'I don't believe we have to go to Aokpe or anywhere else to find her. She is here, she is within us, leading us to her Son.' He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.
'But what about the Thomas inside us, Father? The part that needs to see to believe?' Amaka asked. She had that expression that made me wonder if she was serious or not.
Father Amadi did not respond; instead he made a face, and Amaka laughed, the gap between her teeth wider, more angular, than Aunty Ifeoma's, as if someone had pried her two front teeth apart with a metal instrument.
After dinner, we all retired to the living room, and Aunty Ifeoma asked Obiora to turn the TV off so we could pray while Father Amadi was here. Chima had fallen asleep on the sofa, and Obiora leaned against him throughout the rosary. Father Amadi led the first decade, and at the end, he started an Igbo praise song. While they sang, I opened my eyes and stared at the wall, at the picture of the family at Chima's baptism. Next to it was a grainy copy of the pieta, the wooden frame cracked at the corners. I pressed my lips together, biting my lower lip, so my mouth would not join in the singing on its own, so my mouth would not betray me. We put our rosaries away and sat in the living room eating corn and ube and watching Newsline on television. I looked up to find Father Amadi's eyes on me, and suddenly I could not lick the ube flesh from the seed. I could not move my tongue, could not swallow. I was too aware of his eyes, too aware that he was looking at me, watching me.
'I haven't seen you laugh or smile today, Kambili,' he said, finally.
I looked down at my corn. I wanted to say I was sorry that I did not smile or laugh, but my words would not come, and for a while even my ears could hear nothing.
'She is shy,' Aunty Ifeoma said.
I muttered a word I knew was nonsense and stood up and walked into the bedroom, making sure to close the door that led to the hallway. Father Amadi's musical voice echoed in my ears until I fell asleep.
Laughter always rang out in Aunty Ifeoma's house, and no matter where the laughter came from, it bounced around all the walls, all the rooms. Arguments rose quickly and fell just as quickly. Morning and night prayers were always peppered with songs, Igbo praise songs that usually called for hand clapping. Food had little meat, each person's piece the width of two fingers pressed close together and the length of half a finger. The flat always sparkled-Amaka scrubbed the floors with a stiff brush, Obiora did the sweeping, Chima plumped up the cushions on the chairs. Everybody took turns washing plates. Aunty Ifeoma included Jaja and me in the plate-washing schedule, and after I washed the garri-encrusted lunch plates, Amaka picked them off the tray where I had placed them to dry and soaked them in water. 'Is this how you wash plates in your house?' she asked. 'Or is plate washing not included in your fancy schedule?'
I stood there, staring at her, wishing Aunty Ifeoma were there to speak for me. Amaka glared at me for a moment longer and then walked away.
She said nothing else to me until her friends came over that afternoon, when Aunty Ifeoma and Jaja were in the garden and the boys were playing football out front. 'Kambili, these are my friends from school,' she said, casually. The two girls said hello, and I smiled. They had hair as short as Amaka's, wore shiny lipstick and trousers so tight I knew they would walk differently if they were wearing something more comfortable. I watched them examine themselves in the mirror, pore over an American magazine with a brown skinned, honey-haired woman on the cover, and talk about a math teacher who didn't know the answers to his own tests, a girl who wore a miniskirt to evening lesson even though she had fat yams on her legs, and a boy who was fine.
'Fine, sha, not attractive,' one of them stressed. She wore a dangling earring on one ear and a shiny, false gold stud on the other.
'Is it all your hair?' the other one asked, and I did not realize she was referring to me, until Amaka said, 'Kambili!' I wanted to tell the girl that it was all my hair, that there were no attachments, but the words would not come. I knew they were still talking about hair, how long and thick mine looked. I wanted to talk with them, to laugh with them so much that I would start to jump up and down in one place the way they did, but my lips held stubbornly together. I did not want to stutter, so I started to cough and then ran out and into the toilet.
That evening, as I set the table for dinner, I heard Amaka say, 'Are you sure they're not abnormal, Mom? Kambili just behaved like an atulu when my friends came.' Amaka had neither raised nor lowered her voice, and it drifted clearly in from the kitchen.
