Purple Hibiscus (5 page)

Papa changed his accent when he spoke, sounding British, just as he did when he spoke to Father Benedict. He was gracious, in the eager-to-please way that he always assumed with the religious, especially with the white religious. As gracious as when he presented the check for refurbishing the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart library. He said he had just come to see my class, and Sister Margaret told him to let her know if he needed anything.

“Where is Chinwe Jideze?” Papa asked, when we got to the front of my class. A group of girls stood at the door, talking. I looked around, feeling a weight around my temples. What would Papa do? Chinwe's light-skinned face was at the center of the group, as usual.

“She is the girl in the middle,” I said. Was Papa going to talk to her? Yank at her ears for coming first? I wanted the ground to open up and swallow the whole compound.

“Look at her,” Papa said. “How many heads does she have?”

“One.” I did not need to look at her to know that, but I looked at her, anyway.

Papa pulled a small mirror, the size of a powder compact, from his pocket. “Look in the mirror.”

I stared at him.

“Look in the mirror.”

I took the mirror, peered at it.

“How many heads do you have,
gbo
?” Papa asked, speaking Igbo for the first time.

“One.”

“The girl has one head, too, she does not have two. So why did you let her come first?”

“It will not happen again, Papa.” A light dust lkuku was blowing, in brown spirals like uncoiling springs, and I could taste the sand that settled on my lips.

“Why do you think I work so hard to give you and Jaja the best? You have to do something with all these privileges. Because God has given you much, he expects much from you. He expects perfection. I didn't have a father who sent me to the best schools. My father spent his time worshiping gods of wood and stone. I would be nothing today but for the priests and sisters at the mission. I was a houseboy for the parish priest for two years. Yes, a houseboy. Nobody dropped me off at school. I walked eight miles every day to Nimo until I finished elementary school. I was a gardener for the priests while I attended St. Gregory's Secondary School.”

I had heard this all before, how hard he had worked, how much the missionary Reverend Sisters and priests had taught him, things he would never have learned from his idol-worshiping father, my Papa-Nnukwu. But I nodded and looked alert. I hoped my class girls were not wondering why my father and I had chosen to come to school to have a long conversation in front of the classroom building. Finally, Papa stopped talking and took the mirror back.

“Kevin will be here to pick you up,” he said.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Bye. Read well.” He hugged me, a brief side hug.

“Bye, Papa.” I was watching him walk down the path bordered by flowerless green bushes when the assembly bell rang.

Assembly was raucous, and Mother Lucy had to say, “Now, girls, may we have silence!” a few times. I stood in the front of the line as always, because the back was for the girls who belonged to cliques, girls who giggled and whispered to one another, shielded from the teachers. The teachers stood on an elevated podium, tall statues in their white-and-blue habits. After we sang a welcoming song from the Catholic Hymnal, Mother Lucy read Matthew chapter five up to verse eleven, and then we sang the national anthem. Singing the national anthem was relatively new at Daughters of the Immaculate Heart. It had started last year, because some parents were concerned that their children did not know the national anthem or the pledge. I watched the sisters as we sang. Only the Nigerian Reverend Sisters sang, teeth flashing against their dark skins. The white Reverend Sisters stood with arms folded, or lightly touching the glass rosary beads that dangled at their waists, carefully watching to see that every student's lips moved. Afterward, Mother Lucy narrowed her eyes behind her thick lenses and scanned the lines. She always picked one student to start the pledge before the others joined in.

“Kambili Achike, please start the pledge,” she said.

Mother Lucy had never chosen me before. I opened my mouth, but the words would not come out.

“Kambili Achike?” Mother Lucy and the rest of the school had turned to stare at me.

I cleared my throat, willed the words to come. I knew them, thought them. But they would not come. The sweat was warm and wet under my arms.

“Kambili?”

Finally, stuttering, I said, “I pledge to Nigeria, my country/To be faithful, loyal, and honest…”

The rest of the school joined in, and while I mouthed along, I tried to slow my breathing. After assembly, we filed to our classrooms. My class went through the routine of settling down, scraping chairs, dusting desks, copying the new term timetable written on the board.

“How was your holiday, Kambili?” Ezinne leaned over and asked.

“Fine.”

“Did you travel abroad?”

“No,” I said. I didn't know what else to say, but I wanted Ezinne to know that I appreciated that she was always nice to me even though I was awkward and tongue-tied. I wanted to say thank you for not laughing at me and calling me a “backyard snob” the way the rest of the girls did, but the words that came out were, “Did you travel?”

Ezinne laughed. “Me?
O di egwu
. It's people like you and Gabriella and Chinwe who travel, people with rich parents. I just went to the village to visit my grandmother.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Why did your father come this morning?”

“I…I…” I stopped to take a breath because I knew I would stutter even more if I didn't. “He wanted to see my class.”

“You look a lot like him. I mean, you're not big, but the features and the complexion are the same,” Ezinne said.

“Yes.”

“I heard Chinwe took the first position from you last term.
Abi
?”

“Yes.”

“I'm sure your parents didn't mind. Ah! Ah! You have been coming first since we started class one. Chinwe said her father took her to London.”

“Oh.”

“I came fifth and it was an improvement for me because I came eighth the term before. You know, our class is very competitive. I used to always come first in my primary school.”

Chinwe Jideze came over to Ezinne's table then. She had a high, birdlike voice. “I want to remain class prefect this term, Ezi-Butterfly, so make sure you vote for me,” Chinwe said. Her school skirt was tight at the waist, dividing her body into two rounded halves like the number 8.

“Of course,” Ezinne said.

