Ancestors, page 7
Peter’s parents showed Moremi a photograph of Peter taken in 1997, a color snapshot Peter’s mother carried with her. Peter was leaning against a large boulder with a beach in the background. The day was sunny. He was wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt. He looked young although it was ten years after she had first met him. She couldn’t help feeling that this was destiny and what her parents also would have wanted.
A rushed ceremony was arranged in Nigeria. One of Peter’s cousins stood in for him. Two months later she boarded a plane at the Lagos Airport and watched her homeland disappear. Once they were at 30,000 feet she could only see small patches of green over a brownish hazed landscape and then it was gone.
Fourteen hours later her plane came in low over the water and her heart skipped a beat when she thought there was no runway, only water. The wheels bounced and they were on the ground at San Francisco International Airport. Peter met her as she came through the customs gate. He looked much older and she reminded herself that she was older too.
There had been no time for her to grieve for her lost family. During those last dark days in Nigeria her world had turned upside down. Nothing was safe. When she arrived in America she was convinced of one thing — she must go forward and leave the past behind. She had no chance. She had to.
Her life narrowed down to survival and her link to home had to be internal. Her attachment was in her memory, her lifeline that stretched from her ancestors to her and beyond into the future to those who were not yet born.
As the years went by, she realized she underestimated her ability to carry everything inside as just a memory. That’s when the dreams and the connections started to come. Mami began to visit her whether she liked it or not.
She missed home more and more and began to remember the little things that made her life special. But to give in to the depth of the loss of the family meant death to her and she could not die because she had Ayo, who was the only living link to her family.
She never considered talking about her grief until a friend at work suggested a psychotherapist. Moremi never imagined this was something she could do. Now it seemed right. The mask in Rebecca’s office told her she was meant to do this. She decided not to question it but just follow the path laid out for her.
Meanwhile, she would have to try to understand what her mother meant by “our blood” on their hands.
9
He lay in bed unable to sleep. The room was dark except for the street lamps that cast a dim glow over the night outside the window, blurring a view of the sky. He did not expect her to come up to bed anytime soon. He could see she’d been shaken. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would discover what he’d done but now he suspected she had. He had no idea how she knew to go down to the cellar. There were times when he wondered whether Moremi was psychic, but he didn’t believe in that nonsense so he always dismissed the thought before it grew. What he had done was personal to him, not her. He didn’t want her to think what he had done took any attention away from her. All he did was spill some blood on the black sand.
Peter didn’t go down looking for her altar knowing what he would do. He wanted whatever he did to be spontaneous as it was. It felt sacrificial of course, but more importantly, sacrilegious, which was what he wanted. It had been merely a defiant gesture enacted intuitively and it gave him the release he needed.
He realized that when he had said goodnight to her earlier after she had gone in to say goodnight to Ayo there had been something in her tone and look that was not her usual manner. He fell asleep once she went downstairs. He believed her when she said she had work to do. Often she would do it at night when the house was quiet.
But something awakened him after about an hour. His eyes opened suddenly and he listened for the sound that must have done it. At first he heard only the silence of the house. He walked down the hall to the landing at the top of the stairs and listened further. A premonition drew him further down.
At the foot of the stairs he could see into the living room that was indirectly lit from the kitchen. He didn’t see her at first. She was sitting very still in the chair. He thought she had fallen asleep but as his eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw that she was awake. It was then he knew she had somehow discovered what he had done. In a few short, silent steps he was in the doorway hoping to give her a jolt.
He would not discuss whatever she thought he had done. Not now, not ever. He could accuse her of lying to him but never the reverse.
After he went back to bed he felt unsatisfied. Usually he went right to sleep, but he lay in bed unable to settle down. He knew he was more shaken than he realized. He felt vulnerable and weak. Nothing was worse.
He let his thoughts wander back to memories he rarely allowed to surface.
He remembered the day long after he had gone to America when his father contacted him and said he and his mother had found him a wife. Peter thought his father was joking. Sometimes his parents did tease him about not having a wife because he was then in his late forties. He knew they would not stop mentioning this even though they tried to keep it light by teasing. But he knew his parents never teased without serious intention. Not marrying was really the only true rebellion Peter had engaged in. Early in his twenties he made the decision to move to America and stay. At a distance he would remain their dutiful, respectful son. His parents always assumed he would marry and that she would be Nigerian. He could have had his pick but he politely resisted their nudges. Living in America gave him an excuse to be single and he had been enjoying his bachelor life. When he opened the envelope they had sent containing Moremi’s picture, everything changed.
He had met her in Africa. He was about twenty-eight and she must have been about sixteen. Even though she was still a little gawky and not filled out he could see the woman in the girl. She had poise. His parents considered her mother to be very beautiful. She was curvaceous, buxom, one of those women who looked better with more weight, graceful, flowing and strong. He imagined Moremi would grow up to look like her mother in some ways, but perhaps thinner like her father. He was too young to care about any of that then. After meeting her and her parents she slipped from his mind.
