Who Fears Death Read online

  I swallowed the bread I was chewing. “Really?” I exclaimed.

  “People said that her legs were what kept her on the camels but I know better. She had some sort of gift, too.”

  “Gift of what?” I asked, leaning forward. “Could she walk through walls? Fly? Eat glass? Change into a beetle?”

  The blacksmith laughed. “You read a lot,” he said.

  “I’ve read the Great Book twice!” I bragged.

  “Impressive,” he said. “Well, my Njeri could speak to camels. Camel-talking is a man’s job, so she chose camel racing instead. And Njeri didn’t just race. She won races. We met when we were teenagers. We married when we were twenty.”

  “What did her voice sound like?” I asked.

  “Oh, her voice was aggravating and beautiful,” he said.

  I frowned at this, confused.

  “She was very loud,” he explained, taking a piece of my bread. “She laughed a lot when she was happy and shouted a lot when she was irritated. You see?”

  I nodded.

  “For a while, we were happy,” he said. He paused.

  I waited for him to continue. I knew this was the bad part. When he just stared at his piece of bread, I said, “Well? What happened next? Did she do you wrong?”

  He chuckled and I was glad, though I had asked the question in seriousness. “No, no,” he said. “The day she raced the fastest race of her life, something terrible happened. You should have seen it, Onyesonwu. It was the finals of the Rain Fest Races. She’d won this race before, but this day she was about to break the record for fastest half mile ever.”

  He paused. “I was at the finish line. We all were. The ground was still slick from the heavy rain the night before. They should have given the race another day. Her camel approached, running its knock-kneed gait. It was running faster than any camel ever has.” He closed his eyes. “It took a wrong step and . . . tumbled.” His voice broke. “In the end, Njeri’s strong legs were her downfall. They held on and when the camel fell, she was crushed under its weight.”

  I gasped, clapping my hands over my mouth.

  “Had she tumbled off, she’d have lived. We’d only been married for three months.” He sighed. “The camel she was riding refused to leave her side. It went wherever her body went. Days after she was cremated, the camel died of grief. Camels all over were spitting and groaning for weeks.” He put his gloves back on and went back to his anvil. The conversation was over.

  Months passed. I continued visiting him every few days. I knew I was pushing my luck with my mother. But I believed it was a risk worth taking. One day, he asked me how my day was going. “Okay,” I replied. “A lady was talking about you yesterday. She said that you were the greatest blacksmith ever and that someone named Osugbo pays you well. Does he own the House of Osugbo? I’ve always wanted to go in there.”

  “Osugbo isn’t a man,” he replied as he examined a piece of wrought iron. “It’s the group of Jwahir elders who keep order, our government heads.”

  “Oh,” I said, not knowing or caring what the word government meant.

  “How’s your mother?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “I want to meet her.”

  I held my breath, frowning. If she found out about him, I’d get the worst beating of my life and then I’d lose my only friend. What’s he want to meet her for? I wondered, suddenly feeling extremely possessive of my mother. But how could I stop him from meeting her? I bit my lip and very reluctantly said, “Fine.”

  To my dismay, he came to our tent that very night. Still, he did look striking in his long white flowing pants and a white caftan. He wore a white veil over his head. To wear all white was to present oneself with great humbleness. Usually women did this. For a man to do it was very special. He knew to approach my mother with care.

  At first, my mother was afraid and angry with him. When he told her about the friendship he had with me, she slapped my bottom so hard that I ran off and cried for hours. Still, within a month, Papa and my mother were married. The day after the wedding, my mother and I moved into his house. It should have all been perfect after that. It was good for five years. Then the weirdness started.

  CHAPTER 3

  Interrupted Conversation

  PAPA ANCHORED MY MOTHER AND ME TO JWAHIR. But even if he’d lived, I’d still have ended up here. I was never meant to stay in Jwahir. I was too volatile and there were other things driving me. I was trouble from the moment I was conceived. I was a black stain. A poison. I realized this when I was eleven years old. When something strange happened to me. The incident forced my mother to finally tell me my own ugly story.

  It was evening and a thunderstorm was fast approaching. I was standing in the back doorway watching it come when, right before my eyes, a large eagle landed on a sparrow in my mother’s garden. The eagle slammed the sparrow to the ground and flew off with it. Three brown bloody feathers fell from the sparrow’s body. They landed between my mother’s tomatoes. Thunder rumbled as I went and picked up one of the feathers. I rubbed the blood between my fingers. I don’t know why I did this.

  It was sticky. And its coppery smell was pungent in my nostrils, as if I were awash in it. I tilted my head, for some reason, listening, sensing. Something’s happening here, I thought. The sky darkened. The wind picked up. It brought . . . another smell. A strange smell that I have since come to recognize but will never be able to describe.

  The more I inhaled that smell, the more something began to happen in my head. I considered running inside but I didn’t want to bring whatever it was into the house. Then I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. There was a humming, then pain. I shut my eyes.

  There were doors in my head, doors made of steel and wood and stone. The pain was from those doors cracking open. Hot air wafted through them. My body felt odd, like every move I made would break something. I fell to my knees and retched. Every muscle in my body seized up. Then I stopped existing. I recall nothing. Not even darkness.

