I did not marry Obadiah for love, even though such marriages were becoming fashionable. I had to get him because Florence had her toji-lined eyes on him. Florence was a better catch. Florence had finished primary school with the White men. My education was aborted at Form Two because I was beautiful and so considered valuable; I would fetch the right calibre of suitors when it was time. Florence was plain, in looks and in carriage. One couldn’t tell if she was a girl or a boy, so she got to complete Form Seven at St. Winifred College. Our people sent their undesirable children to missionary schools – the plain ones, the last-borns, or abomination children born from incest. But when more men started chasing educated girls who would not embarrass them once they had established their city lives, I wished my father had let me stay on at St. Winifred.
Obadiah was not the most attractive man in Vaga. Florence had settled for him at last, after abandoning her other loves to me. There had been Shagba, who worked at the Taraku Mills factory and had brought Florence new slippers and dresses whenever he visited the village. Then there was Mvendaga, with his full afro and moon-coloured teeth, who zoomed down from Gboko every market day on his motorcycle. Each time, I only had to smile once, and the man was mine. Florence must have been sure I would leave her with this one, since he was ‘sickle-celled’, as the White men said. I did not. Every man in this village looked at me, except him. I wanted to know why.
Florence had four younger ones from her mother and since she had to nanny them, she became their friend to avoid the trouble of disciplining them. She was usually first in line to have her hair braided at Mamfe’s house, but would quickly stand aside, her hair half-done, yielding the stool to me, or anyone else who was in a hurry. She avoided fights with other girls at the stream by waking up to fetch water before sunrise. At first, I thought it was cowardice, but when Florence reached the age of fourteen without a single scratch from childhood brawls, I began to reassess my judgment of this quiet girl. We became friends.
And now, each time I lift something or paint my nails in the decades I painted my nails, I remember Florence’s hands.
It was customary for the girls in Vaga to go to the edge of the stream and collect the fine sand. We used the sand to glaze our arms and feet until they gleamed. This beauty treatment was practised before festivals, and when Christianity came to our village, we did it the day before Christmas Eve. If we could no longer parade our gleaming limbs in the name of our local deities, we could do so in the name of the White man’s God. I did it for myself. I saw what the boys and men who watched me saw: the sand made my dark skin look like I had bathed in moonlight. The Christmas carol service held at St. Agnes on Christmas Eve became one of the most populated annual events in the region. Young men would come from nearby villages and towns to make this precious night that would herald the birth of Christ, and also to watch our skins gleam.
That Christmas Eve, the year we turned seventeen and the day of her death, Florence and I were in my room. My father had travelled to a court in Taraba and my mother had decided to sleep in our farm so she could set traps for bush animals. Florence was using shiny silver toji to line her eyes – the only beauty treatment she allowed herself – when I noticed her hands. Then her skin. Florence never went for our beauty ritual, not just because she didn’t want to get into beauty contests with the rest of us, but because she didn’t need it – would never need it – I realised. Her dark skin was even, from the backs of her palms, up her hands to her shoulders, her neck, then to her spotless face. The mahogany skin was rich enough and needed no artificial shine.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked suddenly, staring at me with her big, bewildered eyes.
“Me ayam riking your eyes o. Maybe when merchant bring lat poison from Kaduna I tell my father to buy this your thing for me. I rike it vely wer.”
“It is ‘like’ not ‘rike’, and it is ‘rat’ not ‘lat’ – you this girl!” Florence scolded, giggling. She beckoned me over. I moved to her, mesmerised by this quiet girl’s secret power and charm, hidden until now. “Besides, the merchant has already passed our village yesterday. Open your eyes, copy-copy,” she said, and laughed, revealing her front gap tooth. I boiled inside. This was the most beautiful girl in the village besides me – perhaps even more so. And clever too! Florence tilted my head in the mirror to place the wand of toji on the upper lid of my right eye. I flinched and she chided me again. “I won’t blind you, just close your eyes so that your eyelids will press the thing. Ehen. Yes.”
When we finished, we admired each other in the mirror, and while I smiled at Florence, I vowed in my heart to outcompete her in every arena life threw us into. Florence reminded me that we would be late for the carol service.
