Who Fears Death

  The next day was the same. I couldn’t stop looking for him. Two days later, Diti returned to school. “My mother finally pushed me out of bed,” Diti admitted. She made her voice severe. “ ‘ You aren’t the first to go through this!’ Plus she knew you all were back in school.” Her eyes flicked toward me, then away, and I instantly understood that her parents didn’t like me being in their daughter’s rite group. As if I cared what her parents thought.

  Regardless, it was now definitely the four of us. Any friends Luyu, Binta, and Diti had before were no longer important. I had no friends to drop. Most girls who went through their Eleventh Rite together, though they were “bound,” didn’t remain so afterward. But the change was natural for us. We already had secrets. And those were just the beginning.

  None of us was the “leader,” but Luyu was the one who liked to lead. She was fast and brazen. It turned out that there had been two other boys she’d had intercourse with. “Who is the Ada?” Luyu had spat. “I didn’t have to tell her everything.”

  Binta always had her eyes downcast and spoke little when around others. Her father’s abuse cut deep. But when she was with just us, she talked and smiled plenty. If Binta weren’t born so full of life, I doubt she’d have survived her father’s sickness.

  Diti was the princess, the one who liked to lie around in bed all day while her servants brought her meals. She was plump and pretty and things typically fell right into her lap. When she was around, good things happened. A merchant selling bread would sell it to us at half price because he was in a hurry to get home. Or we’d be walking and a coconut tree would drop a coconut at Diti’s feet. The Goddess Ani loved Diti. To be loved by Ani, what must that be like? I’m yet to know.

  After school, we’d study at the iroko tree. At first, I was nervous about this. I was afraid the red and white creature I’d seen was linked to the iroko tree incident. Sitting under the tree felt like practically inviting the eye to come at me again. In time, as nothing happened, I relaxed a little. Sometimes I even went there alone, just to think.

  I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me back up a bit.

  It was eleven days after my Eleventh Rite, four days after I returned to school, three days after I realized I was bound to three girls my age, and a day after Diti returned to school that the other thing happened. I was slowly walking home. My wound was throbbing. The deep unprovoked pain seemed to happen twice a day.

  “They’ll still think you’re evil,” someone behind me said.

  “Eh? What?” I said, slowly turning around. I froze.

  It was like looking into a mirror when you’ve never seen your reflection. For the first time, I understood why people stopped, dropped things, and stared when they saw me. He was my skin tone, had my freckles, and his rough golden hair was shaved so close that it looked like a coat of sand. He might have been a little taller, maybe a few years older than me. Where my eyes were gold-brown like a desert cat’s, his were a gray like a coyote’s.

  I instantly knew who he was, though I’d only seen him for a moment when I was in a disheveled state. Contrary to what Luyu told me, he’d been in Jwahir longer than the few days. He was the boy who saw me naked in the iroko tree. He’d told me to jump. It had been raining hard and he’d been holding a basket over his head but I knew it was him.

  “You’re . . .”

  “So are you,” he said.

  “Yeah. I’ve never . . . I mean, I’ve heard of others.”

  “I’ve seen others,” he said offhandedly.

  “Where are you from?” we both asked at the same time.

  We both said, “The West.” Then we nodded. All Ewu were from the West.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Eh?”

  “You’re walking oddly,” he said. I felt my face grow hot. He smiled again and shook his head. “I shouldn’t be so bold.” He paused. “But trust me, they will always see us as evil. Even if you have yourself . . . cut.”

  I frowned.

  “Why would you have that done?” he asked. “You’re not from here.”

  “But I live here,” I said, defensively.

  “So?”

  “Who are you?” I said, irritated.

  “Your name is Onyesonwu Ubaid-Ogundimu. You’re the blacksmith’s daughter.”

  I bit my lip, trying to remain irritated. But he’d referred to me as the blacksmith’s daughter, not stepdaughter, and I wanted to smile at this. He smirked. “And you’re the one who ends up naked in trees.”

