Jagua Nana

She turned to Ma Nancy. ‘Excuse me, but I mus’ have to be goin’. I goin’ somewhere important.’

‘You done well, Jagua.’

Jagua turned her back on them. It was a back at once insolent and flamboyant, with a narrow waistline, wide hips and well-shaped legs. The rhythm she infused into her walk awakened men’s staring instincts and she could see the startled looks on the lifting faces. As long as there were men in Lagos who knew what that walk promised, she knew she would always be Ja-gwa.

12

Jagua stood in the middle of her room staring at the floor. Half-open trunk boxes, basketwork packed full with linen, crockery, kitchen utensils, chairs, an unmade bed, all added to her confusion. Mike came in, asking questions which only served to heighten her irritation. How she would ever get some order into the room, what she must extract and what she must leave behind, she found it impossible to decide. If she could have known how long she would be away, packing might have been easier.

She put some of her best clothes on the bed. By evening she was still puzzled but had managed to extract a few other clothes which she felt would impress people in Onitsha, Ogabu and Bagana. She had a five hundred mile journey before her and with all the risk involved she chose to travel by Mammy Wagon because it was much the quickest way.

They did not set off until the following evening. In the early hours of the next morning the Mammy Wagon in which she had been travelling broke away from the trunk road and swung into a forest track. By this time Jagua was the only passenger left in the lorry, and after the four hundred miles from Lagos her hair was matted and her eyebrows caked with dust. She knew that her home town lay some six miles inside this track and the thought of getting home brought her some comfort.

Though she was travelling ‘first class’ which meant sitting beside the driver, a muscular young Ibo from Onitsha, her bones were aching. On the door of the lorry, the licensing authorities had painted the words, DRIVER AND ONE PERSON ONLY. This ‘one person only’ was not meant to be a woman, least of all Jagua; but she had – with her own comfort in mind – argued her way to the front seat and was determined to keep it. Once on the road the driver did not mind for it was early dawn and he told Jagua that he wanted to take her home quickly and return to Onitsha in good time to catch the 8 o’clock ferry crossing back from Onitsha to Asaba and Lagos that morning.

The lorry turned a bend and travelled along a lane. She told the driver to slow down as she peered at the sign boards and tried to decipher the lettering. Much of the forest, she noticed, had been cleared of undergrowth and there was a new space of many acres where the builders were beginning to work. The palm trees still towered skywards. As they drove ahead the tree tops cut off the sun. Jagua was the first to see the tree trunk which bore the sign: DAVID OBI, Pastor.

‘We done reach!’ Her cry was jubilant. Before the lorry came to a stop she jumped down.

The smell of wet humus and damp undergrowth brought back memories of her girlhood days when she ran errands along this same lane for her mother. The hot tears filled her eyes and blurred the forest. She saw her father’s house, roofed with zinc, standing at the end of the courtyard. The waterhole in front was new to her, but not the carpenter’s bench standing under the iroko tree. Ten years! And this tree where she had played see-saw with the children was still standing there.

A woman came along the road and met Jagua as she was coming towards the house. She said, ‘Welcome, our daughter,’ and wiped her hands on a big cocoyam leaf. She stared at Jagua without recognizing her until she said, ‘I am the daughter of the Pastor,’ and then a loud jubilant cry went up. The cry was taken up and soon all over Ogabu it was known that the daughter of the Pastor had come from Lagos. Little boys, black and naked, wheeling their hoops and carrying their smaller brothers and sisters on their hips, ran away from Jagua because she looked strange in those down-to-earth surroundings.

In Ogabu the people tilled the soil and drank river water and ate yams and went to church but came home to worship their own family oracles. They believed that in a village where every man has his own yam plots, there is much happiness in the hearts of the men and the women and children; but where it is only one man who has the yam plots there is nothing but anger and envy; and strife breaks out with little provocation. Jagua knew that the men thought only about the land and its products and the women helped them make the land more fruitful. So that her city ways became immediately incongruous. The film of make-up on her skin acquired an ashen pallor. The women fixed their eyes on the painted eyebrows and one child called out in Ibo, ‘Mama! Her lips are running blood! …’ Jagua heard another woman say, ‘She walks as if her bottom will drop off. I cannot understand what the girl has become.’

They all followed her through a cluster of red mud houses. An old man sitting by the fire in one of the mud rooms looked up and called, ‘Bingo!’ to a skinny dog which immediately stopped whinnying at Jagua and came and lay at the old man’s feet. This old man was the watchman and he told Jagua that David Obi and his family had gone away, packed most of their things and gone visiting to the districts round Onitsha, some fifty miles away. He could not tell Jagua her father’s itinerary, but if Jagua went to Onitsha, to the mission, she might find out from the Bishop.

Jagua asked him about her father’s health. News had reached her in Lagos that he was ill, had he recovered? The old man told Jagua: ‘Your father is not a young man any more. If he can get someone to stay with him and look after him, he will feel better. Your mother is sickly too. Them both, them need young people about them.’

