Purple Hibiscus

  The sun had turned red and was about to fall when Aunty Ifeoma said we had to leave. As we trudged down the hill, I stopped hoping that Father Amadi would appear.

  WE WERE ALL in the living room, playing cards, when the phone rang that evening.

  “Amaka, please answer it,” Aunty Ifeoma said, even though she was closest to the door.

  “I can bet it’s for you, Mom,” Amaka said, focused on her cards. “It’s one of those people who want you to dash them our plates and our pots and even the underwear we have on.”

  Aunty Ifeoma got up laughing and hurried to the phone. The TV was off and we were all silently absorbed in our cards, so I heard Aunty Ifeoma’s scream clearly. A short, strangled scream. For a short moment, I prayed that the American embassy had revoked the visa, before I rebuked myself and asked God to disregard my prayers. We all rushed to the room.

  “Hei, Chi m o! nwunye m! Hei!” Aunty Ifeoma was standing by the table, her free hand placed on her head in the way that people do when they are in shock. What had happened to Mama? She was holding the phone out; I knew she wanted to give it to Jaja, but I was closer and I grasped it. My hand shook so much the earpiece slid away from my ear to my temple.

  Mama’s low voice floated across the phone line and quickly quelled my shaking hand. “Kambili, it’s your father. They called me from the factory, they found him lying dead on his desk.”

  I pressed the phone tighter to my ear. “Eh?”

  “It’s your father. They called me from the factory, they found him lying dead on his desk.” Mama sounded like a recording. I imagined her saying the same thing to Jaja, in the same exact tone. My ears filled with liquid. Although I had heard her right, heard her say he was found dead on his office desk, I asked, “Did he get a letter bomb? Was it a letter bomb?”

  Jaja grabbed the phone. Aunty Ifeoma led me to the bed. I sat down and stared at the bag of rice that leaned against the bedroom wall, and I knew that I would always remember that bag of rice, the brown interweaving of jute, the words ADADA LONG GRAIN on it, the way it slumped against the wall, near the table. I had never considered the possibility that Papa would die, that Papa could die. He was different from Ade Coker, from all the other people they had killed. He had seemed immortal.

  I sat with Jaja in our living room, staring at the space where the étagère had been, where the ballet-dancing figurines had been. Mama was upstairs, packing Papa’s things. I had gone up to help and saw her kneeling on the plush rug, holding his red pajamas pressed to her face. She did not look up when I came in; she said, “Go, nne, go and stay with Jaja,” the silk muffling her voice.

  Outside, the rain came down in slants, hitting the closed windows with a furious rhythm. It would hurl down cashews and mangoes from the trees and they would start to rot in the humid earth, giving out that sweet-and-sour scent.

  The compound gates were locked. Mama had told Adamu not to open the gates to all the people who wanted to throng in for mgbalu, to commiserate with us. Even members of our umunna who had come from Abba were turned away. Adamu said it was unheard of, to turn sympathizers away. But Mama told him we wished to mourn privately, that they could go to offer Masses for the repose of Papa’s soul. I had never heard Mama talk to Adamu that way; I had never even heard Mama talk to Adamu at all.

  “Madam said you should drink some Bournvita,” Sisi said, coming into the living room. She was carrying a tray that held the same cups Papa had always used to drink his tea. I could smell the thyme and curry that clung to her. Even after she had a bath, she still smelled like that. It was only Sisi who had cried in the household, loud sobs that had quickly quieted in the face of our bewildered silence.

  I turned to Jaja after she left and tried speaking with my eyes. But Jaja’s eyes were blank, like a window with its shutter drawn across.

  “Won’t you drink some Bournvita?” I asked, finally.

  He shook his head. “Not with those cups.” He shifted on his seat and added, “I should have taken care of Mama. Look how Obiora balances Aunty Ifeoma’s family on his head, and I am older than he is. I should have taken care of Mama.”

  “God knows best,” I said. “God works in mysterious ways.” And I thought how Papa would be proud that I had said that, how he would approve of my saying that.

  Jaja laughed. It sounded like a series of snorts strung together. “Of course God does. Look what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t He just go ahead and save us?”

  I took off my slippers. The cold marble floor drew the heat from my feet. I wanted to tell Jaja that my eyes tingled with unshed tears, that I still listened for, wanted to hear, Papa’s footsteps on the stairs. That there were painfully scattered bits inside me that I could never put back because the places they fit into were gone. Instead, I said, “St. Agnes will be full for Papa’s funeral Mass.”

  Jaja did not respond.

  The phone started to ring. It rang for a long time; the caller must have dialed a few times before Mama finally answered it. She came into the living room a short while later. The wrapper casually tied across her chest hung low, exposing the birthmark, a little black bulb, above her left breast.

  “They did an autopsy,” she said. “They have found the poison in your father’s body.” She sounded as though the poison in Papa’s body was something we all had known about, something we had put in there to be found, the way it was done in the books I read where white people hid Easter eggs for their children to find.

  “Poison?” I said.

