Tears of a basket

When I was a small boy, I used to control my parents as if they were robots. It had been an easy feat at the time, owing to my condition.

They would come running whenever I orchestrated my signature dogged wail, and mother would pack me up in her arms and sing to me, promising me snacks and goodies. 

My cry would become inexorable until they had fulfilled these agreements, and as I gobbled my loot, they would eyeball me with mistrust from the gloomy corners, wondering if in truth I had been in need.

Hence, I would throw in a few phlegmatic sniffles between swallows of my foo-foo, and this would assuage their imaginations for a short while.

Any time my father–a prodigious drinker–stumbled out to his obi to drink palm wine with his associates, the other men, before drinking, would spill a fair amount of wine onto the sandy floor, invoking their gods to come and drink that they may be blessed. But father would lean over his bamboo chair and tilt his portion into my little cup as a libation because I was his god. He dared not take a sip before this ritual offering, or the ears of our neighbors would have no rest until he had atoned for his negligence. 

After that fiasco, he bought me three jerry cans of fresh tapped wine as a sacrifice to buy my clemency. I was barely three and a half years old. The palm wine had been so pleasant that it made me fall asleep for six hours straight.

The very first image I had of my infancy was a basket. This basket remains to this day in my village house, and according to mother, it was the threshold of my salvation; the symbol of my transition from an accursed to a relatively normal child. I was about a year old when my condition made me so sick that my family feared I would die. They summoned the chief priest, and he consulted the gods of our land on my behalf. 

The gods found no fault in my father for depriving them of their drinking offerings. After slaughtering seven pregnant goats, they told the chief priest the sacrifice to do that would save me. It was a simple, age-old tradition, and father regretted wasting all those goats.

On the next market day, my parents settled me in the holy basket, purchased that day from the selfsame marketplace. In it, the priest carried me to the square. Men tied my mother to a nearby tree so she could watch me, and they instructed her to weep loudly once it all began. My father did not come. He had been advised not to attend; or else he misconstrues the actions of some innocent well-wisher and kills them.

Someone removed me from my swaddling clothes and placed me in the basket. The barbs of the woven basket pricked me and I fell to crying. People gathered around me, chattering loudly with excitement. Little children studied my accursed face as I wriggled in the basket. They stared at the black dot on my forehead, knowing its connotation, and they forced themselves to hate me, as tradition demanded.

Mother could only see a weeping basket from her trussed-up position. It was a market day, and the spirits came to buy and sell. The humans roofed their eyes as the priest ululated and insulted the spirits, and before long, an angry wind assaulted the square, threatening to tip my basket from its perch. It was time. The spirits noted us. There were angry and angry spirits seldom think. 

“Gather round this child,” the priest said, concealing the mark on my forehead with white chalk, to bamboozle the spirits. “Show him the love of Ozoro, and it will save him.”

At that moment, my mother wept, and I joined her. The villagers encompassed my basket, and the priest pushed them back with his staff. He told them to line up. People ran around, tongues wagging, looking for objects they could use in saving me. Children laughed, waiting for the game to begin. 

A shaggy old man furnished my soft face with a heavy slap, and my mother thrashed against the tree, its rough bark digging into her flesh. She knew I could die before the ceremony ended, and then she would no longer be a mother. The men held her back. They tightened her fetters. 

My left cheek grew red, and I bawled even harder, my wails escaping in paroxysmal fits. Some other villager upended a bowl of charcoal mixed water over me and it clogged up my nostrils. I coughed black water. Another tipped rotten banana skin over my innocent face, calling me appalling names.

This went on for some time until my uncle came with his own gift. It was a nylon bag overflowing with excreta. The enthused crowd moved back at the nasty smell and he marched with fly escorts to my basket, his love hidden. The spirits came at him, trying to sniff out the love he had for me. They wanted to see if my own family hated me like the other villagers. Put more succinctly, the plan was working.

“I have no ogbanje nephew,” said my uncle, dipping his right palm into the bag. “Let the gods beware.”

Then, my mother’s only brother scooped a large helping of excreta from his bag and smeared it all over my face to the delight of the children. They pinched their nostrils and exclaimed, and flies came buzzing over my basket. As this went on, a flash zipped across the sky, forcing the priest back into the square. 

“Everyone, get away from the child,” he cried, his staff waving. “The spirits have witnessed our hatred and they are coming.”

