TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS PASSED before I decided to go to his hut. I was too afraid.
In those days, I couldn’t sleep through a night. I’d wake to the dark, sure that someone was in the room with me, and it wasn’t Papa or his first wife, Njeri the camel-racer. I’d have happily welcomed both of them. It was either the red eye about to kill me or Aro about to enact his revenge on me. Nevertheless, as Aro promised, no mob came after me. I even went back to school on the tenth day.
In his will, Papa left his shop to my mother and ordered Ji, his apprentice now graduated to Master, to run it. They would split the profits, 80 percent to my mother and 20 percent to Ji. It was a good deal for both, especially Ji who was from a poor family and now bore the title “Blacksmith Taught by the Great Fadil Ogundimu.” In addition, my mother had her cactus candy and other vegetables. The Ada, Nana the Wise, and two of my mother’s friends also came over each day to visit with her. My mother was okay.
Not once did Luyu, Diti, or Binta visit me and I vowed to never forgive them for this. Mwita didn’t come, either. But his actions I understood. He was waiting for me to come to him, at Aro’s hut. So for those four weeks, I was alone with my fear and loss. I returned to school because I needed the distraction.
I was treated like someone with a highly contagious disease. In the schoolyard, people moved away from me. They said nothing to me, mean or pleasant. What did Aro do to keep people from tearing me apart? Whatever it was, it didn’t change my reputation of being the evil Ewu girl. Binta, Luyu, and Diti avoided me. They avoided eye contact as they walked away. They ignored my greetings. This made me so angry.
After a few days of this, it was time for a showdown. I spotted them standing in their usual place near the school wall. I boldly approached. Diti looked at my feet, Luyu looked to the side, and Binta stared at me. My confidence wavered. I was so aware of the brightness of my skin, the boldness of my freckles, especially the ones on my cheeks, the sandiness of the braids that reached down my back.
Luyu looked at Binta and hit her on the shoulder. Binta immediately looked away. I stood my ground. I at least wanted an argument. Binta started crying. Diti swatted irritably at a fly. Luyu looked me straight in the face with such intensity that I thought she was going to hit me. “Come,” she said, glancing once around the schoolyard. She grabbed my hand. “Enough of this.”
Diti and Binta followed close behind as we quickly walked down the road. We sat on the curb, Luyu on one side of me, Binta on the other, and Diti next to Luyu. We watched people and camels pass by.
“Why did you do it?” Diti suddenly asked.
“Shut up, Diti,” Luyu said.
“I can ask whatever I want!” Diti said.
“Then ask properly,” Luyu said. “We’ve done her wrong. We’re not in the…”
Diti shook her head vigorously. “My mother said…”
“Did you even try to see her?” Luyu said. When she turned to me, she was crying. “Onyesonwu, what happened? I remember… when we were eleven, but… I don’t…”
“Was it your father who made you to stay away from me?” I hissed at Luyu. “Does he not want his beautiful daughter being seen with her ugly evil friend anymore?”
Luyu shrank back from me. I’d hit it right on the nail.
“Sorry,” I quickly said with a sigh.
“Is it evil?” Diti asked. “Can’t you go to an Ani priestess and…?”
“I’m not evil!” I shouted, waving my fists in the air. “Understand that about me, if not anything else.” I gritted my teeth and pounded my fist against my chest, as Mwita often did when he was angry. “I am what I am but I am not EVIL!”
It felt like I was shouting to all of Jwahir. Papa never felt I was evil, I thought. I started sobbing, feeling the loss of him hit me again. Binta put her arm over my shoulder and hugged me close to her. “Okay,” Binta whispered into my ear.
“Okay,” Luyu said.
“All right,” Diti said.
And that was how the tension broke between my friends and me. Just like hat. Even at the moment, I felt it. Less weight. All four of us must have felt it.
But I still had to deal with my fear. And the only way to do that was to face it. I went a week later, during a Rest Day. I got up early, showered, made breakfast, dressed in my favorite blue dress, and wrapped a thick yellow veil over my head.
“Mama,” I said, peeking into my parents’ room. She was sprawled on the bed, for once, soundly asleep. I was sorry to wake her.
“Eh?” she said. Her eyes were clear. She hadn’t been crying during the night.
“I made you some fried yam and egg stew and tea for breakfast.”
She sat up and stretched. “Where are you going?”
“To Aro’s hut, Mama.”
She lay back down. “Good,” she said. “Your father would approve.”
“Do you think?” I asked, moving closer to the bed to hear my mother better.
“Aro fascinated your papa. All mysterious things did. Including you and me… though he didn’t like the House of Osugbo much.” We laughed. “Onyesonwu, your father loved you. And though he didn’t know it as strongly as I do, he knew you were special.”
“I-I should have told you and Papa about my feud with Aro,” I said.
“Maybe. But we still wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”
I took my time. It was a cool morning. People were just coming out to do their morning chores. As I passed, no one greeted me. I thought about Papa and my heart ached. In the last few days, my grief was so strong that I felt the world around me ripple as it did at his funeral. Whatever had happened at the funeral could happen again. This was part of my reason for finally going to Aro. I didn’t want to hurt anyone else.
Mwita met me at the cactus gate. Before I could speak, he gathered me into his arms. “Welcome,” he said. He hugged me until I relaxed and hugged him back.
“See,” a voice said from behind us. We jumped away from each other. Aro stood behind the cactus gate, his arms crossed over his chest. He wore a long black caftan made of a light material. It fluttered around his bare feet in the cool morning breeze. “This is why you can’t live here.”
“I’m sorry,” Mwita said.
“Sorry for what? You’re a man and this woman is yours.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking at my feet, knowing that this was what he expected.
“You should be,” he said. “Once we start, you’re to keep him off of you. If you became pregnant while still learning, you could get us all killed.”
“Yes, Oga,” I said.
“You endure pain well, I gather,” Aro said.
I nodded.
“That at least is good,” he said. “Come through the gate.”
As I passed through, one of the cactuses scratched my leg. I hissed with annoyance, jumping away. Aro chuckled. Mwita passed through behind me untouched. He headed for his hut. I followed Aro to his. Inside were a chair and a raffia sleeping mat. Other than a small scratched up calculator wordpad and a lizard on the wall, that was all there was. We walked through the back door to where the desert opened before us.
“Sit,” he said, motioning to the raffia mats on the ground. He did the same.
We sat there looking at each other for a moment.
“You have tiger eyes,” he said. “And those have been extinct for decades.”
“You have old man’s eyes,” I said. “And old men don’t have very long to live.”
“I am old,” he said, getting up. He went into his hut and returned with a cactus thorn between his teeth. He sat back down. Then he utterly shocked me.
“Onyesonwu, I’m sorry.”
I blinked.
“I have been arrogant. I have been insecure. I have been a fool.”
I said nothing. I wholly agreed.
“I was shocked that I was given a girl, a woman,” he said. “But you’ll be tall, so there is that. What do you know of the Great Mystic Points?”
“Nothing, Oga,” I said. “Mwita couldn’t tell me much because… you wouldn’t teach him.” I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice. If he was admitting mistakes, I wanted him to admit all of them. Men like Aro will only admit wrongs once.
“I wouldn’t teach Mwita because he didn’t pass initiation,” Aro said firmly. “Yes, he’s Ewu and I was put off by that. You Ewu come to this world with soiled souls.”
“No!” I said, pointing my finger in his face. “You can say that about me, but you can’t say it about him. Didn’t you bother to ask him about his life? His story?”
“Lower your finger, child,” Aro said, his body going straight and stiff. “You’re undisciplined, that’s apparent. Do you want to learn discipline today? I can teach it well.”
With effort, I calmed myself.
“I know his story,” Aro said.
“Then you know he was made from love.”
Aro’s nostrils flared. “Regardless, I saw past his… mixed blood. I let him attempt initiation. You ask him what happened. All I will say is that, like all the others, he failed.”
“Mwita said you wouldn’t allow him to go through the initiation,” I said.
“He lied,” Aro said. “Ask him.”
“I will,” I said.
“There are few true sorcerers in these lands,” he said. “And it’s not by their choice that they become so. That’s why we are plagued by death, pain, and rage. First, there is great grief, then someone who loves us demands that we become who we must become. Your mother most likely was the one who set you on this path. There is much to her, sha.” He paused, seeming to consider this. “She must have demanded it the day you were conceived. Her demands obviously trumped your birth father’s. If you had been a boy, he’d have had an ally instead of an enemy.
“The Great Mystic Points are a means to an end. Each sorcerer has his own end. But I can’t teach you unless you pass initiation. Tomorrow. No child who’s come to me has passed. They return home beaten, broken, ailing, sick.”
“What happens during… initiation?” I asked.
“Your very being is tested. To learn the Points, you have to be the right person, that’s all I can tell you. Have you thrown that diamond away?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been cut,” he said. “That may be a problem. But it can’t be helped now.” He got up. “After the sun sets, no eating or drinking anything but water. Your monthly cycle is in two days. That may be a problem.”
“How do you know when my… when it is?”
He only laughed. “It can’t be helped. Tonight, before you sleep, meditate for an hour. Don’t talk to your mother after sunset. But you may talk to Fadil, your father. Come here at five a.m. Make sure you bathe well and wear dark clothing.”
