Bennet never stood up to Oba, his father, and never disobeyed him, and neither did his brothers or his sisters or his mother. To do so would be to spit on Oba’s legendary history of survival, a kind of sacred family allegory. Bennet himself appeared as an angel in the story, and so for him, the pressure to believe and obey was particularly acute.
In Igbo, the name of his boyhood village in southern Nigeria, Enugwu-Ukwu, means “on top of a hill.” The terrain was all up and down, round, low mountains glowing lime green in the hot sun, the earth a bright, dusty red. There were seven children in the Omalu family and Bennet was second from the youngest. All of the Omalu kids were smart, but Bennet and his baby sister, Mie-Mie, were said to be especially gifted. Bennet did not challenge the notion, but he kept his doubts private. Mie-Mie was a genius, unquestionably. But Bennet believed himself to be merely studious. Let them think I’m a genius. I will work hard, and harder still, so they will think it! Early on he figured out that if you got labeled “genius” you could get out of doing work around the house. You could open a book and furrow your brow as if processing important information and someone else would sweep the floor. Rake. Do the dishes. “Oh, Mommy, I have to study,” he would say when she would assign him household tasks. She would relent, send him back to his books. “How are you ever going to make it in the world if you don’t learn how to do chores?” she would say. “There will be machines,” he’d say. “Where I am going to live there will be machines to do everything for me. Don’t worry about it.”
No one did. He became known as the kid who simply could not abide physical exertion. The other kids picked up the slack, especially Chizoba, the brother Bennet was closest to, just two years older. Chizoba was freakishly normal, Bennet thought, as they reached school age. Bennet would watch him outside the window playing in the dirt. He would watch him kick a soccer ball around the compound with his friends. Kick? A ball? Friends? Bennet had none of these things and none of these aspirations. He hated the outdoors. He could not be bothered with friends. He loved his mom and whenever he imagined God he pictured her square dark face.
As for Bennet’s father, he was in and out, doing highly impressive father things. Government matters. Village chief matters. When he was home he would receive visitors in the obu, the reception room in which he alone was allowed to sit in the velvet chair and break open the kola nuts, the green ones, breaking them with his thumbs, plucking the fleshy lobes as he prayed the Igbo blessing: “Ihe dï mma onye n’achö, ö ga-afü ya.”
He was said to be defender of the widow, voice of the underdog, protector of the fatherless and the orphan, helper of the helpless, and these matters occupied him. He was a learned man who expounded generously about the value of education coupled with a radical and absolute surrender to the love and mercy of God.
Because of his reputation in the village as a wise leader, Bennet’s father earned the Igbo title of Oba, or “ruler,” and when villagers would come to the compound to partake of his wisdom he would greet them in his tall red hat adorned with three white feathers. This was the highest level of distinction. When you become an Oba, people no longer refer to you by your given name; they call you simply Oba. Bennet’s oldest brother, Theodore, aspired to become an Oba one day, and so did Ikem, the middle son, and so did Chizoba. Bennet had no interest in that whatsoever. Much of the tribal mysticism associated with his Igbo ancestry was lost on him. So much silliness. But he would come to recognize that the culture he came from was distinct, the values particular, the violent history inescapable, and that these things were a part of him.
Oba’s legendary history of survival began when he was orphaned at age three. Onyemalukwube, his surname, means “If you know, come forth and speak”; the shortened form is Omalu. He was born in 1923, not quite a decade after the country of Nigeria was formally established during Britain’s imperial expansion into West Africa. Britain chose boundaries that made economic sense to Britain, not to the indigenous people. The oil-rich lands of the Niger River basin were some of the most densely populated of Africa, representing hundreds of distinct ethnic nationalities and countless cultural and religious traditions. The three most prominent groups were the Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo in the southeast. None of these people ever agreed to get together and form one country.
In 1927, Oba’s father drowned in the village river, and the suspicion that he had been murdered would haunt the Omalu family for generations. Oba’s mother found another man to marry and she left Oba behind. A church elder took him in and put him to work as house help. Oba was smart so the church elder sent him to school. Education equaled freedom; Oba caught on to that equation early and put his teeth into it. He got a job as a trainee in a government office where they dealt with mining and engineering. He worked hard to impress his superiors, and because of his outstanding performance he was offered a scholarship to study engineering in England. He came back five years later with a job as a mining engineer for the Nigerian government—the orphan boy who made good.
