The currents turned to tides as we moved farther towards the great waters. But, from all indications, my man, Pere, was a very capable boatman and there was no fear even when we were crossing troubled waters.
I followed the stars above me with my eyes and knew where I came from despite the long nights and the labyrinthine routes. I would know later from merely looking at the moon and stars where my people lived. I did not cry; not a teardrop fell from my eyes. There are times when you have no fear of the unknown. Let the night and open sea bring out monsters; I was never afraid. I could not drown below the river's bed. I had had the initial shock and instantly recovered. My heart did not miss a beat. I knew I had been sold away unjustly, but I had never been the sort of person who wept for the injustice done to me. I knew I would exonerate myself someday one way or another.
The very day following our arrival at Alagbabri, I was introduced to two Agbon women who had been expecting me! They told me there were many of us Agbon women married there. They had many children for their men. I shook my head because I knew they must have come there the same way I found myself in Alagbabri. I had never heard of that name before I arrived there. The Agbon women there were all doing fine, according to them.”
It was at this stage of Titi's testimony that Kena could no longer control her emotions and burst out wailing loudly. Other women followed; wails rose and fell as if an important person had just died. Titi, for whom these wails were raised, asked them to stop crying since she was living and not dead.
“You need a big heart to overcome your enemies,” she told the wailing women. “Have a big heart!” she counselled.
Kena could still recollect clearly that long evening when many of them, Okpara daughters and many wives, clustered round Titi. Among the Okpara daughters there was Oyeghe, her playground “daughter,” who had come to visit her parents. A few men, friends of the women, as they were called, were there. Among them Iniovo that some men often ridiculed for insisting that women were senior to men; Tefe, the storyteller, who had railed against Titi's betrayal whenever he had the opportunity to do so; and Obie, the young carver, who, unlike men in the same circumstances, never contested seniority with women who were his seniors. Kena remembered Obie's anguished exclamation: “How can we not know our greatest blessing!” Okpara and Agbon men had not yet realized their blessing. According to him, women were a blessing to men just as men were a blessing to women. When this realization would take place, nobody could tell, Kena wondered.
Kena also recollected Tefe's statement: “We must learn from every experience, pleasant or unpleasant. This was a very bad one and never again should we go back to the horrible days of selling our own because in selling our own we sell ourselves. We must learn from the mistakes of ignorance.” Everybody there listened and nodded to the storyteller's words of wisdom.
Titi carried within her some inner strength that intensified over the years. She had likened herself to an orphan who only had to seize her birthright, if not willingly accorded to her. She was not quite an orphan at the time of the shameful act because, though her mother was dead, her father had carried out the act. Somehow, her stepmother died about the same time as her father after a mere fever. She had come, not knowing that both had been long dead. But she had been well received by her relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. Even the children of her stepmother had asked for forgiveness, and she had embraced them as her own brothers and sisters.
For more than forty years Titi had been away from her home and she had come back to show Okpara how she had fared. Nobody needed to be told that she had done better than marriage in Agbon would have made her. “If you want to show off your ivory bangles, stretch your hands,” the saying went. In Titi's figure you could see prosperity and joy. Imagine her talk of her husband's fondness for her. When other men teased her husband that she might not return to him as she left for the publicized trip, he had only laughed and said that both of them were inseparable—he could not imagine Titi living a happy life without him, nor he living a meaningful life without Titi. In Agbon, the wife was seen as another person's daughter, another entity from the man. It was not so in Alagbabri. Pere and Titi had become an inseparable couple.
Titi was back to her husband in Izonland, but the lesson of her fate was something Kena would not forget. Women, when treated unjustly, could reverse their negative perception with their own hands. When denied their rights, women could seize them back. In Agbon the women were still folding their arms, and only they could use their hands as tools or weapons to wrest for themselves the rights they deserved to enjoy. But she knew this was easier to say than to implement. How many Titis were in Agbon to make a change? But she felt that since Agbon produced Titi, there were others there among them who needed to be discovered.
Already members of the women-only Elohor cult were talking surprising things. They were not satisfied with cultivating plantains to induce fertility; they were already planting yams that had been a male crop. That was just one of the signs of the changing attitude of women. But what could they achieve in their chameleon steps? Kena asked herself.
Kena had been so carried away in her recollection of what had happened to Titi and how the victimized woman had bounced back to a robust life that she, at least for that moment, had forgotten the painful reality of her son beside her.
The weather was beautiful, the sun shining but not shooting out hot arrows to drain folks of energy. There was no heat after the harmattan had gone and the first heavy rains were already falling. It was the pleasant season that Okpara folks talked about: neither cold nor hot but daily moderate temperatures that made the people to work normally without being tired. South-westerly winds were blowing, the sign that it was the onset of the rainy season. The rains have succeeded in driving away the heat and farmers were happy working in their farms without their energy being sapped away by heat. The evenings were also sunlit but cool and the ohwarha had some of Okpara's hardworking and busy men this late afternoon. Amraibure, Tefe, Iniovo, Ode, Obie, and some other men were at the ohwarha joint. It was rare for them to be together like this but it happened once in a long while.
This day there was excitement in the air, and it showed on the faces of the men gathered to chat, gossip, and bounce opinion on all sorts of issues. In the local parlance, ohwarha was never a boring place; one came here to throw away boredom and recuperate from tedious work. At ohwarha, there was always a next time for the men as long as they lived and remained healthy. There would always be enough for them to talk about to while away hours without knowing.
“Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“You always answer a question with a question?”
“Are you not an Agbon person?”
“The long-awaited day is coming,” Iniovo said.
“Yes, I heard so,” Tefe replied.
“Agbon is finally living to do what it needs to do,” Amraibure told his mates.
“We will do what our ancestors and gods expect of us,” Ode said.
They skirted around the breaking news, as if it was forbidden to talk publicly about it. It was their way of talking about an important development that was not yet public knowledge. They had all heard the news and it was at the ohwarha that Okpara's men shared news. It was at the ohwarha joint that the men enjoyed debating issues of public concern, and now they had the chance to talk excitedly about a forthcoming event of great importance to all Agbon people.
“If none of you will say it, I will say it out: we are going to have the Edjenu Festival at long last,” Iniovo announced, as he jumped
