“The girl is a ripe agbogho! Very soon a strong young man will bring us palm wine!” another said. Her dirty wrapper was not knotted properly, and one end trailed in the dirt as she walked, carrying a tray mounded with bits of fried beef.
“Go up and change,” Mama said, holding Jaja and me around the shoulders. “Your aunty and cousins will be here soon.”
Upstairs, Sisi had set eight places at the dining table, with wide plates the color of caramel and matching napkins ironed into crisp triangles. Aunty Ifeoma and her children arrived while I was still changing out of my church clothes. I heard her loud laughter, and it echoed and went on for a while. I did not realize it was my cousins’ laughter, the sound reflecting their mother’s, until I went out to the living room. Mama, who was still in the pink, heavily sequined wrapper she had worn to church, sat next to Aunty Ifeoma on a couch. Jaja was talking to Amaka and Obiora near the étagère. I went over to join them, starting to pace my breathing so that I would not stutter.
“That’s a stereo, isn’t it? Why don’t you play some music? Or are you bored with the stereo, too?” Amaka asked, her placid eyes darting from Jaja to me.
“Yes, it’s a stereo,” Jaja said. He did not say that we never played it, that we never even thought to, that all we listened to was the news on Papa’s radio during family time. Amaka went over and pulled out the LP drawer. Obiora joined her.
“No wonder you don’t play the stereo, everything in here is so dull!” she said.
“They’re not that dull,” Obiora said, looking through the LPs. He had a habit of pushing his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose. Finally he put one on, an Irish church choir singing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” He seemed fascinated by the stereo player and, as the song played, stood watching it as if he would learn the secrets of its chrome entrails by staring hard at it.
Chima came into the room. “The toilet here is so nice, Mommy. It has big mirrors and creams in glass bottles.”
“I hope you didn’t break anything,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
“I didn’t,” Chima said. “Can we put the TV on?”
“No,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Your Uncle Eugene is coming up soon so we can have lunch.”
Sisi came into the room, smelling of food and spices, to tell Mama that the Igwe had arrived, that Papa wanted us all to come down and greet him. Mama rose, tightened her wrapper, and then waited for Aunty Ifeoma to lead the way.
“I thought the Igwe was supposed to stay at his palace and receive guests. I didn’t know he visits people’s homes,” Amaka said, as we went downstairs. “I guess that’s because your father is a Big Man.”
I wished she had said “Uncle Eugene” instead of “your father.” She did not even look at me as she spoke. I felt, looking at her, that I was helplessly watching precious flaxen sand slip away between my fingers.
The Igwe’s palace was a few minutes from our house. We had visited him once, some years back. We never visited him again, though, because Papa said that although the Igwe had converted, he still let his pagan relatives carry out sacrifices in his palace. Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an Igwe. So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awka, I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler.
“Good afternoon, sir, nno,” I said to the Igwe when I got downstairs. The hairs that peeked out of his wide nose quivered as he smiled at me and said, “Our daughter, kedu?”
One of the smaller sitting rooms had been cleared for him and his wife and four assistants, one of whom was fanning him with a gilded fan although the air conditioner was on. Another was fanning his wife, a woman with yellow skin and rows and rows of jewelry hanging round her neck, gold pendants and beads and corals. The scarf wound around her head flared out in front, wide like a banana leaf and so high that I imagined the person sitting behind her in church having to stand up to see the altar.
I watched Aunty Ifeoma sink to one knee and say, “Igwe!” in the raised voice of a respectful salute, watched him pat her back. The gold sequins that covered his tunic glittered in the afternoon sunlight. Amaka bowed deeply before him. Mama, Jaja, and Obiora shook hands with him, respectfully enclosing his hand in both of theirs. I stood at the door a little longer, to make sure that Papa saw that I did not go close enough to the Igwe to bow to him.
Back upstairs, Mama and Aunty Ifeoma went into Mama’s room. Chima and Obiora stretched out on the rug, playing with the whot cards that Obiora had discovered in his pockets. Amaka wanted to see a book Jaja told her he had brought, and they went into Jaja’s room. I sat on the sofa, watching my cousins play with the cards. I did not understand the game, nor why at intervals one of them yelled “Donkey!” amid laughter. The stereo had stopped. I got up and went into the hallway, standing by Mama’s bedroom door. I wanted to go in and sit with Mama and Aunty Ifeoma, but instead I just stood still, listening. Mama was whispering; I could barely make out the words “there are many full gas cylinders lying around in the factory.” She was trying to persuade Aunty Ifeoma to ask Papa for them.
Aunty Ifeoma was whispering, too, but I heard her well. Her whisper was like her—tall, exuberant, fearless, loud, larger than life. “Have you forgotten that Eugene offered to buy me a car, even before Ifediora died? But first he wanted us to join the Knights of St. John. He wanted us to send Amaka to convent school. He even wanted me to stop wearing makeup! I want
a new car, nwunye m, and I want to use my gas cooker again and I want a new freezer and I want money so that I will not have to unravel the seams of Chima’s trousers when he outgrows them. But I will not ask my brother to bend over so that I can lick his buttocks to get these things.”
“Ifeoma, if you…” Mama’s soft voice trailed off again.
“You know why Eugene did not get along with Ifediora?” Aunty Ifeoma’s whisper was back, fiercer, louder. “Because Ifediora told him to his face what he felt. Ifediora was not afraid to tell the truth. But you know Eugene quarrels with the truths that he does not like. Our father is dying, do you hear me? Dying. He is an old man, how much longer does he have, gbo? Yet Eugene will not let him into this house, will not even greet him. O joka! Eugene has to stop doing God’s job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene.”
I heard the word umunna. Aunty Ifeoma laughed her throaty laugh before she replied. “You know that the members of our umunna, in fact everybody in Abba, will tell Eugene only what he wants to hear. Do our people not have sense? Will you pinch the finger of the hand that feeds you?”
I did not hear Amaka come out of Jaja’s room and walk toward me, perhaps because the hallway was so wide, until she said, so close that her breath fanned my neck, “What are you doing?”
I jumped. “Nothing.”
She was looking at me oddly, right in the eye. “Your father has come upstairs for lunch,” she finally said.
Papa watched as we all sat down at the table, and then started grace. It was a little longer than usual, more than twenty minutes, and when he finally said, “Through Christ our Lord,” Aunty Ifeoma raised her voice so that her “Amen” stood out from the rest of ours.
“Did you want the rice to get cold, Eugene?” she muttered. Papa continued to unfold his napkin, as though he had not heard her.
The sounds of forks meeting plates, of serving spoons meeting platters, filled the dining room. Sisi had drawn the curtains and turned the chandelier on, even though it was afternoon. The yellow light made Obiora’s eyes seem a deeper golden, like extra-sweet honey. The air conditioner was on, but I was hot.