She watched her mother where she sat, rocking from side to side. ‘Go put down your box, Jagua. And that bag – like that of medicine man.’
Mother. Sweet and trusting and so kind. She had aged terribly, suddenly. Mother was speaking to her as if she had always been there; as if she had known that Jagua would return one day, and for good. Jagua’s other brothers had come down for the burial. Fonso was there, so was Matthew Obi and John. This year was to have been her father’s jubilee at the Mission. Jagua heard the story of his death. He had died of stroke. He was taken ill after his long tour and before they could rush him to the hospital, he had died.
Jagua’s mother said: ‘Only one name he was calling till he died. Jagwa … Jagwa … like that. He did not eat, he did not drink. Jus’ callin’ your name. Oh, if he had seen you!’
‘God forgive me,’ said Jagua.
Drums began to sound from a corner of the room. The room was thick with the smell of palm wine and home-distilled gin. When the moon came out the girls formed a ring and began to dance and sing and Jagua went among them and danced and cried too. While they were dancing Fonso came to her.
‘Jagua, you mus’ look after Mama, or she will jus’ follow Papa. You know de ol’ people, how they love themselves.’
Jagua looked at him, her heart pounding. ‘How?’
‘You stay with her and help her; at least for some months.’
‘Here or in Lagos?’
‘Leave Lagos out of this! You got to stay in this place. That’s the custom. You know Mama mus’ not leave Ogabu, she mus’ not dress her hair or wear any fine cloth for at leas’ six months. And there’s nobody left at home …’
Someone came and drew Fonso away and Jagua went back and joined the dancers. No, it would be too much of a sacrifice to remain chained to Ogabu.
Later she went to the churchyard where he had been buried. Was this really him, this mound of earth, red, hiding the man? His soul had fled, or so they said. She used to be in the choir once. She had a good voice. She knelt down now. Oh, God! She had not prayed for years. She had not been to church, and yet her father was a pastor; born in the church, died in the service of the church. And she had renounced God and chosen Mammon. ‘Look him well. Keep him safe, till I come, O God! I not got long to stay now, me an’ Mama.’ The earth was biting her knees. She rose. She breathed a deep sigh. She felt better. She walked away, glancing over her shoulder. A woman carrying a basket on her head met her on the path.
‘Jagua?’ she smiled. ‘So you come, after all?’
‘I come.’
Jagua could not remember where or when she had known the woman, or whether she was really a woman. Her teeth were stained a dirty brown and burnt to blackness. Her skin was harsh and full of suffering. ‘I don’ think you remember me,’ she said. ‘When you were small, like this …’
Jagua started to cry. When she was ‘small like this …’ how could she know her life would run into these cross-currents of shame, bitterness and degradation? ‘When she was small like this …’ she had lived free and simple in Ogabu. But now,
she was chained down. She let the woman speak, nodding grimly, biting her lips, pointing with her gnarled fingers. Then she walked home to her mother, crying.
24
All the mourners had gone. The dew came down in the morning and settled on the cold trees and shrubs. The sun would not show its face. The girls going single-file to the waterside shuffled along without their usual chatter, keeping together as if their very company gave them protection against some vague external fear. The house in which Jagua’s father had lived had become a coffin and inside this coffin Jagua Nana sat on the deckchair and her mother lay on a grass mat on the floor with eyes closed but not asleep.
There was no choice now for Jagua but to cast aside her city ways and settle down to living in Ogabu. For her it was no easy task. The people still looked on her as a kind of curiosity. The way she talked and dressed, her moods and manner of eating, these were out of keeping with Ogabu ideas. She had overheard them whispering about her, that she was in mourning not for her father, but for some man who had died in Lagos. Some said she was a ‘Miss’ who taught in a school in Port Harcourt and had been recently transferred to Ogabu. But all of them knew that there was about her an aura of tragedy. And so the young men were too young and frightened to make passes at her. She remained isolated from the very surroundings from which she sought acceptance. She soon found that if she wanted company it was not to be found in Ogabu, but in Onitsha or Port Harcourt where she would embarrass no one. She knew her mother would never think of leaving Ogabu: it would not even be right to talk her into leaving Ogabu, her only home.
When the first rains came she and her mother went to the barn and examined the yam seedlings. They took the labourers out into the farm and tilled the soil and planted the corn and the yam, the cocoyam and the okro. This was earth, this was life. Once in four days she accompanied her mother to the market, or went alone. Sometimes a letter would come from one of her brothers working up country beyond the great River Niger. There the trade was brisk and money passed from hand to hand more briskly. Ogabu had a postal agency over the waterside; although it was six miles off, it took more than three days for a letter to be delivered to their owners across the water. During the rains when the bridge was dangerous no letters came and no one worried. Ogabu went on in its own isolated way.