Oba married Bennet’s mother well after he had established his career. As teenagers, the two had been paired by villagers for an arranged marriage, but her father had rejected the union on the grounds that Oba was penniless. Now he was back, a civil servant, and she was unmarried and poor, a seamstress with no schooling. Charity as much as love drove him to her. Catholic doctrine demanded that you serve the meek and he felt the calling intensely. He took her in. He bought her clothes and gifts. In time he would search for his own mother, the woman who had abandoned him, and he took her in, too. He built a home just up the road from the house in Enugwu-Ukwu where he was born. He assigned his wife the role of taking care of his mom and he put a concrete barricade around the house to protect them, as many villagers were doing. He added rolls of silver barbed wire with razorblade teeth on top of the barricade, and he would add rooms and more walls and buildings to the compound as his family grew. If there was talk of war back then it was still just a rumble.
Oba rose quickly in the ranks to become Nigeria’s assistant director of mineral resources, and so the family enjoyed many privileges of the country’s elites: cars, drivers, housing, cooks, butlers. They relocated around southern and eastern Nigeria according to Oba’s postings, but their compound in the village would remain home base, the place to return to for holidays and vacations.
Eventually, Oba moved north, to the city of Jos. Political tensions were mounting in the region. It was the 1960s; the great wave of nationalism and demand for self-governance was sweeping across West Africa. Nigeria had declared independence from Britain. After a half century of trying to figure out how to coexist as one country, the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo tribes were now jostling for supremacy. The cultural and political differences between them were sharp. Christian missionaries and the Western education and culture that came with them had been excluded from the conservative Muslim north—the most underdeveloped region in all of Nigeria, with a literacy rate of just 2 percent by the time the British left.
The opposite had happened in the south. The Yoruba were the first to adopt Western forms of education, and they provided the country with its first Nigerian doctors, lawyers, and professionals. They remained mostly Islamic, with only a portion of the population converting to Christianity.
The Igbo went full-on Christian, full-on education, full-on Westernization. The Igbo people were always said to be freethinkers, with an individualistic ethic—completely at odds with their Muslim countrymen in the north. By the 1960s they had become the country’s literate elite. They moved to other parts of Nigeria in search of opportunity, thousands of Igbo emigrating north, opening businesses and small companies. They thought of themselves as the engine of Nigeria’s advancement onto the world stage—but northerners regarded them as a threat. The Hausa and some of the Yoruba derided the Igbo, called them the Jews of Africa. Economic and social modernization—the very goals of the Igbo—were considered sacrilegious and intolerable to the Hausa.
These tensions boiled, and then, in 1966, after a military coup led by the Igbo to take control of the government and a countercoup led by the Hausa and Yoruba to regain it, the lid blew.
The genocide against the Igbo began in the north when Oba was working in Jos. Tens of thousands of Christian Igbo were slaughtered by the Muslim Nigerian army, their bodies left disemboweled and savaged on roadsides.
An eyewitness quoted in the October 14, 1966, issue of Time magazine remembered his visit to the northern city of Kano this way:
The Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles…hauling Ibo passengers off the plane to be…shot….The troops fanned out through downtown Kano, hunting down Ibos in bars, hotels….They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians…looting and burning Ibo homes….All night long…the massacre went on….Municipal garbage trucks were sent out to collect the dead.
More than a million Igbo fled south. They declared independence from the rest of Nigeria in 1967 and tried to carve out their own country in the south. They would call their new nation the Republic of Biafra, taking the name from the Bight of Biafra, the vast blue bay where the Niger opens like freedom to the Gulf of Guinea.
The Nigerian army would have none of the secession; the resulting bloody civil war between the Nigerian army and the Igbo would rage on for more than two and a half years.
Oba was stuck hiding in Jos during the massacre of the Igbo in the north. Friends in his office, British engineers of no political allegiance to the north or the south, wrapped him in blankets and shoved him onto the floor of a truck. They hid him in basements and on train cars on a weeklong journey from Jos to Enugwu-Ukwu. The family back in the compound did not hear from him for more than a month, because communication had been cut to the south; they presumed him dead.