I stared at him. How was I going to remember all those instructions?
“Go talk to Mwita. He’ll repeat my directions if you need to hear them again.”
I smelled burning sage as I approached Mwita’s hut. He was sitting quietly on a wide mat meditating, his back to me. I stood in the doorway and looked around. So this was where he lived. Woven items hung on the walls and were piled around his hut. Baskets, mats, platters, and even a half-done wicker chair.
“Sit down,” he said, without turning around.
I sat on the mat next to him, facing the hut’s entrance.
“You never told me that you could weave,” I said.
“Not important,” he said.
“I would have liked to learn,” I said.
He pulled his knees to his chest but said nothing.
“You haven’t told me everything,” I said.
“Do you expect me to?”
“When it’s important.”
“Important to whom?”
Mwita got up, stretched and leaned himself on the wall. “Have you eaten?”
“No.”
“It’s best if you eat heavily before the sun sets.”
“What do you know about this initiation?”
“Why would I tell you about the greatest failure of my life?”
“That’s not fair,” I said, standing up. “I’m not asking you to humiliate yourself. Telling me what you went through was crucial.”
“Why?” he said. “What good would it have done you?”
“It doesn’t matter! You lied to me. There should be no secrets between us.”
As he looked at me, I knew that Mwita was running through our relationship. He was searching for a truth or secret he could demand of me. He must have realized that I held nothing from him for he next said, “It’ll only scare you.”
I shook my head. “I’m more afraid of what I don’t know.”
“Fine. I almost died. I did… no, almost. The closer you come to completing the initiation, the closer you come to death. To be initiated is to die. I came… very close.”
“What ha…”
“It’s different for everyone,” he said. “There’s pain, horror-absolute. I don’t know why Aro even allows any of these local boys to try. That’s his malicious side.”
“When did you…”
“Not long after I came here,” he said. He took a deep breath, looked hard at me and then shook his head. “No.”
“Why? I’m to do this tomorrow, I want to know!”
“No,” was all he said and that was the end of it. Mwita could walk through the palm tree farms in the dead of night. He’d done this several times after spending hours with me. Once when we were sitting in my mother’s garden, a tarantula crept near my leg. He crushed it with his bare hand. But now, at the mention of his failed initiation, he looked utterly terrified.
Before I went home, Mwita reviewed my initiation requirements with me. I grew annoyed and asked him to write them down instead.
I knelt down beside my mother. She was in the garden, churning the soil around the plants with her hands. “How was it?” she asked.
“As much as I can expect from that crazy man,” I said.
“You and Aro are too much alike.” my mother said. She paused for a moment. “I talked to Nana the Wise today. She spoke of an initiation…” she trailed off as she searched my face. She saw what she needed to see. “When?”
“Tomorrow morning.” I brought out the list. “There are all these things I have to do to prepare.”
She read it and then said, “I’ll make you a large early dinner. Chicken curry and cactus candy?”
I smiled broadly.
I took a long hot bath and for a while I was calm. But as the night wore on, my fear of the unknown returned. By midnight, the delicious meal I’d eaten was gurgling uneasily in my belly. If I die during the initiation, Mama will be alone, I thought. Poor Mama.
I didn’t sleep. But for the first time since I was eleven years old, I wasn’t afraid of seeing the red eye. The cocks started crowing around three a.m. I bathed again and dressed in a long maroon dress. I wasn’t hungry and I felt a dull throb in my abdomen, both sure signs that my monthly was near. I didn’t wake my mother before I left. She was probably already awake.
“PAPA, PLEASE GUIDE ME,” I said as I walked. “Because I need guidance.”
To be honest, I didn’t think he was there. I had always believed that when people died, their spirits stayed close or sometimes came to visit. I still believed this, for it was this way with Papa’s first wife, Njeri. I felt her often in the house. But I didn’t feel Papa around me now. Only the cool breeze and the sounds of the crickets were with me.
Mwita and Aro were waiting for me in the back of Aro’s hut. Aro handed me a cup of tea to drink. It was lukewarm and tasted like flowers. After drinking it, the mild crampiness that I’d been feeling disappeared.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Walk into the desert,” Aro said, wrapping his brown garments around him.
I turned to Mwita. “All that matters to you is what is ahead,” Aro said.
“Go, Onyesonwu,” Mwita mumbled.
Aro pushed me toward the desert. For the first time in my life, I was reluctant to go into it. The sun was just coming up. I started walking. Minutes passed. I began to hear my heart beat in my ears. Something in the tea, I thought. A shaman’s brew, maybe. Whenever the breeze blew, I could distinctly hear sand grains clacking over each other. I clapped my hands over my ears. I kept walking. The breeze picked up, becoming a sand and dust filled wind.
“What is this?” I screamed, working to maintain my footing.
The sun was quickly blotted out. My mother and I had lived through three big sandstorms while we were nomads. We’d dug a hole and lain in it, using the tent to protect us. We were lucky not to be blown away or buried alive. Now here I was in such a storm with nothing between it and myself but my dress.
I decided to return to Aro’s hut. But I couldn’t see anything behind me. I shielded my face with my arm as I looked around. The whipping sand was drawing blood. Soon my eyelids were encrusted with sand, granules paining my eyes. I spit sand out only for more to fill my mouth.
Suddenly, the wind changed, moving behind me. It blew me toward a small orange light. When I got closer, I saw that it was a tent made of sheer blue material. There was a small fire burning inside.
“A fire in the middle of a sandstorm!” I shouted, laughing hysterically. My face and arms stung and my legs shook as I tried not to let the wind take me away.
I threw myself inside and was slapped with silence. Not even the tent’s walls shuddered from the wind. Nothing held the tent down. The bottom of the tent was sand. I rolled to my side coughing. Through my stinging watery eyes, I saw the whitest man I’d ever seen. He wore a heavy black cloak with a hood that dropped over the top half of his face. But the bottom half I saw plainly. His wrinkly skin was white like milk.
“Onyesonwu,” the man in black said very suddenly.
I jumped. There was something repulsive about him. I half expected him to scamper around the fire toward me with the speed and agility of a spider. But he remained seated, his long legs stretched before him. His sharp nails were grooved and yellow. He leaned back on one elbow. “Is that your name?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re the one Aro sends,” he said, his wet pink flat lips bending into a smirk.
“Yes.”
“Who sent you?”
“Aro.”
“What are you then?”
“Excuse me?”
“What are you?”
“Human,” I said.
“Is that all?”
“Eshu also.”
“So are you human then?”
“Yes.”
He reached into his robes and brought out a small blue jar. He shook it and set it down. “Aro calls me here and a female sits before me,” he said. He flared his nostrils. “One who will bleed soon. Very very soon. This place is sacred, you know.” He looked at me as if waiting for an answer. I was relieved when he picked up the container. He shook it and slammed it down. I wanted to rub my eyes they hurt so badly. He looked up at me with such anger that my heart jumped.
“You’ve been cut!” he said. “You can’t climax! Who allowed this to happen?”
I stammered, “It was a… I wanted to please my…I didn’t…”
“Shut up,” he said. He paused and when he spoke his voice was cooler. “Maybe that can be helped,” he said more to himself. He mumbled something and then said, “You may die today. I hope you’re prepared. They won’t find your body.”
I thought of my mother and then pushed her image out of my mind.
The man in black threw the container’s contents-bones. Tiny, fine bones, maybe from a lizard or some other small beast. They were bleached white and dry, several crumbling at the tips, revealing ancient porous marrow. They flew from the container and landed as if they would never move again. As if they were sure. My eyes felt heavy as I looked at the scattered bones. My eyes were drawn to them. He stared for a long time. Then he looked at me, his mouth a surprised O. I wished I could see his eyes. Then he masked his face with a more controlled look.
“This is normally where the pain starts. Where I get to listen to the boys scream,” the man in black said. He paused, looking down at the bones. “But you,” he smirked and nodded. “I must have you killed.” He lifted his left hand and twisted his wrist. I felt a crack in my neck as my head turned itself all the way around. I grunted. All went dark.
I opened my eyes and instantly knew that I wasn’t myself. The feeling was more peculiar than scary. I was a passenger in someone’s head yet still able to feel sweat rolling down his face and the insect biting his skin. I tried to leave, but I had no body to leave with. My mind was stuck there. The eyes I looked through stared at a concrete wall.
He sat on a hard and cool block of concrete. There was no roof. Sunlight shined in, making the already hot room even more uncomfortable. I heard many people nearby but I couldn’t tell exactly what they were saying. The person whose body I was in mumbled something and then laughed to… herself. The voice was a woman’s.
“Let them come, then,” she said. She looked down at herself and nervously rubbed her thighs. She wore a long coarse white dress. She was not as light-skinned as me but she was not dark like my mother either. I noticed her hands. I had only read about these in story tales. Tribal markings. This woman’s hands were covered with them. The circles, swirls, and lines wove into complex designs snaking up her wrists.
She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes in the sunshine and the world became red for a moment. Then someone grabbed her-us-with such roughness that I silently screamed. Her eyes flew open. She made no sound. She didn’t fight. I desperately wanted to. Then thousands of people burst before us, all of them screaming, yelling, shouting, talking, pointing, laughing, glaring.