‘You hear anythin’ about my brother, Fonso?’

‘He’s trading in Onitsha. You fin’ him in de market, where dem sellin’ cycle parts; and his wife, too.’

So Fonso had settled down with that girl, after all the protest from their father. Jagua vowed that if she found the time she would visit Fonso in Onitsha. In the meantime she decided to spend the rest of that day in Ogabu. Tomorrow she would resume the journey, but instead of going back to Onitsha to ask after Brother Fonso and her parents, she would continue forward to Bagana, Freddie’s hometown.

The air in Ogabu delighted her and she took deep whiffs of it holding her hips and raising her nostrils to the palm trees. It had the mixed scent of palm fronds, wild flowers and humus. The old man showed her into his room. Here were no spring mattresses, terrazzo-tiled floors and decorated walls. Jagua had to stoop to enter because the roofing of the house swept down so low. Inside, a shaft of light illuminated a spot in the gloom.

The old man showed his gums. ‘Our daughter, if you wan’ sleep, put a mat dere. We soon fin’ you sometin’ to eat.’ Already the boys had arrived with fat bananas and a basket of oranges. One of them held out a small keg of wine which the old man took from him and tasted.

‘Good wine,’ he mumbled, and handed the keg to Jagua.

Jagua shook her head. Her bones were heavy within her, and her head soggy. She lay down on the mat. ‘I travel long way,’ she said. ‘Am tired. Perhaps I better sleep small.’

When she woke it was early afternoon with the sun throwing shadows on the banana leaves and the fowls no longer scratching the humus but lying in the shade. The boys lay, swollen-bellied in the shade, faces turned away from the glare, snoozing and snoring. They seemed content with the little that life offered them. They read their books to the rhythm of a swinging cane wielded by a school ‘Miss’ very much like the one who came home here to Ogabu to be with her widowed mother every Friday evening. Jagua did not want to think too hard now or to question things. Ogabu was restful enough for her.

She asked for a sponge and a calabash of soap and took out a towel from her portmanteau. On her bare feet she padded down to the stream. The sand was hot, but it should not be, if her skin had grown the protective cuticle so prevalent in these parts. How Ogabu had c

hanged. She now discovered that the wide area which had been cleared beyond the church was being planned for building a college. She learnt that Government had not yet approved the funds necessary for the project, but the people of Ogabu had started off, optimistically, on their own. When she got to the stream the women washing clothes looked at her with curious eyes. Some of them were washing cassava for foofoo, others had children on their backs and were beating the linen against stones.

She went up the stream where the water was limpid clean and waded in. It was ice-cold and her skin contracted in thousands of gooseflesh pimples. She knew well the art of bathing in the river in the public gaze. She began by sponging her face and neck, her breasts, belly and back. When she raised her arm, the men on the other side of the bridge looked at her armpits. She was glad she had shaved off the hair, though she knew the men here did not like bald armpits. Without removing the girdle from her waist she sponged her hips, down to her thighs and knees, looking round the stream with semi-aggressive eyes, quelling all seekers. But this was a part of the world where Nature prevailed and nudism was no stranger; human bodies were not concealed with the art of non-concealment.

When she felt clean she sat on the riverbed and ran her hands over her body massaging it well until it was no longer slippery. Then she walked to the bank where her clothes were and putting a cloth over her shoulders took off the girdle and went back to the stream to wash it. She was singing gently now and enjoying the very rare luxury of being free. This was what the city woman meant when she told her friends, ‘I am going home.’ No men ran after her in Ogabu, none of them imbued her with unnecessary importance. Here she was known, but known as someone who lived with them and grew up with them. She was not known as a glamourite, someone to be hungered after for sheer diversion.

Things were now in their right proportion. She was glad and she washed the cloth and sang and then she went to the bank and began combing her hair. In the evening the girls danced and sang in the clearing and told folk tales. The moon which she glimpsed between the trees, was big and lazy. How many years now, since she had had the time to look up at night and see the moon? In Lagos the street lights were so bright that no one ever really saw the moon. She surrendered herself to the idleness and voluptuous feeling of laze. The hard earth bruised her body with all the fervour of an ardent lover. She was too lazy to care and too deeply asleep to feel anything.

Next morning the bicycle-taxi came. While she ate boiled yam dipped in oil, her suitcase and other paraphernalia were tied on to one bicycle which departed for the main road. As soon as she had completed her breakfast and bade her host goodbye, she climbed into the seat at the back of the second bicycle and the rider set off, wheeling through the compound. The forest road was six miles long and as he pedalled forward they met and overtook other bicycle-taxis coming down the road. Little boys with shiny bellies ran after them for a while, raising dust. The road was populated all the way with pigs, fowls and sheep. This was indeed the land of the bicycle-taxi where the people did not in the least depend on four wheels for their transport.

On the main road, they did not have long to wait. It was market day and the market was situated at the junction where the forest road met the tarmac. The bicycle-taxi wheeled straight into the market and before Jagua had dismounted they were mobbed by lorry drivers and motor-park touts.