LEGACIES

"Does it have to be on a table?". Manic laughter. "Be.. because we do not dine on a table in my home". More hysteric laughter. I don't quite understand what might sound funny to them but I do love the laughter. It is better than the silence and the staring as if I just fell from the skies. Everyday I come into the class, right from the hallway, I can feel their silent stares burning through my skin, the strange inquisitive look they give me every morning till my skin melts and stick s to my chair so I can't get up,not when they are around. It's called Silent bullying. I'd rather they leave marks on my skin and auction my menstrual pad on a website than the pain I feel but can't quite heal, the blindfold, and my shut eyes under the blindfold, they help, so I don't know if they are laughing at me or something else and even if they were, I still love the laughter, at least they are listening to me and I'll be sure, with a lot more crazy unnecessary laughter, that people actually hear me and not just Mama. Sometimes my voice just thins out, very gradual, till nobody hears anymore so I just keep quiet, most of the time, I'm the type that makes noise on paper, until today, Miss Marbella asked me to give my presentation but I couldn't, she noticed I suppose, she called it anxiety, and I just wanted to laugh, like them.Nigerians do not have anxiety, there is no in between in mental health, it's either you are visibly stable or not. She made a deal with me, that I'd present my write-up while she doesn't tell Mama I had a C. Mama doesn't like grades lower than a B but she wouldn't scold me seriously if I had one, I wasn't bothered about that, I was bothered about her asking me why I had a C and me telling her I was staring at a boy in class, you would expect that I could lie but I promised Mama I would never lie to her and she promised me that she wouldn't die, so if I told her the reason,she would flip, she always warns me against boys, I can be friends with them but I should never get too familiar. I have many books on self defence against predators so I can handle myself but that doesn't mean I have to fall for the enemy. He came late that day and it just intrigued me, how he was frantically trying to settle in, so I stared and only did half my test. Now I have to present and then I get a makeover, hence the blindfold, "anxiety",but it does feel good, to only ever just have people watch my lips move and listen to what I have to say. "But we have tables, we have a center table where Papa keeps his feet on, crossed, when he watches football, we have errr a really big table, that's what we call it "big table", it is where we put stuff we don't need immediately but use regularly, like the novels I read, we have tiny side tables with beautiful glasses with designs, we have a wide reading table in the study and I have a personal one in my room, so we have tables". Suppressed chuckling. "We don't eat on a dining table but we do have one,we eat on nicely woven traditional mats, Papa likes it,so we do it, sit in a circle and eat. Like I said, we have a dining table but it's not here, it's back home, in Nigeria, Papa and Mama too. We only ever use the dining table on special family, extended family occasions. No child is allowed on it, just adults, and you can't ever sit at the table until you are thought to be old enough". I remember the first time I was allowed on the table, I did not like it very much, I look very young for my age so it didn't feel like I fit in but I sat there anyways. I didn't very much like the first day, I had witnessed something very horrific earlier that I couldn't speak of. I was sitting at the window when I notice that my father's beloved parrot was missing, so I went to look for it, I checked everywhere and after hours of searching, I finally saw it, it hid itself under a black bucket, it was visibly shaken when I saw it so I brought it out from underneath the bucket and placed it on the balcony bars carefully so it could climb its way back to his cage but it didn't. It stayed on the balcony bars, shaking and just watching and all of a sudden, it started flapping his wings, it couldn't fly so I wanted to see what it was trying to do, then it jumped,from the balcony to the ground and it went up again and did the same thing, till it died and I just watched, I understood, maybe, Papa's bird commited suicide, but you don't interfere with someone else's prophecy, Mama used to tell me and that was its prophecy. So you should understand when I say it was a bad "first day" experience for me, my father cherished it, it was the only thing my father still had from his past, happy life,so it meant a lot to him. Everyday when he came back from work, he'd speak to it and he'd stare at it,as if he could see the past in its eyes. I didn't know how to tell him so I just hoped he'd never ask. He didn't. He knew. I would later find out.

           I do not know what else to say. I do know, I know what I had written in the paper I submitted to Miss Marbella but I do not know how to tell it. Family Legacy, that's what we were asked to write about, and I did but it had very much interested the Miss, that she requested that I presented and explained what I had written before the whole class. I do not still understand what might have interested her, I don't have a family whose predecessors fought at wars or made music or was part of a revolution like the predecessors of the white-black, African- Americans who have somehow mastered the art of taming their afro hair, they wear it with so much pride,woven,full or plaited,the most I could do for mine is to put an elastic band around it and even at that,it still shrinks and rises as it wishes. Yes, I am still frozen before the whole class, I have given a perfect analysis of all the tables we own back home but I do not know how to explain why a dining table is my family legacy. I don't understand why they are so silent, I'm I talking? I don't know but anyways, the only legacy my family owns, that I know of and that I think is worthy enough, is a dining table. It is like a mirror to me, on it, in it, I can see parts of myself I never knew of and would still know. Prophecies, I saw the prophecies hanging to the roots of my thick, black hair. A part of everyone's misery dropped in the blood that runs in my veins so I grew to study everyone as they came in, to know who I am, was and will be.

    Mama loved writing and I had stumbled upon a note where she had written that she was scared that I'd be like her mother's sister, my grand aunt because I came to the world with no hair. The same way Old Nino had left the world. She had cancer and she had grown frail and sick over the time. Mama wrote that she wasn't the most pleasant at all, that fate hadn't been kind to her either. She had lost her children, all of them,in a fire. I had seen her once, at the dining table, she had no hair, I was little and I had none either at the time. She stared at me and I did too. However way the prophecy of me growing old with no hair or children left me, I would never know but I soon got my long, black, thick hair.

      Since the note, I have observed too, every morning when I look in the mirror, something changes, I do not see myself, I only ever see a perfect puzzle of everyone else staring back at me.

  In my eyes, I can see the misery staring back at me, I would maybe grow to amass so much wealth and lose it, like my father, he's there, I will have a parrot and teach it how to commit suicide.

   My mother's in my hair, I do not have much to say about her. She is also a puzzle, believe me, I have seen her colour change a lot so I understand.

  So I watch, like Aunt Lina, I will die alone cause every man I marry will die too.

I hated that I'd have to carry other people's fates about so the night after the dinner, I prayed, I haven't done it in a long time, but I prayed, to find myself and I cut my hair and shaved my brows and I left home, I left the prophecies.

 You could run as far as you want from them, but you can't hide them, Mother had also written.