“Secession from Nigeria would turn so much upside down,” Sunny said.
Orlu sighed, deflated and tired. “I know,” he said. “I’m not all for it. I just . . . like the thought. It’s doing something, saying something, not just sitting in the pit as if all this is okay.”
“It’ll lead to more trouble.”
“There’s trouble already,” he said.
Sunny looked at him, worried. This was exactly the kind of thinking and feeling that led down a dark, dark, blood-soaked path.
He sat back down beside her. “Tear gas feels like acid and smells like vinegar. Taiwo calls it the devil’s perfume.”
“Taiwo was here?”
“He was at the riot,” Orlu said. “Until he wasn’t. Came to my house later.”
Sunny wondered how much worse the riots would have been if Leopard People hadn’t been there. But then again, some of the police may have been Leopard People, too.
“You know what doesn’t smell like vinegar?” she asked. She brought out her juju knife, did a flourish, and paff! a minty, fresh, yet smoky herbal smell burst around them. “Lavender.” Orlu’s favorite scent.
They both sat sniffing the lovely smell of flowers, and for a time, Sunny hoped Orlu forgot the smell of tear gas, politics, and death.