When he came staggering down the hill toward the compound, starving, emaciated, and filthy, the children and their mother ran in tears to greet him. They led him limping inside the gates.
Bennet wasn’t born yet. Winny, his older sister, was six:
He came down this hill. It was more than a month. Everybody yelled like he’d come from the dead. Broken. Stories to tell. Horrifying stories. There was no time to plan. We have to run, he said. You only listened to the radio to know where the soldiers are. Or people tell you, they tell you, fifteen miles away, you start to run. Daddy! Mommy! Don’t ask me questions, just go get this and that. One car. Luggage. We packed some clothes and then food and water. Just one car. Packed in the night. Where are we going? They say don’t ask questions, just pray.
“We have to leave here,” Oba said to his family. “We have to flee.”
The soldiers were making their way south. On July 6, 1967, the federal government in the then capital city of Lagos had launched a full-scale invasion into Biafra. The Nigerian army came in tanks and bombarded the area with artillery. The air force sent bombers and the navy sent missiles and established a sea blockade that denied Biafra food and supplies. The strategy was to slaughter all the Igbo they could and starve the rest. They claimed rivers and roads and bridges, and the flow of food to Igboland stopped altogether.
Oba and his family loaded the car with yams and water and ran from town to town as the Nigerian army came closer.
We went thirty miles to my grandmother’s town, but the soldiers were already there. Rationing food, parents yelling. We moved again. There was nowhere else to move to. We settled there in that town, Nnokwa, where we were for almost two years. Wartime. The teachers had left. We were going to some school, I don’t know what it was or who paid. Food had changed. Now we’re dependent on food supplies dropping from the sky. Egg yolk, corned beef, powdered milk from airplanes, but sometimes the aircraft dropped bombs, one, then the other, you had to tell the difference. You see them. They stick out their heads with their guns and then they bomb residential areas. That was horrible. You don’t wear colorful dress. You don’t wear colorful clothes. You learn where to run and hide. Horrible horrible. We were seeing these men. They come so low! You see them and they drop bombs.
The Igbo were vastly outnumbered and they had no army and they had few weapons and now they were starving—as many as five thousand people a day dying from starvation.
The world took notice, but not, at first, because of the genocide. Because of oil. By claiming an independent Biafra, the Igbo were also claiming the vast oil reserves pooled beneath the ground in the south of the country. British companies had claims on that oil. So the British helped the Nigerian army fight the Igbo; they sent more airplanes and guns, and then the Russians sent arms, and then the United States did—although the United States officially declared itself neutral. Israel, France, Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa helped Biafra.
The Nigerian-Biafran War became famous around the world because of what the Igbo did as their last resort and only fighting chance. Outgunned, outmaneuvered, facing starvation, they waged a public relations war. They sent photos of dying babies to international newspapers: pictures of starving children, their bellies distended and their faces covered with flies. This was something new. Forty percent of the casualties of World War I were civilians, fifty percent in World War II. But now here was a war of one hundred percent civilian casualties, an outright genocide with pictures to personalize it, and soon the world responded. The French charity Doctors Without Borders was created in response to Biafra’s appeal. The Red Cross and churches around the world raised money for Biafran relief. American children took boxes distributed by UNICEF on collection drives sponsored by schools. “Trick or treat for UNICEF!” became a cry in suburban America, the images of the Biafra babies now a symbol of a humanitarian crisis to which citizens of the world would respond if individual governments would not. Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie took up the cause, John Lennon gave back his Member of the Order of the British Empire medal to the Queen of England in symbolic support, Kurt Vonnegut wrote screeds, Martin Luther King Jr. gave speeches, as more and more planes flew over the Igbo people delivering dried milk and rice and blocks of dried fish. Food was the main issue. As many as two million Igbo lost their lives, fewer than ten percent of them killed by military gunfire. The rest starved to death.
And so it was in the midst of this that Bennet came. My daddy was gone for food. We were all waiting. We knew a baby was coming. Exciting. A baby! And we were all waiting for Daddy to come with our food. The air raid came about 2 P.M. These aircraft. So my father was coming out of the town building where they were distributing food, he was running and he fell. He was blown up, explosions everywhere, and while he was lying down there, he couldn’t move, he didn’t realize why he couldn’t move. He looked up and saw his car—that car. That car was everything. Next thing he saw he was in hospital. Somebody rescued him and drove him in that car. My mom didn’t believe.