The people stayed back as if some invisible force kept them twenty feet from the hole we were being dragged to. Beside the hole was a pile of sand. The men dragged us to the hole and pushed us in. I felt the woman’s whole body shudder as she hit the bottom. The ground was just higher than our shoulders. She looked around and I got a good view of the giant mob that was waiting for the execution.
Men shoveled dirt into the hole and soon we were buried to our neck. It was at this point that the woman’s fear must have infected me because suddenly I was being torn in two. If I had a body, I’d have thought that a thousand men had one of my arms and a thousand had the other and both groups were pulling. From behind, I heard a man loudly say, “Who will throw the first stone at this problem?”
The first stone hit the back of our head. The pain was an explosion. Many more came after that. After a while, the pain of our head being stoned fell to the back and the sensation of being pulled apart came forward. I was screaming. I was dying. Someone threw another rock and I felt something break. I knew death the moment it touched me. As best I could, as nothing, I tried to hold myself together.
Mama. I was leaving her all alone. I have to keep going, I thought with despair. Mama willed it to be so. She willed it! I had too much left to do. I felt Papa catch and hold me. He smelled of hot iron and his grasp, as always, was strong. He held me for a long time in that spirit place where all was colorful light, sound, smell, and heat.
Papa held me close. The squeeze of a hug. Then he let go and was gone. Soon the world of the spirits, a place I would learn to call “the wilderness,” began to melt and mix with a star-salted darkness. I could see the desert. There I was lying in it, half buried in the sand. A camel stood over me with a woman on its back. She wore a green shirt and pants and sat between the camel’s two shaggy humps. I must have moved because suddenly the camel started. The woman calmed it with a pat.
Instinctively, I flew down and lay on my body. As I did so, the woman spoke.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
I tried to answer but I had no mouth, not yet.
“I’m Njeri.” She looked up and grinned widely, the sides of her eyes creasing. “I was Fadil Ogundimu’s wife.” She was addressing someone else. She turned back to me and laughed. “Your papa has much to learn about the wilderness.”
I wanted to smile.
“I know your kind. I was like you, though I wasn’t given an opportunity to learn my gift. I could speak to camels. My mother went to see Aro. He refused me. I wouldn’t have passed the initiation. But he could have taught me other useful things. Always walk your own path, Onyesonwu.” She paused seeming to listen to someone. “Your father wishes you well.”
As I watched her ride off, I felt myself change. I could suddenly feel the air against my skin and my heart beating. There was an odd feeling of being weighed down, as if a weight was attached to each part of me, weights that weren’t so bothersome now but eventually would be. My mortality. I was exhausted. I ached all over, my legs, arms, my neck, and especially my head. I retreated into a restless, helpless sleep.
I woke to Mwita’s humming as he rubbed oil into my skin. Staticky energy coated my body like a computer’s monitor. His touch rubbed it away. He stopped when he realized I was awake. He pulled my rapa over my body. I grasped it weakly to my chest.
“You passed,” he said. His voice was strange. It was strained with concern, but there was something else too.
“I know,” I said. Then I turned my head and started crying. He didn’t try to hold me and I was glad. Why didn’t she fight? I thought. I’d have fought even if it was hopeless. Anything to stay out of that hole a bit longer.
I vividly remembered the sensation of having my forehead caved in by a large rock. It didn’t hurt as much as it should have. It just felt like I was suddenly… exposed. A rock destroyed my nose, bloodied my ear, buried itself in my cheek. I was conscious through most of it. The woman was, too. I gagged. Nothing came out because my stomach was empty. I sat back and massaged my temples. Mwita handed me a warm towel to wipe and soothe my eyes. It was soaked in oil.
“What is this?” I asked in a hoarse voice. “It’s not going to…”
“No,” Mwita said. “That’ll help get it out of your system. Wipe your face with it, too. I’ve rubbed it on the rest of you. You’ll feel better soon.”
“Where are we?” I asked, rubbing the oil on my eyes. It felt good.
“In my hut.”
“Mwita, I died,” I whispered.
“You had to.”
“I was in a woman’s head and I felt…”
“Don’t think about it,” he said, getting up. He picked up a plate of food sitting on his table. “Right now, you have to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Your mother made this,” Mwita said.
“My mother?”
“She was here. Yesterday.”
“Eh, but I didn’t see her…”
“Two days have passed, Onyesonwu.”
“Oh.” I slowly sat up, took the plate from Mwita and ate. It was chicken curry and green beans. Within a few minutes, my plate was clean. I felt much better.
“Where’s Aro?” I asked, rubbing the back and sides of my head.
“I don’t know,” Mwita sighed.
Then I understood what I had sensed in Mwita. It surprised me. I took his hand. If I didn’t address this now, our friendship would die. Even back then, I knew that disregarded jealousy eventually turned poisonous.
“Mwita, don’t feel that way,” I said.
He pulled his hand away. “I don’t know how to feel, Onyesonwu.” “Well, don’t feel that way,” I said, my voice hardening. “We’ve been through too much. And, besides, you’re above that sort of thing.”
“Am I?”
“Just because you were born a male does not make you more worthy than me.” I harrumphed. “Don’t act like Aro.”
Mwita said nothing, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes either.
I sighed. “Well, the way you feel won’t stop me from…”
He pressed his hand over my mouth. “Enough talking,” he whispered, his face close to mine. And then he moved over me; the oil on me made his motions smooth. My body ached and my head throbbed but for the first time in my life, I felt only pleasure. My Eleventh Rite juju was broken. I pulled Mwita closer. The sensation was so succulent that it brought tears to my eyes. It was so overwhelming that at some point, I stopped breathing. When Mwita noticed, he froze.
“Onyesonwu!” he said. “Breathe!”
Every part of my body was a sharp point of bliss. It was the most beautiful sensation I’d ever felt. When I only looked at him with bewildered eyes, he opened his mouth and breathed loudly to demonstrate. I began to see silvery red and blue explosions as my lungs demanded air. I had recently experienced death so it was easy for me to forget to breathe. I inhaled, my eyes locked on Mwita’s. Then I exhaled.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have…”
“Finish,” I breathed, pulling him to me, my head buzzing.
As our bodies met, fully, finally, throughout, Mwita reminded me to breathe. As he moved inside of me, he continued to remind me but by this time I wasn’t listening. It was exquisite. Soon I was so hot that I was shaking. Minutes passed. The sensation began to feel earnest, then agitating. I couldn’t release. I had been circumcised.
“Mwita,” I said. We were both slick with sweat.
“Eh?” he said, out of breath.
“I… something’s wrong with me. I…” I squeezed my face. “I can’t.”
He stopped moving and the terrible sensation in my loins decreased. He looked at me, beads of sweat dropping onto my chest. He surprised me with a smile. “Do something about it then, Eshu woman.”
I blinked, realizing what he meant. I concentrated. He began to move inside of me again and immediately, it felt like I had released my very being. “Ooooooooooooooooh,” I moaned. From far off I could hear Mwita laughing, as I fell into sleep with a sigh.
That tiny piece of flesh made all the difference. Growing it back hadn’t been hard and it pleased me that for once in my life obtaining something of importance was easy.
I RETURNED HOME THAT DAY. The sun was just ambling into the sky and the air and sand were warming. My mother shouted my name when she saw me. She’d been sitting on the front steps waiting. There were bags under her eyes and her long braids needed rebraiding. It was the first time I’d ever heard my mother’s voice go above a whisper. And the sound of it made my legs weak.
“Mama,” I shouted back from up the road.
Around us the neighborhood went about its business. Everyone was so unaware of what my mother and I had gone through. People only glanced up with mild curiosity. Most likely the sound of my mother’s voice was something talked about that night. Neither of us cared what they thought.
Aro didn’t request my presence for a week. And in that week, I was plagued by nightmares. Over and over, night after night, I was stoned to death. I was haunted by someone else’s demise. During the day, I was plagued by terrible headaches. When Binta, Diti, and Luyu came to my bedroom three days after my initiation, I was a blithering mess hiding under my covers weeping.
“What’s wrong with you?” I heard Luyu ask. I threw the covers from over my head, shocked at hearing her voice. I saw Diti turn and leave.
“Are you all right? Is it your father?” Binta said, sitting on my bed beside me.
I wiped the snot from my nose. I was disoriented and my confusion caused me to think about my biological father instead of Papa. Yes, he is my problem, I thought. More tears dribbled down my face. I hadn’t seen my friends in days. I’d left school two days before my initiation and I hadn’t told them a thing. Diti returned and handed me a towel soaked with warm water.
“Your mother asked us to come,” Luyu said.
Diti opened the curtains and pushed the window open. The room flooded with sunshine and fresh air. I wiped my face and blew my nose into the towel. Then I lay back, angry with my mother for asking them here. How was I supposed to explain my state to them? I had grown my clitoris back and I no longer carried my diamond in my mouth. My belly chain might as well have turned green.
For a while, they just sat there as I sniveled. If it weren’t for them, I’d have let the snot run freely down my face and pool onto my covers. What does it all matter? I thought. My mood darkened and I reached for my bed sheet to pull it back over my head. I’ll just ignore them. Eventually they’ll go away.