  “Who are you?” I asked again. How strange we must have looked standing there on the side of the road.

  “Mwita,” he said.

  “What’s your last name?”

  “I have no last name,” he said, his voice growing cold.

  “Oh . . . okay.” I looked at his clothing. He wore typical boy attire, faded blue pants and a green shirt. His sandals were worn but made of leather. He carried a satchel of old schoolbooks. “Well . . . where do you live?” I asked.

  The coolness thawed from his voice. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “How come you don’t come to school?”

  “I’m in school,” he said. “A better one than yours.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “This is for your father. I was going to your home but you can take it to him.” It was a palm fiber envelope stamped with the insignia of the Osugbo, a lizard in midstride. Each of its legs represented one of the elders.

  “You live up the road past the ebony tree, right?” he asked, looking past me.

  I nodded absentmindedly, still looking at the envelope.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he left. I stood there watching him walk away, barely aware of the fact that the throbbing between my legs had grown worse.

  CHAPTER 6

  Eshu

  AFTER THAT DAY, it seemed I saw Mwita everywhere. He often came to our house with messages. And a few times I ran into him on his way to Papa’s shop.

  “How come you didn’t tell me about him before?” I asked my parents one night during dinner. Papa was shoveling spiced rice into his mouth with his right hand. He sat back, chewing, his right hand resting over his food. My mother put another piece of goat meat on his plate.

  “I thought you knew,” he said at the same time that my mother said, “I didn’t want to upset you.” My parents knew so much back then. They should have also known that they couldn’t shelter me forever. What was coming would come.

  Mwita and I talked whenever we saw each other. Briefly. He was always in a hurry. “Where’re you going?” I asked after he delivered yet another envelope from the elders to Papa. Papa was making a great table for the House of the Osugbo, and the engraved symbols on it had to be perfect. The envelope Mwita brought contained more drawings of the symbols.

  “Somewhere else,” Mwita said, smirking.

  “Why’re you always hurrying?” I said. “Come on. Just one thing?”

  He turned to leave and then he turned back. “All right,” he said. We sat on the steps to the house. After a minute he said, “If you spend enough time in the desert, you will hear it speak.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It speaks loudest in wind.”

  “Right,” Mwita said. “Butterflies understand the desert well. That’s why they move this way and that. They’re always Holding Conversation with the land. They talk as much as they listen. It’s in the desert’s language that you call the butterflies.”

  He lifted his chin, took a deep breath and breathed out. I knew the song. The desert sang it when all was well. In our nomad days, my mother and I would catch scarab beetles slowly flying by on days when the desert sang this song. Remove the hard shells and wings, dry the flesh in the sun, add spices—delicious. Mwita’s song brought three butterflies—a tiny white one and two big black and yellow ones.

  “Let me try,” I said, excitedly. I thought about my first home. Then I opened my mouth and sang the desert’s song of peace. I drew two hummingbirds who zipped a
round our heads before flying off. Mwita leaned away from me, shocked.

  “You sing like . . . your voice is lovely,” he said.

  I looked away, pressing my lips together. My voice was a gift from an evil man.

  “Some more,” he said. “Sing some more.”

  I sang him a song I’d made up when I was happy and free and five years old. My memory of those times was fuzzy, but I clearly remembered the songs I sang.

  It was like that each time with Mwita. He’d teach me a bit of simple sorcery and then be shocked by the ease with which I picked it up. He was the third to see it in me (my mother and Papa being the first and second), probably because he had it in him too. I wondered where he learned what he knew. Who were his parents? Where did he live? Mwita was so mysterious . . . and very handsome.

  Binta, Diti, and Luyu first met him at school. He was waiting for me in the yard, something he’d never done. He wasn’t surprised to see me come out of school with Binta, Diti, and Luyu. I’d told him much about them. Everyone was staring. I’m sure many stories were told that day about Mwita and me.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, politely nodding.

  Luyu was grinning too widely.

  “Mwita,” I quickly said. “Meet Luyu, Diti, and Binta, my friends. Luyu, Diti, Binta, meet Mwita, my friend.”

  Diti snickered at this.

  “So Onyesonwu is a good enough reason to come here?” Luyu asked.

  “She’s the only reason,” he said.

  My face felt hot, as the eyes of all four turned to me.

  “Here,” he said, giving me a book. “Thought I’d lost it but I didn’t.” It was a booklet on human anatomy. When we’d last spoken, he’d been bothered by how little I knew about the many muscles of the body.

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling annoyed at my friends’ presence. I wanted to tell them again that Mwita and I were just friends. The only type of interaction Luyu and Diti had with boys was sexual or flirtatious.

  Mwita gave me a look and I returned it with a look of agreement. After that, he only approached me when he thought I’d be alone. Most of the time he succeeded but sometimes he was forced to deal with my friends. He was fine.

  I was always happy to see Mwita. But one day, months later, I was ecstatic to see him. Relieved. When I saw him coming up the road, an envelope in hand, I jumped up. I’d been sitting on the house steps staring into space, confused and angry, waiting for him. Something had happened.

  “Mwita!” I screamed, breaking into a run. But when I got to him, all my words escaped me and I just stood there.

  He took my hand. We sat down on the steps.

  “I-I-I don’t know,” I babbled. I paused, a great sob welling up in my chest. “It couldn’t have happened, Mwita. Then I wondered if this was what happened before. Something’s been happening to me. Something’s after me! I need to see a healer. I . . .”

  “Just tell me what happened, Onyesonwu,” he said, impatient.

  “I’m trying!”

  “Well, try harder.”

  I glared at him and he glared back, motioning his hand for me to get on with it.

  “I was in the back, looking at my mother’s garden,” I said. “Everything was normal and . . . then everything went red. A thousand shades of it . . .”

  I stopped. I couldn’t tell him about how a giant red-eyed brown cobra slithered up to me and rose up to my face. And then how I was suddenly hit with a self-loathing so deep and profound that I started raising my hands to gouge out my own eyes! That I was then going to tear my own throat with my nails. I am awful. I am evil. I am filth. I should not be! The mantra was red and white in my mind as I’d stared in horror at the oval eye. I didn’t tell him how a moment later an oily black vulture flew down from the sky, screamed and then pecked at the snake until it slithered away. How I snapped out of it just in time. I skipped all this.

  “There was a vulture,” I said. “Looking right at me. Close enough for me to see its eyes. I threw a rock at it and as it flew off, one of its feathers fell off. A long black one. I . . . went and picked it up. I was standing there wishing I could fly as it did. And then . . . I don’t . . .”

  “You changed,” Mwita said. He was looking at me very closely.

  “Yeah! I became the vulture. I swear to you! I’m not making this . . .”

  “I believe you,” Mwita said. “Finish.”

  “I . . . I had to hop out from underneath my clothes,” I said holding my arms out. “I could hear everything. I could see . . . it looked as if the world had opened itself to me. I got scared. Then I was lying there, myself again, naked, my clothes next to me. My diamond wasn’t in my mouth. I found it a few feet away and . . .” I sighed.

  “You’re an Eshu,” he said.

  “A what?” The word sounded like a sneeze.

  “An Eshu. You can shape-shift, among other things. I knew this the day you changed into that sparrow and flew into the tree.”

  “What?” I screamed, leaning away from him.

  “You know what you know, Onyesonwu,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I clenched my shaking fists.

  “Eshus never believe what they are until they realize it on their own.”

  “So what do I do? What . . . how do you know all this?”

  “Same way I know all the other things,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s long story,” he said. “Listen, don’t go telling your friends about this.”

  “I didn’t plan to.”

  “Firsts are important. Sparrows are survivors. Vultures are noble birds.”

  “What’s noble about eating dead things and stealing meat from chopping blocks?”