Bennet was born in September 1968 in Nnokwa. One child among the seven million Igbo refugees boxed into the Biafran enclave.
Oba’s body was filled with shrapnel and he was patched up in the same hospital where Bennet had just been born. The doctor who had delivered Bennet tended to Oba. His name was Ifeakandu, which means “life is the greatest gift of all.” He brought the baby to Oba. “Ifeakandu,” Oba said. “That will be his name.” This middle name would memorialize Oba’s miraculous survival from the air raids. Bennet was said to be the angel who bore the miracle. Bennet, meaning “blessed,” would be the child’s first name.
In its entirety, then, the newborn’s full name carried a specific and ominous weight:
Blessed.
Life is the greatest gift of all.
If you know, come forth and speak.
Biafra surrendered in 1970. The food falling from the sky had only prolonged the inevitable. Oba was reabsorbed into the Nigerian Department of Mineral Resources but at a much lower rank; the family’s privileged economic and social status was no longer. They came back to reclaim the compound in Enugwu-Ukwu, but it had been destroyed in the war, all their belongings gone. So they began rebuilding.
Nobody said “Biafra” anymore. Igbo graveyards were bulldozed by a Nigerian army that was trying to erase physical reminders of the war. The Bight of Biafra was renamed the Bight of Bonny. Biafra Light, the oil pumped from Igboland, got renamed Bonny Light.
When Bennet grew up they didn’t mention Biafra in schools and they didn’t teach the war. It was something that sat in your history, like the shrapnel still in Oba’s body. Your people had been persecuted. It was a wound that was supposed to heal.
Bennet started school at age three instead of five like most kids. It had nothing to do with being smart. It was because of the anxiety that overtook him when his brother Chizoba started school.
All of the Omalu children were protected behind the gates of the compound after the war—they were not permitted to leave unless it was in a car and with an adult escort—but Bennet, with his delicate constitution and aversion to physical exertion, was especially pampered. At that time his big brother was his world. His mother was occupied with infant Mie-Mie, and the older siblings were big kids concerned with big-kid matters. Without Chizoba in the house, Bennet was overcome with sorrow. Inconsolable. So they packed him a lunch and sent him to school with Chizoba. And if they were surprised that a boy so much younger could keep up academically with his older peers, they explained it by declaring him a genius. In truth Bennet was simply desperate to be with his brother. If he made himself as smart as the older kids he could remain by Chizoba’s side. Intelligence, he came to understand, was a matter of will.
The plan backfired when it was time to go to secondary school, the equivalent of high school in Nigeria, and Bennet earned entrance into the boarding school for super-smart kids, Federal Government College. That was special. That brought honor to the whole family. It would be a place for Bennet’s mind to grow and soar.
But Chizoba didn’t get into the smart-kid school. He was sent to the regular school across town.
So now Bennet was alone. Twelve years old, starting high school, living in a dorm with thirty strange, loud boys.
The first months did not go well. His mom came every other weekend with home-cooked yam porridge, ogbonu soup, and other delicacies for him, hoping to ease the transition. One Saturday, when she didn’t come, Bennet paced in the bathroom like a prisoner. He panicked. He needed Chizoba. He needed his mom. There was a window overlooking the avocado trees and he plotted his escape. He rationalized his decision to bust loose by saying, hey, the cool kids are always sneaking out, hitching rides into town, smoking cigarettes, or doing other crazy things. He was sneaking out more as a lifesaving mission.
Still in his uniform shirt and tie, he climbed out the first-floor window, scooted out the school gates, and ran toward the main road. A car was approaching and so he dived at once into the culvert, the deep, dank gutter. It was horrifying and exhilarating all at the same time, a secret, forbidden adventure. He kept running and when he got to town he stopped to catch his breath and walked. He realized, in that moment, that he had never walked down a street by himself. Twelve years old and this was the first time.
Fear overcame him with a thunderous clap on his chest and up his spine. He was not allowed to do this. There must have been a reason he was not allowed to do this. Surely something bad was going to happen.