  Mama tightened her wrapper, then went to the windows; she pushed the drapes aside, checking that the louvers were shut to keep the rain from splashing into the house. Her movements were calm and slow. When she spoke, her voice was just as calm and slow. “I started putting the poison in his tea before I came to Nsukka. Sisi got it for me; her uncle is a powerful witch doctor.”

  For a long, silent moment I could think of nothing. My mind was blank, I was blank. Then I thought of taking sips of Papa’s tea, love sips, the scalding liquid that burned his love onto my tongue. “Why did you put it in his tea?” I asked Mama, rising. My voice was loud. I was almost screaming. “Why in his tea?”

  But Mama did not answer. Not even when I stood up and shook her until Jaja yanked me away. Not even when Jaja wrapped his arms around me and turned to include her but she moved away.

  THE POLICEMEN CAME a few hours later. They said they wanted to ask some questions. Somebody at St. Agnes Hospital had contacted them, and they had a copy of the autopsy report with them. Jaja did not wait for their questions; he told them he had used rat poison, that he put it in Papa’s tea. They allowed him to change his shirt before they took him away.

  A DIFFERENT SILENCE

  The Present

  The roads to the prison are familiar. I know the houses and shops, I know the faces of the women who sell oranges and bananas just before you turn into the pothole-filled road that leads to the prison yard.

  “You want to buy oranges, Kambili?” Celestine asks, slowing the car to a crawl, as the hawkers start to wave and call out to us. His voice is gentle; Mama says it is the reason she hired him after she asked Kevin to leave. That and also that he does not have a dagger-shape scar on his neck.

  “What we have in the boot should do,” I say. I turn to Mama. “Do you want us to buy anything here?”

  Mama shakes her head, and her scarf starts to slip off. She reaches out to knot it again as loosely as before. Her wrapper is just as loose around her waist, and she ties and reties it often, giving her the air of the unkempt women in Ogbete market, who let their wrappers unravel so that everyone sees the hole-riddled slips they have on underneath.

  She does not seem to mind that she looks this way; she doesn’t even seem to know. She has been different ever since Jaja was locked up, since she went about telling people that she killed Papa, that she put the poison in his tea. She even
wrote letters to newspapers. But nobody listened to her; they still don’t. They think grief and denial—that her husband is dead and that her son is in prison—have turned her into this vision of a painfully bony body, of skin speckled with blackheads the size of watermelon seeds. Perhaps it is why they forgive her for not wearing all black or all white for a year. Perhaps it is why nobody criticized her for not attending the first- and second-year memorial Masses, for not cutting her hair.

  “Try and make your scarf tighter, Mama,” I say, reaching out to touch her shoulder.

  Mama shrugs, still looking out of the window. “It is tight enough.”

  Celestine is looking at us in the rearview mirror. His eyes are gentle. He once suggested to me that we take Mama to a dibia in his hometown, a man who is an expert in “these things.” I was not sure what Celestine meant by “these things,” if he was suggesting that Mama was mad, but I thanked him and told him she would not want to go. He means well, Celestine. I have seen the way he looks at Mama sometimes, the way he helps her get out of the car, and I know he wishes he could make her whole.

  Mama and I hardly ever come to the prison together. Usually Celestine takes me a day or two before he takes her, every week. She prefers it, I think. But today is different, special—we have finally been told, for certain, that Jaja will get out.

  After the Head of State died months ago—they say he died atop a prostitute, foaming at the mouth and jerking—we thought Jaja’s release would be immediate, that our lawyers would quickly work something out. Especially with the prodemocracy groups demonstrating, calling for a government investigation into Papa’s death, insisting that the old regime killed him. But it took a few weeks before the interim civilian government announced that it would release all prisoners of conscience, and weeks more for our lawyers to get Jaja on the list. His name is number four on the list of more than two hundred. He will be out next week.

  They told us yesterday, two of our most recent lawyers; both of them have the prestigious SAN, for senior advocate of Nigeria, after their names. They came to our house with the news and with a bottle of champagne tied with a pink ribbon. After they left, Mama and I did not talk about it. We went about carrying, but not sharing, the same new peace, the same hope, concrete for the first time.

  There is so much more that Mama and I do not talk about. We do not talk about the huge checks we have written, for bribes to judges and policemen and prison guards. We do not talk about how much money we have, even after half of Papa’s estate went to St. Agnes and to the fostering of missions in the church. And we have never talked about finding out that Papa had anonymously donated to the children’s hospitals and motherless babies’ homes and disabled veterans from the civil war. There is still so much that we do not say with our voices, that we do not turn into words.

  “Please put in the Fela tape, Celestine,” I say, leaning back on the seat. The brash voice soon fills the car. I turn to see if Mama minds, but she is looking straight ahead at the front seat; I doubt that she can hear anything. Most times, her answers are nods and shakes of the head, and I wonder if she really heard. I used to ask Sisi to talk to her, because she would sit with Sisi in the living room for long hours, but she said Mama would not reply to her, that Mama simply sat and stared. When Sisi got married last year, Mama gave her cartons and cartons of china and Sisi sat on the floor of the kitchen, crying loudly, while Mama watched her. Sisi comes in now, once in a while, to instruct our new steward, Okon, and to ask if Mama needs anything. Mama usually says nothing, just shakes her head while rocking herself.

