No Longer at Ease (16 page)

“Our women made black patterns on their bodies with the juice of the
uli
tree. It was beautiful, but it soon faded. If it lasted two market weeks it lasted a long time. But sometimes our elders spoke about
uli
that never faded, although no one had ever seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white man. If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them. They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next year. Okoye in the book today cannot become Okonkwo tomorrow. In the Bible Pilate said: ‘What is written is written.’ It is
uli
that never fades.”

The kinsman had nodded his head in approval and snapped his fingers.

The result of Okonkwo’s mystic regard for the written word was that his room was full of old books and papers—from Blackie’s
Arithmetic
, which he used in 1908, to Obi’s Durrell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier. Okonkwo never destroyed a piece of paper. He had two boxes full of them. The rest were preserved on top of his enormous cupboard, on tables, on boxes and on one corner of the floor.

Mother’s room, on the other hand, was full of mundane
things. She had her box of clothes on a stool. On the other side of the room were pots of solid palm-oil with which she made black soap. The palm-oil was separated from the clothes by the whole length of the room, because, as she always said, clothes and oil were not kinsmen, and just as it was the duty of clothes to try and avoid oil it was also the duty of the oil to do everything to avoid clothes.

Apart from these two, Mother’s room also had such things as last year’s coco yams, kola nuts preserved with banana leaves in empty oil pots, palm-ash preserved in an old cylindrical vessel which, as the older children told Obi, had once contained biscuits. In the second stage of its life it had served as a water vessel until it sprang about five leaks which had to be carefully covered with paper before it got its present job.

As he looked at his mother on her bed, tears stood in Obi’s eyes. She held out her hand to him and he took it—all bone and skin like a bat’s wing.

“You did not see me when I was ill,” she said. “Now I am as healthy as a young girl.” She laughed without mirth. “You should have seen me three weeks ago. How is your work? Are Umuofia people in Lagos all well? How is Joseph? His mother came to see me yesterday and I told her we were expecting you.…”

Obi answered: “They are well, yes, yes and yes.” But his heart all the while was bursting with grief.

Later that evening a band of young women who had been making music at a funeral was passing by Okonkwo’s
house when they heard of Obi’s return, and decided to go in and salute him.

Obi’s father was up in arms. He wanted to drive them away, but Obi persuaded him that they could do no harm. It was ominous the way he gave in without a fight and went and shut himself up in his room. Obi’s mother came out to the
pieze
and sat on a high chair by the window. She liked music even when it was heathen music. Obi stood in the main door, smiling at the singers who had formed themselves on the clean-swept ground outside. As if from a signal the colorful and noisy weaver birds on the tall palm tree flew away in a body, deserting temporarily their scores of brown nests, which looked like giant bootees.

Obi knew some of the singers well. But there were others who had been married into the village after he had gone to England. The leader of the song was one of them. She had a strong piercing voice that cut the air with a sharp edge. She sang a long recitative before the others joined in. They called it “The Song of the Heart.”

A letter came to me the other day.
I said to Mosisi: “Read my letter for me.”
Mosisi said to me: “I do not know how to read.”
I went to Innocenti and asked him to read my letters.
Innocenti said to me: “I do not know how to read.”
I asked Simonu to read for me. Simonu said:
“This is what the letter has asked me to tell you:
He that has a brother must hold him to his heart
,

For a kinsman cannot be bought in the market,
Neither is a brother bought with money
.”

Is everyone here?
(
Hele ee he ee he
)
Are you all here?
(
Hele ee he ee he
)
The letter said
That money cannot buy a kinsman,
(
Hele ee he ee he
)
That he who has brothers
Has more than riches can buy.
(
Hele ee he ee he
)

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

Obi’s serious talks with his father began after the family had prayed and all but the two of them had gone to bed. The prayers had taken place in Mother’s room because she was again feeling very weak, and whenever she was unable to join the others in the parlor her husband conducted prayers in her room.

The devil and his works featured prominently in that night’s prayers. Obi had a shrewd suspicion that his affair with Clara was one of the works. But it was only a suspicion; there was nothing yet to show that his parents had actually heard of it.

Mr. Okonkwo’s easy capitulation in the afternoon on the matter of heathen singing was quite clearly a tactical move. He let the enemy gain ground in a minor skirmish while he prepared his forces for a great offensive.

He said to Obi after prayers: “I know you must be tired after the great distance you have traveled. There is something important we must talk about, but it can wait until tomorrow, till you have had time to rest.”

“We can talk now,” said Obi. “I am not too tired. We get used to driving long distances.”

“Come to my room, then,” said his father, leading the way with the ancient hurricane lamp. There was a small table in the middle of the room. Obi remembered when it was bought. Carpenter Moses had built it and offered it to the church at harvest. It was put up for auction after the Harvest Service and sold. He could not now remember how much his father had paid for it, eleven and three-pence perhaps.

“I don’t think there is kerosene in this lamp,” said his father, shaking the lamp near his ear. It sounded quite empty. He brought half a bottle of kerosene from his cupboard and poured a little into the lamp. His hands were no longer very steady and he spilt some of the kerosene. Obi did not offer to do it for him because he knew his father would never dream of letting children pour kerosene into his lamp; they would not know how to do it properly.