“Onyesonwu, just tell us,” Luyu said, softly. “We’ll listen.”
“We’ll help you,” Binta said. “Remember how the women helped me during our Eleventh Rite? If they hadn’t helped me that night, I was going to kill him.”
“Binta!” Diti exclaimed.
“Really?” Luyu said.
Binta had my full attention.
“Yes. I was going to poison him… that very next day,” Binta said. “He gets drunk almost every evening. He smokes his pipe as he does it. He wouldn’t have tasted it.”
I wiped my face again. “My mother once said that fear is like a man who, once burned, is afraid of a glow worm,” I said vaguely. I told them everything but the details of my initiation. From the day of my conception to the day I crawled into bed and didn’t want to leave it. Their faces grew distant during the part about my mother’s rape. I relished a little in forcing them to know the details. When I finished, they were so silent that I could hear the soft footsteps outside of the door. Moving down the hallway. My mother had listened to the whole thing.
“I can’t believe you kept this from us all this time,” Luyu finally said.
“You can really change into a bird?” Diti asked.
“Come on,” Binta said pulling my arm. “We have to get you outside.”
Luyu nodded and took my other arm. I tried to pull my arms away, “Why?”
“You need sunshine,” Binta said.
“I’m… I’m not properly dressed,” I said, yanking may arms away. I felt the tears coming back. Life was out there and death was, too. I feared both now. They pulled me from bed, unwrapped my night rapa and pulled a green dress over my head. We went outside and sat on the front steps of the house. The sun was warm on my face. There was no red haze blocking it, no sickly fuzzy mold growing on the ground, no smoke in the air, no looming death. After a while I quietly said, “Thank you.”
“You look better,” Binta said. “Sunshine heals. My mother says that you should open the curtains everyday because the sunlight kills the bacteria and such.”
“You made your father breathe,” Luyu said, her elbow on my knee.
“No,” I said, grimly. “Papa had passed. I only made his body breathe.”
“That was then,” Luyu said.
I sucked my teeth and looked away, irritated.
“Oh,” Diti said. Then she nodded. “Aro will teach her.”
“Right,” Luyu said. “She can do it already. She just doesn’t know how.”
“Eh?” Binta said, looking confused.
“Onyesonwu, do you know if you can do it?” Luyu asked.
“I don’t know,” I snapped.
“She can,” Diti said. “And I think your mother is right. That’s why she worked so hard to keep you alive. Mother’s intuition. You’re going to be famous.”
I laughed at this. I suspected that I’d be more infamous than famous. “So you think my mother would’ve allowed us both to die out there in the desert if she didn’t think I was so special?”
“Yes,” Diti said looking serious.
“Or if you’d have come out a boy,” Luyu added. “Your biological father is evil, and if you were a boy you would have been, too, I think. That’s what he wanted.”
Again we were quiet. Then Diti asked, “So will you stop going to school?”
I shrugged. “Probably.”
“What was it like with Mwita?” Luyu asked, smirking.
It was as if speaking his name summoned him, for there he was coming up the road. Luyu and Diti snickered. Binta patted my shoulder. He wore light tan pants and a long matching caftan. His clothes matched his skin so well that he looked more like a spirit than a person. I’d always avoided wearing this color for this very reason.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Not as good as it was for you and Onyesonwu a few nights ago, I hear,” Luyu said under her breath. Diti and Binta giggled and Mwita looked at me.
“Good afternoon, Mwita,” I said. “I-I’ve told them everything.” Mwita frowned. “You didn’t ask me.”
“Should I have?”
“You promised me secrecy.”
He was right. “Sorry,” I said.
Mwita looked at the three of them. “They can be trusted?” he asked me. “Completely,” Binta said.
“Onyesonwu is our Eleventh Rite mate, there should be no secrets between us, Mwita,” Luyu said.
“I don’t respect the Eleventh Rite,” Mwita said.
Luyu bristled. Diti gasped, “How can you…”
Luyu held up a hand to silence Diti. She turned to Mwita with a hard face. “Just as we keep your secrets, we expect you to respect Onyesonwu as a woman of Jwahir. I don’t care what kind of-of juju you’re capable of.”
Mwita rolled his eyes. “Done,” he said. “Onyesonwu, how much did you…”
“Everything,” I said. “If it weren’t for them coming today, you’d have found me in my bed losing my… self.”
“Okay,” Mwita said, nodding. “Then you all have to understand that you’re connected to her now. Not by some primitive rite, but by something real.” Luyu rolled her eyes, Diti glowered at him, and Binta looked at Onyesonwu with surprise.
“Mwita, stop being such a camel’s penis,” I said, annoyed.
“Women always have to have companions,” Mwita mused.
“And men always have false senses of entitlement,” I said.
Mwita gave me a dark look and I gazed back. Then he took my hand and massaged it. “Aro wants you to come by tonight,” he said. “It’s time.”
“YOU TOLD YOUR FRIENDS?” Aro asked. “Why?”
I rubbed my forehead. On the way to Aro’s hut, I’d had one of my headaches and been forced to lean myself against a tree for fifteen minutes until it passed. The headache was mostly gone.
“They helped me, Oga. Then they asked so I told them,” I said.
“You do understand that now they’re part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“You’ll see.”
I sighed. “I shouldn’t have told them.”
“Can’t be helped now,” Aro said. “So, answers. You will understand much tonight. But first, Onyesonwu, I have talked to Mwita about this and now I talk to you, though I wonder if I’m wasting my words. I know what you two did.”
I felt my face grow hot.
“You possess both ugliness and beauty. Even to my eyes, you’re confusing. Mwita can only see your beauty. So he can’t help himself. But you can.”
“Oga,” I said trying to hold calm. “I’m no different from Mwita. We’re both human, we should both make the effort.”
“Don’t deceive yourself.”
“I’m not d…”
“And don’t interrupt me.”
“Then don’t continue with these assumptions! If you’re going to teach me, I don’t want to hear any of that! I’ll stop having intercourse with Mwita. Okay. I apologize. But he and I will both make the effort to refrain. Like two humans!” I was shouting now. “Flawed, imperfect creatures! That’s what we both are, Oga! That’s what we ALL are!”
He stood up. I didn’t move, my heart pounding hard in my chest. “Okay,” Aro said with a smirk. “I will try.”
“Good.”
“However, you are never to speak to me as you just did. You’re learning from me. I am your superior.” He paused. “You may know and understand me, but if we came to blows again, I’d kill you first… easily and without hesitation.” He sat back down. “You and Mwita are not to have intercourse. Not only will it disrupt your learning, but if you were to become pregnant, you’d risk a lot more than your own and the child’s life.
“This happened to a woman long ago who was learning the Points. She was too early in her pregnancy for her Master be aware of it. When she attempted a simple exercise, the entire town was wiped out. Disappeared as if it never existed.” Aro seemed satisfied with my shocked look. “You are now on the road to something very powerful but unstable. Have you seen your birth father’s eye since you were initiated?”
“No,” I said.
Aro nodded. “He won’t even try to watch you now. That is how potent your path is. If you simply avoid meeting him face-to-face, you’ll be safe.” He paused. “Let’s start. Where we begin is up to you. Ask me what you wish to know.”
“I want to know the Great Mystic Points,” I said.
“Build a foundation first. You know nothing about the Points, so you aren’t even prepared to ask about them. To get the answers, you must have the right questions.”
I thought for a moment, then I had my question. “Papa’s first wife,” I said. “Why didn’t you teach her?”
“You wish me to apologize for my previous mistakes, too,” he said.
I didn’t but I said, “Yes. I do.”
“Women are difficult,” he said. “Njeri was like you. Wild and arrogant. Her mother was the same way.” He sighed. “It was for the same reason I refused you. It was a mistake to refuse to teach her at least minor jujus. She’d have failed initiation.”
I hoped Njeri heard his words. I believe she did. “Well… Okay. I guess, my next question is… Who was she?”
I wasn’t surprised that Aro understood I was referring to the woman whose death the man in black had forced me to experience. “Ask Sola,” he snapped.
“The man who initiated me?” I asked.
Aro nodded.
“Then who is Sola?”
“A sorcerer like me but older. He’s had more time to gather, absorb and give.”
“Why’s his skin so white? Is he human?”
Aro laughed loudly at this, as if remembering a joke. “Yes,” he said. “He throws the bones and reads your future. If you’re worthy, he shows you death. You have to ride through death to pass, but riding through it doesn’t mean you pass. That’s decided afterward. Almost all who pass through death pass initiation. There are a few… like Mwita, who are denied for some reason.”
“Why didn’t Mwita pass?”
“I’m not sure. Neither is Sola.”
“What of you, Aro? What was it like for you? What’s your story?”
He looked at me in that way again, as if I wasn’t worthy. He didn’t know he did it. He couldn’t control it. My mother was right, I thought. All men bear stupidity. I laugh at these thoughts now. If it were only so simple for women bear it too.
“Why do you look at me that way?” I snapped before I could stop myself.
He got up and walked toward the desert, a place that now also held a bit of mystery for me. I got up and followed. We walked until his hut was barely in sight.
“I’m from Gadi, a village on the fourth of the Seven Rivers,” he said.
“That’s where that storyteller was from,” I said.