A few weeks after Jagua left Lagos she received a letter from Rosa to say that she would like to come to Ogabu as she was very lonely and things were bad in Lagos. Jagua dismissed it as idle talk. She did not want to hear from Lagos, as it might reawaken her desires to go back there. To avoid boredom Jagua obtained permission from her mother and went to Onitsha. She sought out Brother Fonso who helped her choose a sewing machine. Every morning she had it taken out to the main Port Harcourt road by the market and in a shed which had been built for her, she would sit sewing. There were four other sheds like hers, side by side. Soon she grew to know its owners, and because she was Jagua, from Lagos, the girls in the village came to her bringing her work and wanting to learn the craft of fashion from her. The village women in the nearby sheds did not like that, but Jagua paid no attention to them. She started by sewing odds and ends for the convent girls, and then some of the more daring women brought her material for blouses. The occupation gave her a direct contact with the world she knew and loved. She found herself sitting – as it were – on the edge of her old world, daring to watch it with an amused smile. When the cars and trucks and buses and lorries whizzed past, speeding towards Port Harcourt, she sometimes wished she would go with them and from there by outboard-engined canoe to Bagana and Krinameh. But if she went now, she would never return and her mother would be left unattended. Besides, what was there to find in Port Harcourt which she had not already seen in Lagos? It was true Port Harcourt was to the eastern part of Nigeria what Lagos was to the western part: a port, a conglomerate of peoples drawn from all over the world, fleeting, hungering for sensation and diversion, hands in their pockets fingering the all-powerful sterling and dollars, a polyglot world with quite different ideas of conduct from Ogabu. If ever she went to Port Harcourt it would not be to pick up the threads of her Lagos life. There must be some definite reason: to buy dress materials, to steal to Krinameh, for instance …
In the evenings, she would walk home, balancing the sewing machine on her head. When she got home she would be pleasantly tired, but would still help her mother until late when she would be told like a child to go to sleep. Soon she was able to buy a bicycle of her own and while she rode to the shed, a boy would take the machine out on the road for her. She had become housekeeper to the family, and more important still, custodian of her mother’s will to go on living. Her duty was to look after the property, to avoid marriage, for that would take her away from home and mother. If any children came to her through casual love affairs she must bear them and they would simply become part of the household. She was still free, but in a new and penitent way. So her brothers had decided at the family meeting before they all dispersed and so it must be. She must suffer in silence.
Jagua never thought she would be able to adapt herself to the new life. She found, after a few months of it that the atmosphere in Ogabu had a quality about it totally different from the Lagos atmosphere. That driving, voluptuous and lustful element which existed in the very air of Lagos, that something which awakened the sleeping sexual instincts in all men and women and turned them into animals always on heat, it was not present here. Here in Ogabu, men dressed well but sanely. Women were beautiful but not brazen. They had become complementary to the palm trees and the Iroko, the rivulets and the fertile earth. They were part of their surroundings as natural as the wind. Whereas in Lagos MAN was always grappling to master an ENVIRONMENT he had created. It was money, money, yet more money. She did not find the same rush here, the desire to outstrip the other fellow. No time, sorry, too busy, time is short. Time, time. I must go now! … None of that here. She was resting.
Not that she preferred the quiet life, but she had gradually ceased to picture the riotous life. It had become an echo too distant to touch her. Once a man came down on leave from Lagos. He was not an Ogabu man, but happened to be passing by their stalls. There must have been something about Jagua which made him stop his car and come along the road to her shed. A young man, neat and smiling. He was sharply dressed in the manner that made her heart leap. He talked trifles with her for a long time, flashing his teeth and fingering his silk tie. She liked his silver cigarette case, the way he flicked it open, offering her a cigarette and taking one himself. As she drew in the soothing smoke it occurred to her that she had not smoked for almost six months. This was a polished young man, sophisticated too. She liked him recklessly. He took to coming to her shed, not saying why he came; and every day her eyes wandered up the road, resting only when they lighted on the familiar grille of his car. She began to brush her hair and to dip into her suitcase for clothes she had not worn for months. And one evening she closed early and followed him out in his car. They drove about until evening turned to dusk and he took her to a shed by the river, a stone’s throw from the shrine. Here in the silence of the trees he took her and had her, and the fragrance of the forest gave it a romantic tang that remained with her.
He visited her again and took her to the shed but soon his leave was over and he went back, romantically promising to write to her, to send her presents. When the month came round, she did not see her period. Thrilling, but a secret she must nurse within herself. She would not tell her mother, yet. If it was true, it would be quite impossible to believe, she told herself. But the second month passed and the third. In a trembling fit of joy she took her bicycle and rode thirty miles to the nearest hospital. She told the doctor, ‘I am the daughter of the late David Obi.’ She spoke in Ibo, and the name sent the doctor bustling about the clinic. Oh. He took her into a little alcove. It was only a wooden hospital built among the palm trees, but it served the people and they came to it from eighty miles around. It had been a ‘temporary’ hospital for thirt
y years now. The Government kept on promising to build a bigger one. The doctor talked about the hospital while the nurse stood by, watching the examination.
‘Yes,’ he smiled, rubbing his hands. ‘God is wonderful. Your husband will be a happy man.’
One afternon Jagua was seated in her roadside shed showing one of her girls how to embroider the neckline of a child’s dress. A lorry stopped across the road. A woman came out of it and crossing the road began asking an old woman questions. The old woman eased her basket from one shoulder to the next and pointed. Jagua saw the stranger turn. A vague resemblance stirred somewhere. When she looked again, she recognized Rosa.
She dropped the dress and ran across the street. ‘Rosa! …’