Under the Udala Trees (10 page)

We arrived at the book of Judges. Chapter 19.

Mama read the words quietly, as if God were physically there with us in the room, as if she were paying obeisance to Him:

¹
And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the side of mount E'phra-im, who took to him a concubine out of Beth-lehem-judah.

²
And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father's house to Beth-lehem-judah, and was there four whole months.

³
And her husband arose, and went after her, to speak friendly unto her, and to bring her again, having his servant with him, and a couple of asses: and she brought him into her father's house: and when the father of the damsel saw him, he rejoiced to meet him.

⁴
And his father-in-law, the damsel's father, retained him; and he abode with him three days: so they did eat and drink, and lodged there.

The father and the Levite went on to bargain over a price for the damsel, and the damsel was forced to return with the Levite. On their way back to his home, they passed the town of Gibeah, where most of the citizens were up to no good. One of the noble townspeople, in order to protect the travelers, offered them shelter at his home. But before the night was over, the other men of the city showed up at the kind man's door and demanded to rape the Levite. The kind man pleaded with his fellow townspeople, even offering up his own daughter to be raped instead.

Rather than offer up himself to the townsmen, the Levite offered up the damsel to be raped. The men of the town defiled her all through the night before finally letting her go. When they were done, she collapsed in front of the door. In the morning the Levite came out, prodding her to get up so that they could be on their way. She did not respond. Annoyed, he threw her over his donkey and took her with him that way. Back at home he cut her into pieces, limb by limb, which he then sent out to all the territories of Israel.

We were in the parlor, settled on the floor around the center table.

“Think about it,” Mama said when she was done reading.

It was a mess of a story. I was not sure what she wanted me to think about. “Think about what?” I asked.

“Don't you see how this applies to you?”

I did not, but just for the sake of trying to see things from her point of view, I forced myself to think deeper of it. I imagined the whole thing in my head. The terrible image of the rape, of the poor damsel lying unconscious at the doorstep, and then being flung over the donkey by the Levite. The terrible image of the Levite cutting up her body into twelve pieces. These were what came to my mind. What part of that could possibly apply to me?

I stretched out my legs under the center table and said, “Mama, I don't understand what you're asking.
A ghotaghi m.
”

“What is there not to understand?” she said. “Do you not see why the men offered up the women instead of the man?”

I said, “No, I don't see why.”

After a moment I realized that I
did
know why. The reason was suddenly obvious to me. I said, “Actually, Mama, yes, I do see why. The men offered up the women because they were cowards and the worst kind of men possible. What kind of men offer up their daughters and wives to be raped in place of themselves?”

Mama stared wide-eyed at me, then, very calmly, she said, “Ijeoma, you're missing the point.”

“What point?”

“Don't you see? If the men had offered themselves, it would have been an abomination. They offered up the girls so that things would be as God intended: man and woman instead of man and man. Do you see now?”

A headache was rising in my temples. My heart was racing from bewilderment at what Mama was saying. It was the same thing she had said with the story of Lot. It was as if she were obsessed with this issue of abomination. How could she really believe that
that
was the lesson to be taken out of this horrible story? What about all the violence and all the rape? Surely she realized that the story was even more complex than just violence and rape. To me, the story didn't make sense.

I thought, What if all of these stories were actually only allegories for something else, something more than we could easily put our fingers on?

In addition to our studies, I had now begun to accompany Mama to church on Sundays. Why was it that these questions never came up at church? Why was it that people never asked any questions at church? Instead, everyone nodded, and cried “Amen” after everything Father Godfrey said, and clapped, no one asking him to explain anything. I wished that Papa were here so that I could have asked him what he thought. I wondered what Father Godfrey would say if I confronted him with these questions. Would he even know the answers? How much did pastors pretend to know?

I looked at Mama and said, “Mama, the Bible is full of stories. Maybe they're all just allegories of something else.”

“Hush,” Mama said. “The Bible is the Bible and not to be questioned. What we read in it is what we are to take out of it.”

Earlier, Mama had risen mid-lesson to fetch us glasses of water. The glasses were now on the table, one for me and the other for her. We had not yet touched them.

I opened my mouth again to ask her if she knew what an allegory was. But this time she must have seen the moment when my mouth opened. She reached out to the table, shifted one of the glasses to me. “Here,” she said. “Drink some water.”

It occurred to me that I was indeed thirsty. I picked up the water and drank.

She watched me drink. When I was done, she said, “Good. We have no time to stop. We must continue.
Osiso-osiso.
” She took a hurried sip out of her glass, turned the pages of her Bible, and continued to read.

B
IBLE STORIES AND
thoughts of their potential as allegories were beginning to invade my mind. One night I lay on my bed, alone in my room, and thought about everything. If my mind were one of those old-fashioned scales, the scales of justice, with one metal pan measuring right and the other wrong, both sides would have been dead even. It was turning out that all that studying was not actually doing any good; if anything, it was making it a case between what I felt in my heart and what Mama and the grammar school teacher felt. The Bible was beginning to feel almost negligible, as it was seeming to me more and more impossible to know exactly what God could really have meant.

But I wanted to know. I rose from my bed and knelt by its edge, because it also seemed to me, rather suddenly, that maybe I could arrive at the answers if I tried again to pray to God on my own. Perhaps God would speak to me. Perhaps He would allow His voice to echo in me, providing me with the answers.

