Voice of America (12 page)

I heard my parents talking about Uncle Siloko.

“And I thought he was a godly man. What about his wife and his daughter? He does not even talk about bringing them over anymore. Now he wants to bring a white woman to my house, Ava Wilson, or is it Abba Wilson he calls her?”

“America changes people. He is a grown man, and free to make his choices,” my father said.

“You are not even thinking about your daughter,” my mom said, gesturing toward my room, obviously unaware that I was listening to their conversation.

“What about my daughter? What has this got to do with her?” my dad asked.

“Oh, you mean you don’t know she’s almost a woman now, you want her to think it’s okay for married people to have affairs, eh? Does the Abba, or is it Ava, woman know that your friend is even married?” Mom asked.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she knows—some of them don’t care. After all, she is not Nigerian,” my dad said.

“In that case, I owe it to his wife to let her know,” Mom said. “Hmmm,” Dad responded, sighing.

“And all the money he’s been spending going to D.C. bars with her, can he not at least contribute something to this house?”

“I already told you, I do not want him to contribute anything,” Dad responded.

“A white woman in this house, oh, wonders shall never end,” Mom said.

“What is wrong is wrong, it does not matter if she’s black or white,” Dad said.

Mom had always vaguely discouraged me from making white friends. Even when I was much younger and my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Pomeroy, had made a telephone directory of all of us in her class and had encouraged us to call each other on weekends, Mom had objected. I recall her saying that it was not that white people were not good, it was just that we were not the same. When a classmate of mine, Mariah Schroder, had called the house, inviting me for a sleepover, Mom had lied to her that I was not home, that I had gone to spend the weekend at my uncle’s place in Largo. Later that week, Mariah had asked me if I had fun at Largo; for a moment I had forgotten my mother’s lie and hesitated, and then I had told her Largo was fun. Later Mom had tried to explain to me why my friends could not sleep over. Our Nigerian food would be too spicy for them; they would come back to school with tales of the things we ate and the way we lived. I believed her.

All through that week, Uncle Siloko came home very late. I heard him telling Dad that he was grading papers. He would come in and go straight to the bathroom. He would then head to
his room and would start snoring not long thereafter. Long gone were the days of talking with Dad past midnight.

Ava Wilson’s visit started off on a wrong note. When she pulled into our driveway with Uncle Siloko, we all looked out through the window blinds. She stepped out of the car, a smallish woman with dyed red hair. She shut the door of the car, and as Uncle Siloko stepped out, she whispered something to him. They both looked up, and then she put her hand in her bag and brought out a pack of cigarettes. She lit up and blew up the smoke furiously. It was a cold day, and she was wearing a big winter coat that looked like a man’s and almost swallowed her up.

“Oh, so she smokes?” my mom said, and hissed and walked to the kitchen.

When they both came inside, Dad welcomed her, smiling and fussing over her, but Mom greeted her with a tight smile and walked back to the kitchen. Ava asked for coffee, but coffee was hardly drunk in our house, though Mom managed to find a sachet of instant decaf somewhere in one of the kitchen cupboards.

Mom served the meal of rice and stew and vegetable salad that she had been busy preparing in the kitchen. Ava, who had earlier said she loved spicy food, tasted the rice and stew, and her face turned red; instantly she asked for water, and after taking a few sips sat staring at the food. She never went back to it, but finished her coffee.

“My friend, well, not my friend, my brother has told me how helpful you have been to him in the school, thank you so much,” my dad said.

“He exaggerates,” Ava said, smiling and looking at Uncle Siloko, who had been surprisingly quiet.

“When his wife and daughter join him here, we will all come and say thank you properly,” Mom chimed in.

“What’s that?” Ava asked. The way she said it made both words run together.

“My wife is saying that when my friend’s wife here joins him from Minnesota, we will all get together for dinner with you to show our appreciation,” my Dad said, smiling.

Uncle Siloko stood up, and Ava stood up too. She said she had to be going, since she did not like to drive at night. When they both left, Mom looked at Dad and Dad looked at her, and they both clasped each other’s right hand like wrestlers in a ring and began to laugh.

