PETER
2006
SHE WAS HIRED to teach you English and elocution because your last teacher, Mr. Atogun, had died after being attacked by a horde of bees in the yam farm he kept behind the school fence. You all attended his burial service. Seventeen government buses had taken all students living in the boarding house to Atanda cemetery that Saturday in November. You treated that bus ride to the cemetery like any other school trip to the city, singing Tuface songs out loud in the bus, shouting hoarse cusswords at people driving past in fancy cars, the better the cars, the nastier your insults. When a taxicab driver drove close enough to the bus, you yelled with all the other boys, “Oko ashawo”—husband to prostitutes—“watch where you are going.”
The Monday morning after the burial, Miss Abigail was there in your junior secondary class, teaching English language and literature. She was dressed like those women in old English textbooks, her natural hair pulled up high over her head, her blouse wide with big, fluffy sleeves, her skirt—well, she always wore skirts.
You were not happy at the quickness with which there was a replacement teacher. You imagined that for a couple of weeks at the minimum, you would spend your English and literature class periods sleeping, eating, and talking with friends.
There was nothing lazy about wanting free, unregulated time in a Lagos boarding school. Every single moment of your waking life was regulated by the bell—which was technically just a rusty wheel from an abandoned lorry—hanging in the center of your school. At six a.m. and every thirty minutes after until your nine p.m. bedtime, some person unlucky enough to be appointed timekeeping prefect rang the bell, telling you all it was time to do something else.
Catching all the junior boys, and some of the junior girls, giving her tired, annoyed looks that first day in your class, Miss Abigail assumed you all were upset to see her because you all missed your old teacher. She decided to begin your class that morning by saying prayers for the safe repose of Mr. Atogun’s departed soul. Unfortunately for her, she called on—with no clue of how bad an idea it was—Adebayo, the tallest boy in your class and the most incorrigible class clown, to say this prayer.
Adebayo began in his best attempt at invoking reverence, his voice hoarse from early puberty, projecting as far as he could:
“Dear Lord, we are nothing but stories written in pencil by your hand. When you bring your giant eraser in the sky, you wipe us away, no one will remember us.
Do not wipe us away, Lord.
Do not erase us, Daddy Jesus.
Do not remove us, Jehovah.
Do not delete us, Almighty God—”
The class erupted first in giggles and then, as he continued praying in that manner, outright laughter. You all laughed with glee at his audacity. You, Peter, laughed especially because Miss Abigail stood there before the blackboard, her eyes wide with shock, her lips thin from restrained anger.
The new teacher allowed him to go on like that for at least five minutes, then interrupted him with her calm, “In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”
Later, Miss Abigail, after you had become the teacher’s pet, would tell you she knew that Adebayo was making a mockery of prayer. “I have been a teacher for a long time,” she said to you. “I can tell who the mischievous children are just by watching how the class reacts to them.”
The rumors began spreading a few weeks after Miss Abigail joined the school. First, it was said that by being a stickler for rules, promoting to higher classes only those students who had a 60 percent average, she had made enemies in her former school, the all-girls school in the city. They said this was her last chance to teach in a government school.
Later, it was modified to include a story where she had quit because the teacher she loved had jilted her without warning, marrying some other lady. She discovered his deceit by stumbling upon his village wedding photos while cleaning up after him in his off-campus apartment.
You did not often believe things just because of the number of times you heard them repeated. You needed to see with your own eyes, this cruelty, this naivete. This was why you watched her closely, any chance you got. You sometimes saw Miss Abigail talking to herself as she walked the path to her apartment in staff housing. Sometimes she held in her hands a pile of books. Other times it was a grocery bag filled with fresh fruits. Once you watched her eat a bunch of tangerines. She peeled the skin off each one and then, instead of littering the path like anyone else would have, she wrapped the skins in a white handkerchief, tucking them back into her grocery bag.
Miss Abigail had a way of talking about the world that made her different from all your other teachers. Before she became your teacher, English literature class was the one place where you struggled to stay awake. You had no interest in dead or almost dead white men writing about springtime and snow. You definitely had no interest in memorizing lines from Shakespearean plays so that, like Mr. Atogun, you could say things like “Yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays,” laughing at your own little joke.
She was hired to teach English literature from books written by the English, but she taught you about the fall of Rhodesia, the fight for black freedom in South Africa, and black dignity in America.
She was asked to teach poetry, but all she did was ask her students questions like, “If you are in prison or separated from your family because you have to flee an oppressive government, will you write poetry? Is writing or reading poetry an appropriate response to pain?”
You all laughed. You all said you would not have time for poetry, but for forgetting your sorrow or remembering the good in the past or imagining a better future. But you were beginning to understand what she meant. Poems are tears of the soul. You had never imagined that poems could help a person survive. Then you read “Nightfall in Soweto” by Oswald Mtshali, then you read “Letter to Martha” by Dennis Brutus. Then you read.
