Changer's Daughter (9 page)

“I was drunk,” he repeats.

“It happens,” the stocky man says in a tone of voice that adds wordlessly,
“Far too frequently where you are concerned, don’t you agree?”

Dakar props his head on his hand. “Who th’ hell are you?”

Anson A. Kridd chuckles. “Don’t you recognize our kinsman? You stayed at his house until just a few weeks ago.”

Dakar recognizes that he is being baited and simply glowers. It is the same glower that stares out of the faces of all those wood or iron or plastic figures glued onto the dashboards of automobiles and lorries racing along the streets outside. It is the glower of a god who does not like being made angry. Anson relents and lowers his voice, although this is hardly necessary since they are alone.

“It is my good friend, Eddie Zagano. He has come here to see Nigeria and to get away from his too-demanding overlord.”

“He’s black!” Dakar says, stating the obvious.

“Lovern’s work. It is still Eddie.”

Eddie’s new face shows white teeth in a weirdly familiar grin. “Shall I whisper secrets from your file? Tell you what you asked for the last time you called Pendragon Productions? I can prove I am who I say...”

Dakar stops him with an abrupt gesture, reflecting that several days in the company of that obnoxious trickster has done nothing good for Eddie’s manners.

“I believe you.” He is about to offer them some of the palm wine, notices that the bottle is nearly empty, and frowns. He draws breath to shout for the bartender when Anson places a hand on his arm.

“I have an idea. Let’s go and find something to eat. We need to lay the groundwork for our business and...” It is his turn to frown. “Some new troubles have developed that I must tell you about. Can you walk?”

“Of course”—Dakar surges to his feet—“I can.”

He staggers a few steps, then pitches forward. There is a dull thud as he hits the packed-earth floor.

Eddie kneels and rolls Dakar over, finding him completely passed out. He shakes his head as he looks up at Anson.

“He can walk all right, just not very well.”

“
It’s like binary,”
Aduke thinks as she watches the
babalawo
casting palm nuts for his client.

She and Oya have come to the Grove of the Gods, seeking answers to her many questions. Now they stand in the doorway to one of the diviner’s shelters, watching the
babalawo
cast the palm nuts for another client.

The casting falls into a rhythm like a dance, though the Ifa diviner remains seated. First, he tosses the sixteen nuts between his hands. The rhythm is rapid, rather like ceremonial drumbeats. Thus, this stage is often called “beating” the nuts.

When the nuts have been beaten sufficiently, the
babalawo
attempts to pick from his left hand as many nuts as he can with his right hand. If one nut remains, he makes two marks in the smoothed wood dust held in the divining tray set on the mat before him. If two remain, he makes one mark. Any other end result—three nuts or no nuts, for example—calls for a repeat.

Then the
babalawo
gathers up the nuts and begins again until sixteen sets of marks have been drawn in the dust. It is a long process, sometimes made shorter by use of an
opele
, or divining chain. Oya, however, had insisted that they go to this diviner.

“The
orisha
,” she had said seriously, “are said to listen more carefully to the fall of the palm nuts, than to that of the chain.”

Aduke, who was beginning to hear her college-educated self arguing with her traditional self, had not resisted.

There are 256 possible figures that can be arrived at in either form of Ifa divination. Each is tied to a series of stories; the wiser the diviner, the more stories he knows. All the stories are held within the diviner’s memory—though some scholars like her brother-in-law Kehinde have tried to record them. In the stories are the answers to any problem a client may bring.

So the elders say.

Yes, it’s rather like binary,
Aduke thinks, remembering that lecture on computer languages.
Binary is 1 0 1 0, open shut open shut. So much has been said about the abacus as an ancestor of the adding machine. Has anyone ever noticed that the Yoruba invented the computer?

She sighs. So often she is like this, a woman of two worlds. In one world she is what the Yoruba sometimes call
onikaba
, a gown wearer, a westernized woman. This is the Aduke who has been to the university, speaks and reads not only English but French and some German, knows history and dates, theories and theorems.

In the other world she is little better than an
aróso
, a wrapper wearer, like the women in the market when she was a child. This Aduke trembles at the stories of
àbikú
and dreads that her baby might have been one, that she is doomed to bear the same frivolous ancestor spirit back to earth again and again, suffering each time it dies. The
aróso
here looks upon the
babalawo
and his palm nuts with respect and awe, hoping he can show her the path her personal ancestor spirit chose for her before her birth, hoping that he can guide her to discover which god demands a sacrifice or what actions she must take to ensure that her next baby is born willing to dwell on the earth with her.

When her mind is torn like this, Aduke feels more like a twin than a single person. Certainly Taiwo, her husband, the firstborn of twins, does not seem to feel any such confusion. His university education sits easily on him; his only mention of the traditional ways is to make jokes about the old customs. Kehinde, his identical twin, is interested in the things Taiwo is not. He is forever listening to the old people’s stories. At first he wrote them down, now he tapes them. Perhaps that is one of the powers of twins—to split a single destiny between two people and so move into life without confusion of purpose.

And who,
she thinks to herself in amusement,
are you now? Are you the
aróso
believing that twins are born with greater power than other people or the modern student of psychology analyzing the quirks of the human psyche?

