Mummy

I was six when I knew Mummy was a witch. She had gone to the market that Saturday. Only my elder sister, Temi, who was asleep, and I were at home. Normally, I would have gone to Emeka’s house, but Mummy had warned me to stay away from him. She said he was a bad influence. Who else was there to be friends with? Not Obinna and Peter, my classmates who lived nearby, and always called me Michaela because, according to them, I acted like a girl.

Sucking on my thumb — I sucked on my thumb until I was eight, I stared at a lone, idle spider on the ceiling, imagining a war between spiders, until I became bored and began to crave for meat. I fought the urge to steal meat until I could not anymore. In the kitchen, I uncovered the pot of soup. Floating on the surface were four pieces of meat the size of a fist — my parents’.  Ours were one-fifth of theirs. I took one of theirs. With the meat now in my mouth, the peppery stew hot on my tongue, Mummy appeared, and the meat fell on the ground.

“Kunle,” she screamed, and slapped me.

It was not the first time I stole. The other times I had stolen, she didn’t terrify me by appearing, and this baffled me when I grew older. Why not wait until I was older before appearing? Wasn’t a child, and his innocence, supposed to be protected at all cost? Why did she appear when the meat was already in my mouth? Why not before?

I didn’t know who a witch was yet. I didn’t even know the word “witch.” Not until a few days later when Mama Bimbo, our neighbour, banged on our door early in the morning.

“Thief,” she shouted. “Witch! Thief witch! You stole my agric fowl and disappeared. Thief oh!” She clapped. Come out here. Come and face me.”

Mama Bimbo’s accusations gave me a narrow meaning of who a witch was: someone who could appear and disappear and take whatever they wanted. So I wanted to be a witch, too. I wanted to have the ability to take whatever I wanted. So that afternoon, after school, I said, “Mummy, I want to be a witch, too.”

Seated on a sofa, she gaped at me. Her look said I had dropped a statement bigger than my mouth. A look that meant a slap was coming soon. And I expected a slap; she didn’t slap me.

She gasped. “Never say that again. Witches go to hell. You want to go to hell?”

“No. Does that mean you will go to hell?”

“Keep quiet! Do your assignment. Another question from you and I won’t add meat in your food.”

I never asked her again, afraid I won’t get meat anymore, afraid she’d beat me, but not afraid of her, of the extraordinary things she could do, because she and I were close. She would order Temi, my elder sister, to stay home, but would take me to the market, and buy almost everything I pointed at. And those market women used to say, “You and this your boy.” They’d turn to me and say, “Mummy’s boy.”

The year Mummy was pregnant with my kid sister, Ayo, she became even more alert. Before, she would appear when I was doing wrong, but then, she screamed my name whenever I thought of doing wrong. She was in my mind, and I felt invaded and tense.

One afternoon, immediately after the clang of the school closing bell, I dashed to the back of our one-bedroom house, behind the landlord’s window, to excrete into a plastic bag. I would have used the water closet in the house, but it was a dry closet. We always poured water from buckets to flush it. Not once did water ever rush out of our taps. The whole neighbourhood fetched water from one borehole. I would have gone to fetch, but couldn’t hold it anymore. I was about to defecate on myself.

When I came out of the backyard, my classmates were trudging by, schoolbags on their backs. I whipped to the backyard, dumped the bag on the ground. They would sing about it in school the next day if they had seen me. Such was not uncommon. Our neighbourhood was full of broken, blocked, and filled-up toilets. In fact, some face-me-I-face-you compounds had no toilet. So it was not uncommon to see a girl or boy holding a plastic bag, darting towards the landfill.

“Kunle,” Mummy shouted. The slap-slap of her slippers was approaching. I did not bother to run. She always knew where I was. She emerged in the backyard.

“You want me to force that shit down your throat, abi? she said in Yoruba.

I backed away, scared of what would come next. A slap.

“Oya, pick it up.” She snapped her fingers and retied her ankara wrapper over her breasts.

