Purple Hibiscus

“Did you say he is a fada?”

“Yes.”

“A real Catholic fada?”

“Yes.” I wondered if there were any unreal Catholic priests.

“All that maleness wasted,” she said, combing my thick hair gently. She put the comb down and untangled some ends with her fingers. It felt strange, because Mama had always plaited my hair. “Do you see the way he looks at you? It means something, I tell you.”

“Oh,” I said, because I did not know what Mama Joe expected me to say. But she was already shouting something to Mama Bomboy across the aisle. While she turned my hair into tight cornrows, she chattered nonstop to Mama Bomboy and to Mama Caro, whose voice I heard but whom I could not see because she was a few sheds away. The covered basket at the entrance of Mama Joe’s shed moved. A brown spiraled shell crawled out from underneath. I nearly jumped—I did not know the basket was full of live snails that Mama Joe sold. She stood up and retrieved the snail and put it back in. “God take power from the devil,” she muttered. She was on the last corn row when a woman walked up to her shed and asked to see the snails. Mama Joe took the covering basket off.

“They are big,” she said. “My sister’s children picked them today at dawn near Adada lake.”

The woman picked up the basket and shook it, searching for tiny shells hidden among the big ones. Finally, she said they were not that big anyway and left. Mama Joe shouted after the woman, “People who have bad stomachs should not spread their bad will to others! You will not find snails this size anywhere else in the market!”

She picked up an enterprising snail that was crawling out of the open basket. She threw it back in and muttered, “God take power from the devil.” I wondered if it was the same snail, crawling out, being thrown back in, and then crawling out again. Determined. I wanted to buy the whole basket and set that one snail free.

Mama Joe finished my hair before Father Amadi came back. She gave me a red mirror, neatly broken in half, so that I saw my new hairstyle in fractions.

“Thank you. It’s nice,” I said.

She reached out to straighten a cornrow that did not need to be straightened. “A man does not bring a young girl to dress her hair unless he loves that young girl, I am telling you. It does not happen,” she said. And I nodded because again I did not know what to say.

“It doesn’t happen,” Mama Joe repeated, as if I had disagreed. A cockroach ran out from behind her stool, and she stepped on it with her bare foot. “God take power from the devil.”

She spit into her palm, rubbed her hands together, drew the basket closer, and started to rearrange the snails. I wondered if she had spit in her hand before she started on my hair. A woman in a blue wrapper with a bag tucked under her armpit bought the whole basketful of snails just before Father Amadi came to pick me up. Mama Joe called

her “nwanyi oma,” although she was not pretty at all, and I imagined the snails fried to a crisp, warped corpses floating in the woman’s soup pot.

“Thank you,” I said to Father Amadi, as we walked to the car. He had paid Mama Joe so well that she protested, weakly, and said she should not take so much for plaiting the hair of Aunty Ifeoma’s niece.

Father Amadi brushed my gratitude aside in the goodnatured way of someone who had done what was his duty. “O maka, it brings out your face,” he said, looking at me. “You know, we still don’t have anybody playing Our Lady in our play. You should try out. When I was in the juniorate, the prettiest girl in the junior convent always played Our Lady.”

I took a deep breath and prayed I would not stutter. “I can’t act. I’ve never acted.”

“You can try,” he said. He turned the key in the ignition, and the car started with a squeaky shudder. Before he eased it onto the crowded market road, he looked at me and said, “You can do anything you want, Kambili.”

As he drove, we sang Igbo choruses. I lifted my voice until it was smooth and melodious like his.

The green sign outside the church was lit with white lights. The words ST. PETER’S CATHOLIC CHAPLAINCY, UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA seemed to twinkle as Amaka and I walked into the incense-scented church. I sat with her in the front pew, our thighs touching. We had come alone; Aunty Ifeoma had gone to the morning service with the others.

St. Peter’s did not have the huge candles or the ornate marble altar of St. Agnes. The women did not tie their scarves properly around their heads, to cover as much hair as possible. I watched them as they came up for offertory. Some just draped see-through black veils over their hair; others wore trousers, even jeans. Papa would be scandalized. A woman’s hair must be covered in the house of God, and a woman must not wear a man’s clothes, especially in the house of God, he would say.

I imagined the plain wooden crucifix above the altar swinging back and forth as Father Amadi raised the host at consecration. His eyes were shut, and I knew that he was no longer behind the altar draped in white cotton, that he was somewhere else that only he and God knew about. He gave me communion and when his finger grazed my tongue, I wanted to fall at his feet. But the thunderous singing from the choir propped me up and strengthened me to walk back to my seat.

After we said the Lord’s Prayer, Father Amadi did not say, “Offer to each other the sign of peace.” He broke into an Igbo song instead.

“Ekene nke udo—ezigbo nwanne m nye m aka gi.” “The greeting of peace—my dear sister, dear brother, give me your hand.”

People clasped hands and hugged. Amaka hugged me, then turned to exchange brief hugs with the family seated behind. Father Amadi smiled right at me from the altar, his lips moving. I was not sure what he said, but I knew I would think about it over and over. I was still thinking about it, wondering what it was he had said, as he drove Amaka and me home after Mass.

He told Amaka that he still had not received her confirmation name. He needed to get all the names together and have the chaplain look at them by the next day, Saturday. Amaka said she was not interested in choosing an English name, and Father Amadi laughed and said he would help her choose a name if she wanted. I looked out the window as we drove. There was no power, and so the campus looked as though a giant blue-black blanket had covered it. The streets we drove past were like tunnels darkened by the hedges on each side. Gold-yellow lights of kerosene lamps flickered from behind windows and on verandahs of homes, like the eyes of hundreds of wild cats.

Aunty Ifeoma was sitting on a stool on the verandah, across from a friend of hers. Obiora was on the mat, seated between the two kerosene lamps. Both were turned low, filling the verandah with shadows. Amaka and I greeted Aunty Ifeoma’s friend, who wore a bright tie-dye boubou and her short hair natural. She smiled and said, “Kedu?”

“Father Amadi said to greet you, Mom. He couldn’t stay, he has people coming to see him at the chaplaincy house,” Amaka said. She made to take one kerosene lamp.

“Keep the lamp. Jaja and Chima have a lit candle inside. Close the door so the insects don’t follow you in,” Aunty Ifeoma said.