What is a child who does not have a mother?
When we first entered this world, even after our eyes opened in the village, we remained fogged in newness. We were very young. But soon (a matter of years to you but nothing to us), we were forced into sharpness, forced by blood wiped along a tarred road, the separation of a bone at three points, and the migration of a mother.
Our brothersisters have always possessed the cruelty that is our birthright. They stacked their bitterness like a year’s harvest; they bound it all together with anger, long memories, and petty ways. The Ada had not died, the oath had not been fulfilled, and we had not come home. They could not make us return because they were too far away, but they could do other things in the name of claiming our head. There is a method to this. First, harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child.
Saul and Saachi were living at Number Three then, with the children and Saul’s niece Obiageli. Obiageli was one of De Obinna’s two daughters, but she was not like her father, she did not know the right songs or dances or the source of the spring. She was Christian, decidedly so, blind in that way. But she loved the Ada, and sometimes, love is almost protection enough. When Obiageli’s sister came to visit, Obiageli left her to babysit. Saachi had a rule: the children did not leave the house unless they were with her or Saul. She was a practical woman, so the odds were that the child would live.
Besides, the mischief of the Ada’s infancy had progressed into moody troublemaking. She lost her temper frequently, slamming doors and fighting with Chima and Añuli, the increased weight of her body ricocheting off the walls of their house. Her anger would mutate hotly into bouts of uncontrolled weeping, until her lungs got tired. She was violent, and years later, it made even her human mother afraid. Saachi could not discipline the children in the ways that Saul and Obiageli could, not with fear, not like a Nigerian. But she did run a tight household; she was tough with anyone who didn’t have her blood in them, and most of the time no one would have even dreamed of breaking her rules.
This cousin, however, was only visiting. The salt in the kitchen had finished and she needed to go to the shop to get some more, so she broke the rules and took the girls out of the house, because they begged to come with her on that hot and loud afternoon. It was meant to be a quick trip across Okigwe Road. All they had to do was turn left when they came out of the gate, walk past the man who sold sweets at Number Seven, turn left again at the red gate, and walk until they reached the main road.
The whole way, Añuli kept talking about crossing the road by herself; she’d seen other small children doing it and saw no reason she couldn’t. They made it to the corner where the women sold roasted corn and yam and ube over hot coals, and they waited for a gap in the traffic. The Ada kept her hand inside her cousin’s wrapped palm, but Añuli looked left, then broke free and darted, small, six, across the road. A pale blue pickup truck came in from the right and hit her with a sound like the world stopping.
The Ada screamed as Añuli fell onto the tarred darkness. The pickup couldn’t stop. The driver tried but his brakes did not work, the truck could not stop, not even for her, not even for her small six-year-old self, for her Pink Panther T-shirt and shorts, the snagging of the cotton to its metal undercarriage, for the rubber slippers torn off her feet or the hooking of her shoulders and spine to the truck’s skeleton. It dragged her small golden body away, down the road, smearing blood in burning tire trails. We (the Ada and us) do not remember our mouth’s sounds, our own personal screams, nor those of the cousin. We do not remember how the road was crossed, who stood around, who reached out and unhooked the pink splattered cloth from the underside, what the pickup driver said, when Saul’s neighbor arrived with the station wagon, who lifted Añuli’s awake body from the road and put her in his backseat, or how many people were in the car.
We do remember how, in the car, our body twisted to look at Añuli screaming behind the driver’s seat, her leg dug open from knee to ankle to bone, warm and red and gushing with shocks of white. The girls used to be mirrors, dressed alike, four horns curving down from the sides of two heads, before the truck tore one away from the other. The Ada was frantic, shouting, trying to think of how to fix it, who to handle it.
“Take her to our father’s hospital, please,” the Ada sobbed. The men in the car did not listen to her—the Ada was eight and she was wrong. They took Añuli to Lisa’s father instead. He was an orthopedic surgeon, not a gynecologist like Saul. The electric signboard of his hospital was cracked from when someone threw a stone at it during one of the riots, and the building smelled like strong antiseptic and flesh that had gone off. Someone gave the Ada a Pepsi and took her next door to Lisa’s house, while Lisa’s mother sent their driver to fetch Saachi. When she arrived, the human mother entered the emergency room and looked at her youngest child, leg laid open on the examining table. Añuli’s Pink Panther shirt had been cut open to get to her chest and it was stained dark with blood. Saachi cried and cried while our brothersisters smirked invisibly against the cabinets at the breaking they had begun.