I picked it up, crying. She shoved me forward towards the front of our fenceless house. Some girls in my class were passing by, so I tried to run back, but she blocked my way. She slapped the back of my head, and I screamed. I shuffled on, crossed the gutter in front of our house, my face covered with my open palm.

Back from the landfill, I sat outside drawing cartoon figures under a guava tree that stood a few steps from the front door. I didn’t want to see her. In the evening, she came out holding a tray of beans, so I went inside.

That night, I sat under the dining table, eating dinner: amala and ewedu. Mummy was telling Daddy about how I had dumped my faeces in the backyard. She said she had stumbled upon me by mistake, not that she had heard my thoughts. I never knew she could lie until then.

After she recounted her version of the story, she said to me, “What are you doing under there? Come and sit beside me.” She patted the space on the sofa.

“Mummy, I’m doing something.”

“I have told you to always reply in Yoruba. How would you learn if you don’t speak?”

As if I wanted to learn. “Mummy, I’m doing something,” I stuttered in Yoruba. I hated Yoruba. I hated speaking it. I was always happy when people thought I was Igbo because of my fair skin. I even hated my Yoruba name, Damilola, which was my first name. I loved my English name, Michael, so I had changed it to my first name the previous year at school.

“Come and take meat.” She stretched her hand.

I swallowed the last mould of my amala and meat, and crawled out from under the table, carrying my plate.

She stroked my arm. “Take these plates to the kitchen. Omo mi, Omo Ekun, Omo Olugusi,” She started eulogising me, calling me names I couldn’t pronounce, whose meanings I didn’t know. “Omo adagbada wole ogui, akinkanju ni o, ekun kii se ojo.”

I carried the plates to the kitchen, and she was still talking. My head swelled. I came back with a mat to the sitting room. Mummy now quiet, I laid it on the carpeted floor, the spot where Temi and I slept. The only bedroom was my parents’. I lay down, uncovered. Later, Mummy blanketed me. She always did and I always expected her to. I loved the touch of her hand, warm and smooth.

Mummy and Daddy disagreed about a lot of things. One matter they never agreed on was my climbing the guava tree. Daddy wanted me to grow into a strong, fearless man. Ever since everyone started to call me Mummy’s boy, he had been afraid I would grow into a girlish boy, so he wanted me to climb trees and do what boys did. But she, afraid that I would fall and break my leg, was totally against it. She was fearful. She would hear a jiggling sound and appear.

“Your uncle, Tunde, fell from a tree when he was small and now he walks with a limp,” she said.

“Your brother was just too careless,” Daddy said. “I climbed trees too but look at me. No broken leg. He will be careful.”

They argued about it for about a week, and for her peace of mind, he said to me, “Don’t climb trees for now.”

But I disobeyed. I was eight already. I thought I was a big boy. What would she do? I’d say. Beat me? My skin was as tough as an elephant’s. I no longer cried when she beat me, so she’d throw away the cane and use her hands on me instead. My only fear was that she would appear when I climbed the tree. But I hoped she would not. After she gave birth to my kid sister, she became lenient, not appearing at every opportunity and she no longer read my thoughts. Maybe she still read my thoughts and refused to react. Perhaps she was tired of being everywhere.

The day I climbed the tree was a Sunday. My parents had gone to visit a church member at the hospital and would go for a naming ceremony afterwards, so only Temi and I were at home. We’d had lunch already, yet I was hungry, and the guavas were so ripe, their skin a sunny yellow. They were calling me. Kunle, Kunle, come and pluck us. I climbed the tree to the top, standing on two branches, my two hands clutching a branch. I plucked a guava and ate, looking out for Mummy. I couldn’t sit on a branch, kept praying she would not appear, kept looking out for her. I pocketed three guavas and hurried down. As my legs touched the ground, a two-mouthed whip landed on my back. I fell, screaming.

“I told you not to climb this tree,” Mummy yelled.

I looked around for Daddy. He was not with her. She raised the whip. I curled up and covered my face. The whip continued to land on my back, on my head, on every part of me. Afterwards, she disappeared.