But when he saw the picture in the envelope it all came back. He couldn’t believe the girl he had met and the one in the picture were the same. She was standing with her parents, taller than both of them. Like her mother she wore a long cotton skirt patterned in bright reds and yellows with an embroidered blouse. An outdoor market was in the background and they all looked happy, at ease together. When his mother had told him that Moremi’s mother was a priestess it meant nothing to him. Now he had grown to realize its significance.
As he drifted toward sleep with her picture in his mind another memory surfaced, associated with the word priestess. He let the images unfold.
It was Sunday afternoon, even hotter than usual, humid after the rain. He was about twelve and he had been playing football with some friends until it began to rain. The grass field tended to be squishy with mud but when it rained even a little pockets of slick mud formed, making it impossible to run over the ground without falling. They had been lazily kicking a ball around near their school because it had been too humid to play hard, even for them. At about 4:00 in the afternoon they disbanded. Most of the boys headed for home leaving just him and Osaze, who stayed behind and kicked the ball around with him.
Osaze was gifted. He maneuvered the ball with deadly accuracy. He was swift as a gazelle and could run and zigzag at the same high speed, his upper torso seeming to glide while his legs and feet moved with the precision of a tap dancer. His family were Igbo. Peter knew little about how the Igbo people were different from his. However, he had an early memory of his father saying, “Those damn Igbos think they’re better than we are. But hell, they’re responsible for Biafra.” At school and football practice, the boys were all the same. After school they split up into groups and went home to neighborhoods in different parts of town. Osaze lived on the outskirts of town in an area Peter knew very little.
In that moment, alone after the others had gone, they were just two boys standing in the heat of a late Sunday afternoon looking for something to do. Osaze said, “Hey, come with me. I want to show you something.” His tone promised adventure so Peter followed.
After almost an hour’s walk on a dusty road littered with debris and waste, lined with coconut palms, they reached the uninhabited outskirts of town. The landscape was rural with large rock outcroppings and dense areas with palms and low rainforest undergrowth near the river.
Osaze left the main road and they headed through a rainforest thicket, eventually following a narrow path. After a while Peter could hear the sound of drums and the low murmur of chanting and voices. Finally in the distance he saw a cleared area with a straw roof over a walled enclosure. Something was going on inside the mud walls. Osaze grabbed an old wooden crate and plunked it down at the wall that was about five feet high in some places. A few others had done the same so Peter also found an old crate lying on the ground and brought it next to Osaze and together they watched what was going on inside the enclosure.
Peter was riveted. The drums were constant, intense, mesmerizing. The ground was packed hard.
People inside the arena were sitting along the inner wall on benches or chairs, anything they could find to sit on. Many had their eyes closed and were swaying back and forth.
In the center was a square pole as tall as the ceiling of the front roof. Standing in what looked like concrete, it rose through a large rectangular platform about chest high to a grown man and was painted with blue and white stripes up to the ceiling.
Objects were scattered on the large shelf — rattles and bells, some drums and books and other things, including an assortment of jars filled with various substances he couldn’t really see. Hanging from the rafters beneath the roof was a model of a wooden ship with sails. He stared at it. It appeared to be well-made and detailed.
“Look, it’s a flying ship,” he said.
Osaze paid no attention. He was absorbed in what was going on in the arena. Peter remembered thinking he looked as if he were transported into an imaginary realm.
Osaze exclaimed to Peter, “There she is!” He pointed to a large woman sitting in a chair. “She’s the Mambo. Very important person.” Peter realized Osaze knew more about this than he had let on. This wasn’t just a Sunday adventure.
Peter watched and wondered. The Mambo sat near what seemed like a small room built to be entered from the inner courtyard, and waved her arms over her head as if she were conducting something. She bent over and looked into the entrance. Out of the darkness a woman burst forth holding her hands on either side of her head like horns. She was not old but Peter couldn’t guess her age. Younger than his mother, but he couldn’t tell. She ran around in circles bucking her upper torso up and down as if someone invisible were riding her. Peter couldn’t hear but she kept running in circles and pointed to a man who went over and took her arm as if to steady her and calm her down. Slowly she did calm down, but she had a strange, wild look in her eyes and periodically she would leer and rush at the crowd as if she were a bull charging at them.
People sitting on the sidelines would stand up and draw back to stay out of her way. They were frightened and transfixed by her at the same time. After she backed off to head in another direction they would sit down again.
The Mambo never took her eyes off her and seemed almost to control her with a steady, connecting gaze. Peter could see the crowd trusted the Mambo.
The wild woman stopped dead, still in the middle of the courtyard, and moved her head around scanning the crowd. She squinted at the hot sun low on the horizon, and craned her neck sniffing the air. Then, without warning, she shot out her right arm and pointed right at Peter, locking him in her gaze. Everyone looked Peter’s way. He stared at her for what seemed a long time but was probably no more than a few seconds. The Mambo stood, looking concerned, and her eyes shot to Peter.