Saul had been at the mechanic shop, and when he got to the hospital, Añuli asked him to give her an injection so that she could die. She had heard the doctors say they wanted to amputate her leg, and although she was small, she was already certain of what she could not live in this world without. Saul fought back tears as he reassured her, then he let them draw his blood for her transfusions. They took the Ada home, and for three days, she refused to visit her sister. Our brothersisters were pleased with that. Love for a human threatens the oath and makes spirits want to stay when they owe debts, when they should return.
Finally, Saachi sat down with the Ada. “Tell me,” she said. “Why won’t you go to the hospital?”
The Ada started sobbing. “It’s my fault …”
Saachi looked at her, confused. “Ada, it’s not your fault the car hit her.”
“I’m the big sister … it’s my j-job … t-to protect her …” She broke down wailing and Saachi put an arm around her, holding the child to her side and feeling the small shoulders curve in as they convulsed. We realized, later, that she was always a little uncertain when it came to her first daughter, what exactly to do with her, how to soothe such a force. It was understandable; it is always like this with ọgbanje, it is difficult for their mothers. If we could go back, we would tell Saachi what she realized only many years later: that none of the ways she tried to take care of this child would ever feel like enough.
“It’s not your fault,” Saachi repeated.
The Ada said nothing, but she didn’t believe her. Duties were duties. We agreed with her on this. Over the years that followed, we (the Ada and us) became good at protecting Añuli, except for a terrible oversight in which we failed, for a very long time, to protect her from ourself.
At the hospital, they cast the amen’s leg in plaster of Paris. They used a mechanical blade to cut the cast open every time they had to change it, then dressed the wound with sugar and honey. The first few times, they gave her narcotics to kill the pain, but then they had to stop, and she would scream and scream until the dressing was done. When it was over, she laughed. She was, to our surprise, not a being that the brothersisters could break so easily.
Saul’s family came up from Umuahia to the hospital to see her, and old women in the ward drifted from the other beds to stand by Añuli’s.
“Chai,” they said dolefully. “What a beautiful child!”
“Ewo!”
“What a shame.”
After about a week of this, Añuli turned to Saachi and asked if she was going to die. The human mother stared at her, this little girl who spoke of death so comfortably. We were not surprised, though. Had it not brushed past her on the bloody tar of that road? She was not afraid. Our brothersisters had touched her and she had lived. She asked Saachi that because she thought the visitors were there to mourn her approaching death, and we were impressed by this concept, to grieve the loss of breath while it was still in the body. After all, since we had been born to die, the Ada’s life was a placeholder, an interlude; it made sense to start mourning it now.
The Ada became a precocious but easily bruised child, constantly pierced by the world, by words, by the taunts of Chima and his friends as they mocked her body for being soft and rounded. Reality was a difficult space for her to inhabit, unsurprisingly, what with one foot on the other side and gates in between. We wriggled deeply in her, reliving the blood of the backseat over and over again till the red was painted all inside. You must understand that Añuli’s accident was a baptism in the best liquid, that mother of a color, then a clotting movement, a scrambled look at mortality and the weakness of the vessel. With our swollen new eyes, we saw the blood and knew it was a mantle.
We waited.
*
Things had not been easy for Saachi. They never are when you are the type of woman who gets chosen—just ask any other mother who has had a god grow inside her before spitting it out into a wild world. When Añuli was first born, Saachi became sick. The Ada was focused on her private mischiefs then—drawing on the walls and destroying the deep brown leather cushions by tugging on their threads. Chima was in school; he’d started Primary One down by Faulks Road. Saachi was drowning in anxiety. It rattled her chest and surged up her throat; it made her hands shake and then she cried and could not breathe. Saul did not help. He was an impatient man, a blind man. The children were always more Saachi’s than his.
“I can’t stay with you in the house!” he told his panicking wife. “I have work to do. If you have mental illness, then you’ll just have to go to London.”
That was it. Saachi had to turn to her friends, the women who had been born in other countries and who, like her, had accompanied their husbands to this small, violent town. Her friend Elena came by to check on her and Lisa’s mother sent a girl in the evenings to stay with her, because Añuli was just a baby and Saul would not stay home and Saachi was drowning. Our brothersisters had known this, had known where the weak points in the Ada’s family were, where to best apply pressure for a breaking. This was at Number Seventeen, at the red brick, and the next day, Saachi collected her three children and took them to Elena’s house. She left them there and went to the hospital, where she stayed for two nights.