After you first arrived at your grandmother’s house, after Father left you one evening with nothing but clothes in your backpack, telling you he was going after a job lead in Abuja, you spent the first few weeks waiting with patience for his return. You sat on the veranda looking out into the street from the moment you woke up. You were there early enough that it was before the women hawking bread and beans began their rounds and before tricycles overcrowded with schoolchildren hobbled down the street. You were still there when nighttime arrived, when the entire neighborhood began to shut down in a dependable rhythm. First, the giant lights of the gas station went out, then the generators of the beer parlor got turned off, and finally the small kiosk owners turned off their candle and kerosene lamps and locked up their stalls.
MOST OF THE time your grandmother left you alone with your watching. Sometimes she even let you sleep out there on the veranda without waking you. She never said anything about it to you. You were not even sure she noticed or even cared. Then one day, when she thought you were sleeping, you heard her crying. She was standing over you, covering your feet with a blanket, mumbling to herself, Ibanuje ka ori agba ko odo ki la fe se ti omode.
“Sadness inverts the old person’s head, what won’t it do to a little boy?”
It was the first time you heard anyone use the Yoruba noun for “sadness”—ibanuje. You had no idea what the word meant; your literal interpretation made you think of a disease, of a rotting of the insides. That frightened you, because you wondered whether maybe you were sick and dying, which was why your grandmother had left you alone to sit and mope.
THEN YOU ASKED your sister what the meaning of ibanuje was and she said “sadness,” adding, when she saw your confusion at her interpretation, “It’s just classic Yoruba overstatement.”
The first time Miss Abigail had your class read “Nightfall in Soweto,” you thought immediately about those nights. You knew nothing of the world outside Lagos. You did not know that the world outside Lagos was just as hard for many people. You would never have imagined that it was sometimes even harder.
Surely, there were kids like you all over the world with missing parents who also could not go to the police station and say, “Excuse me, sir, policeman. Can you please find my mother or my father? I am not greedy; either of them will be enough.”
The television shows you watched at home with your brother and sisters only showed loud and happy families, kids with parents who drove them to school and read bedtime stories. Where were all the shows for children like you? The ones who went to bed screaming, or the ones without beds.
You realized then from reading those poems that every language in the world must have a word like ibanuje, a word for “afraid” and a word for “sad” and a word for “tears.” You did not tell Miss Abigail, but the more you read the sufferhead poetry she gave your class, the less alone you began to feel.
Miss Abigail said, one day in the middle of class, that she was up at night reading your original poem, turned in as part of your midterms. She said that her heart broke and fixed itself, that you are pure of heart and full of empathy.
“We want to hear this pure poem,” some junior boy said.
What choice did she have? She made you read it out loud to them all. She must have imagined that you liked that type of attention. Or that you were glowing with pride at her praise.
Rain
There is such a thing as too much rain.
It is too much rain if we grow nothing.
It is too much rain if it hides our pain.
What does one do with heads that turn to mash?
And hearts that flee in fright?
It is too much rain because we grow nothing.
We grow nothing because there is too much rain.
When she asked you to read it again, slower this time, for the benefit of the members of your class, those ones you called backbenchers, the boys and girls who sat all the way at the back committed to nothing but disorderliness, you acted like you did not hear her. You sat back in your seat, putting your head on the desk. You thought about your disobedience later and decided it was a pretty harmless way to make the point that you were not soft. You were under no compulsion to keep standing there reading, looking like the teacher’s pet, but then, after class was over, you began thinking about the look of pain or confusion she had on her face as you ignored her. You decided to be better to her.
Miss Abigail arrived for her next class with copies of the class list and announced a surprise quiz, a thing she had never done, not even in the week the state inspector visited your school and all the other teachers had chosen to have surprise quizzes so that they were not nervous and shaken when the inspector stopped by to listen to their classes.
On her way out after the test, she called on you and another student to carry the test papers behind her. You did it in a hurry. You picked up all the papers so there were none for the other student to carry, so that he went back to his seat. You were the picture of efficiency. You wanted her to think of you with kindness when she read the incorrect answers you had written out.
When Adebayo shouted as you walked out of the class, “Peter, the teacher’s pet,” you laughed and said to Miss Abigail, “I am sorry about that, Ma. I think he is just jealous.”
Later, after you have become the teacher’s pet, Miss Abigail will tell you that you broke her heart that day you refused to read your poem the second time. That you embarrassed her.
You talked about Miss Abigail to anyone who would listen. All your brother, Andrew, who did not have any classes with Miss Abigail because he was two classes ahead of you, said was, “Peter, just begin falling asleep in her class and she will leave you the fuck alone.”
