It was Saturday morning and the sun was just getting into gear. The friends were part of a crowd in front of the path to Leopard Knocks. Sunny couldn’t stop smiling. Since she was with Leopard People, there was no reason for her to pretend she needed her black umbrella. She was standing in the sunshine, just like everyone else. She’d considered asking Anatov why she was no longer light sensitive, but really she didn’t want to know.
In the distance, they spotted an ominous red cloud-the funky train, approaching at a ridiculous speed. “Wish you’d brought a box of tissues?” Sasha asked Sunny.
“Not funny,” she said. She didn’t tell him she actually had. This was going to be a snot fest.
The funky train was covered with sayings embellished with colorful loops and swirls. JESUS IS MINE, O!; NO ONE BUT CHRIST!; THE BLOOD OF GOD!; NOTHING BAD!; SLOW BUT SURE!; LIFE IS SHORT!; JESUS SAVE US! In the center was a crude painting of a very white-faced blond-haired Jesus flashing the peace sign.
“Is this for Leopard People?” she whispered to Chichi. “Or Christian fanatics?”
Chichi only laughed. “It’ll change to different things about Allah when we enter Hausaland. And the Jesus painting will become a crescent moon and star. You know the saying-‘When in Rome do as the Romans do.’”
The driver was a man who called himself Jesus’s General. But there was nothing holy about him. Every other word he spoke was a jolly swear word. Loud profanity-laced hip-hop blasted over the sound system. Sunny wondered if he changed his name to Allah’s General when they crossed into Hausaland. She laughed to herself.
“How many are you?” Jesus’s General shouted, getting out of the vehicle.
“Sir,” said a stately woman, “does this piece of junk run on fuel-gasoline?”
“Oh, this no be so!” A man groaned a few steps away. He spat something in what Sunny thought was Yoruba and then threw his dusty backpack on the ground.
“Eh, eh, eh,” Jesus’s General protested humbly. “Na hybrid vehicle. A little fuel, a lot of juju, and plenty plenty of God’s will. Come, ah beg. I no go disappoint you. Step aboard. I give you good price to get to festival.”
“It’s a piece of rubbish! We’ll probably all die of the fumes,” a woman said. “I’ll wait for the next one.”
Jesus’s General waved an annoyed hand at the angry people and turned to Anatov.
“Anatov,” Jesus’s General said, shaking, slapping, and snapping hands with him. “Good as hell to see you, my man.”
“Likewise,” Anatov said, putting an arm around the driver’s shoulder. They moved a few steps away, obviously to discuss prices. Anatov looked at them and said, “Get on,” then turned back to negotiate.
It took a while to find a seat because the long vehicle was mostly full. Sunny’s backpack was slung over her shoulder, and as they made their way to the back, it smacked a boy in the head. “Oh! I’m so sorry,” she cried, patting his head. She snatched her hand away when she realized what she was doing. “Sorry,” she said again.
Rubbing his head, the boy nodded. Her face grew hot. He was gorgeous. Of all people she could have bashed in the head, it had to be him. He gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s okay,” he said in Igbo. “I’m still conscious.”
She laughed and quickly moved on.
There were exactly five seats at the very back of the funky train. The chair in the center was large, clean, and throne-like with much more legroom than the others. It was obviously for Anatov. Chichi plopped down beside Sunny, Orlu, and Sasha on the other side of Anatov’s seat. Not surprisingly, Sasha took the window seat.
“Young strong men,” Jesus’s General shouted from the front of the bus, “we need a push.”
Sunny almost laughed. Clearly, even a vehicle powered by juju needed a push so the driver could pop the clutch. Several men got up and went outside, including Anatov. Jesus’s General got behind the wheel.
They pushed and pushed and the funky train began to roll. Finally, the engine popped, banged, and chugged. At the same time, she heard another noise that sounded more like wind blowing through the top of a dry palm tree. Blue lights running along the vehicle’s walls and on the floor lit up. The air began to smell of flowers. Sunny sneezed and groaned.
They were officially on their way to the Zuma festival.
Anatov said they’d be staying at the Hilton, the biggest and most lavish hotel in the city. Even one of America’s presidents had stayed there. Sunny was only able to relax when Anatov said that Leopard Knocks was paying for the room. She barely had enough money to afford two meals, and she doubted they’d take chittim.
It was going to be a very busy day. First they would get her juju knife. Then they’d attend the wrestling finals. After that, Anatov would attend a meeting of scholars from all over Africa. They’d have the rest of the day and evening all to themselves. “There’s an arts and crafts fair all day and a student social tonight,” Anatov said. He looked at Orlu and Sasha and smiled. “And, as always, there’s the Zuma Football Cup match around five o’clock.”