“How were all our people in Lagos when you left them?” he asked. He sat on his wooden bed while Obi sat on a low stool facing him, drawing lines with his finger on the dusty top of the Harvest table.

“Lagos is a very big place. You can travel the distance from here to Abame and still be in Lagos.”

“So they said. But you have a meeting of Umuofia people?” It was half-question, half-statement.

“Yes. We have a meeting. But it is only once a month.” And he added: “It is not always that one finds time to attend.” The fact was he had not attended since November.

“True,” said his father. “But in a strange land one should always move near one’s kinsmen.” Obi was silent, signing his name in the dust on the table. “You wrote to me some time
ago about a girl you had seen. How does the matter stand now?”

“That is one reason why I came. I want us to go and meet her people and start negotiations. I have no money now, but at least we can begin to talk.” Obi had decided that it would be fatal to sound apologetic or hesitant.

“Yes,” said his father. “That is the best way.” He thought a little and again said yes, it was the best way. Then a new thought seemed to occur to him. “Do we know who this girl is and where she comes from?” Obi hesitated just enough for his father to ask the question again in a different way. “What is her name?”

“She is the daughter of Okeke, a native of Mbaino.”

“Which Okeke? I know about three. One is a retired teacher, but it would not be that one.”

“That is the one,” said Obi.

“Josiah Okeke?”

Obi said, yes, that was his name.

His father laughed. It was the kind of laughter one sometimes heard from a masked ancestral spirit. He would salute you by name and ask you if you knew who he was. You would reply with one hand humbly touching the ground that you did not, that he was beyond human knowledge. Then he might laugh as if through a throat of metal. And the meaning of that laughter was clear: “I did not really think you would know, you miserable human worm!”

Obi’s father’s laughter vanished as it had come—without warning, leaving no footprints.

“You cannot marry the girl,” he said quite simply.

“Eh?”

“I said you cannot marry the girl.”

“But why, Father?”

“Why? I shall tell you why. But first tell me this. Did you find out or try to find out anything about this girl?”

“Yes.”

“What did you find out?”

“That they are
osu
.”

“You mean to tell me that you knew, and you ask me why?”

“I don’t think it matters. We are Christians.” This had some effect, nothing startling though. Only a little pause and a slightly softer tone.

“We are Christians,” he said. “But that is no reason to marry an
osu
.”

“The Bible says that in Christ there are no bond or free.”

“My son,” said Okonkwo, “I understand what you say. But this thing is deeper than you think.”

“What is
this thing?
Our fathers in their darkness and ignorance called an innocent man
osu
, a thing given to idols, and thereafter he became an outcast, and his children, and his children’s children forever. But have we not seen the light of the Gospel?” Obi used the very words that his father might have used in talking to his heathen kinsmen.

There was a long silence. The lamp was now burning too brightly. Obi’s father turned down the wick a little and then resumed his silence. After what seemed ages he said: “I know Josiah Okeke very well.” He was looking steadily in front of him. His voice sounded tired. “I know him and I
know his wife. He is a good man and a great Christian. But he is
osu
. Naaman, captain of the host of Syria, was a great man and honorable, he was also a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.” He paused so that this great and felicitous analogy might sink in with all its heavy and dreadful weight.

“
Osu
is like leprosy in the minds of our people. I beg of you, my son, not to bring the mark of shame and of leprosy into your family. If you do, your children and your children’s children unto the third and fourth generations will curse your memory. It is not for myself I speak, my days are few. You will bring sorrow on your head and on the heads of your children. Who will marry your daughters? Whose daughters will your sons marry? Think of that, my son. We are Christians, but we cannot marry our own daughters.”

“But all that is going to change. In ten years things will be quite different to what they are now.”

The old man shook his head sadly but said no more. Obi repeated his points again. What made an
osu
different from other men and women? Nothing but the ignorance of their forefathers. Why should they, who had seen the light of the Gospel, remain in that ignorance?

He slept very little that night. His father had not appeared as difficult as he had expected. He had not been won over yet, but he had clearly weakened. Obi felt strangely happy and excited. He had not been through anything quite like this before. He was used to speaking to his mother like an equal, even from his childhood, but his father had always been different. He was not exactly remote from his family,
but there was something about him that made one think of the patriarchs, those giants hewn from granite. Obi’s strange happiness sprang not only from the little ground he had won in the argument, but from the direct human contact he had made with his father for the first time in his twenty-six years.

As soon as he woke up in the morning he went to see his mother. It was six o’clock by his watch, but still very dark. He groped his way to her room. She was awake, for she asked who it was as soon as he entered the room. He went and sat on her bed and felt her temperature with his palm. She had not slept much on account of the pain in her stomach. She said she had now lost faith in the European medicine and would like to try a native doctor.

At that moment Obi’s father rang his little bell to summon the family to morning prayers. He was surprised when he came in with the lamp and saw Obi already there. Eunice came in wrapped up in her loincloth. She was the last of the children and the only one at home. That was what the world had come to. Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one’s hands with spittle.