Lightning flashed, and yet there was no thunder. The sky grew dark. The throng of well-wishers dispersed. As they ran under the shades and kiosks, they called me a bastard and accursed ogbanje. A wizened hag, who would later confess to being a witch, ran against the fleeing horde. She hawked and onto my ravaged face, donated chunky saliva from her unwashed maw. Those in the shades egged her on, but the priest soon cudgeled her away.

“Loosen the child’s mother,” the priest said. It was still afternoon, but the market day had become night.

The men set my mother free, and she wrenched me from the basket, checking my heartbeat and blowing at the sand in my eyes and nose.

“Take him to the house,” the priest commanded. “And boil water with which you shall use in bathing him. Go!” 

There was no time to clean the urine and aged palm-wine and only god-knew-what else had been on my body. Mother clutched me to her bosom and like Ovie, the town crier turned thief, she ran from the marketplace. 

The villagers all remember that day. They said they saw the darkness in the sky follow my mother’s fleeing figure. The spirits purportedly chased after me, hating me as the people had conditioned them into doing. And the sky reset. 

The trees in the bush raged, but no wild animal got my mother. As we arrived at our hut, father and one of his hunter friends came to welcome us. This friend was a clairvoyant, the third son of our priest, and when he saw me, he shuddered. 

“That boy is tainted,” he screamed. “His curse is now on the surface of his body, and we must quickly wash it off.”

Father ran to boil the water, and mother positioned me on a straw mat, fanning me as we waited for it to boil. The hunter told my mother that she was lucky for the spirits to have hated me so and that many children die during their own ceremony. 

He said I had become useless to my phantasmagoric parents, who wanted my life dearly and were the causes of my condition. He told her he could see them standing over me, seething. 

“Let them squeeze their faces like one who has eaten rotten lime and vex forever,” my mother screamed at the air. “My child cannot die while I am still breathing. He will not!”

“The water is boiling, Ayaya,” Father ran into the room. “Bring him.”

Mother carried me into the kitchen, where a blackened pot sat on red-hot pieces of firewood. We had no basin large enough, so father simply dropped me in the pot after diluting the water. They washed me with their feet, and when I was clean, the hunter plucked me from my affliction. 

“Oghene mi-o!” Father cried, glancing into the pot and gripping his hair. “Look at this, look at the water.”

Mother looked and saw the neatest body of water she had ever seen. There was not a single banana peel in the pot.

The priest came to our house at nightfall, and he played with me. He told my mother not to celebrate anything on my head until seven days had passed and the evil had gone forever. Seven days went swiftly by and my enjoyment began. My parents showered me with more affection than a bee had for flowers or the flowers had for the sun. They sold their lives to me.

I grew up pampered, and when I was five; the priest came to our house again. This time he brought with him a whip. 

“Where is he?” the priest shouted at the door. “Where is the ogbanje boy who has grown?”

Father and mother produced me, and as they dragged me to the old man, juvenile stubbornness pulled me back.

“That is a symptom of his evil spirit,” the priest said to my parents. “Do not be alarmed.” 

He told them he needed to consummate his ritual, or I would die before I was twenty-one. He lashed away at me with his whip and the marks are still on my back at present. 

“Where did you bury you life?” The priest asked between strokes. “Show us!”

My stubbornness leaped and pulled me away from the house and I ran into the bush, screaming and bleating like a wounded goat. They ran after me and when I bent to nibble at the root of a mango tree; the priest frowned. Men were called from the village youth, and together they hewed down the suspicious mango tree. Another crowd formed around the spot, as I had become a village celebrity. Everyone knew who the ogbanje boy was, even the smallest of children.

“Dig it up by yourself!” The priest commanded me, and I jumped into the hole, weeping. My mother stared blankly as I rummaged in the sand. As I dug, my fingers felt nothing, and I quickly diverted them to another site. 

“He has found it.” The priest leaped into the pit, whipping me upside the head. “He found it and wants to fool us.”

The people laughed as the priest hunkered down and from the spot I had been digging; he dragged a crude sack out from the floor. His hand went into the sack and he brought out a small, ugly doll and a smooth pebble. A painted face was on this pebble, and the priest said I was the one who did the painting. He jutted it in my face.

“Look at it, boy. Look at your life.”

I tried to shield my eyes, but the stone smiled at me, and I fainted. After that fateful incident, my health improved and my epileptic fits stopped altogether, but I did not let my parents know that. As I grew, my mother told me stories of my accursed past. She told me how the priest burnt my recovered sack in the village river and how I once stopped breathing seventy-eight times in one month.

