In my mother’s church they wore white gowns. They walked around on bare feet, and danced to drums. They were baptized in a stream of holy water and drank from it to cleanse their spirits. They believed in spirits; evil ones sent by other people to wreak havoc, and reborn spirits, which would not stay long on earth. Their incantations, tireless worship and praise. I could bear even the sight of my mother throwing her hands up and acting as I’d never seen her act in an Anglican church. But I was sure that if the priest came before me and rolled his eyeballs back as he did when he was about to have a vision, that would be the end of me.
He had a bump on his forehead, an expression as if he were sniffing something bad. He pronounced his visions between chants that sounded like the Yoruba words for butterfly, dung beetle, and turkey: labalaba, yimiyimi, tolotolo. He smelled of incense. The day he stood before me, I kept my eyes on the hem of his cassock. I was a reborn spirit, he said, like my brother, and my mother would have to bring me for cleansing. I was too young, she said. My time would soon come, he said. Turkey, turkey, turkey.
The rest of the day I walked around with the dignity of the aged and troubled, held my stomach in until I developed cramps. Death would hurt, I knew, and I did not want to see my brother like that, as a ghost. My father only had to ask how I was feeling, when I collapsed before him. “I’m going to die,” I said.
He asked for an explanation.
“You’re not going back there again,” he said.
Sundays after that, I spent at home. My mother would go off to church, and my father would leave the house, too. Then Bisi, our house girl, would sneak next door to see Akanni, the driver who blared his juju music, or he’d come to see her and they would both go off to the servants’ quarters, leaving me with Baba, our gardener, who worked on Sundays.
At least, during the Civil War, Bisi would sometimes invite me over to hear Akanni’s stories about the war front far away. How Biafran soldiers stepped on land mines that blew up their legs like crushed tomatoes; how Biafran children ate lizard flesh to stay alive. The Black Scorpion was one of Nigeria’s hero soldiers. He wore a string of charms around his neck and bullets ricocheted off his chest. I was old enough to listen to such tales without being frightened, but was still too young to be anything but thrilled by them. When the war ended three years later, I missed them.
Television in those days didn’t come on until six o’clock in the evening. The first hour was news and I never watched the news, except that special day when the Apollo landed on the moon. After that, children in school said you could get Apollo, a form of conjunctivitis, by staring at an eclipse too long. Tarzan, Zorro, Little John, and the entire Cartwright family on Bonanza were there, with their sweet and righteous retaliations, to tell me any other fact I needed to know about the world. And oblivious to any biased messages I was receiving, I sympathized with Tarzan (those awful natives!), thought Indians were terrible people and memorized the happy jingles of foreign multinational companies: “Mobil keeps your engine—Beep, beep, king of the road.” If Alfred Hitchcock came on, I knew it was time to go to bed. Or if it was Doris Day. I couldn’t bear her song, “Que Sera.”
I approached adolescence with an extraordinary number of body aches, finished my final year of primary school, and began the long wait for secondary school. Secondary school didn’t start until early October, so the summer vacation stretched longer than normal. The rains poured, dried up, and each day passed like the one before unless something special happened, like the afternoon Baba found iguana eggs, or the morning a rabid dog bit our night watchman, or the evening Bisi and Akanni fought. I heard them shouting and rushed to the servants’ quarters to watch.
Akanni must have thought he was Muhammad Ali. He was shadow boxing around Bisi. “What’s my name? What’s my name?” Bisi lunged forward and slapped his face. He reached for her collar and ripped her blouse. “My bress? My bress?” She spat in his face and grabbed the gold chain around his neck. They both crashed into the dust and didn’t stop kicking till Baba lay flat out on the ground. “No more,” he said. “No more, I beg of you.”
Most days were not that exciting. And I was beginning to get bored of the wait when, two weeks to the end of the vacation, everything changed. It was the third Sunday of September 1971, late in the afternoon. I was playing with my catapult when I mistakenly struck Baba as he was trimming the lawn. He chased after me with his machete and I ran into the barbed wire fence, snagging my sleeve. Yoruba tradition has us believe that Nature heralds the beginning of a person’s transition: to life, adulthood, and death. A rooster’s crow, sudden rainfall, a full moon, seasonal changes. I had no such salutations as I remember it.
“Serves you right,” came a girl’s voice.
A nose appeared between the wide gap in the fence, followed by a brown eye. I freed my sleeve from the barbed wire fence and rubbed my elbow.
“For running around like that,” she said. “With no head or tail. It serves you right that you got chooked.”
She looked nothing like the Bakare children who lived next door. I’d seen them through the wide gap in our fence and they were as dark as me; younger, too. Their father had two wives who organized outdoor cooking jamborees. They always looked pregnant, and so did he in his flowing robes. He was known as Engineer Bakare. He was Uncle Fatai’s friend and Uncle Fatai called him Alhaji Bakare, because he’d been on pilgrimage to Mecca. To us he was Chief Bakare. He threw a huge party after his chieftancy ceremony last year and no one could sleep that night for the sound of his juju band badabooming through our walls. Typical Lagos people, my father said. They made merry till they dropped, or until their neighbors did.
“I’m Sheri,” she said, as if I’d asked for her name.
“I’ve never seen you before,” I said.
“So?”
She had a sharp mouth, I thought, as she burst into giggles.
“Can I come to your house?” she asked.
I glanced around the yard, because my mother didn’t want me playing with the Bakare children.
“Come.”
I was bored. I waited by the barbed wire fence, forgot about my torn sleeve, even about Baba who had chased me. He, apparently, had forgotten me too, because he was cutting grass by the other fence. Minutes later, she walked in. Just as I thought, she was a half-caste. She wore a pink skirt and her white top ended just above her navel. With her short afro, her face looked like a sunflower. I noticed she wore pink lipstick.
“How old are you?”I accused.
“Eleven,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Eh? Small girl like you?” she said.
At least I was a decent eleven-year-old. She barely reached my shoulders, even in her high heel shoes. I told her my birthday was next January, but she said I was still her junior. Her birthday was two months earlier, in November. “I’m older, I’m senior. Don’t you know? That’s how it is. My younger brothers and sisters call me Sister Sheri at home.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” she said.
Breeze rustled through the hibiscus patch. She eyed me up and down.
“Did you see the executions on television last night?”
“What executions?”
“The armed robbers.”
“No.”
I was not allowed to watch; my father was against capital punishment.
She smiled. “Ah, it was good. They shot them on the beach. Tied them,