to be. You want to be a lawyer?”
Going to work was too remote to contemplate.
He laughed. “Tell me now, so I can take back my gifts.”
“I’m too young to know.”
“Too young indeed. Who will run my practice when I’m gone. And another thing, these romance books you’re reading. No chasing boys when you get there.”
“I don’t like boys.”
“Good,” he said. “Because you’re not going there to study boy-ology.”
“Daddy,” I said.
He was the one I would miss. The one I would write to. I settled to write a poem after he left, using words that rhymed with sad: bad, dad, glad, had. I was on my third verse when I heard raps on my window. I peeped outside to find Sheri standing with a sheet of paper in her hand. Her face appeared like a tiny moon. She was crouching.
“Open up,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“I came to get your school address.”
Wasn’t she afraid? It was as dark as indigo outside.
“On your own?”
“With Akanni. He’s in your quarters, with his girlfriend.”
She pulled a pencil from her pocket. She was like an imp who had come to tempt me. I couldn’t get rid of her.
“Eni-Tan,” she spelled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Your school address,” she said. “Or are you deaf?”
1975
Had I listened to my mother, that would have been the end of Sheri and I, and the misfortune that would bind us. But my mother had more hope of squeezing me up her womb than stopping our friendship. Sheri had led me to the gap between parental consent and disapproval. I would learn how to bridge it with deception, wearing a face as pious as a church sister before my mother and altering steadily behind her. There was a name my mother had for children like Sheri. They were omo-ita, street children. If they had homes, they didn’t like staying in them. What they liked, instead, was to go around fighting and cursing, and getting up to mischief.
Away from my own home, my days in boarding school were like a balm. I lived with five hundred other girls and shared a dormitory with about twenty. At night we let down our mosquito nets and during the day we patched them up if they got ripped. If a girl had malaria, we covered her with blankets to sweat out her fever. I held girls through asthma attacks, shoved a teaspoon down the mouth of a girl who was convulsing, burst boils. It was a wonder we survived the spirit of samaritanism, or communal living. The toilets stunk like sewers and sometimes excrement piled up days high. I had to cover my nose to use them and when girls were menstruating, they flung their soiled sanitary towels into open buckets. Still, I preferred boarding school to home.
Royal College girls came from mixed backgrounds. In our dormitory alone we had a farmer’s daughter and a diplomat’s daughter. The farmer’s daughter had never been to a city before she came to Lagos; the diplomat’s daughter had been to garden parties at Kensington palace. There were girls from homes like mine, girls from less privileged homes, so a boarder might come back from class to find her locker had been broken into. Since she knew she’d never see her missing belongings again, the next step was to put a hex on the thief by shouting out curses like, “May you have everlasting diarrhea.” “May you menstruate forever.” If the thief were caught, she would be jostled down the hallways.
I met Moslem girls: Zeinat, Alima, Aisha who rose early to salute Mecca. Some covered their heads with scarves after school, and during Ramadan, they shunned food and water from dawn till dusk. I met Catholic girls: Grace, Agnes, Mary, who sported gray crosses on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday. There were Anglican girls, Methodist girls. One girl, Sangita, was Hindu and we loved to tug on her long plait. The daughter of our math teacher and the only foreign student in our school, she had such a resounding, “Leave me alone!” she sent the best of us running.
I met girls born with sickle cell anemia like my brother. Some were sick almost every other month, others hardly ever. We called them sicklers. They called themselves sicklers. One thought it excused her from all ills: untidiness, lateness, rudeness. I learned from her that I carried the sickle cell trait, which meant I would never be sick, but my child could be, if my husband also carried the trait.
I learned also about women in my country, from Zaria, Katsina, Kaduna who decorated their skin with henna dye and lived in purdah; women from Calabar who were fed and anointed in fattening houses before their weddings; women who were circumcised. I heard about towns in western Nigeria where every family had twins because the women ate a lot of yams, and other towns in northern Nigeria, where every other family had a crippled child because women married their first cousins. None of the women seemed real. They were like mammy-water, sirens of the Niger Delta who rose from the creeks to lure unsuspecting men to death by drowning.
Uncle Alex had always said our country was not meant to be one. The British had drawn a circle on the map of West Africa and called it a country. Now I understood what he meant. The girls I met at Royal College were so different. I could tell a girl’s ethnicity even before she opened her mouth. Hausa girls had softer hair because of their Arab heritage. Yoruba girls like me usually had heart-shaped faces and many Igbo girls were fair-skinned; we called them Igbo Yellow. We spoke English, but our native tongues were as different as French and Chinese. So, we mispronounced names and spoke English with different accents. Some Hausa girls could not “fronounce” the letter P. Some Yoruba girls might call these girls “Ausas,” and eggs might be “heggs.” Then there was that business with the middle-belters who mixed up their L’s and R’s. If they said a word like lorry, there was no telling what my bowels would release, from laughing.
It all provided jokes. So did the stereotypes. Yoruba girls were considered quarrelsome; Hausa girls, pretty but dumb; Igbo girls, intelligent, but well, they were muscular. Most girls had parents of the same origin, but there was some intermingling and we had a few girls, like Sheri, who had one parent from a foreign country. Half-castes we called them, without malice or implications. Half because they claimed both sides of their heritage. There was no caste system in our country.
Often at Royal College, we shared family stories while fetching water from a tap in the yard. I learned that my mother’s behavior wasn’t typical. I also learned that every other girl had an odd family story to tell: Afi’s grandmother was killed when a bicycle knocked her down in the village; Yemisi’s mother worked till her water broke; Mfon’s cousin smoked hemp and brought shame on the family; Ibinabo’s father stripped her down, whipped her, and made her say “thank-you” afterward.
In the mornings, we congregated in the assembly hall to sing our national anthem and took a few minutes to appreciate Beethoven or some other European composer. At meal-times we packed into our dining hall and sang:
Some have food but cannot eat,
Some can eat but have no food,
We have food and we can eat,
Glory be to God, Amen.
After school, we drummed on our desks and sang. We sang a lot, through the transformations in our country; when we began to drive on the right side of the road; when