He began to sweat and he did not like the wet feeling. He began to pant, his chest heaving. He felt he was discovering the real world for the first time that day and he did not like it. There was…trash. It was disgusting. People were loud, yelling about the price of milk. There were cows curled up in the beds of pickup trucks, legs tied to horns, live cows curled up for sale and transport. The goats bleated vomit sounds and were smelly and people stepped in the excrement of those goats. People without shoes. Where were their shoes? In his family everyone wore shoes. Girls carrying plates of kola nuts on their heads came after him begging for money. Well, this was a horrible place! He ran, and he ran; he ran five miles home, and when he arrived at the gate his mother saw him and dropped her bag of onions. She scooped him up. “What is wrong? What happened? What have you done?”
He was dirty, sweating, crying about those horrible streets and all those strangers and one man picking his teeth. He sobbed in her arms about the horribleness of the real world. She stripped him naked and put him in the tub to scrub the filth of Nigeria off him. “I’m sorry, my baby boy. My precious baby boy.”
“He can’t take the real world,” Bennet’s mother said to Winny one day, recalling the events of Bennet’s terrifying journey out on the streets alone. Two years had passed and stud-ious Bennet seemed emotionally equipped for little beyond his life of books. “He is too fragile,” his mom said to Winny. A pampered angel. What happens to the angel when he grows up?
“We will take care of him,” Winny said. “We will find him a place where he will never know sorrow or ugliness.” Winny was already in college when Bennet was off trying to survive secondary school. Like everyone else in the family, she adored her baby brother. “But right now we have to support him, Mommy. We have to go watch.”
“I don’t think I can,” her mother said.
It was spring, Bennet was fourteen, and word had come back from the headmaster at school that he had joined the track team.
“Track,” her mother said. “That is…running.”
“I know, Mommy,” Winny said.
“But why would he volunteer for something that involves perspiration? He hates sweat.”
“I don’t know,” Winny said. The important thing was that today was his first track meet and they would need to go support him, she said.
They drove through town and worried together if Bennet had the constitution to do an athletic event. Perhaps the fresh air would make him keel over, they joked. They sat on the bleachers and popped open an umbrella to shield the sun. Bennet came out in his running shorts and Winny reached for her mother’s hand as if to say, “Do not laugh.” He was tiny compared to the other kids. Square, and short. Holding his hands on his hips, studying the posture of the tall boys and trying to assume it, kicking at the dirt like the tall boys.
They watched Bennet stretching his skinny chicken legs and prepared themselves for his humiliation. Why in the world was he running track? Perhaps this represented some newfound courage or maturity. They worked on optimism but mustered little. Bennet was running the 4 x 100-meter relay, and he was positioned to be the last runner on his team to pick up the baton and run with it to the finish line.
“Oh, Mommy—” Winny said.
“Oh, Winny—” her mom said, and she wrapped her arm around her.
The gun goes off. The ground beneath his thin track shoes is soft. It’s kind of bouncy, he thinks. He would like sunglasses but it seems kids here don’t wear sunglasses. He can see that his mom and his big sister Winny have come to watch. They probably think he actually wants to run track. They probably think this is a sign of something good.
The reason Bennet has decided to run track has nothing to do with running. Mainly he wants to look at Christy’s thighs. He has discovered one good thing about school and it is Christy. He goes to bed each night thinking about her. He would like to speak to her someday. But that is a long way off. People who run track wear shorts and when he heard Christy saying she was going to run track he knew he would get to see her in shorts. He had been imagining her thighs for some time. The first time he saw them, firm, arching like palm trees, he felt so much excitement it was like a drug and he wanted more. After he runs this relay he will get to watch Christy run, watch her thighs move through the air like missiles.
Four runners, four more waiting for the baton. It’s kind of boring waiting. He has figured out what he wants to do with his life when he grows up and a lot of it has to do with Christy. He loves girls. He loves girls so much. Nobody prepared him for this feeling of loving girls and it has come on with such a wallop. What he wants to do with his life is talk to girls. Some day he will do it. He has not once spoken to a girl who isn’t a relative. When he grows up he will talk to so many girls, girls in every city of the world. He will be an airline pilot and he will have girls in every city he flies into, and he will talk to them and hold them. He will buy them condominiums and they will wait for him in the condominiums, wait for him to fly in. Then he will fly to the next one. And then the next. It will be his own airplane and he will have to keep it running on time. He will treat the girls with respect and he will never be late and he will buy them presents.