He jumped down from his perch and tore out of there as if a wild boar were chasing him. He ran until he had to stop and catch his breath. Then he ran again like the wind until he reached the outskirts of town. He stopped and bent over with pain in both his sides and threw up in the dirt. All that came out finally was spittle followed by dry heaves. He managed to calm down, remembering how his football coach had taught him to breathe slowly and evenly, in and out, in and out.
He hurried home, shaken. He couldn’t comprehend what had happened to him. Why did the crazy woman point at him as if accusing him of something? There had been other times in his life when he had been scared but not quite like that. At least in the past he had recognized the danger. This had been different.
His father had a capricious, dark temper. Calm one moment, furious the next, with no connection between the two. More than once Peter referred to his father behind his back as “the Black Mamba.”
He made up the name after he had seen one when he was ten at boarding school. A gamekeeper had to come to the school to kill it and the boys had all collected in the yard to watch while the headmaster kept ordering them to stand back. But they were eager to see the snake and had no idea how lethal it was. Peter thought the snake was beautiful. It was yellow with a green hue, long and sleek, at least eight feet long and raised its head a foot and a half in the air. Someone collected snakes and it had escaped onto the school grounds and the gamekeeper had been called. The Mamba moved back and forth as if in a hunting dance poised to strike while the gamekeeper backed away mimicking its movements. When the snake struck, missing him by an inch, he jammed the stick just below its head and held it there, grinding it into the ground. Peter saw the black inside its mouth and shuddered. The gamekeeper did not let it up until his assistant came and threw a net over the dead snake. They hauled it away very carefully even though it was dead.
His father, like the Mamba, was not predictable, but Peter had learned how to get out of his way unbitten.
Nothing had prepared him for the shock of that crazy woman pointing. He thought she was bewitched and had sent a poison arrow into his body. As he ran home, stopping to catch his breath and then running again, he tried to forget what had just happened.
When he reached home his mother asked where he had been. Peter lied and said he went with another friend to his house and forgot about the time. He did not mention Osaze’s name. His explanation seemed to be the end of the incident. His mother had no real interest in Peter’s wanderings after school or on the weekends and did not have the energy that evening to reprimand him. She told him to wash up because dinner was ready. Peter never spoke of the incident after that, not to anyone. Osaze never mentioned it either, and Peter avoided being alone with him again.
Over the years the memory had almost faded away. But now it was back.
The day his father called from Nigeria to talk with him more about Moremi and the arranged ceremony Peter asked for more detail about what had happened to her family. He did not know then about any connection between their deaths and his father’s influence. When he heard more about what happened to them he started to pull away from Moremi, not wanting to touch someone so afflicted with tragedy.
But he reconsidered. He imagined how grateful and compliant this would make her toward him. The opportunity of having her under his power — this beautiful, graceful, lost woman — he felt the power surge as if he were a hunter who captured his magnificent prey.
He imagined the Black Mamba. Even though it had been killed it was formidable and left a lasting impression. The gamekeeper understood his rival and Peter saw the outcome could easily have gone the other way. He realized for the first time that he and his father were like the snake and the gamekeeper. I was the Black Mamba. You got me.
It was not until later that Peter learned the extent of the betrayal his family had perpetrated on Moremi’s. Even though his father explained it in few words Peter knew it was not that simple. His father said, “Moses had become a political liability. He was speaking out from that pulpit of his and people were beginning to listen. He was on the wrong side.”
Peter knew that in the mid-nineties reprisals were common. Abacha’s government could not tolerate such independent thinkers. Things had gotten out of hand and something had to be done to maintain order.
His father went on to explain, “He didn’t respond to intimidation. We tried, but he thought he was another Mandela. We couldn’t have that so he had to be sacrificed. The mother was just stupid, she ran into the line of fire. And the brother? Well, he was like the mother and got in the way by asking too many questions and snooping around where he shouldn’t. But I saved Moremi for you. She’ll give you children. She’s a gazelle. Beautiful. Aristocratic line. She’s yours. We are giving her to you.”
For the first few years of their marriage, the deadly secret made their connection more exciting than anything he had ever known. But he couldn’t sustain it. At first it had infused their bond with exquisite tension — her loss was his gain — but then slowly but surely the secret became a burden. It began to get into the way. He realized he never really possessed her. Her mind was always somewhere else, unreachable. He had underestimated her connection to her mother. He knew she practiced her mother’s religion in secret.
As he lay in bed a thought settled into him like a slow death in quicksand just before you go under. She would find out. Because of her connection to her dead mother and that dead mother’s grandmother and on and on back into the never-ending past she would find out the truth.
And then what? He might die. But what would happen to Ayo? He could not allow Ayo to ever know what happened. He would have to sacrifice Moremi. Sleep took over as he asked himself: How? When?
It must be soon. I think there is not much time. I’ll think of something tomorrow.
