“Go and get a drink for Odili,” said Mrs Nanga to her eldest son, Eddy—the one at secondary school. He soon brought me a bottle of ice-cold beer which was just the thing after my strenuous ride. I poured the first glass down my throat in one go and then began to sip the second. As I did so I kept wondering how to broach the question of Edna without appearing too suspicious.
“When are you preparing to return to Bori?” I asked. “The house is quite cold without you and the children.”
“Don’t tell me about Bori, my brother. I want to rest a bit here . . . Eddy’s father says I should come back at the end of next month before he goes to America but I don’t know. . . .”
“I thought you were going with him?”
“Me?” She laughed.
“Yes. Why not?”
“My brother, when those standing have not got their share you are talking about those kneeling. Have you ever heard of a woman going to America when she doesn’t know ABC?”
Fine, I thought, and was about to plunge in, but Mrs Nanga obliged me even more!
“When Edna comes she will go to those places,” she said. “I am too old
and too bush.”
“Who is Edna?”
“Don’t you know about Edna, our new wife?”
“Oh, that girl. Nonsense. She doesn’t know half as much book as you.”
“Ah, she does-o. I no go Modern School.”
“But standard six in your time was superior to Senior Cambridge today,” I said in our language, refusing to be drawn into the levity of pidgin.
“You talk as though I went to school in nineteen-kridim,” she said, somewhat hurt.
“No, no, no,” I said. “But education has been falling every year. Last year’s standard six is higher than this year’s.”
But she didn’t seem to be all that hurt after all. Her mind appeared to be far away on other thoughts.
“I passed the entrance to a secondary school,” she said wistfully, “but Eddy’s father and his people kept at me to marry him, marry him, and then my own parents joined in; they said what did a girl want with so much education? So I foolishly agreed. I wasn’t old enough to refuse. Edna is falling into the same trap. Imagine a girl straight from college not being allowed to teach even for one year and look around. Anyway what is my share in it? Let her come quick-quick to enjoy Chief Nanga’s money before it runs away.” She laughed bitterly.
My first reaction was to feel uncomfortable, not so much for what Mrs Nanga had said as by the presence while she said it of her fifteen-year-old son, Eddy.
“Is she coming into the house soon?”
“I don’t know. What is my own there? She can come tomorrow as far as I am concerned; the house is there. And she can take over from me and stay awake at night to talk grammar; and in the morning her dress will be smelling of cigarette smoke and white people.” I couldn’t help laughing.
“Why don’t you want to advise her? She should take at least one year and teach and look around. She will listen to you, I’m sure; she is only a little girl, really.”
“True? She was born yesterday, eh? Let her come and suck.” She indicated her left breast. “No, my brother, I won’t spoil anybody’s good fortune. When Eddy’s father married me I was not half her age. As soon as her mother recovers let her come and eat Nanga’s wealth . . . The food is cooked and the smell of the soup is around. Let nobody remember the woman who toiled and starved when there was no money . . .” She rubbed her eyes with a corner of her lappa and blew her nose into it.
“Where is her home? I must go and talk to her—tomorrow morning, I must.” Before I said this I considered Eddy’s presence but quickly took the calculated risk that he was likely to be on his mother’s side, although you couldn’t see anything of it on his handsome face, even with his mother on the brink of tears.
“Go if you like,” said Mrs Nanga with feigned indifference, “but don’t tell anyone I sent you. If I am not to grow bigger let me at least remain as small as I am.”
I was right about Eddy. He immediately and carefully described how to get to Edna’s home—in another and fairly distant part of the village. He even suggested that the driver take me in their Vauxhall, which showed that in spite of his height he was still a mere boy.
• • •
I lost my way a few times before I found Odo’s house of red earth and thatched roof. He was sitting in his front room making the rope used for tying yams on to erect poles in the barn. The short pieces of fibre from which he worked lay beside him in three bundles, one of which had become loose at the girdle from depletion. The rope he had made so far was rolled up in a ball lying between his feet; he held its free end in his hand and tied new lengths of fibre to it. When I came in he was strengthening the last knot by pulling hard at it across his chest, exposing his locked teeth in the action. He was a big man with an enormous, shining stomach sitting on the rolled-up portion of his loin-cloth. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair greying.
We shook hands and I took a chair facing him and backing the approaches to the house. He said “welcome” several times more while he worked.