“Yes o, your boyfriend is waiting for you!” I jumped up, giggling. Florence looked away, and blushed.
That was when I said, “What if he cheats on you? He is a man!”
I went to the kitchen to fetch some boiled yams, which were already burning on the fire. We were late because we insisted on eating something, and she had stopped by to use my charcoal iron to straighten out her choir uniform. I doused the large chunks of yams in red oil after peeling their softened skin. On my way back to my room I remembered Florence liked her food a little salty, so I turned back to the kitchen to sprinkle some more. When I returned, Florence had finished ironing the skirt and had set a bowl of water so we could wash our hands. We sat on the floor and ate.
“Chop quick-quick,” I urged in English, “or you want us to rate for carol?”
But Florence, careful in everything, wanted to take her time. Rushing a meal might stain her uniform or upset her stomach. I ate with a ravenous hunger from all the preparation. I was already done before she swallowed two chunks. I washed my hands in the bowl and stood up to spread some extra pomade on my lips.
“You’re leaving me?” she asked.
“If people start rooking for Sister Florence, who will give excuse on your behalf?” I asked. “I’ll say your moon is full, but you’ll make it.”
“In the name of God—”
I laughed and said, “Till you come,” as I rushed out.
I hurried to the church in excitement, getting there before Florence, so I would get Obadiah to focus his attention on me for a while. Father Ignatius was giving the homily when I arrived. Across the bench where Obadiah sat, he kept throwing questioning glances from Florence’s vacant seat in the choir to me. When he asked me where she was after mass, I told him she was experiencing cramps. I stared back into his reddish eyes, waiting for him to say something else, but he nodded and turned away. I basked in the high of his attention all the way home, now that I had finally gotten it. I opened my bedroom door and found Florence on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Then I screamed.
Getting Obadiah was so easy, it felt like a trap. I simply waited for him at his house when he came back from mass one day and told him I had heard a divine call; I was to be his wife. I told him I had explained this to Florence before she died, and that she had agreed to the will of God. He was quiet for a long time. What I had really said to Florence about him was, “What if he cheats on you? He is still a man.”
She had laughed without looking at me and told me how shy he was when they met, asking her after the St. Agnes Parish Christmas Carol rehearsal if she would make it to the main event. She assured me he wasn’t the type of man to misbehave. There is a part of me that went after Obadiah because I thought, plain as she looked, Florence deserved a man who could protect her and take care of her. Obadiah’s family came from one of the first people to translate the Dutch Bible to Tiv, and so they had some money and status. But come on, a sickle-celled man? I wanted better for my friend.
After a long pause, Obadiah’s eyes fell on my breasts, and I relaxed inside. He was a man after all. A man of God, but still a man. I could have dumped him and moved on, but the shock of Florence’s death had weakened me. I found I enjoyed not having to worry about other women looking at my man. I shocked the town by being a faithful girlfriend, then fiancée. I married Obadiah and he was grateful. As were his people. He found time between work and church activities to teach me English. His elder brother, who worked in a plastic-manufacturing factory in Lagos, sent the latest kitchen appliances and a crockery set as a wedding gift. His father sent me a goat for Christmas. Since Vaga village no longer saw me as a harlot but a virtuous woman softened by the death of her best friend, all focus returned to my beauty. And as the most beautiful girl, I had elevated Obadiah’s family status. People stopped by his mother’s fish stand more often on market days. People stopped by our house during the Christmas season to try my spicy jollof rice, and Obadiah got invited to more tribesmen association meetings in the market square. They no longer cared that he was thin and feeble.
In fact, that feebleness disappeared every time I took off my wrapper and showed him my breasts. It was as if I had injected this strange vitality into him. He climbed ladders to fix the leaking thatch roof in the kitchen he had cemented for me, he assisted the electrician to wire our compound when electricity came to our village, and he helped me break the ground in our backyard so I could plant tomatoes, fresh pepper, and curry. Watching him find something to fix in the house, after returning from his teaching job at the new government secondary school, made me fall deeply in love with him. Though I know Florence would never believe it.
Obadiah, like the rest of his family, had been as firmly rooted in the Roman Catholic Church as the old mango tree in the centre of their compound. I followed along the best I could. My parents were too busy pursuing Hausa allies who could help them curry favour in court after their land was seized by a colonial officer. They had no time for new religions or trying to have more children after me. I joined the choir and sang soprano, tried to memorise the Latin. I tried to be good. In the end, my goodness was not enough.