'Amaka, you are free to have your opinions, but you must treat your cousin with respect. Do you understand that?' Aunty Ifeoma replied in English, her voice firm.
'I was just asking a question.'
'Showing respect is not calling your cousin a sheep.'
'She behaves funny. Even Jaja is strange. Something is not right with them.'
My hand shook as I tried to straighten a piece of the table surface that had cracked and curled tightly around itself. A line of tiny ginger-colored ants marched near it. Aunty Ifeoma had told me not to bother the ants, since they hurt no one and you could never really get rid of them anyway; they were as old as the building itself.
I looked across at the living room to see if Jaja had heard Amaka over the sound of the television. But he was engrossed in the images on the screen, lying on the floor next to Obiora. He looked as though he had been lying there watching TV his whole life. It was the same way he looked in Aunty Ifeoma's garden the next morning, as though it were something he had been doing for a long time rather than the few days we had been here.
Aunty Ifeoma asked me to join them in the garden, to carefully pick out leaves that had started to wilt on the croton plants. 'Aren't they pretty?' Aunty Ifeoma asked. 'Look at that, green and pink and yellow on the leaves. Like God playing with paint brushes.'
'Yes,' I said.
Aunty Ifeoma was looking at me, and I wondered if she was thinking that my voice lacked the enthusiasm of Jaja's when she talked about her garden.
Some of the children from the flats upstairs came down and stood watching us. They were about five, all a blur of food stained clothes and fast words. They talked to one another and to Aunty Ifeoma, and then one of them turned and asked me what school I went to in Enugu. I stuttered and gripped hard at some fresh croton leaves, pulling them off, watching the viscous liquid drip from their stalks.
After that, Aunty Ifeoma said I could go inside if I wanted to. She told me about a book she had just finished reading: it was on the table in her room and she was sure I would like it. So I went in her room and took a book with a faded blue cover, called Equiano's Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African. I sat on the verandah, with the book on my lap, watching one of the children chase a butterfly in the front yard. The butterfly dipped up and down, and its black-spotted yellow wings flapped slowly, as if teasing the little girl. The girl's hair, held atop her head like a ball of wool, bounced as she ran. Obiora was sitting on the verandah, too, but outside the shade, so he squinted behind his thick glasses to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was watching the girl and the butterfly while repeating the name Jaja slowly, placing the stress on both syllables, then on the first, then on the second. 'Aja means sand or oracle, but Jaja? What kind of name is Jaja? It is not Igbo,' he finally pronounced.
'My name is actually Chukwuka. Jaja is a childhood nickname that stuck.' Jaja was on his knees. He wore only a pair of denim shorts, and the muscles on his back rippled, smooth and long like the ridges he weeded.
'When he was a baby, all he could say was Ja-Ja. So everybody called him Jaja,' Aunty Ifeoma said. She turned to Jaja and added, 'I told your mother that it was an appropriate nickname, that you would take after Jaja of Opobo.'
'Jaja of Opobo? The stubborn king?' Obiora asked.
'Defiant,' Aunt Ifeoma said. 'He was a defiant king.'
'What does defiant mean, Mommy? What did the king do?' Chima asked. He was in the garden, doing something on his knees, too, although Aunty Ifeoma often told him 'Kwusia, don't do that' or 'If you do that again, I will give you a knock.'
'He was king of the Opobo people,' Aunty Ifeoma said, 'and when the British came, he refused to let them control all the trade. He did not sell his soul for a bit of gunpowder like the other kings did, so the British exiled him to the West Indies. He never returned to Opobo.'
Aunt Ifeoma continued watering the row of tiny banana-colored flowers that clustered in bunches. She held a metal watering can in her hand, tilting it to let the water out through the nozzle. She had already used up the biggest container of water we fetched in the morning, 'That's sad. Maybe he should not have been defiant,' Chima said. He moved closer to squat next to Jaja. I wondered if he understood what 'exiled' and 'sold his soul for a bit of