  It was awful.

  Next thing I knew, I was stuck high in the giant iroko tree that grew in the center of town. I was naked. It was raining. Humiliation and confusion were the staples of my childhood. Is it a wonder that anger was never far behind?

  I held my breath to keep from sobbing with shock and fear. The large branch I grasped was slippery. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just spontaneously died and returned to life. But that didn’t matter at the moment. How was I going to get down?

  “You have to jump!” someone yelled.

  My father and some boy holding a basket over his head were below. I gnashed my teeth and grasped the branch more tightly, angry and embarrassed.

  Papa held his arms out. “Jump!” he shouted.

  I hesitated, thinking, I don’t want to die again. I whimpered. In order to avoid my subsequent thoughts, I jumped. Papa and I tumbled to the wet iroko-fruit-covered ground. I scrambled up and pressed myself to him trying to hide as he took off his shirt. I quickly slipped it on. The smell of the mashed fruits was strong and bitter in the rain. We’d need a good bath to get the smell and purple stains off our skin. Papa’s clothes were ruined. I looked around. The boy was gone.

  Papa took my hand and we walked home in shocked silence. As we trudged through the rain, I struggled to keep my eyes open. I was so exhausted. It seemed to take forever to get home. Did I come that far? I wondered. What . . . how? Once home, I stopped Papa at the door. “What happened?” I finally asked. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Let’s just get you dried off, for now,” he soothingly said.

  When we opened the door, my mother came running. I insisted I was fine but I wasn’t. I was falling into oblivion again. I headed to my room.

  “Let her go,” Papa told my mother.

  I crawled into bed and this time tumbled into a normal deep sleep.

  “Get up,” my mother said in her whispery voice. Hours had passed. My eyes were gummy and my body ached. Slowly, I s
at up, rubbing my face. My mother scooted her chair closer to my bed. “I don’t know what happened to you,” she said. But she looked away from me. Even then I wondered if she was telling the truth.

  “I don’t either, mama,” I said. I sighed, massaging my sore arms and legs. I could still smell the iroko tree’s fruit on my skin.

  She took my hands. “This is the only time I will tell you this.” She hesitated and shook her head, saying to herself, “Oh, Ani, she’s only eleven years old.” Then she cocked her head and had that look I knew so well. That listening look. She sucked her teeth and nodded.

  “Mama, what . . .”

  “The sun was high in the sky,” she said in her soft voice. “It lit everything. That’s when they came. When most of the women, those of us older than fifteen, were Holding Conversation in the desert. I was about twenty years old. . . .”

  The Nuru militants waited for the retreat, when the Okeke women walked into the desert and stayed for seven days to give respect to the goddess Ani. “Okeke” means “the created ones.” The Okeke people have skin the color of the night because they were created before the day. They were the first. Later, after much had happened, the Nuru arrived. They came from the stars and that’s why their skin is the color of the sun.

  These names must have been agreed upon during peaceful times, for it was well known that the Okeke were born to be slaves of the Nuru. Long ago, during the Old Africa Era, they had done something terrible causing Ani to put this duty on their backs. It is written in the Great Book.

  Though Najeeba lived with her husband in a small Okeke village where no one was a slave, she knew her place. Like everyone else in her village, if she lived in the Seven Rivers Kingdom, only fifteen miles east, where there was more to be had, she would spend her life serving the Nuru.

  Most abided by the old saying, “A snake is foolish if it dreams of being a lizard.” But one day, thirty years earlier, a group of Okeke men and women in the city of Zin rejected it. They’d had enough. They rose up rioting and demanding and refusing. Their passion spread to neighboring Seven Rivers towns and villages. These Okeke paid dearly for having ambition. Everyone did, as is always the case with genocide. On and off this had been happening since. Those rebelling Okekes that weren’t exterminated were driven East.

  Najeeba had her head to the sand, her eyes closed, her attention turned inward. She smiled as she held conversation with Ani. When she was ten, she joined the journeys along the salt roads with her father and brothers to trade salt. Since then, she’d loved the open desert. And she’d always adored travel. She smiled wider and rubbed her head further into the sand, ignoring the sound of the women around her praying.

  Najeeba was telling Ani how she and her husband had sat outside the night before and seen five stars fall from the sky. It’s said that the number of stars a wife and husband see fall will be the number of children they will have. She laughed to herself. She hadn’t a clue that this would be the last time she’d laugh for a very long time.

  “We don’t have much, but my father would be proud,” Najeeba said in her rich voice. “We have a house that sand is always getting into. Our computer was old when we bought it. Our capture station collects only half as much water from the clouds as it should. The killing has begun again and is not far. We have no children yet. But we’re happy. And I thank you . . .”

  The purr of scooters. She looked up. There was a parade of them, each with an orange flag on the back of the seat. There must have been at least forty. Najeeba and her group were miles from the village. They’d left four days ago, drinking water and eating only bread. So not only were they alone, they were weak. She knew exactly who these people were. How did they know where to find us? she wondered. The desert had erased their trail days ago.