My parents bought me a golden ring and because the priest allowed it, they gave me anything I asked. The village children played carefully if I was around, as none of them wanted to push the ogbanje boy too hard. I stuck captured cockchafers in their ears, and they would only report to my parents, who dared not raise a finger at me.

After two years of my enjoyment, the financial situation of my parents went downhill. Father broke his leg and could no longer hunt, and mother borrowed money from her brother to feed us. When she asked him for some of their father’s inheritance, he said it belonged to men only. Still, my uncle was a fine man, and he gave us big yams whenever his harvest was bountiful.

I hated the smell of poverty wafting from my house, and as my unmet requests increased, I became a little monster, the very god I spoke of earlier. I would grip my chest and pretend to be dying, all the while yelling the name of the thing I wanted.

“Roasted plantain and egg,” I would screech until my lungs clenched, holding my breath just enough to remain alive. During these tantrums, mother would run out to beg for food. Father would borrow money from his friends to buy the goat meat I desperately wanted, and his creditors would become family foes. If they refused to get me those things, I would threaten to slit my throat with our sharp knife. 

That was my childhood, and it is long gone. I am now thirty and I have three children. None of them is an ogbanje. I can never forget the reason I left that place. 

I was asking mother to let me stick my hand in the yam she was pounding, and she told me it was too hot. I fell at once and acted on my seizures, but as I dashed my head against the kitchen floor, my entire body convulsed and the faux seizure became real. My eyes bulged, and I stuck out my tongue, trying to taste the atmosphere.

“No!” Mother said, flinging her pestle away. She witnessed life leaving my eyes and threw herself over my spasmodic frame, praying.

I saw death hovering over us. He was not smiling. Accursed or not, a child who deliberately hits his head on the floor will beyond doubt attract sorrow and pain into his household. Mother sensed the futility of her prayers in reviving me. She was getting up to call her husband when the spook hit her.

Gripping at her left breast, she fell over and hit her head on the mortar. It toppled and where I lay; I saw something red mixing with the white foo-foo she had been pounding. 

“Argh!” I screamed, telling the spirit of death he could not take me. I still could not breathe. Father heard my voice, and he came.

“What is taking you so long, woman?” he berated. “Must we wait until midnight before eating your tasteless dinner?” 

His eyes found the deposed mortar, and mother’s unmoving frame. He also saw me, the almighty deity, squirming on the floor. A man will do foolish things for his god. Father chose wisely.

The sole job of an ogbanje child is to bring suffering into the life of its mother, and although I survived, I did my job perfectly. Father grabbed her shoulders and shook. But there was no life. I gasped as he wailed, and the look he gave me made me cringe. He wanted nothing to do with me anymore. His hatred had become genuine.

The priest later said Mother’s last wish was for her son to live, and it was nobody’s fault. Death came for me, and she gave me life for the second time. 

After mother’s burial, the family packed me and sent me to Lagos to live with a relative who was an outcast. The only thing good about this arrangement was that the man was a filthy rich, self-made millionaire at thirty-five. His way of life in the city surprised me and I wondered how people could refuse to enjoy the wealth of a relative just because he was an untouchable.

Sergeant Justus was his name, and he was a Christian. He taught me many things and told me not to serve man-made gods. Justus was so holy he refused to marry a wife, and when he died, he willed his entire estate to me. An outcast like himself.

A year after Justus’ burial, father sent me a message that he would be coming to visit my family in the city. I told him I would pay for his flight ticket. Then he added he would be coming with the priest, who would pray for my children and me. I knew the reason for their visit was so he could reclaim me as his son, and thus have access to my wealth, so I gave some money to my gate-man, Santos.

“This money is for my father and his people, when they come give it to them.”

I also gave the spirited gate-man a piece of land and two hundred thousand naira so he would not run away with my father’s parcel. Then my family and I boarded the next flight to the United States, where no African witches or charmers can fly. There, I went for a medical test. Turns out, I had not been an ogbanje after all, and that priest must have been controlling my family with his illusions, feeding off their zealotry like a leech. Asthma is what I have, fucking asthma! 

The basket incident was inevitable, and it is quite unfortunate that even in this new world people could be so ignorant. When my children ask how I got the marks on my back and neck, I tell them they are scars from an accident I had in Nigeria. But in the shower, when my hands run over them, and I close my eyes, I see my mother’s face, smiling.