Sunny frowned. Why didn’t he look at her when he said this? She liked soccer, too. And she was good at it.
Their rooms were on the sixteenth floor of the Hilton. And they weren’t just rooms-they had a suite! Orlu and Sasha had one room and Chichi and Sunny had another. Anatov’s room was farther down the hall. “We leave in an hour,” he said. As soon as he was gone, they looked at each other and then howled with excited laughter.
“I can’t believe I’m here!” Sunny screeched, throwing herself onto her bed.
“This place is so toxic,” Chichi said, chidingly. But she ate one of the chocolates that had been placed on their beds. “I’ll bet that’s why Anatov is making us stay here.”
“I thought you’d like it,” Sunny said.
Chichi frowned at her. “Why’s that?”
“Imagine the books they’ll be selling at the festival,” Orlu said, sitting on the cabinet beside the TV.
“Bet there’ll be a lot of hot girls there, too,” Sasha said.
“There’ll be even more hot boys,” Chichi said, giving him a look. “There are always more boys.”
“Hey, don’t go off with anyone,” Orlu said. “We’re not at home.”
“Same to you,” Chichi said.
“I’m a guy,” Orlu said in total seriousness, pulling a book out of his bag. “You’re a girl. It’s not the same.”
Chichi scoffed.
“It’s not,” Sasha said with a shrug. “Anyway, Chichi, come here. Look at this.”
“So what do you think?” Orlu asked Sunny. Behind them, Chichi and Sasha had started whispering to each other and snickering as they looked at Sasha’s book.
“Ask me in a few days,” Sunny said.
“I hate this hotel and everything it stands for,” Orlu said. “The over-extravagance when people are living so badly just outside the hotel, it’s obnoxious.”
“It’s not all bad.”
Orlu shook his head. Chichi and Sasha quickly shut Sasha’s book. Sasha shoved it back into his bag.
“What are you guys up to?” Sunny asked.
Chichi wouldn’t meet Sunny’s eyes. “Sasha’s just helping me out with-something. Nothing you and Orlu would be interested in.”
“Sunny, you going to get in that soccer game with me?” Sasha asked. “Or football, I mean. Whatever you guys call it here.”
“I still call it soccer, too,” she said, laughing. “Part of my Americanness, I guess. You think I can play in the game?”
“Definitely. I’ve seen you handle the ball, man,” he said. “Orlu, you in?”
“Nah, I’ll watch with Chichi.”
“So they let girls play?” Sunny asked, tentatively.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sasha said. “You’re playing.”
They split up to take showers and change. Everyone wore their best. Sasha had on baggy jeans and a short-sleeved blue dress shirt. He paused to look at Chichi, who wore a bright green rapa and matching top. “You look nice,” he said. “You should dress up more often.”
“Only when there’s a reason,” Chichi said, but she looked pleased.
Sunny fidgeted. She knew she looked good in her navy blue dress pants and blue top with orange and yellow designs, but it didn’t really matter to her. “I hate dressing up,” she said.
“I don’t mind it much,” Orlu said. He wore a long light blue caftan and matching pants. “But there are more important things.”
The same funky train that dropped them off picked them up. It was a tenth of the size they’d left it in, even smaller than a van, and it was empty. There was a white throne for Anatov in the second row.
“Hey,” Sasha asked, sitting behind Jesus’s General. “What music you got?”
“If it’s got gam-gbam dim-dim that shakes the very air I breathe, I dey grab,” Jesus’s General said. He and Sasha slapped hands. Sasha clicked through Jesus’s General’s digital collection.
Anatov sat in his seat, opened up the day’s paper, and began to read. Chichi sat beside him and did the same. Orlu and Sunny went to the back. As they drove off, Sasha got the music going. He and the general bobbed their heads to the beat.
“Hey,” Orlu said. “Remember what I said about you guys being careful. Chichi knows her way around, but you’re new, so be extra careful.”
“Sure,” Sunny said, rolling her eyes. “So, did you and Chichi come to this together last year?”
“Yeah,” Orlu said.
“Your parents and Chichi’s mother are friends?”
Orlu frowned and cocked his head. “Yeah… sort of.” He lowered his voice. “Chichi gets her weirdness from her mother. Her mother’s really, really brilliant. She’s an assistant to Sugar Cream and she’s a Nimm priestess.”