“Yes, but I’m much older than she,” he said. “I knew it before the Okeke started revolting. My parents were fishermen.” He turned to me and smiled, “Shall I call my mother a fisherwoman? Does that suit you?”
I smiled back, “Yes, very much.”
He harrumphed. “I’m the tenth of eleven children. All of us fished. My grandfather on my father’s side was a sorcerer. He beat me the day he saw me change into a water weasel. I was ten years old. Then he taught me everything he knew. ”
“I had been changing my shape since I was nine. The first time I did it, I’d been sitting at the river, a fishing stick in my hands, and a water weasel had come up to me. It grabbed me with its eyes. I remember nothing of those moments, only coming back to myself in the middle of the river. I’d have drowned if one of my sisters hadn’t been in her boat nearby and seen me floundering.”
“I went through initiation at thirteen. My grandfather knew so much but he was still a slave, as we all were. No, not all. Eventually I refused the fate set for me by the Great Book. One day, I saw my mother beaten bloody for laughing at a Nuru man who had tripped and fallen. I ran to help her but before I could get to her, my father grabbed and beat me so badly that I lost consciousness.
“When I came to, right there, I changed myself into an eagle and I flew away. I don’t know how long I remained an eagle. Many years. When I finally decided to change back, I was no longer a boy. I became a man named Aro, who traveled and listened and watched. This is me. You see?”
I saw. But there were parts about himself that he was leaving out. Like his relationship with the Ada. “Your initiation,” I said. “What did you…”
“I saw death, as you did. You’ll recover, eventually, Onyesonwu. It was something you had to see. It happens to us all. We fear what we don’t know.”
“But that poor woman,” I said.
“It happens to us all. Don’t weep for her. She’s reached the wilderness. Congratulate her instead.”
“Wilderness?” I said.
“After death, the path leads there,” he said. He smirked. “Sometimes before death, too. You were forced there the first time. The clitoris or penis, when put through that kind of trauma, will take sensitive ones there. This was why I was worried about you being circumcised. You must pass into the wilderness during initiation. Being Eshu saved you, for nothing taken from an Eshu’s body is ever permanently gone until death.”
We walked for a few minutes as I mulled over these things. I wanted to be away from him, to sit and think. Aro implied that I had grown my clitoris back during initiation and removed it afterward, for I’d had to grow it again with Mwita. I wondered why I’d done that, removed it again? Jwahir’s customs were under my skin more than I realized.
“What happened to you that first day with the weasel?” I asked. “The day you almost drowned? Why does it happen like that?”
“I was visited. We all are.”
“By who?”
Aro shrugged. “Whoever must visit us to show us how to do what we can do.”
“Too much of this doesn’t make complete sense. There are holes in…”
“What makes you think that you should understand it all?” he asked. “That’s a lesson you have to learn, instead of being angry all the time. We’ll never know exactly why we are, what we are, and so on. All you can do is follow your path all the way to the wilderness, and then you continue along because that’s what must be.”
We followed our own footsteps back to the hut. I was glad. I’d had enough for one day. Little did I know that this was the mildest day of them all. This day was nothing.
IT ’S A DAY THAT I’VE PULLED UP MANY TIMES in the last year to remind me that life is also good. It was a Rest Day. The Rain Fest lasts four days and during those days no one works. Sprinklers made from capture stations are set up all around the market. People can huddle under umbrellas, watch singing acrobats, and buy boiled yam and stew, curry soup, and palm wine.
This memorable day was on the first festival day, when not much was going on other than people hanging around and catching up with one another. My mother was spending the afternoon with the Ada and Nana the Wise.
I made myself a cup of tea and sat on the front steps to watch people pass by. I’d slept well for once. No nightmares, no headaches. The sun felt good on my face. My tea tasted strong and delicious. This day was just before I started learning the Points. When I was still capable of relaxing.
Across the road, a young couple showed off their new baby to some friends. Nearby, two old men concentrated on a game of Warri. On the side of the road, a girl and two boys drew pictures with colored sand. The girl looked as if she’d be eleven soon… I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to think about anything like that today. I looked up the road. I grinned. Mwita grinned back, his tan caftan blowing in the breeze. Why does he insist on wearing that color? I thought, though I kind of liked it. He sat beside me.
“How are you?” he said.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to think about how I was. He touched one of my long braids, pushed it aside and kissed my cheek. “Some coconut sweets,” he said, handing me the box tucked under his arm.
We sat there, close enough for our shoulders to touch, eating the soft square-shaped cakes. Mwita always smelled good, like mint and sage. His nails were always well trimmed. This was from his wealthy Nuru upbringing. Okeke men bathed several times a day but only the women took such care of their skin, nails, and hair.
Minutes later, Binta, Luyu, and Diti arrived on Luyu’s camel. They were a whirl of brightly colored garments and perfumed oils. My friends. I was surprised that there wasn’t a parade of men following their camel. But then again, Luyu liked to ride fast.
“You’re early,” I said. I hadn’t been expecting them for another three hours.
“I had nothing better to do,” Luyu shrugged, handing me two bottles of palm wine. “So I went to Diti’s house and she had nothing better to do. Then we went to see Binta and she had nothing better to do. Do you have anything better to do?”
We all laughed. Mwita handed them the box of coconut sweets and they each happily took some. We played a game of Warri. By the end of the game, we were all nicely spirited from Luyu’s wine. I sang some songs for them and they applauded. Luyu, Diti, and Binta had never heard me sing. They were amazed and, for once, I was proud. As the day progressed we moved inside. Well into the night, we talked about nothing much of substance. Insignificance. Wonderful unimportance.
See us here and remember it. We had all lost most of our innocence, certainly. In my, Mwita’s, and Binta’s case, all of it. But this day we were all happy and well. This would soon change. Dare I say that just after the Rain Festival, when I returned to Aro’s hut, the rest of my story, though it spans over four years, begins to move very fast.
“BRICOLEUR, ONE WHO USES all that he has to do what he has to do,” Aro said. “This is what you must become. We all have our own tools. One of yours is energy, that’s why you anger so easily. A tool always begs to be used. The trick is to learn how to use it.”
I took notes with a stick of sharpened charcoal on a piece of paper. At first, he’d demanded that I hold all lessons in my memory but I learn best by writing things down.
“Another of your tools is that you can change your shape. So already, you have tools to work two of the four Points. And now that I think of it, you have one to work the third. You can sing. Communication.” He nodded, frowning to himself. “Yes, sha.”
“We’ve come far for this, so listen.” He paused. “And put down that charcoal stick, you’re not allowed to write this down. You’re not to ever teach this to anyone, unless he has passed his initiation, too.”
“I won’t,” I nervously said.
Of course, by telling you all this, you see that I lied. Back then I spoke the truth. But much has happened since. Secrets mean less to me now. But I understand why these lessons can’t be found anywhere, not even in the House of Osugbo-a place which I now knew had pushed me out by using its irritating tricks. It knew only Aro could teach me.
“Not even Mwita,” he said.
“Okay.”
Aro pushed back his long sleeves. “You’ve carried this knowledge, since you… have known me. That may help or it may not. We’ll see.”
I nodded.
“Everything is based on balance.” He looked at me to make sure I was listening.
I nodded.
“The Golden Rule is to let the eagle and the hawk perch. Let the camel and the fox drink. All places operate off of this elastic but durable rule. Balance cannot be broken but it can be stretched. That’s when things go wrong. Speak, so I know you hear me.”
“Okay,” I said. He wanted constant acknowledgment of my understanding.
“The Mystic Points are aspects of everything. A sorcerer can manipulate them with his tools to make things happen. It’s not the ‘magic’ of children’s stories. To work the Points is far beyond any juju.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But there’s logic to it, pitiless calm logic. There is nothing that a man must believe that can’t be seen or touched or sensed. We are not so dead to things around and within us, Onyesonwu. If you are paying attention, you can know.”
“Okay,” I said.
He paused. “This is difficult. I’ve never spoken this aloud. It is strange.”
I waited.
“There are four points,” he said loudly. “Okike, Alusi, Mmuo, Uwa.”
“Okike?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “But…”
“Just names. The Great Book says that Okeke people were the first people on earth. The Mystic Points were known long before this wretched book existed. A sorcerer who believed he was a prophet wrote the Great Book. Names, names, names,” he said with a wave of his hands. “They don’t always equal up.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The Uwa Point represents the physical world, the body,” Aro said. “Change, death, life, connection. You’re Eshu. That is your tool to manipulate it with.”
I nodded, frowning.
“The Mmuo Point is the wilderness,” he said, moving his hand as if it traveled over ripples of water. “Your great energy allows you to glide through the wilderness while carrying the baggage of life. Life is very heavy. You’ve been to the wilderness twice. I suspect that there have been other times where you’ve stepped into it.”
“But…”
“Don’t interrupt,” he said. “The Alusi point represents forces, deities, spirits, non-Uwa beings. The masquerade you met the day you came here was an Alusi. The wilderness is populated by them. The Uwa world is also ruled by Alusi. Silly magic men and fortune-tellers believe it is the other way around.” He laughed dryly.
“Lastly, the Okike Point represents the Creator. This point cannot be touched. No tool can turn the back of the Creator toward what It has created.” He spread his hands. “We call the sorcerer’s toolbox that contains the sorcerer’s tools Bushcraft.” He stopped talking and waited. I took my cue to ask my questions.