“I don’t know,” she says aloud, and her companion, the strange woman Oya, turns to look inquiringly at her.

“What don’t you know, Aduke?” she asks pleasantly.

“I...” Aduke certainly doesn’t want to tell her thoughts here, not where the
babalawo
might hear and be insulted. But then, if he truly is a “father of secret things,” as his title implies, might he know anyhow, might her lying block his ability to help her?

The two sides of her mind pull her in separate directions like a woman tugged by two small children (
like,
her westernized mind whispers,
the charioteer in Plato’s story, pulled by the two horses, the unruly black and the patient white
).

Which is the unruly side?
Aduke wonders desperately. Her black side seems the more patient one, willing to accept what happens and be guided by tradition and custom. It is her “white” side, the one that has been exposed to the contradictions offered in her European-influenced education, that seems unruly.

Belatedly, she realizes that Oya is studying her, still waiting for an answer.

“I can’t say,” Aduke answers lamely, choosing neither to lie nor to enlighten.

She wonders if Oya might understand her confusion. The older woman seems completely comfortable with traditional ways, yet Aduke heard her speaking to a tourist a few days ago, speaking perfect English and using modern idiom. There is definitely more to her than first impressions would suggest.

“I am,” Aduke says aloud, in complete honesty, “very tired. My breasts ache with milk I cannot give my child. My heart hurts, and I am sick of the heat and the wind.”

“Don’t ever feel sick from the wind,” Oya says. “The wind is a woman’s friend, the storm power that remained hers when Shango took the thunder and lightning. Sickness comes when the wind stops blowing in fresh air.”

“It is an ill wind that blows no one good,” Aduke quotes with a smile. Only after she says this does she remember the old Yoruban story. It had not been just any woman who had possessed the wind. It had been Oya.

The
babalawo
is ready for her now. He greets her, welcoming her to sit on the ground in front of him. She does so, placing a few
naira
on his mat as Oya has coached her. Even as she moves, she recites the appropriate greetings for a young woman to an older man, for a supplicant to a priest.

The Ifa diviner is an old man, and what hair he has is sparse and white. His costume is the traditional long robe of striped cotton, bright and clean except where it has trailed in the dirt. Clearly his family treasures him. Kehinde would treasure him, too, as a repository of nearly lost stories.

When the old man smiles at her, he shows more gum than teeth. When he speaks, slight whistles and lisps slip out where the teeth should be, but Aduke understands him without too much difficulty.

“Daughter, what do you wish to know of yourself?”

“I had a baby,” she says, and despite the fact that she has rehearsed these words over and over in her mind over her voice cracks, “a son, still nursing. He was taken by”—she drops her voice low, leaning forward so only the father of secrets will hear her—“the Owner of Hot Water.”

She feels hot water falling on her hands and bare arms and realizes that she is crying. Letting the tears fall, she continues:

“Baba, why did my son die? Do I have an enemy? Is he
àbikú?
What can I do to keep my future children, if I am blessed with them, alive and safe? Will I have other children?”

Aduke stops, realizing that she has departed from her prepared speech. She swallows hard. Somehow she is leaking all over: tears from her eyes, milk from her breasts, words from her mouth. Whatever happened to the Aduke she thought she knew?

Another question,
she scolds herself.
Be silent and listen.

The
babalawo
seems to know that she has collected herself.

“It is easiest,” he says with a gentle smile, “if we begin with one question. The stories may give you the answers you need at once, but if not, you can ask more questions.”

Aduke nods. “Yes, Baba.”

“What is it you want to know?”

Aduke reiterates her first question. “Why did my son die? I know the simple answer. There was an illness, but...”

She stops in mid-word. That had been the
aróso
speaking, prating about simple answers and illnesses. In a moment she would have been talking about bacterial infections, vaccinations, disease vectors. Why ask if she knows the answers?

“I’m sorry, Baba,” she says repentantly. “My question is ‘Why did my son die?’”

The
babalawo
smiles and nods. Then he taps a bell against his divining tray to get the god Ifa’s attention. When this is done, he scoops his sixteen palm nuts, polished with frequent use, from the carved wooden cup made specifically to hold them. This cup is particularly beautiful. A man on horseback surrounded by his entourage is carved around the stem of the cup. The cup itself is over their heads, like a ceremonial umbrella.

Normally, Aduke would have admired the artistry. Today, she is too nervous.

While he casts the nuts, Aduke feels her thoughts wandering again. She lets them go, feeling them blown on a wind she rides.

Ifa divination is not the only form of traditional divination she might have chosen. There are many simpler forms: casting four cowries or four kola nuts; water gazing, and trance utterances. Some Yoruba use forms of divination taken from other cultures, like Islamic sand cutting or even reading tarot cards or casting dice.

Initially, she had been drawn to a form of divination similar to the casting of the palm nuts. In this form, sixteen cowries are cast instead. The way they fall onto a wicker basket indicates the verses to be recited, just as in Ifa divination the combination of ones and twos indicates what verses are to be recited.

What had attracted Aduke to this form, even though it was less complex and thus (to her westernized way of seeing things) could offer her a less precise answer, was that in the divination with sixteen cowries, the diviner might be a woman.
Babalawo
are always men.