“What’s-”
“Women who become Nimm priestesses are chosen at birth. Their intelligence is tested before their mother even gets a chance to hold them. If they pass, they’re ‘sold’ to Nimm, a female spirit who lives in the wilderness.”
“Like Osu people?” she asked, horrified. These were Igbo people sold as slaves to an Igbo deity.
“Sort of. Nimm women aren’t outcasts like the Osu,” he said. “Nimm women all have ‘Nimm’ as a last name, and they’re never allowed to marry. And they reject wealth.”
“Is that why Chichi’s father left?”
Orlu laughed bitterly. “No. I overheard my mother telling my aunt that he was one of the most selfish men she’d ever met. He didn’t know that Chichi’s mother is Leopard, though.” He paused. “I’ll bet if he knew he couldn’t marry her mother, he’d have fought to marry her.”
“Oh,” she said, realizing something. “So Chichi’s not pure Leopard?”
Orlu shrugged. “No one’s ‘pure.’ We’ve all got Lambs in our spiritline somewhere. Anyway, Nimm women are… kind of eccentric. My parents are friendly with her, but not friends.”
There was a silence. Music drifted back from the front of the funky train.
“Orlu,” Sunny finally said, glancing at Chichi, who was reading her newspaper, “what do I… do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Am I supposed to keep all this stuff from my family for the rest of my life? Who can live like that? It’s already weird. What do free agents do?”
“Well, for one, the pact we made prevents you from telling anyone about it,” Orlu said. The trust knot, the symbols on the book, and the juju knife-it seemed like years ago, not just a few months. “I don’t know, Sunny. You know what, though?”
“What?”
“You really need to find out about your grandmother,” he said. “Especially from your mother. You didn’t inherit the spiritline from your mother, but maybe your mother knows more than you think.”
The Abuja market was about ten minutes from the Hilton. Sunny hadn’t expected them to go to a Lamb market, especially not this one. It was the first African market she had visited, a few months after her family had returned to Nigeria when they’d stayed with her aunt. Talk about culture shock! The American supermarkets were always neat, the prices rigid, everything so sterile. The Abuja Market in particular was ripe, unpredictable, and loud. She’d been overwhelmed by what the market sold, and how the vendors sold it. Now it was just a market.
After Anatov paid Jesus’s General, they all went straight to a shaded part of the market. A crude roof of wooden planks was built over all the booths here.
“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure!” a man announced in a gruff voice. Junk Man. He had a look that practically screamed that he was far more than what he seemed. He was short and fat, his head shaven so close that it shone like a black bowling ball. In contrast, he had a bushy gray mustache and a long equally bushy gray-black beard. He wore a bronze ring on every finger. His cushioned chair creaked whenever he moved.
His booth was the same size as everyone else’s, about twelve feet by twelve feet. Wooden dividers separated his shop from a utensil shop to his right and a basket shop to his left. But his place was packed! A narrow path led through his wares. He raised his fat hands and shouted, “Hey! Anatov!”
“Junk Man,” Anatov said, as they vigorously shook hands. Junk Man’s rings clicked loudly.
“That one?” Junk Man said, pointing at Sunny. Anatov nodded. “Ah, an albino,” he said. He smiled, and a dimple appeared on his left cheek. “Go on, have a look-see. But none of it is free. Don’t be shy. Look, then you buy. But don’t touch the things you don’t think you should. Especially those parrot feathers. For some reason, people don’t know better. Then they get home and wonder why all they want to do is chatter about nonsense.”
Sasha, Orlu, and Chichi were already looking around. Sunny had no idea what not to touch. There were so many items-most on tables, some on the ground or hanging from nails on the wooden dividers.
There were baskets; ebony and bronze statues; rings, necklaces, and anklets of various metals; piles of colorful stones and crystals; ancient-looking coins; cowry shells the size of her pinky and larger than her head; scary and smiling ceremonial masks; a jar of gold powder; a pile of jewels and rusted daggers; bags of colored feathers. An eight-foot-tall ebony statue of a stern-looking goddess watched from the far corner.
“Hey, you see this?” Sasha asked Chichi. The two huddled close around something. That snickering again.
Sunny stopped to look at a mask emitting a very foul odor.
“Sunny,” Orlu said, “here are the knives.”
They were piled in a beat-up cardboard box. Some had jeweled handles; others were made of metal, copper, bronze, or what looked like gold. Another looked like wood. Another was plastic.
“How do I-”
“You American?” Junk Man asked. Suddenly, he was right next to her.
She jumped. “Um-yeah, sort of. I was born there and lived there for nine years before we came back.”