“How can I… I was in the wilderness, did that mean I was dead?”
Aro just shrugged. “Words, names, words, names. They don’t matter sometimes.” He clapped his hands together and got up. “I’m going to teach you something that will make you sick. Mwita has a lesson with the healer today but that can’t be helped. He’ll be back soon enough to care for you if need be. Come. Let’s go tend to my goats.”
A black goat and a brown goat sat in the shade in the shed near Aro’s hut. As we approached, the black goat stood up and turned around. We had a nice view of its anus opening up to push out tiny round black balls of feces. It made the place smell that much more strongly of goat, musky and pungent in the dry heat. I frowned and flared my nostrils, disgusted. I’d never liked the smell of goats, though I ate the meat.
“Ah, one has volunteered,” Aro laughed. He led the black goat by its small horns around to the back of the hut. “Take it,” he said, putting my hand to its horn. Then he went into his hut. I looked down at the goat as it tried to yank its head from me. When I turned around, Aro was coming out of the hut with a large knife.
I raised a hand to fend him off. He stepped around me, grabbed the goat’s horn, turned its head, and slit its throat open. I was so prepared for combat that the goat’s blood and its brays of shock and pain might as well have been my own. Before I knew what I was doing, I knelt beside the terrified animal, pressed my hand to its bleeding throat, and shut my eyes.
“Not yet!” he said, grabbing my arm and yanking me back. I sat back hard in the sand. What just happened? was all I could think as the goat bled to death before my eyes. Its eyes grew sleepy. It knelt down on its knobby knees, looking accusingly at Aro.
“Never seen anyone unlearned do that,” Aro said to himself.
“Eh?” I said, out of breath, watching the goat’s life fade. My hands itched.
Aro touched his chin. “And she’d have done it, too. I’m sure of it, sha.”
“What…”
“Shhh,” he said, still thinking.
The goat laid its head on its hoofs, closed its eyes, and did not move. “Why did you…” I began.
“You remember what you did to your father?”
“Y-yes,” I said.
“Do it now,” he said. “This goat’s mmuo-a is still around, confused. Bring it back and then mend the wound as you wanted to.”
“But I don’t know how,” I said. “Before… I just did it.”
“Then just do it again,” he said, growing agitated. “What can I do with so much doubt, sha? Ah ah.” He pulled me up and shoved me toward the goat’s corpse. “Do it!”
I knelt down and rested my hand on its bloody neck. I shivered with revulsion, not from the dead goat, but the fact that it had died so recently. I froze. I could feel its mmuo-a moving around me. It was a light shifting in the air, a soft sandy sound nearby.
“It’s running,” I said softly.
“That’s good,” Aro said behind me, the frustration gone from his voice.
The poor thing was terrified and discombobulated. I looked at Aro. “Why did you kill it like that? That was cruel.”
“What is it with you women?” Aro snapped. “Must everything make you cry?”
Anger flared in me and I could feel the ground beneath me grow warm. Then it felt as if I knelt on hundreds of metal-bodied ants. They moved about underneath me, conducting something through me. I understood. I pulled it up from the ground and pushed it into my hands. More and more-there was an endless supply of it. I drew from my anger at Aro and from my own reserve of power. I drew from Aro’s strength, too. I’d have also drawn from Mwita if he’d been there.
“Now,” Aro said softly. “You see.”
I saw.
“Control it this time,” he said.
All my eyes saw was the goat’s dead body. But its mmuo-a ran circles around me. I felt it right next to me, its hoof on my leg as it watched what I was doing. Beneath my hand, the cut to its neck was… churning. The cut’s edges were knitting themselves up. The sight made me nauseated.
“Go,” I told the mmuo-a. A minute later, I removed my hand, turned my head, and was violently sick. I didn’t see the goat stand up and shake its head. I was vomiting too loudly to hear its cry of joy or feel it lay its head on my thigh in thanks. Aro helped me up. In the short walk to Mwita’s hut, I vomited again. Much of it was filled with hay and grass. My breath tasted like the odor of live goat and that made me vomit again.
“Next time, it will be better,” Aro said. “Soon, bringing back life will have little physical effect on you at all.”
Mwita returned late. Aro wasn’t a good caretaker. He made sure that I didn’t choke on my own vomit but he had no soothing words. He wasn’t that kind of man. Later that evening, Mwita shaved off the goat hairs growing on the back of my hand. He assured me that they wouldn’t grow back but what did I care? I was too sick. He didn’t ask me what had made me so ill. He knew from the day I started learning that there would be a part of me that he’d have no access to.
Mwita knew more than Jwahir’s best healer. Even the House of Osugbo thought him worthy of its books, for Mwita consumed many medical books he’d found there. Because he was such an expert on the human body, he was able to calm mine. But there were things I suffered from that came from the wilderness. He could do nothing about those. So I suffered much that night, but not as much as I could have.
This was how it was for three and half years. Knowledge, sacrifice, and headaches. Aro taught me how to converse with masquerades. This left me hearing voices and singing strange songs. The day I learned how to glide through the wilderness, I was ignorable for a week. My mother could barely see me. Several people probably thought I was dead after seeing what they thought was my ghost. Even after that, I was prone to moments of not being quite either there or here.
I learned to use my Eshu skills not only to change into other animals but to grow and change parts of my body. I realized that I could change my face a bit, altering my lips and cheekbones, and if I cut myself, I could heal the wound. Luyu, Binta, and Diti watched me as I learned. They feared for me. And sometimes they kept their distance, fearing for themselves.
Mwita grew closer to and more distant from me. He was my healer. He was my mate, for though we could not have intercourse, we could lie in each other’s arms, kiss each other’s lips, love each other dearly. Yet, he was barred from understanding what it was that was shaping me into something he both marveled at and envied.
My mother allowed what was to be. My biological father waited.
My mind evolved and thrived. But it was all for a reason. Fate was preparing for the next phase. After I tell you, you decide for yourself if I was ready for it.
MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE OF THE POSITION OF THE SUN. Or maybe the way that man inspected a yam. Or the way that woman considered a tomato. Or maybe it was those women laughing at me. Or that old man glaring at me. As if they all had little else to worry about. Or maybe it was the position of the sun, high in the sky, bright, sizzling.
Whatever it was, it got me thinking about my last lesson with Aro. The lesson was particularly infuriating. The purpose was for me to learn to see distant places. It was rainy season, so collecting rain water wasn’t too hard. I took the water inside Aro’s hut and concentrated on it, focusing hard on what I sought to see. The storyteller’s news from years ago was on my mind.
I expected to see Okeke people slaving for Nurus. I expected to see Nuru people going about their business as if this were normal. I must have tuned in to the worst part of the West. The rainwater showed me ripped oozing flesh, bloody erect penises, sinew, intestines, fire, heaving chests, mewling bodies engaged in evil. Without thinking, my hand slapped the clay bowl away. It crashed against the wall, breaking in two.
“It’s still happening!” I shouted at Aro who was outside tending to his goats.
“Did you think it stopped?” he said.
I had. At least for a while. Even I’d exercised some denial in order to live my life.
“It ebbs and flows,” Aro said.
“But why?? What is…”
“No creature or beast is happy when enslaved,” Aro said. “Nuru and Okeke try to live together, then they fight, then they try to live together, then they fight. Okeke numbers dwindle now. But you remember the prophecy that storyteller spoke of.”
I nodded. The storyteller’s words had stayed with me for years. In the West, she’d said, a Nuru seer prophesied that a Nuru sorcerer would come and change what was written.
“It will come to pass,” Aro said.
I was walking through the market, rubbing my forehead, the sun beating down as if to provoke me, when the women laughed. I turned. It had come from within a group of young women. Women my age. Around twenty. From my old school. I knew them.
“Look at her,” I heard one of them say. “Too ghastly to marry.”
I felt it go snap inside me, in my mind. The last straw. I’d had enough. Enough of Jwahir, whose people were as bloated and complacent as the Golden Lady herself. “Is something wrong?” I loudly asked the women.
They looked at me as if I were disturbing them. “Lower your voice,” one of them said. “Weren’t you raised properly?”
“She was barely raised at all, remember?” one of the others said.
Several people paused in their transactions to listen. An old man glared at me.
“What is with you people?” I said, turning around to address all around me. “All this is unimportant! Can’t you see?” I paused to catch my breath, actually hoping an audience would gather. “Yes, I am talking, come and listen. Let me answer all the questions you’ve all had about me for so long!” I laughed. The crowd was already larger than the meager gathering that came to hear the storyteller speak that night.
“Only a hundred miles away, Okeke people are being wiped away by the thousands!” I shouted, feeling my blood rise. “Yet here we all are, living in comfort. Jwahir turns her fat unmoving backside to it all. Maybe you even hope our people there will finally die off so you can stop hearing about it. Where is your passion?” I was crying now and still I stood alone. It had always been this way. This was why I decided to speak the words Aro had taught me. He’d warned me not to use these words. He said I wasn’t remotely old enough to speak them. I’ll pry your cursed eyes open, I thought as the words tumbled from my lips, smooth and easy as honey.