The third runner has the baton and soon it will be Bennet’s turn. His team is keeping up. Where is Christy? He can’t see her in the crowd but she will be here, he knows it, as soon as he finishes running this race it will be her turn. He’s thinking about speeding up the plane to get to Paris because he will not be a man who makes a girl in Paris wait. It will take a lot of determination. If he isn’t on time he could lose the girl in Paris and then the girl in Rome and the girl in Dubai. He will send them flowers and jewelry but that won’t be enough. He has to hurry, has to put his foot on the gas or whatever a pilot does to an airplane to make it go supersonic. His future depends on it and he will just have to do it.
The third runner on his team is approaching, his face tight with resolve, mouth stretched and cheeks bouncing and eyes like coyote eyes. But then, with no warning, that boy trips. Down on the ground, a roll and then a scramble. Bennet can see his mother and Winny standing up as if saying, “Oh, no!” because now Bennet won’t even get a chance with the baton and his team will lose. Right now losing is not an option. “Get up! Get up! Get up!” Bennet screams to the boy on the ground. And Bennet runs, runs back to the boy who fell, runs like a crazy child for the baton when it is clearly so hopeless and then he grabs it, and like fire turns toward the finish line and he knows what he has to do.
Doing what he has to do! He is violating some important international airspace law, and a few principles of physics probably. And he can go faster still. Rocket scientists will turn to their calculators to come up with new laws of orbital mechanics because of how fast he can go.
Winny has both her arms wrapped tight around her mom’s waist as she watches Bennet run toward the finish line that day. Oh, Bennet, run! And it isn’t that Bennet begins to sprint so fast, legs a blur of circles inside circles, running toward the finish faster, faster, from so far behind overtaking the other kids, one, then the next, then the next, in the most uncharacteristic burst of athleticism—that is not the most remarkable part. The most remarkable part is the sound coming out of Bennet’s mouth, a guttural explosion, agghghgh! as he runs, AGGHGHGH! loud like a full-throttle fighter jet blasting over the hills of Enugu.
Impossibly, Bennet wins the race that day, despite the boy on his team who fell; Bennet grabbed that baton and carried it triumphantly over the finish line, and Winny and her mother flopped back on the bench with exhaustion and wonderment.
What was that noise coming out of him? Who was this boy?
After family brunch in the village compound on a warm Sunday when Bennet was fifteen, his father called him into the obu, the receiving room with the big velvet chair, to talk to him about what he would do with his life. His mother sat in the corner, stitching a hem.
“I will become an airline pilot and travel around the world,” Bennet said. He was excited about the plan, had been dreaming about it all year.
Oba grinned, picked up a bottle of cognac, popped out the cork, and poured. “Oh, Bennet,” he said. His voice was a deep baritone, and he was a very large, fleshy man; the overall effect was of a tuba. “My silly boy.”
One thing about being the angel who represented everything good that ever happened to your family is you didn’t have a lot of movement in terms of identity. That was pretty much already solidified the day you were born. From that point on, your main job was to fulfill expectations.
Bennet felt stupid for saying he wanted to be an airline pilot and he reached for the drawer on the long table and he opened it. He was relieved to see that his bottle caps were still there. The Fanta team, the Sprite team, the Ginger Ale team, and the Heineken team. Table soccer, his private game, just him and his bottle caps all those summers when Chizoba was out in the compound, playing real soccer with real people. Each team comprised ten players and a goalkeeper, and in the off-season they lived in paper boxes that fit neatly inside the drawer and kept everyone organized. The boxes doubled as goals. The thick caps of brandy were the coaches and the wine corks were refs. He used the caps of BIC pens to move the players. The balls were pellets of squished aluminum foil. He loved those teams. He loved that game. He built Ginger Ale a big trophy from the foils of cigarette packets—a bigger trophy than he ever built for Coke. Just because it was truly remarkable the way Ginger Ale pulled out that victory and he wanted to do something special for them.