“Who’s older? Him?” he asked, pointing at Orlu.
Sunny shrugged. “Only by a few months.”
“Your parents born here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Then you from here and there. Dual thing, you know?”
She laughed. “If you say so.”
“I know so.”
“So what’s that make me, then?” she asked.
“Who cares?” he said. “You want a juju knife, right?”
She nodded, grinning. She liked Junk Man very much.
“Close your eyes, reach in there, and pick one up.”
She shut her eyes. As she rummaged around, one of the knives cut her. “Ah!” She snatched her hand away and opened her eyes.
Junk Man immediately reached into the box. “We have a winner,” he said. The knife he brought out had a small smear of her blood on the blade. “Funny,” he said.
She stared at it. “What is that?”
“Oh. Weird,” Orlu said.
“Is that the one that chose you?” Chichi asked, coming over.
“Oh, that’s-uh, that’s different,” Sasha said.
Its handle was an unremarkable smooth silver, but the blade was paper-thin, made of a clear green material, like glass.
“Man from the north gave me this one for free after I bought some others from him,” Junk Man said. “He wore a thick veil, so I didn’t see his face. But he had eyes pretty like a woman’s and a very kind voice. You can always tell a man’s nature by his voice, a woman’s nature is more in the eyes. Anyway, there’s your knife. It picked you fair and square.
“Thirteen coppers, that one will be,” Junk Man said.
They all gasped. “That’s crazy!” Chichi said.
Sunny frowned, annoyed. She had expected to pay three. “Do you want-”
“I know what you want and I know what wants you,” Junk Man said. “When it comes to juju knives, I don’t negotiate. This one chose you, so no other knife will until it is destroyed. I could charge you a thousand chittim and you’d have to pay up.”
Thankfully, Sunny had brought twenty copper chittim. She dug out thirteen while Junk Man polished the knife with a white cloth.
“Let me see,” Anatov said to Junk Man when he’d finished with it. Anatov held it before him, pointing it straight ahead. He peered down the blade. “Nice.”
“Lucky girl-maybe,” Junk Man said. He looked at Sunny. “Come here and put them in that basket there, under the table,” he said. She dropped the chittim into the half-full basket. “Here, take it.”
Slowly, she took the juju knife. She yelped and almost dropped it. Junk Man grinned. “Ah, that’s all I really needed to see, that look.”
“Is-is this normal?” she asked, staring at her hand and the knife. It felt as if her hand and the knife had merged. She’d read about it in the juju knife book, but experiencing it was very different from reading about it.
“Yep,” Anatov said. “It’s a sensation best understood by experience.”
She touched the tip of the knife. It was amazing-she felt it right through the knife. She tapped it lightly against the table. It was like tapping her finger.
“Now try something,” Junk Man said.
“But I’m not that good at-”
“Call music,” Chichi said. “That’s easy enough.”
Sunny did remember how to do it, but she was still nervous. “Tell me again.”
“Cut downward, flick your wrist, and then catch the invisible pouch,” Chichi said. “Then speak the trigger words into it: ‘Bring music.’”
“All right,” she whispered. She carefully cut the air and flicked her wrist as if tying the invisible pouch in a knot. The wet, cool juju pouch dropped into her hand. She smiled. “Bring music,” she said into the pouch in English.
It wasn’t classical music that came. It was fast, high-pitched guitar. Highlife music. Her father’s favorite song by Nyanga Tolotolo. She laughed and grinned. She glanced at Chichi and was relieved to see her grinning, too. Two copper chittim fell to her feet.
“Ha! See? It pays for itself!” Junk Man shouted.
The loud music startled people, most of whom were Lambs and probably assumed it was coming from a boom box somewhere in Junk Man’s booth. A woman passing by shimmied her shoulders a bit, and a man did a few dance steps. Seconds later, the music faded away.
“Well done,” Anatov said.
“Your first juju charm by knife,” Sasha said, patting her on the back. “You’re a new woman.”
“It’s just the beginning,” Chichi said.
“Here,” Junk Man said, handing her a small blue bean. A sound was coming from it. She held it to her ear. The thing was giggling!
“I like to give my new customers a little gift,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said, looking at the bean. “What is it?”
“Take it home and put it under your bed. Wait a few days.”
“How much is this?” Sasha asked, holding up a polished brown conch shell the size of his hand.
“Hmm. Do you know what that does?” Anatov asked.
“Sure do,” Sasha said. Anatov and Sasha exchanged a look.
“One copper and a silver,” Junk Man said.
“How about one copper,” Sasha said.
“Sold.”