By the time Uncle Siloko came back that night, I was already in bed. A few days later he moved out. He told dad that he had found a place in College Park; it was close to campus, and he would be sharing the place with a Ugandan grad student.

We later heard that his contract was not renewed at the college, and he went back to Minnesota at the beginning of spring. The last time Dad heard about him, he had returned to Nigeria to run for the chairmanship position in his state’s local government elections.

N
duka sounded very excited on the phone when he called. She could hear him panting like a heavy smoker who had been forced to do a hundred-meter dash.

“I have paid someone to bring you in. He will invite you to America as his fiancée. He is African American. He will send you a letter that you’ll take to the embassy. They respect their own people. I am sure they will honor the letter. I paid him well; I paid him thirty-five hundred dollars.” The words rushed out of his mouth. He did not wait to hear her questions, but went right on tabulating his plans.

“Baby, you see I have not been sleeping, I have been working hard for you to join me over here. Greet Papa and Mama—I will speak with them when next I call, okay?”

Ijedi was happy; finally she was leaving for America to join her husband. There was hardly anything she had not tried to get a visa after Nduka left for the United States. On one occasion she had gone to a pastor to bless her international passport
before she went for her visa interview at the embassy. She remembered the pastor’s words.

“As soon as they open your passport, they will be blinded by the anointing.” He sprinkled olive oil on the pages of the passport; he turned to her and stared into her eyes.

“As soon as they are blinded by the anointing, they will have no choice but to honor your request; they will be so overwhelmed by the fire that they will do your bidding.” And the pastor laughed in a maniacal manner like a hyena, grabbed her head with his two hands, and began to spit out incantations in a strange language at her.

She had left with her heavily stained passport after leaving some money in a white envelope for the pastor. She recalled that the interview at the embassy had lasted only a few minutes. The consular officer, a sunburned American lady who looked like a retired school headmistress, turned to Ijedi as she flipped through the passport, taking in the olive-oil-stained pages.

“Why should I issue you a United States visa when I have no guarantees that you are going to return to your country after your visit, as you claim? I don’t see any ties binding you to your country.”

“I have a large shop where I sell provisions and clothes,” Ijedi said. She was scared; the woman’s eyes were green, the exact color of her grandmother’s cat that had returned to the wild after living with them for several years.

“I am not convinced there is enough incentive for you to return; how much do you make each year from your provisions store?” Cat Eyes asked.

“About two million naira,” Ijedi lied bravely, even as the lie
attempted to stick in her throat. She managed to scrape only a couple of thousands of naira as profit after all the taxes and levies she had to pay to the state and local government.

“Do you have any children?” the woman asked.

“No, none yet.”

“Any houses, landed property, things of value like stocks, bonds, shares, trust funds, and annuities?” she asked, again the words rolling off her tongue in mockery.

“No, I do not have any of the things you mentioned.”

The woman pulled out a heavy stamp and stamped furiously on Ijedi’s anointed passport, some of the ink splashing on the white sheets of paper on her table.

Ijedi walked out of the embassy like a rain-soaked vulture, her mind reeling, restraining herself from calling Nduka right away. He would just be waking up at that hour, since Nigerian time was six hours ahead. She hissed at nobody in particular and waved down a passing yellow cab.

A
YEAR AFTER
their wedding, Nduka had lost his job at the bank. It was a small but very well-managed bank that had been bought by a bigger bank in the restructuring of the banking sector. The bank had been kind enough to give him a generous severance package. When Nduka showed her the letter of retrenchment, she had broken down in tears.

“It is my fault, everyone is going to blame me for bringing bad luck into your life, people will say I’m a bad-luck woman, that you were doing well before you married me, and now you have lost your job.”

“Why are you so concerned about what people are going to say? I think you should be more worried about us, about our survival, about our future, about the children we are going to have …,” Nduka said, trailing off.

“But you know how it is. Your parents have been worried that I am not yet pregnant, and now to have this on top of that is just too much for me. What am I going to do?”