  The hate had finally made it to her home. Her village was a quiet place where the houses were tiny but well built, the market small but well stocked, where marriages were the biggest events that happened. It was a sweet harmless place, hidden by lazy palm trees. Until now.

  As the scooters drove circles around the women, Najeeba looked back toward her village. She grunted as if punched in the stomach. Black smoke plumed into the sky. The Goddess Ani hadn’t bothered to tell the women that they were dying. That as they had their heads in the sand, their children, husbands, relatives at home were being murdered, their homes being burned.

  On each scooter rode a man and on several a woman accompanied the man. They wore orange veils over their sunny faces. Their expensive military attire—sand-colored pants and tops and leather boots—were probably treated with weather gel to keep them cool in the sun. As Najeeba stood staring at the smoke, her mouth agape, she remembered how her husband had always wanted weather gel for his clothes when he worked up in the palm trees. He could never afford it. He will never afford it, she thought.

  The Okeke women screamed and ran in all directions. Najeeba screamed so loudly that all the air left her lungs and she felt something give from deep in her throat. She’d later realize that this was her voice leaving her forever. She ran in the opposite direction from her village. But the Nurus made a wide circle around them, herding them back together like wild camels. As the Okeke women cowered, their long periwinkle garments fluttered in the breeze. The Nuru men got off their scooters, the Nuru women behind them. They closed in. And that was when the raping began.

  All of the Okeke women, young, prime, and old, were raped. Repeatedly. Those men didn’t tire; it was as if they were bewitched. When they spent themselves inside one woman, they had more to give to the next and the next. They sang as they raped. The Nuru women who’d come along laughed, pointed, and sang, too. They sang in the common language of Sipo, so that the Okeke women could understand.

  The blood of the Okeke runs like water

  We take their goods and shame their forefathers.

  We beat them with a heavy hand

  Then take what they call their land.

  The power of Ani belongs to us

  And so we will slay you to dust

  Ugly filthy slaves, Ani has finally killed you!

  Najeeba had it the worst. The other Okeke women were beaten and raped and then their abusers moved on, giving them a moment to breathe. The man who took Najeeba, however, stayed with her and there was no Nuru woman to laugh and observe. He was tall and strong like a bull. An animal. His veil covered his face but not his rage.

  He grabbed Najeeba by her thick black braids and dragged her several feet from the others. She tried to get up and run but he was on her too fast. She stopped fighting when she saw his knife . . . shiny and sharp. He laughed, using it to cut her clothing open. She stared into his eyes, the only part of his face she could see. They were gold and brown and angry, the corners twitching.

  As he held her down, he brought a coin-shaped device from his pocket and set it beside her. It was the sort of device people used to keep the time, the weather, to carry a file of the Great Book. This one had a recording mechanism. Its tiny black camera eye rose up, making a clicking and whirring sound as it began to record. He started singing, stabbing his knife into the sand next to Najeeba’s head. Two large black beetles landed on the handle.

  He pulled her legs apart and kept singing as he bore into her. And between songs, he spoke Nuru words that she couldn’t understand. Heated, biting, snarling words. After a while, anger boiled up in Najeeba and she spat and snarled right back at him. He grabbed her neck and his knife and pointed its tip at her left eye until she grew still again. Then he sang louder and bore more deeply into her.

  At some point, Najeeba went cold, then numb, then quiet. She became two eyes watching it happen. She’d always been like this to an extent. As a child, she’d fallen from a tree and broken her arm. Though in pain, she’d calmly gotten up, left her panicking friends, walked home and found her mother, who took her to a friend who knew how to set broken bones. Najeeba’s peculiar behavior used to anger her father whenever she misbehaved and was beaten. No matter how ha
rd the slap, she wouldn’t make a sound.

  “This child’s Alusi has no respect!” her father always told her mother. But when he was in his usual good mood, her father praised this part of Najeeba, often saying, “Let your Alusi travel, daughter. See what you can see!”

  Now her Alusi, that ethereal part of her with the ability to silence pain and observe, came forward. Her mind recorded events like the man’s device. Every detail. Her mind observed that when the man sang, despite the song’s words, his voice was beautiful.

  It lasted about two hours, though to Najeeba it felt like a day and a half. In her memory, she saw the sun move across the sky, set, and come up again. It was a long time, that’s what matters. The Nurus sang, laughed, raped, and, a few times, killed. Then they left. Najeeba lay there on her back, her garments open, her pummeled and bruised midsection exposed to the sun. She listened for breathing, moaning, crying and for a while, she heard nothing. She was glad.

  Then she heard Amaka shout, “Stand up!” Amaka was twenty years Najeeba’s senior. She was strong and often a voice for the women of her village. “Stand up, all of you!” Amaka said, stumbling. “Get up!” She went to each woman and kicked her. “We’re dead but we won’t die out here, those of us still breathing.”

  Najeeba listened without moving as Amaka kicked at thighs and pulled at women’s arms. She hoped she could play dead well enough to trick Amaka. She knew her husband was dead and, even if he weren’t, he’d never touch her again.

  The Nuru men, and their women, had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children. Such children are not children of the forbidden love between a Nuru and an Okeke, nor are they Noahs, Okekes born without color. The Ewu are children of violence.