He held Ginger Ale’s trophy between his fingers and rolled it back and forth. He tried to think of a way to tell his dad the reason why he wanted to become an airline pilot, but just saying the words “airline pilot” out loud had already made the dream seem ridiculous. His father was not, anyway, interested in hearing what he had to say. He cast a long and dark shadow. If Oba sometimes behaved like a bully, if he drank too much, if he was sometimes mean to Bennet’s mom, well, everyone forgave him. What he’d been through. All he’d been through! What he’d made of himself. What he’d done for everyone! He instilled God in his children, a backbone of Catholicism from which none of them would ever stray, and he instilled in them the value of education that was somehow light-years beyond most other kids in the village. The boys, the girls, everyone would get the best education money could buy and go as far as they wanted, even if it meant traveling abroad for school, which many of them did.
“So I should be an engineer?” Bennet said to his father that day. Perhaps he should choose his father’s line of work? None of the others had done so. All of the Omalu children would go on to succeed mightily in their professions. Theodore, the oldest, studied industrial mathematics; he would become partner in a land reclamation company in Nigeria and live part-time in the United States. Winny, the second oldest, would become a nurse practitioner and live in London. Uche, the next, would become a physician and a professor of pediatrics in Nigeria and live part-time in the United States. Ikem studied economics and would go on to own a chemical marketing company in Nigeria. Chizoba studied marketing and would go on to own a farm. Mie-Mie, the baby, the genius, would become a lawyer, with a PhD in international energy law, and would become general counsel of a multinational petroleum company in Nigeria. All of them would marry and produce children, and that fact alone would translate to an even higher standing in the village for Oba.
Bennet hoped his father wouldn’t say yes to engineering that Sunday after brunch, because he imagined it a very boring career. Certainly nothing compared to flying jumbo jets around the world and all that went with that life. Bennet’s father poured himself another glass of cognac and Bennet sat on his hands and he tried to think about how to go another round on this pilot idea. Perhaps he could present an argument? No one in even his distant family had chosen such a career. Bennet had never been on a plane ride. He was not, now that he thought about it, even a tiny bit interested in aviation. That wasn’t what the dream was about at all. If it was about fleeing Nigeria and not just about women in condos, he was not aware of it then. Flying away from this broken country: Coup after countercoup in the wake of a war no one dared talk about. A government so corrupt nothing worked. Water mysteriously shutting off. Electricity on one hour, then off the next. If you wanted to make sure the lights would stay on for a funeral or a wedding or some important occasion you had to bribe some shady government man who would make it happen. Random checkpoints on roads, soldiers demanding cash.
“It would be exciting to be an airline pilot,” Bennet said.
“Why do you keep saying such foolish things?” his father said.
There was no way he could admit to his father all that the dream represented. He did not know how to talk to his father about these matters. He certainly did not know how to talk to him about girls and the thunder awakening inside him. He still had not had a girlfriend, still longed to be touched and to be held. He did talk to Christy one time when she dropped her pencil. He picked it up and handed it to her and said, “Here is your pencil.”
“You will die in a plane crash,” Bennet’s mother added.
Bennet reached for the comfort of his bottle caps. Fanta and Ginger Ale and the trophy. Then he slammed the drawer shut. He was fifteen years old, too old for games.
Bennet’s father reminded him of the Catholic doctrine that said life was about serving the Lord and the way you did that was by serving your fellow man. How would he choose to serve? “What matters is how much you make yourself an instrument of God’s peace, love, and joy,” he said. “And how much difference you have made in the lives of people around you.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Bennet said. “Of course, Daddy.” He thought of what his father had done for people as an engineer, the erosion control and the paved roads and the efforts to restore postwar Enugwu-Ukwu. “Then I should become an engineer?” he said.
“Engineers work in dirt,” his mother said. “My Bennet cannot handle dirt.”
Bennet let out a sigh of relief; engineering sounded so dreadful. His father held the brandy to his lips and it seemed he had known the answer all along, and mostly at this point Bennet just wanted to get it over with, to find out what his future held.
“The smartest boy in a family studies medicine,” his father said, as if this were some sort of biblical law, which Bennet knew it was not. “You will become a doctor.”
“Ka anyï kpe ekpere,” his father said. Let us pray.