I had just come out of another one of my studies with Mama. My headscarf, which I always wore during the sessions, had come completely undone by now, and my braids hung loose, aimless around my shoulders. I was in the middle of gathering the braids together, of tying the scarf around them, when my mind circled back to Adam and Eve.

The thought occurred to me: Yes, it had been Adam and Eve. But
so what
if it was only the story of Adam and Eve that we got in the Bible? Why did
that
have to exclude the possibility of a certain Adam and Adam or a certain Eve and Eve? Just because the story happened to focus on a certain Adam and Eve did not mean that all other possibilities were forbidden. Just because the Bible recorded one specific thread of events, one specific history, why did that have to invalidate or discredit all other threads, all other histories? Woman was created for man, yes. But why did that mean that woman could not also have been created for another woman? Or man for another man? Infinite possibilities, and each one of them perfectly viable.

I wondered about the Bible as a whole. Maybe the entire thing was just a history of a certain culture, specific to that particular time and place, which made it hard for us now to understand, and which maybe even made it not applicable for us today. Like Exodus.
Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.
Deuteronomy said it too. But what did it mean? What did it mean
back then?
Was the boiling of the young goat in its mother's milk a metaphor for insensitivity, for coldness of heart? Or did it refer to some ancient ritual that nobody performed anymore? But still, there it was in the Bible, open to whatever meaning people decided to give to it.

Also, what if Adam and Eve were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside of yourself? What if that was all it was? And why not? By now I knew enough that there were at least a few allegories in the Bible—those ones that were explicitly identified as such. So why should other stories in the Bible, like the story of Adam and Eve, not be conducive to allegorical treatment as well? After all, if it were to be taken so literally, whom, then, did Cain marry, if only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were in existence at the time? If it were to be read literally, whom, then, was God warning against taking vengeance on Cain? Who else would have been on earth to warn save Adam and Eve, Cain's own parents, who, from all signs, had no intention of killing their son? Surely there must have been other sets of mankind, other possibilities of human existence, Adam and Eve being only one instance, a symbolic representation of them all.

I was excited by my thoughts. From the time our Bible studies began, I'd had the feeling of a person wandering lost and aimless and thirsty in the desert. But now I had stumbled upon a tap of water. The joy of my discovery washed over me. My first instinct was to go to Mama and present my case to her. It might result in a fit of argument, but she needed to know that there was more to the Bible than her interpretation of it. I ran from the side of my bed toward the door.

I had just reached the door when I realized I'd be better off not trying to present these theories to Mama. What good would arguing over it do? She might decide that I was being insubordinate to her and to God, and then maybe she would increase the lessons to two times a day.

I stood at my door for a moment, then turned and headed back to my bed.

W
E HAD ARRIVED
at the end of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi. Mama had just finished with the closing prayer. She was leaning on the center table, her elbows crossed above it. She was wearing an ugly expression on her face, like a frown, as if the sun, through the open panels of the louver windows, had somehow descended from the sky and was attacking her.

She looked away from me, all the while fiddling with the corners of her Bible. Finally she turned back to me and spoke. Her voice was a whisper, very calm. She said, “Do you still think of her?”

The question came as a surprise. I lowered my head, thinking of ways in which I could pretend not to have heard. But Mama would not let me pretend. She asked it again, and in more detail: “Do you still think of her
in that way?
”

The answer was simple: of course I still thought of Amina. And, yes,
in that way.
How could I force away memories of a person with whom I'd shared all that time? There were nights when I dreamed of her, dreams so vivid that when I woke it seemed that the waking was the dream, and the dream, my reality: Amina running errands with me, washing clothes and hanging them to dry, chopping wood, coming along with me to fetch kerosene.

Amina and I bathing together out by the tap, both of us looking into each other's faces. Amina and I on the mattress we shared, our warm breaths intermingling in the small space between.

I did not have the presence of mind to say anything but the truth. I looked Mama in the eyes and nodded. “Yes, I still think of her,” I said. And, “Yes, I still think of her in that way.”

Suddenly Mama was rising from the floor, flailing her hands in the air, shouting about prayer and forgiveness. She pulled me up by the collar of my dress.

She screamed, “Get on your knees now! I say, get on your knees!”

I got on my knees as she demanded, but I remained silent, unable to speak. My mind was too busy for words—too busy retracing steps and settling on and mulling over the moment that I had made the gaffe. I stewed over my foolishness, over why I had not been more clever—far less forthcoming—about the answer that I had given.

“Pray!” she screamed. “You must ask God for the forgiveness of all your sins, but especially for that one particular sin in you. Did I not just tell you to pray? Why do I not see your lips moving? Why do I not hear any sound coming out of your mouth? Pray, I say! No child of mine will carry those sick, sick desires. The mere existence of them is a terrible disrespect to God and to me!”

She continued to scream in that fashion, and all the while I could only get myself to look wide-eyed at her. Finally I made to rise up, but she shouted at me to kneel back down. “Kneel!” she screamed, panting as if out of breath.

I did as I was told.

She placed her hands on my head, put pressure on it so that I turned my face downward toward the center table.

“Only your own prayer will save you now. I have prayed all I can for you. Now you must pray for yourself! Only God can save you!”

I brought my hands to my face, shutting my eyes. I remained in that pose, still lost in my thoughts, still wishing that there were a way that I could go back in time and take back the answer that had led to this blowup.

“Pray!” she cried.

I could have prayed at this point. I
did
want to pray, even, if prayer would be what would calm things down. But my mind could not think up the words to begin. All of her screaming, all of her orders, were instead replaying themselves inside my head.