I won’t tell you the words. Just know I spoke them. Then I flared my nostrils and drew on the anxiety, rage, guilt, and fear swarming around me. I had unknowingly done this at Papa’s funeral and knowingly done it with the goat. I crossed over. What will they see? I wondered, suddenly afraid. Well, it can’t be helped now. I dug deep into what made me me and took them into what my mother went through.
I should never have done this.
All of us were there, only eyes, watching. There were about forty of us and we were both my mother and the man who helped make me. The man who’d been watching me since I was eleven. We watched him get off his scooter and look around. We saw him see my mother. His face was veiled. His eyes were like a tiger’s. Like mine.
We watched him ravage and destroy my mother. She was limp beneath him. She’d retreated into the wilderness and there she’d waited as she watched. She always watched. She had an Alusi in her. We felt the moment my mother’s will broke. We felt her attacker’s moment of doubt and disgust with himself. Then the rage that came from his people took him again, filling his body with unnatural strength.
I felt it inside me, too. Like a demon buried under my skin since my conception. A gift from my father, from his corrupted genetics. The potential and taste for amazing cruelty. It was in my bones, firm, stable, unmoving. Oh, I had to find and kill this man.
There was screaming from everywhere, from everyone. The Nuru men and their women, their skin like the day. And the Okeke women with skin like the night. The din was awful. Some of the men sobbed and laughed and praised Ani as they raped. Women called to Ani for help, a few of these women were Nuru. The sand was clumpy with blood and saliva and tears and semen.
I was so transfixed by the screaming that it took seconds for me to realize that it had started coming from the people in the market. I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map. Around me, people sobbed. A man fainted. Children ran in circles. I didn’t think about the children! I realized. Someone grabbed my arm.
“What have you done?” Mwita shouted. He pulled me along at such a fast pace I couldn’t immediately answer. People around us were too stunned and shaken to stop us.
“They should know!” I shouted, when I’d finally caught my breath.
We’d left the market and started up the road.
“Just because we hurt doesn’t mean others should!” Mwita said.
“It does!” I shouted. “We’re all hurting whether we know it or not! It has to stop!”
“I know!” Mwita shouted back. “I know it more than you!”
“Your father didn’t rape your mother to create you! What do you know?”
He stopped walking and grabbed my arm. “You’re out of control!” he hissed. He threw down my arm. “You only know what you’ve seen!”
I just stood there. I was far too defiant and unwilling to own up to the stupidity of my comment and my lack of self-control.
“I will tell you,” he said, lowering his voice.
“Tell me what?”
“Move,” he said. “I’ll tell you as we go. Too many eyes here.” We walked for two minutes before he spoke. “You can be really stupid sometimes.”
“So can…” I shut my mouth.
“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t.” He looked behind us and I looked too. No one was following us. Yet.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s true that I traveled east alone until I met Aro. But there was some time there, just after… When the Okeke and the Nuru were fighting and I turned myself ignorable to escape, I didn’t know how to stay ignorable for long. Not yet. Only for a few minutes, really. You know how it is.”
I did. It took me a month to sustain it for ten minutes. It required serious concentration. Mwita had been so young; I was surprised he was able to hold it at all.
“I made it out of the house, out of the village, away from the real fighting. But out in the desert, I was soon captured by Okeke rebels. They had machetes, bows and arrows, some guns. I was locked into a shack with Okeke children. We were to fight for the Okeke side. They killed anyone who tried to run away.”
“That first day, I saw a girl raped by one of the men. The girls had it worse because they weren’t just beaten into obeying, as we all were. They were raped, too. The next night, I saw a boy shot when he tried to escape. A week later, a group of us were forced to beat a boy to death because he’d tried to escape.” He paused, flaring his nostrils. “I was Ewu, so they beat me more often and watched me more closely. Even with all the sorcery I knew, I was too afraid to attempt an escape.
“They showed us how to shoot arrows and use machetes. The few of us who showed that we had good eyes were taught to shoot guns. I was very good with guns. But twice I tried to kill myself with the one given to me. And twice I was beaten out of doing so. Months later, we were taken into the fighting against the Nuru, the race of people I was raised to live with as family.
“I killed many.” Mwita sighed and continued, “One day, I got sick. We were camping in the desert. The men were digging mass graves for those who’d died in the night. There were so many, Onyesonwu. They threw me in with the bodies when they saw that I couldn’t get up.
“I was buried alive. They moved on. After a few hours, the fever I was suffering from abated and I dug myself out. Immediately, I went looking for medicinal plants to cure myself. And that was how I was able to travel east. I’d spent two months with those rebels. If I hadn’t looked dead, I’m sure I’d be dead. Those are your innocent Okeke ‘victims.’ ”
We’d stopped walking.
“It’s not as simple as you think,” he said. “There is sickness on both sides. Be careful. Your father sees things in black and white, too. The Okeke bad, Nuru good.”
“But it’s the Nuru’s fault,” I said quietly. “If they hadn’t treated the Okeke like trash, then the Okeke wouldn’t be behaving like trash.”
“Can’t the Okeke think for themselves?” Mwita said. “They know best what it feels like to be enslaved yet look what they do to their own children! My aunt and uncle weren’t murderers, Onyesonwu! They were killed by murderers!”
I was deeply ashamed.
“Come,” he said, holding out his hand. I looked at it and noticed for the first time, a faint scar on his right index finger. From the trigger of a hot gun? I wondered.
A half hour later, I stood outside Aro’s hut. I’d refused to go in.
“Then stay here,” Mwita had said. “I’ll tell him.”
While Mwita and Aro talked, I was glad to be alone because… I was alone. I kicked the hut’s wall with the heel of my foot and sat down. I scooped up some sand and let it run through my fingers. A black cricket hopped over my leg and a hawk screeched from somewhere in the sky. I looked to the west where the sun would set and the evening stars would rise. I took a deep deep breath and held my eyes wide open. I stayed very still. My eyes grew dry. My tears felt good when they came.
I stood up, took off my clothes, changed into a vulture and rode the late hot afternoon air into the sky.
I returned an hour later. I felt better, calmer. As I was putting my clothes on, Mwita poked his head from Aro’s hut.
“Hurry up,” he said.
“I will come when I please,” I mumbled. I straightened out my clothes.
As the three of us talked, I found myself getting riled up again. “Who’s going to stop it?” I asked. “It won’t stop once the Nuru have killed all the Okeke in their so-called land, will it, Aro?”
“Doubtful,” Aro said.
“Well, I’ve decided something. This prophecy will come true, and I want to be there when it does. I want to see him and I want to help him succeed at whatever it is he will do.”
“And your other reason for going?” Aro asked.
“To kill my father,” I said bluntly.
Aro nodded. “Well, you can’t stay here anyway. I was able to stop the people from coming after you before but this time you dug your talon into a sore part of Jwahir’s psyche. Plus your father is expecting you.”
Mwita got up and without a word walked off. Aro and I watched him leave.
“Onyesonwu,” Aro said, “it’ll be a harsh journey. You have to be prepared for…”
I didn’t hear the rest of what he said, for one of my headaches began to throb in my temples, increasing with each thump. Within seconds, it felt as it always eventually did, like stones hitting my head. It was the mixture of Mwita’s leaving the hut, knowing I was to leave Jwahir, the images of violence still swirling around my mind, and the face of my biological father. All those things triggered my sudden suspicion.
I jumped up and stared at Aro. I was so pained, so flabbergasted, that for the second time in my life, I forgot how to breathe. My headache increased and everything tinted silvery red. The look on Aro’s face scared me more. It was calm and patient.
“Open your mouth and take in air before you pass out,” he said. “And sit down.”
When I finally sat back down, I started sobbing. “It can’t be, Aro!”
“All initiates have to see it,” he said. He smiled sadly. “People fear the unknown. What better way to remove one’s fear of death than to show it to him?”
I pressed my temples. “Why will they hate me so much?” Somehow I would end up being jailed and then stoned to death and many people would be very happy about it.
“You’ll find out, won’t you?” Aro said, solemnly. “Why spoil the surprise?”
I went to see Mwita. Aro had instructed me on several things, including when he thought I should leave. I had two days. Mwita sat on his bed, his back against the wall.
“You don’t think, Onyesonwu,” he said, looking blankly straight ahead.
“Did you know?” I asked. “Did you know that it was my own death that I saw?”
Mwita opened his mouth and then shut it.
“Did you?” I asked again.
He got up, took me in his arms and held me tightly. I closed my eyes. “Why’d he tell you?” he asked, his lips near my ear.
“Mwita, I forgot how to breathe. I was so stunned.”
“He shouldn’t have told you,” he said.
“He didn’t,” I said. “I just… figured it out.”
“He should have lied to you then,” Mwita said.
We stood like this for some time. I inhaled Mwita’s scent, noting that this was one of the last times I’d be able to do this. I held him back and grasped his hands.
“I’m coming with you,” he said before I could say anything.
“No,” I said. “I know the desert. I can change into a vulture when I must and…”
“I know it as well as you do, if not better. I know the West, too.”
“Mwita, what did you see?” I asked, ignoring his words for a moment. “You saw… you saw yours, too, didn’t you?”
“Onyesonwu, one’s end is one’s end and that’s the end of it,” he said. “You won’t be going alone. Not even close. Go home. I’ll come to you tomorrow afternoon.”