Nduka had stormed out at that point. She knew he was going to the drinking place down the road to meet with his friend Emeka, whom everyone referred to as his “second wife.” Emeka was his childhood friend and had been the best man at their wedding. He was still a bachelor, even though he was doing well and ran his own advertising agency. Every night, after taking his dinner, Nduka would join Emeka in the beer parlor down the road, and they would drink and smoke till after midnight. In the early days of their marriage, Ijedi had followed Nduka to the place and had sat down with them while sipping a malt drink. She had been disappointed by everything. They just sat there, occasionally exchanging some dry jokes in code and calling for more beer and cigarettes. Ijedi was surprised there were no girls in the place. Someone had told her that single girls went to some of the drinking places to hook up with men who were drunk and therefore generous.

Nduka came back from the bar in high spirits. He said Emeka had promised to help him get an American visa. He would give him a letter to the embassy, stating that Nduka was one of Emeka’s senior executives who was going for an advertising workshop in America. The ruse had worked, and Nduka had been issued a visa. Since he left, he had been sending money to Ijedi for her to join him, but she had found it impossible to get a visa.

People had told her she was lucky that Nduka had not
forgotten her. She had her in-laws to thank for that. They had been behind her, writing letters to their son and making expensive international telephone calls to America.

S
HE GOT A
fresh passport and went to the embassy with the documents and pictures that Nduka sent. She had a fairly easy time. She concluded that it must be because everyone loved a love story.

“How did you get to meet your fiancé?” the consular officer asked her.

“He saw my picture with my cousin who lives in the United States, he told him he liked me, he got my e-mail address and telephone number from my cousin, and we have been communicating ever since.”

“And you say you have never met; how can you marry a man you have never met? I mean, it is kind of strange.”

“My father married my mother through a photograph his family sent to him; they never met until their wedding day, and they are still happily married,” Ijedi responded.

This seemed to break the ice, and the consular officer listened to Ijedi’s narrative about how her father had been sent a photograph of her schoolteacher mother by his parents, and he had told them to go ahead and marry the bride for him. Ijedi was given the visa. It was called a K-1 visa and was for people who were joining their American fiancés. The visa rules stipulated that the couple must get married within ninety days. Nduka had told her that she would live with her “husband” for some time, for appearance’s sake. Besides, the immigration officers had been known to visit to confirm that husband and wife were actually living together.

N
DUKA CAME TO
meet her at the airport with her “husband.” His name was Jonathan Smokes; he was tall and gangly and reminded her vaguely of a character from the television comedy
Good Times.
He wore his hair in curls and spoke in a soft singsong voice that she would grow to love in the days to come.

Nduka gave her a big hug. He hadn’t changed much. He just looked a lot less relaxed than he used to be, and a bit impatient. She did not blame him. She had already noticed that the pace of life was faster here than what she was used to back in Nigeria. People spoke faster; she had to strain her ears to hear the questions the immigration officer asked her. The immigration officer had made a joke about mind over matter that she did not get but laughed about.

“We will sleep at Jonathan’s place,” Nduka told her. When she asked him why he had told her to be patient, he responded, “This is America.”

Jonathan’s apartment was tiny but very clean and beautiful. The walls were painted white, which added a touch of cleanliness to the place. Pictures of chubby-cheeked children—he said they were his nieces and nephews—adorned the walls. It also began to dawn on her that it was no coincidence that the guy’s last name was Smokes. He smoked a lot of cigarettes; otherwise he was very nice, called her I-Jay, and smiled a lot.

Ijedi was surprised that he had put on an apron and gone to the kitchen to cook for them. After having a bath they had joined him in the kitchen. Nduka had whispered to her that Jonathan was a marvelous cook. She asked to help him out, but he only smiled and told her he was fine. In a corner of the kitchen was
a hair dryer and piles of
Ebony
and
Essence
magazines. Nduka said Jonathan was a hairdresser, and Jonathan smiled at her, touching her hair and commenting on its fine texture. Ijedi was surprised that Nduka only smiled when Jonathan touched her hair. The old Nduka would not have let anyone touch his woman.