It was a dusty afternoon. Sun-yellowed leaves waved in the November harmattan. The wind howled; lips split and skins cracked in response. People shook whitened hands with less vigor, scratched body sores with less rigor and carried little bottles of ointment to keep their skin safe.
In this weather, minor injuries were aggravated. When Grace was not running or hurting her knees, she was peeling her own flesh. I took the big Vaseline from the toilet cabinet in my sister’s room. I hid it in an empty cereal box, a ready excuse should an adult in the house accost me.
“Going to throw this out,” I would have volunteered.
But nobody saw me leave.
I joined the mass of bodies pressing towards the Okengwe community market. My mother’s stepbrother lived near this market. The first time he took us to his house, we rode in his one-door tortoise car. I saw Grace from the backseat of his brown Volkswagen beetle.
She wore a dress that sheltered her disquiet. She lived in a one-storey building near the market. Lived in front of it, the way a guard lives at the cusp of a mansion. She kept all the windows and doors open, the curtains skied. This building had the façade of public infrastructure and the color of dried mucus. People thronged past it daily. Nobody really stopped there.
But it’s different when you’re not driving. You measured, with tact, the distance between the house and Grace’s shack. If you were too close to where she sat, but walked too fast, she decided you were terrified. Your fear invited your torment. She howled and chased. Walk too far from her, the judgement and punishment was similar. You were required to strike a balance between both distances and mind your steps. You needed to know how to navigate her. Like me. As soon she saw me emerge from a receding cloud of brown, her arms spread.
When you’re eight, giving Vaseline is a show of affection. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t mine to give away in the first place. It was part of the necessary, degrading ritual of interest, debasing your recorded integrity for the passing pleasure of a nod. This was so commonly done and with such putative honesty that the gesture itself had been drained of all heroism. My friends jumped fences into compounds, whose mean landlords they hated, to besiege mango and cashew trees. They would bag them or pocket them, depending on the girl’s appetite. Their fear of being caught dimmed by that starlit promise of courtship. I paid no girl this kind of homage, but I imagine it would’ve been more embarrassing getting found out for rifling Vaseline than if it was, say, Mango. In one case, one could credit hunger. Who eats Vaseline? And should the motive be forgiven, how could I explain the recipient?
Grace was my first attachment outside family. It was a devotion to a grownup who talked excessively, laughed excessively, blinked excessively, struck up pointless conversations with complete strangers, dressed how she liked, if at all, and ate what she dug from where she liked, excessively. It was as though this grownup had a special kind of access which elevated her in the adult community and gave her a license to be wild. When you’re eight, you admired that.
Her slightest movements caused mothers to tighten their grip on children. Her wild, intemperate laughter harassed the pace of passers-by. I looked at her and saw a child given a wide berth to behave in a different way from how I was learning adults were expected to, and rather than be punished, seemed to command awe and a measure of deference, a kind of respect flung at her from safe distances. I was fascinated by her spooky dance steps, her fixed, sustained gazes which traced invisible lines down multiple spines, that brazen wildness which flourished at the expiation of other people’s reserve. I was drawn to the effortless way she drew awe, the way we feared her without betraying it, but in which both we and her mutely admitted that timidity was offered and accepted. I admired the way she was worshipped on her own terms. How she achieved the greatest effect with mere effort. She could hijack a person’s heart rate or walking pace by merely pitching her laugh or faking a sprint. There was a statutory air of nonchalance about her. This absence of restraint was at once a mesmerizing and terrifying spectacle to witness: powerless to question her legitimacy, you were compelled to observe her strange habits in silence.
Grace ruled. The way she had access to everyone and everything in sight, the way she could laugh at anyone – and point while doing it – the way she could summon you by whistling loud and run after you when you didn’t look at her, the meaningful and endlessly powerful way in which she was permitted this unsupervised campaign made me cast her as superior to whatever authority administered our community. I was there for her dances, for her political speeches, for her infrequent explosions of “not guilty,” and consistently agreed with her condemnation of faux beauty – she hated to see women with bleached skin, and chased them every chance she got.
It was in the midst of this unwavering devotion that she began noticing me. She asked me my name and called me her husband – a responsibility I neither accepted nor denied. Later, she grew confident in this union to say my name. The first time she said it she sang it, the way a mother sings her child’s name into something meaningful. Later that day when my mother learned of it, she forbade me from going to the market or visiting her stepbrother. I found new ways of making contact. School lunch-breaks were useful. Grace began to expect me. She took pictures, forming her palms into a rectangle and, making her lips into a ball, giggling like a stuffed duck, whispered, “chakam!”
In the second term of primary 3, I wrote a description of Grace as the person “I’d like to meet most” in an English composition test. She is very tall and has dark bushy hair folded neatly behind her neck. Her teeth are very white and clean and well arranged, like our church keyboard. She is strong and powerful. Nobody makes her go to church or school or choir practice. Our new English teacher, laughing, made me read it to the class. I read those 150 words like they were the most sacred in the known history of language. He intended to humiliate me, but the class seemed unwilling to enjoy it. Today, I’m still unsure if they were protesting the subject or defending me. They all sat behind their little wooden desks, chewing 2B pencils or rolling paper planes, teeth tucked behind tongue, brows on lockdown. It could’ve been rebellion or disgust, or both.
