When the canoe turned the creeks she stood up, nearly upsetting it. The other passengers protested, but Jagua was waving at a Bagana vanishing in the rising heat. ‘Goodbye, Chief! … Expect me! … I mus’ surely come an’ see you again!’
In Ogabu she kept the mammy wagon waiting in the forest lane and ran to her father’s house. The barking of the old watchman’s dog welcomed her. He came out of the hut and brought the dog to heel.
‘Daughter. You back? You stop there long time.’ The sun caught the angles of his shoulders and elbows, the criss-cross wrinkles on his bare skin. His eyes were dancing with delight.
‘Only three week I stay. Where’s Papa an’ Mama?’
‘You’re to be feared!’ He clicked his hands at her, in a gesture of reproach. ‘You won’t even bring down your load, you begin’ ask about Papa an’ Mama! Your Papa still on tour.’
‘I go an’ see dem for Onitsha!’
She ran quickly back to the lorry and jumped in beside the driver. The old man called after her. ‘If you don’t see them, you find Brother Fonso in the market.’ He waved at her. ‘Go well!’ By this time, his children had appeared and were waving and yelling. Before the people of Ogabu gathered to make a fuss, Jagua’s lorry was well on the way to Onitsha.
She found Fonso in Onitsha Marke
t sitting among bicycle parts, poring over an account book. It was just as the old man had said. He did not appear to her different in the least. If anything he appeared a little paler, like one whom the world has treated none too gently.
‘Ai, Sister!’ He looked up and shut the book. ‘You come to our Onitsha? Is it in a good way?’
‘I jus’ from home; I returnin’ to Lagos by de ferry, so I say let me come an’ see how you gettin’ on.’
Fonso folded his book and talked to his helper, a young man in khaki. He talked earnestly while Jagua waited.
‘Le’s go,’ he said. ‘De ferry can cross you today, but you mus’ stop and eat pepper with me. Is a long time I seen you.’
Jagua followed him into his little house by the waterside. Onitsha, the market town, she thought as they passed along the streets with the noise of bicycles, the blaring of gramophone records, the tooting of horns, all slamming at her eardrums. Onitsha was busy in a fiendish way, minting the money. By the riverside she saw the yams and the cassava, the newly-killed fish and the long canoes, vying for the merest space in which to squeeze and make a stand against the customers. The riverboats and launches were drenching the market with soot. Jagua felt caught up in the unbelievable atmosphere of trickery, opportunism, intuition, daring and amazing decisions. People who lived here, she was sure, did not care what happened elsewhere; they were hard-headed and complete strangers to laziness.
Brother Fonso pointed them out to her triumphantly. She sensed a sharp reproach in his manner, though as yet he had said nothing direct. He talked about their father, how ill he was and how neglected. ‘One day, you’ll just hear he’s dead.’ Was Jagua doing anything in Lagos, and when Jagua said she was trading in cloth, Fonso laughed. ‘Let us hear somethin’ else, Jagua. You deceivin’ no one. My dear sister, is time you stop your loose life. Is a shameful thin’ to me, your brother. I got a beautiful sister like you. God made you with dignity; an’ when I think of your kind of life …’ He was not looking at her face, and he walked so quickly that she found difficulty in keeping up with him. ‘So what I say to you is this. My sister, come home and stay in the family. You don’ wan’ to marry. Awright. Nobody forcin’ you. Den keep yourself with respect.’
‘You won’ let me reach house, before you start, Brother Fonso.’ This was one reason why she dreaded meeting him. He was always trying to lead her to a righteous life. ‘But I tell you, brodder. One chief in Krinameh wan’ to marry me. An’ he already pay my bride price.’
‘So they always do; and when them sleep with you finish, no more talk about marriage.’ He walked faster. ‘Jagua, come out from deceivin’ yousself.’
If it was money she wanted, the money was there in Onitsha, Brother Fonso told her. For instance, she could remain with him now and try to become one of the Merchant Princesses in the town. Fonso talked about one woman who made a monthly turnover of £10,000. The Merchant Princesses, he boasted, were independent women; and he knew that his sister loved independence. And they were free. They turned their minds to business, not frivolities. They were grown-up women.
Brother Fonso’s house by the ferry waterside was ill-lighted and musty. Jagua knew that her brother was worth a good deal of money, and in her turn she upbraided him for living so drably. What was the use of making money and not finding time to enjoy it, Jagua asked him. But he was more interested in making the money – first. He was living alone now, he said, because his wife had gone home to her own people to have a baby. He scrambled her a meal, but kept pressing her to stop in Onitsha, not to cross any more with the ferry. She must stop with him and try her hand at trading – in the Onitsha manner. He was sure she would soon pick it up. Jagua suspected Brother Fonso of unhappiness and loneliness, of wanting to detain her for company. Certainly she felt he made the whole thing sound easy. He made no reference to his loneliness but she saw it in his wild-eyed look and in the breath of wind his cry brought.
She listened to him because he was her brother and she wanted to show him that she was not a ‘useless’ woman. In the morning they went together in search of the Merchant Princesses. Brother Fonso took her to one of them who said she sold £2,000 worth of exercise books a week during the boom period. It was she alone who distributed exercise books to three million schoolchildren. She owned a fleet of lorries which travelled north and east, distributing bicycles, soap and cement. Jagua sat in her shed and listened almost mesmerized. She could find nothing at all unusual in this money-spinning woman who did not know how to write in English. She came away feeling like one who has been offered a new path to salvation.