You talked to Fat Fred, the boy who sat next to you in class who just laughed and said, Miss Abigail doesn’t want you, I heard she had to leave her old school because she was teaching the junior girls lesbianism. Your friend Irene just said you had a crush on her and it was beyond disgusting.
Miss Abigail never acted like there was something special between you when other teachers where around. When her best friend, Miss Ufot, the math teacher who was also the soccer coach, was around, Miss Abigail acted like you did not exist. Sometimes, Miss Ufot stopped by as your teacher began her lessons, her smile wide as she listened in to Miss Abigail’s teaching. When Miss Abigail stopped you one evening as you walked out of the dining hall to ask if you had eaten dinner and if you liked what was served, you said, “I’m sure you have seen the trash we are served. I would have to be a goat to enjoy that.”
Miss Abigail shook her head, laughing. She reached into her purse and held out a fifty-naira note.
“Okay. Go buy bread with this. Things will get better. Cheer up,” she said. She did not ever get angry with you.
Later, after you have become the teacher’s pet, Miss Abigail will tell you that your anger frightens her. When she tells you this, you just shrug and say nothing. In your heart, you say to yourself, that is just what boys without mothers do.
Almost every night, you dreamed about your mother, only it was not your mother but your older sister Ariyike, only she was not loving you, she was asking if you remembered to hang your towel out to dry. Sometimes she was sitting at the edge of your bed, shouting at you to put some lotion on.
“Peter, look how scaly and ashy your elbows are,” she said in those dreams.
You answered, “Auntie mi, I cannot see my own elbows.”
The day you became the teacher’s pet, Mr. Ahmed, the Islamic teacher, who was the new head guardian of the junior boys’ dormitory, led all the boys in your class to clear out weeds from the soccer field. It was a Saturday morning, and all students had to do weekend chores. You walked at the very end of that procession, rehearsing over and over how you could explain to Mr. Ahmed that weeding was one of the few chores you could no longer do because your right hand had no grip. In the past, Mr. Atogun had let you be in charge of taking attendance and giving boys water to drink.
All your rehearsing did not matter because Mr. Ahmed insisted that you grab a hoe like the other boys. When you did not do that, he asked one of the boys to get two branches from the guava tree. The boy bought three. When Mr. Ahmed began to whip you, some of the boys began to scream.
“Please, sir, don’t beat him. He has sickle cell disease,” one said, lying.
“Sir, he is suffering from beriberi, he is not strong,” Adebayo, the class clown, said jesting.
“Sir, he has fainted three times this term already, please leave him alone,” a different boy said.
Mr. Ahmed didn’t listen, even though your face had swollen from crying and the fresh bark of the tree branch had left numerous green stains all over your limbs and on your clothes.
It was Miss Abigail who ran all the way from the other side of the school, who lifted you up in her arms as though you were a feather pillow, who walked away without saying anything.
When she put you down with the same gentleness with which she had lifted you, it was on the front lawn of her staff quarters, and you had stopped crying. You sat in the armchair closest to the door. She went into her kitchen, making a large mug of warm cocoa. She brought it to where you were sitting, with a red straw inside it so you did not have to lift it up.
There was no TV in her living room, but her battery-operated radio was tuned to a station playing country songs.
“Do you want to talk to the principal about what happened?” she asked right after an advert for insecticide ended and Kelly Clarkson’s soft voice began singing “Because of You.”
“It is fine. I’m okay,” you said.
She walked back into the kitchen and even though you wanted to tell her to turn off the radio because you were about to begin crying again, you said nothing. Miss Abigail was doing dishes and humming along with the radio and you did not want to ruin it for her.
“Teachers like Mr. Ahmed do not belong in government schools, I can tell you that right now.” She walked into the living room, her hands dripping with water.
“That man did not even study a proper subject in the university, that is, if where he went can even be called a university. He studied Arabic and Islamic studies.”
You had no idea why she said it like it was a bad thing. To you, Arabic seemed like the right subject for an Islamic studies teacher.
“Can you imagine that, Arabic studies? Yet he is probably going to become principal ten years before someone like me can even be considered. Do you know why?” She stood in the center of her living room, towering over you like a statue.
You did not know anything about how teachers in government schools were promoted. What you knew was that her question did not need an answer as much as she needed reassurance that it was okay for her to continue. You nodded, giving her permission to continue unburdening.
“Federal character is destroying civil service. Let me tell you right now. Federal character is destroying us all. Every time promotion comes, the government must make sure an equal number of people are promoted from all the states. Can you imagine anything more bonkers? People like Ahmed, who come from states with few teachers, always get promoted. Do you know I have a master’s degree? I have a master’s degree from OAU, and Ahmed, with his National Diploma, is two levels above me.”