I was not surprised when Chinwe walked past me to the girl at the next desk and repeated herself, only with a different nickname that she had thought up. Chinwe had never spoken to me, not even when we were placed in the same agricultural science group to collect weeds for an album. The girls flocked around her desk during short break, their laughter ringing out often. Their hairstyles were usually exact copies of hers—black, thread-covered sticks if Chinwe wore isi owu that week, or zigzagging cornrows that ended in a pony tail atop their heads if Chinwe wore shuku that week. Chinwe walked as if there were a hot object underfoot, raising each leg almost as soon as her other foot touched the floor. During long break, she bounced in front of a group of girls as they went to the tuck shop to buy biscuits and coke. According to Ezinne, Chinwe paid for everyone's soft drinks. I usually spent long break reading in the library.

“Chinwe just wants you to talk to her first,” Ezinne whispered. “You know, she started calling you backyard snob because you don't talk to anybody. She said just because your father owns a newspaper and all those factories does not mean you have to feel too big, because her father is rich, too.”

“I don't feel too big.”

“Like today, at assembly, she said you were feeling too big, that was why you didn't start the pledge the first time Mother Lucy called you.”

“I didn't hear the first time Mother Lucy called me.”

“I'm not saying you feel too big, I am saying that is what Chinwe and most of the girls think. Maybe you should try and talk to her. Maybe after school you should stop running off like that and walk with us to the gate. Why do you always run, anyway?”

“I just like running,” I said, and wondered if I would count that as a lie when I made confession next Saturday, if I would add it to the lie about not having heard Mother Lucy the first time. Kevin always had the Peugeot 505 parked at the school gates right after the bells rang. Kevin had many other chores to do for Papa and I was not allowed to keep him waiting, so I always dashed out of my last class. Dashed, as though I were running the 200-meters race at the interhouse sports competition. Once, Kevin told Papa I took a few minutes longer, and Papa slapped my left and right cheeks at the same time, so his huge palms left parallel marks on my face and ringing in my ears for days.

“Why?” Ezinne asked. “If you stay and talk to people, maybe it will make them know that you are really not a snob.”

“I just like running,” I said again.

I remained a backyard snob to most of my class girls until the end of term. But I did not worry too much about that because I carried a bigger load—the worry of making sure I came first this term. It was like balancing a sack of gravel on my head every day at school and not being allowed to steady it with my hand. I still saw the print in my textbooks as a red blur, still saw my baby brother's spirit strung together by narrow lines of blood. I memorized what the teachers said because I knew my textbooks would not make sense if I tried to study later. After every test, a tough lump like poorly made fufu formed in my throat and stayed there until our exercise books came back.

School closed for Christmas break in early December. I peered into my report card while Kevin was driving me home and saw 1/25, written in a hand so slanted I had to study it to make sure it was not 7/25. That night, I fell asleep hugging
close the image of Papa's face lit up, the sound of Papa's voice telling me how proud of me he was, how I had fulfilled God's purpose for me.

DUST-LADEN WINDS
of harmattan came with December. They brought the scent of the Sahara and Christmas, and yanked the slender, ovate leaves down from the frangipani and the needlelike leaves from the whistling pines, covering everything in a film of brown. We spent every Christmas in our hometown. Sister Veronica called it the yearly migration of the Igbo. She did not understand, she said in that Irish accent that rolled her words across her tongue, why many Igbo people built huge houses in their hometowns, where they spent only a week or two in December, yet were content to live in cramped quarters in the city the rest of the year. I often wondered why Sister Veronica needed to understand it, when it was simply the way things were done.

The morning winds were swift on the day we left, pulling and pushing the whistling pine trees so that they bent and twisted, as if bowing to a dusty god, their leaves and branches making the same sound as a football referee's whistle. The cars were parked in the driveway, doors and boots open, waiting to be loaded. Papa would drive the Mercedes, with Mama in the front seat and Jaja and me in the back. Kevin would drive the factory car with Sisi, and the factory driver, Sunday, who usually stood in when Kevin took his yearly one-week leave, would drive the Volvo.

Papa stood by the hibiscuses, giving directions, one hand sunk in the pocket of his white tunic while the other pointed from item to car. “The suitcases go in the Mercedes, and those
vegetables also. The yams will go in the Peugeot 505, with the cases of Remy Martin and cartons of juice. See if the stacks of
okporoko
will fit in, too. The bags of rice and
garri
and beans and the plantains go in the Volvo.”

There was a lot to pack, and Adamu came over from the gate to help Sunday and Kevin. The yams alone, wide tubers the size of young puppies, filled the boot of the Peugeot 505, and even the front seat of the Volvo had a bag of beans slanting across it, like a passenger who had fallen asleep. Kevin and Sunday drove off first, and we followed, so that if the soldiers at the roadblocks stopped them, he would see and stop, too.

Papa started the rosary before we drove out of our gated street. He stopped at the end of the first decade so Mama could continue with the next set of ten Hail Marys. Jaja led the next decade; then it was my turn. Papa took his time driving. The expressway was a single lane, and when we got behind a lorry he stayed put, muttering that the roads were unsafe, that the people in Abuja had stolen all the money meant for making the expressways dual-carriage. Many cars horned and overtook us; some were so full of Christmas yams and bags of rice and crates of soft drinks that their boots almost grazed the road.

At Ninth Mile, Papa stopped to buy bread and okpa. Hawkers descended on our car, pushing boiled eggs, roasted cashew nuts, bottled water, bread, okpa, agidi into every window of the car, chanting: “Buy from me, oh, I will sell well to you.” Or “Look at me, I am the one you are looking for.”