I got home around midnight. My plans didn’t surprise my mother. She’d heard about what I’d done at the market. All of Jwahir was buzzing about it. The gossip carried no details, only a hardened sentiment that I was evil and should be jailed.
“Mwita is coming with me, too, Mama,” I said.
“Good,” she said after a moment.
As I turned to go to my room, my mother sniffed. I turned around. “Mama, I…”
She held up a hand. “I’m human but I’m not stupid, Onyesonwu. Go and sleep.”
I went back to her and gave her a long hug. She pushed me toward my room. “Go to bed,” she said, wiping her eyes.
Surprisingly, I slept deeply for two hours. No nightmares. Later that night-or should I say morning-around four a.m, Luyu, Binta, and Diti showed up at my window. I helped them climb in my room. Once inside, the three of them just stood. I had to laugh. It was the most comical thing I’d seen all day.
“Are you all right?” Diti asked.
“What happened?” Binta asked. “We need to hear it from you.”
I sat down on my bed. I didn’t know where to start. I shrugged and sighed. Luyu sat beside me. I could smell scented oil and a hint of sweat. Luyu would normally never let the smell of sweat creep onto her skin. She stared at the side of my face for so long that I turned to her, irritated, “What?”
“I was there today, at the market,” she said. “I saw… I saw it all.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She looked down. “But you have told us, haven’t you? Was that… your mother?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Show us,” Diti said quietly. “We want to… see, too.”
I paused. “Okay.” It wasn’t as jarring for me the second time. I listened closely to the Nuru words he snarled at my mother but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand them. Though I spoke some Nuru, my mother didn’t and this vision was gathered from her experience. Vile, vicious, cruel man, I thought. I’ll take his breath away. Afterwards, Binta and Diti remained stunned into silence. Luyu, however, only looked more tired.
“I’m leaving Jwahir,” I said.
“I want to go with you, then,” Binta suddenly said.
I quickly shook my head. “No. Only Mwita goes with me. You belong here.”
“Please,” she begged. “I want to see what’s out there. This place, it… I have to get away from my Papa.”
We all knew it. Even after the interventions, Binta’s father still couldn’t control himself. Though she tried to hide it, Binta was ill quite often. It was because of his abuse, because of the pain she endured from it. I frowned realizing something disturbing: If the pain came only when a woman was aroused, did that mean her father’s touch aroused her? I shuddered. Poor Binta. On top of this, Binta was marked as “the girl who was so lovely even her father couldn’t resist her.” Mwita told me that there was already a growing competition for her among the young men because of this.
“I want to go, too,” Luyu said. “I want to be a part of this.”
“I don’t even know what we’re going to do,” I stammered. “I don’t even…”
“I’ll go, too,” Diti said.
“But you’re betrothed,” Luyu said.
“Eh?” I said, looking at Diti.
“Last month, his father asked for her hand on his son’s behalf,” Luyu said.
“Whose father?” I asked.
“Fanasi’s, of course,” Luyu said.
Fanasi had been Diti’s love since they were very young. He was the one who’d felt so insulted by Diti’s cries of pain when he touched her that for years he refused to talk to her. I guess, it took those years for him to grow into a man and learn that he could take what he wanted.
“Diti, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
She shrugged, “Didn’t seem important, not to you. And maybe it’s not, not now.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
“Well…” Diti said. “Would you be willing to speak to Fanasi?”
And that is how Mwita, Luyu, Binta, Diti, Fanasi, and I ended up in the main room the next day while my mother was at the market buying me supplies. Diti, Luyu, Binta, and I were nineteen. Mwita was twenty-two and Fanasi was twenty-one. All of us so naive, dabbling in what I would later realize was wishful thinking.
Fanasi had grown tall over the years. He stood half a head taller than Mwita and me, a full head taller than Luyu and Diti and even taller than Binta, the tiniest of us all. He was a broad-shouldered young man with smooth dark skin, piercing eyes, and powerful arms. He looked at me with great suspicion. Diti told him her plan. He’d looked at Diti then me and surprisingly said nothing. A good sign.
“I’m not what they say I am,” I said.
“I know what Diti tells me,” he said, in his low voice. “But only that.”
“Will you come with us?” I asked.
Diti had insisted Fanasi was a free thinker. She said he’d been part of the storyteller’s audience that day years ago. But he was also an Okeke man, so he didn’t trust me. “My father owns a bread shop that I’m to inherit,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes, wondering if his father was that mean man who had snapped at my mother when we’d first arrived in Jwahir. I wanted to shout at him, “Then the Nurus will come and tear you apart, rape your wife, and create another like me! You’re a fool!” I could feel Mwita next to me willing me to keep quiet.
“Let her show you,” Diti said softly. “Then you decide.”
“I’ll wait outside,” Luyu said before Fanasi replied. She quickly got up. Binta followed close at her heels. Diti took Fanasi’s hand and squeezed her eyes shut. Mwita simply stood next to me. I took us all to the past for the third time. Fanasi reacted with loud blubbering tears. Diti had to comfort him. Mwita touched my shoulder and left the room. As Fanasi calmed, his grief was replaced with anger. Raging anger. I smiled.
He pounded his large fist on his thigh. “How can this be! I… I didn’t… I can’t…!”
“Jwahir is much removed,” I said.
“Onye,” he said. He was the first to call me this. “I’m very sorry. Truly I am. People around here… we all have no idea!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Will you come?”
He nodded. And then there were six.
WE WOULD LEAVE IN THREE HOURS. And because people knew this, they left me alone. Only their stares when I passed by showed their anxiousness for me to go, their anxiousness to forget again. I stood with Aro before the desert. From here, we’d go southwest around Jwahir and then due west. On foot, not on camel. I don’t ride camels. When my mother and I were living in the desert I knew wild camels. They were noble creatures whose strength I’d refused exploit.
Aro and I walked up a sand dune. A strong breeze blew my braids back.
“Why does he want to see me?” I asked.
“You have to stop asking that question,” Aro replied.
Again, the sandstorm came. This time, however, it wasn’t so painful. Once in the tent, I sat down across from Sola. As before, his black hood covered his white face down to his narrow nose. Aro sat beside him and gave him a peculiar handshake that involved twining their fingers together.
“Good day, Oga Sola,” I said.
“You’ve grown,” Sola said in his papery voice.
“She belongs to Mwita,” Aro said. He looked at me and added, “If she would belong to any man at all.”
Sola nodded his approval. “So you know how this will end,” Sola said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Those that go with you,” Sola said. “Do you understand that some of them may fall along the way?”
I was quiet. It had crossed my mind.
“And that all of this is your responsibility?” Aro added.
“Can it… be helped?” I asked Aro.
“Maybe,” he said.
“What is it that I should do? How can I… find him?”
“Who?” Sola asked, cocking his head. “Your father?”
“No,” I said. I suspected he and I would find each other. “The one the prophecy speaks of. Who is he?”
They were quiet for a moment. I sensed they were exchanging words without moving their lips. “Do so then, sha,” Aro mumbled aloud. He looked drained.
“What do you know of this Nuru man?” Sola asked.
“All I know is that some Nuru Seer prophesized that a tall Nuru man who was a sorcerer would come and change things somehow, rewrite the book.”
Sola nodded. “I know the Seer,” Sola said. “You must forgive us all for our weaknesses, me, Aro, all of us old ones. We’ll learn from this. Aro refused you because you were an Ewu female. I almost did the same. This Seer, Rana, guards a precious document. This was why he was given the prophecy. He was told something and couldn’t accept it. His stupidity will give you a chance, I think.”
I sighed and held up my hands. “I don’t understand what you mean, Oga.
“Rana couldn’t believe what he was told, apparently. He wasn’t advised to look out for a Nuru man. It was an Ewu woman,” he said. He laughed. “At least he was truthful about one thing, you are tall.”
I walked home in a daze. I didn’t want Mwita to walk with me. I cried the entire way. Who cares who saw me? I had less than an hour to be in Jwahir. When I walked in, my mother was waiting for me in the main room. She handed me her cup of tea as I sat beside her on the couch. The tea was very strong, exactly what I needed.
That’s enough for today. In two days, I know what will happen here… maybe. I can hope, can’t I? What else can I have for myself and the child that grows inside me? Don’t look so surprised.
Enough. I’m glad the guards let you in and I hope your fingers were fast enough. And if they snatch that computer from you and dash it to the ground, I hope your memory is good. I don’t know if they’ll let you back in here tomorrow.
You hear everyone out there? Already gathering to watch? They wait to stone to death the one who turned their small world upside down. Primitive. So much unlike Jwahir’s people, who are so apathetic but so civilized.
Two guards right outside this cell have been listening. At least they’ve been trying to. Thankfully, they can’t speak Okeke. If you’re able to return here, if you’re able to get past these arrogant, hateful, sad, confused bastards again, I’ll tell you the rest. And when I’m finished, we’ll both see what happens to me, no?
Don’t worry about me and the cold here tonight. There are plenty of stones. so I have ways of staying warm. I have ways of staying alive, too. Protect that computer on your way out. If you don’t return, I’ll understand. You do what you can and the rest you leave in the cold arms of Fate. Take care.