At the beginning of the next term, my father waded into the matter. It was the threat he proposed—of keeping me away from school altogether—which ultimately began the degrading of this infatuation. Yet, I remained devoted in that feisty manner of army wives. She wasn’t in the picture, granted, but she mattered. Any attempt to contest this truth did not end well for the fool. The day we learnt the word “deranged,” a boy got up to name Grace as his example. I punched his nose at lunch break. I ran my errands twice and stopped doing sports. During sports break, I took my flask to her. Sometimes, I watched her eat. Because of her chakams, there are many pictures of me nobody, not even me, has seen or will ever see. And if her account is to be taken as infallible, I was very happy in all of them.
I have a sister named Grace. She is the third of five daughters. She was the first woman I ever saw hacking wood. Right in front of our grandfather’s house, she would pick his axe and hack a sizable tree into small usable pieces. She was sixteen or seventeen then. I grew up to my sisters calling her Grace, her own given name, in a derisory way. And she unfailingly responded in a way that suggested she knew they were deriding her. I didn’t understand the insult until I met the other Grace. Nobody knows anything for sure about the other Grace. All we know is that she lived in that house with her second husband, with whom she had a daughter. The most peddled tale about this daughter is that Grace abandoned her in the bath one morning. One morning turned to seven mornings. The other story is that she did this because the baby was ugly. The dead baby stayed in that bathroom for a week. We also know that she dressed and powdered the dead child and bought her a fine cot. The stories seemed to suggest she blamed her husband for the child’s ugliness and she tried to save the child from an ugly life, that she preferred the beauty of a lifeless ugly child to a screaming little monster.
In the late nineties, just before General Abdusalam Abubakar came into power, Okengwe was a small community, easily traversed and conquered in one huge stride; much like Ogori Magongo has been for the last decade or two. There’s a running joke that if you steal a loaf of bread in one Magongo house, before you finish eating it the news would have reached all your relatives. News of a son or daughter’s folly was traded at the market, contemplated at family dinners and improved upon as post-service topic at the community’s biggest assembly, St. Paul’s Anglican Church. My grandfather was a beacon of this church and he couldn’t tolerate very long his grandson being the topic of Sunday gossip. He called his son to order and two days later, my father called his own son to order. He asked what I found fascinating about this child-killer. I was unbalanced by his diplomacy, but admitted I thought she was powerful, beyond anything we both knew. He frowned, considered me briefly and, wistfully nodded his agreement. He said she was influential and I nodded as if the idea were original to him. For the first time, I felt we had come to the same conclusion about Grace. Humans everywhere are after all related by semen and clay.
When my primary school principal died a year after our graduation, my mother sent me with food to his house. Previously, this errand would thrill me. His family house was thirty steps from my uncle’s and therefore I had to pass Grace’s house to get there. On this stiff October afternoon, I was taller. I measured my shadow against electric poles and signposts. My friends and I did this for fun. While the sun burned our backs, we learned how much growing we had managed since the previous day. I was so engaged in this business I had no idea how much ground I’d covered. Before I realized I was tilting against a familiar signpost, I clattered into her, violating the safe distances. Thrust into this re-acquaintance, I learned my education was complete. She sang my name. I backed away slowly. Shocked, she accepted this close insult, and though I was absolutely mindfucked that she still knew my name after three years, there was no denying this new distance I enforced. A distance she now had to respect. She had chased a boy to his death, crushed by a motorcycle, the year before. So the community did something about her freedom. Rusted irons shackled her to one spot and she wobbled when she tried.
We moved from Okengwe fifteen years ago. The last time I was there, in April 2015, for my aunt’s wedding, my sister husband, drove us past Grace’s building. A knife-cut of sunlight kissed the tip of the building, now taller and flanked by three neat houses with sublime countenances. My chest rose as darkness fell in the valley of my history. Silence like death entered the car and escaped the notice of my co-travellers. What I mean is, true, I heard laughter and true, I saw the flashing of teeth, but the accompanying words avoided me. There was the singing of my name, though. And there were images of Grace in her favourite outfit: blue scarf, brown skirt, men shoes and white Standard Biscuit! shirt, everywhere, images deceiving like campaign posters. Everything I recognized – treed family houses and brownstone streets, my former school, the late principal’s house idling permanently behind it, the revamped community market – now looked like a litany of freaks, a dizzying estate of absurdities. The cup of sunlight flirting with the building’s peak seemed to be the only light in the world. It was strange that none of my siblings, all older, remembered who used to live here, or whose curiosity was prevented from appearing here. Why, everybody comes here now. It is now the colour of fresh berries, sitting behind two “No Parking” signs and a hoisted flag of United Bank of Africa. Sometimes, inanimate things suffer the misfortune of tasting a terrible life. These “No Parking” signs seemed to energize my recollection of the distances Grace would have imposed on this structure.
*Photo by Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash