Mama Agbor’s Joint used to be at the tail-end of Alapini Street, directly opposite our house. It was a small kiosk under an Udala tree, with wooden benches and a dozen plastic chairs for customers to sit. It was the one place where people ran when their world stopped making sense.
Mama Agbor’s customers were mostly men; men who were tired of thinking out the madness that this life is, who came to empty their sorrows in bottles of ogogoro. These men were different things—teachers, truck drivers, retired soldiers, tree-fellers—and had different webs wrapped around their minds. Most of them came to talk about how unfair this life is, how predatory this country is, where big and beautiful dreams die of starvation. Others talked of women, their wives.
“Even if you win them this world and lay it at their feet, they will still complain about how your mates are bringing home heaven for their wives,” Mr. Lawrence once said. Mr. Lawrence was a small man who always had an Okri cap on, always in a long-sleeve shirt he tucked into a baggy blue bend-down-select jeans, which he always left a little above his waist. He was a Government teacher at Igbobi before he retired. The men listened to his take on matters, especially marriage, though he himself, in his early sixties, was not known to have a wife or child.
“I agree with you,” Baba Ike said. He cleared his throat and took a sip of palm-wine from a brown plastic cup. “The other day, Mama Ike told me there was no rice in the house again—I had just gotten corporative money—so I went out and bought half-bag of rice and half-bag of garri, so that the children would have something to put in their stomach when they returned from school and their mother was not at home.” He cleared his throat again and took a sip of palm-wine. “When I got home with the rice and garri, what did Mama Ike say? You should have bought rice and beans; there is garri in the house.”
Everybody laughed at this—for some it was a long hearty laughter, for others it was a brief burst—because they knew Baba Ike was not the kind of man who bought things for his family; he did only when his wife tugged at his shirt, shouting “Oloriburuku. Yeye man.”
Mr. Lawrence just gave a wry smile. “That was how the Maker made them,” he said.
◆
For the men whose wives refused them entrance into their bodies, or for those who wanted to taste another, and for boys who wanted to die the electricity in their veins, there were girls. The girls in Mama Agbor’s Joint were diverse, like the coloured feathers of a peacock: brown, black, yellow, white, small, large, slim, plump. You could have whatever you wanted as long as you had good cash. According to the men, their services were quite expensive.
“To touch breasts, money. To suck them, money. To have your balloon blown, money. To have them on top, money. Mama Agbor, are their bodies Shoprite goods that there is price on everything like this?” Baba Ike once asked, after he spent half of his sixty-thousand naira salary on a girl.
“If you think they are expensive, go home to Mama Ike,” Mama Agbor said.
Two days later, Mama Ike came and rained insults on Mama Agbor, said she was breeding husband snatchers. She packed up her sagging breasts in her hands. “What do they have that I don’t? Ehn! Tell me.” She turned around and shook her buttocks. “What do they have that I don’t, those good-for-nothing girls?”
Mama Agbor smiled. “You should ask your husband why he prefers new wine.”
◆
At Mama Agbor’s Joint, there were times when palm-wine and ogogoro and beer flowed like a stream, when even the lame came out of their hideouts to drink. This happened at the end of the month when the civil servants among them had just got their salaries, or when the other men who worked privately got a big pay. A civil servant, always Baba Ike, would begin the festivity by shouting: “Woman,” referring to Mama Agbor, “give my people something to drink.” Another man would say the same, and another. The drinking would go on and on and on until wives began to arrive to take their husbands, who would have lost their minds and mouths to too much drinking.
My father used to be one of them. It was here he ran every time the world was turning itself into a fist delivering heavy blows on his soul. Like the other men, he ran to ogogoro to get away from the harsh reality of life, to abide in the brief paradise of alcohol. My father was one of them until he was tired of living with the pain that ran in his veins.
◆
The night before he left, he picked the best of my clothes and folded them neatly and placed them in a neat traveling bag. “Your mommy is coming to pick you tomorrow,” he said as he shined my shoes. “Remember to be a good boy. O.K.?” I shook my head, wanting desperately to ask him why she was coming to pick me now. I had not seen her in years; she left when I was just three.
Around 4 the next morning, he woke me up to have my bath; he also had his. He dressed me up in a shirt and jeans, and the shoes he polished the previous night. He picked his phone and showed me my mother’s number. It was saved as “Ayanfe”, and it was the last number he had called or that had called him.
“Call her later today, around 10 in the morning,” he said. Then he asked me to go back to bed.
Not long after I went back to bed, I heard the net-door open. I tiptoed after him but he saw me and asked me to go back to bed. I went back inside but I couldn’t sleep. I spent some time playing Danger Dash and some car racing games on his phone, which he had left behind. Later, I began to think of my mom: What would she look like now? What did she even look like before? All I could remember was her voice, the tiny one that sang me lullabies when I was a baby.
Morning sunlight began to seep into the room through the louvered window and I could hear the voices of the few men who came to have early shots of ogogoro at Mama Agbor’s, but Daddy wasn’t back. I thought he was over at Aunty Nneka’s; that was the only place he went to very early in the morning.
When I was tired of waiting for him to return, I left the room and went to the backyard. There, I found him hanging from a mango tree like a ripe curse, his neck plugged into the kind of rope they used in tying Ileya rams.
A neighbour saw me standing there, pointing at my father, crying “Daddy! Daddy!”, and took what she saw to the men at Mama Agbor’s. The men brought him down. His face was ashen, his body cold, un-answering. I kept tapping him, asking him to wake up, asking why he had decided to tie himself.
Two days later, they buried him. As they pushed his body, wrapped in white and tied like a bad present, into the earth, I cried “No! No! Don’t. My daddy is sleeping.” Aunty Nneka pulled me close and told me not to cry, that Daddy was in a better place now. I ran away from her. I smelled him on her clothes, on her skin.
As I’d done since the day my father pushed himself, I called the number he saved as “Ayanfe”. Each time, a voice that was not hers responded, “The number you’re trying to call is not reachable at the moment, please try again later.” I kept trying until I realised the number would never go through. I stopped last year.
◆
Of all the men at Mama Agbor’s Joint, there was only one unusual man, who did not come to drink or burn beneath a woman’s body. He came to preach. I still don’t understand why it was under the same Udala tree where men found salvation in alcohol he chose as his spot to share the word of God, to talk about the salvation that is in Christ.
Mama Agbor wanted to send him away—she even made attempts at it—but Mr. Lawrence and some of the men told her to leave him alone. They enjoyed how he spoke and how he looked; his suit that looked like it was once worn by his grandfather, who bequeathed it to his father who handed it down to him. Added to the look that a big and faded suit gave him was his shoes: black suede shoes with peeling skin and soles flattened from too much trekking.
Still, Mama Agbor could have sent him away, but she couldn’t because of Agbor, her only child. Agbor loved Bro Josh – that was the preacher’s name – a lot. There was a day he refused to eat because Bro Josh didn’t show up. Once, too, when Bro Josh didn’t come to the joint for a whole week because he had gone to the village to visit his father, the boy fell ill. He kept crying that they should take him to Bro Josh, and he didn’t stop until they found Bro Josh’s number and called him and he heard his voice.
◆
Mama Agbor came to Lagos in mid-2007, heavy with the pregnancy of the child that would become Agbor, to look for his father. All she came with was some money she had stolen from her uncle’s wardrobe, a bag containing a few of her clothes, and a piece of paper where Agbor’s father had written her a non-existent address.
Agbor’s father wasn’t somebody she really knew; all she knew about him was that he was a relative of somebody in the village and that he had a fancy job in the Big City and that he had money, because he came to the village in big, fine cars. Some of the things she knew about him were things he told her—and he told her a lot of lies. And she believed them. He had only visited the village for a couple of weeks. They met one day on her way to the market. The next day after they met, he asked her to go out with him and she did.
When he was leaving, he gave her some money and said he was going to call her as soon as he got to the city, how could he not call her, he was coming to marry her in a month’s time. He also wrote her his number and address, both in a neat piece of paper. A month and God’swill (that was what he called himself) didn’t call or send a message to her by the drivers that went from Owerri to Lagos and from Lagos to Owerri. Two months and it was the same, and she already knew she was pregnant. Three months, her uncle was asking who was the father of the child she was carrying. Though she knew whose it was, she did not know how to say a boy whose name was God’swill, who lived in the city, who had visited the village for two weeks, whose relatives she did not know, was the father. During those months, she went about asking if anybody knew a family who had a son or relative named God’swill, but nobody knew him; she called the number he had given her, but the voice in the phone said it was a wrong number. Then, one morning, she decided she was coming to Lagos to find him, to knock the gates of his house and ask him why he never looked back.
The bus dropped her at Obalende, and there, she asked people if they knew “No 77, Anwunaya Street, Gold Village”. Some of them hissed and walked away, knowing she was one of those women who came to Lagos with no bearing, like a needle with no holding thread; but some waited and asked reasonable questions, made suggestions and left with pity on their faces. That night, she slept under a bridge. That was her home for weeks until she delivered Agbor and she realized she had to feed herself and feed her child. With her baby on her back, she began selling pure water in hold-ups. In about a month, she added soft drinks. Then she got space in an uncompleted building where she slept on spread carton, her baby wrapped in a shawl, next to her. The fee was hundred naira per night.
When Mama Agbor told this story, she smiled, with water in her eyes. Then she asked, “How did I survive it?” She looked at Agbor, now a ten-year old boy who looked twelve, “How did you not die?”
She was going to do anything in the world to make Agbor happy. Anything. Even if it was keeping a man who told her customers that what she sold would end them in hell.
◆
Before Bro Josh began his message, he drank some water. He always had this in a plastic Eva bottle. Then he would use his white-turned-brown handkerchief on his sweaty face, and smoothen his suit at the hems as if he was going to ask a lady out. To bring God down, he would spend a long time, almost twenty minutes, in prayer. His voice was both loud and hushed when he prayed. One could hear him asking for the Holy Ghost, for fire, and for grace to speak the truth “with all confidence”, to never be “ashamed of the gospel of Christ”; one could hear him pick and drop “the heart of every man in Mama Agbo’s Joint in the hands of the Father,” who would soften it; one could hear him binding all the “principalities and powers in high places”; one could hear him plead that the hand of God should heal the wounded spirits and mend the broken hearts; and one could hear him say “Thank you, Daddy”, in that same way I used to say it to my father on those days he came home with all the good things.
His prayer was a mix of normal speech and a web of tongues. Though I had seen and heard other men of God speak in tongues when Daddy and I used to attend that Baptist church where he said they joined him to my mother for better and for worse, there was none that sounded like Bro Josh’s. His did not sound rehearsed; it poured out of him the way water pours out of a pregnant woman whose time is ripe. It came like rain from the sky, in drizzles of spittle finding their escape out of his mouth.
It was in that same way that the word of God came out of his mouth, a long sermon with tongues as its dessert, salted with the quotation of many Bible verses. While preaching, he would jump from Bible story to Bible story. He would talk about Noah—he saw himself as Noah, the Noah of our time—warning people about a coming Great Flood, pleading with them to get into the ship before it was too late.
One day, suddenly, he cried: “GET IN!!!”
Everyone fell quiet, some wondering what had gotten into him.
“It might be too late tomorrow,” he added.
He then told us that our lives are not ours to own, that they are safer when kept by God. Then he listed those who won’t enter the Kingdom of God, which is incomparable, in beauty, peace and every other thing, to any city in this world. It was a long list, which included: men and women whose first love was alcohol; fornicators, who have too much electricity in their bodies and who do not seek the Lord for self-control, which is one of the nine fruit of the spirit, he said; adulterers, who leave their matrimonial bed for the bed of the strange woman spoken of by the wise king Solomon in Proverbs; cheaters, who take what belongs to other people; bribe collectors and thieves; and even corrupt politicians who leave the masses to feed on the crumbs of a decayed democracy, while they spend each minute in air-conditioned rooms, signing cheques with so many zeros it could dig pits in a nation’s pocket.
I thought of Daddy. I wondered if God understood that when a man loses all that he ever had and begins to learn that life is nothing but the emptiness of time, he runs to the body of a woman, not for pleasure, but to pour out pain scribbled in unseen letters on his semen. That the bottles could be floaters sometimes. And I wondered, I still do, if God condemned him to an eternity of flames because he found salvation in taking what the preacher said was never his—his life.
◆
It was not long before Mama Agbor’s Joint became a place for fellowship. Further away from her kiosk and benches, under the canopy provided by a dogoyaro tree, the new converts put benches and stools brought from their homes and sat to receive teachings from the man of God. The congregation grew daily.
One of the new coverts was Mama Rose, the loudest woman on the street, the one whose mouth knew all the wrong names to call people. She had once called Mama Agbor a fat squirrel, and Baba Ike a dog’s sibling. Her mouth also led her to her conversion.
One evening, a Saturday, she called Mr. Lawrence pankere, said his manhood was as dead as the rust edge of a cutlass. That that was why he read books and would never marry.
Mr. Lawrence did not say a word in reply. He just stood up from the white plastic chair he sat in and left the joint. For a whole week nobody saw him around, and his absence was felt. Then one evening, he came and sat in the white chair he always sat in. He was not holding any book that day; he held a slim brown envelope. He dropped the envelope on the table and asked a boy to go and call Mama Rose for him.
When Mama Rose was seated, across from him, he dug his slim brown hand in the envelope and pulled out photos. The photos were of a woman and a child, a boy who was maybe three or four years old in the photographs. We had all gathered around him.
The woman was his wife. The boy was his child. The woman was killed twenty-three years ago by armed robbers who attacked their bus while they were travelling to Owerri. The boy died of leukemia two years after the death of his mother.
“They first touched her. Three of them.” He pushed out his under-lip. “They walked between her legs right before my eyes. And then they took her life.” There was tears streaking out of his eyes now. He pushed out his under-lip again. “There were a few other women,” he said, “but none of them ever stayed.”
What surprised everyone was the tears in Mama Rose’s eyes. The way it flowed like tap water. The way mucus dripped from her nose. The way her whole body shook under the weight of this knowledge. Suddenly, she stood and ran back into her house.
For days nobody saw her outside. When she finally came out, it was to become born-again. After the prayer with Bro Josh, she walked up to Mr. Lawrence, knelt down before him and said, “Forgif me, Sah. Omode lo semi.”
◆
We all heard when they began their trouble. An Eye boy snatched an Aye boy’s girlfriend, and when the Aye boy called the Eye boy to warn him away from the girl, the Eye boy, together with other Eye boys, attacked the Aye boy at home. There, in his house, they butchered him like cow meat—they did it so badly that the boy was unrecognizable. The picture of the boy’s butchered body went around on Facebook for a while. However, in a few days, the matter was cold, with the Aye boys not reacting at all. They had a Candle Night. All of them were dressed in black tops with red prints that read: RIP ZOBO, and each one of them held lighted candles. They went around the neighborhood singing Oro Nla Le Da.
Nobody heard a thing after that Candle Night, until one Thursday evening when we heard gunshots and people were screaming and running into their houses and turning locks. The wind brought the news that the Aye Boys had finally descended on the Eyes; that they were gunning and hacking and stabbing each other.
Though the fight was happening about six streets away, Alapini street was so silent one would have thought angels had walked through the street and had touched the people’s tongues mute. The only sound was the bangs of gunshots in the distance—and the hush chat of some men at Mama Agbor’s Joint. While everybody on the street closed their shop, Mama Agbor didn’t; all she did was pack her goods off the stall, and into her kiosk.
A gunshot hit the air and Mama Agbor rose to her feet and began to ask where Agbor was. She went this way and that, and that way and this. She held her breasts in her two hands, squeezing them, calling God, asking him to watch over her child, wherever he was. Then she sat in the dust and began to say, “Agbor, I say mey you no go ride keke today. I say mey you no go.”
◆
It was not long after the gunshot hit the air that a man ran into the street, bearing Agbor in his arms; a crowd of small boys and girls and men and women behind him; some of them hissing, others weeping. There was blood all over the boy’s butter-coloured shirt and thick blood around his chest.
Agbor had gone to ride bicycle three streets away, at Baba Ejim’s. He had ridden the bicycle to Magba Street because there was a tarred road there. He was on his bicycle, according to the man that bore him in his arms, when an Aye boy pursuing an Eye boy fired a shot. The shot missed the Aye boy and hit Agbor on the bicycle. By the time the man, who had been watching through the window of his house, could reach him, his heart had almost stopped beating.
“He died in my arms,” the man said, tears welling up in his eyes. He laid Agbor down before his mother. She was still where she was when she heard the gunshot.