When she had seen all that Brother Fonso would show her, she wanted to be one of them. Fonso took her to the secretary of the woman traders who had an office at the market entrance. He looked at Jagua through his heavy-rimmed glasses and told Jagua that she was new and must ‘prove herself’. He could not take her before the white agent who supplied the women with goods, until she had proved herself. To prove herself she must take out goods and pay cash first. Then – if she did well – she would be trusted with credit facilities, and the amount would gradually be increased to a worthwhile sum.
Jagua consulted with Fonso. With his permission she decided to use the £150 she had and Fonso added another £50 to make it a round £200. The Union Secretary told Jagua that £200 worth of goods would only bring her a profit of £2. There were women taking £10,000 worth of goods, and getting £100 commission. ‘You need not really sell. All you must do is move the goods. Get people to come from the jungles and buy them. It doesn’t matter where they come from. Push the goods to your sub-customers who will then take them deeper inside. Nigeria is a big country, there’s plenty of space. Then, you bring back the cash to us: and take out goods worth more money. And so on. But mark you, you must study the market and know what you can push. You must always buy goods that move. D’you know something?’ He stirred the snuff in his palm with a stick. ‘You don’t even need a shop or a stall to succeed.’ With the stick he scooped the tobacco into a left nostril and inhaled.
Sitting in her own stall, Jagua was miserable. It rained, and when it was not raining, the customers came, but not to her stall. She saw them in the stalls of the other women traders. Once she saw a dark man holding a canvas bag. She watched him: he walked past her stall to the nearest stall and began counting out money from the canvas bag, waiting while the woman trader in the stall checked it. ‘God, if I kin get lucky like dat woman,’ Jagua thought.
But it was not to be. Her stall seemed to repel the buyers. She was new, she had to ‘exercise patience’. Fonso told her that a trader must be a patient animal. Jagua found herself quite unable to learn this new quality of patience without glamour. She loved showing herself off, but sitting in the stall gave her no time to preen herself, to strut about the alleyways of Onitsha. She spent her time in the bleaching sun, from morning till six at night, with a meal snatched behind the goods she was selling. It was not her idea of living her life. At night she moaned. Yet when she saw the merchant princesses in the evenings, sitting in the owner’s corner of their limousines, she envied them, and longed to own hers. She told Fonso and he reminded her of the one hundred rungs of the ladder. According to him her foot was scarcely planted on the first rung. He told her to ‘have patience’ but already her stock was exhausted. She was glad Onitsha had given her an insight into the big money business. But she was realistic enough to know that she was not yet equipped to partake of the loot. Though she had lost her money in the first venture she could still go, Jaguaful, down to the riverside in the evenings to watch the canoemen bringing in the day’s catch of the best-tasting fish in Nigeria.
It was from the beach-side that she caught a glimpse of the ferry launch packed full with Lagos-licensed cars. The wind blew across to where she stood, snatches of a familiar jazz tune from the Tropicana. It must have come from one of the car radios. She saw a young man, Lagos-tailored, talking to a dashingly dressed girl with a heavily made-up face. The two of them must be coming from Lagos, going eastwards. Those two young people seemed to tell her she was in some danger of losing her chic, of becoming more provincial and less Jaguaful. This was the last thing she ever wanted to happen to her. The suppressed desires came rushing to her stimulated imagination.
She gave the fish-seller a pound note, but it was when she got home she realized she ought to have waited for her change.
16
Someone told her once that if she ever left Lagos for one week, no one would remember her. But Jagua soon discovered that leaving Lagos as she had done for more than three months meant – in addition – not recognizing the city on her return, it was changing so fast. The lorry park had been cemented and paved and they had now built a proper entrance and exit but the lorries and the touts and small quick-quick buses were still there. If anything they were flourishing more vigorously.
A taxi took her back to her lodgings. She was glad she still retained her rooms. Try as she would Lagos still remained her natural habitat. The memory of Chief Ofubara and Krinameh still lingered, but the pressure to go back was already becoming less urgent. This time was perhaps the best hour to come back unnoticed: sunset fading into a short twilight that dazzled the eyes and confused the senses. People were mere forms, hazy and ghostly but identifiable. No one knew just when Jagua got back to her room. She remained for a moment in the room, smelling its mustiness. At last she had reached home. Ogabu was the home of her father and mother; Bagana was Freddie Namme’s home where Uncle Namme lived as Regent; Krinameh was the home of Chief Ofubara who was infatuated with her. Jagua thought of all these places and tried to fit herself into one of them. There was none quite like Lagos and the Tropicana. She opened the windows and without putting on the light, she began to unpack, mainly foodstuffs, yams, oranges, plantains. She would not need to spend her money on expensive Lagos food for some time at least. Back home. She breathed in the air of freedom.
While she took off her clothes, Michael came in and beamed over her, telling her how well she was looking. He had kept the place remarkably clean in her absence. She examined her body in the mirror as she talked to him. Going east had made her fairer of skin, more rounded on her face, younger looking, more desirable to men,