About thirty minutes later, Daddy arrived with her.

“What happened to you?” Daddy asked, his gaze on the whip marks on my hands. They were worm-shaped, stinging me like red pepper. He tried to touch it, and I cringed.

I looked at Mummy. She scowled, and I looked away. Daddy gave her the eye and went inside. She followed, and their screams erupted. Daddy yelled about her appearing and disappearing. Hadn’t they agreed that she would not use her powers in the house? Didn’t she pity him? Didn’t she see that the church was pressuring him to send her away? That they would have chased her away if they had not respected him so much? That he would not become a church elder if she did not turn away from witchcraft?

Mummy, too, shouted. Wasn’t she using her witchcraft for good, especially to discipline the children and to protect us? Hadn’t she been trying her best? What more did he want — for her to kiss his feet?

It lasted for over an hour, the argument. That night Daddy slept on the sofa in the sitting room. “Never climb that tree again,” he said before he slept.

The Sunday of that week and for a long time, Mummy stayed at home while we went to church because, according to Daddy, she needed rest. Whenever we got back she was always in the sitting room, with a magazine or watching TV, lunch already prepared. How was her body? I’d ask, hoping she would go with us the following Sunday.

One Sunday when we returned home, the front door was open, and nobody was in the sitting room. I called her name a few times, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she went out, so I stopped calling her. At night, Temi and I were hungry and she hadn’t come out yet, so I knocked on their door and called her.

“Go. I’m coming,” Daddy said.

“What about Mummy?””

“I said go, I’m coming.””

He came out about thirty minutes later in his shorts, his hairy potbelly exposed.

“Go and buy two hundred naira bread and four eggs.” He gave Temi money.

“Daddy, what of Mummy?” I asked. “She hasn’t come out since.”

“Your mother…” He gazed at me, then turned towards his room. “Tell Temi to fry the eggs and share it among yourselves, and don’t disturb me.””

It must have been five a.m when he woke us up the next morning in the sitting room. On most days, he used to go to work before we woke up, but he had never woken us up himself. Mummy always did.

“Temi, take this money. Buy bread and make tea for your brother and sister. And close the door when you are going to school. You still remember how to close the door?””

“Yes, sir. What about Mummy?”

He sighed. “Your Mummy traveled.”

“When?” I asked. “When we were at church?”

“And she didn’t tell us? Where did she go? Temi asked.

“When I come back, I will tell you.”

A month passed, then months, but Mummy still had not returned. She was on a spiritual assignment, Daddy always said. She’d return in a week. He should call her so we could talk to her, we said, and he’d say there was no network where she was.

For weeks, I would go into her bedroom and look through her empty wardrobe, or sit on the bed, wishing she could appear and eulogise or blanket me so I would feel the touch of her hands on my neck. I dreamt about her those days. Some of those dreams were memories in which we were in the market, Mummy bargaining with the market women, me holding her hand and not letting go.

When I could not bear missing her anymore, I went into the kitchen and took a piece of meat from the pot, expecting Mummy to appear like she used to. I chewed on the meat, looking around, expecting a slap as she’d appear. I stood there beside the pot, praying with my eyes closed. She didn’t appear. I left the kitchen wondering what might have happened to her. Perhaps, she was sick and couldn’t come. I stole meat thrice but she never appeared. I still tried to summon her by stealing a toothbrush or a biscuit at the supermarket.

Now in my twenties and no word from her yet, I wish things had happened differently. I wish to see her open-mouthed smile once again, to watch her excitement burst into words, her open-teeth gleaming. I have tried to forget her, to be angry because she left us, but all I feel is sadness. I think she’s dead. I think she died since I was little. If not she’d have appeared when I stole again today.

Samuel Oladele

is a fiction writer. His works have appeared on Virtual Zine magazine and Kreactive Diadem. He’s currently working on his first novel, Chronicles of Michael’s letters.

Cover image credit: Tosin Taiwo