One evening, not long ago, she came to visit. Somehow, we started talking about her grandmother, my husband’s sister. Malaika told me that her grandmother, before she died, was desperate to talk to my husband one last time and tell him that she was sorry.
“Sorry for what?” I said.
“For everything that happened,” she replied.
“What everything?”
It was then she told me the story my husband’s sister told her before she died, a story the sister had never told anyone. A medium had told the sister, while she was wasting away with a large mass in her belly, that she needed to tell someone the darkest secret in her stomach in order for death to come, so she had told her granddaughter days before she died. She revealed what happened when my husband was seven years old.
—
You went to her one evening and told her what an uncle had done to you. How the uncle had asked you to go hunting, and how, once you were both deep in the forest, only bugs and birds in view, under an iroko tree, the uncle had untied his loincloth, spread open his legs, and said his manhood was itchy, could you please itch it for him? When you shook your head and averted your eyes from the swollen organ, he said he couldn’t believe you wouldn’t help him after all the gifts of fruits and nuts he had given you, he hadn’t shown any other boy in the village as much generosity as he had shown you, he thought you were friends, how could you not help him in his time of need? When you started crying, he told you that if you didn’t take the manhood in both hands and start rubbing it, he would leave you alone in the forest for beasts to feast on your flesh. That was how he got you to do to him things a boy should never do to a man.
You sobbed as you told your sister the story.
When you were done speaking, she asked you no questions. She merely told you never to repeat the story to anyone. When her husband, the man you called your father, came back from a family visit, your sister made you repeat the story to him. He too said what your sister had said, that the story must not be told. Not in their lifetimes, not in your lifetime. The uncle who had taken you into the forest was one of the heads of your family. He had two wives and nine children. No one would believe your story. Even if someone believed you, your sister and her husband said, what would they do about it? Would they undo what the uncle had done to you? They believed you, they said, because they knew you were a good child. But they also knew that the uncle was a good man. Whenever there were conflicts between family members, your uncle was the one who resolved them. He was a dear friend of the village head and one of his counselors. The village was what it was, safe and prosperous, because of men like him. Did you want to see the village fall into disarray because he’d done something you did not like? Wasn’t it more important that everyone bore whatever they could for the sake of the family and the village? Your sister’s husband told you to wipe your eyes, show them that you were a strong boy. Look at your body, your sister’s husband said, did the uncle leave any scars? You shook your head. So there’s nothing for you to dwell on, then, your sister said. As soon as you let go of the whole episode, there would be nothing worth talking about.
—
I pulled my blanket to my face and cried when Malaika was done talking. Even after she left, my tears wouldn’t stop flowing. I wept for my beloved—him as a child, alone in his shame; him as a man, alone in his torment. She sacrificed him, his own sister. Made him suffer for her honor. She sewed up his lips so others would not speak ill of her for allowing him to tear apart the village with a vile tale. I spent days wondering why my husband felt compelled to hide this story, and then it occurred to me: even if he had revealed it in his adult years, how many among us would have believed it, or understood what it was like for him, a grown man, held captive by someone long dead?
And his sister—I feel so many things toward her, malevolent things, but I also force myself to imagine her suffering. How it must have devastated her to do this to him. How she must have fought with her husband to do something, anything, to which her husband must have told her that nothing could be done. Sacrifices, her husband must have told her, they must be made in life. He must have reminded her that everyone needed to make sacrifices for the sake of their families and villages and countries, to keep them together, to move them forward, to prevent them from falling apart from within.
—
How I wish you’d told me. How I wish you’d allowed me to keep you company in that darkness. I would have cried with you on the nights when your gloom thickened. I would have understood why you raved and yelled and insulted whenever you thought someone wasn’t rising up and saying what needed to be said, or doing what needed to be done. You fumed at even the most inconsequential of events—an older child taking a younger child’s toys and the adults doing nothing. We thought it was all just a part of your miserable disposition, your inability to simply