Obadiah didn’t live as long as my in-laws had promised. He didn’t even die from his sickle-cell as I had feared. Sometime after midnight in the first year of our marriage, I had been squatting over the pit toilet in the far corner of our compound when I heard the front door of our living room crash. The brutal, pungent stench of male arrogance filled the air. Then the shouting of strange men and Obadiah’s plea, “Don’t kill me, please…I have a wife!” The gunshot. Three. “And a baby,” I whispered to myself, but Obadiah would never know. If Florence was alive, I would have told her. But I had no one, so I froze in the toilet until dawn, long after I heard the men drive away. I was still in the toilet when the cock crowed and neighbours who had heard the gunshot found me there. They begged me to talk, to say something, but I couldn’t speak to anyone. The only person I wanted to talk to was Florence.
*
I know the people of Vaga always wondered, even if they didn’t tell me, why I put so much effort into being alive. I juggled different trades to keep afloat, rejecting aid and alms from my in-laws after Obadiah’s death, alms that were really gifts of guilt, for through them I had become a young, childless widow. They begged me to remarry, and when, after three successive, childless divorces, my own parents gave up on me, his parents became my parents, eventually bequeathing me his compound. I rented the guest room and the storeroom to Peace Corps members from America, then to soldiers during the Civil War. The whole village knew I picked lovers from my tenants, but they forgave me and wondered why I would even seek any pleasure at all. I was childless and unmarried, so what was I living for? They admired my zeal for life as much as they ridiculed it. What was my secret?
Florence was my secret. It didn’t matter that she was dead; I had made that vow to outdo her in everything. Florence was always born to win. How couldn’t anybody see this? How couldn’t anybody see she was the consummate deceiver, this Florence? For while I was dusting my face with powder and pencilling my eyebrows, Florence was blooming, unseen.
There was a professor who had just returned from Cambridge and promised to leave his British wife for me once he got a new job with the new, oil-rich government in the ’70s. He promised to further my education if only I would marry him. I said yes. When the church secretary at St. Agnes announced that I had gotten admission at the newly established University of Calabar, the catechist decided to intervene. He visited after mass and told me how pleased he was with my decision to return to school, but asked, “However, have you thought about devoting your life to heavenly causes? Something that would make your life more…meaningful?”
There were babies abandoned in the church almost weekly now that the Civil War was over. There were several displaced children who had wandered from their homes till they ended up in Vaga. The church had just been discussing how suitable I was to mother them. They would finance any building repair and add more rooms if needed. Reverend sisters would be deployed to assist in their care.
I told the catechist I would think about it and have a response the next Sunday. During the week, I managed to find tenants who would rent my room, and by the following Sunday, I had said yes to the lecturer and moved with him to Calabar to start my school registration.
The marriage didn’t last long; four babies dying in my womb ruined our romance. I returned to Vaga, taking solace in satisfying that old itch, to know if I could still turn heads. I ignored the church because the catechist never forgave me for my trickery, so I focused on building my businesses and acquiring farmland for my aged parents. Everything I was, everything I had tried to be, was for Florence. I survived all kinds of ridicule and name-calling. Worse than a promiscuous girl, they saw me as a middle-aged whore. Someone’s mother broke into my house looking for her son, calling me a child-eater.
There was a baby that stayed alive long enough in my womb to be born full term. I didn’t even know it was there. I had given up on trying to do the one thing Florence could not do: having a child. I carried my two legs to Benue State University Teaching Hospital so they could tie my womb for me. They told me I should wait; there is a baby inside. At this point I had lost too many babies and had too much bitterness inside me. I would have aborted it if I could. But I went back home and let it grow. It was my worst pregnancy, wouldn’t let me sleep. This baby was a true child of Florence, I thought – it really wanted to kill me. When I went back to the teaching hospital, I was just…done. I begged them to flush it out. They said my water had not broken, so I should be patient. When the baby came out of me, it fell out of my body, out of this world. I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. I dreamt of people screaming and running, I dreamt of being carried in the air. When I came back to my senses, I was in a different hospital. They told me I had been air-lifted out of the teaching hospital because there had been a great flood. And my baby?