  “Everything must eat.”

  “Mwita,” I said. “You have to teach me more. I have to learn to protect myself.”

  “From what?”

  Tears dribbled from my eyes. “I think something wants to kill me.” He paused, looked me in the eye and then said, “I’ll never let that happen.”

  According to my mother, all things are fixed. To her there was a reason for everything from the massacres in the West to the love she found in the East. But the mind behind all things, I call it Fate, is harsh and cold. It’s so logical that no one could call him or herself a better person if he or she bowed down to it. Fate is fixed like brittle crystal in the dark. Still, when it came to Mwita, I bow down to Fate and say thank you.

  We met twice a week, after school. Mwita’s lessons were exactly what I needed to hold back my fear of the red eye. I’m a fighter by nature and simply having tools to fight, no matter how inadequate, was enough to take the crippling edge off my anxiety. At least during those days.

  Mwita himself was also a good distraction. He was well spoken, well dressed, and he carried himself with respect. And he didn’t have the same type of outcast reputation I had. Luyu and Diti were envious of my time with him. They took pleasure in telling me about the rumors that he liked older married girls in their late teens. Girls who’d completed school and had more to offer intellectually.

  No one could figure Mwita out. Some said that he was self-taught and lived with an old woman to whom he read books in exchange for a room and spending money. Some said he owned his own house. I didn’t ask. I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Still he was Ewu and so every so often, I’d hear people mention his “unhealthy” skin and “foul” odor and how no matter how many books he read, he’d only amount to something bad.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lessons Learned

  I TOOK MY DIAMOND FROM MY MOUTH and handed it to Mwita, my heart beating fast. If a man touched my stone, he’d have the ability to do great harm or good to me. Though Mwita didn’t respect Jwahir’s traditions, he knew I did. So he was careful taking it.

  It was a weekend morning. The sun had just come up. My parents were asleep. We were in the garden. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

  “According to what I know, whatever you’ve turned in
to, you retain the knowledge of it forever,” he said. “Does that feel right to you?”

  I nodded. When I focused on the idea, I felt the vulture and the sparrow just below my skin.

  “It’s right there, under the surface,” he said, slowly. “Feel the feather with your fingers. Rub it, knead it. Shut your eyes. Remember. Draw from it. Then be it.”

  The feather in my hand was smooth, delicate. I knew just where it would go. In the empty shaft on my wing. This time I was aware and in control. It wasn’t like melting into a pool of something shapeless and then taking another shape. I was always something. My bones softly buckled and cracked and shrunk. It didn’t hurt. My body’s tissue was undulating and shifting. My mind changed focus. I was still me, but from a different perspective. I heard soft popping and sucking sounds and I smelled that rich smell that I only noticed during moments of oddness.

  I flew high. My sense of touch was less, for my flesh was protected by feathers. But I saw all. My hearing was so sharp that I could hear the land breathing. When I returned, I was exhausted and moved to tears. All my senses buzzed, even after I changed back. I didn’t care that I was naked. Mwita had to wrap me in my rapa as I cried on his shoulder. For the first time in my life, I could escape. When things felt too tight, too close, I could retreat to the sky. From up there, I could easily see the desert stretching far beyond Jwahir. I could fly so high that not even the oval eye could see me.

  That afternoon, as we sat before my mother’s garden, I told Mwita much about myself. I told him the story of my mother. I told him about the desert. I told him about how I’d gone somewhere else when I was circumcised. And I finally told him the details about the red eye. Mwita wasn’t shocked even by this. That should have given me pause, but I was too enamored by him to care.

  It was my idea to go to the desert. It was his idea to go that very night. It was my second time sneaking out of the house. We hiked across the sand for several miles. When we stopped, we made a fire. All around us was darkness. The desert hadn’t changed since I’d left it six years ago. We were so at peace in cool quietness around us that we were speechless for the next ten minutes. Then Mwita poked at the fire and said, “I’m not like you. Not completely.”