  Last month, when I told her I was going to Nsukka, she did not say anything, either, did not ask me why, though I don’t know anybody in Nsukka anymore. She simply nodded. Celestine drove me, and we arrived around noon, just about when the sun was changing to the searing sun I have long imagined can suck the moisture from bone marrow. Most of the lawns on the university grounds are overgrown now; the long grasses stick up like green arrows. The statue of the preening lion no longer gleams.

  I asked the new family in Aunty Ifeoma’s flat if I could come in, and although they looked at me strangely, they asked me in and offered me a glass of water. It would be warm, they said, because there was no power. The blades of the ceiling fan were encrusted with woolly dust, so I knew there had been no power in a while or the dust would have flown away as the fan turned. I drank all the water, sitting on a sofa with uneven holes at the sides. I gave them the fruits I bought at Ninth Mile and apologized because the heat in the boot had blackened the bananas.

  As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly, above Fela’s stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka’s untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as a freedom song. As laughter.

  “We are here,” Celestine says.

  We are at the prison compound. The bleak walls have unsightly patches of blue-green mold. Jaja is back in his old cell, so crowded that some people have to stand so that others can lie down. Their toilet is one black plastic bag, and they struggle over who will take it out each afternoon, because that person gets to see sunlight for a brief time. Jaja told me once that the men do not always bother to use the bag, especially the angry men. He does not mind sleeping with mice and cockroaches, but he does mind having another man’s feces in his face. He was in a better cell until last month, with books and a mattress all to himself, because our lawyers knew the right people to bribe. But the wardens moved him here after he spat in a guard’s face for no reason at all, after they stripped him and flogged him with koboko. Although I do not believe Jaja would do something like that unprovoked, I have no other version of the story because Jaja will not talk to me about it. He did not even show me the welts on his back, the ones the doctor we bribed in told me were puffy and swollen like long sausages. But I see other parts of Jaja, the parts I do not need to be shown, like his shoulders.

  Those shoulders that bloomed in Nsukka, that grew wide and capable, have sagged in the thirty-one months that he has been here. Almost three years. If somebody gave birth when Jaja first came here, the child would be talking now, would be in nursery school. Sometimes, I look at him and cry, and he shrugs and tells me that Oladipupo, the chief of his cell—they have a system of hierarchy in the cells—has been awaiting trial for eight years. Jaja’s official status, all this time, has been Awaiting Trial.

  Amaka used to write the office of the Head of State, even the Nigerian Ambassador in America, to complain about the poor state of Nigeria’s justice system. She said nobody acknowledged the letters but still it was important to her that she do something. She does not tell Jaja any of this in her letters to him. I read them—they are chatty and matter-of-fact. They do not mention Papa and they hardly mention prison. In her last letter, she told him how Aokpe had been covered in a secular American magazine; the writer had sounded pessimistic that the Blessed Virgin Mary could be appearing at all, especially in Nigeria: all that corruption and all that heat. Amaka said she had written the magazine to tell them what she thought. I expected no less, of course.

  She says she understands why Jaja does not write. What will he say? Aunty Ifeoma doesn’t write Jaja, she sends him cassette tape recordings of their voices, instead. Sometimes, he lets me play them on my cassette player when I visit, and other times, he asks me not to. Aunty Ifeoma writes to Mama and me, though. She writes about her two jobs, one at a community college and one at a pharmacy, or drugstore, as they call it. She writes about the huge tomatoes and the cheap bread. Mostly, though, she writes about things that she misses and things she longs for, as if she ignores the present to dwell on the past and future. Sometimes, her letters go on and on until the ink gets smudgy and I am not always sure what she is talking about. T
here are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

  Although I was interested in what she wrote, so much that I memorized most of it, I still do not know why she wrote it to me.

  Amaka’s letters are often quite as long, and she never fails to write, in every single one, how everybody is growing fat, how Chima “outfats” his clothes in a month. Sure, there has never been a power outage and hot water runs from the tap, but we don’t laugh anymore, she writes, because we don’t have the time to laugh, because we don’t even see one another. Obiora’s letters are the cheeriest and the most irregular. He has a scholarship to a private school where, he says, he is praised and not punished for challenging his teachers.

  “Let me do it,” Celestine says. He has opened the boot, and I am about to bring out the plastic bag of fruits and the cloth bag with the food and plates.

  “Thank you,” I say, moving aside.

  Celestine carries the bags and leads the way into the prison building. Mama trails behind. The policeman at the front desk has a toothpick stuck in his mouth. His eyes are jaundiced, so yellow they look dyed. The desk is bare except for a black phone, a fat, tattered logbook, and a pile of watches and handkerchiefs and necklaces crumpled down on one corner.

  “How are you, sister?” he says when he sees me, beaming, although his eyes are focused on the bag in Celestine’s hand. “Ah! You come with madam today? Good afternoon, madam.”

  I smile, and Mama nods vacuously. Celestine places the bag of fruit on the counter in front of the guard. Inside is a magazine with an envelope stuffed full of crisp naira notes, fresh from the bank.