“We are so terribly sorry, madam.”
That was when feeling returned to my body. That was when I started to scream.
I couldn’t control it, I truly couldn’t. How do I say this? I wasn’t the one screaming. I belonged to an endless scream, a great mighty scream, older than me. The doctors considered taking me to a psychiatric hospital in Kaduna. I didn’t care what happened to me or my house at the time. I didn’t care if I left this world. But then Florence came to me. In my dreams, not with her real face, but I knew it was her, I just knew it. She was no longer the friend who had helped me to practise English etiquette. She came to me as my secret nemesis who seemed better than me. I hardened my resolve and turned my back on the great scream. I told the doctors I was fine, God had finally comforted me, and they were relieved. I returned home and burned all the clothes I wore during the pregnancy. I sought another lover.
I focused on becoming more.
My businesses thrived. An orange Vita Juice Factory bought my dead parents’ land, so I was able to afford to run for local government chairman in my constituency. Women’s groups danced at my campaign, tying wrappers emblazoned with my face, but I knew they talked on the way home about the long history of death in my life. Secondary school students clapped when I commissioned libraries and new classroom blocks, but I knew they made up stories about how I harnessed energy from all the babies and husbands I’d murdered to win the election. It was painful at first, and I let it wash over me. I won the elections. Two terms. I won because I had to win. I had to show Florence that I was greater. Surely by now I was greater, wasn’t I?
*
After all this time, I can still find the spot I think Florence was buried. Only knights of the church and a few clergy men got tombstones in this forest, nothing for unwanted babies and poisoned girls. When I lie down on the grass, I can feel her.
I know the children who saw me come here would tell their mothers. They will wake up old rumours about how I am a witch. Internet has reached this village. If you have a phone, you can sit here and see someone in London, but the people are still scared of the evil forest, this piece of land their ancestors had given White missionaries to bury their dead, this place where the poisoned and the murdered were sent to rest. Manila trees grew and filled with birds and just like that, they named it ‘evil forest’. I have to laugh. I am too old to worry about what other people think about me, thank God.
My doctor said I should stop smoking. I don’t have long in this world. I unzip my purse and sigh in relief when I find my lighter and two sticks of Benson & Hedges. When I cup a hand over the lighter and scroll up a flame, I see my hands as they were 20 years ago, 35 years ago, then a third of a century, when I was the most beautiful girl in Vaga. I choke on the first puff and Obadiah’s disapproving face emerges from the fumes. I choke some more, laughing. I never saw him screw his face like this in life. He would disapprove of my smoking, of this, I am sure. The rosary I started wearing when we got married still hangs down my neck. It will have to do.
“Shebi you know I really loved him,” I say to Florence, “not at first, yes, not at first. But I came to love him.”
Florence must think I have come to rile her up or pick a quarrel. I turn to the ground and scold, “I just came to rest,” before lying on my back again. “I need to rest.”
But how does one rest from eighty-five years of living? What kind of rest would appease a body worn out from the years, if not the deep rest of death? I lift my hands like a musical conductor, to study them again. How I envy Florence. I know she is happier wherever she is, without the burden of having to bathe, eat, sleep, wake up, think of enemies or think of death. It costs too much, this business of being alive.
“I didn’t kill you, Florence,” I say, louder than I intend. This is the first time I am saying it in the absence of people. I said it to my parents who didn’t need yet another court case on their hands, I said it to her mother who never truly got her senses back after the loss, then to the local government police, to any girl in our friend group who dared to ask even indirectly, and to Obadiah – swearing on the lives of our future children. Until now, I have never said it to myself. I think I have always feared the words would fall flat, or worse, stand up and mock me. It is hard to deceive yourself, no matter how successful you are at deceiving others. “I didn’t kill you, Florence!” A startled flock of birds descend from the ceiling of leaves towards me, but I don’t bother to shield my face, or flinch, even though my heart pounds. And because now I am sure of it – surprised, but sure – tears stream out of my eyes. The flock suddenly changes course a few feet above my head and flies westward, letting out a shrilling chorus.
* Photo by Rawad Semaan on Unsplash