Purple Hibiscus

My hand shook as I tried to straighten a piece of the table surface that had cracked and curled tightly around itself. A line of tiny ginger-colored ants marched near it. Aunty Ifeoma had told me not to bother the ants, since they hurt no one and you could never really get rid of them anyway; they were as old as the building itself.

I looked across at the living room to see if Jaja had heard Amaka over the sound of the television. But he was engrossed in the images on the screen, lying on the floor next to Obiora. He looked as though he had been lying there watching TV his whole life. It was the same way he looked in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden the next morning, as though it were something he had been doing for a long time rather than the few days we had been here.

Aunty Ifeoma asked me to join them in the garden, to carefully pick out leaves that had started to wilt on the croton plants.

“Aren’t they pretty?” Aunty Ifeoma asked. “Look at that, green and pink and yellow on the leaves. Like God playing with paint brushes.”

“Yes,” I said. Aunty Ifeoma was looking at me,

and I wondered if she was thinking that my voice lacked the enthusiasm of Jaja’s when she talked about her garden.

Some of the children from the flats upstairs came down and stood watching us. They were about five, all a blur of food-stained clothes and fast words. They talked to one another and to Aunty Ifeoma, and then one of them turned and asked me what school I went to in Enugu. I stuttered and gripped hard at some fresh croton leaves, pulling them off, watching the viscous liquid drip from their stalks. After that, Aunty Ifeoma said I could go inside if I wanted to. She told me about a book she had just finished reading: it was on the table in her room and she was sure I would like it. So I went in her room and took a book with a faded blue cover, called Equiano’s Travels, or the Life of Gustavus Vassa the African.

I sat on the verandah, with the book on my lap, watching one of the children chase a butterfly in the front yard. The butterfly dipped up and down, and its black-spotted yellow wings flapped slowly, as if teasing the little girl. The girl’s hair, held atop her head like a ball of wool, bounced as she ran. Obiora was sitting on the verandah, too, but outside the shade, so he squinted behind his thick glasses to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was watching the girl and the butterfly while repeating the name Jaja slowly, placing the stress on both syllables, then on the first, then on the second. “Aja means sand or oracle, but Jaja? What kind of name is Jaja? It is not Igbo,” he finally pronounced.

“My name is actually Chukwuka. Jaja is a childhood nickname that stuck.” Jaja was on his knees. He wore only a pair of denim shorts, and the muscles on his back rippled, smooth and long like the ridges he weeded.

“When he was a baby, all he could say was Ja-Ja. So everybody called him Jaja,” Aunty Ifeoma said. She turned to Jaja and added, “I told your mother that it was an appropriate nickname, that you would take after Jaja of Opobo.”

“Jaja of Opobo? The stubborn king?” Obiora asked.

“Defiant,” Aunt Ifeoma said. “He was a defiant king.”

“What does defiant mean, Mommy? What did the king do?” Chima asked. He was in the garden, doing something on his knees, too, although Aunty Ifeoma often told him “Kwusia, don’t do that” or “If you do that again, I will give you a knock.”

“He was king of the Opobo people,” Aunty Ifeoma said, “and when the British came, he refused to let them control all the trade. He did not sell his soul for a bit of gunpowder like the other kings did, so the British exiled him to the West Indies. He never returned to Opobo.” Aunt Ifeoma continued watering the row of tiny banana-colored flowers that clustered in bunches. She held a metal watering can in her hand, tilting it to let the water out through the nozzle. She had already used up the biggest container of water we fetched in the morning.

“That’s sad. Maybe he should not have been defiant,” Chima said. He moved closer to squat next to Jaja. I wondered if he understood what “exiled” and “sold his soul for a bit of gunpowder” meant. Aunty Ifeoma spoke as though she expected that he did.

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Defiance is like marijuana—it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”

The solemn tone, more than the sacrilege of what she said, made me look up. Her conversation was with Chima and Obiora, but she was looking at Jaja.

Obiora smiled and pushed his glasses up. “Jaja of Opobo was no saint, anyway. He sold his people into slavery, and besides, the British won in the end. So much for the defiance.”

“The British won the war, but they lost many battles,” Jaja said, and my eyes skipped over the rows of text on the page. How did Jaja do it? How could he speak so easily? Didn’t he have the same bubbles of air in his throat, keeping the words back, letting out only a stutter at best? I looked up to watch him, to watch his dark skin covered with beads of sweat that gleamed in the sun. I had never seen his arm move this way, never seen this piercing light in his eyes that appeared when he was in Aunty Ifeoma’s garden.

“What happened to your little finger?” Chima asked. Jaja looked down, too, as if he were just then noticing the gnarled finger, deformed like a dried stick.

“Jaja had an accident,” Aunty Ifeoma said, quickly. “Chima, go and get me the container of water. It is almost empty, so you can carry it.”

I stared at Aunty Ifeoma, and when her eyes met mine, I looked away. She knew. She knew what had happened to Jaja’s finger.

When he was ten, he had missed two questions on his catechism test and was not named the best in his First Holy Communion class. Papa took him upstairs and locked the door. Jaja, in tears, came out supporting his left hand with his right, and Papa drove him to St. Agnes hospital. Papa was crying, too, as he carried Jaja in his arms like a baby all the way to the car. Later, Jaja told me that Papa had avoided his right hand because it is the hand he writes with.

“This is about to bloom,” Aunt Ifeoma said to Jaja, pointing at an ixora bud. “Another two days and it will open its eyes to the world.”

“I probably won’t see it,” Jaja said. “We’ll be gone by then.”

Aunty Ifeoma smiled. “Don’t they say that time flies when you are happy?”

The phone rang then, and Aunty Ifeoma asked me to pick it up, since I was closest to the front door. It was Mama. I knew something was wrong right away, because it was Papa who always placed the call. Besides, they did not call in the afternoon.

“Your father is not here,” Mama said. Her voice sounded nasal, as if she needed to blow her nose. “He had to leave this morning.”

“Is he well?” I asked.

“He is well.” She paused, and I could hear her talking to Sisi. Then she came back to the phone and said that yesterday soldiers had gone to the small, nondescript rooms that served as the offices of the Standard. Nobody knew how they had found out where the offices were. There were so many soldiers that the people on that street told Papa it reminded them of pictures from the front during the civil war. The soldiers took every copy of the entire press run, smashed furniture and printers, locked the offices, took the keys, and boarded up the doors and windows. Ade Coker was in custody again.