The doctors told her not to ingest any stimulants, and when they left her room, one of them, a woman, remained and asked Saachi kindly and quietly if everything was okay at home. Because it was strange, you see, the panic attacks and the way Saul was not there. Saachi said everything was fine. We do not know if she was lying, but the doctor prescribed medications to slow her heart rate, and after the second night, Saachi checked out, collected her children, and went back to Number Seventeen. She told herself that she would never be in that state again. Every day for a month, while the Ada and Chima played by themselves, Saachi would put Añuli down on a woven mat, then lie on the sofa and cover herself with Chima’s akwete blanket, all the way over her head, making a dark cave. The anxiety curled up on her chest like a cat and purred through her bones. She hid and hid, and Saul did not find her because he, as he had made clear, could not be at home with her and therefore was not looking.
It’s like we said—things had not been easy for her. As she was drowning, the years slid past and the Ada’s family moved down the street to Number Three. Then there was the truck and the amen and the impact and the blood. When Añuli could walk again, Saachi said that she would need plastic surgery, skin grafts for the river of glossy scar tissue running down toward her foot. She took Añuli back to Malaysia to consult with some doctors; she left the Ada behind. While on the trip, Saachi spoke to a nursing agent who offered her a job in Saudi Arabia.
There are many ways of breaking a family and isolating a child—our brothersisters knew this. Saul, for example, cared more about himself, so he was never going to protect the Ada and he was too human to be any kind of threat to the brothersisters. After career setbacks in London, he had been happy to end up in Nigeria, where he was hailed as a big man, coming from abroad with his Benz with the customized plates. He needed people to see him glow; he desired the glory of something. When Saul got his chieftaincy title, it was like he’d been dipped in silver, like he was finally as shiny as he wanted to be. He spent a lot of money on new things for himself, money that he refused to spend in other ways, like on his family. Saachi had to sew her traditional outfit for the ceremony out of an old sari. They’d fought over this and other things, like Saul refusing to buy things needed for the household. As his clinic struggled, Saachi kept transferring in money from her accounts in London. Immediately after the chieftaincy ceremony, instead of hosting the visitors who came to congratulate Saul, Saachi took the children to Onitsha to visit a friend and left a note for her husband.
“You may be a chief,” she wrote, “but you are not a god.”
She was correct, even more than she knew. He was not a god. He’d had to pray to one in order to get the Ada; she was not a child he could have created alone. Still, Saachi gave him many chances, windows and windows, ways he could have been worthy. In Malaysia with Añuli, after she got the job offer, Saachi called him.
“What do you think?” she said. “Should I take it? Will you be able to look after the children?”
“Let’s talk about it when you get back,” he said.
So she flew back to Nigeria with the amen, and by then, the Ada, who had never been without them for this long, almost didn’t recognize them. We, however, knew already that forgetting could be protection.
Saul had paid for the trip, and when Saachi told him that the doctors had advised against skin grafts for Añuli’s scar, recommending it be left as it was, Saul hissed. “So it was just a waste of my money, a wasted trip,” he said, and then he walked away.
Saachi looked at his prideful back, then she looked at their bank accounts and at their family and she made a choice. It was easier to get free for the sake of her children than for the sake of herself—she did things for the Ada that Saul would never have lifted a finger to do. We admit, we accepted her because of that. She took the job and left the house at Number Three and as it turned out, she never lived there again.
Our brothersisters rejoiced from the other side—they had succeeded in chasing her away. No god would intervene, because ọgbanje are entitled to their vengeances; it is their nature, they are malicious spirits. Besides, there were many ways to look at what happened. Our brothersisters broke Saachi’s heart, yes, but they also set her free, releasing her from the akwete blanket that Saul had condemned her to. If they had not thrown her last born into the road, she would never have gotten away. They meant to punish her: they took her children, they filled her mouth with sand. But it is only a fool who does not know that freedom is paid for in old clotted blood, in fresh reapings of it, in renewed scarifications. If Saachi did not know this before, then being a god’s surrogate surely taught it to her. Such lessons are never easy.
*
The next five years of her life were contracted away in Saudi Arabia, and when that contract ended, Saachi called Saul.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Should I come back to Nigeria or should I try London?”
Saul had already left in all the ways that mattered, so it was not surprising that he said nothing, that his mouth was a gray space. Saachi was alone, and she knew that although Saul hated the money she made, he needed it. We thought he was weak; we knew he was chosen only because he would give the Ada her correct names. We did not pay attention to him.
In the face of his grayness, Saachi went to London, just to see what it was like and if, perhaps, she could move them all there. But when a depression seized her, she left and flew back to her deserts, to Saudi. By the time her last contract ended, the human mother had spent ten years there, from Riyadh to Jeddah and, finally, the mountains of Ta’if. She returned to Nigeria once or twice each year with suitcases that smelled cool and foreign. She left behind the sacrifice of three children fastened to an altar with thin sinews, and she would pay the costs of that for the rest of her life.
And this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.