Mama Agbor’s voice sliced through the air like a fresh, hot knife through solid pap. Like a new razor blade parting skin. She kept asking, “God, wetin I do? Ehn! Who I offend? God no do me dis wan. No take this wan. Abeg. Abeg. Abeg. Goooooooooooooood, abeg.” She was shaking her hands as if she had dug them in fire and they got badly burned. Briefly, she would stop the shaking of her hands, and she wouldn’t cry either; she would just look, and point. Then she would say, “Agbor, come. I dey here. No go. No leave me. No leave me like dis.” Then she would look at the cold body lying before her, and she would touch him gently—first on the face, then neck, then chest—and she would place her ears to his blood-oozing chest, and she would tug at his shirt. Then again she would go calm. In no time, she would resume the wailings and the shaking of hands burned by grief.
People shook their heads this way and that in pity, some saying “Ehi”, others asking “God why?”.
Not long after the man brought the cold body of Agbor, Bro Josh arrived at the joint. He was quickly briefed by Mr. Lawrence about what had happened. Baba Ike begged him to do something. He was a man of God afterall, and what can God not do?
Gently, he walked through the crowd that had formed around the woman and her boy like a wall; quickly they gave way and whispered “Bro Josh”.
◆
Bro Josh knelt down next to Agbor’s body. There was tears in his eyes, but there was fire in them, too. He began a worship song, and the crowd that had formed took it from his mouth and raised it and changed it for another worship song every now and then. He lifted his hands and a hush fell on the crowd like someone had poured them cold water. He placed his hands on Agbor’s forehead and called the name of Jesus twenty-one times. He began to charge in tongues; occasionally he spoke in plain English. Again he raised his hands, this time to heaven. A clenched fist. He bound the principalities and the powers of darkness. He told death to “get out of this body now.” He said the body was alive by the power in the resurrection of Christ. “Let him go!” he barked at death. The people said loud amens. He opened his big, black Bible, worn out from a long history of use, and read from Isaiah 60, crying: “Agbor, arise and shine for your light is come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.”
The boy did not feel the wind on his skin.
He read from Isaiah 53: “He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows:… he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
There was no miracle.
He screamed “Talita Kumi”. He spoke with the voice with which Christ told Lazarus to come forth. Agbor, however, was gone—he was too far away to hear a man who desired him to return, for the sake of his mother and for the glory of God.
Minutes of shouting amens slipped into hours of watching a young man bang hard on the floor, asking and crying to God to please do this one miracle, to please return life to this one body, for the glory of His name and to comfort a mother.
Bro Josh pulled the boy.
Mama Agbor’s wails and shrill cries filled the air, sharp like darts, cutting through people’s hearts. Her wrapper had fallen off her body and some women were helping her to tie it.
Night was falling, and the rain had begun to fall, too, drizzling. God was soddening the earth that would house the body of that boy.
People began to leave. Mama Rose left first. Mama Ike, who had heard and had come, followed. Her husband soon followed her. Mr. Lawrence too soon left. One by one, everyone left till the world was an empty room with the still image of a weeping woman, a cold boy, and a broken preacher.
The preacher was lying on the floor now, next to Agbor, turning this way and that, tears gushing out of his eyes, his cloth soaked in perspiration. All he wanted was the fate of Lazarus for a boy that was a mother’s world. Did God not see that? Did he not know that? Did he not see through his heart and find it pure? Did he not find his request valid? Why would he take this little boy? Now it was the preacher shouting “Why? Why? God why?”
I remembered Daddy staring at a portrait of my mother he had painted himself (he burned it a few months before he hung himself), the one where she wore her wedding gown, shouting “Why? Why? God why?”
Like it was on the day Daddy asked, there was no answer for the preacher. The preacher’s voice rose but was beaten back down by the rain and washed away.
That night the preacher left and never returned. We watched him walk away like a man emptied of his bones. We watched from the perch of the balconies of three- and two-story houses to the windows; from the cold balconies of bungalows to the shops; from the pavements of Baba Olorunlugo mosque to the windows of the Gospel Baptist Church.
The next morning, we met his Bible, dripping with rain and sweat and tear-water, opened to the book of Psalms. Psalm 106. The first verse read: “Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”