She walked away from you as she spoke, back to her kitchen, stopping at the doorway to pat her hands against the lace curtain. She did this several times absentmindedly.
“That is why he is impudent. He is so arrogant. He doesn’t care what anyone does. Even our principal is afraid of him. Ahmed could become principal within the next two years—even state inspector.”
The radio stops playing music. The announcer reads out the next program; Storytime for early readers. The story is titled “Pot of Gold.” Miss Abigail walks away from the curtain with dry hands, she sits next to you, her cold hand rests on your knees.
You have heard many versions of this story, it is the story of a rude little girl who demands a pot of gold from the ancient forest spirit.
“Once upon a time, there lived a poor orphan girl in the village of Iperu.” The radio announcer reads quickly in a deep voice, it sounds like a waterfall. This story, in the version your sister Bibike told you, begins when the poor orphan girl helps an old stranger do some chores in the stranger’s home. In that house, a wood shack up a hill, the orphan girl is asked to pick a fair price for her labor from a hidden room filled with great treasure of all types—gold necklaces, diamond rings, colorful waist beads. The orphan girl picks the thing she needs the most, a clay pot. However, when she gets home, the clay pot cracks, hatches, and becomes an unending stream of gold.
The rude little girl, from the richest family in Iperu, hears the story and runs up the hill to the old stranger’s home, demanding her own pot of gold. The strangers leads her to the hidden room. She is also asked to pick whatever she wants. She picks a gold necklace. When she gets home it becomes a hive of bees and the bees sting her to death.
As the radio announcer reads his version of this story, you think about the orphan girl, about what she wanted and what she got instead.
Miss Abigail sat in the chair next to you, and you could smell the citrus scent of her dish soap.
“Huhh! I know this story,” she said.
“I don’t like this story.” You did not even know you had said it out loud.
“Yeah! It’s a problematic tale, like most of our traditional stories,” she said.
You could smell something else, something dry and dusty like old shoes.
“Give me my own pot of gold, I want the biggest pot you have,” the radio announcer continued in his loud voice. The two of you sat in silence, listening as the rude girl met an unfortunate end.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asked.
“I really hate this story,” you said.
A smile spread across Miss Abigail’s face. “Oh, Peter. You’re so smart. You are thinking that there is nothing wrong with wanting good things, right? A little greed is in fact a good thing.” She laughed. “Don’t worry, you can ignore it, it’s folklore, not doctrine.”
“What about what she wanted?” you asked.
“Who?”
“The orphan girl, what about what she really wanted?”
Miss Abigail looked at you from the corners of her eyes like she had words to say but did not want them to leave her mouth. She pursed her lips together and nodded slowly but said nothing.
You were thinking about the orphan girl who got a pot of gold from an ancient spirit. “I bet she would have asked for something else, if the spirit had asked her what she wanted. I bet she would have asked for her parents back, or a new family, not money, not gold. Why will a spirit give an orphan girl money?” you said.
Miss Abigail turned her face to you with sad eyes.
“I think the spirit just gave her what he had,” she said.
“Yeah. That’s it. When you are like me, people give you what they have, and you are supposed to be grateful, say thank you, sir, thank you, madam. This is going to be my whole life, isn’t it, being thankful for things other children don’t have to be? The spirit should have asked what she wanted and she would have said, Can I have my parents back, even for one day, and then even if that did not happen, if that was beyond the spirit’s ability, at least the story would be about family, not gold. What type of orphan cares about gold?”
Miss Abigail placed one slim finger on your face and wiped underneath your eye. She did it quickly and quietly like she needed to make sure the tears did not fall all the way down. This made you cry harder, fuller, and freer. Soon you were wailing and hiccupping, she was cradling your head in her breasts and rocking you back and forth, back and forth.
This was how you became the teacher’s pet, by talking about what you wanted. By reading poems, by writing your own poetry. It was not the life you would have had if your mother had not left you, but it was a soft and quiet life. As much as you hated school, with the hundreds of boys living in small rooms, the loud bells, numerous activities, unending chores, Miss Abigail made it bearable, even pleasurable for you to be there. She was constant and available, always there when you needed her to be.
Even those times when you did not know you needed her, she showed up swiftly for you, like that Saturday when all the junior boys stood in line for the visiting barber, who charged twenty naira a cut to make you all look like wrinkly grandfathers. Just when it was almost your turn, she appeared before you in line, interrupting the order of things, asking the barber what sterilization process he used for his clippers. She did not leave him alone until he poured some methylated spirit on the clippers’ teeth and lit it on fire for five seconds with a cigarette lighter.
“See, now it is safe,” the barber said to your teacher. “Nothing survives fire.”